David and his crew were posted to 625 Squadron, whose stark motto was We Avenge. 625 Squadron was part of No. 1 Group of Bomber Command, based at Kelstern, which had been established only eleven months earlier. Situated on agricultural land four hundred feet up on the Lincolnshire Wolds, exposed and windy, the station was a raw collection of widely scattered Nissen huts. With three concrete runways it was a typical bomber airfield. Under several outstanding wing commanders the squadron had already developed a sturdy and buoyant spirit. David was deeply impressed to learn that he would serve under a 23-year-old Wingco who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and Bar, and who took part in the squadron’s most dangerous ops.
David was going on to active ops just as Bomber Command’s part in the war was coming to its peak.
Before joining the squadron, the men had a week’s well-earned leave. The ban on Australian troops visiting London had been lifted, but the first V2 rocket had arrived only 24 hours before, and there was still plenty of flying bomb activity. David wrote, The V1s move fast and low across the skyline and are rather fascinating to watch. But few pass our defences.
He spent the first morning trying to elicit more information about Frank and wrote to his parents, There is still no news of Frank, who has been posted as ‘Missing’. The majority of his crew were ‘Missing, believed killed’. But he was pleased to be able to tell them that another cousin, Eric Mattingley, flying in the Mediterranean theatre, had been awarded the DFC. At the Boomerang Club, David met numerous friends and acquaintances, and gleaned news of others. Sadly, much of it was bleak. All too many are now casualties, was all David allowed himself to write in his diary. He discovered that the fellow who had fallen in the canal near Lichfield was among the missing. So in future David’s crew would drop the ‘Oh, my profile!’ joke.
Back at Kelstern, David longed to go on his first op, but instead was called on for another duty, which gave him a new insight. Told ‘You’re wanted by the Adjutant,’ he walked briskly to the office wondering what it could be.
‘You are assigned to stay with Pilot Officer Jackson in sick quarters until he leaves the station,’ the Adjutant told him.
‘Why?’ David wanted to ask. But the Adjutant’s manner, tone and expression did not encourage questions.
‘Make your way there at once. You will be informed when you are to be relieved.’
‘Sir,’ David saluted smartly, and headed to the sick quarters at the edge of the station. An orderly showed him to a six-bed ward which had only one occupant. ‘Which bed is mine?’ David asked.
‘That’s your choice, sir,’ the orderly replied. He nodded towards the airman sitting on a bed in the far corner. ‘There’ll only be the two of you in here. Your meals will be brought.’ The door clicked shut behind him.
As he approached the slouched figure, David’s footsteps resounded on the bare floor. But the airman did not even seem to hear. He was in a world of his own. David walked up to the bed. ‘Hullo,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Mattingley’s the name.’
The young airman stared up at him as if he had not seen or heard. David tried again. ‘Pilot Officer Jackson, isn’t it? Have you been long on the station?’
Suddenly the eyes focused on David. ‘A lifetime,’ he said in a flat voice.
‘How many ops have you done?
‘Too many. Too bloody many,’ the other replied. He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew a packet of cigarettes. His hand was shaking as he pulled one out and his lips trembled as he tried to shove it between them and light it.
‘How old are you?’ David asked. About twenty-two, the same as he was, he judged.
But the other saw it differently. ‘The same as Methuselah,’ he laughed, and his laugh was hard, hollow.
‘Had any leave lately?’ David’s enquiry was met with the same response and a violent shaking of the head.
‘Bloody war,’ the young pilot muttered. ‘Bloody awful war. Seeing your mates shot to pieces, burned alive. Dropping bombs to burn other people to death.’ He lapsed into a silence from which he did not rouse until the orderly entered with their meal. Then he only pushed the food around the plate.
Afterwards, David picked up a pack of cards lying on a locker. ‘How about a game?’ His charge ignored the question and lit up another cigarette. David dealt himself a hand of patience. He was going to need it, he decided. There was not going to be much conversation here. David chose the bed in the corner diagonal from the other’s, who continued to smoke until he fell into troubled sleep. Then David moved quietly across to check that the pilot’s last cigarette really was out. Bad enough to be incinerated by enemy fire. Too bad if it was just a careless cigarette.
