11
Arthur Harris – ‘Bomber’ Harris as he became known to the world, but ‘Butch’ to the men who carried out his orders – liked shocking people. He presented himself as a leader for times of crisis, willing to confront hard decisions that weaker men would flinch from and to face uncomfortable truths with brutal frankness.
Even those accustomed to his ways were shaken by his reaction to a drama which blew up early in 1943. A comment scrawled on the bumf that flew back and forth between the departments involved in trying to sort the matter out, summed it up: ‘This seems an incredible story!’ wrote Reginald Maudling, the young private secretary to the Air Minister, Archibald Sinclair.1
The flap over an outbreak of venereal disease (VD) among Harris’s men does not merit even a footnote in the official histories, whose authors, if they knew about it, perhaps regarded it as a small and rather sordid episode in the great saga of the strategic bombing campaign. But the tale has a larger significance. The small flashbulb lights up a big picture. At the centre is the bulky figure of Harris, who loomed over the wartime RAF, blustering and intimidating. Behind him stand the men he led, engaged in the most dangerous job of the British war. The after-image that lingers is stark, a chiaroscuro revealing the grim outlines of the bomber battle. One impression endures: far from sparing a new generation from the horrors of trench warfare as its advocates claimed, strategic bombing invented an aerial version of it, and flying bombers to Germany was to the Second World War what fighting on the Western Front was to the First.
The story began late in 1942 when the Air Ministry noted a sharp rise in the incidence of VD among RAF personnel. This was a serious matter. Treatment was with Sulfonamide antibiotics (penicillin had not yet come into widespread use) and infection could put a man on the sick list for several weeks.2 The increase was highest in Bomber Command and particularly affected aircrew members. The situation prompted Sir Bertine Sutton, the officer in charge of personnel at the Air Ministry, to alert the chiefs of the various commands and ask for comments and possible remedies. As C-in-C of the command most effected, Harris’s response had particular significance. He generally took an indulgent view when attempts were made from time to time to restrain the off-duty high-jinks of the Bomber Boys. This time, his reaction was savage.
On 9 January 1943, without consulting the Air Ministry, he wrote to his group commanders pointing out that the incidence of VD among aircrews was 35 per thousand per annum, ‘four times that of all other RAF personnel in the Command’.3 He went on:
The consequences of this are far too serious for it to be regarded with tolerance as the natural result of war. At best, it shows criminal carelessness, but I am strongly inclined to believe that this is not the whole truth and that a substantial amount of deliberate malingering is involved … Every member of a crew who contracts Venereal Disease incapacitates not merely himself but breaks up his entire crew and I will not have the efficiency of the Command to carry on the war impaired by individual irresponsibility in this way. Still less do I propose to allow anyone who may hope to do so to gain advantage from deliberately exposing himself to infection.
He concluded with a terrible warning to anyone henceforth unlucky enough to fall victim to the ‘clap’. ‘In future … it will be the rule that anyone contracting Venereal Disease, irrespective of the stage he has reached in his operational tour, will be required to start afresh and complete his 30 sorties, as soon as he is in a fit state of health so to do.’
Without any evidence, Harris was accusing airmen of deliberately setting out to get infected in order to shirk their duty. More shockingly, in order to enforce sexual discipline, he was prepared to threaten his men with what might well be a sentence of death. In 1943 the chances of surviving a standard tour of thirty operations was about one in five.4 To condemn a man who was nearing the end of his tour to start all over again for the crime of ‘copping a dose’ would be seen by many as amounting to a writ of execution.
Harris sent Sutton a copy of the letter claiming that his tough policy had the approval of the Chief of the Air Staff, Portal, himself. Perhaps for this reason, Sutton’s criticisms of Harris’s approach were mild. As an Air Marshal, Sutton was outranked by Harris and the tone of his correspondence with him is deferential, prompted no doubt by a wish to avoid provoking the Air Chief Marshal’s fury.
It took him three weeks to make contact, offering the rather lame-sounding excuse that he ‘wanted to wait until I could tell you that an [American-made] film’ on VD was available for showing to RAF personnel. When he finally got down to business the approach was placatory. ‘I was very glad to see that you were telling all your groups to tackle the subject of prevention of the disease with vigour,’ he wrote.
However, he was ‘surprised to note the particular action you suggested they should take’. With a reserve bordering on timidity, he listed his reasons: ‘That one ought not to make the extension of operational tours a punishment in any way … secondly that if people unfit [sic] are sent on them they will not be able to do their best in action against the enemy, and thirdly it may lead to concealment and that in turn leads to the spreading of the disease.’
There is no mention of the probable fatal consequences of the policy, nor of the charge of malingering. The soft approach did not work. Two days later, on 5 February, Harris wrote back that he was ‘absolutely satisfied that no other form of deterrent will have the desired effect which is essential and urgent, and moreover, that this warning, which will not be made retrospective in action, will have the effect which is intended’.
It was left to the RAF’s Director General of Medical Services, Sir Harold Whittingham, to fire a shot across Harris’s bow. Harris had decided that the best method of delivering the threat of a repeat tour was via station or squadron medical officers. When Whittingham heard of the order he was concerned by what he saw as a breach of medical ethics and condemned the idea of imposing ‘a punishment for contracting disease’. On 25 February, a letter was sent from the Air Ministry stating that the ‘present procedure lays us open to attack both in the House [of Commons] and in the Press’. It finished with a firm order: ‘If any such instructions have been given they must be cancelled at once.’
Sutton assumed that Harris had backed off and the official focus now was on tackling VD through a programme of lectures by medical officers, more explicit than hitherto, on ‘the physiology of sex … including the use of condoms’ and screenings on stations of a US Army film on sexual hygiene.
The flap subsided. Then, in June 1943, news of the Harris order reached the ears of Archibald Sinclair. He learned about it only after a respected Labour MP, George Strauss, began making inquiries. Sinclair was annoyed at having been kept in the dark. He seems to have shared the view of his private secretary that the story was barely credible. ‘Clearly, the methods of the Commander in Chief are objectionable,’ he wrote to Sutton in July 1943. Harris, it seemed, had not rescinded his letter to the group commanders. Sinclair thundered that ‘it should be made clear to him that it must be withdrawn at once’.
The intervention of the political brass generated action on all fronts. Philip Joubert, now an RAF Inspector General, was ordered to come up with a plan for combating what had become officially a ‘scourge’. If Harris’s draconian solution was ever applied – and there is no evidence I can find, documentary or anecdotal, either way – then it made no difference. The VD rate among bomber crews continued to climb in 1943, reaching a peak in August.
Joubert’s inquiry took him to fifty-three stations across the operational commands in the company of Lord Amulree, a medical doctor. The report appeared on 17 September 1943 and its central conclusion was that ‘indiscipline and idleness breed infection’. Joubert’s tour seems to have left him with a poor impression of the conduct of airmen in general and bomber crews in particular. His solution was to make them more like soldiers, recommending that ‘all RAF personnel including aircrew, must be trained to fight under their own officers and NCOs’ – advice, which like most of that proffered in the report, was ignored by the Air Council.
What is most striking about the report is the absence of serious interest in the – surely relevant and certainly fascinating – questions of why the rate had risen and why it was so marked among the bomber crews?
