Chapter 8
Usually the members of two crews shared a Nissen hut. We’ve been there and seen the adjutant come along and collect all the stuff out of their lockers and you knew that crew hadn’t made it. Within a day or so, a new crew came in and they’d ask, ‘What’s it like?’ We’d say, ‘Oh, bloody awful. It’s terrible.’ You put the fear of God into them. We were a rotten lot in that respect. It was just devil may care. On low flying exercises if we saw people on farms working on a haystack we made a point of just shooting over the top and pulling the nose up quickly so that the slipstream from the four fans blew the straw all over the poor buggers! The times we were reported for this! The CO just told us not to blow anymore haystacks down. May as well talk to a brick wall.
Bomb Aimer, Sergeant Derek ‘Pat’ Patfield
Powerful winds from the north that carried the four-engined heavies south at every stage of their flight to Berlin on the night of the 24/25 March affected hardened old soaks and ‘Gen Men’ and the ‘sprog’ crews alike. Low lying Fenland and dykes were no barrier to chill winds and rain that came sweeping in from the North Sea to make life on the far flung airfields in Lincolnshire quite unbearable for the men of all nations who had come to fight in Bomber Command. Primitive wartime facilities cloaked in wintertime fog threatened to dampen the resolve of resolute Aussies and Kiwis who had left their Antipodean sunshine and, equally, those from Canada’s prairies, occupied Poland and the cities, towns and villages all over Britain. At the beginning of 1944 the ramshackle base at Skellingthorpe was shared between 50 Squadron and 61 Squadron. But as both were building up their operational strength, it was not long before an acute accommodation problem arose and the ‘Lincoln Imps’ had forsaken ‘Skelly’ to move to Coningsby on a three month detachment. Coningsby, at least, offered more in the way of home comforts. But for young ‘green’ aircrew arrivals like Norfolk-born Sergeant ‘Pat’ Patfield and others, most of whom were in their late teens or early twenties, it was still a shock to the system after their training in Canada. The young bomb-aimer had learned bombing and gunnery at Lethbridge, Alberta. And he had attended Air Observation classes at Malton, Ontario, before returning to England with ice skates bought in Moncton, a petrol cigarette lighter, given as a Christmas present by a family in New Brunswick, and many photos including the snows near Niagara Falls. Further training had continued at places from Newquay in Cornwall to near the Welsh border at Hereford and quite a number of airfields around the Midlands and Lincolnshire before the seven crew members concluded their training at the Lancaster Finishing School at Syerston near Nottingham. Like debutantes they ‘came out’ to join the ranks of the Lincoln Imps.
With the exception of Tommy Thomas, the navigator from ‘somewhere in London’, who had crewed up with them only a week or so before, they had trained together for a number of months previously. Two of the crew really were returning home after their travails. Pilot Officer Desmond ‘Denny’ Freeman their 21 year old RAFVR pilot was from Gainsborough. On 29 December 1940 Denny Freeman’s father, Luther Henry Freeman, had died on service with the 11th Lindsey (Gainsborough) Battalion, Home Guard aged 42. Sergeant Leslie ‘Jimmy’ Chapman, the wireless operator hailed from Melton Washway near Spalding. Eva and Ernest Chapman’s only son had gone to the Saracen’s Head School in Whaplode before going to work on the land and there he could have stayed because his work in food production was so important that he was not conscripted. But the 20 year old had insisted on joining up. Frank Devonshire, the flight engineer, was from Birmingham. Bill Smith, the rear-gunner, was from somewhere near St Helens, Lancashire. On ops Bill would talk about women until they got to the enemy coast and then even he shut up. ‘Old Bill’ was a real ‘rough diamond’. His only interest in life was meeting girls and going out with them. He always said he had a hell of a job to convince girls he was christened Bill Smith! After the war he said he was going to be a gigolo and get paid to keep women happy! As Pat Patfield said, ‘He was just the bloke for a rear-gunner’. Arthur ‘Dep’ Sherriff was the mid-upper gunner and oldest member of the crew at 34 years of age.
The crew had flown their first op to Frankfurt on 18/19 March and the second had followed on 26/27th, to Essen. ‘The experience of being told that “There’s a war on tonight and you’re on the list”,’ recalled Sergeant ‘Pat’ Patfield, ‘was received with a certain amount of foreboding, in spite of the fact that during training we had been anxious to get on with the real thing. Word would go round operations were on. The standard phrasing was, “There’s a war on tonight”. You went into the Ops Room and there’d be a list of the crews on the big Ops board, but it wouldn’t say the target. That was usually about lunchtime. Just after lunch you went out to the aircraft and checked all the equipment – which you did everyday even if you weren’t on ops. The ground crews would be working on them anyway and we’d just take it up for a short air test.’
Though short in stature Derek Patfield had a lot of nerve and courage. During his boyhood he had dived from the rigging of a moored sailing vessel into a river, which was quite a feat for a boy of his age. He always had an eye for a pretty girl. Though Lincoln had a castle and a cathedral, he and his friends were not interested in them. They were only interested in meeting the girls at the ‘Saracen’s Head’. Since enlisting in the RAF in 1942 Derek’s mischievous sense of fun, which he had demonstrated during civilian air-raid duty, had not deserted him either. The Norfolk ‘dumpling’ was now the perfect little Lincolnshire ‘imp’.
‘Usually the members of two crews shared a Nissen hut. We’ve been there and seen the adjutant come along and collect all the stuff out of their lockers and you knew that crew hadn’t made it. Within a day or so, a new crew came in and they’d ask, “What’s it like?” We’d say, “Oh, bloody awful. It’s terrible.” You put the fear of God into them. We were a rotten lot in that respect. It was just devil may care. On low flying exercises if we saw people on farms working on a haystack we made a point of just shooting over the top and pulling the nose up quickly so that the slipstream from the four fans blew the straw all over the poor buggers! The times we were reported for this! The CO just told us not to blow any more haystacks down. May as well talk to a brick wall.
‘When operations were on, pilots, navigators and bomb-aimers reported to the various sections for the individual briefings. We’d be told the bomb load, but not what the target was. We always had a flying meal of eggs and bacon. The flight engineer told you the fuel load and by that you’d pretty well know if it was going to be a long trip. If you had a heavy bomb load and medium fuel load, chances were it was going to be a short trip. Then we went in for the main briefing all together. We’d be briefed on the different coloured Target Indicators and bombs and which ones to bomb. The actual bomb load was explained, what we were carrying and the terminal velocity of the bombs (the speed of the bombs going down). Terminal velocity, height of the target from sea level, forecast wind speed and direction and the speed of the aircraft all had to be set on the bombsight. Then we would be told the target and issued with our target maps before going over any salient points, land marks en route and what to look for on the target. Then it was a question of going back to the crew room to check personal equipment. If you were lucky you got an Irving jacket but it was mainly a canvas type flying suit with two or three jumpers underneath. Our girlfriends gave us all lucky charms. I had a tin badge and a stocking, which I would wrap around the bombsight. I didn’t go bananas if I hadn’t got it with me. We wore a Mae West and a parachute harness but the parachute was stowed in a little cubbyhole in the side of the fuselage. In an emergency you had to clamber out of position and hook the parachute on to the harness before you dived out. The advantage of my position was that I actually knelt on the escape hatch so I could pull the rubber pads back and get out – hopefully. You’d be lucky if you had time to do that.
‘When you drew your parachute from the parachute section you also drew your escape kit with little silk maps of the area you were operating, wakey-wakey tablets, fishing line, unnamed packets of cigarettes and currency. If you came down over Europe and fell into the hands of the escape committees they could forge all the documents for you, but they couldn’t get photographs. We had photographs taken on the squadron and sewn into our flying suit so, we already had the pictures for them. Flying rations consisted of a packet of boiled sweets and a flask of coffee or tea. My biggest faux pas was when I was throwing ‘Window’ out of the chute. I’d go to get my sweets and find that I’d thrown them down the hatch as well! Some rotten Jerry had my sweets.
‘We’d all come together and wait for the crew buses to take us out to the aircraft about an hour before take-off. Most crews peed on the tail wheel for good luck. Damn silly things we did! Then we piled into the aircraft and made ourselves comfortable. On some of the daylights in the summertime it was terribly hot in the aircraft, which had been sitting out in the sun. We had no fans and all this flying gear on, which we needed because we’d freeze up higher. We sat there swearing our eyeballs out, waiting to take-off. Then the green flare would go up and No. 1 aircraft would taxi out and the others all followed. It was an Air Ministry directive that bomb-aimers should not be in the nose on take-off or landing but I’m afraid I disobeyed this order. I could hardly move for bundles of ‘Window’ stacked in the nose. By the time you got all your maps sorted out you didn’t want to move just for a few minutes, then fight your way back down again. You knew damn well that if you didn’t take off and it crashed you were going to be killed anyway. Whether you were a few yards back didn’t make any difference. The take-off was the worst part. On board were 2,000 gallons of high-octane petrol, eight tons of high explosive bombs, 1½ million candlepower magnesium flares and high-pressure oxygen bottles. If the aircraft didn’t get off the ground there’d be quite a big bang so, you always breathed a sigh of relief once you got in the air!
‘We didn’t take the wakey-wakey pills until we were on the way. It was the sensible thing to do. Some blokes took them as soon as they got in the aircraft at the dispersal but you might be on the dispersal for half an hour or more before you took-off. Sometimes, especially if the weather clamped in, the op was scrubbed. Some crews had already taken the wakey-wakey pills, so they couldn’t sleep when we went back to the billet. The pills would give you a bit of a headache but we put that down to tiredness and stress.
