Coastal Command is an air force in miniature. Its Sunderlands and Catalinas range the ocean to protect our ships; so likewise do its Beauforts and Blenheims, its Whitleys and Wellingtons, its Hudsons and Liberators, but they are also a bombing force capable of instant use against a wide choice of targets; its Beaufighters and Blenheim fighters join combat with the Luftwaffe at ranges beyond those within the compass of Fighter Command. It is an amphibious force in the sense that, though its element is the air, it makes us of both land and sea to provide it with bases from which to set out against the enemy. Its aircraft fly over the restless waters of the Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea, over the pack-ice about the shores of Greenland, over the desert scrub and palms of West Africa, over the stern mountains of Norway and Iceland, ever the wide fields of France, over the iron and concrete buildings of Reykjavik, the wooden houses of Trondheim, the brick-built mansions of Rotterdam, the lighted windows of Nantes.
Their Spirit is Serene; Coastal Command; The Air Ministry Account of the Part Played by Coastal Command in the Battle of the Seas 1939-1942.
At the outbreak of war Coastal Command Order of Battle (ORBAT) was eleven GR (General Reconnaissance) squadrons, ten of which were equipped with Avro Ansons; and of the six flying boat units only two had Sunderlands - 204 Squadron at Mount Batten, near Plymouth in Devonshire and 210 Squadron at Pembroke Dock - always known as ‘PD’. On 3 September 1939 Coastal Command was equipped with six main types comprising 487 aircraft, the most numerous being the Avro Anson with 301 aircraft. The Anson or ‘Faithful Annie’ to give it its Service nickname was a military development of the Avro 652 six-passenger commercial aircraft, two of which were ordered by Imperial Airways in April 1934. In May 1934 the Avro Company was invited by the Air Ministry to consider the design of a twin-engined landplane for coastal reconnaissance duties. The design which later became known as the Anson was accepted by the Air Ministry in September 1934 and the prototype first flew on 24 March 1935. In July 1935 Avro’s received an initial contract for 174 Ansons and on 6 March 1936, Ansons entered service on 48 Squadron at Manston, Kent. On Tuesday 5 September 1939 when two Ansons on 206 Squadron were deployed to fight German U-boats, mistakenly attacked two surfaced British submarines with two 99lb depth charges. The HMS Snapper received a direct hit on its conning tower but that did no more than break four electric bulbs inside the boat. On 3 December an Anson on 206 Squadron released its bombs onto the conning tower of another surfaced submarine - U-boat this time - and Pilot Officer R. H. Harper received the DFC for his determined attack. Though classified as obsolescent for front-line service by 1940, Ansons continued to fill the gap for many Coastal units until late 1941.
Not surprisingly, the German Unterseeboote was a highly respected adversary. A U-boat for example, could be armed with an 88mm gun and two 20mm guns forward, or four 20mm cannon, or a 37mm gun. Either way, when they cornered one, crews knew they were in for a fight, especially when Karl Dönitz, the U-boat Commander-in-Chief, ordered that U-boats, when attacked, were to remain on the surface and ‘slug’ it out with their low level attackers.
After the Anson, at the outbreak of war the next most numerous aircraft were 53 Lockheed Hudsons and thirty obsolete Vickers Vildebeest biplane torpedo-bombers which had been in service since 1933. The Hudson was the first American-built aircraft to see operational service with the RAF in the Second World War. The original Lockheed 14, from which the Hudson derived, made its first flight on 29 July 1937. The first Hudson for the RAF first flew on 10 December 1938. The turret was fitted on the Hudsons after arrival in England and was of Boulton Paul type, carrying twin guns. The Hudson first entered service on 224 Squadron at Gosport in the summer of 1939, replacing Avro Ansons. 1
A flight sergeant in charge of a maintenance party on 224 Squadron who was a pilot until an accident put him on ground duties, said that being the first squadron in the RAF to be equipped with American aircraft, anyone who wanted to know the difference between the English and American language should have come to his workshops then. ‘Many of the engineering terms are quite different. Most people know that petrol is gasoline and engines are motors, but did you know that the American equivalent of chassis is ‘structure’, oil or petrol feed-pipes are collectively called ‘plumbing’, a hand fuel pump is a ‘wobble pump’ and a tailplane is a ‘horizontal stabiliser’? There are many more curious terms we had to learn when we first got Hudsons. We could have done with a dictionary. We had the very willing assistance of Lockheed and Wright-Cyclone engine experts to smooth the difficulties, but even they unwittingly misled us on occasions. For instance, they would talk about seeing a ship out at sea and while we would look on the water they were watching an aircraft in the sky.