The obvious explanation had been hinted at by Harris in a long letter to Sutton in which he set out justifications for his harsh approach – an important document that we will return to later. Repeating a tenaciously held but totally unsupported assertion, he wrote that ‘there is not the least doubt that even after giving the fullest possible rein to the spirit of “Eat, Drink and be Merry” there is the very strongest possibility of deliberate malingering’.
The phrase, which would crop up regularly thereafter, of course continues: ‘for tomorrow we die.’ In the summer of 1943, there was every possibility that as a member of a Bomber Command aircrew you would die, if not tomorrow then at some point before the end of your operational tour. By the early months of 1943, only about seventeen out of a hundred men were likely to be alive after thirty operations. The survival rate for a second tour was a minuscule 2.5 per cent.5 Senior commanders did their best to keep the information secret. ‘I am extremely anxious that statistical information relating to the chances of survival of aircrews in certain types of operational employment should be confined to the smallest number of people,’ Portal wrote to the Air Member for Training, at the end of 1942. ‘The information can be so easily distorted and is then so dangerous to morale that all possible steps must be taken to safeguard it.’6
Though it might take a little time to sink in, the Bomber Boys knew soon enough what they had got themselves into. For a young man, fit and adventurous, the prospect of imminent extinction provided a plausible enough motive for wanting to live whatever remained of life to the full.
In the brief space he devoted to the subject, Joubert rejected the notion that the VD surge was a reflection of the fatalism felt by young warriors who assumed they were heading to their doom. As with Harris and his charge of malingering, he trusted to instinct and does not seem to have spoken to any airmen actually involved in operations, on the ground or in the air. He concluded that ‘a large number’ of infections were contracted in the last phase of training, at the end of courses at Operational Training Units (OTUs) and Heavy Conversion Units (HCUs) before crews joined their squadrons.
‘The natural feeling of elation’ that resulted, he wrote, ‘leads to excess during the period of relaxation before the serious business of war has to be undertaken.’ He went on: ‘I do not believe that there is much of the “Let us eat, drink and be merry …” feeling but rather a perfectly natural desire to show off. I should have expected to find a very high rate in the operational units if the former had been the case but the facts are against it.’
RAF sergeant and companion at dance, Nuffield Centre, 1944 (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images)
It was true that Lindholme, the station with the highest incidence of VD, housed two HCUs. Medical records put the infection rate at 85 per thousand per annum. According to Joubert, ‘in many cases … there is a record of a visit to Doncaster [the nearest town], a condition of drunkenness and a return to camp without taking any precautions. In practically no case is the name of the woman known to the infected aircrew.’
The statistics confirmed that conversion units were the worst affected with a rate of 72.2 per thousand. But the rate in operational squadrons was still considerable, at 44.6. And a salient fact was, as Whittingham pointed out, that ‘the incidence of venereal disease in air crews is about four times greater than in ground personnel in the command’. Ground crews worked hard but they had fixed hours, got time off, and were just as keen on beer and skittles as the aircrews. The big difference between the two groups was that one was facing imminent extinction and the other was not.
Joubert seemed reluctant to entertain this obvious explanation for the reckless encounters which his report described. At the Air Ministry, Sutton, too, tried to treat the issue as a problem that could be resolved in a tidy, bureaucratic manner. Like Joubert, he believed that more discipline, combined with greater pastoral care and ‘welfare activities and discussion groups’ were the way to keep the crews on the straight and narrow.
The men around Harris at Bomber Command headquarters in High Wycombe took a worldlier view. Responding to Sutton’s proposals for a programme of ‘useful diversions’, Harris’s chief administration officer, Arthur Sanders, gently pointed out some hard realities. After consulting with the command’s medical authorities, his findings were that there was ‘no evidence that one station is better than another because of a higher standard of welfare or of ethical counteraction’. The fact was that ‘all station commanders are trying to do everything within their powers to provide compensatory attractions in the way of welfare activities, recreation and healthy diversions so that the personnel may be induced voluntarily to stay “in camp”’. Even so, despite ‘all counter attractions [being] promoted ad nauseam, one is forced to the conclusion that these efforts at dissuasion … give no positive results’.
Nor was a ban on excursions to local towns a practical proposition. ‘No doubt if we were to put places known to be sources of infection out of bounds, or at least put a ban on the pubs, cheap dance halls and night clubs etc., and if we controlled personal freedom and increased surveillance of promiscuity in public parks, back alleys etc., we could reduce the disease to almost pre-war level. But with what reactions!’
Young men were ‘not normally very receptive of the teachings of self-control, restraint and abstinence in any form’. With aircrews, there were other powerful factors. They basked in the ‘enhanced “hero-worship”’ they encountered in pub, shop and cinema. But there was also the ‘uncertainty of the span of life’ and the ‘strain arising out of the nature of [their] war occupation’. Sanders concluded that examination of the figures and taking the human factors into account ‘[forced] one to regard the hazard of operations as being a supreme factor in the incidence’. As far as Bomber Command HQ were concerned, then, ‘eat, drink and be merry …’ explained almost everything.
One small detail from the story seems particularly poignant. The VD rate at Leeming, in Yorkshire was one of the highest but Joubert’s inquiries led him to believe that the figure could well be an underestimate. He warned that ‘[the] figures may not be by any means the total of actual infections since it is reported that a large number of M and B tabloids [tablets] … have been found in missing aircrews’ kit,’ he reported. May and Baker tablets were antibiotics used for everything from urinary-tract infections to pneumonia. The implication is that VD sufferers were not reporting sick but somehow getting hold of the necessary medication. Why they were unwilling to follow correct procedures and how they got hold of the tablets is open to conjecture. One possibility is that, having learned of Harris’s directive, they sought the help of sympathetic medical officers who were willing to provide treatment off the books. In any case those few words paint a sad picture: a young airman treating himself in secret, going to his death with the vague memory of a shop-door grapple as his last, and perhaps only, experience of sex.
The founders of the RAF claimed to have invented a new form of warfare. Technology would speed things up and cut down casualties, both for the victorious and the defeated. Death was supposed to be a by-product of military action, not the primary purpose. The fatalism implicit in the VD episode, however, seems to belong to an earlier, but not that far-distant, era: it feels like the spirit of the trenches.
By the summer of 1943, the aircrews of Bomber Command were enmeshed in a terrible slogging match that, despite being fought in the air, had some of the characteristics of the struggle their fathers and uncles had endured in the front lines of Flanders a generation earlier. Their work was repetitive. Their losses, proportionately, were huge and seemingly without purpose. There was no progress that they could measure and they were forced to return to the same targets over and over again. The men who sent them there, they seldom saw.
This was not how the bomber war had been conceived but this is where it had ended up. It had arrived there largely because of the triumph of the Air Ministry doctrines that dominated the military thinking of the previous decade and the long-term planning decisions that had resulted. The fantasy of the ‘knock-out blow’ had been exposed almost immediately. The realization that Bomber Command was incapable of delivering the results it had promised took a little longer. As the war progressed there were constant calls for a reordering of priorities and a reallocation of air assets – to Coastal Command, as we have seen, and to meet the ever-growing needs of the Middle and Far Eastern theatres. But the bombing lobby prevailed and the investment that had been made in strategic bombing; in huge four-engine machines that could deliver the payloads to cripple German industry and fulfil the prophecies of Trenchard and his followers; and the physical and human resources to operate them, could not be unspent.
