MAKING AN IMPACT
While the Allied small-boat and amphibious raids against the French coast were at best pinpricks, and at worst an amateurish debacle (as in the case of Dieppe), the bombers were striking painful blows against the Nazi regime and the German people. And the order to attack cities and civilians came from the very top. When Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca in January 1943, they set the strategic direction for the bombing campaign in the last two years of the war.
This meeting, which saw the American and British administrations working together to prosecute the war against Germany, took place as the German Sixth Army was facing annihilation at Stalingrad on the Eastern Front. Stalin demanded that the Allies do their part in the war against Germany and, with the invasion of Europe put off for at least a year, the Allied leaders ordered that the aim of the bombing campaign would be “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system. And the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”1 There was no grey area here; it was a stark order to attack the cities, smash societies, and kill civilians. The American and British bombers in the Combined Bomber Offensive would strike the Germans “around the clock.”
Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Arthur Harris, of RAF’s Bomber Command, took to his orders with enthusiasm and continued to stand up new bomber squadrons. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan continued to prepare thousands of airmen of all nationalities for service, and the location of the system in Canada meant that the majority of airmen were Canadian. By war’s end, the senior Dominion’s flyers formed nearly a third of the total Bomber Command force.2 Prime Minister King was well aware of the scale of this effort and demanded that the imperials follow a policy of Canadianization, meaning that the nation’s airmen would serve together in identifiable RCAF squadrons. Together with his minister of national defence for air, Charles “Chubby” Power, King pressured the British throughout the war to ensure that Canadians flew together. The RAF senior command stonewalled Ottawa’s requests, however, and diverted recruits to British squadrons. Significantly more Canadian RCAF flyers—some 93,844—flew in RAF units than in RCAF ones. But the RCAF was expanded throughout the war, eventually consisting of thirty-eight overseas squadrons.3
Halifax bomber attacking sites in France.
Les Morrison, who enlisted in the RCAF in 1942, when he was eighteen, took enormous pride in his uniform, the coveted wings, and the shoulder patches “emblazoned with one word, Canada.” He believed, “they became a reflection of our intense pride.”4 “I am sure proud of our democracy,” wrote another Canadian, having in mind the differences in class-consciousness in Canadian and British society.5 Canadians serving overseas in either RCAF or RAF squadrons often saw themselves as deeply and intimately linked to Britain, but also as separate. Unlike in the Great War, when about half of Canadian soldiers were British-born, in this conflict, the proportion was far smaller: the vast majority of Canadian service personnel now were Canadian-born. With their own uniforms, units, and symbols, most Canadians took pride in their distinctive status.
The flip side of the men’s pride in Canada was often a yearning for home. Soldiers and airmen wrote of missing Canadian food, gum, and leisure activities, as well as their families and community. Arthur Wilkinson penned a letter to his mother on April 14, 1940: “I listened to the hockey game on the radio last night, between New York Rangers and Toronto. Rangers won the Stanley Cup. It was grand to hear Foster Hewitt’s voice and hear the crowd yell. It made me sort of homesick.”6 RCAF Sergeant Earle Miller from Renfrew, Ontario, saw a film titled Untamed, and wrote home about it in December of that same year: “It was all about Canada in the wilds…. This doc in the States was told to take a trip for change so he took a geography book and opened it up to a map of Canada. There was seven Sergeant Air Gunners sitting with me and we all stood up and clapped. It was hunting and fishing. Good Old Canada.”7
Whether or not they missed “Good Old Canada,” most Canadians fit in easily within the RAF squadrons. They found camaraderie and kindred spirits among young men from many nations in the shared struggle. When inter-nation tension occurred, it stemmed chiefly from class prejudices in British society or hidebound adherence to RAF customs. The civilian airmen sometimes chafed at military discipline and taunts reflecting on Canada’s colonial past. Many Canadians in uniform held a perception that they were a unique breed of tough, northern warriors who came from an egalitarian society that prized independence and initiative. Not all British officers treated Canadians with disdain, but “some of the English boys looked upon the Canadians as uncouth Colonials,” remembered Flight Lieutenant Arthur Wahlroth of No. 405 Squadron. “A few of us used to foster this impression by going into the kitchen before dinner and getting a strip of raw meat, then walk through the mess chewing on it. It tasted like hell, but they thought we were real backwoodsmen!”8
THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT and RCAF headquarters overseas kept pressing for the creation of an all-Canadian bomber group—the air force equivalent of an army. Each of the RAF bomber groups, of which there were initially five, had around a dozen squadrons, all taking their orders from Harris’s headquarters. An all-Canadian group would allow the RCAF to distinguish itself within the larger Allied war effort and, equally importantly to senior airmen, would provide much-needed opportunities for Canadians to fill critical command and staff positions. The King government greased the deal by agreeing to pay to equip and maintain it. Commander Harris was not pleased with the idea, feeling the Canadians were too inexperienced to carry off the administrative and planning work, but the decision was out of his hands: 6 Group was activated on January 1, 1943.