‘When we left the English coast, going out, it was the bomb-aimer’s job to select and fuse all the bombs on the panel. It usually brought a corny remark from someone, as I passed my message, “All bombs fused and selected” to the navigator to enter in his log.
“What do you mean, ‘foosed’?”
Apparently my Norfolk dialect didn’t lend itself kindly to the word “fused” and it sounded like “foosed”. I was usually referred to as a “Swede” or a “Dumplin”.
‘Over 10,000 feet we went on oxygen. On a lot of flights, when we were flying high, the moisture from our breath froze in our oxygen masks. We had to keep squeezing our oxygen mask and the corrugated pipe that came down to break the ice. It wasn’t a very nice smell but we had to be on oxygen all the time over 10,000 feet. Our oxygen masks had a microphone on the end, so it was quite a lot of weight hanging down. We didn’t have steel helmets and flak vests like the Americans; just a leather helmet and canvas flying suit.
‘Usually the pilot was strict on intercom silence. We kept quiet unless we had something to report. It would be quiet and all of a sudden I’d say, “Bomb-aimer to navigator, we’re just crossing the coast”. He would acknowledge it and it would go quiet again.
‘We had as many as four or five maps, on which we marked out the route and turning points. These had to be checked with the bombing leader and each one of us to make sure they were accurate. We had a target map as well. We had to ‘Window’ at a certain rate depending on our point on the route. If an area of radar-controlled searchlights and guns were coming up, I’d just chuck bundles out as quickly as possible. They were brown paper parcels done up with string. I had to pull the string off and then I’d have all the individual bundles of ‘Window’. Each individual bundle had a piece of brown paper wrapped round with an elastic band or piece of string to pull off and then I shoved it down the chute beside me. Before long you were just mixed up with paper, string and ‘Window’. That got a bit tiresome.
‘You could not see much at night. If we had to come down and make a forced landing I couldn’t see if it was a wood or a field or houses below. It was awful being unable to see what was happening. We even lost some chaps who went to investigate flak damage to the aircraft and went straight out a hole in the fuselage. I definitely preferred daylights. You could see what was happening and we had a fighter escort on some of them.
‘It was quite interesting to see aerial combats at night. I could see tracer the bombers fired. It was a different colour to fighter tracer. To demoralize the bomber crews, the Germans fired up shells containing Very lights, oil and explosives so, when the shell exploded, it mimicked an aircraft blowing up. They did demoralize us, especially when they were right near. We were told about these shells, but that was all eyewash. They were really aircraft exploding.
‘I was in my compartment all the time, unless there was a lot of fighter activity. Then I’d get up in the front turret. There was no bottom to it. It was open. There was a little platform to kneel on when bombing. You stood on that and you were in the front turret. There wasn’t a lot of room. I was always glad I was small. Quite honestly I failed to see how you were going to get out in an emergency. I was kneeling on the emergency hatch, surrounded by parcels of ‘Window’. If you had to get out quickly, you had to chuck all the bundles of ‘Window’ out of the way and pull back the rubber pads and then you’d have a job finding the hatch release handle. The rear-gunner used to say he was lucky. He saw what he’d been through. At the front you saw all you were going into. I’d identify the target by the surrounding area. You had to be quick to identify flying bomb sites, to get your bombs down in time. They were not self-evident like a big factory or marshalling yard because they were well camouflaged. You just went by your maps and photographs, but we all did our own navigation and bomb run.
‘I was given the job of leading the squadron on a daylight to St Leu. That was quite a responsibility. I looked for some fields, one of which was marked with what was almost a Cross of Lorraine. Being the lead aircraft on a daylight I thought, “Where the hell are those fields?” Was I relieved when I saw the river! Then I saw the fields. There were all sorts of underground works there as well. The river was a wonderful landmark. When travelling at 200 mph you had to keep your eyes open to see the target far enough ahead to line the aircraft up and get it in your bombsight. We even passed V-1s on the way on one or two daylights and I saw some V-2 rockets going up – they went pretty fast.
‘The bomb release point could be one to four miles to the target – depending on our height. I had to release the different bombs in a certain order to keep the aircraft stable and the different sized bombs had a different time in the air. They had to be arranged so they went down at a similar point. I had selector switches and a sweep arm went round, made contact and each contact released a bomb. Lots of things affected hitting the target. I had to set the height of the target above sea level on the bombsight. That came from our maps. If that was wrong the bombs’ angle of flight would be wrong and the bombs wouldn’t hit the target. I had to take drift and speed and direction into account as well. The winds were given to us at briefing, but we had to check it on the bombsight. Even at night I’d check. It is surprising what you could see at night. Headlands, marshalling yards and railway lines shone if there was a bit of a moon. There was a compass on the bombsight so I could give the navigator a bearing on any pin point and he could check his navigation. He’d start re-navigating on any pin point I gave him. I’d set drift on the bombsight so that the graticule was at an angle. Then I’d bring the aircraft round so the graticule lined up to the target. The aircraft went slightly sideways to allow for drift.
‘It didn’t do to worry about the people in the towns and cities. As far as we were concerned it was a target and we were interested in pasting the German war machine. That was all we were interested in. At 20,000 feet you were only concerned with hitting the target. I’d think about what we were told when we graduated: you had the station personnel, ground crew and six other blokes all working getting you over the target, with one thing in mind – to drop the bombs on that target. That’s the way I thought about it and I always made sure I had got the Aiming Point. That’s why I’d have a clear conscience, knowing I got the AP in the graticule of the bombsight and everything was in order when I released the bombs.
‘Getting back to base it was often misty. The ‘dromes were so close together there was the risk of collision, in the circuit, with other aircraft. We were all circling and fatigued and it might be ten minutes before we landed. If you were firing off reds because you’d got injured on board, or damage to the aircraft, you got priority. As soon as we landed we had to open the bomb doors. At dispersal the bomb-aimer would look in the bomb bay to make sure you’d got the fuse links hanging down from each lug. That meant the bombs had gone down live. If you didn’t fuse the bomb, or the solenoid froze up, the arming links wouldn’t be caught by the solenoid and held in the aircraft pulling away from the fuse of the bomb. If the arming links weren’t in the bomb bay they’d gone down attached to the fuse and that bomb went down safe. The arming links prevented the detonator going down to detonate the bomb. The chances were, even though you were dropping from thousands of feet, that the bomb wouldn’t explode but just make a dirty great hole in the ground.
‘The squadron buses would come out to pick us up. First we’d hand in our parachutes and parachute harness, our escape kit and any special maps we had. Then we went to debriefing and had a cup of tea and a cigarette. “What was it like? What was the opposition like? What was the condition of the target?” The morning after the operation the bombing photographs were on the board in the Ops Room. Everybody ploughed in to see how they’d got on.
‘You hoped you’d finish the tour, but basically all the time, nobody really thought that they would. You’d wake some mornings and see empty beds of crews that had gone and then you saw them scrubbed off the operations board. It was peculiar really. You just accepted the fact you’d be bloody lucky if you got through and the chances were you wouldn’t. It was a peculiar world. At night all the might of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht was against you, trying to kill you. Then, a few hours later – perhaps that evening if you weren’t on ops – you’d be in Lincoln going out with the girls, or in the pub among normal people. You jumped from war to peace, peace to war, within a few hours and so it went on week after week.’
One of the perks of Bomber Command aircrew was a break from operations every six weeks with six days off and a rail warrant home. At Coningsby on 30 March, Pilot Officer E. A. ‘Ted’ Stone, the regular skipper of N-Nan, was about to go on leave to his home in Bridgewater, Somerset. Just before he and his crew left camp Ted was called into the CO’s office where Wing Commander R. N. Stidolph asked him to delay their crew leave for 24 hours and fly a maximum effort operation later that night. In return Stidolph promised that upon their return to Coningsby the following morning, he would have a Sprog crew fly Ted to the nearest airfield to his home. Stone agreed though he and everyone else at aircrew level for that matter did not know what the maximum effort was.
At Metheringham Pilot Officer Dick Starkey and his crew in 106 Squadron were nearing the end of their tour of 30 operations. They had been scheduled to take part in a raid on Brunswick on the night of 29 March. However, four crews were on the last 10 trips of their tours and it looked as though they would complete their tour at about the same time, so it was decided to stagger the remaining trips. Starkey’s crew were therefore told to stand down for the Brunswick raid but this operation was then cancelled because the Met forecast was not good. On 30 March Starkey’s Flight Commander told him that his crew would be stood down. Starkey recalls:
‘I informed the lads of the order but as one man they said that as we had been a stand down crew for a cancelled operation one of the other crews should do so for the raid and they asked me to see the Flight Commander again. Although I had to decide whether or not to let the order stand, I agreed that we should be put on the Battle Order and gave my views to the Flight Commander. At first he said the order would not be reversed but after some thought he changed his decision.’
That afternoon at crew briefings on the Bomber Command airfields throughout the north-east and Midlands they learned what their destination for the maximum effort was. Many probably expected another raid on the ‘Big City’ or even Schweinfurt, Leipzig or several other German cities, but it was Nuremberg. Apart from attacks by a few Mosquitoes, this ‘most German of German cities’, as Hitler called it, and the scene of his infamous National Socialist Party rallies before the war, had not been heavily bombed for seven months. Perhaps a raid on the birthplace of Nazism would go some way to proving that ‘a state of devastation’ would make surrender ‘inevitable’.