David was woken by a scream. The young pilot who had seen too much was reliving the night horrors. The horrors David was yet to experience. A strangled groan became choking sobs. ‘No. No. NO!’
David shook the writhing shoulders. ‘Wake up. It’s all right. It’s not really happening.’ He switched on the nightlight.
The other pilot twisted around and stared up at him. ‘Yes it is. It is. Somewhere over there. You’ll find out soon enough,’ he sobbed. David patted the shaking body and prayed for the soul in torment, until the pilot again subsided into sleep. When the roar of Merlin engines broke the night silence, as Lancasters took off on another op, he moaned, and his occasional babbles of terror brought David to his side throughout the night. David was thankful indeed when the orderly came in with breakfast.
‘You’re leaving at 0800,’ the orderly told the other pilot. He made no response.
‘Like a lamb to the slaughter,’ David thought as he saw his fellow officer being led away. ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ And he resolved to do all in his power to keep up the morale of his crew. Pilot Officer Jackson would never be spoken of on the squadron again. Nothing would ever be heard of him. Nothing would ever be explained.
And he, David, had been chosen as guard because he was new on the station and did not know this victim of stress.
On the OTUs, there had always been rumours swirling around about what happened on squadrons when ops became too much for an airman and he lost his nerve and the will to go on. It seemed these rumours were indeed true. The unfortunate airman was classified as LMF, ‘lacking moral fibre’, and the consequences were summary, harsh, with no return. Stripped of his rank, all privileges removed, pay frozen, sent to a retraining unit where the regime was severe, then put on ground duties or even sent to work underground in the coal mines. Some were forced to resign with no pension or recourse. Dire indeed.
David remembered the proud day at Point Cook sixteen months before when, watched by his parents, he had graduated as a pilot. With what love and probably secret misgivings his mother had sewn his wings onto his uniform, the wings of her youngest son. Had Jackson’s parents watched him graduate too? Had his mother lovingly sewn on his wings, the wings about to be stripped from his uniform? What could her son tell her of his humiliation, the price of this brutal war? David reflected soberly on what he had seen and heard while guarding a casualty of the psychological wounding of war, and promised that that would never happen to one of his crew.
When he rejoined them, they looked at him closely.
‘Had a rough night?’ Birdy asked.
‘You could say so,’ David replied.
‘Without us? You sly dog,’ they teased their skipper.
David managed a smile but said no more.
Finally, on the afternoon of 16 September, David found his name on a battle order for the first time. Battle Order 165. This was it! At last!
Duplicated battle orders were pinned up around the station, which buzzed with a concentrated burst of activity. Telephone lines to the outside were closed to prevent any information being divulged. But the Tannoy public address system crackled with announcements as everyone purposefully went about his or her part in preparing for the operation. The roads were busy with men hurrying on foot, men on bikes, fuel tankers, tenders, tractors hauling bomb trolleys, many driven by WAAFs. In the Messes, beyond the porch where men hung their gas masks, the enticing smell of bacon pervaded the usual smell of wet greatcoats, warm beer and cigarettes, as aircrew queued for their flying meal. ‘The condemned man ate a hearty meal,’ they always joked. Normally it was the luxury of eggs and bacon with plenty of fat to sustain them while flying. It also ensured that they were well stoked in the event of having to bale out and maybe face German interrogation and POW internment, or hide out in an attempt to escape. There was always a bowl of cod liver oil capsules on the counter too, for those who could tolerate them. The hum of voices and the sound of laughter intensified as the men chatted and bantered to break the tension. And above it all was the growl of engines, as the ground crews worked on the Lancs.
As it was his first op, David would fly as second dickey and flight engineer to a more experienced pilot and crew. The pilot was another Australian, from Melbourne. David was glad that he seemed a quietly confident sort of chap who had good relations with his crew. David spent the rest of the afternoon on a ground test, observing closely all the procedures as the pilot ran up the engines and the crew checked every item of equipment. Then he attended his first operational briefing, impressed at the line-up of senior officers and section heads who outlined the operation and provided the relevant information. The purpose of the raid was to immobilise German airfields in support of a large airborne operation at Arnhem in the Netherlands. Their squadron’s target, from 17 000 feet, was the airfield at Rheine on the Dortmund-Ems Canal. Other squadrons were to put nearby radar installations out of action.