‘In a way, we are rather like surgeons who take a pride in performing restorative treatment. We replace broken sections and graft on new metal skin. If you could see the damaged condition in which an aircraft sometimes returns, you would think it could never be repaired. But we can do wonders with a few days in the workshops - or even a few hours - and it comes out again as good as new. When an aeroplane returns with battle-scars we make a thorough examination to check up the full extent of the damage. It’s amazing how some bullet-holes hide themselves away. On one occasion we thought we had finished the repairs, but a final check-over revealed a bullet-hole through a bolt holding a wing in place. The bullet had neatly removed the core of the bolt without damaging anything else, so it was difficult to see that anything was wrong. Then, sometimes, a scrap of shrapnel will play havoc with the complicated wiring system of the instrument panel. When something goes wrong with that box of tricks, you need the patience of Job to put it right again.
‘The aircraft repair section of any station is a pretty busy place. All day and all night as well, you hear the buzz of electric drills, the rattle of compressed air riveters, the hum of paint-sprayers and the roar of engines. It’s not a peaceful life, but it’s a very interesting one. There’s plenty of work for us all, from the youngest reservist to the station engineer officer. Talking of youngsters, I have a very useful lad who is a modern counterpart of the chimney-sweep boys of the past. He’s only four feet six inches and of course is called Tich and is the only person on the station small enough to crawl right to the tail end of the fuselage of a Hudson. He was away one day and another rigger took his place. This man got to the end but became wedged and we couldn’t move him. It took two hours’ work to get him out. He had gone in feet first and got stuck on his back between a couple of cross-bracing struts and the roof. We had to turn him over on to his stomach and pull on his shoulders to get him out. After that, Tich reigned supreme in his own sphere.
‘One of our most interesting jobs was repairing a Hudson which became known as the ‘corkscrew plane’. It was badly damaged near Norway and limped home with rudder controls away. The crew almost baled out, but decided to try and put it down and made a sort of side-slip landing in the dark. They were all safe, but the aircraft was a mess! We got to work that night. The tail control wires were all wrapped round each other like a ball of wool after the cat’s got it. We had to rebuild the entire port tailplane, but that aircraft was flying again within five days and is still doing its patrols today. We did a quick-change act on another Hudson which came back 300 miles over the sea with one engine seized up. The pilot radioed that one engine had packed up and the moment he landed we had a new engine and all accessories ready. The aircraft arrived back in the evening and we had it flying again the next day. It’s a great help to us that the engine unit of a Hudson is amazingly compact. Each of the two 1,100 hp engines is held to the wing by only a very few main bolts. We can take out one engine and bolt another in position in a quartet of an hour and it only takes another couple of hours to connect all the pipe-lines, controls and exhaust system ready for starting up. Every man on the maintenance side knows the responsibility of his work. The crews of out aircraft give us their complete confidence. Their successes against the enemy are ample reward for our work. They place their lives in our hands and we do our best to be worthy of the trust.’
Hudsons maintained constant patrols over the French beaches during the evacuation of the British troops at Dunkirk in May 1940 and also made low-level bombing attacks on German troops in the vicinity of the beaches. On several occasions, although only reconnaissance aircraft, Hudsons engaged in air combats with German aircraft. A Hudson on 206 Squadron went to the aid of Fleet Air Arm Skuas under attack by Bf 109E fighters and with concentrated fire from its turret drove the enemy off. The Flight Lieutenant leader of the flight of three Hudsons recalled: ‘We were suddenly attacked by a flight of Messerschmitt fighters, which came screaming down out of the sun. We dived towards the sea in order to prevent them from getting beneath us and to allow our rear gunners to get to work. The Messerschmitts had the advantage of being faster than we were, so we remained in tight formation and dodged and twisted to break up their attacks. They were flying up behind us, shooting as they came and then breaking away on either side to turn and renew the attack. Our Lockheeds were going hell for leather. I was wrenching the stick right over from side to side and keeping the engines at maximum boost the whole time. The air-speed indicator was showing about fifteen or twenty mph more than the maximum claimed by the American manufacturers. Even then I had something in hand because as leader I had to make sure that the other two were keeping up with all I was doing. The nose cannons of the Messerschmitts were firing at us all the time. Puffs of smoke came from them with unpleasant regularity, like someone hurriedly blowing a lot of smoke-rings. In all we had fifteen attacks from each of them. Then they ran out of ammunition and went home. Our Lockheed Hudsons were still flying as well as ever, although the attacks had lasted for more than half an hour. By that time we had led them about 150 miles from land and there was just a chance that the Messerschmitts would not have enough petrol to get back.