Everything about bombing was expensive; in money for the machines and bases and in time for the training of the aircrews. The Ford Motor Company in Manchester, which began producing the Rolls-Royce Merlin aero-engine, the power plant for the Lancaster bomber, in May 1941 cost £7 million to build and equip.7 By the end of the war it employed 17,316 workers. The purchase price of a Lancaster in 1943 was £42,000, about £2 million in today’s money.8 During the war more than 7,000 were built in Britain alone as well as 6,000 Halifaxes and nearly 2,000 Stirlings.
Building a bomber station cost about £1 million (£59 million today). Bomber Command had started the war with twenty-seven, all with grass runways. In 1944, it had 128, all but two with concrete runways.9 According to Harris, ‘the education of a member of a bomber crew was the most expensive in the world’, costing £10,000 (£589,000), ‘enough to send ten men to Oxford or Cambridge for three years’.10 Many of the RAF’s eggs had been put in one basket. For better or worse, the air campaign against Germany was a central pillar of British strategy, and the logic was that to weaken it would undermine the whole construct.
This was the thinking that underpinned Churchill’s statement of policy delivered to the War Cabinet on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, placing the hope of victory on the shoulders of the RAF, and in particular Bomber Command. Despite the abysmal results to date, Churchill was adamant that the way ahead was to ‘develop the power to carry an increasing volume of explosives to Germany, so as to pulverize the entire industry and scientific structure on which the war effort and economic life of the enemy depend, while holding him at arm’s length from our Island. In no other way at present visible can we hope to overcome the immense military power of Germany …’11
It would be another eighteen months before bombing showed any signs of effectiveness. Despite this delay, the appalling losses in late 1941 that forced Churchill to call a suspension of operations until the following spring, and the huge change for the better in the strategic situation by the entry of first Russia, then America into the war, Britain’s leaders stuck to the spirit of the plan. The arrival of the thirty-ton, four-engine bombers, better navigation aids, properly trained crews and a ruthless and energetic leader in the shape of Harris provided the ‘power’ that Churchill’s speech looked forward to. From the summer of 1942 onwards the story can be told in terms of tonnages. In 1940 Bomber Command dropped 13,033 tons of bombs; in 1941, 31,704; in 1942, 45,561; in 1943, 157,457, in 1944, 525,718, and in 1945, up to 1 a.m. on 9 May, 181,740.12 By the end of the war Bomber Command could deliver in twenty-four hours the same weight of bombs as the Luftwaffe had managed in the whole eight months of the 1940–41 Blitz.13
Support for the primacy of bombing was wide and deep. There was plenty of resentment from the other services and inside the RAF itself at Bomber Command’s privileged status, but in the civilian world there was near-universal agreement that bombing Germany was the right and obvious thing to do. The consensus spanned the political spectrum and there were as many enthusiastic bombers on the left as on the right. The high-minded Marxist sympathizer Stafford Cripps, Minister of Aircraft Production in 1942, was a fervent supporter of bombing Germany. Another leading Labour intellectual, John Strachey, Eton-educated, a sometime Communist, joined the RAF and served as a public relations officer, broadcasting propaganda about the men of Bomber Command on the BBC.
In early 1942, there was at last something substantial to boast about. It was the raid on Cologne on the night of 30/31 May that demonstrated to the British people, the Germans and the world at large that an important shift had taken place in the direction of the air war. Every serviceable bomber, including aircraft from training units, was dragged in for the first Thousand Bomber Raid. This was the biggest air operation in history and set new records of violence, destroying 13,000 homes, nine hospitals, seventeen churches and numerous other public buildings and killing 469 people, all but fifty-eight of whom were civilians. Forty-three aircraft failed to return – just under 4 per cent of the force. These were the heaviest losses yet suffered by Bomber Command but deemed acceptable, given that the clear conditions favoured not only the bombers but also the German defences.14
Cologne was as much a propaganda as a military exercise. Newsreel crews were given access to briefings and filmed aircraft being bombed up. The commentaries that accompanied the reports are remarkably similar in tone and content. There are passing references to Cologne being ‘of first importance to German war industry’. The overwhelming message, though, is that this is an act of retribution. The Pathé Gazette report, written and voiced by a veteran American journalist, Quentin Reynolds, started with a comparison based on his own experience of the Blitz. ‘A year and a half ago I saw the Nazis concentrating their might on London,’ he declaimed. ‘From the clouds, hell was let loose … as the flames roared, Londoners set their teeth and took it on the chin. But it wasn’t a knock out. It gave birth to a grim determination that the Germans should pay dearly for such destruction. Then at last came the Spring morning when the people of London and other blitzed cities of Britain heard that the Royal Air Force had sent more than a thousand planes over Cologne and the Ruhr, the crews having instructions to “let ’em have it! Right on the chin!” And so it was … RAF bombers dropped big beautiful bombs, right on the centre of the Nazis’ war effort. An uppercut, right on the chin, creating havoc and fear in the hearts of the foolish people who put Hitler in power …’15
The punch line was Harris’s. All the newsreels carried footage of him dictating a message to his crews in which he exhorted them to ‘press on your attack. If you succeed you will have delivered the most devastating blow against the very vitals of the enemy. Let him have it, right on the chin!’ This was followed by a warning to Germany and a statement to the world of Bomber Command’s intentions, which would soon be reinforced by the arrival of the air power of the United States Army. ‘Cologne, Lübeck, Rostock. Those are only just the beginning. Let the Nazis take good note of the Western horizon. There they will see a cloud, as yet no bigger than a man’s hand. But behind that hand lies the whole massive power of the United States of America. When the storm bursts over Germany, they will look back to the days of Lübeck and Rostock and Cologne as a man caught in the blasts of a hurricane will look back to the gentle zephyrs of last summer …’
It was in this appearance that he delivered his most famous prophecy, all the more effective for being delivered in tones of cold certainty, devoid of histrionics: ‘The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them … they sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’ The biblical theme of great sins inviting greater punishment was a favourite of Harris’s. The Allied air attack on Hamburg launched in the last week of July 1943 that killed 30,000 was code-named Operation Gomorrah.
These sentiments were warmly endorsed by figures accepted on the left as moral arbiters, notably George Orwell who, in a BBC broadcast after Cologne, told listeners: ‘In 1940, when the Germans were bombing Britain they did not expect retaliation on a very heavy scale … the people of this country are not revengeful, but they remember what happened to themselves two years ago, and they remember how the Germans talked when they thought themselves safe from retaliation.’16
It was quite clear from the coverage what ‘retaliation’ meant to the Germans on the ground. The British Movietone News report explained that the smoke still covering the city days after the raid had made it impossible to include reconnaissance footage of the damage. Over images of roofless buildings, the voice track continued: ‘but from these pictures of previous raid results, it’s easy to imagine what Cologne looks like today’.17 A cheerful airman then reports: ‘We certainly gave Cologne a good pasting today. I looked down on the target and it was nothing but a sea of fire.’
