They were intelligent young men; and as some surviving correspondence shows, they were often very sensitive too. The shadow of their fear could be discerned in exchanges of letters with loved ones that started effusively and then began – with each successive letter, week after week – to tighten and become less expressive, more staccato. That was an age when such things could not be spoken aloud. The crewmen of the bombers were all afraid, yet all were taught to believe that such emotion could very easily tip them over a moral line into cowardice and official disgrace. This prospect held its own terrors. So these young men affected wide smiles and ludicrous acronym-based banter even as the empty beds on airbases on the days following missions spoke of the proximity of death.
Back at those bases in eastern England, the authorities ensured that days free of operations were filled with all the distractions high-spirited young men might want: foaming pints of beer, trips to the pub with the concomitant possibility of romance with local girls (‘popsies’), variety shows featuring comedians essaying their more daring material. Yet none of these things could ever realistically have made the crews of the Lancaster bombers forget what they had been through, or what they had yet to face.
Contrary to the popular image, many of these young men were serious and reserved and preferred to take their pleasures quietly. One airman was genuinely delighted by the generous allocation of severely rationed oranges; and wrote to his wife about his longing for strawberries.1 These were men who enjoyed serious authors and serious poets. Poetry was popular throughout Britain during the war, but many in Bomber Command eschewed the lighter works in favour of T. S. Eliot and similarly demanding artists. Miles Tripp, the young airman we encountered in Chapter 6 and who was to find himself at the forefront of the worst of the Dresden bombing raids, became a novelist after the war. He reflected deeply upon his experiences, both while serving and in the years after. His fiction perhaps acted as a lightning rod to protect him from the more violently frightening and traumatic memories, but he did not shy away from those either. What he and his fellow airmen endured now seems wholly inconceivable.
When crews were stood down from planned operations owing to adverse weather or one of a hundred other potential obstacles, this simply screwed the tension and the fear tighter, heightening the anticipation of horrors to come. Sometimes Tripp and his colleagues were taken by bus into nearby large towns for recreation, or to Cambridge to hear lectures, an aural diet more nourishing than the patter of music-hall comedians.
Admiration for the crews’ achievements was not universal. By 1945 some political and religious hostility towards them and their role in the conflict was becoming more evident, not only in pained interventions from the Bishops of Chichester and of Bath and Wells but also in the literature of the Bombing Restriction Committee, a group that featured an array of figures such as the Labour MP R. R. Stokes, the philosopher C. E. M. Joad and the actress Sybil Thorndike.2 In 1944, the committee’s leading figure, author Vera Brittain, published Seed of Chaos, a passionate denunciation of the moral corrosion to civilization caused by the RAF’s area bombing.3 There were a few who thought that the airmen themselves would simply, finally, refuse to carry out such missions. But these critics, no matter how solid their ethical objections, did not understand at all the nature of life on those airfields, something that went beyond simple duty.
Among the prized attributes the RAF was looking for in recruits was an innate orderliness, both in physical approach and in temperament. The nature of those hours on board the Avro Lancaster bombers required an intensity of concentration and focus and more than this: an ability to react quickly and calmly to the unexpected. What now seems difficult to imagine is how all these thousands of young men were able to carry out operations that they knew very well could see them violently killed while still maintaining that steady gaze.
