STRIKING BACK
Flying Officer Charlie Hancock and his bomber crew discovered that no accommodations had been made for them when they arrived at the Royal Canadian Air Force base at Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire, to serve with No. 408 Squadron. “On the first night I slept in a bed used the night before by a member of the Jones crew, which had not returned from operations,” he recounted. “It felt a bit creepy, but it would happen again and one had to get used to it.”1 The dead were a heavy presence as bomber crews took off each night and disappeared into the darkness. New flyers like Hancock were there to replace the vanished.
RCAF Wireless Operator Howard Hewer also wrote of finally arriving at RAF Station Marham in August 1941 to serve with No. 218 Squadron. He had spent months training and he felt ready for battle. He and his crew were greeted by a cheerful squadron commanding officer, who told them, “The glamour period is over. You got in for a penny, but now you’re in for the pound.” The officer concluded his talk with a stark prediction: “I think it is only fair to tell you that casualties in this command have been high, and that they are on the rise as we make more and more flights further into Germany. I must tell you then that many of you will not be with us a few weeks or a month from now.” Hewer left the talk feeling sick. The next day, he was even more disturbed when the squadron medical officer lectured the crew on the terrible nature of burns that were so common to airmen. He offered some useful observations to the new flyers, but concluded fatalistically: “I hope it doesn’t happen to any of you, but in the event that you find yourself trapped in a burning aircraft, with no chance of escape, best to get things over with in a hurry. What I suggest you might do is lean directly over the flames, open your mouth, and inhale strongly. The fire should scorch the lungs and cause almost instant death, much preferable to burning slowly. Well, good luck chaps.”2 These types of warnings to new airmen were not meant to unnecessarily scare, but were simply part of the harsh reality of flying in a bomber: the life expectancy of new crews could be measured in weeks.
WHILE THE BOMBERS COST tens of thousands of dollars each, the high command had little inclination to spend lavishly on the bases that were being built across eastern Britain. Some were prewar RAF stations, featuring winterized multi-storey facilities and established messes, but many were wartime throw-ups, which meant corrugated iron huts for the crews’ living quarters and for rest and relaxation. The huts were poorly insulated and were heated by a central coke stove that threw off little warmth. The iron beds and rough blankets were no great comfort, although airmen always lived better than the ground-pounders in the field or the sailors on the sea-swept corvettes.
The first overseas RCAF bomber unit, No. 405 Squadron, was activated on April 23, 1941, in 4 Group, and it flew Wellingtons out of Driffield in Yorkshire. It was formed initially from experienced Canadian and Commonwealth crews already flying in the RAF, but it would only be 50 percent Canadian by the fall of 1941. A wing commander led the bomber squadron, which consisted of two flights of eight aircraft plus a few spares, each led by a squadron leader. The squadron contained about 200 airmen, supported by several hundred ground crew and service staff. No. 405’s first operation was on June 12, when the twin-engine Vickers Wellingtons bombed a railway marshalling yard at Schwerte, near Dortmund. Later that month, No. 405 Squadron was joined by No. 408 Squadron; Nos. 419 and 420 then stood up at the end of the year. While Canadian in name, most of the aircrew in the new squadrons were drawn from across the Empire, although the number of Canadians increased throughout the year and into the next as casualties whittled away at the original number, and BCATP-trained flyers arrived from across the Atlantic. Throughout 1941, Canada began to build a massive bomber force that would culminate in fifteen squadrons within an all-Canadian bomber group.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1941, wishful thinking augmented by poor follow-up to assess the damage left the Bomber Command air marshals and senior officers believing they were hurting the German war machine more than was really the case. For months, the air force brass were convinced that German industries were being destroyed and civilians being driven to the edge of panic. Just one more operation, they believed, might push Germany towards capitulation. Some of the air crews flying at the time had their doubts. Bomber pilot John Gee remarked that the two-engine bombers had virtually no navigational equipment. “Here we were flying 500 to 600 miles over enemy territory, trying to locate a target in total blackout, often with cloud below us and a lot of industrial haze. It’s not surprising that our bombers were [off target by] 5, 10 miles.”3 The bombsights were not accurate and a miscalculation of wind speed by a mere 5 kilometres an hour caused a bombing error of more than 100 metres.4 Eventually, in August 1941, D.M. Butt, a member of the cabinet secretariat, was instructed to study photographs and operational reports to more accurately gauge Bomber Command’s achievement. His report revealed that only one-third of the missions in the previous two months had struck within 7 kilometres of their targets; the remaining two-thirds were even more wildly inaccurate. Moreover, the farther away a target was from Britain—such as those in the industrial Ruhr valley—the less likely they were to be hit with any accuracy.5
The Butt report’s conclusions challenged the power of the bombers. Churchill fumed and considered reallocating resources, but he needed the bombers to hit back against Germany, or at least to show that the British bulldog had some bite.6 The chiefs of staff concluded that a renewed offensive should be made against Germany’s major industrial centres, with the bombers taking to area bombing. If pinpoint accuracy was not possible, then entire cities would be smothered in high explosives. The chiefs also persuaded themselves that area bombing would crack German civilians’ morale. To make all of this happen, a new front-line force would have to be constructed, and it would have to be equipped with larger four-engine bombers. Even with the acknowledged failure of bombing up to that point, the Allies had few other ways to take the war to the Germans.
