Bill Purdy was sharp-eyed and nimble, with the quick hand-eye coordination that gave a crew confidence in their pilot when under attack. Bill often seemed to be fused with his aircraft, so quick were his reactions. These skills were tested on the Brunswick raid that saw Charlie and his crew killed. It was Bill’s first op as captain of a 463 Squadron Lancaster. He remembered ‘bags of searchlights and flak from Bremen to the Ruhr’.
The radar controlled searchlights were usually set apart from the main defences where you would be least expecting them—one moment pitch black and the next blinded by the intense almost blue light. It was like looking directly into the sun. The idea was that the main light would hit you and then half a dozen satellites grouped in a circle would pick you up. Once that happened there was no chance of escape as the anti-aircraft batteries just fired up into the cone until you became another statistic. Hence the reason for leaving the first controlled beam in a hurry.
Suddenly, Bill was caught in a cone. He knew that he had a split second to try and get out of it. ‘The moment it hit me I was doing a steep diving turn and then turning 180 degrees, a backbreaking effort when you just yank the aircraft around. You just hope that they don’t pick you up.’ Somehow Bill managed to survive the flight, and quickly determined that if he was to continue doing so, he had to be prepared to take instant evasive action. ‘You were either quick or you were dead,’ he said. ‘You had no chance to debate. If one of my crew said to “Corkscrew!” I didn’t ask questions, I just did it immediately.’
A month after that first Brunswick raid, on the night of 22 May, Bill was back there again, only to find that since his previous op the searchlights between Bremen and the Ruhr had been joined into one complete belt. Twice in the Ruhr valley, searchlights picked out his Lancaster, but Bill climbed to 30,000 feet to avoid the lights and guns. He waited until ‘some other poor sod was coned in a dozen lights, then put our nose down and cleared the area doing an initial 520 miles per hour’.
All the crew complained about the pain in their joints, which Bill speculated was the onset of the bends at such an altitude without pressurisation. In the event, the raid was a failure. The master bomber’s radio communications were partly blocked, and the target was obscured by cloud. The bombs from Bill Purdy’s and other Lancasters fell harmlessly in Brunswick’s surrounding countryside.
Bill’s raid was part of the build-up for OVERLORD, the long-planned Allied landings in Normandy. Bomber Command’s strategy was now focused on destroying the Germans’ transportation systems to hamper the movement of troops and armaments. OVERLORD would be the greatest sea invasion in history, and 460, 463 and 467 RAAF Squadrons would play crucial roles in the preliminary air offensive.
Planning for the invasion had begun in earnest in December 1943 when General Dwight Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was officially formed on 15 February 1944, with Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory as the Air Commander-in-Chief. Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Tedder was to coordinate the operations of tactical and strategic air elements during the build-up to OVERLORD. Sir Arthur Harris initially wanted Bomber Command to be independent of SHAEF, and disagreed with Eisenhower’s proposal of using bombers to cripple the French railway system, on which the Germans’ defence would depend. But when the British Chiefs of Staff agreed to put Bomber Command under SHAEF’s ultimate supervision and to adopt the ‘Transportation Plan’, Harris came around. The bulk of bomber operations shifted from Germany to France—with devastating effect. By D-Day, according to the historian Gordon Harrison, ‘the transportation system was on the point of total collapse’. That would be of inestimable value to the invading armies.
Bomber Command launched the first attack on railway communication and repair centres in France and Belgium in March 1944. The RAF had been allotted thirty-seven of the seventy-nine such centres that had been targeted. The rest were divided among the USAAF, which had been part of a combined bomber offensive since June 1943; the Allied Expeditionary Air Force; and some elements of the 15th Air Force, based in the Mediterranean.
Prewar Europe, particularly France, was well served by a highly efficient railway network that made up for the lack of high-speed roads. The Germans depended on this rail system to move their armoured units to trouble spots. Railway junctions were relatively easy to destroy by precision bombing, but they were also easy to defend and rebuild.