The obvious message that mass air raids produced civilian casualties produced no outcry. There were a few brave dissenters who spoke out against area bombing, such as George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, and the Labour MP Richard Stokes. But the vast majority agreed with Orwell that the Germans had had it coming, a view that persisted even when the scale of the destruction was revealed. In 1946, the pioneering documentary maker Humphrey Jennings made A Defeated People, which showed the consequences of the Allied victory. It opened with footage of a moonscape of pulverized streets and voiceovers in a variety of accents reflecting what Britons were saying about Germany. The first says: ‘They asked for it. They got it!’18
The name of Arthur Harris would stick to the bombing war the way that Bernard Montgomery’s stuck to El Alamein. It was his good luck to arrive at Bomber Command just as it reached effectiveness. It was his misfortune to be associated forever in everyone’s mind as the prime mover behind area bombing, rather than the man who carried it out. If any one senior airman bears responsibility for the policy it is Portal, who was advocating ‘a definite attempt with our offensive to affect the morale of the German people’ by attacks ‘with the prime aim of causing heavy material destruction’ as early as October 1940.19
Harris complained about the misattribution but accepted there was little hope of correction. Given the gusto with which he entered into his role as the scourge of Germany, it was hardly surprising that he should get the blame rather than the cool, fastidious Portal, who was as surefooted as a chamois on the slippery slopes of power and whose distaste for publicity equalled Harris’s enjoyment of it.
Seventy-five years on, Harris seems an unsympathetic figure, brutal of speech and manner and apparently indifferent to the human cost of the bombing campaign, whether of German women and children or his own men. The experience of the bomber crews may have some marked similarities with the lot of infantrymen in the trenches, but Harris was no Douglas Haig. The judgement that matters most to a commander is that of his own troops. ‘Butch’ won the respect, even the admiration, of many. In the company of men whose emotions were strictly rationed, he could also kindle a strange sort of liking.
Bomber Boys were by and large a bolshie lot. Many of them came from social backgrounds and areas of Britain which gave them no reason to respect the established order or take for granted the good faith or competence of the ruling class. Eric Banks, a Bradford boy who completed a tour as a rear gunner with 166 Squadron, had what was in some ways a typical attitude towards his duties. Brave, resourceful and punctilious when in the air, he resented attempts to impose petty rules and restrictions on the ground and did his best to thwart them. Yet his judgement on Harris was fulsome. ‘He was a figure of the highest esteem, almost affection, from his “boys”,’ he wrote.20 ‘I never saw the legendary leader, neither did I come across anyone else who had caught a glimpse of him. He did not tour around the bomber bases holding impromptu talks with his air and ground crews, sloganizing and entertaining his troops with light-hearted patter. Perhaps he surmised that his minions, young as most were, deserved better. From my small experience, I gained the impression that, to a man, they regarded their commander as one of their own – the highest praise of all.’
This verdict does not sit easily with some of Harris’s attitudes and actions. He was opposed, for example, to setting a limit on operational tours, a practice he inherited on taking over. ‘I am most unwilling to do anything to foster the idea that our crews are under some description of Trade Union contract to carry out a certain number of carefully-defined operational missions, after which they are free, at any rate for a fixed period, to take no more part in the war,’ he wrote to the Air Ministry in February 1942.21 As was sometimes the case, his habitual sarcasm disguised more nuanced thinking and a willingness to let things lie. In this case, he did nothing to alter the existing arrangement and his real point was that he thought it better to leave the length of a crew’s tour for the squadron commander to decide, on the basis that he would know whether or not they had ‘done their best’.
So it was with his attitude towards VD. In his letter replying to Sutton’s querying of his policy of punishing sufferers with a second tour, he amplified the point made in the original signal to group commanders, and his justifications made a certain harsh sense. ‘The personnel concerned must be regarded not as unfortunate individuals [he wrote] but as people who through their own action and their own carelessness … have broken up a highly skilled and highly trained flying crew. It is not the individual but the crew that matters. These crews are first disrupted and then thrown out of gear perhaps for the rest of their tour. As a consequence, not only is the operational effort of the whole Command seriously reduced, but “patched up” crews are undoubtedly liable to suffer heavier casualties than crews who have been trained and learnt by long experience to work together as a team.’22
Cruel though the measure seemed, the Bomber Boys would not have denied the truth of Harris’s words. The chemistry of a crew was a mysterious thing. In a brilliant display of imagination, the system allowed each team to select itself, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer and air gunners, milling round in a hangar until they coagulated into a unit in a process often described as resembling a mass blind date. Time and trial were needed to weave the web of trust needed to fly a huge aeroplane efficiently in conditions of extreme danger. The loss of one of the team for whatever reason was bad news, and, as Harris said, possibly fatal.
Norman Lee, a rear gunner with 428 Squadron, had finished three trips with his regular all-NCO crew when they were tasked with a raid on Milan. They were apprehensive about the operation, not just because it meant a ten-hour flight and crossing the Alps twice, but because their regular navigator had gone sick and they were getting a young pilot officer as a replacement. ‘This didn’t please us much,’ he wrote, ‘not because he was an officer or because we doubted his technical competence … but because it was unsettling to have a stranger flying with us.’23
The outward journey was uneventful and the target was lightly defended. Soon after they turned for home the trouble started. The pilot lost his way and they found themselves over Paris, where ‘they gave us a dreadful pasting. The searchlights had us coned for about ten minutes while the flak gunners threw everything they had at us.’ The pilot, Johnny Harkins, ended the ordeal by finding sanctuary in a cloud, and eventually they reached the Channel coast. When they eventually landed, ‘two of our engines actually died of thirst as we finished our landing run’.
Lee admitted that ‘it was probably a bit brutal of us, but I don’t think anyone spoke a single word to the poor old navigator after we left the aircraft. There was none of that sense of comradeship that is supposed to be generated by sharing and surmounting common dangers. Or rather that was just the trouble. The comradeship existed, but it was between the regular crew and it didn’t include stand-in navigators who lost the way home.’
Almost every account of the experience makes it clear that in the later stages of training and for the duration of the tour, your crew were the most important people in the universe, crowding out thoughts of friends and family; even girlfriend or wife. Often the individual members had little in common and, in other circumstances, had their paths crossed no lasting relationship would have ensued. But as Lee said, shared danger and the responsibility each man shouldered for keeping the others alive created a deep attachment, the quality of which can perhaps only truly be understood by those who experienced it.
Eric Banks considered that joining the crew of Squadron Leader Stowell was ‘without doubt the most important decision I ever made’. It was a typical Bomber Command jumble of backgrounds and nationalities. All but the pilot were sergeants. Banks, the wireless operator, had been a clerk before joining up. ‘Tubby’, the Canadian navigator, interrupted his science studies at university to volunteer. He was ‘large, with a rather vacant fixed grin’. The mid-upper gunner was ‘Whitey’, from Shropshire, who had lied about his age to join the RAF. Jimmy, another Canadian, was a Methodist minister’s son whose ‘chief interest appeared to be “chicks” with whom he went dancing on just about every free evening’. ‘Red’, the bomb aimer, was the third Canadian in the crew and Banks’s best friend. The last to join was Ernie, the flight engineer, from the East End of London who was ‘the most accomplished booze artist I ever met’. He spent every evening ‘propping up the bar of some Lincolnshire pub, quietly talking to anyone around drinking one pint every twelve minutes or so, and when the evening came to an end, collecting those of his companions who had fallen by the wayside and ensuring that they reached camp safely’.