The smashing arm of Bomber Command became the four-engine bombers, with their ability to fly farther, carry a heavier payload, and survive more devastating punishment from flak or cannon fire than their smaller predecessors. The four-engine Short Stirling began to fly in February 1941, while the Handley Page Halifax entered battle a month later, and the iconic Avro Lancaster started flying operationally by year’s end. The Lancaster was initially the more robust machine. Statistics recorded between August 1941 and October 1942 revealed that Halifax crews were lost at nearly twice the rate of counterparts on Lancasters. Early versions of the Halifax had difficulty gaining height with heavy bomb loads, were sluggish in flight, and were hampered by faulty exhaust shrouds that were so ineffective that enemy fighters could see the exhaust flames from over 500 metres. But officials studied these defects, funded new research, and gradually rectified the problems—eventually reaching the point where the Halifax was on par with the Lancaster and both were usually loved by their crews.7 The Stirling was significantly slower, with a top speed of 420 kilometres per hour, and could attain an altitude of just 17,000 feet when fully bombedup, which made it vulnerable to flak fire. While the poor performance of the Stirling was recognized early in 1942 due to the crippling loss rates, the planes, even with the defects, continued to fly. Any and all bombers were required in the war against Germany.8 It would take almost two more years to phase out the Stirling.
A Handley Page Halifax flying over a smoke-obscured target in the Ruhr.
ON FEBRUARY 24, 1942, Bomber Command received a new commander-in-chief. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, a Great War veteran who had risen steadily through the RAF, while seeing action in India and Mesopotamia in the 1920s, was to become Bomber Command’s greatest champion. Often bad-tempered and bristling for a fight, Harris held strong and unswerving opinions about how to wield the bombers effectively. While Harris was a dominating personality, he was also a forward-thinking commander, and in his previous position as the AOC (air officer commanding-in-chief) of 5 Group he had urged his airmen and staff officers, and later operational scientists, to constantly improve the destructive power of the bombers and to find ways to aid the air crews in their battles over Europe.9
Sir Arthur Harris was air officer commanding-in-chief, Bomber Command, from February 1942 to the end of the war. Canadians served under Harris’s command and he was a vigilant proponent of attacking German cities to drive the enemy from the war.
Harris is regularly portrayed in history books as the architect of Bomber Command’s aerial campaign to destroy Germany. Indeed, he pursued that policy with zeal, writing, for example, in April 1942, “We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war.” It needs to be remembered, however, that Policy Directive Number 22 was issued on Valentine’s Day, 1942, ten days before Harris took over.10 This directive stipulated that the primary objective of Bomber Command was to crush the “morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, of the industrial workers.”11 Harris was not a lone wolf. The strategy of laying waste to entire cities that he implemented was not only supported firmly but also set in place by Sir Charles Portal, the chief of the air staff, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The two men knew now that individual factories were nearly impossible to hit, but they also believed that entire cities could be carpeted in fire and high explosives to disrupt water and electricity, destroy housing, and kill and maim civilians. In the process, war industries would be damaged and the workers who kept them going would be killed. Relentless blows from the bombers would ultimately disable the German war machine. Harris merely applied previously established policy, albeit with a fierce conviction that bordered on the evangelical.12
Canadians flying in Bomber Command were not dismayed by their mission any more than were their British and Commonwealth comrades. Flight Lieutenant Warren Duffy, an RCAF pilot in No. 57 Squadron, RAF, wrote in July 1942, “The RAF are sure doing a big job now, as you read in the newspapers…. They asked for it, and now they’re really getting it, and I don’t mean maybe. That’s the way it should be, eh…. That may sound funny but the more operations I do the keener I get about doing them. ‘Jerry’ has a lot coming to him, and I sure want to be in on it.”13 Many others echoed his sentiments. Hugh Bartley, for example, from Heddingly, Manitoba, a pilot with No. 128 Squadron, RAF, said this of his fellow airmen: “We took the view, in many cases, and certainly the British population did, that as you sow, so shall you reap. And we had all been to London and places like that where the East End was all smashed to smithereens. So we didn’t have too damn much sympathy.”14
THE ALLIED BOMBING STRATEGY forced the Germans to protect their homeland. The Kammhuber Line consisted of belts of interconnected aerial defensive zones, where long-range Freya radar stations tracked the incoming Allied bombers and alerted a second, short-range radar system known as Würzburg that directed night fighters to engage the incoming enemy bombers. After the bombers passed through this fireand-fighter screen, they encountered the defences of each German city, which were protected by additional fighters, anti-aircraft guns, and searchlights to guide them. Even though the guns were operated mainly by adolescents and old men—young, able-bodied men having been conscripted for service abroad—combat veterans usually filled leadership roles. As the bomber war intensified, however, increasing numbers of soldiers were ordered back from other theatres to defend German cities.