No one was conscripted into serving with RAF Bomber Command, or indeed with the US Army Air Force. In the case of the RAF, all those many thousands of young men, broadly aged between nineteen and twenty-six, had volunteered. But this was a very different proposition to Fighter Command, where individual pilots in Spitfires soared through the clouds and had a measure of autonomy when it came to the pursuit and destruction of the enemy. Obviously, any form of combat flying was extremely hazardous – while death was the most obvious hazard, the mutilating burns suffered by survivors could be almost as bad – but there was an unquestionable romanticism attached to individual fighter pilots. When, after the war, Fighter Command’s former chief Lord Dowding attended seances in Wimbledon to make contact with the long-dead young men, it was as if he imagined them still flying through the clouds. They had already been halfway to Heaven.4
It was different for the bombers: theirs was an industrial form of warfare. Those who volunteered had, from the start, the iron conviction that this was the way the enemy would be defeated: how else could the fear be endured? But there was none the less a stubborn and distinct sense of the metaphysical among many of the aircrew. In the Imperial War Museum, among diaries and correspondence, are many examples of poems written by pilots. There were those who would muse about the euphoria of flight, ‘playing hide and seek with the clouds’.5 The training period held its own range of dangers: fatalities and crashes were common. But these young men were initially caught up in the exhilaration of seeing their world from unfamiliar heights. This sensation occasionally suffused dreams: one crewman, Canadian navigator Frank Blackman, had a recurring and terrifying nightmare that he was flying of his own volition, unable to touch the ground, and that he was being drawn further and further up, the earth disappearing beneath him.6
A Lancaster bomber had a crew of seven. Some of these crews had coalesced during training, bands of young friends who knew that they could implicitly trust one another throughout flights of seven or eight hours’ duration. There are innumerable photographs of such crews standing beneath their aeroplanes in the benign blue light of English afternoons, their faces seemingly free from strain. Yet as they left the pale sunlight and climbed into the dark, uncomfortable interior of their bombers, the reality was quite different. In his memoirs, Miles Tripp wrote about the ‘Eighth Passenger’ that accompanied the seven-man bomber crews, the invisible and ubiquitous presence to be found in every aircraft: fear.7
Bomber crews frequently formed extraordinarily strong friendships, a result of having to understand and intuit the thoughts and impulses of their crewmates at moments of dire stress. In command, no matter what his rank on the ground, was the pilot. In times of emergency it was his voice that would be listened to foremost. In front of him, in the nose of the plane, was positioned the bomb aimer. He would be staring down through a bubble of clear perspex, ready for when the blank silver darkness of cloud suddenly gave way for the deeper darkness far below, which he would seek to interpret. Like Britain, Nazi Germany operated very strict blackout regulations. Throughout the war the RAF had been developing new electronic navigation aids and target finders: beams bouncing up from the earth, blips on cathode tubes. But the bomb aimer was also reliant on his own judgement. It was hard to avoid being gulled by fires blazing in the cities below; very often these were decoy fires positioned on the edges of suburbs, far from built-up centres. Miles Tripp was a bomb aimer, and at the crucial point in a raid, when the plane was almost over its target, it was understood that for these few moments the aimer took over from the pilot as the dominant voice. It was his course corrections – ‘starboard a little, a little more’8 – that would be acted upon in the immediate seconds before the markers – brilliantly bright coloured flares to provide aiming points for following planes – and incendiaries and bombs were dropped.
Working a few feet back from the pilot – and behind a curtain – was the navigator. The curtain was needed, as the navigator required light and the plane could not afford even a glimmer to be seen. Like the pilot and the aimer, the navigator needed all his powers of concentration: any misreading or misinterpretation of the speed of a headwind or the path of a railway line could result in the bomber veering hundreds of miles off course. There was no let-up throughout the entire operation. Even if it stretched on for seven, eight, sometimes nine hours, the navigator not only had to get the plane to the target but also then get it safely back across Germany and across the Channel to its own airfield.
Close by was the wireless operator. In some respects, these young men were like today’s computer experts, devoted to the technology. Although they were not trained to fly, the Lancaster wireless operators had all been through selection processes as rigorous in their own way as those used for pilots. The young volunteers had to be blade-sharp on mathematics, and also extremely articulate. They also had to be proficient in Morse code: an exacting enough discipline to translate and transcribe at high speed while on the ground, but high in the frozen air, in oxygen mask, gloves, bulky flying suit, and all the while contending against the muscular hum of the Lancaster’s four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, the rarest of skills to master.
Wireless operators had not only to deal with all the message traffic in flight but also to field weather reports and help the navigator by identifying the sources of other signals. Added to this, they were expected to man the Lancaster’s guns whenever the mid-upper and rear turret gunners had to vacate their station. Immobile in their even colder positions, the gunners needed to take breaks both for the obvious reason (each plane was fitted with a chemical toilet) and literally to stretch their legs. Staying still in a plane that only had the most primitive heating could lead to frostbite, and certainly to a kind of frozen paralysis: they needed a chance to get the blood pulsing again.
The gunners in the perspex bubble turrets were faced with a paradox. On the surface, theirs was the most dangerous and terrifying position, with full view of enemy fighters closing in, the searchlights from below and the night air around exploding with flak; conversely, they at least could see what was coming from all directions and in theory could prepare themselves to meet it. The turrets were fitted with a seat, and the gun barrels poked through the metal fuselage. Even after many adjustments, and late in the war, these turrets still admitted the freezing air. The gunners therefore had to wear the most extraordinary range of protective clothing: Sergeant Russell Margerison recalled how the first item to be donned before an operation was a pair of ladies’ silk stockings.9 Then came more conventional long underwear. There were electrically heated slippers, which were worn inside fur-lined boots: there were also trousers and a tunic that were fur lined. The all-in-one flying suit was similarly electrically heated. Before getting into the turrets, the gunners’ faces were completely smeared with an oil preparation to prevent frostbite, and as the operation unfolded, it was the gunners, with that panoramic view, who judged whether to open fire on enemy fighters in the dark who may not have seen them. It was the gunners who watched as incendiaries and then explosives landed on cities far below: mass destruction as glittering light display.