The creation of the group was met with little enthusiasm on the part of Canadian aircrews. As one Canadian report in late 1941 observed, Canadianization was tolerated, but most Canadians already fighting were more interested in “getting on with the war” and were “unlikely to be in a mood to seriously contemplate ‘official policy on ‘Canadianization.’”9 Little had changed two years later. Canadians in established aircrews did not want to be torn from their mates and parachuted into a sprog squadron of neophytes. They knew that their chances of survival were better when they worked with experienced crews. In the end, the policy was haphazardly applied to the waves of airmen coming out of the BCATP. “Although proud to be a Canadian in the RAF,” recounted RCAF Flight Sergeant B.G. McDonald, “it didn’t make any difference to me which squadron I was on as long as it was an RAF Lancaster one.”10 For McDonald and many of his comrades, the issue was less about nationalism or identity, and more about having access to the best machines. For those who flew night after night, simply surviving mattered more than flag waving.
Under the command of Air Vice-Marshal George Brookes, 6 Group consisted initially of six obsolete twin-engine Wellington squadrons and three four-engine Halifax squadrons. Over time, the number of squadrons would rise to fifteen. Brookes had served in the Great War as an aviator, had enjoyed a distinguished career as a Permanent Force RCAF officer, and had served competently in various commands since the start of the war. He faced more than a few challenges in establishing the new unit. Many Canadian flyers felt that they had not received their fair share of medals, which rankled. More serious was the failure to get the most up-to-date bombers. The Wellingtons were slowly taken out of front-line service and replaced by more modern Halifaxes and Lancasters, but as long as they were in use, the outdated Wellingtons were a problem. Flying at a lower altitude made them more susceptible to flak, and the two-engine bombers were also more vulnerable and less robust than their four-engine cousins.
The Canadians requested the more powerful Lancaster bombers, but the RAF was reluctant to supply them. The RAF suffered from a shortage of bombers in 1943, and Harris believed in rewarding experienced squadrons with newer aircraft. He equipped the long-service RAF squadrons with the best bombers, and sent Halifax bombers to the Canadians to replace the Wellingtons. The Halifax was a good plane, and on par with the Lancaster, although less sturdy in absorbing flak or fighter fire, but the Canadians found themselves with the fault-prone Mark II and V variants, which added to the fledgling group’s problems. There was grumbling in the RCAF overseas command and from Minister of Air Chubby Power that the Canadians were being shorted, just as the RCN suffered while the RN favoured its own with the newest equipment. Harris’s policy of rewarding experienced squadrons with better bombers was not unreasonable, but the Canadians were finding out that it was difficult to be the junior partner in a military alliance.
All of the best aerodromes were also already taken by British air groups. The 6 Group squadrons were spread out over a number of airfields among the rolling Yorkshire hills in the north of England. Consequently, the Canadians had to fly at least half an hour longer than squadrons stationed further to the south in order to reach their objectives. The extra distance put considerable strain on crews who already were in the air for six or seven hours, a strain made worse if their plane was shot up and returning after sustaining damage. Many of the northern airfields were so close together that circling aircraft preparing to land were held in dangerously overlapping flight patterns. It was also a notoriously cloudy area of England, often blanketed by industrial smog from Leeds and Middlesbrough, which, again, led to a higher occurrence of aircraft accidents. In a final most unhelpful move, three of the group’s most experienced RCAF squadrons were ordered to North Africa in early 1943, to take part in the bombing of Sicily and Italy. With inferior aircraft, far-flung northern bases, and a lack of experienced squadrons, it is not surprising that 6 Group performed less effectively than most RAF groups in its first year of operations.