In the early part of the war, the first-line German night fighters were the Messerschmitt Bf 110, a twin-engine fighter, and the Junkers Ju 88, a converted twin-engine bomber. Neither had fared well in the dogfights over Britain, but on the defence, with their ability to hunt relatively slow-moving Allied bombers with no fighter protection, they were extremely effective. The Bf 110 was fast, at 525 kilometres per hour, and was typically armed with five 7.9mm machine guns and two 20mm cannons. The latter fired a shell that was as long as two index fingers, and it could open up a bomber like a tin can. The single-seater Messerschmitt Bf 109, which had been in service since the Spanish Civil War and was flown by many of the Luftwaffe’s highest scoring aces, was an even deadlier opponent, but most of the 109s were posted to the Eastern Front, the Mediterranean, or the Middle East. By late 1941, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 had come on strength in greater numbers; armed to the teeth with four 20mm cannons, it also proved to be an agile fighter. The German night fighters took their toll. One Canadian pilot wrote of the enemy fighters, “They were killers in our book, killers who had every advantage over us, the prey they stalked.”15
The need for the Germans to defend their cities forced them to divert resources away from the fighting fronts. This especially assisted Soviet forces on the Eastern Front, as the dual-purpose anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun, the 88mm flak gun, was devastating on the battlefield. Because thousands of these guns were situated throughout the Reich to protect the cities against bombers, the Wehrmacht’s anti-tank defences were significantly weakened from 1942 onward. Moreover, it was estimated that the 88mm guns expended some 16,000 shells to bring down a single aircraft, so an enormous amount of ammunition was wasted that might otherwise have been used on the forward lines.16 These home defences became a considerable drain on German resources, and would eventually by manned by over 900,000 troops.
THE BOMBER AIRCREWS went “over the top” two or three times a week in a relentless battle of attrition. Flying Officer Ron Peel completed his first tour of operations in May 1942 and would eventually wear the Distinguished Flying Cross, but in the process he witnessed many comrades lose their lives. When another mate was killed in early July 1942, he confided despairingly to his diary, “It seems that all whom I befriend ‘get the chop.’”17 Yet even as the casualties mounted, more aircrews were trained and more squadrons stood up for battle. Seven new RCAF bomber squadrons were formed in 1942, including No. 425 (Alouette), the only French-Canadian squadron. The Alouettes became a proud symbol of French Canada’s contribution to the war effort, although like most Canadian squadrons it contained Canadians from across the country, representing several nationalities.
Thousands of German 88mm flak guns defended Western Europe and Germany against Allied bombers. While the guns could throw up a deadly rain of shells, it was the bomber threat that forced Hitler to pull back these defences to guard the cities.
Each squadron had its own separate identity. Besides being numbered between 400 and 450 (save for a few oddities), each was also given a title or nickname, with many linked to Canadian animals, birds, or cities. The third overseas bomber squadron, No. 419, was formed in December 1941 and soon gained its identity from its commanding officer, Wing Commander John “The Moose” Fulton, of Kamloops, British Columbia. He was an inspiring leader who flew regularly with his aircrews. The Moose, with his carrot-coloured hair and engaging smile, was a mere twenty-six years old, but soon the squadron took to calling themselves the “Moosemen.” A great outpouring of grief took place when Fulton was killed on July 28, 1942, in an operation against Hamburg. A badge incorporating the image of a moose was later commissioned for the Squadron. No. 408 Squadron took on a goose as its emblem, while 420 Squadron adopted a snowy owl. Thunderbirds were embraced by 426 Squadron, bison by 429, and a porcupine by 433. No. 415 Squadron took the name Swordfish when it was in Coastal Command, and kept it after moving to Bomber Command. Other squadrons were linked back to Canadian cities, such as 405 (Vancouver) Squadron and 432 (Leaside) Squadron, while 434 (Bluenose) Squadron was not a town but reflected the maritime heritage of many of its members. Perhaps the most interesting name was acquired by 427 (Lion) Squadron, which was linked to a Hollywood studio, MGM. Hollywood actors from the studio—including Lionel Barrymore, Van Heflin, and Spencer Tracy—offered their names to individual bombers in the squadron. The crews fought among themselves for the honour of representing MGM’s cinematic bombshell, Lana Turner.18
IN MARCH 1942, morale among the aircrews was at a grievous low as a direct result of the withering casualties that Bomber Command had taken. After having lost more than a thousand crews in the previous twelve months, the bomber armada had grown little in the attritional battles.19 Harris needed a high-profile victory. To achieve it, he coordinated Bomber Command’s resources to attack the port of Lübeck. The city along the northern coast of Europe, on the shore of the Baltic Sea, was the major centre for Red Cross shipments in and out of Germany, which were crucial for the comfort of prisoners of war. It also happened to be an easy target for the Allied aircrews to locate and it was lightly defended. In the early hours of March 29, 80 hectares of the city core, in which most of the buildings were made of wood, were burned to the ground when 234 bombers struck. Some 520 civilians were killed and another 785 injured.20
Harris now had evidence that a German city could be virtually destroyed, and he was anxious to follow the Lübeck operation up with a more spectacular one. With the support of Portal and Churchill, he planned a thousand-bomber raid on May 31, 1942, against Cologne. Almost every available bomber was thrown into the mix, including obsolete or run-down machines pulled from Training Command, to achieve what was planned—as much as a publicity coup as an operational victory. Studies had demonstrated that German fighters patrolled sectors of space, and when the bombers flew independently, they could be picked off with relative ease. On this raid, the bombers were channelled into a stream—a bit like a naval convoy. By using this system, a concentration of bombers would punch through the enemy defensive grid with minimal losses, and would be over the target and its defences in less time than if bombers flew on their own.