Training was hard, and dangerous; many young recruits found the combination of the aircraft’s violent motion and movement of the turret made them impossibly nauseous. But the reality for these young men, who were both warriors and witnesses, went far beyond any normal description. Quite apart from taking aim and picking off enemy fighters coming in at extraordinary angles, the gunners in their turrets saw the fates of so many bombers flying along nearby. It was they who would watch as other planes glowed a deep cherry red, or burst into flame and blinding sparks before dropping out of the sky.
The seventh crew member bore the prosaic material responsibility for the aircraft, and yet he was also closest to its heart. The flight engineer was required to be an expert in matters mechanical, hydraulic and electrical. He would help with take-off, and fuel monitoring while in flight, and he would be sharp on fault corrections and understanding the root of any malfunctions. In addition, the flight engineer would sometimes aid the bomb aimer and he would also be prepared to take over gunner duties to give other crew members a break. But the flight engineer had an important role on the ground too: liaising with the maintenance crews who were looking after the plane. He would have intimate knowledge of any of the craft’s aches and pains, or indeed worse problems that it might have developed. The flight engineer tended to the plane when it was at rest and coaxed the best out of it when it was active.
Some four out of ten bomber airmen were either killed, seriously injured or taken prisoner. The crews who were assembling for raids involving a thousand or more bombers towards the end of the war will not have known of the precise statistics but equally there were no delusions of invulnerability. The diaries of the time feature the leitmotif of superstition. There were airmen who developed what would now be termed obsessive-compulsive disorder: men who had to rub their faces in a certain way just before they boarded; a gunner who had a very particular order in which he had to get dressed, from the socks up; a flight engineer who had become manically attached to a certain tweed cap, and who would not contemplate flying a mission without it.10 Because, of course, the sort of courage needed to carry out such lethal work over and over again could not be – would never be – innate.
There were particular bomber crews whose control and determination seemed so superhuman as to be bordering on the automaton. These were the Pathfinders, and they were seen as the specially selected elite of all the Bomber Command personnel. Unlike other crews, who would face the prospect of thirty operations, these men – precisely because of their experience and expertise – were required to fly forty-five. That was not the only factor that would press on raw nerves. The job of these crews was to lead the mass raiders and – when over the target – begin to throw down the night-dazzling marker flares. ‘H-Hour was bombing time,’ recalled Flight Lieutenant Leslie Hay.11 These men were the first to face enemy gunfire from the ground; the first to be caught in the ghost-white beams of searchlights. The master bombers were the last to leave, circling the area continually as the following bombers swept in and aimed for the targets that had been marked. Even though this was area bombing, they still strove for precision, working with maps annotated with munitions factories or ball-bearing works, and seeking to identify these shapes in the murk below.
The initial wave of Pathfinders would first drop deep green flares within a mile of the target. These would be followed by what Hay called ‘lights’ – a cascade of bright white incendiary sticks;12 the city below illuminated, the next planes would release red flares, which were intended to mark precise targets. There were further colours yet – orange, blue, pink – denoting different targets. These gaudy illuminations, nicknamed ‘pink pansies’ and ‘red spots’,13 were easy marks to release monstrous ‘Cookie’ bombs upon, designed to crash through entire buildings, peeling them wide open to receive the fire of the incendiaries. Once the bombs had been released, the suddenly lightened planes lurched into higher altitudes, then banked and pointed the way home towards the Channel and thence the sanctuary of eastern-county airfields. Meanwhile, the master bombers subjected themselves to a doubling of jeopardy. They flew over the roaring, burning cities in order to ensure that targets had been hit. These were airmen who knew that they were prime targets for retribution; the ones staying in the enemy sky the longest, always resisting the most fundamental human temptation to fly away.
It is difficult to imagine how these crews could have found any form of psychological respite back at base. Having seen bullets and flak tear through the outer skin of their planes, having seen faults develop, wings be hit, engines fail, having made it back through the lethal blank of Channel fogs, how was it possible for an airman to contemplate doing the same thing again just a few nights hence? There were those who went for meditative bicycle rides through the flatness of the fens; others who went to the bar. But these were only temporary releases; aircrew sharing rooms on base would frequently wake each other with nightmare screams.