The attack on Nuremberg by 572 Lancasters and 214 Halifaxes and nine Mosquitoes, was planned for what would normally have been the middle of the stand down period for the main force, when a near full moon would be visible. And their lords and masters had opted for a ‘straight in, straight out’ route, with none of the jinks and deviations that might cause the night fighter controllers to make the wrong decisions about their destination. An indirect route with four shorter legs was suggested by Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett but the forthright Australian AOC of 8 (PFF) Group was the single dissenting voice. The plan was countenanced by the AOCs of the three Lancaster Groups – Air Marshal Sir Ralph A. Cochrane KBE CB AFC commanding 5 Group, by Air Vice Marshal E. A. B. Rice, the South African commander of 1 Group, and Air Vice Marshal R. Harrison of 3 Group, a Yorkshireman. Then, under protest, approval was finally given by Air Vice Marshal C. Roderick Carr of 4 Group, a New Zealander, and Air Vice Marshal C. M. ‘Black Mike’ McEwen of 6 Group, RCAF, both of whose Halifaxes were more vulnerable than the faster and more reliable Lancs.1 After the turning point over Belgium crews would fly a long outward leg of 265 miles through a well-defended part of Germany, past known fighter beacons Ida, south of the Ruhr, Otto near Cologne and Heinz close to the Ruhr. But a strong tail wind was expected, which would speed the bombers along the ‘long leg’ in just 62 minutes’ flying time. Reports were that there would be high cloud on the outward route and that the target area would be clear for ground-marked bombing.
At Metheringham some of Pilot Officer Dick Starkey’s crew, with only three weeks to go to the end of their tour, were not alone among the many hundreds of assembled bomber crews who began to have reservations. Many, not least among the old sweats and ‘gen men’, were filled with a sense of foreboding.
At Dunholme Lodge Flying Officer John Chatterton DFC of 44 Squadron, whose crew had flown 22 ops and after some early mistakes and a great deal of luck, had developed into a competent unit, able to rely totally on each other, had a feeling of unease. It was not helped by the fact that he was flying the Squadron’s spare Lancaster, E-Easy, instead of his beloved Y-Yorker, which was having an engine changed after ‘collecting some heavy metal’ over Berlin six nights previously:
‘For the last five months we had spent night after night clawing our way through varying densities of cloud to attack the major cities of Germany, including eight to the ‘Big City’ itself. Despite the constant anxiety of icing and flak, this damp cloak of darkness was just what we burglars needed to enable us to creep in and creep out again, without being apprehended by the vigilant night fighters. Every now and then we realized that we were hitting civilians when bombing German targets and we tried to shut this out of our minds. We felt much better when we went on to marshalling yards; we felt that we were fighting like the Eighth Army or the Battle of Britain boys. It was good clean fighting.
‘Some time ago, with our accumulated experience and Jack’s navigational skill, we had been made the Squadron’s ‘wind-finder’ and PFF supporter.2 I relished this job of wind-finder. It meant that we took off alone about half an hour before the rest of the Squadron came queuing up along the perimeter track, with radiators and tempers overheating. We then flew along in a relatively uncluttered sky to join the first wave of the Pathfinders in order to give them support against the searching German radar by thickening the shower of “Window”.’
At this time a third of Bomber Command’s airmen were from the Commonwealth. At Waddington Squadron Leader Arthur William Doubleday DFC RAAF, a farmer from Wagga, New South Wales and now the ‘B’ Flight Commander in 467 Squadron RAAF, warned his crew: ‘Look boys it’s on for young and old tonight. Just keep your eyes on the sky.’3 Warrant Officer Jim McNab, a Scot among the Australians in 467 Squadron adds, ‘Five of our crew were Aussies and they were a lot more outspoken than we were. Because it was bright moonlight they questioned the wisdom of the operation in no uncertain manner. But the briefing officer said it was all OK. He said that a reconnaissance Mosquito had reported that there was plenty of cloud and the only hole in the cloud was over Nuremberg. This satisfied everyone. The morale was really terrific as it always was and this was our 26th operation.’
It was only after the crews had been briefed that information from a reconnaissance Mosquito indicating that the route would be clear of cloud but that the target would probably be covered, was withheld. The raid would go ahead as planned.
One of the 18 crews in 57 Squadron at East Kirkby who were briefed for the raid was Pilot Officer Ron Walker’s. His bomb-aimer, Sergeant ‘Ginger’ Hammersley noted that they were in the first wave after the Pathfinders and ‘like the flight to Berlin, it looked as if we were set for a long trip’.
At Coningsby 61 Squadron assembled 14 Lancasters. N-Nan’s pilot, Flying Officer E. A. ‘Ted’ Stone was by now probably regretting that he not gone on leave after all. V-Victor, flown by Pilot Officer J. A. Haste, an Australian from Maylands, South Australia, was a Lancaster veteran although the crew were flying only their eighth operation. Another Australian, Pilot Officer J. A. Forrest, was at the controls of Mickey the Moocher. Pilot Officer Donald Paul was flying R-Robert. Flying Officer Bernard C. Fitch and his crew of Royal Pontoon were regarded as the ‘Gen Men’ or ‘Old Sweats’ of the Squadron, as Sergeant Leslie Cromarty DFM the rear-gunner, recalls:
‘Our squadron had taken a battering. We were on the Berlin raid less than a week before, when Bomber Command lost over 70 aircraft and so we only had about a dozen crews left this night. We were the most experienced crew. Next came Squadron Leader E. H. Moss DFC [an Oxford University graduate who had been a school master, in P-Peter, whose crew were on their 20th operation]. We had an outstanding navigator, Sid Jennings, and also the best aircraft in the Squadron. Royal Pontoon was a Canadian-built Lanc with Rolls-Royce Packard engines with paddle-bladed props. It could climb much higher than most other Lancasters. We never did find out just how high it could go because at 30,000ft the contrails would begin and we would drop below that height for obvious reasons. We were flying as “wind-finders” as usual.’
Q-Queenie was piloted once again by Pilot Officer Denny Freeman whose crew were flying their third op. His bomb-aimer Sergeant ‘Pat’ Patfield, recalled:
‘The usual business of briefing over, we were soon clambering aboard Queenie out at her dispersal point at the edge of the airfield, though just prior to which we had all gazed up into the open bomb bay to have a good look at the bombs hanging there. We had seen them or similar ones before but they always fascinated us just the same. And so in we climbed and were soon making ourselves as comfortable as the cramped crew positions permitted. As we plugged in our intercom we ceased our somewhat idle chatter about girls and got down to the serious job of checking equipment, controls, guns and radio etc. and waited somewhat nervously for the four engines to burst into life. We didn’t have long to wait before we were rumbling round the perimeter track towards the end of the runway, accompanied by other Lancs of our squadron which, in the rapidly fading daylight, gave the appearance of large, dark birds of prey. On to the runway, engines revving hard. A green light from the caravan. Brakes off. We were away.
‘As usual, I sat in the nose of the aircraft on take-off (rules are made to be broken) and got settled down with maps spread out, parachute stowed near – very near, the numerous fairly heavy and bulky brown covered parcels of ‘Window’ stacked all around me. In a few seconds, which were only broken by the orders of the pilot and acknowledgment of the flight engineer, with engines straining to get the over-laden aircraft into the air, the jolting ceased and, with the engineer’s “Under-carriage Up”, we knew we were really on the way. With a remark from one crew member, “And to think I had a bloody date in Boston tonight”, we settled ourselves to our allotted tasks, en route to Nuremberg. We did not know it then of course, but this was to be the last time that we flew together.
‘Gaining height, we flew off to the rendezvous where we could see the dim shapes of other Lancs turning on to course. Taking up our position, we joined in the gaggle for we didn’t fly in formation. Indeed it would have been extremely dangerous to attempt to do so. We headed for a point on the south-east coast of England on the first leg of the flight plan. Looking down through the Perspex blister in the nose, the ground, what could be seen of it, looked strangely quiet and I often wondered how many people stopped and peered skyward as the drone of the bombers disturbed the peace of the evening sky. I know I had, many times during training, wondering whether I would join them one day. Where were they going and how did they feel? Well, now I was here and the main thought in our minds was not whether we would get back OK – you just didn’t think of that – but what it’ll be like at the target. Hope we could find it and then let’s get back to that egg and bacon and bed.
‘There wasn’t much chatter over the intercom, just the odd remark or two, which usually concerned the opposite sex. The flight engineer took his instrument readings, the navigator was busily working intently at his small table, working out the next course for the pilot, the wireless operator getting his set lined up, and listening for messages and the numerous other things a wireless operator did. The two gunners, who always seemed so remote from the rest of the crew, were busy swinging their turrets around and peering into the darkness for anything, which shouldn’t be there. The pilot as ever, was intent on his instruments and usually oblivious to what was happening elsewhere. Having put the correct settings on the bombsight computer, I was now gazing downwards in the hope of picking up some recognizable landmark which, after checking with a map, would be passed to the navigator as a “pinpoint” to check against his calculated position. Map reading was the bomb-aimer’s primary job, next to actual bombing and even at night it was surprising how many geographical landmarks could be seen. The hardest part was reading maps, as in the nose no lighting was permitted and the only source of light was from a “blacked-out” flashlight with a few tiny pinpricks to allow a very small percentage of light to pass through. At last the Suffolk coast appeared and crossing it we really felt we were on our way. The usual instruction from the pilot to both gunners, “OK gunners, keep your eyes skinned”!’