Years later he still cherished memories of ‘great hilarity, much revelry and above all, the unthinking loyalty and friendship of a small group of youngsters towards each other’. The odd man out was the pilot, who Banks gives the pseudonym ‘Squadron Leader Stowell’. He was thirty-six years old, ancient by aircrew standards, a pre-war regular who had volunteered for flying duties with Bomber Command. He was the son of a senior official at the Colonial Office, and ‘it soon became evident that he had no idea as to how the vast majority of British citizens lived’. The other crew members regarded Stowell as snobbish and offhand, though Banks charitably excused his manners on the grounds that he could not be blamed for his upbringing. On one of their first outings, however, his attitude provoked a mutiny. While still at the OTU at Peplow, Shropshire, they were returning from a cross-country daytime trip. As they approached the base, ‘Tubby’ the navigator warned the skipper to gain height as they were in danger of flying into the 1,335-ft-high Wrekin, which lay to the south of the station. Stowell ‘replied that this was nonsense and [it] would be another twenty minutes or so before reaching the area of the airfield. He refused to gain altitude but the matter was resolved when the Wrekin appeared.’
After landing, ‘Tubby’ announced that this was ‘the last time I fly with that bastard’. The rest agreed. They decided to report their decision to the Wing Commander in charge of flying training. He listened sympathetically and agreed that Stowell had acted improperly. ‘He was naturally loath to break up a crew,’ wrote Banks, ‘and asked if we would consider continuing with Stowell for the moment until he had a tactful talk with him … we rather doubtfully agreed to this [but he] must have been as good as his word as we never had further nonsense of this sort again.’
Later, while they were doing their conversion course to Lancasters at Lindholme HCU, Stowell made an attempt to be sociable, asking Banks if he might join them on their nightly excursion to the village pub. Banks agreed, though the others received the news without enthusiasm. That evening in the bar ‘the customers were as usual thick on the ground. He pushed his way through to us and insisted on buying a round, although we had just been served with our second whiskies.’ Banks judged that ‘by and large the evening was a success. He chatted amicably with us but we learned nothing about him that we did not already know.’ The experiment was not repeated, and he would never be one of the boys.
Nonetheless, when they began their tour of operations flying out of Kirmington in north Lincolnshire with 166 Squadron, the rest of the crew came to respect his courage and skill. In late July the squadron took part in a raid on Le Havre. It was an evening operation but it was still broad daylight when they arrived. ‘All went well until we were nearing our target and had commenced the bombing run,’ Banks remembered. He was standing in the astrodome to get a view of the heavy flak barrage when he ‘happened to glance upwards. To my horror, a Lancaster with bomb doors open was positioned exactly above us and … appeared almost within reach.’ The rear gunner, Whitey, had seen it too and screamed a warning over the intercom. Stowell ‘could not have known just what had occurred, but he certainly knew panic when he heard it. Our aircraft was thrown wildly to starboard as the bombs hurtled past our port wing. It was a magnificent reaction and Whitey and I breathed again.’
Their relief was premature. Banks assumed the skipper would abort the operation. All the other aircraft had completed their bombing runs and were heading for home. He was astonished to hear Stowell’s voice in his earphones. ‘“We’ll have to go around again,” he said conversationally. It was as if he was suggesting another round of … golf.’
His first thought was that ‘there was no way that a sole aircraft could, in daylight, fly through that flak barrage and come out the other side without phenomenal luck. I honestly doubt that I had any great feeling of terror … Possibly I had passed the terror stage.’
With ‘Red’ the bomb aimer, calling directions, Stowell ‘carefully handled the aircraft towards the target. He was quite oblivious to the lethal barrage and seemed no more concerned than any pilot on routine bombing range practice. “Bombs gone!” shouted Red. The aircraft banked steeply to port and in no time we were out of range of the German gunners.’ Despite this extraordinary sang-froid, Banks believed there ‘was nothing foolhardy about Stowell. He was just doing his job as instructed.’
Halfway through their tour the crew were told out of the blue that Stowell was being promoted and posted away to command 12 Squadron at Wickenby in Lincolnshire and they were to get a new skipper. At first this seemed like good news. Then they reconsidered. He was after all ‘a competent pilot and had shown he did not panic in desperate situations … we had completed fifteen ops with Stowell and shared the dangers and worries with him and survived’. Another thought struck them. What if his replacement was ‘a gung-ho type who would really be “one of the boys”’? It was a relief when a few days after his departure they received a message that ‘Wing Commander Stowell wanted “his boys” at Wickenby’, where they would finish their tour, with the CO occasionally flying with them.
Harris believed there were similarities between what his men were doing and the experience of serving as an infantryman on the Western Front. They showed ‘the courage of men with long-drawn apprehensions of “going over the top”,’ he wrote in a memoir, two years after the end of the war.24 But he pointed out an important distinction. It was ‘furthermore, the courage of the small hours, of men virtually alone, for at his battle station, the airman is virtually alone’.
Bomber crews operated in a capsule. On boarding their aircraft, men merged with machines. Flying towards enemy territory in the gathering dusk it was reassuring to see what Les Bartlett of 50 Squadron observed on his maiden op, a trip to Berlin on 22 November 1943. ‘At 9,000 feet, still climbing, we break cloud,’ he wrote in his diary.25 ‘It is almost dusk yet all around we can see shapes, vague yet resolute, all moving in the same direction. It is rather comforting to know you are not alone in your efforts …’ On their return, as they crossed the English coast, he realized that ‘we are in the centre of a great armada, hundreds of little red, green and white navigation lights – actually they’ve been there all the time, without lights, but of course we couldn’t see them.’ Once night fell, the darkness swallowed your companions who might reveal themselves only as they loomed out of nowhere on a collision course over the target area or went up in a fireball, struck by flak or a night fighter’s cannon shells.
Inside the skin of your Stirling or Halifax or Lancaster speech was strictly rationed. Once an operation began, the banter and easy familiarity ended and all was grave and serious. Outsiders they met in the towns and villages near the stations where they served ‘would no doubt regard us as a bunch of happy clowns without a care in the world,’ wrote Eric Banks. ‘They would not have recognised us if they could have seen us at work. We regarded ourselves and each other as experts, each in his own particular field. And the fooling stopped when we donned our flying kit …’
It annoyed Norman Lee how ‘in films about the war, the crews seem to chatter away over the intercom all the time about popsies, wizard prangs and all the rest of it, always using Christian names and generally giving a rather happy-go-lucky impression’. His crew ‘never did this … we always followed the procedure when we spoke to one another: “rear gunner to pilot”; “pilot to navigator” and so on. No-one was ever addressed by his first name while we were in flight, which is as it should be.’
Personality was replaced by function. It was a lonely business, especially for a rear gunner like Lee, an arse-end Charlie marooned at the extremity of the Halifax connected to his mates only by intercom. The pilot, engineer and navigator were kept constantly busy but for the others there were long periods with nothing to do. Lee boasted that he was entirely without imagination, which he regarded as an attribute rather than a deficiency in his chosen line of work for it meant he hardly ever felt fear. It also meant he suffered more than most from boredom. The business of flying did nothing for him, and it was true that the glamour of aviation soon wore after a few hours in a bomber. ‘The alleged poetry and beauty of it all left me cold,’ he confessed. ‘Going on an op in an aeroplane was just riding to work as far as I was concerned.’