‘When we landed, we found that only one of our Lockheeds was at all badly hurt. It had received two cannon shots in the wings, one in the cabin and one in the tail. Quite a lot of metal skin was blown off the wings, but the flying performance was very little impaired. One shell had come from behind, ripped through the wing to the main spar - and exploded there. The upper and lower surfaces of the wing looked like a sort of colossal nutmeg grater. By a stroke of good luck neither the flap nor aileron controls were affected. We tested the engines of all three aircraft. There wasn’t a thing wrong with any of them.’
On another occasion three Hudsons on 220 Squadron attacked forty Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers and destroyed five of them, damaging two more. The event was described in a contemporary account by David Masters.
‘On the evening of 31 May 1940 in a mess somewhere on the east coast of England, Flying Officer Ronald Nicholas Selley read with troubled eyes a note advising him that his brother was missing. He turned to his friend Flying Officer Hilton Aubrey Haarhoff. ‘If we do meet anything we’ll give them what for,’ he said quietly. Both the young men were South Africans who flew together in a Hudson aircraft which was manned by a crew of four, a wireless operator, a navigator, an air gunner who was Flying Officer Haarhoff and the pilot Flying Officer Selley. The Hudson is a useful long distance reconnaissance aircraft which can carry a good load of bombs for offensive purposes and is armed with twin guns in the pilot’s cockpit and a nice sting in the tail where Flying Officer Haarhoff sat in the turret with his two guns. But in those Dunkirk days all aircraft became fighters, as the German dive bombers over the beaches learned to their cost.
On 1 June a battle flight of three Hudsons took off to relieve the dawn patrol over Dunkirk. It met the other battle flight about midday over Dover, inward bound for their base. Selley flew on the port side of the outward bound formation at about 1,000 feet. In the Channel, sea-power was working its miracle. Haarhoff gazed on the greatest and most miscellaneous collection of shipping he had ever seen in his life. There were tugs towing barges and tugs towing yachts, with motor boats of all sizes, some, towing lifeboats, with torpedo boats and destroyers coming and going on their errand of mercy and deliverance. Up and down the coast by Dunkirk the formation of Hudsons patrolled for fifteen minutes each way. Once some Spitfires dropped out of the clouds and mistakenly attacked the leader, who had difficulty in evading them. Another time a Hudson chased an enemy aircraft which fled for its life right into the fog of black smoke with which the burning oil blanketed the town and the smoke, seeping into the cockpit of the Hudson, nearly choked the gunner. Not a ripple stirred the sea. It was so calm that Haarhoff could see bottles floating about; once or twice he saw a body amid rafts and overturned boats and drums and barrels; a bombed destroyer was lying on its beam near the beach. There was the remarkable pier of lorries formed by army drivers to help the evacuation and one or two other wrecks nearby, among them an overturned steamer.
‘It was a miracle: not a breath of wind during the vital days. When I saw all the little craft passing across I was thrilled,’ said Wing Commander T. H. Carr DFC who flew another Hudson during those historic hours.
Selley noted the moving figures and boats and all the wrecks and the flotsam and jetsam on the sea, with its huge patches to tell of oil which would never fall into the German hands. A couple of days earlier he had seen a table floating four miles from shore with three men upon it and closer examination revealed a bicycle. In that emergency one of those men was literally fighting for his life, yet he still refused to relinquish his bicycle and had dragged it after him on to the table before they floated away. The pilot of the Hudson soon brought a steamer to the spot, but the captain was out to save life, not bicycles and the South African pilot watched the men being picked up while the cycle which one had risked. So much to save went floating away on the table top.