At Metheringham the procedure was the same. Dick Starkey recalls:
‘We took off and climbed on course over the Norfolk coast towards Belgium. The moon was bright and almost full, making near daylight conditions. At our cruising height of 21,000 feet the air temperature was very low and the bomber stream began making condensation trails as we flew en route, over Belgium towards the long leg which ran from south of the Ruhr east to a turning point north-west of Nuremberg. It was this long leg that crews were apprehensive about because it ran for over 200 miles. Flying conditions over Germany were ideal for fighter aircraft against slow bombers who had inferior armament and the sky was absolutely clear with a near full moon and four-engined bombers making condensation trails which could be seen for miles. The fighters began their attack and from the number of tracers being fired, it appeared there were combats everywhere; I saw around 30 aircraft go down in a short period and, as we continued to the target, the ground became covered with burning aircraft.’
Flying Officer John Chatterton was about to make a routine intercom check on the crew when suddenly, the mid-upper-gunner, Bill Campion ‘an eighteen-year-old Canadian of an excitable nature, but possessing the sharpest eyes on the Squadron, bless him’ came on. ‘Hey, Skip! Are the engines OK? There seems to be smoke coming from them!’ The rear-gunner, a phlegmatic Glaswegian and the perfect foil to the eager Canadian, said, ‘Wheesht yer bletherin’ Champ – they’re contrails!’
‘Contrails! How did he know? We had never made them before, although we had often admired the pretty patterns left by the USAAF on their daylight raids 10,000 feet above us. Everyone craned their necks to look behind them through side blisters and astrodome but without much success. Then Ken nudged my right arm and pointed down, where a thousand feet below another Lanc was leaving four long white fingers, which were twisted into a cloudy rope by the slipstream – a perfect invitation to the night fighters. I decided to climb out of the layer of humidity, but Easy was very reluctant and Ken had to put the revs up to 2,750, the throttles being already fully open. However, by now we had used about a third of our seven and a half tons of fuel, so with much mushing she was able to heave herself up another few hundred feet, as the clutching fingers of fog snapped on and off a few times and finally disappeared. While Ken was synchronizing his propellers again I called the nav. “Pilot to navigator, how much longer on this leg, Jack?” As usual, his calculations were right up to date and he immediately replied, “I’ve just got a fix on Giessen. We are about two thirds of the way along, about twenty minutes if you can manage to stay on course.” I grinned to myself, which was a mistake as the slight wrinkling of the oxygen mask allowed some icy condensation to trickle down my chin – after all it was minus thirty-five outside and the cockpit heating of Easy was on a par with the rest of her. The wry smile was a tribute to all navigators. Sitting there behind their curtains, at a vibrating plotting table where just hanging on to pencils and protractors was a work of art, precise mathematicians, who couldn’t really understand why ham-handed pilots were not able to hold a course to one degree. Our crews appreciated that we had got one of the best.
‘Using Gee until it was jammed at the Dutch coast and H2S, Jack worked swiftly to calculate winds, which were then transmitted back to Group by the W/Op, Jock Michie, who had to risk breaking the radio silence that all bombers observed. At Group the winds from all sources were averaged out and re-transmitted back to the bomber stream in the half hourly “group broadcast”. The wind-finders complained that Group were far too conservative and always played safe with the averages. Jack was still disgruntled about the last Berlin raid when he had found winds of well over one hundred knots due to freak weather conditions (since known as “jet stream”). Group would not accept them, which badly upset the planned time over the target. The intercom crackled again: “Nav to pilot. Group has done it again, Johnny. They are still using the forecast winds, which will put everybody north of track.”
‘Unwelcome proof of this came from both gunners who had been reporting unusually large numbers of “scarecrow flares”, mostly off to the port quarter and quite a way behind. “Scarecrow flares” had been first mentioned at briefing some weeks earlier with the explanation that the Germans were sending this impressive firework up to 20,000 feet to look like exploding aircraft and lower our morale. We hardened cynics were pretty sure that they were exploding aircraft, but knowing nothing of the night fighters using upward-firing tracer-less cannon we could not understand why there were not the usual exchange of tracer in the normal “curve of pursuit”. What the gunners were reporting were the deaths of over fifty bombers. This was the night that the German controllers got their calculations right and ignored a spoof attack in north Germany, deciding that the bomber stream would use a favourite flak gap just south of Cologne to penetrate into the hinterland and maybe turn left to Leipzig or Berlin. Me 110 and Ju 88 squadrons had been pulled in from the north and south to orbit fighter beacons Ida and Otto near Bonn and Frankfurt. They could hardly believe it when they found the bomber stream flying en masse between the two beacons and into their waiting arms, like the gentlemen guns in a partridge shoot waiting for the coveys to sweep over them. The resulting slaughter was much the same.’
Squadron Leader Arthur William Doubleday adds:
‘They started to fall within ten minutes of crossing the coast and from then to the target the air was not only of good visibility but seemed to be bright. The moon was really shining brightly although it wasn’t a full moon.’4
As they flew over the North Sea Warrant Officer Jim McNab was not alone when he realized that the meteorological forecast was wrong. There was no cloud: ‘One of our chaps said we were for it and he was right. Nuremberg was the only place covered by cloud. I could see Lancasters being shot down by anti-aircraft guns and fighters. It was so light that I could clearly read the squadron letters and identification numbers on the Lancasters flying next to us.’
Pilot Officer Starkey of 106 Squadron continues:
‘We continuously operated the “banking search” looking for enemy aircraft coming up from below. This was achieved by turning steeply to port for 15 degrees to see if fighters were preparing to attack and then banking to return to the original course. Our Fishpond aircraft detector failed to work on the Nuremberg raid. [The bombers were attacked just before they reached the Belgian border and the attacks lasted for the next hour.] We had been flying the long leg for many miles. When we were in a position 60 miles north-west of Nuremberg our luck changed. A fighter attacked with tracer and cannon fire, which hit the port main-plane and outer engine, flashed past outside the Perspex covering of the cockpit and between my legs. I remember praying we would not go up in flames. However, within three or four seconds the port outer engine and mainplane were alight. It was always the one you didn’t see that shot you down as in our case and if Monica had been available we would have been aware of the fighters’ approach.
‘There was only one action to take; I gave the order to abandon aircraft. The engineer, Sergeant Johnnie Harris feathered the port engine as he helped me with the controls because we were going down at a very fast rate and the next few seconds I remember vividly. The bomb-aimer, Sergeant Wally Paris, acknowledged my order to bale out and said he was leaving the aircraft. The navigator, Sergeant Colin Roberts, came to the cockpit to escape through the front hatch. The rear-gunner, Sergeant Joe Ellick also acknowledged the order but said he could not get out of his turret (this was because the port outer engine powered the turret; the alternative way was to turn the turret by hand controls in order to fall out backwards). There was no reply from the mid-upper gunner, Sergeant Jock Jameson and the wireless operator, Sergeant Jock Walker. I assumed they must have been killed by the burst of fire, which ran along the side of the aircraft. Johnnie Harris handed me a parachute from one of two in the rack at his side. I managed to connect one of the hooks on the chute to the harness I was wearing (we did not wear seat type chutes), at the same time trying to control a blazing aircraft, which was diving at well over 300 mph. I gave up all hope of survival and waited for the impact; a terrifying experience. That is the last thing I remember because the aircraft exploded with a full bomb load (we had no time to jettison) and 1,500 gallons of high octane fuel, which must have ignited and caused the explosion. As I lost consciousness I did have a feeling of being lifted out of the cockpit and must have been propelled through the Perspex canopy. When the petrol tanks exploded in the port wing outside my window a fireball must have been created in the aircraft, which would incinerate anything in its path and I must have been just ahead of it as I was blown from the aircraft. Many years later I was told an unopened parachute was found next to the body of the flight engineer who had landed in a wood six kilometres from the wreckage of the aircraft. We were only two feet apart in the cockpit when the aircraft went up and Johnnie Harris must have been blown out like me but I was lucky my parachute had opened, probably by the force of the explosion.
‘When I regained consciousness and realized what had happened my first thought was, “where am I?” Then I heard the sound of aircraft engines as the main force passed overhead and I was suspended somewhere over Germany. I expected to feel the parachute supports in front of my face but could not find them. I thought I was coming down without a parachute! I desperately groped around and located the one hook attachment and hung on. This attachment was well above my head; evidently the part of the parachute that once it opens rises to a position over your head. I wasn’t aware of this. By this time I did not know how quickly I was descending. I was coming down without flying boots. As I looked up I saw the canopy of the parachute quite clearly in the bright moonlight. It was riddled in parts with a number of burnt small holes, some of them half an inch in diameter. It was terrifying because I was afraid that my descent might be too fast for a safe landing. Although the moon was bright I could not see the ground but there were several fires burning, which I took to be from our aircraft. The fires did not help me to judge my altitude because I did not know the size of them. I also had facial injuries and a nosebleed. These must have occurred when I was blown out of the aircraft.5
‘As my thoughts dwelt on landing, I hit the ground with an almighty wallop and rolled backwards down a small hill. When I reached the bottom I regained my wind and could see hills silhouetted against the night sky. My neck and back were very painful and when I attempted to stand, my right leg collapsed. It was out of line just above the ankle and I knew it was broken. I must have then lost consciousness again and when I came to the moon was low in the sky behind the hills. I could not walk and waited for someone to arrive. I soon heard shouting in German and realized I had left Metheringham a few hours before where everyone spoke English and here I was for the first time listening to a German voice. I saw a torch about 200 yards away so I shouted back and the torch came towards me. A number of people arrived and the torch was shone in my face. I could make out both young and elderly men; one of the younger men started shouting and was about to hit me in the face with a rifle when he was stopped by one of the elderly men. One or two of them went off to search the wreckage and the others wrapped me in the parachute, placed me on a stretcher and carried me to a horse-drawn cart, which took me to a small village called Königsberg about 1,000 metres away.’