On the night of May 31, the 1,047 bombers—including 78 from RCAF squadrons—crashed through the German defences and converged on Cologne, Germany’s third largest city. In 90 punishing minutes, the bombers dropped 500 tons of high explosives and more than 1,000 tons of incendiaries on the city. The high explosives blew up buildings, cracked water mains, and shattered glass, all of which contributed to the spread of the fires ignited by the incendiaries. The death toll was 469, but some 13,000 homes were destroyed, along with 36 factories. Within days, thousands of citizens fled the city.21 RCAF navigator Ray Silver, who was shot down returning from Cologne, remembered the fiery cloud that arose 7 kilometres from the city below into the illuminated sky: it “was at once a torch of hope for enslaved millions and a preface to Armageddon.”22
THE BOMBER CAMPAIGN OVER EUROPE was not the only aspect of the Allied air war. Thousands of Canadians served in RCAF and RAF formations in other capacities around the globe. RCAF bomber squadrons also took the war to the Axis in the Mediterranean and the Far East. One such RCAF squadron, No. 413, was formed at Stranraer on the southwest coast of Scotland in June 1941, but its Catalinas and crew were transferred to Coastal Command and flew out of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) in early 1942. The airmen swept the Indian Ocean in long, monotonous flights, staring endlessly at the open water as they patrolled for U-boats or any sign of the enemy. On April 4, Squadron Leader Leonard Birchall of St. Catharines, Ontario, piloting a Catalina flying boat, sighted a Japanese fleet about 500 kilometres south of Ceylon and sent off a warning message just before he and his crew were shot down by a dozen enemy fighters. Birchall and five of his crew survived the crash, but two were machine-gunned while they floated helplessly in the water.23 Churchill labelled Birchall “the saviour of Ceylon” after the British defenders, alerted to the impending attack, repelled the Japanese raid. The Canadian airman was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions on this day, though he would exhibit even more impressive feats of bravery in the brutal Japanese prisoner of war camps, where his calm leadership saved lives. Birchall stuck up for his men against the cruel oppressors and, on one occasion, when a Japanese guard was pummelling a defenceless man, Birchall entered the fray and struck the Japanese guard. He was sentenced to death and forced to undergo a mock execution that was stayed at the last moment.24 Birchall, shaken but undeterred, continued to defend the rights of British prisoners of war, perhaps a far greater deed than that for which he is better known.
In the same Pacific theatre of war, RCAF Flying Officer R.W. Eves remembered that “Burma, during the war, was something you didn’t want to miss, but you wouldn’t want to do it again, either.”25 The RCAF had two Transport Command squadrons in Burma providing airlift to the British Fourteenth Army, which was fighting the Japanese. Perpetually short of ammunition and food, the Fourteenth fought an aggressive action against the enemy, holding down significant resources. The supplies carried in by the RCAF’s Douglas C-47 Dakotas were vital in the inhospitable campaign, and, as RCAF pilot Bob Farquharson of No. 435 Squadron remembered, “We dropped absolutely everything. If somebody at the front had lost his eyeglasses or his false teeth, we flew in eyeglasses and false teeth. We flew in ammunition, clothing, rations.”26 In just two weeks in January, for example, No. 436 Squadron reported that it had lifted 2,500 tons of cargo and 735 passengers during 2,087 hours of flying.27 Atholl Sutherland Brown, an RCAF pilot in the Burma theatre, spoke for many of his comrades, both in the air and on the ground, when he wrote that “their efforts and sacrifices were unrecognized and largely forgotten in the panorama of the war.”28 As many as 7,500 Canadian airmen served in the Far East and Pacific theatre of war, most with RAF squadrons, and according to one source, 431 of them were killed.29
WITH BOMBER COMMAND expanding into its role as an offensive strike force, Fighter Command also sought influence in the battle over Europe. The Spitfires and Hurricanes of 1940 had saved Britain, but Fighter Command had lost its raison d’être when the Germans had pulled back their bomber assaults the next year. By summer 1941, RAF and RCAF fighters were patrolling across the Channel, hoping to engage the Luftwaffe in battle and wear down its strength. As part of these engagements, twelve RCAF fighter squadrons were deployed: eight were day fighters, three were night fighters, and one—No. 418 Squadron—was an intruder unit whose fighters sought to harass enemy planes as they left or returned from their bases.