To minimise loss of French lives and damage to French property, attacks on rail and other transportation targets in France were made at low altitude and not begun until the target was correctly identified. Such was the intensity of operations over France and Belgium, as well as German industrial areas, that 463 and 467 Squadrons lost—killed in action or taken prisoner—nearly sixty per cent of their normal crew strengths in the three months before D-Day.
On the night of 3 May, Rollo Kingsford-Smith led 463 Squadron Lancasters on a raid that dropped 1500 tons of bombs on a German military camp in northern France, destroying thirty-seven tanks, blowing up ammunition dumps, and damaging 114 barracks buildings. Eight nights later, their target was a marshalling yard at Lille, in northern France. Rollo noted that only ninety-four aircraft had bombed when the controller ordered the raid abandoned because of dust and smoke.
As part of the build-up, on 9 May Rollo set off for Lille to destroy railway yards and a railway junction. Although their usual bombing altitude over Germany was about 20,000 feet, at Lille they went in at a much riskier 7000 feet to ensure accurate bombing. To Rollo’s surprise, anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights ringed the city, and there were more than the expected number of night fighters above and around the target. Soon shells were bursting so close he could smell the cordite. But—
We did not smell the one that hit us. Just at the moment our bombs were released the flight engineer called out, ‘Starboard outer engine on fire.’ Fire in the air was the happening that I feared the most. A Lancaster burned quickly and after a fire started it could only be a second or two before the fuel tanks exploded and of course if it still had bombs in the bomb bay the aircraft went up with a terrific explosion and none of the crew had time to get out.
In fact, the engine was not on fire, though it was damaged. Shrapnel had burst a pipe in the coolant system and glycol was being pumped from the engine into the atmosphere, leaving a distinctive clear white vapour trail that reflected all the light from the action in the air and on the ground below. Rollo, thinking the windmilling propeller must be pumping fuel out onto the presumed flames, immediately ordered the engineer to feather the engine while he closed the throttle. By now at least five searchlights were trained on them, fixing the Lancaster in the centre of a cone of light. Then the anti-aircraft guns homed in.
Suddenly, Rollo noticed that in the excitement the engineer had feathered the wrong engine—the undamaged starboard inner engine. Now they were not only in the enemy’s sights, they had lost power from both starboard engines.
We had to get away from the searchlights and the guns and with only half our normal power and extra drag [from the windmilling propeller] I could only gain enough speed for the usual violent evasive action by trading away height. We dived. Almost to ground level, where the searchlights and flak lost us. At the same time the engineer got my message and stopped the engine, which was pumping out the vapour and unfeathered the engine stopped by mistake. As we dropped out of the sky the heavy flak no longer followed us. The light flak gunners, who were no doubt waiting for this opportunity, then started. Fortunately they were to one side of us, requiring a fair amount of deflection on their part, and their tracer rounds were well behind us. I could not see it but the rear gunner admired the show.
Restarting the feathered engine took time, ‘far too long’, in Rollo’s anxious view. Eventually it started, and they returned to base safely on three engines. In the briefing that followed, Rollo discovered that 463 Squadron had lost three of fourteen aircraft and twenty-one aircrew killed. The result was even worse for 467 Squadron, which had lost four of seventeen aircraft and twenty-eight men. Rollo reflected on his own near escape: ‘A few centimetres to one side the shrapnel would have missed. About 30 centimetres to the other it would have been in the fuel tank followed by the fire. About two seconds earlier and into the bomb bay before the bombs were released we could expect the massive blast, the ball of red flame and seven crew members immediately becoming lumps of charred flesh.’
On the night of 19 May, 5 Group attacked railway yards in the centre of Tours, causing considerable damage. Rollo noted that RAF Wing Commander James ‘Willie’ Tait, the 5 Group master bomber, kept the force waiting after each wave until he was satisfied that no damage was done to the residential part of the town.