His duties were ‘to report flak positions or searchlights but otherwise it was dead quiet apart from the aircraft noise. I used to sing to myself the whole way there and back.’ Lee recalled that during his tour in the summer of 1943, the gunners were instructed not to open fire at night fighters unless in dire necessity. ‘Shooting enemy fighters down was not what the rear gunner existed for, but bringing the aircraft back,’ he wrote. ‘The vital part of the job was to spot the night fighters in time for the pilot to take evasive action. Firing your guns at the enemy was only a last resort if you failed to evade him, the point being that when you opened up with your guns you were giving a firework display, so if there was another fighter in the vicinity, he would spot it and join in the party.’ After seventeen ops he had ‘never fired my guns in anger’.
In his determinedly unheroic memoir, Lee several times makes the point that operations could often go off without the participants feeling any real sense of danger. His first trip with 428 was to Hamburg on 2 August 1943. The weather was atrocious, their Halifax was repeatedly struck by lightning, and of the thirty-two aircraft that set off from their station, Middleton St George in Yorkshire, only a handful reached the target. Lee’s crew was not one of them and instead they dropped their bombs on Heligoland. The weather kept the night fighters on the ground and the flak gunners ‘couldn’t do much that night except poop off a few rounds, more as a gesture than in real hope’. He concluded that ‘all in all, I can’t say that this first taste of war impressed me very much’. The second and third trips were not much more eventful.
Even when things livened up, Lee felt insulated from events outside the aircraft and a sense of disconnection between the bomber and the bombed. Later, when, after being shot down he fell in with the French resistance, he was able to compare fighting in the air with fighting on the ground. ‘Seeing the people you are shooting at makes you dry in the mouth, especially when you hit them,’ he wrote. ‘Hearing the bullets whistling around your unprotected body is quite another thing from seeing flak from the inside of an aeroplane.’
Little noise penetrated the aircraft because the roar of the engines drowned out everything. ‘To us the whole affair was just a silent firework display, like Cinerama with the sound turned off. The searchlights poked about the sky. The flak explosions made puffballs all round. The town below quietly burned and exploded. We were no more than spectators of it all. The only sense of reality came from the smell of cordite produced by the flak bursts, [which] came through despite the oxygen masks.’
This sense of isolation is echoed in the testimony of many Bomber Boys. They were delivering an abstract violence, turning the ground below into a boiling palette of reds and yellows, and it needed an effort of imagination to translate what they saw into dead bodies and shattered buildings. It took personal disaster to puncture the bubble. For Lee and his crew, it came on the night of 4 October 1943. They took off from Middleton St George at 17.25 to bomb Frankfurt. It was a clear evening, which favoured the night fighters who were further helped by marker flares dropped by Path Finder Force aircraft to direct the bomber stream to the target.
They were thirty minutes’ flying time from Frankfurt when Lee saw a Junkers 88 about three hundred yards astern. ‘I immediately told Johnny using the standard reporting procedure: “Rear gunner to pilot – prepare to corkscrew to starboard. Corkscrew starboard down – go!”’ Johnny Harkins threw the aircraft into the approved manoeuvre, which involved falling away in the direction of the attacking fighter, then rolling and climbing. It seemed to be successful. As far as Lee could see, the attacker never opened fire. But ‘there must have been another fighter working with him’ for the bomber was raked from underneath, and both engines on the starboard fire burst into flames. Lee saw ‘the starboard aileron sail past the tail and disappear. As it went, the flames from the engines were shooting past my rear turret on the starboard side. I remember Scotty the flight engineer yelling over the intercom, “the whole bloody aircraft’s on fire.” Indeed it was. The flames had reached back down the petrol feedlines and were setting the inside fuselage ablaze.’
Nobody panicked. Things were happening too fast for that. Harkins gave the order to bale out and it was every man for himself. Hunched in his position at the back of the aircraft Lee ‘centralised the turret, opened the turret doors, grabbed my parachute which was hanging inside the fuselage’ and clipped it on. He swung the turret away from the flames roaring down the starboard side and climbed onto the seat. The correct drill was to tumble out backwards but he ‘didn’t fancy this’. He went out feet first and a few seconds later ‘there was a thump and an upward jerk on my chest and shoulders, and there I was dangling by my armpits on a cold night eighteen thousand feet somewhere over Europe …’ All the crew survived. Four were taken prisoner, but Lee and two others avoided capture. He landed near the Germany–Luxembourg border, and was sheltered by the head of the local resistance, who passed him on to the French underground. He would end up fighting with the Maquis in the South of France.
Lee was leaving the bombing war just as it was entering its most intense and costly phase. In November 1943 Harris was given a free hand to launch a series of massive raids on the German capital and other cities that became known as the Battle of Berlin. It lasted until March and aimed to prove once and for all the contention that it was possible to bring about the collapse of the enemy from the air. It was the aerial equivalent of the ‘Big Push’, beloved of First World War generals, and developed in much the same way. Initial success, raising hopes of a breakthrough, soon subsided. Gains dwindled as deaths rose. For those who took part in it there were none of the longueurs that Lee describes and every night there were dramas and catastrophes.
Les Bartlett arrived at Skellingthorpe in Lincolnshire to join 50 Squadron just as the battle got started. He was the bomb aimer with a crew skippered by Michael Beetham, who would gain a reputation as one of the most able and tenacious pilots in Bomber Command and end up Marshal of the RAF and Chief of the Air Staff. The life he described in his diary is one of almost constant hazard. Almost every operation, even those regarded as a ‘piece of cake’, resulted in significant losses. Perched in the nose of their Lancaster he had a stark view of the mayhem on the way to the target as night fighters slunk into the bomber stream, dealing death to their unsuspecting victims from below. During fourteen large raids on ‘the Big City’ between the middle of November 1943 and the end of January 1944, 384 aircraft were lost.26 The campaign was a failure. As time passed, the raids became less effective and more costly. Most of the victims fell to the reorganized Luftwaffe night-fighter force which by the end could muster nearly 400 aircraft and Berlin, though battered, was still nowhere near surrendering when a halt was called.
The night of 30/31 March 1944 saw the biggest slaughter. The objective was Nuremburg, far away in Bavaria, which so far had been left off the target list. Bartlett recorded that when the crews learned their destination at the briefing, someone remarked: ‘Oh this should be nice quiet stooge.’ They took off at 10 p.m. and climbed to their operational height over the Channel. The first stage was uneventful. Then, wrote Bartlett, ‘as we drew level with the south of the Ruhr Valley, things began to happen.
Enemy night fighter flares were all around us and in no time at all, combats were taking place and aircraft were going down in flames on all sides. This aggravated the situation because each time a kite hit the deck a great glow lit up the area and night was turned into day making it easier still for the enemy fighters … I can remember looking out at the poor blighters going down and thinking to myself it must be our turn next, just a question of time … a Lancaster appeared on our port beam converging on a collision course, so we dropped a hundred feet or so to let him cross. He was only about two hundred yards on our starboard beam when ‘crash’ – a string of cannon shells hit him and down he went. The night fighter which got him must have been on our tail at the same time but with so much happening we didn’t spot him.