About 3 o’clock in the afternoon the Hudson sighted forty Junkers 87s. As these were unseen by the Spitfires patrolling above open cloud at 4,000 feet, the three Hudsons were ordered to break formation and attack. Selley sped off to attack eight Junkers 87s that were about five miles away. ‘As we approached,’ said Haarhoff afterwards, ‘we could see them circling in about a two mile radius. Each one was doing a steep climb with a stall turn at the top and then came over in a very steep dive straight down. It was a very pretty and impressive sight and they were doing it with such regularity and uniformity that they might have been at Hendon flying pageant. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. We saw about forty altogether and they seemed to split up into two bunches of twenty. I took a bunch of eight Junkers 87s which had twelve more flying at 200 feet above them. When we came in to attack they all joined in one big circle at about 1,200 feet. We just went straight into them. We thought there were a lot, but we didn’t mind. It was our job to look after the fellows below and we had to do it.’
Regardless of the risk, Selley flew alone in that ring of twenty enemies. It might have been a performing circus with the South African as the ringmaster. Round and round he went with them. He tried at first to follow one down and get it while it was diving, but the dive was too steep for the Hudson to follow, so he decided to time his attack to coincide with the moment that an enemy aircraft climbed in front of him before it did its stall turn and dive. We attacked as one came up and as he stall turned we just leapt across and shot him down. As we circled with them, Haarhoff picked them off going round and as they came up I got them with my front guns. I shot down two with my front guns and damaged two more, one badly, but we did not see him go in. Haarhoff shot one down into the sea and damaged another, but we did not see that go in either.’
The extraordinary thing is that the Hudson was not hit. Unable to stand up to the guns of the avenging South Africans, the Germans fled and gave them the skies to themselves. That was how Selley and Haarhoff eagerly and fearlessly attacked twenty enemy aircraft and each was awarded the DFC. Five minutes after routing the Junkers they saw two lifeboats adrift full of men which they circled while the other Hudsons flew off to find a ship to pick them up. Almost simultaneously three Junkers 88s and three Heinkel 111s with an escort of two Messerschmitt 109s hove in view to bomb the boats. At once the South African made a head-on attack. Those eight German aircraft had not the courage to face that lone Hudson. They turned away over Dunkirk and gave the tugs which came on the scene a chance to take the lifeboats in tow.
Later in the week a Wing Commander of the Coastal Command beheld not the least amazing sight in those amazing times. ‘For two or three days after the evacuation ended, Tommies were leaving the coast in rowing boats, on rafts, bits of wreckage, in fact anything that would float and putting out in the Channel where we were sighting them and sending ships to pick them up,’ he remarked when it was all over. ‘Some Tommies swam out to a ship that was lying on her side and took refuge in her. When I came along, the ship seemed to be deserted. Then I saw a man poke his head through a porthole and look up very cautiously. He observed us carefully and when he saw it was a British aircraft he started to wave frantically. In a few seconds men’s heads began to pop up through the portholes to right and left and hands began to wave to us for succour. It was a most astounding sight. At one moment the ship was dead, the next it sprang to life. The men had been in hiding there for three days when we saw them and directed a ship to their rescue.’
The British pilots who witnessed Dunkirk from the air conjure up an unforgettable picture of the continual pall of smoke under which they flew, of beaches lined with men walking into the water with their rifles held over their heads as they climbed into little boats which rowed them to the bigger boats further out. ‘It was’ as Pilot Officer Lloyd Bennett DFC remarked afterwards ‘one continual traffic, almost a bridge of boats. The Channel was very small for our Hudsons and I circled so much one day that I mistook a burning town on the other side for Dover and thought the war had moved over to our side. I was quite surprised to find we were all right.’ It is possible to make a mistake like that in daylight, the difficulty of fixing a position at night after taking violent evasive action can be imagined.’ 2
At the outbreak of war Coastal Command was equipped with three types of flying-boats, the most numerous being 27 Short Sunderlands, the last of a long line of flying boat designs in RAF service and without question the finest boat to see service in Coastal Command. The others were 17 Saro London and nine Supermarine Stranraer obsolete biplane flying-boats which had been in service since 1936. These two types were superseded by the Sunderland, which was produced as a military development of the renowned ‘C’ Class Empire flying-boat resulting from a 1933 Air Ministry Specification. The prototype Sunderland flew at Rochester, Kent on 16 October 1937 and was the first British flying-boat to incorporate power-operated turrets as part of its defensive armament. These were so effective in combat that the Sunderland was nicknamed the ‘Flying Porcupine’ by the Germans The first Sunderland entered RAF service on 28 May 1938 when L2159 was flown to Seletar, Singapore to join 230 Squadron on 22 June 1938. In Britain Sunderlands first entered squadron service in the summer of 1938, being issued to 210 Squadron at Pembroke Dock. In both 230 and 210 Squadrons the Sunderland superseded Singapore III biplane flying-boats.