In the early months of 1943, only 17 percent of Bomber Command crews could be expected to complete their tours: the majority were shot down before their sixth mission.11 The odds were even worse for the Canadians. Flying outdated Wellingtons, 6 Group posted losses of a crippling 9 percent per mission in June 1943, when anything above 5 percent was viewed as unsustainable, in terms of both aircraft lost and the crushing effect on morale.12 Writing at this time, RCAF navigator George Brown, who sortied against Duisberg, Bochum, Dortmund, and Dusseldorf, and who saw his bomber twice caught in searchlight cones and riddled with flak fire, observed, “I think that these raids toughened us. Either that or we accepted the fate that it was inevitable that our turn would come and it was only a matter of time.”13
THE BOMBERS LEANED HEAVILY against the German cities throughout 1943. The policy that had been decided at Casablanca was reaffirmed at the May 1943 Washington conference. It authorized around-the-clock bombing, with the Americans flying by day and the British and Commonwealth forces at night. While the Canadian government had no control over this policy, neither did it raise any objection to it. And none of this was a secret. The British government occasionally downplayed the effects of the bombing or evaded direct questions about whether civilians were targeted, but the hammering of German cities was widely reported in British and Canadian newspapers—and rarely condemned by politicians, the media, or civilians.14 In fact, the newspapers offered graphic accounts of the bombing and even provided justifications for them.15 On July 30, 1943, for example, The Vancouver Sun labelled the raid on Hamburg a “heavy terror attack” that caused “extensive fires in several areas of the town and high casualties among the civilian population.”16 Moreover, the RCAF historical section produced several wartime best-selling histories that made no secret of how the bombers were striking back against the Germans.17 As further evidence that the Allied bombing policy reflected the convictions of most Canadians, the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion took two polls in January and June of 1944. These revealed that between 76 and 80 percent of the Anglo-Canadian public supported the bombing of Germany.18 Targeting civilians was central to the bombing strategy, and most Canadians, like their British cousins, understood that the workers in German urban centres supported an odious Nazi regime that had put millions to the sword. Though almost no one in Canada knew of Hitler’s horrifying Final Solution, which would eventually entail the murder of six million Jews and other unlucky innocents, these crimes were known to Churchill, Roosevelt, and select senior military officers by the midpoint of the war. These leaders were therefore further steeled in unleashing the full range of weapons at their disposal.19 There would be no let-up against the barbarous Nazi regime.
This cartoon, published in The Halifax Herald on July 31, 1943, makes stark reference to the “Allied Air Offensive” against the city of Hamburg. The city is being put through a meat-grinder.
“Bombing of Cities is a crime,” wails Hitler, while standing on a mountain of victims from “Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, Belgrade, etc.”
The US Eighth Army Air Force—the “Mighty Eighth”—had begun European operations in August 1942, sending its bombers into enemy air space during the day. Soon the USAAF squadrons learned the hard way—just as the RAF had done— how skilled the German defenders were, and American aircrews suffered horrendous losses from blanketing anti-aircraft fire. Their B-17 Flying Fortresses carried around 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of bombs (about half that of a Lancaster) and were armed to the teeth (each aircraft had at least ten .50-calibre machine guns), but they were no match for the swift German fighters.20 Even with these visible setbacks, the Americans made far-fetched claims for their bombers, saying that they were better at targeting factories and munitions plants and avoiding homes and schools. This was nonsense: there was no such thing as precision bombing from 20,000 feet. One postwar study of fifty-seven American “precision” strikes on three separate synthetic oil plants revealed that only 2.2 percent of the bombs hit buildings and equipment, while no less than 87.1 percent were spread uselessly over the countryside.21 Even the American official history observed that in January 1945, when the Luftwaffe was all but destroyed and after enormous progress had been made in tactics and technology, the 8th Air Force “had an average circular probable error of two miles on its blind missions which meant that many of its attacks depended on effectiveness on drenching the area with bombs.”22 The RAF, RCAF, and USAAF all bombed German urban centres, killing widely and indiscriminately: nothing else was possible with the available technology and the fierce German defences.23