Aggressive fighter sweeps varied in scale from “rhubarbs,” in which a few pilots “stooged” across the Channel to shoot up targets of opportunity, to more organized mayhem, known as “rodeos,” in which larger numbers of fighters sought out the Luftwaffe, their actions usually based on intelligence relating to the location of enemy squadrons. A third type of operation, “circuses,” saw several squadrons and light bombers attacking predetermined sites. The bombers were used as bait to draw out the Luftwaffe, which was then fought off by the escort wing and, if the trap was fully sprung, jumped by a high-cover squadron. But the Luftwaffe refused to fight according to the RAF’s plans. Flight Commander Wilf Burnett of No. 408 Squadron, RCAF, recalled that the circuses had little effect on the enemy: “They were not prepared to sacrifice their fighters against a massive number of fighters, so they stayed on the ground and left us to the anti-aircraft gunners. We got quite a hammering from the anti-aircraft fire.”30
While the RAF and RCAF concentrated their forces in the hope of wearing down the German defences as they “leaned into France,” they faced a skilled enemy who were directed onto targets by ground radar, and who, should they be driven down by enemy fire or mechanical failure, had the same advantages as the RAF during the Battle of Britain, in that they could be flying again within days, or even hours, if they survived the drop unscathed. In any battle, the Allied pilots always had to keep one eye on the steadily dropping fuel gauge. Nonetheless, the premier fighters for the two sides, the Bf 109 and the Spitfire, engaged in wild dogfights in the skies over Europe. The Spitfire—all metal and with seemingly razor-thin wings—was more nimble and could turn more sharply, which was critical in a dogfight; but the Bf 109, which could climb to 30,000 feet, often roared out of sun or clouds for the decisive first strike. The arrival of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 by late 1941 provided a new advantage to the Luftwaffe, and it took some time for improved Spitfires—the Mark V and Mark IX—to hold their own in single combat. But the upgraded Spitfires and Fw 190s were close enough in technological effectiveness to ensure that pilot skill rather than engineering determined the outcome of their battles.
Spitfire Vs of No. 403 (Wolf) Squadron, RCAF, in an operation against German forces in Europe.
The RCAF pilots honed their tactics over time, learning to fly in the “finger four” position, so named because it resembled the fingers on an outstretched hand. In combat, the four fingers broke off to the basic two-plane fighting unit, a leader and his wingman, one the “shooter” and the other the “eyeball.” The wingman defended the more experienced leader, and stuck close to him through twists and turns, watching for enemy fighters coming from behind, above, or below. With the Spitfire V’s two 20mm cannons protruding from the leading edge of the wings, as well as four additional machine guns also in the wings, the aircraft had enough ammunition for six seconds of fire. But even a short burst sent hundreds of shells in a lethal cone of fire between 200 and 400 metres ahead of the gunsight.
Flying Officer Hugh Godefroy, who flew Spitfire VBs with No. 401 Squadron, described one chaotic battle on October 17, 1941, when he and his RCAF comrades were jumped by fifteen Bf 109s: “I fired at every 109 that came in front of me. Two peeled off from above and attacked head on. I flew straight at them, firing back, and they went by on the other side firing. Then I ran out of ammunition and I held the Spitfire in tight shuddering turns to avoid being shot down from 25,000 feet. At 15,000 feet I recovered from the spin and at 10,000 feet, I started to pull out and headed for the White Cliffs of Dover.” He landed to find that of the twelve pilots who had begun the patrol, five had gone down in flames, including his wingman. Over the following months, Godefroy observed that the Spitfires were as good as or better than the 109s, but the Fw 190s were a very tough opponent. In many battles, he said, the Allied fighters, who had more total planes than the Germans, were outnumbered in the fierce battles over European soil, as the Luftwaffe vectored fighters to the battles when it suited their forces or simply avoided combat when it did not. The Spitfires and Hurricanes were often reduced to “dogfighting to survive and running out of ammunition; sometimes hit in several places and [where it was always a] struggle to get back to base.”31 Godefroy survived 77 sorties in 1941 and the early part of 1942 and returned for a second tour later in the war, for a total of 144 sorties. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar, and he made it back to Canada.