As they altered course to approach Nuremburg, he ‘looked down on the starboard beam at the area we had just passed … there were kites burning on the deck all over the place, bombs going off where they had been jettisoned by bombers damaged in combat and fires from their incendiaries across the whole area’. By the end of the night ninety-six aircraft had been lost, the largest number in a single operation in the history of Bomber Command. The catastrophe marked the close of the Battle of Britain, but failed to shake Harris’s conviction that crushing cities was a war-winning strategy.
Sharing such experiences forged a camaraderie which rendered the larger institutional identity of the Air Force remote and insignificant. The squadron, an important focus of loyalty for fighter pilots, does not seem to have featured greatly as an emotional point of reference for most bomber crews. A bomber station was a big, impersonal place, swarming with the two or three thousand ground staff needed to keep the fliers in the air. Each squadron had around a hundred and forty aircrew, whereas a fighter unit was a seventh of the size and there were usually two squadrons at each base. In 1943 and early 1944, when the losses were most intense, there was not enough time during the course of a tour to connect with your fellow airmen, who might be chatting in the canteen one day and vanished the next. In the six months from November 1943, during the Battle of Berlin, 50 Squadron lost nineteen crews, and only five completed a tour of operations.
Both earlier and later in Bomber Command’s war, when the pace of operations was less hectic, some sort of squadron spirit had a chance to evolve and aircrew might get to know something of the character and quality of their superiors. During the darkest passage of the story, the relationship between directors and actors seems to have become more tenuous, and the crews’ sense of identity tighter and more exclusive. You saw the base commander and the squadron commander at operational briefings, and perhaps when there was some administrative or disciplinary business to be dealt with, but the human scale of the enterprise was too big to allow much intimacy. Norman Lee and his crew ‘scarcely saw an officer except at briefings or debriefings’. The commanders who flew disappeared with the same rapidity as everyone else. Five squadrons lost their COs in the first week of the Battle of Berlin.
Norman Lee claimed that talk of ‘squadron spirit, morale and so on’ was already redundant during his tour of duty with 428 Squadron, which ended halfway through when he was shot down just before the assault on the Big City got properly underway. ‘To be frank, there just wasn’t any,’ he wrote. ‘I never cared tuppence about the squadron as such, nor did the rest of our crew. But we did care for each other and this extended to our ground crew as well.’ Officially the squadron belonged to the RCAF, but all but two of those flying with Lee were British. The ground crew, however, were Canadians. ‘They looked after our aircraft [only] and our confidence in them was total. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was too much trouble, and they nursed our aircraft as if their lives depended on it as much as our own.’
Aircrew and ground crew took turns inviting each other out ‘on the beer’, a treat the better paid Canadians could afford more easily than the Brits. Lee ‘particularly wanted to point this out, not because it rankled with us but because it didn’t. We were a happy group together, and if there was indeed on the squadron as a whole anything that could be described as high morale, it was within the individual crews that it was generated.’
The death rate made any wider emotional association almost impossible. In the nine weeks that Lee was in action, 428 Squadron lost twenty-one crews on operations – that is almost the entire strength of an average bomber squadron. The turnover created an atmosphere of anonymity that numbed the emotions. Lee wrote that although ‘the empty chairs appeared night after night … the truth is that in our squadron at least, it didn’t much bother anyone – certainly not the crews … my crew was scarcely on the squadron long enough to get to know anyone properly, and as a matter of fact I don’t think many other people were either. Nobody lasted long enough. The disappearance of people whose names you could barely fit to their faces produced little impact. Our feelings were that the other crews were either already there when we arrived so they didn’t count, or else they joined us afterwards so they didn’t count either.’
Conversely, the death of a member of the group, a rear gunner killed by flak, say, was felt intensely. The only time Lee ‘saw a man go to pieces’ was on returning from a mid-tour leave. ‘There was an air-gunner on the squadron who joined our train at York. He ought to have returned the day before but had some compassionate reason for not having done so. When we got back to Middleton St George he learned that his crew had returned on time, gone on ops that night and gone missing. He had a complete nervous collapse and had to be taken off flying immediately.’
Operational flying created a confidence in your abilities and a faith in the competence of those around you that fostered a disinclination to show unquestioning respect for superiors and deference to orders that seemed pointless or stupid. Eric Banks noted early on in his training that it was those without combat experience who most revered the rules and that the closer you came to operations ‘the less the bull’. The training staff seemed to understand that ‘the types volunteering for flying duties were not those who would respond with any enthusiasm to the … theory that only those who would jump to attention when shouted at were fit to fight the Hun’.
The instructors were ‘gen men’ who knew the reality of what they were preparing their charges for, yet spoke little about their exploits even in the pub. ‘Gen men’ were the only superiors Bomber Boys were likely to look up to, officers like Flight Lieutenant Les Gray, the signals leader at Wickenby, responsible for the wireless operators and who Banks was told by his colleagues on arrival was ‘the best bloke you’ll ever come across’. Having completed two tours and won the DFC he need never have flown again. However, against regulations, he had taken ‘every opportunity of standing in for any wireless operator, or even gunner, who happened to be unfit for flying’, often managing to get the trip credited to the absentee’s total. His standing was further cemented by his institution of ‘periodic piss-ups’ at a hotel on the Lincoln Road, where all wireless operators were welcome provided they could hold their beer.
In this self-confident ambience, where respect was hard-won, Joubert’s proposal that an attempt should be made to impose something like pre-war discipline on the crews seems absurd. A less rigid mind might have concluded that such efforts were not only futile but counter-productive. Instead, as his report made clear, during his tour of the bomber stations, where others might have recognized constructive informality, he saw slackness.
On his visit to Wyton, Cambridgeshire, he was unimpressed by the conduct of Wing Commander Tommy Rivett-Carnac who had just finished leading 156 Squadron of the Path Finder Force. ‘It would appear that [he] needs training in his duties as commanding officer,’ he wrote. ‘I was particularly struck by the number of charges preferred by the APM [Assistant Provost Marshal] against the aircrew of his squadron which were dismissed by this officer.’27 ‘I also observed that some aircrew who had bad conduct sheets were nevertheless put up for promotion as a matter of course. In other words, bad behaviour was having no effect whatsoever on their careers.’
Rivett-Carnac was twenty-eight years old, South African-born, had a DFC and bar and was about to be awarded the DSO. As a Cranwell graduate and pre-war professional he might be expected to share Joubert’s opinion about the need for firm discipline. Instead he seems to have taken the view that men facing death were entitled to a bit of fun.
The resistance that the aircrews showed to old-fashioned military discipline did not reflect any lack of commitment to their task. Norman Lee, a proud member of the awkward squad, recorded how ‘when we were told at briefing … “you’re going to the Big City tonight,” a great cheer went around the room’. Les Bartlett and his crew could not wait to start their tour of operations. ‘Our luck is out,’ he wrote in his diary on 10 November 1943, on learning that his crew was not on the list for 50 Squadron’s trip to Modane on the French–Italian border. ‘What a bind … Good shooting you lucky people!’