THE FLYERS PAID A HEAVY PRICE for Bomber Command’s gains. RCAF navigator James Baker, writing to his mother in January 1943 during the final stages of training, did not sugar-coat the nature of the task that lay ahead: “We are going to have a terrific fight on our hands. We’re going to lose a lot of men and a heavy price is going to be paid amongst the Air Crews. We all realize that and there is no use tying to dodge the fact. We are all going into this with our eyes open. God knows after 3 years of war, we ought to know what to expect. We must go forward and if we fall, it is God’s Will. Each of us hopes that he won’t be the one that is unlucky.”24 By mid-1943, the corpse counters at Bomber Command headquarters concluded that an airman had a 17 percent chance of completing a thirty-operation tour, while only a dismal 2.5 percent saw a second tour to the end.25 “If you live on the brink of death,” wrote Halifax pilot Flight Lieutenant Denis Hornsey, “it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one.”26
But not all aircrews accepted their likely end with such fatalism. Throughout 1943, 6 Group squadrons had a high “turn back rate,” meaning that bombers returned to base without completing the sortie. These crews were often accused of lacking a sufficiently aggressive spirit to “push home the attack.”27 The charge seems unfair as the bombers frequently experienced mechanical failure, and any delay from a blown engine left the bomber straggling behind the stream and therefore a prime target for enemy fighters. Nevertheless, the commanding officer, Air Vice-Marshal George Brookes, had little sympathy for “boomerang crews” who turned back before completing their mission.
RCAF flyers buried at an air base. Their planes made it home, but they did not survive.
Flying Officer Alex Nethery, a bomb aimer with No. 427 Squadron, RCAF, recounted the tale of his first operation with a nervous crew and, at the last moment, a new navigator. The navigator got confused and took the bomber off course, eventually leading it to London, where it was nearly shot down by friendly anti-aircraft fire. The bewildered sprog crew was terrified by the searchlights and flak, and the skipper banked the bomber sharply to escape. Somehow the navigator got confused again and took them back to London, where they were fired at again. By now, there was no way to catch up to the bomber stream. There was the added risk in this particular mission of running into the returning bombers, because the operation followed a nearly straight flight path both to and from England. The pilot made the hard call: the crew jettisoned their bombs over the sea and sheepishly returned to the squadron. “When we arrived back at the base, we did not get a very good reception,” Nethery remembered. “We were then told there was going to be a raid the next night and we were going—regardless! The powers that be seemed to imply there was a little lack of moral fibre on our part.”28 Nethery was clearly no coward and would survive fifteen operations with No. 427 Squadron and another fourteen as a navigator with No. 405 Pathfinder Squadron, RCAF. Pilot Douglas Harvey had experiences similar to Nethery’s, writing that by 1943, “the climate of trust that had marked our earlier operations vanished, and the interrogations after a raid turned bitter as accusations were flung at the crews.”29 Canadian flyers reacted badly to being treated as delinquents by senior officers who urged them to “press on” but rarely experienced the same dangers as the crews.
The photographs, showing the bomb pattern when the planes’ payload was released, allowed the scientists, boffins, and staff officers to develop tools to improve the bomb aimers’ accuracy, but photographs also revealed when a crew dropped their bombs short or avoided a target altogether. The crews tended to resent this monitoring, and some figured out how to deactivate the cameras. Official reports drew attention to the issue in guarded language, saying, for example, that the failure of numerous cameras “could not definitely be explained,” especially considering that the cameras worked fine before take-off and upon landing.30 It is impossible to estimate how many crews found ways to avoid completing their missions, but it does not appear to have been widespread or epidemic. The vast majority of bomber crews pushed on.