Between mid-June and December 1941, the RAF lost 395 pilots (killed, missing, or taken prisoner), against 154 Luftwaffe losses, of whom about half survived to fight for Germany another day.32 However, at the time, RAF and RCAF pilots reported shooting down some 731 enemy aircraft, revealing a wide margin of error and again demonstrating the difficulty of determining kills in air combat. It was a common tactic, for example, for the fighters of both sides to mimic a dying spiral, and then to pull out below cloud cover and race back to safety. While the RCAF Spitfire squadrons gave a good account of themselves (having converted from Hurricanes in the fall of 1941), the battle went against the side that fought on enemy terrain and far from their base. Douglas Lindsay, a decorated RCAF pilot who served on Nos. 403 and 516 Squadrons, said he survived the war likely because he knew “how to get out of trouble when trouble presented itself. You have to have some thought about your own survival. I can think of some individuals who went headlong into everything, and they didn’t last more than three or four trips.”33 Even with the losses, Allied output of fighter aircraft and trained pilots was soon dwarfing that of the Germans. And their activities all had the effect of reducing the pressure on the bombers that continued to raid German cities, while also allowing photo reconnaissance units to build up photographic evidence of German defences for the day when the Allies would storm France’s shores. Flying Officer Frederick Wilson of Thunder Bay, Ontario, survived two operational tours and observed, “One thing about a Spitfire, you were master of your own destiny, and you could either fly the damn thing and be as good as the next guy, or you couldn’t; and if you couldn’t, you paid the consequences. You bailed out, cracked up, or died.”34
THE TINY ISLAND OF MALTA became another key battleground in the Mediterranean. Both the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force used it as a base of operations from which to attack German and Italian convoys supplying Rommel’s desert army in North Africa. The Axis powers saw Malta as a thorn in their side that caused them much misery, and they bombed it relentlessly from Sicily. The besieged Allied fighter squadrons on that bomb-pocked island fought some of the most intense aerial battles of the war. The Malta garrison somehow survived the continuous attacks of 1941 and, in April of the next year, its starving civilian population, most of them living underground in vast rat-infested caves, was awarded collectively the George Cross for bravery. More than 100 Canadians and Americans served on the island, often engaging in pitched battles against German and Italian fighters. Malta became a story of resistance for the Empire, a miniature Battle of Britain, where the RAF struggled against overwhelming odds while striking back at the enemy. Eighty Axis ships were sunk in the first seven months of 1942, and another 150 were sent to the bottom in the final five months. It was estimated that 60 percent of the Axis supplies coming from the sea in the autumn of 1942 were destroyed by the Royal Navy and the fighters from Malta, and this interdiction had a profound impact on Rommel’s ability to wage war in the desert.35
Seen here writing a report, George Beurling, from Verdun, Quebec, was Canada’s highest-scoring ace of the war, with twenty-nine kills.
Pilot Officer R.W. “Buck” McNair had scored a kill against a Bf 109 in England with No. 401 Squadron, RCAF, before he arrived in Malta in March 1942. During a three-month tour of frenzied and nearly continuous combat, he shot down nine enemy aircraft and, by the end of the war, after commanding No. 126 (Canadian) Wing of the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force, was Canada’s sixth-highest scoring ace, with sixteen victories. John McElroy finished the siege with ten victories, while Rod Smith recorded six. Five of the top twenty Allied aces in the blistering battles over Malta were Canadian—but all were eclipsed by Canada’s highest-scoring ace of the war, George Beurling.36
A lanky, good-looking lad from Verdun, Quebec, Beurling learned to fly at fourteen and was in combat with the RAF at age twenty. Posted to Malta in June, he immediately showed his prowess in the air and also developed a reputation for being a lone wolf. In a period of formation flying, Beurling’s tactics harkened back to those of Billy Bishop of the Great War—another Canadian ace who enjoyed flying alone and killing swiftly. Beurling was seen by many fellow airmen and administrators as reckless and undisciplined; on the ground, he was insubordinate, moody, and even a little strange. He did not drink in the mess, which set him apart, and for a fighter ace with an international reputation, he was shy. One Canadian ground crewman remembered that after shooting down an enemy plane, Beurling flew across the aerodrome and executed a “victory roll” before he landed. According to the crewman, “Victory rolls had been outlawed because too many very enthusiastic, second-class pilots couldn’t do the roll and would kill themselves.” Beurling was reprimanded. After shooting down another plane, he again buzzed the base, flying upside down. “So, they pulled him up on the carpet and said, ‘We told you if you ever did that again we’ll have to ground you.’ Buzz snapped back, ‘I didn’t do it the same way this time. I did it upside down! That’s Buzz Beurling.”37
Like most aces, Beurling had incredible vision, quick reflexes, and was a master of the art of deflection shooting: leading his target with fire, which required splitsecond calculations involving angles, speed, and almost knowing what your enemy was about to do before he did, to ensure that he flew into the stream of shells. But Beurling also killed within an intimate range. Beurling described one of his victories: “I closed up to about thirty yards … I was on his portside coming in at about a fifteendegree angle … it look[ed] pretty close. I could see all the details in his face because he turned and looked at me just as I had a bead on him…. One of my can[non] shells caught him right in the face and blew his head right off.”38 Beurling was relentless in hunting the Axis fighters and bombers that blasted the Malta defences. At the same time, he continued to rouse the ire of many of his British colleagues, who well understood the eccentricities of pilots but for some reason found Beurling’s beyond the pale. He acquired the nickname “Screwball,” although within six weeks of being posted to the island, he had claimed seven kills. Beurling remained an unstoppable force over Malta and was awarded four gallantry medals in four months. By the time he was wounded and shot down in the sea on October 14, he had twenty-nine kills. In the vicious air war over Malta, where the Allied fighters were always outnumbered and suffering from overwork, where they slowly succumbed to malnourishment and were plagued by the “Malta Dog” (dysentery), Beurling and his mates bested the enemy time and time again. The RAF needed more screwballs.