Flight Lieutenant Tim Woodman who, with his navigator-radar operator, Pat Kemmis, were in a Mosquito night fighter of 169 Squadron supporting the operation noted: ‘Instead of the bomber stream being five miles wide it was more like fifty. Some had already been shot down and before I reached to the far side of the stream they were being shot down on my left. Masses of ‘Window’ were being tossed out of the bombers, which also jammed our radar. We tried three times but each time came up below a bomber, the rear-gunner spotting us the third time, his tracer coming uncomfortably close whilst his pilot did a corkscrew. It was hopeless. We were doing more harm than good. Ahead the bombers were being shot down one after another, some going all the way down in flames, some blowing up in the air, the rest blowing up as they hit the ground. I counted forty-four shot down on this leg to Nuremberg. What was happening behind I could only guess . . . I was inwardly raging at the incompetence of the top brass at Bomber Command.’
The 14 Lancasters of 61 Squadron were experiencing varied fortune. Near Cologne R-Robert flown by Donald Paul passed night fighter-beacon Ida and was attacked by a Ju 88 night fighter. Over the next 15 minutes vigorous corkscrewing by the pilot and good work by the gunners managed to stave off two further attacks. Flight Sergeant R. A. F. Griffin, the navigator, saw a stream of tracer bullets, probably from the mid-upper turret, going straight into the Ju 88’s belly but with no apparent effect. They had heard that the Junkers had armour plating and their .303 bullets could not damage them. During the defensive manoeuvres the Lancaster had lost altitude and suffered severe damage to two engines and Paul had to shut them both down. Still losing height and down to 10,000 feet, the skipper had no alternative but to jettison his bombs and turn for home. Later, after throwing everything moveable out of the aircraft in order to maintain height and flying speed over the North Sea, Paul managed to land safely at Manston on the Kent coast. The ‘Gen Men’ of Squadron Leader Moss’s crew were killed when Hauptmann Fritz Rudusch of 6./NJG 6, flying a Bf 110 night fighter, shot down their Lancaster near Rimbach, north-west of Fulda. Major Rudolf Schoenert of NJGr.10 flying a Ju 88 fitted with Naxos aircraft location equipment, which homed in on H2S signals, detected V-Victor, flown by Pilot Officer Haste. Schoenert’s crew followed the Australian’s aircraft for over half an hour picking up intermittent H2S signals and finally, when he saw the Lancaster heading for home at 20,000 feet he positioned his night fighter under the bomber and fired shells from his Schräge Musik weapon into V-Victor’s right wing tanks. The aircraft caught fire and crashed near Namur in Belgium. There were no survivors.
Leslie Cromarty aboard Royal Pontoon continues:
‘As we flew south of Cologne at about 26,000ft, Len Whitehead the mid-upper gunner, and I, began reporting aircraft going down. Sid Jennings got a bit fed up with logging them after a while and told us that as there were so many they must be “scarecrows”. As we began approaching the target area a Lancaster flew close alongside us. It was upside down and blazing like a comet. I asked Sid to come and look at this “scare-crow”. We tried to turn away from it but it seemed to follow us. Then it slowly dipped and exploded. As we approached Nuremberg we were horrified to see the great spread of the target area. Most aircraft were turning and bombing too soon. We saw the last of the PFF aircraft going down with TIs pouring out of it. We continued turning on to the target but by the time we arrived all the markers had gone out. We began to circle. Sandy Lyons, the bomb-aimer, thought he saw either a railway station or yard and so we bombed that and left the target area. We continued to log aircraft going down as we flew along the “Long Leg”.’
Meanwhile, Q-Queenie had crossed the enemy coast and was heading for the Otto night fighter beacon near Frankfurt. It was not long before searchlights probed the darkness and then the crew realized the absence of flak, which meant mainly one thing; night fighters. ‘Pat’ Patfield immediately started undoing the brown paper parcels of ‘Window’ and began shoving the small bundles through the small chute in the side of the fuselage to disrupt enemy radar defences. ‘It wasn’t long before maps, brown paper, string and myself began to get mixed up’ he recalls. ‘The blessed chute wasn’t large enough to push the brown paper out as well! For the next half-hour or so very little happened and then there was an exchange of machine-gun fire to our port. Only a short exchange, but suddenly from that direction we saw a glow in the sky, small at first but soon becoming larger, until we could plainly make out the outline of a Lanc, burning fiercely. It continued flying steadily for a while and then turned and went down in a shallow dive. “Lanc gone down to port!” I yelled to the navigator, whose job it was to log such incidents. This was our first experience of real air-to-air combat and with a remark from the pilot, something like “Bugger me! Did you see that? Keep a lookout gunners”. I know we all felt that funny feeling in the pit of our stomachs reserved for such occasions. It wasn’t long before we saw more exchanges of gunfire. There we were, droning along feeling very much on our own one minute and the next being rudely awakened to the fact that this was definitely not the case and we were the hunted!
‘Suddenly the whole sky before and above us was lit by what appeared to be huge fireworks. Fighter flares! We had heard all about these during training. They were the things most feared by bomber crews and here they were. Hanging in the sky like giant magnesium chandeliers, they were being dropped by German planes flying above the bomber stream in lanes three or four abreast and stretching out far in front of us. We then fully realized that we were far from being alone! Other bombers could be clearly seen on either side and ahead of us and it made us feel as naked as the day we were born, exposed to everything! Very soon combats could be seen taking place all over the sky. Sometimes there followed a ruddy glow lasting only a few seconds and ending in a terrific explosion. At others, like the first encounter we had seen, the bomber would burn steadily and begin to lose height. These were the lucky ones, or so we thought, as they were having enough time to bale out. We did in fact see two or three parachutes floating down from time to time. “Two going down to port and one to starboard” I passed this information back to the navigator for logging. I always admired the navigator in his tiny compartment, not being able to see what was going on but hearing it all over his intercom. In the midst of this, he was working calmly on such things as courses and wind speeds with his charts and protractors etc., while such a commotion was going on outside. Sometimes, 20,000 feet below, a large, solitary explosion marking the end of a plane and perhaps its crew, could be seen as it hit the ground. Other explosions frequently occurred on the ground also, an exploding “stick” of bombs, which had been released from a bomber in distress. Although unavoidable in most cases, these should not have been released until the bomber had turned away from the stream as the incendiaries burning on the ground made the bombers stand out clearly to any fighter as they flew over. The battle raged fiercer, encounters all around, explosions and fires and at one time we counted 13 aircraft going down all at once.
“‘Gunners, can you see any fighters?” the pilot kept asking. To which the usual reply was, “Not near enough to have a go at”. I kept standing up in the front gun turret to man the front guns just above my head, but I did not see anything to have a go at.
‘Scared? Of course I was, with a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, would I see my 21st birthday next week? I wondered, surely we must be attacked!
‘Without warning, over the intercom, we heard the gunners firing like mad and a yell from Bill, the rear-gunner, “Look out, skipper, three of ‘em coming in!” At the same time there was a terrific explosion. Things whizzed around and there was a sickly smell of smoke and cordite. I was almost thrown on my back as the aircraft tilted at a crazy angle and the nose went down. My first impressions were of small flames all around me and my face all wet and sticky. Blood, I thought but I seemed to be in one piece and felt no pain. This sticky mess turned out to be hydraulic oil from the gun turret, as a considerable part of it had disappeared and the severed pipes had spewed out their contents over me!
‘We were still diving steeply when the pilot yelled, “I’ve got her under control but we’re in a mess!” The gunners were swearing and I heard three voices saying rather feebly, “I’ve been hit skipper”. It was Frank Devonshire, the flight engineer, Tommy the navigator and Jimmy the wireless op.
‘In the nose I had already pulled aside the rubber cushioning on which I knelt, exposing the emergency hatch in readiness to make a quick exit. But the order didn’t come, which was just as well, as I discovered afterwards that the hatch had been chewed up quite a bit and was wedged fast! Needless to say I had already hooked on my parachute! “Come up here as soon as you can Pat,” yelled the pilot. I told him I had a bit of a fire amongst the brown paper strewn around me – the wrappings from the parcels of “Window’ ’ – but fortunately I managed to put the fires out, mainly by sitting on them! Then I clambered up into the main cabin. Frank was half-standing, half-kneeling and beating furiously at a glow by his instrument panel; Tommy was slumped over the remains of his chart table and Jimmy Chapman, the wireless operator, was sitting by his set with blood streaming down his face. With some relief I saw Denny Freeman at the controls and noticed the shattered windscreen in front of him. “We can still fly”, he said, “We’ve lost a lot of height. I’m turning north and then making for home. Keep a lookout gunners. The engines are still going but one’s spitting.”
‘Eventually we got the fires out. They were only in the cabin and fortunately they were small. “Pat, we’re over Germany so better get rid of the bombs. If we’re going down we don’t want to take them with us,” said Denny. So clambering back into the nose I pressed the bomb “tit”. I suppose Denny had opened the bomb doors! Down they went but as the indicator lamp didn’t work in the release switches I couldn’t tell if they had all gone. I clambered back down the fuselage, still with parachute on and lifted up the small inspection covers over the release hooks of each bomb position. One had hung up. It was the 4,000-pounder! Probing through the small opening with a short hooked length of wire the Air Ministry supplied for the purpose, I at last managed to release the “cookie”.