GENERAL SIR ALAN BROOKE, the chief of the imperial general staff and Churchill’s primary military advisor, did not believe that bombing could win the war. He did think, however, that the attacks were worthwhile, and that they would “bring the horrors of war home to the German people.”31 He also argued that the bombing campaign had, in effect, opened a second front against the Nazis. Stalin had demanded that the Allies somehow relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front, and a cross-Channel invasion was out of the question in 1943. The bombing campaign helped to placate the Soviet tyrant by drawing off significant German hitting power.32 It forced the Germans to pull back from the east thousands of fighters and anti-aircraft guns in order to defend the Reich. Many of these weapons, such as the 88mm anti-aircraft gun, could also be employed in an anti-tank role.33 The hard-pressed German army needed every gun at its disposal as it was now outnumbered by the Red Army, and the removal of thousands of these guns from the Russian steppes had a significant impact on their campaign. Late in the war, the Germans had 22,000 light and medium anti-aircraft guns, as well as 11,000 heavy 88mm guns guarding their cities within range of the bombers. In contrast, they had only 12,000 other anti-aircraft guns in all theatres of war, from Italy to the Balkans to the Eastern Front.34 The bombing campaign also siphoned off fighters from the Eastern Front and the Mediterranean, and by April 1944, the Luftwaffe was reduced to 500 aircraft of all types against more than 13,000 Soviet planes.35 By mid-1943 more than 40 percent of German weapons production was devoted to aircraft that were largely employed in the defence of Germany, while tanks and self-propelled guns had fallen to just 6.27 percent.36 There were other ways to measure the effectiveness of the bombers.
The bombing campaign was weighted heavily on the industrial heartland of Germany, the Ruhr. Between March and June 1943, the cities of Duisburg, Bochum, Krefeld, Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Mulheim, Gelsenkirchen, and Cologne were hit; more than 15,000 civilians were killed and thousands of buildings destroyed. The nation’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, confided his shock and fury in his diary after the spring aerial attacks: “We find ourselves in a situation of helpless inferiority.”37 While the Ruhr presented many targets, it was far from Britain and protected by dense pockets of anti-aircraft batteries, as were the approaches to it over northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Allied flyers took terrible casualties as a result, but their sacrifice was not wasted. The German war industry had continued to increase output, year after year, as armament minister Albert Speer tightened slack in the system, increased productivity through the use of slave labour, and pressured the heads of industry to carry on despite the terror from the skies. From February 1942 to May 1943, wartime production, particularly armaments (as other industries were scaled back), almost tripled.38 This was an impressive achievement, and yet barely enough to stave off the Red Army on the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1943, Hitler and Speer needed more, and were planning to increase steel production for weapons by 2.8 million tons per month. The massed bombing attacks against the Ruhr severely disrupted the plan. Instead of an increase, production of steel fell by 400,000 tons per month.39 Bomber Command was having a direct impact on the Nazi war machine.
THE CITY OF HAMBURG was subjected to four major attacks in late July. This was Germany’s second largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, and the site of factories that manufactured aircraft and submarine parts. In the late hours of the 24th, 792 British and Canadian bombers took off with Hamburg as their destination. The bomber crews were aided in their attacks by a new low-tech defence system: the bombers approached the target and airmen shovelled aluminum foil strips—codenamed “Window”—from their bomb bays and flare chutes. The tens of thousands of strips of foil, each ten inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide, effectively blinded the German radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns. And then they dropped their bomb loads. Just twelve planes were lost in the raid, and large parts of the city were burned to the ground. Two additional American attacks over the next two days were followed by another RAF and RCAF operation on the morning of July 28, when 787 bombers returned to the still-smouldering ruins of the city.
The heat of summer, high humidity, and collision of two weather fronts, combined with 2,313 tons of high explosives and incendiaries—the most bombs dropped up to that point in history in a single operation—created a massive firestorm. The manmade tempest, fed by cooler air on the ground and super-heated air above it, generated a peak temperature of 700 degrees Celsius and produced upward-flowing winds that rose to the sky like a monumental fountain. The conflagration sucked in oxygen to fan the flames to create a gale force vortex that uprooted trees and pulled houses into pieces. The flames burned higher and hotter. Fleeing citizens, some with their hair on fire, were lifted off their feet by winds that reached speeds of 110 kilometres per hour and dragged them into the incinerating heart of the storm. One civil defence report noted, “The scenes of terror are indescribable. Children were torn from their parents’ hands and whirled into the fire.”40 Entire blocks were consumed in the blaze, terrified civilians were cooked alive in the streets, cowering mothers and children suffocated from lack of oxygen in shelters, and even those who dived into the canals for safety were later found boiled alive. In the scorched streets, corpses were reduced to charred bones, mummified remains, and coagulated human body fat.41
This was the brutal, horrifying potential of the raids. Almost all of the bombers involved in the operation survived the mission, but more than a few airmen who looked back must have shuddered at the devastation in their wake. The appalling butcher’s bill for the four aerial attacks was 42,600 killed and 37,000 wounded.42 Much of Hamburg was reduced to ashes.