It was another week before they were selected. ‘Tonight’s the night’ runs the entry for 17 November. ‘You can imagine how excited we felt as we put on our flying kit and drove out to the kite to do our Night Flying Test.’ Then at 2 p.m. they were told that ops had been scrubbed due to poor visibility. ‘What a disappointment,’ he wrote.
Then at last, on 22 November, they made their debut. ‘Briefing started at 1.30 pm and what do you think? It’s the Big City … Needless to say we were all very excited, because to an experienced crew Berlin is quite an assignment, so you can imagine what we felt like to be doing it as a first trip.’
Sitting in his bombing compartment after take-off his enthusiasm began to falter. ‘I plug in my electric suit, make myself comfortable (if that is possible) and let my thoughts wander … I realise what we are out to do and how frightened I really am … In spite of the unsuitable surroundings I say a prayer to ask forgiveness for the murder of so many human beings by the dropping of my bombs, and also a prayer to ask for courage which I seem to lack at the moment, and for a safe flight to enable me to return to the land which I realise I love so much – to relatives and friends and to my wife who means more to me than anything in the world.’
This entry makes it clear that Bartlett was fully aware of what attacking the Big City meant for the population. Lee says that before his first trip to Berlin (on 23 August 1943), ‘a ring was drawn around a sector of the city on the briefing map. The briefing officer pointed to it and said: “This is where you bomb and the next time you hit Berlin you’ll bomb the area adjacent to it, and so on until the city is completely flattened.”’
Lee knew ‘perfectly well’ that in the attacks on Berlin ‘we were being sent to bomb civilians. I can’t answer for all the other aircrews but as far as ours was concerned it didn’t bother us. We felt the Germans had only themselves to blame. They had started it and now we were finishing it.’ Once again the impersonal nature of the bombing war made that understanding easier to live with: ‘It wasn’t like a couple of infantrymen slugging it out with bayonets. It was just a technical job … We didn’t think about the people we were killing because we didn’t see them.’
After his moment of reflection on his first trip, Les Bartlett’s diary records no further qualms about civilian casualties. His accounts of raids become technical and dispassionate. Describing a trip to Stettin on 5 January 1944 he wrote: ‘We settled down to bomb and I did a “bang on” run up on the centre of the city. The raid was highly concentrated and kites were bombing above and below and on all sides of us. Visibility was excellent and I could clearly see whole areas of houses and shops blasted and blazing like an inferno. The place “burned like a bastard” …’28
He soon noticed that not everyone shared his eagerness for action. ‘Ops tonight but just as we were going out to the kite it was scrubbed,’ he wrote on 30 November, a week after. ‘Loud cheers. The blokes just ran around in circles, dumped their kit and dashed off to town.’ A few days later, after surviving a hair-raising fourth trip to Berlin (he would do ten in all), he and the crew felt the same way. ‘Ops were on again but just as we were going out to the kites it was scrubbed and were we glad. We are going on leave in two days’ time and feel much safer on the deck until we have had it.’
Operations brought little or no sense of progress. Eric Banks’s first trip to Germany was to bomb Stuttgart, and when he left the city was swamped with smoke and fire. When he entered the briefing room the following day ‘and saw that Stuttgart was again the target, I naively thought that this was rather overdoing things. From my view on the previous night I expected that the chaos below would be total and that not much would have escaped the attentions of the several hundred bombers.’ This was in August of 1944. Stuttgart had first been attacked four years before, and in the first seven months of 1944 had already been subjected to six heavy raids.
In the end, the importance of each operation was that it brought you one step closer to the end of your tour and re-entry to a world where the prospect of a future could reasonably be entertained. That, perhaps, provided the main impetus to keep going. There was, of course, another force at work. The crews had no real choice in the matter. In the First World War dereliction of duty could mean a death sentence.
By 1940 the authorities had devised other deterrents for those who refused to fly on operations. There was an official reluctance to stigmatize men as exhibiting a ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ (see here), which meant, before more humane procedures were introduced, they were stripped of their rank and placed on menial ground duties at another base. Guidelines emphasized that it was ‘highly important … to eliminate any possibility of medical disability before a member of an aircrew is placed in [the LMF] category’.29 Between February 1942 and the end of the war, the vast majority of those who dropped out were stated to be suffering from ‘neurosis’ (8,402) rather than LMF (1,029).
Sometimes, circumstances forced the issue, leading to a court martial. The offence came under the heading of ‘failure to carry out a warlike operation’. It seems to have been an unwelcome last resort, and only a handful of cases appear in the records. One trial, on 31 August 1943, gives a grim taste of the pressures brave men were under, and a glimpse of the harsh face authority was prepared to show when it felt an example needed to be set.30 The case related to four sergeants of 214 Squadron based at Chedburgh in Suffolk, members of the same all-NCO crew. In the last week of July, they had undergone a succession of sticky trips. During a mass raid on Hamburg on 24/25th, an exhaust burst into flames, attracting a night fighter which they managed to drive off. On the return leg, an engine caught fire and they staggered back to base, making an emergency landing which collapsed the undercarriage. Two nights later they were sent to Hamburg again but were forced to turn back when the rear turret jammed. The following night the squadron joined the third great operation in the Battle of Hamburg. After bombing, the crew found themselves apparently alone over the city and were ‘coned’ in searchlights for eight minutes while flak burst all around, hitting their Stirling in the port wing and tail.
They were coned again over Heligoland, and, almost out of fuel, were redirected to land at Stradishall, the main base. It was 7.15 a.m. before they got to bed. Few were able to sleep. At 2 p.m. they learned they were on ops again that night. Four of the team told their Australian captain they were too ‘shaken up’ to fly that night. He referred them to their flight commander who was unsympathetic and reported them to the Wing Commander who was Squadron CO.
They explained to him they felt unfit to operate and feared they would endanger each other if ordered to fly. According to one defendant, the CO ‘appeared … to have already made up his mind that we were to fly, and that was that, no matter what happened’. By his own admission, the Wing Commander hinted that they faced a firing squad if they refused, warning them: ‘Do you realise the maximum penalty for this offence?’ It made no difference. Although ordered to operate, they turned up at dispersal without their equipment and were arrested, charged and imprisoned in the guard house for the next thirty days.
The court martial revealed the system at its worst. There were ways to deal with such incidents which, if infrequent, were not uncommon. Flight commanders had the discretion to leave a crew off the battle order if they judged they were reaching the limit of their physical and mental endurance. One easy get-out was to treat the matter as a medical problem and refer the men to the MO. Instead, the CO was recorded in the transcript of the proceedings as having told the bomb aimer when he announced he felt unfit to fly: ‘Ridiculous, man! You look all right to me.’ The bullying tone of the prosecuting officer, who held the rank of squadron leader but flew a desk in the department of the Advocate General, sounds contemptible to modern ears. He put it to the crew’s flight engineer, just nineteen years old: ‘When you join the service, you are taught to do what you are told, whatever it may be. It is not for you to set up your own opinion against what you are told to do. Do you agree with that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the humble reply.
None of the accused was refusing to carry on with their tour, just seeking the shortest of respites before taking their place again in the line. ‘All I actually needed was a night’s sleep,’ said the bomb aimer, a London policeman in peacetime. ‘I thought I would be all right for the next night.’ Instead, he and his comrades were sentenced to 112 days’ detention, reduction to the ranks, and utterly undeserved ignominy. The upside was that they lived.