‘The next concern was for the injured. Jimmy helped me with the navigator. What we took to be a cannon shell had torn a huge hole in his chart table, taking a lot of his hand with it. We tied up his arm as best we could and got him to the “rest bed”, half way down the fuselage. We then discovered that the escape hatch in the roof immediately above the rest bed was missing and an icy blast was coming through, though we didn’t give it more thought at the time. We plugged in his oxygen and intercom, gave him a shot of morphia from the first aid kit, and went back to Frank. Jimmy insisted that he wasn’t badly hurt but he didn’t look too good so we decided he had better sit down by his radio to take it easy. He did but he started fiddling with the set and set about getting a “fix” to define our position.
‘When I got to Frank, he was about “all in” and sitting on the fuselage floor. His right arm looked a mess. His flying suit around the elbow was badly torn and sticky with blood. My knowledge of first aid being limited to cut fingers, I was horrified to see bits of torn flesh and bone sticking out and was rather at a loss what to do. So I tore his sleeve open more and tied a thick bandage near the shoulder as a makeshift tourniquet. I gave him a shot of morphia and tied his arm up in a sling – all this in almost total darkness – then sat him down on the floor behind the pilot.’
E-Easy’s crew in 44 Squadron were, according to John Chatterton, ‘the lucky ones at the front end, having managed to slip through the deadly gap before the wolves gathered. We had ploughed on towards turning point “C” where we made a right-handed turn almost due south towards Nuremberg 76 miles away. Normally, a steep turn like this would have thrown off many fighters, but conditions this night so favoured them that they were able to follow round the corner and shoot down another 30 bombers. In the perfect conditions it was easy to follow the bomber stream and the aces among them managed to shoot down six or seven apiece6 before they had to break off and refuel. At the target Scotty, the bomb-aimer, came into his own. He increased his “Windowing” rate to the maximum number of bundles per minute and about halfway through the 20-minute run to the target he handed the job over to Ken with obvious relief, and took up a prone position by the bombsight. But now another adverse factor was bedevilling the raid. The Met men, who had promised us high cloud to hide in on the long leg, had also predicted that Nuremberg would be clear of cloud for the attack. The marking force of Pathfinders were, therefore, stocked up with near-ground bursting TIs, which couldn’t be seen through cloud and so when they opened the attack five minutes before zero hour these fell useless and unseen. Some of the markers carried a few “sky-markers”, a parachute flare released above cloud so that the bomb-aimers could direct their bombs through a theoretical spot in the sky resulting in a fall on the target. Unfortunately, to be accurate, the flare release and bombing runs must be downwind and here we had a crosswind of 75 knots, so that when two very lonely red flares appeared dripping yellow blobs, Scotty gave me a stream of “left, lefts” in an attempt to follow them. This was no way to do a bombing run and I consulted the nav, who agreed that the town on his H2S screen was drifting away to the right. I had to make a quick decision. “Right Jack, we’ll drop them ‘on the box’! Scotty, abandon bombing run. I’m turning onto 270°M.”
‘We headed back to Nuremberg and although the centre of towns gave a mushy picture, Jack was able to pick up the river and gave Scotty the “now” to drop the load which fell without trace through the cloud. I felt the exhilarating “twang” under my feet as the straining floor reasserted to normality and Easy surged upwards like a tired hunter taking the last fence after a muddy chase. I held the course for 30 seconds for the obligatory photoflash and camera run, both useless tonight, but which one day would earn the crew an aiming point photograph and 48-hour pass. In the middle of a normal raid this always seemed the longest half-minute of my life with searchlights and flak all around and a hideous inferno below. But here at Nuremberg it was quite unreal. A bit of flak about, the odd sky-marker still drifting on a reciprocal underneath and the occasional bump of a slipstream passing at 90 degrees to us. The latter reminded me that it was a bit dicey on a different course to everybody else, so I hastily turned on to 201°M for the 31 miles out of Nuremberg to position “D” where we thankfully took up a westerly heading that would take us home. The gunners reported that the target had livened up a bit after we left, but not very much and, after several minutes, they called our attention to another target away over to our right, which seemed to be cloud free and with a lot of action. Tongue in cheek I asked Jack if he was sure we had bombed Nuremberg and received the expected forceful reply, with added information that the burning town was probably Schweinfurt (we learned later that about one third of the force went there by mistake).’
Flight Sergeant Les Bartlett, bomb-aimer in Pilot Officer Michael Beetham DFC’s7 crew in 50 Squadron, which contributed 19 Lancasters, one of which crashed on take-off at Skellingthorpe, recalls:8
‘Everything was quiet during the climb to 20,000 feet over the Channel. We crossed the enemy coast and as we drew level with the south of the Ruhr valley things began to happen. Enemy night fighter flares and their familiar red Very signals were all around us and in no time at all combats were taking place with aircraft going down in flames on all sides. So serious was the situation that I remember looking out at the other poor blighters going down and thinking to myself that it must be our turn next; it was just a question of time. We altered course for Nuremberg and I looked down on the starboard beam at the area over which we had just passed. It looked like a battlefield. There were kites burning on the deck all over the place with bombs going off where they had not been jettisoned and incendiaries burning across the whole area – such a picture of aerial disaster I had not seen before and certainly hope never to see again. On the way to the target the winds became changeable and we almost ran into the defences of Schweinfurt but altered course in time. The defences of Nuremberg were nothing to speak of; a modest amount of heavy flak, which did not prevent us doing a normal approach and we were able to see the TIs dropped by the Pathfinders and score direct hits with our 4,000lb “cookie” and our 1,000lb bombs and incendiaries.’
Squadron Leader Neville Sparks DFC AFC, one of the Pathfinders of 83 Squadron, looked on horrified at the shambles over Nuremberg. ‘As was the custom, we left England after the stream had gone and, highly laden, we passed them on the way. We were flying at 19,000 feet and the main force were 3,000 feet above us. Contrary to the forecasts there was no layer cloud. The forecast was for the moon to be at about half its full strength. In fact it was about as bright as it could be. The night too was as clear as a bell – no clouds – with fantastic visibility. Anyway, we were catching up with the force on the second leg of the trip – the 250 miles between Charleroi and Fulda – when the slaughter began and we had an incredible view. In the 60 or 90 minutes after midnight we saw sparkles of cannon fire, some distant and some almost directly above us. This was followed by explosions, fires, plunging planes and a scattering of fires on the ground as far as the eye could see. I saw three planes blow up as they collided and one of them, a Pathfinder, blazed like a torch as its flares ignited. My navigator, Doc Watson, marked 57 ticks in his log on the way to Nuremberg. Each tick was a four-engined bomber we had seen shot down by German fighters.’
‘On this occasion’ says Sergeant Roland Hammersley, ‘the Pathfinders were hardly required, as the moon was brilliant and other aircraft were plainly visible nearby. Although our wave received little attention during the attacks we could see the battles taking place around us and there were a considerable number of aircraft being shot down as we flew on deeper into Germany. The Pathfinder aircraft were about five minutes late on target and their marking was rather scattered. However, my crew bombed from 21,000 feet and “Mack” MacKinnon, the flight engineer, informed me later that we had hit our target. The flight home was a long haul south of Stuttgart, north of Strasbourg and Nancy, heading towards the French coast. We crossed the coast near Dieppe and so back to Lincolnshire and base. At debriefing we told of the aircraft that we observed being shot down. One of our own crews, pilot Flight Lieutenant E. W. Tickler CGM was missing.’9
‘On the way back,’ continues Squadron Leader Neville Sparks ‘a powerful head wind blew up unpredicted at briefing. We were diverted to Downham Market and I rushed to the CO there who happened to be my cousin “Lofty” Cousins to tell him that we had seen planes fall from the sky like pigeons dipped in lead. Doc Watson showed his log to the CO who immediately got on to the AOC and told him it had been a “killer” raid. We did not know then that it was the worst in the history of the RAF but we were pretty sick about what we had witnessed. There were rumours about a leak but how could you tell what was true? It certainly looked like an ambush from where we were watching. It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen, the more so as it had a certain wild, primitive beauty about it.’
With their eyes peeled, Pilot Officer Michael Beetham’s10 crew were able to successfully get out of the target area which, as Flight Sergeant Les Bartlett11 says, ‘was always a dodgy business’ and set course for Skellingthorpe. ‘However, the varying winds continued to cause us a dance and we found ourselves approaching Calais instead of being 80 miles further south so we had a slight detour to avoid their defences. Once near the coast it was nose down for home as fast as possible but even then we saw some poor bloke “buy it” over the Channel. Back in debriefing we heard the full story of our squadron’s effort: four aircraft lost with another written off on take-off. It was the worst night for our squadron and for Bomber Command.’ 12
Anxious eyes at bases throughout the Midlands and north-east England scanned the horizon for returning Lancasters and Halifaxes. Fourteen bombers reached England only to crash with further loss of life. At Bardney where 16 Lancasters had been dispatched, one was missing13 and Pilot Officer H. Forrest limped home with a dead mid-upper gunner after being attacked by a night fighter near Beacon Ida. The night fighter had sprayed the area between the rear door and the end of the bomb bay and the whole of the fuselage up to the mid-upper turret was in flames. Sergeant B. Pinchin the rear-gunner could see the mid-upper gunner getting down from his turret and he began crawling up to the front of the aircraft. Forrest decided to jettison the bombs and dive to put the flames out. At 13,000 feet the fire finally went out. Forrest stayed with the bomber stream and carried on to the target and back to Bardney where Sergeant B. T. Utting, who was from Fakenham in Norfolk, was removed from the aircraft. He was apparently unmarked but the medical officer found that a small fragment of cannon shell had entered his stomach and cut the small intestine.14
E-Easy in 44 Squadron may have ‘lacked an aerodynamic finesse’ but the Lancaster lived up to its name and it got back safely to Dunholme Lodge, even if it was not as quickly as John Chatterton would have liked.