Like Major Billy Bishop in the previous war, Beurling became a national hero. He was pulled back to Canada, much against his will, to sell war bonds and put a human face on the war. The media dubbed him “Buzz” Beurling, which was probably better than “Screwball” and certainly a name more befitting one of Canada’s first heroes of the war. He was also known as the Knight of Malta. By all accounts, he was generous and friendly on the cross-Canada tours, even though the introverted, blue-eyed hero found the adulation painful and he was jittery from the long-term effects of the Malta ordeal.
Upon his return to the front, Beurling was transferred to the RCAF and flew with No. 403 Squadron, but he scored only two more victories before he was pulled from operations in January 1944 for what his superiors believed was reckless behaviour in the air. It would be a blow to Canadian morale if the nation’s hero was killed in combat. But the fighter ace was lost without the thrill of flight and fight, and he was released from the RCAF in August 1944. He was killed four years later in a crash near Rome while ferrying an aircraft to Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Whether fighting over Britain, “leaning into France,” or battling over Malta, fighter pilots earned a reputation as dashing, heroic figures. These “knights of the sky” built upon the image of the gallant fighters of the Great War, who were also feted for their aerial combat skills. The fighter pilots were portrayed as lone heroes engaging the enemy in the battlefields of both the air and the imagination. The exhilarating prospect of soaring into the endless blue skies captivated civilians of all nations, but the cruel, dark reality of vicious air battles, the stark certainty of confrontations in which opponents either killed or were killed—or scurried like mad for cover—exacted an emotional toll on all who participated in the aerial battles.
“DO YOU REALIZE that we’re winning this war, that the tide is definitely on the turn, that light is beginning to break?” wrote RCAF Flying Officer Thomas Reid to his fiancée on June 12, 1942. “The cost of winning is fearful—we feel sick every time a new casualty-list comes out, because some of our pals are named in every one—but we’re winning.”39 It may have felt to Reid that the Allies were now winning the air war, but to date, in fact, Bomber Command had made little impact on the enemy’s ability to wage war. The cost to Bomber Command was heavy, and Reid, like so many other flyers, would eventually have his name added to the casualty lists when his bomber was shot down a year later.
As German defences were strengthened by the addition of fighters and flak guns, the bombers needed new ways to overcome the enemy, and preferably to get to the targets and out of enemy air space as rapidly as possible. Allied scientists and researchers pored over reports and aerial photographs, seeking methods to equip the navigators and pilots with technology that would enable them to better locate their targets. In early 1942, the RAF introduced the navigational aid Gee. The original system, and the evolutions that followed, vectored the bombers to their targets. The navigator watched his Gee box, a cathode-ray receiver that sat on one side of the navigator’s worktable, as it received signals from fixed bases in England and allowed constant triangulation to place the location of the aircraft. Navigators studied the receiver and factored in speed and wind—which could push the bomber off its intended path— to stay on target and within the relative protection of the bomber stream. “Through the use of Gee,” remarked RCAF Flight Lieutenant John Patterson, “the navigator could quickly and accurately determine his aircraft’s position,” which aided bombers in finding their targets.40
Oboe, introduced in 1943, was similar to Gee in that it allowed aircraft to pick up pulses from two ground stations. It improved upon the accuracy of Gee, but most crews did not like it because the bomber had to fly a straight course to get a proper reading, and this left the aircraft vulnerable to enemy fire. The best device was H2S, downward-looking terrain-mapping radar used operationally for the first time in January 1943, which provided a picture of the ground features over which the bombers flew by bouncing pulses from the plane to the earth and back again, much like a warship’s asdic. Water, irregular surfaces, and built-up areas were all reflected on the navigator’s screen. “Things such as buildings gave a stronger reflection than trees or water,” recounted one RCAF navigator, and “cities were normally easy to pick up.”41 While these early computer-like screens assisted the navigators, they could be jammed and would often malfunction, and so more often conventional maps, astronavigation, and dead reckoning were the most trusted methods employed to get to and from the objective, although they did nothing to ensure that bombs landed accurately on their targets.