Some 900,000 stunned survivors fled the dead city, spreading disorder and panic throughout the surrounding countryside. Shocked Nazi officials feared that the bomber campaign would be unstoppable now that the Allies had reached this new level of ferocity. The attacks on Hamburg had killed almost as many people than were massacred during the six-month Blitz against Britain. In the horrendous aftermath, trains filled with quicklime were sent to the city to dissolve the charred bodies that were too numerous to bury. Some 40,000 houses, 275,000 apartments, 277 schools, and 58 churches were destroyed. Another 260 factories were burned out.43 Hitler raged about the ineffectiveness of the city’s defences, and ordered more fighters and anti-tank/anti-aircraft guns pulled back from the fighting fronts to further fortify the cities, thus undermining his generals on the Eastern Front and in the Mediterranean.44
Speer observed, darkly, that six more such raids in quick succession would cost Germany the war. In fact, it was impossible to replicate the conditions that had produced the firestorm: the precise concentration of aircraft in time and space, the weather and wind, the topography, and the mass of buildings on the ground. But that did not stop the wild rumours that circulated throughout Germany after the raid—the whispered speculation that the Allies had developed some new, terrifying weapon. The summer of bombing put a terrible strain on Germany’s home front, and the raids continued to kill by the thousand, culminating in another smaller firestorm on October 22 in Kassel, where 6,000 civilians were killed. While German civilians had been able to shrug off all but the worst effects of the bombing campaign from 1939 to 1942, now, in the summer of 1943 and until the end of the war, the intolerable tension caused by the nightly sirens, the blasted houses, the killing of neighbours, and the terror-filled nights spent in bunkers and dugouts led to growing disillusionment with the war and the Nazi regime. The citizens of Essen, a steel production centre, endured 635 warnings of enemy aircraft approaching from 1939 to 1943, plus another 198 warnings over the last two years of the war.45 Each potential threat drove citizens to the shelters. As often as not, the Allied bombers veered off for other targets, but each false warning reminded the entire city that no safe refuge was to be had. A postwar survey of German civilians revealed that the disruption and fear precipitated by the bombers was the most trying aspect of the war, and far more damaging to morale in 1943 than the defeats at the fighting fronts, including the disaster of Stalingrad.46 The war was being brought home and no one in the burned out, moonscape cities could pretend that Germany was not paying a steep price for its warmongering and unfettered aggression.
“WAR TO US IS SPASMODIC,” wrote Flight Lieutenant Leslie McCaig in his diary.47 The flyers fought a stop-and-start war, flying into danger for a few hours then returning to the relative luxury of a bed, a warm meal, and stiff drinks. The airmen served on both a martial and a domestic front. They did not endure the extended misery experienced by soldiers in the field. Nor did they suffer through the long, monotonous periods of waiting, broken by brief bouts of terror, as sailors did. Instead they were jolted fitfully, almost daily, between danger and safety. There were also many nights when they prepared themselves for battle only to find their mission scrubbed because of poor weather or mechanical failure. “The effect of these cancellations was traumatic,” remarked wireless operator Howard Hewer. “Each man had psyched himself up for the raid in his own private way. To have the raid cancelled at the last minute … imposed more stress on the aircrews than an actual operation.”48 Stopped in their tracks, with adrenaline pumping through their systems, the airmen had nowhere to go but back to the mess.
The mess was the flyers’ retreat from the outside world. Men read quietly, wrote letters home, and smoked until their fingers were stained yellow. Most officers’ messes had comfortable chairs, libraries, and games. They created a shared space where airmen could talk about their operations, their near misses, and those who never returned. None other than Air Vice-Marshal Donald Bennett, the first commander of Pathfinder Force, suggested that the lessons of battle were “taught mainly through gossip,” or informal learning, “and not through classroom stuff.”49 Mess chat saved lives.