One strand of this life seems even more difficult to contemplate now: the ice-shard ruthlessness of the authorities when it came to dealing with traumatized crew members. The accusation of ‘lack of moral fibre’ was one that might have found approval from the Nazis, for it suggested not merely a disgraceful inbuilt cowardice but something also possibly genetic: cowardice in the fibre of one’s being.14 Anyone tarred with this description was effectively denounced as a lesser type of man. The concept had been present in the RAF since the start of the war. Air Chief Marshal Keith Park of Fighter Command, for example, had considered such harshness essential at the time of the Battle of Britain: if a pilot was refusing to carry out duties, or displaying obvious signs of fear, then the reasoning was that he should be separated from his fellow airmen as quickly as possible, for it was believed that fear was contagious.
In the army, the aftermath of the First World War had deepened understanding of what was termed ‘shell shock’. But curiously, in the RAF the idea that pilots and crew could be the victim of similar breakdowns was – for a time – not acceptable. Any bomber crew exhibiting such symptoms with no obvious medical cause would be removed from base and taken to a special centre. In some cases, the airmen’s wings insignia would be cut from their uniforms. All previous service would be disregarded. The idea was that depriving a man of such a proudly won identity would be a deterrent to any other airmen refusing further missions.
It was argued by many that in a time of existential national crisis, such measures were wholly necessary; that if entire squadrons of crewmen were to be infected with the cowardice shown by the odd airman, then the RAF would be left with only inexperienced young novices to fly and navigate and defend the bombers. But as the war developed, RAF psychiatrists at last began to see that the flinty mercilessness of the policy – haunted bombers returned to ground duties and humiliated and scorned by their superiors – was hardly going to change the reality of how men reacted to flying through fire and seeing their comrades incinerated in the sky. When planes returned, Rose turrets (open perspex bubbles for rear gunners fitted to Avro Lancasters specifically designed by the Rose brothers) sometimes had to be ‘hosed out’, as one ground-crew member put it:15 not the result of gastric upset, but rather the blood and flesh of crew who had fallen to enemy fire, with pilots steering their torn corpses homeward. Some RAF medics tried to soften the ‘moral fibre’ policy, pinpointing psychiatric breakdowns and prescribing appropriate treatment in retreats around the country, after which the afflicted pilots would have a chance to return to airborne duties.
It seemed that most bomber crews had, or knew of, someone who either had been removed smartly from duty or was visibly incapable of carrying on. Others, meanwhile, remained adamant that they were fit to continue when clearly they were anything but. A navigator called Bill Burke recalled how, after returning from each tour, having avoided being shot down by anti-aircraft tracer and having faced skies glowing with fires and colliding bombers, he developed the classic aviator’s twitch.16 To all intents and purposes, standing in the saloon bar of the pub, he would be fine; but when he came to light a cigarette, his crewmates would note with sympathy the uncontrollable judder of his hand as it tried to raise the match. In this, he was fortunate: such twitches in others tended to involve the head or even the entire upper body, and were utterly debilitating socially.
For others, physically and mentally shattered men who by continuing to fly were placing their crewmates’ lives in even greater jeopardy, the official policy – the RAF’s equivalent of handing out white feathers – made withdrawal in effect impossible. ‘Since all aircrew were volunteers, no one could be forced to fly,’ recalled Miles Tripp, ‘but the humiliation and ignominy which followed the confession of a stricken man were such that some men continued to fly long after their nerves were in shreds rather than go LMF [lack of moral fibre].’17
By February 1945, however, the psychiatrists were more skilled at diagnosis: the authorities now no longer placed such emphasis on moral fibre. At this stage of the war, they did not need to. In any case, as Bill Burke also observed, there was an opposite (and presumably equally dangerous) psychological problem, which he termed ‘flak happy’.18 There were, among these young men, those who despite their twitches and their screaming bad dreams found themselves morbidly addicted to the adrenaline of their tours. These individuals – even having completed all the operational sorties they were due – craved to fly more.
This was the curious mental landscape that airmen inhabited in February 1945. Even as the Allies were moving steadily east, and the Soviets closed in, the air war saw a new kind of intensity. But it was not only British airmen – and their comrades from around the world, including Australia, Canada, Poland – who were being asked to draw from deeper wells of fortitude for the raids to come. American airmen – some of whom shared the philosophical doubts emanating from their own high commands about the efficacy and ethics of area bombing – were preparing for their own missions in parallel. The USAAF still favoured attacking by day; the fact that they were to end up following the British with a further raid on Dresden would colour the propaganda rising from the bombing for decades afterwards.