Of fifty types of aircraft used by Coastal Command during the years 1939-45, the Sunderland was the only one in front line service from the first to the last day of the European war. The crews who manned these flying boats were perhaps the most individualistic of all in the RAF. Among the naval-oriented terms used by these fliers, one of the best-known was their reference to their huge aircraft as ‘boats’, a word which immediately identifies anyone who ever served on Sunderlands. It was also said that the mark of a boat veteran was the green-stained cap badges worn by some, testimony too many hours on patrol over the salt waters of the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean, which comprised their main hunting grounds in the U-boat war.
In September 1939, 210 Squadron had six Sunderlands on strength and 204 Squadron at Mount Batten began receiving its Sunderlands from July 1939. Four of 210 Squadron’s pilots, who flew Sunderlands on operations during the first month of war, were Australians from an RAAF detachment at Pembroke Dock which had arrived in England in July to receive and fly back a complement of Sunderlands to Australia for RAAF use. In the event, the Australians were given additional RAAF and RAF personnel and formed the nucleus of 10 Squadron RAAF, which on 3 January 1940 joined 15 Group Coastal Command and was declared operational with effect from 1 February; flying its first operational sortie five days later.
Until the spring of 1940 the war at sea had gone steadily in Britain’s favour. 3 Even the Germans’ victorious campaign had cost the Kriegsmarine one-third of its cruisers and almost half its destroyers. However, in April the sea war flared up again. Units of Bomber Command found themselves called upon to bolster 18 Group Coastal Command, which was responsible for Britain’s Northern Approaches. Germany’s occupation of Norway, the subsequent overrunning of France and the Low Countries and Italy’s intervention in the war changed the situation in the war at sea radically. U-boats and E-boats began operating with deadly effect from French Atlantic bases. Soon aircraft such as the four-engined Focke Wulf 200, an adapted commercial transport with a range of 2,000 miles, began to menace Britain’s Western Approaches and reach out into mid-Atlantic waters previously immune from German intervention. RAF Coastal Command was at once confronted with a series of fresh problems ranging from anti-invasion patrols to long-range escort duties. In June 1940 Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill KCB CMG DSO 4 could only call upon 500 aircraft for such diverse tasks and only 34 of these, the Sunderlands, could only operate beyond 500 miles from Britain’s shores. The period between June and October, when U-boats sank 282 ships with only seven U-boats lost to all causes, became known to the U-boat crews as the ‘Happy Time’. At first the U-boats attacked shipping in the South-West Approaches. During June sinkings by U-boats peaked at 63 ships. By August they became bolder, following up on the surface during the day and delaying closing in on convoys until nightfall. To escape detection by the Asdics 5 they remained on the surface and attacked under cover of darkness. Coastal Command did not have an answer to such tactics and from the beginning of June to the end of 1940 over 300 million tons of Allied and neutral shipping was sunk. 6
The only salvation available to RAF crews was ASV (Air to Surface Vessel) radar. Relatively few aircraft in Coastal Command were fitted with the device and those that were did not always perform as efficiently as crews would like.
By the middle of 1941 the shortage of Very Long Range (VLR) aircraft as opposed to long-range aircraft was still causing problems. As the U-boat campaign intensified stop gap measures were tried such as procuring Blenheims from Bomber Command. Bases were established In the Hebrides, Northern Ireland and Iceland but very valuable locations were denied the British in neutral Eire. By May 1941 the U-boats were largely reduced to operating off West Africa or in the Central Atlantic, the latter being beyond the range of Coastal Command aircraft. In June 1941 Bowhill was posted to form Ferry Command while Air Marshal Sir Philip Joubert took over Coastal Command. Joubert inherited a force of forty squadrons and more than half the aircraft were now fitted with ASV (Air to Surface Vessel) radar. Joubert’s overriding task was to increase the effectiveness of his ASV aircraft and create airborne U-boat killers. He pressed for heavier types of anti-submarine bombs, bomb sights for low level attack and depth charge pistols which would detonate at less than fifty feet below the surface. He encouraged tests, first started by Bowhill, with various forms of camouflage, in order to render the attacker invisible for as long as possible. As a result all anti U-boat aircraft were painted white on their sides and undersurfaces.