Two nights later, Rollo was involved in a raid on a well-protected site at Duisburg, in the Ruhr heavy industrial area. The raid involved 510 Lancasters and twenty-two Mosquitos from 1, 3, 5 and 8 Groups. Considerable damage was caused in the southern part of the city, with 350 buildings destroyed and 665 badly damaged. Twenty-nine Lancasters were lost. ‘We lost two crews, all killed and I doubted during the operation whether my crew and I would survive that trip,’ Rollo said. As it was navigator Norm Kobelke’s and mid-upper gunner Dai Rees’s last trip of their second tour of operations, Rollo expected bad luck. ‘But we got back.’
As May drew to a close, 100 Lancasters and four Mosquitos successfully attacked the railway junction at Nantes. The first fifty aircraft dropped their bombs so accurately that the master bomber ordered the others to bring their payloads home.
With 5000 flying hours, Sam Balmer was a dynamic leader and one of Bomber Command’s best and most experienced pilots. In April, he was awarded the DFC for his skill, efficiency and devotion to duty, and early in May, he was made group captain. On the night of 11 May, the thirty-three-year-old commander of 467 Squadron led fourteen of his unit’s bombers to join 190 Lancasters and eleven marker Mosquitos on a raid to a large military camp at Leopoldsburg in Belgium. Sam’s Lancaster was carrying one 4000-pound ‘cookie’, six 1000-pound and eight 500-pound bombs. Only ninety-four aircraft had dropped their bomb loads when the master bomber ordered the raid abandoned because dust and smoke obscured the target and there was risk to the nearby civilian population.
When the 467 Squadron aircraft returned to Waddington, one was missing. It was Sam Balmer’s. The Melbourne Argus reported the loss:
GRP-CAPT BALMER MISSING
Grp-Capt John Raeburn Balmer, OBE, DFC, of Bendigo, commander of a RAAF Lancaster squadron in the UK and formerly commander of a famous Beaufort torpedo squadron in New Guinea, has been reported missing in air operations over Europe. In June, 1942, Grp-Capt Balmer led the Beauforts on their first strike in the SW Pacific, a mission which resulted in the sinking of the Japanese freighter Tonyo Maru off the end of the airstrip at Lae. Before joining the RAAF as a cadet in 1932 he studied law at Melbourne University, and as a racing motorist was noted for his record-breaking trip from Darwin to Adelaide in July, 1936, when he took nine hours off the existing record.
After the war, it was established that his Lancaster was shot up by a night fighter on its bombing run and crashed in flames near Herenthout, Belgium. There were no survivors.
The Operations Record Book of 467 Squadron conveyed the unit’s sorrow, referring to an operation the previous night when 463 and 467 had lost six aircraft and their crews attacking the rail yards at Lille:
As bad as yesterday if not worse, for we lost our squadron commander and included in the crew the gunnery leader, both on their last trip. It is understood that the squadron commander went missing as a group captain and this was to be his last trip before assuming his new position . . . The loss of such a capable crew and of such a dynamic CO shock the squadron considerably.
Rollo Kingsford-Smith had begged Sam not to fly, especially since he had just been promoted. But Sam decided to make one more trip as commander so his crew could complete the final, twentieth op of their second tour. Rollo was shocked.
To fly when it was not your duty, when you had doubly discharged your duties was challenging fate too much and his aircraft was the only one shot down of the hundred or so that flew on that target. I felt his death more than any others. From 1940 he had taught me so much about flying, he was the perfect wartime pilot although a rascal on the ground. I missed his phone calls in the middle of the night: ‘Smithy, jam at such and such a place and I have a few problems, could you come and get me.’
Bill Brill was named as Sam Balmer’s replacement as squadron commander. Despite Air Vice-Marshal Wrigley’s doubts about Group Captain Bonham-Carter’s abilities, he would remain station CO until the following April.
Among those in the crew who died with Sam Balmer was RAF air gunner Norden-Hare, who had fallen out with Ted Pickerd three days earlier over a fruitcake. Like Sam Balmer, it was to be his last trip.