‘At last over the sea we had put the nose down a fraction to gain speed without caning the engines or spoiling Ken’s proud fuel record of over one air mile per gallon. With these tactics and a bit of navigator’s log cooking in our beloved Y-Yorker, we could normally rely on being the first back. (Our ground crew had a considerable bet on it.) But when, at last, I called for landing instructions I was a bit narked to hear my mate, Australian Roy Manning in Q-Queenie, get ‘No. 1 to land’. And so to interrogation – just a normal sort of trip – 1,500 miles, seven and a half hours and the Squadron lost two aircraft.’
Of the 17 Lancasters of 106 Squadron that had been dispatched from Metheringham, three failed to return, all probably falling victim to a night fighter. Squadron Leader Doubleday was first back at Waddington and Air Marshal Cochrane called him up to the control tower.
He asked, ‘How did it go?’
I said, ‘Jerry got a century before lunch today.’ He didn’t quite – he got 95.
Sixty-four Lancasters and 31 Halifaxes (11.9 per cent of the force dispatched) were lost (and 10 bombers crash-landed in England); the worst Bomber Command loss of the war.15
For those on stand down, waiting for news was intolerable. At East Kirkby, Pilot Officer J. ‘Cas’ Castagnola DSO DFC of 57 Squadron, who had flown the Berlin raids, had a strong feeling at this time, and he was not a suspicious type, that the Germans knew several operations in advance. ‘A number of times when we were at full stretch and most vulnerable we would find the German fighters already there above us, waiting. Specialist raids were never talked about but the main force mass raids were different. It could happen quite simply. Maybe a crew would be stood down from a raid for some reason and they would naturally head for the “local” to celebrate. Someone would say, “You not going today?” And they would answer, unthinking, “No thank God. It’s Nuremberg via Fulda and they’re welcome to it.” No leak was intended but we were only kids. You could certainly hear such a conversation about 5 Group too often for comfort in any one of the three pubs we used in Boston. There was the Red Cow in Market Square; the White Hart in the town centre and, in another pub known as Rose and Twink, the landlord had two lovely daughters.
By the time Royal Pontoon began approaching Coningsby they were about half an hour late and the crew thought that they would be worrying about them thinking they were lost. Just north of Paris the crew had seen a number of searchlights round a town. They had all been very quiet up to that point and Les Cromarty thought that the skipper must have thought that they were all dozing off because he dived among the searchlights and Len Whitehead had a ten-minute shoot-out with them. Nevertheless, there was little the mid-upper gunner could say about the Nuremberg raid. It was one that Whitehead and most of the others tried to black out from their minds. ‘We were just sitting ducks’ is all he would say about the operation though rear-gunner Les Cromarty recalls the landing back at base where another shock awaited him:
‘Our call sign was “Starlight” and we used to land on the number system. When we called up we expected to get at least 15 or 16 and be stacked, but instead we got, “Number one, pancake”. We just could not believe it and so we called again, but got the same reply. We were in fact the first to land, shortly after an aircraft from 619 Squadron crashed off the end of the runway. One or two more aircraft landed but I think most of the others landed at other airfields.’ Word came in that Don Paul had put down at Manston. Only 10 crews in 61 Squadron reported bombing the target. One of them was Ted Stone, who now took up his CO’s promised flight home and he headed for Bridgewater a few hours after the debriefing. Mickey the Moocher made it back after running into problems returning over the North Sea, having encountered stormy conditions off the north Norfolk coast. The Lancaster was struck by lightning on the front turret causing Pilot Officer J. A. Forrest to lose control and the aircraft plummeted towards the sea. While in a blinded and shocked state, the Australian pilot ordered the crew to bale out while he tried to pull the aircraft out of the dive. Forrest managed to regain control at 1,000 feet and he immediately countermanded the order to bale out. Unfortunately, it was too late to save the lives of the mid-upper gunner, Flight Sergeant Harold W. Pronger and wireless operator, Sergeant L. Darben, who was from Walthamstow, London. They had already parachuted into the sea and were presumed drowned. This took the number of missing aircrew to 16.16 The ground crew told Les Cromarty that his friend Harold Pronger, who was from Bundaberg, Queensland and the WOp/ AG, had baled out over the North Sea. Cromarty wanted to go out on a search right away but the ASR section told him that because the water temperature was so low no one could survive for more than an hour. ‘I think that the worst thing about those raids was losing one’s friends. After a while you just became hardened to it but eventually you just stopped making close friends with anyone outside your own crew.’
There was no sign of the two Lancasters that were overdue.
From the time of being hit, Q – Queenie’s crew had forgotten about fighters and the pandemonium. It was just luck that they were not attacked again. All of the able bodied on board were working feverishly to save lives and get Queenie home, even if it meant that some of them had to perform tasks they were unaccustomed to, as ‘Pat’ Patfield recalls:
‘The bomb-aimer, being second navigator among other things, the pilot asked me to do what I could about navigating us home. The chart table was a shambles, with torn maps, quite a bit of blood about, no protractors or any other navigation instruments to be seen anywhere. This wasn’t a bit like the navigation exercises I’d done during training. And the crew was hoping I would get them home! Fortunately, I had the bit of the chart showing our last position worked out just before being hit. Knowing that we had turned north and roughly taking the ground speed of the aircraft and approximate time since turning, I made a guess at the distance we’d travelled north. Then I measured this from the scale on the chart with my finger! I was able to put a cross on the chart, which looked all right. I made a guess at the drift from the flight plan and passed the course to the pilot. I was still trying to establish our true position when Jimmy passed me a bit of paper with a position written on it. Thank Heaven he had got his set to work and obtained a fix. I took the scrap of paper and had great difficulty in trying to work out which was longitude and which was latitude. I tried to plot this fix but I didn’t succeed.
‘The next thing I knew was finding myself under the remains of the chart table and hearing the pilot calling over the R/T, “Mayday! Mayday!” This was the distress call for immediate assistance. I realized then that we must be over England but what a short journey! Only a few minutes before we had been over Germany, or so I thought! Anyway, what was I doing here on the floor and I attempted to get up. “Pat’s coming round” I heard Jimmy say as I saw him coming to help me up. Oh my head! It was splitting, or so it seemed! “You passed out”, said Jimmy “and you have been out a long time. You started dancing about soon after I gave you a second ‘fix’ and then flopped out on the floor. I couldn’t see any sign of injury but I then saw that your oxygen mask had two fairly big holes in it (shrapnel or bullets, we found out later), so I guessed you’d passed out from lack of oxygen, but we daren’t come down too low at the time.”
‘That was it then. No wonder it had seemed a short journey back! Naturally, when safe to descend where normal breathing was possible, the pilot had done so and I’d eventually come round. What a time to have a sleep!
‘The pilot was still calling “Mayday, Mayday”. Then came an answer, “Searchlights will home you”.
‘On my feet now, with nothing worse than a sickly headache, I saw from the cabin windows searchlights wavering from the vertical position almost to the ground, like a giant arm beckoning. Following these we soon saw a cone of three searchlights poised stationary. These marked the ‘drome. Shortly, over the R/T the controller called us. “This is Horsham St Faith. Another plane is landing. Do a circuit and land.” We almost cried with relief! To me this call made me feel much better. We were over or at least very nearly over, Norwich, my hometown. Horsham St Faith was in the suburbs. I really felt that I was home.
‘Again the controller’s voice but not with the message we had hoped for. “Q-Queenie, runway blocked – proceed to Foulsham aerodrome.” Then they gave us a course to fly. We came to the conclusion that the other aircraft landing at Horsham was possibly a crippled bomber from the same raid. Foulsham was only a few minutes’ flying time away and we seemed to be flying fairly well so the pilot acknowledged and off we flew. Very shortly we could see another cone of three searchlights and so as we approached we called up Foulsham. Answering us, they told us it was clear to land.
‘ “Undercarriage going down” said the pilot. “Blast, the indicator isn’t working!” (This was the green light on his panel, which lit up when the wheels were locked down.) The warning horn was sounding, which should have stopped if the wheels were properly locked in the down position.) He looked out of his side window at the port wheel. It seemed down OK. “How about the starboard, Pat?” he called. Well, it was down but it didn’t seem to be fully down and I told the pilot so. He swung the aircraft about, as much as he dared in an endeavour to make it lock down but it wouldn’t.
‘ “Get ready for crash landing. I’m going down,” said the pilot. Jimmy went to the rest bed to hang onto Tommy while I sat down with Frank with my arm around him, behind the pilot’s seat. “Here we go, hold tight,” yelled the pilot. A sickening lurch as we hit the runway, more bumps, but we seemed to be doing OK. The pilot was holding the plane over onto the port wheel, which was apparently locked down. The starboard wheel was flapping about uselessly. As we lost flying speed the starboard wing began to drop and then the wingtip dug into the ground. This swung us completely round as we grated to a stop. Our fear now was fire!