“Parties were frequent and frequently riotous,” recalled RCAF navigator Douglas Humphreys.50 Alcohol played an important role. Twenty-year-old J.K. Chapman remembered, “Many of our drinking parties were wakes for crews who had been lost the night before. In part they followed the old dictum: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.’”51 The men had so many opportunities to drink, and so much peer pressure to join in, that it was hard to resist. Twenty-eight-year-old Flight Lieutenant Leslie McCaig’s diary is an endless recitation of nights out and mornings hung over. “We drink more as time goes on,” he wrote. This resort to self-medication was not without purpose, however. Martin Schellin, a mid-upper gunner in No. 407 Squadron, RCAF, remembered years after the war that the booze, songs, pranks, and adolescent camaraderie “seem silly as hell now but were a real part of life then.” With alcohol used as a means to relax, socialize, and forget, as one Canadian wrote, “Tomorrow was a hundred years away.”52
The strain of sustained operations is etched into the face of this Canadian airman. He has earned his rest.
Music was important too. Almost all the messes had a piano and all had a gramophone on which to play the latest hits. Young men were used to singing at church, during school, or at home, and found it easy to sing in the company of their friends. In this new war, First World War songs were recycled, as were more modern, bawdy music-hall pieces. Multiple versions of each song were developed, and what they had in common, said pilot Douglas Harvey, “was the foul language of the work-a-day air force, language born out of loneliness, frustration and fear…. Helpless to control our lives, we turned to song to express the insanities of the moment.”53 Anodyne songs such as “The Quarter Master’s Stores” were absorbed and reworked with new lyrics to better suit the moment:
There was flak, flak, bags of bloody flak,
In the Ruhr, in the Ruhr.
There was flak, flak, bags of bloody flak,
In the Valley of the Ruhr.
My eyes are dim I cannot see,
The searchlights they have blinded me.
The searchlights they have blinded me.
Flight Lieutenant Harlo Jones, an RCAF No. 408 Squadron bomber pilot, recalled a ditty they sang to the tune of “Bless Them All”:
They say there’s a Lancaster leaving the Ruhr,
Bound for old Blighty shore,
Heavily laden with terrified men,
Shit scared and prone on the floor.
There’s many a Junkers that’s hot on their tail,
Many a Messerschmitt too.
They’ve shot off our bollocks and fucked our hydraulics
So cheer up my lads, bless them all.54
Flight Sergeant B.G. McDonald enjoyed a rousing untitled, anti-authoritarian song that was sung to the tune of the popular “Lili Marlene”:
Coming out of briefing,
Getting into the kites,
Down the effing runway,
And off into the night,
We’ve left the flare-path far behind,
It’s effing dark, but never mind,
We’re pressing on regardless,
For the CO’s DSO.55
Irreverent, hyper-masculine, and super-sexualized songs were the flavour of the day: they made fun of the airmen’s grim fate, took the piss out of their officers, and, of course, poked fun at the Führer. One of the favourites was sung to the tune of “Colonel Bogey”:
Hitler has only got one ball.
Goering has two but they are small,
Himmler, is somewhat sim’lar
But Goe-bals has no balls at all.56
This one remained popular well after the war. Vulgar and cheery, the songs reflected the desperate mindset of young men who faced death almost nightly. And why not sing out your fears? In a saying popular among flyers at the time, “There’s fuck all else to do.”57
“Most of us had a sort of perverted sense of humour,” said RCAF Flight Lieutenant John Zinkhan. “We were always playing pranks on each other. I guess this was a sort of safety-valve for inner tensions.”58 In addition to cards and darts, new games were devised, fuelled partly by alcohol and the high pain tolerance of youth. The mess game “Chesterfields” involved two teams cheered on by the bibulous crowd. Bets were placed. After an appropriate wind-up of taunts and boasts, each team picked up a chesterfield and charged at the other, ramming the couches together in a woodsplintering crash. If the chesterfields survived the first impact, they did it again until one of them lay broken on the floor. A variation played at No. 109 Squadron, RAF, was “High Cockalorum,” in which teams of men climbed onto their partner’s shoulders to wrestle or ram others to the ground. “The game could get quite violent,” remembered Ron Peel, a Canadian navigator in the squadron, “as all roared around the room with a full head of steam often generated by the consumption of more than a little alcohol.”59
“There are absolutely no women around our mess which makes it much easier,” wrote Canadian pilot Jack Small, who did not survive the war.60 One Canadian airman recounted how a fellow dominion flyer, an Australian pilot, amazed new and old hands by drinking his beer in the mess and then eating the glass. “He snapped off pieces of the glass with his front teeth and carefully manoeuvred the pieces with his tongue between his molars. Then he would grind the glass, with a horrible sound, before washing it down with beer.”61 Drunk newcomers, urged on by mates or puffing their own chest, tried to emulate the freak show, and almost always ended up with bleeding gums and lacerated tongues, to the howls of delight from their comrades. Other playful and painful tricks involved sneaking up behind a man, spraying him with lighter fuel, and lighting his jacket on fire. A less dangerous gag was to “pants” a man by grabbing his trousers and pulling them down. All of this, no doubt, was more amusing in the boozy mess environment than in the retelling.