David clambered onto the vehicle which took his and two other crews to their dispersal bays, listening to the crews’ joking, which covered their feelings.
‘Look out, Fritz, here come the Brits!’
‘Have a good trip,’ they said, as one crew after another was dropped off. David noticed that nobody said, ‘See you later.’ They knew too much for that.
Then, picked out by the transport’s hooded lights, their plane B Baker loomed huge in the gloom. With the familiar pungent smell of oil and petrol filling his nostrils, David was acutely aware, as never before, of all that his senses were telling him. Climbing up the ladder into the aircraft, at each step he felt the metal colder under his grasp. And knew the taste of fear.
Loaded with twenty 500-pound high-explosive bombs, B Baker took off just before midnight, with David, tense yet excited, standing beside the pilot. The sight of his own crew waiting at the edge of the runway to wave him off tightened his throat. ‘I’ll be back for you, boys. I’ll be back,’ he promised them silently. As the revs increased, the roar of the mighty Merlin engines filled the aircraft, filled his head, vibrated the fuselage, sent vibrations right through him. Once they were fully airborne, with one hand he unlocked and with the other he raised the undercarriage lever which brought the wheels up with a gentle thump. Then he progressively lifted the flap selector handle. Now the aircraft was trimmed for climbing and David settled on to the folding seat beside the flight engineer’s panel on the starboard side.
Ahead, around and behind, navigation lights of the bomber stream glimmered like fairy lanterns. Then, as they crossed the English coast, they were all extinguished. They flew on in darkness, horribly conscious how close other aircraft were, as sickening lurches and bumps indicated they had entered slipstreams. Only too aware that many planes and their crews went down as a result of collisions.
On reaching the Dutch coast they encountered their first flak. The 88 mm shells from heavy Krupps guns exploded at predetermined heights. Others, fitted with special fuses, were set off by the proximity of aircraft. ‘Thank God we got through that lot,’ the pilot muttered more to himself than David. Then the kindly cover of darkness was ripped by the glare of the flares German fighters dropped from above as they tried to locate victims. Flak could strike anywhere but aircraft on the outer edges of the stream were most vulnerable to attack from enemy fighters.
Shortly before B Baker reached the target, David could see red TIs, target indicators, dropped by specially trained crews, the Pathfinders. The TIs accurately illuminated the intersection of the runways. He felt the aircraft shuddering gently and lifting as the bomb aimer called over the intercom ‘Bombs gone!’ and twenty high explosives (HEs) left the bomb bay. The doors were closed and B Baker turned away. The target was well pranged, and the airfield was made u/s for some time to come.
But it was not over yet. They still had to get home.
The flak had stopped. But this was only to allow the German fighters more freedom to harry the returning stream. The bombers were even more vulnerable on the homeward flight as the enemy knew their route and enemy fighters often infiltrated the stream and pursued them almost all the way to their base. No aircraft was safe until it had landed. The threat of intruders placed a final burden on the crew. Although exhausted from the operation, they had to remain vigilant from take-off to touchdown. David saw several aircraft illuminated by flares. He watched in shock as two unfortunate crews went down in flames and he thought of their ground crews waiting in vain in the cold and dark for their return.
Almost four hours later B Baker landed safely at Kelstern. David attended his first interrogation, when the crew reported details of their sortie. He wrote in his diary, It was more or less the ideal op, but of course it did not give me experience in many of the problems I would strike later on in the tour, concluding with typical understatement, The flying meal after interrogation was most enjoyable. All 625’s aircraft returned safely. But it was bad news two days later to hear that the Arnhem airborne landing they had supported had failed to outflank the German defence and the paratroops and glider troops had been withdrawn after heavy casualties.
Map showing Bomber Command operational area, some targets, and postwar boundaries of Germany