The most important innovation was not technological but doctrinal. To assist in leading the bomber stream to targets, pathfinders were introduced in August 1942. While Harris had initially opposed the creation of a target-finding force for fear of drawing off the best crews into an elite formation, he was overruled by Portal. These aerial rangers became the spearhead of the bomber stream.42 Typically flying de Havilland Mosquito light bombers—a fast, wooden machine—the pathfinders arrived first over the target and dropped coloured flares to pinpoint and highlight the area to be bombed by the follow-on force. The timing was critical: the pathfinders had to be close enough to the stream that German ground defences had no time to light decoy flares outside the city or to mask the dropped flares. After they dropped their first round of flares, the pathfinders continued to fly over the city to ensure that the bombers’ high explosives and incendiary bombs landed in the intended area, as a common tendency of those bombers arriving at the end of the stream and encountering a sea of fire below them was to drop their loads short, a phenomenon known as “creep-back.” And so there were generally two waves of pathfinders: those that marked the target area with flares, and then a second group that dropped another round of sky markers that renewed aiming points or corrected previously obscured targets. As one Canadian pilot—later a pathfinder in No. 614 Squadron—wrote, “Quite often the falling bombs would scatter the target indicators on the ground and the pathfinder aircraft would have to keep circling the area and replenish the markers.”43 These elite bombers flew circuits for twenty or thirty minutes over their targets and were subject to ground fire the whole time. Casualties were high. The pathfinders were experienced, second-tour aircrews and wore their badge with pride. They accepted the danger.
While technological advances, the introduction of pathfinders, and the sheer number of heavy bombers all helped to raise the level of intensity and violence in the battles over Europe, dropping bombs from 18,000 feet or higher when visibility was impaired by plumes of smoke, smog, and flames was never an exact science. But it did not have to be. Any strike against an enemy city was a blow against the enemy’s infrastructure and morale. And the strikes got harder. From January 1942 on, Lancaster and Halifax bombers usually carried a “cookie,” a 4,000-pound bomb that contained about 3,000 pounds of amatol, a high explosive material made from TNT and ammonium nitrate. The cookie occupied the centre of the bomb bay, and there were usually additional 500-pound high explosive bombs placed fore and aft of it, plus dozens of 4-pound incendiary bombs. The bomb load was about five and a half tons. Later, this was increased yet again, until the Lancaster was capable of carrying loads as great as 12,000 pounds, albeit at the cost of reducing speed to a lumbering crawl.
A collection of RAF and RCAF bombs, including incendiaries and high explosives, with the most common armament in the foreground, the 4,000-pound high explosive.
The cookie, an ugly green-painted cylinder, blasted buildings, blew off roofs, collapsed walls, and killed in a wide radius, while the 500-pounders buried themselves in structures before exploding from the inside. Timed fuses could delay the explosion by a few seconds or a few hours. All of these bombs burst water pipes and cut gas mains, the latter leading to secondary fires that were often ignited by the bombers’ incendiaries. Because the bombs were made in different shapes and sizes and possessed different aerodynamic qualities, they never landed in the same spot. However, this lack of a consistent and tight bomb pattern was inconsequential when the target was an entire city.
Carpet bombing kilometres of urban centres created scenes of genuine horror on the ground and resulted in vast physical damage, and yet German industry was barely slowed by the bombings in 1942. While the damage wrought by the bombers grew in intensity, the war industries were made more efficient as the duplication in the industrial sector was eliminated and procedures were streamlined. Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, was responsible for much of this increased output.44 Speer was also able to draw upon the vast occupied territory in the east for additional raw material and slave labour. Statistics would later show that between February and August 1942, German production increased by 27 percent for guns, 25 percent for tanks, and 97 percent for ammunition. And this was a period when Bomber Command dropped 28,000 tons of bombs and lost 852 aircraft.45 What the stark numbers cannot reveal is the degree to which the destruction of infrastructure, the killing of workers, and the disruption of German society actually slowed the rate at which Speer was able to increase production. Might the increases above have doubled or tripled without the bomber’s hammer blows? The bombing campaign of 1942 had few measurable successes, but with more bombers carrying heavier payloads, the next year would see German cities gutted, civilians killed in shocking numbers, and industrial production severely curtailed.
In 1942, German civilian morale, much like that of the British during the Blitz, was not crushed. But as the aerial assault thickened, there was little escape for those who lived in the cities. Hundreds and then thousands, and then tens of thousands, were killed. When the high explosive reverberations stopped and the fires burned down, the survivors crept from their blackened concrete bunkers and underground silos to return to their neighbourhoods and houses, to salvage their losses, to gather their precious items, and to bury the dead. The workers went back to manufacturing guns and war supplies, and continued until the next air raid drove them underground again. Yet while buildings and factories might be rebuilt, there was no restoring the charred bodies of loved ones and friends. And such attacks were also debilitating for the German troops at the front, anxious for their families who faced the bombs alone.
Churchill continued to press for the full-fledged bomber offensive, even though he knew by now that it would not, by itself, win the war, as some of the more enthusiastic bomber barons claimed. The bomber war was also popular with British civilians, who had faced the Blitz and now watched the same weapon used against the aggressor. A Daily Express headline captured the angry sentiment of millions of Britons on the day after the first thousand-bomber raid against Cologne: “The Vengeance Begins!”46