D.J. Matthews, an RCAF navigator in No. 547 Squadron, RAF, described yet another diversion in a letter to his wife: “Late in the evening F/O Hemiston organized a work party to pile up furniture as a makeshift scaffold across the floor of the ante room. He was then passed shoes that had been ground thoroughly into the soot of the fireplace. Putting these on his hands he produced a realistic path of excellent footprints up one wall, across the ceiling, then down another. It was our parting shot after a couple of months’ [of ] open warfare with two unpopular ‘wingless wonders’ commonly spoken of as ‘V.D.’ and ‘Joe Syph.’”62 Again, through drinking, songs, pranks, and their own closed culture, this unique community banded together against the hazards of their duties, and against those who did not share the danger, especially the “wingless wonder” staff officers.
Airmen lived for the moment, wringing all they could from simple pleasures. “Morale was important in the air, as well as on the ground, to survive and keep your sanity,” said Flying Officer Alex Nethery, who completed twenty-eight operations with his band of brothers. “Our crew did things together…. In a strange country the crew took the place of the family and friends left behind in Canada.”63
NEARLY ALL THE AIR BASES were close to villages or cities to which the flyers would more or less regularly escape. These excursions were one of the defining experiences of bomber crews and RCAF personnel in their non-flying hours. Much as they valued the seclusion of the mess, they also needed sometimes to put a distance between themselves and their base. While the sailors were at sea and the infantry fighting in other theatres of war, the aircrews were a part of the home front, and were daily in contact with the British people. Those civilians, in turn, saw the bombers rumbling through the skies and had frequent encounters with the young men who had enlisted to defend them.
Few airmen had cars, but most could secure a bicycle, which, according to twenty-one-year-old Flight Lieutenant George Joseph Chequer, was “worth its weight in gold.”64 Many of the bikes were known as “stand up and begs,” because the rider holding the high handlebars looked like a dog on its hind legs, but they got the airmen around. Some of the more adventurous Canadians purchased motorcycles, but petrol was expensive and driving on the English roads in the blackout was not for the faint of heart. Flying Officer Bob Wallace wrote to his girlfriend, Norma Etta Lee, an air traffic control operator in Canada, that his mate had bought a motorbike and wanted Wallace “to buy one but there is lots of ways to get killed over here without going looking for it on a motor-cycle.”65 As the Germans were reputed to have said, “Give the Canadians enough motor-cycles, and we don’t need to worry about them.”66
Canadians in those years came from a puritanical country where drinking establishments were dreary, dingy, and reputedly frequented only by degenerates. In Britain, in contrast, the pub was the community meeting place, filled with good cheer and boisterous folk. The airmen had money to burn and many came straight from battle after less than a day’s rest. “There is no doubt that we took them over and in the course of doing so we drank too much,” said Bon Cassels, a wartime navigator with No. 428 “Ghost” Squadron.67 Pubs also offered the opportunity to meet local women, as did the dances arranged by various benevolent organizations. Flying Officer Ron Peel, who enlisted as an eighteen-year-old in September 1940, wrote of his experiences at the dance halls as “innocent fun and relaxation.” Many of his older or more experienced fellow airmen—and all service personnel—used them as a place to meet new friends and lovers.68 The music was lively and the atmosphere genial. The quickstep, slow foxtrot, waltz, and tango were all popular, as well as novelty dances such as “Doing the Lambeth Walk.” More than a few hardened combat veterans studied dance guides to rectify the problem of two left feet.
Whether in the pubs, the dance halls, or the shops and streets, the British people rarely complained about the Canadian interlopers. They knew that the high-spirited young warriors who sang too loudly and drank too much risked everything for them.