‘Getting up we gathered our wits and made our way down the fuselage to the exit door. The gunners had just opened it when voices outside shouted, “OK, we’ll get you out” and, illuminated by the headlights of a jeep and an ambulance, we saw figures clambering in to help us. Fortunately no fire occurred. Poor old Queenie had crumpled quite a bit but didn’t catch fire thank goodness.
‘Little was said as the injured were taken in the ambulance to sick quarters and we who were not injured were taken in a jeep to the crew room, where a number of officers including the CO flocked round us with cigarettes and soon, mugs of hot tea. “Put something in it” said the CO. “I reckon they need it.” And out of the blue came a bottle of whisky and they put a very generous amount in our tea! With apologies they told us they’d have to spend a little time interrogating us about the raid before we could go to bed. This over, we were taken to a Nissen hut where beds had been prepared. Sleep? What an effort. I kept being sick in a pail, which I had asked to be left near the bed. My head was going round and round and I felt, as if it would burst. Eventually I slept. When we got up at about midday, on reporting to the CO, we were told we’d be flown back to Coningsby. We went to the sick quarters to see about the injured but we were not allowed to see them. The MO (Medical Officer) told us that Jimmy had quite a lot of small pieces of shrapnel in his back and just under the scalp. Frank’s elbow was badly smashed and he had shrapnel in his side. Tommy’s hand was also badly smashed and (I believe) frostbitten, caused by the icy draught blowing on him from the escape hatch opening. I never saw either of them again.
‘We then went to have a look at Queenie. There she was, lying out there in the middle of the aerodrome, lying over onto a crumpled wing, her two starboard propellers bent over the engine nacelles. We clambered into her and looked around. What a mess and holes were everywhere. How it was that the engines kept functioning, we’ll never know. Those three German fighters had riddled her but she had brought us home though she was now a write-off.’
Later that day the crew of Q-Queenie flew back to Coningsby and they were interrogated. All four uninjured members of the crew were given a fortnight’s leave commencing the next morning. Denny Freeman was awarded the DFC for bringing the crippled Lanc home safely, while Jimmy Chapman was awarded the CGM for getting his wireless set working again, obtaining fixes, plotting them and helping to navigate after ‘Pat’ Patfield had passed out.
The crew of Q-Queenie never flew all together again. Frank Devonshire was invalided out of the service and ‘Tommy’ Thomas never flew again either. Flight Sergeant Bill Smith regrettably never had the opportunity to take up his new ‘career’ as a ‘gigolo’. Sadly he was killed in action on the night of 7/8 July during the operation to St-Leu-d’Esserent when the Lancaster he was flying in was hit by flak and exploded in mid air killing the entire crew. He is buried at Marissel French National Cemetery. Flying Officer Denny Freeman and four of his crew were killed in action on 24 September when his Lancaster was hit by flak and crashed into the sea during the operation to attack strong points at Calais. Derek Patfield was not surprised Denny Freeman got killed ‘because he was a bit lax in his discipline. They went low over the French coast and shot up some naval installations and they got him. He shouldn’t have done it, but he was that type of bloke. He was a good pilot and wouldn’t have any talking on the trip unless it was essential.’ ‘Pat’ Patfield did another 30 raids after Nuremberg. Although they were not without incident none would be quite as bad as 30/ 31 March, which became known as ‘the biggest chop night’ of the war for Bomber Command.
‘Three operations flown’, wrote Sergeant Roland Hammersley ‘and I had seen the loss of 176 crews from Bomber Command. No good news for the rest of us. We were granted leave and once we had obtained clearance from the squadron office, I was away into Lincoln. I hitched a ride in a lorry and then on to London and Watford by train making the final leg home on a bus. I had already said to the lorry driver that we would most likely find that the Nuremberg night operation would show heavy casualties and when the news was out, my thoughts were confirmed. Dad was on leave and with Mum we visited his favourite pub, “The Oddfellows” in Apsley End. The company was good and cheerful. It was during the evening that I told Dad for the first time that I was serving on a bomber squadron and flying operations. The news was out that there had been considerable casualties on the Nuremberg raid and I told him that I had flown that operation, asking him not to tell Mum. However, he could not keep the news to himself and I found him telling all and sundry in the pub. “My boy was on that raid last night!” The news soon filtered through to Mum and then the tears flowed. I felt sorry that I had said anything, but by then it was too late.’
Notes
1
See The Nuremberg Raid by Martin Middlebrook (Penguin, 1973).
2
Lancaster crews were required as ‘supporters’ for the PFF Lancasters of the ‘Flare Force’. This meant arriving at the target at the same time but flying at 2,000 ft below the ‘Flare Force’ to attract the flak and enable them to carry out a straight and level run. After drawing the flak the ‘supporters’ then recrossed the target to drop their bombs.
3
Later Wing Commander Doubleday DSO DFC who commanded 61 Squadron.
4
Night fighting in good visibility was ideal and the weather over Belgium and eastern France was 0/10ths to 4/10ths thin cloud while Holland and the Ruhr were cloudless. At Nuremberg there was 10/10ths cloud at 1,600 – 12,000 feet but the cloud veiled at 16,000 feet with generally good altitude visibility. Jamming was carried out on a large scale but Mosquito spoof attacks on Cologne, Frankfurt and Kassel were identified for what they were because, to the German defences, they were apparently flying without H2S. The heavies on the other hand could quite clearly be followed on radar by their H2S bearings. As the bomber stream was clearly recognized from the start, it was attempted to switch in night fighters as far west as possible. All units of 3 JD were switched in over radio beacon Bonn. 2 JD was brought near via radio beacons Bonn and Osnabrück and switched in by radio beacons Bonn and Frankfurt respectively. 1 JD was brought near via radio beacons Bonn and Harz and switched in by radar station north of Frankfurt, as was 7 JD. Single-engined units from Oldenburg, Rheine and Bonn were directed via radio beacon Frankfurt to radio beacon Nürnberg. Night fighter units from Ludwigslust, Zerbst, Jüterborg and Wiesbaden were led directly to radio beacon Nürnberg. Altogether, 246 twin- and single- engined night fighters were engaged. Despite the British jamming the first interception of the bomber stream in the area south of Bonn was successful. From there on in the bomber stream was hit repeatedly and the majority of the losses occurred in the Giessen-Fulda-Bamberg area. A staggering 82 bombers were lost en route to and near the target.
5
Apart from Starkey, only Sergeant Wally Paris, the bomb-aimer, survived when he was hurtled from the exploding aircraft. Pilot Officer Starkey and his crew were possibly shot down by a Bf 110 flown by Oberleutnant Martin ‘Tino’ Becker, Staffelkapitän,2./NJG 6 as the 37th aircraft to go down on the Nuremberg raid. Becker and his Bordfunker Unteroffizier Karl-Ludwig Johanssen had taken off from Finthen airfield for a Zahme Sau mission. (I. and II./NJG 6 operated 19 Zahme Sau Bf 110s and four in Himmelbett sorties.) They were guided by 3 JD into the bomber stream to the south of radio beacon Ida whereupon they intercepted and shot down six bombers between 00.20 and 00.50 hours with their Schräge Musik cannons. After returning to base to re-fuel and re-arm, Becker and Johanssen took off on a second sortie and they claimed their seventh kill of the night when they destroyed a Halifax south of Luxembourg. Next day Becker received news that he was awarded the Ritterkreuz.
6
Hauptmann Martin Becker, Staffelkapitän 2./NJG 6, shot down seven for his 20th to 26th Abschüsse, which earned him the Ritterkreuz.
7
Beetham’s citation for the DFC included a mention of the Augsburg raid on 25/26 February 1944. He and his crew completed their bomb run and turned for home when the flight engineer said that the coolant temperature on one of the port engines had begun to rise alarmingly. Beetham cut the power and feathered the propeller. Flying on three engines they lost height and flew 600 miles over enemy territory alone. Beetham went on to fly a total of 30 operations, 10 of them to Berlin. See Vulcan 607 by Rowland White (Bantam, 2006. Corgi, 2007).
8
Diary entry. See The Lancaster Story by Peter Jacobs (Cassell, 2002).
9
A Bf 110 flown by Oberleutnant Helmuth Schulte of II/NJG 5 shot down Tickler’s crew who were on their 15th operation. Four crew were killed. Tickler and two others survived and they were taken prisoner. Only 110 Conspicuous Gallantry Medals (Flying) were awarded in the Second World War. When it was instituted in November 1942 it was to right the anomaly that existed between officers and NCO airmen in that there was no equivalent to the DSO, which was awarded to commissioned officers only. Nothing existed for the non-commissioned airmen between the DFM and the VC.
10
In 1982 during the Falklands War, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Beetham GCB CBE DFC AFC was in his fifth year as Chief of the Air Staff and he initiated the plan to use Avro Vulcans in Black Buck raids against Port Stanley. He retired with rank of a Marshal of the Royal Air Force.
11
Later in his tour of operations Les Bartlett was commissioned and he was awarded the DFM.
12
Diary entry. See Jacobs, op. cit. In all, 50 Squadron lost three Lancasters missing in action in addition to the one piloted by Flight Sergeant G. C. Bucknell that crashed on take-off. One returned damaged. Fifteen men were killed and seven taken prisoner. All four of 156 Squadron’s losses resulted from actions by the German night fighters. A Ju 88 piloted by Oberleutnant Köberich of II/NJG 2 shot down ND476 piloted by Captain F. Johnsen from Bergen, Norway. All eight crew, who were on their 25th operation, were killed. Oberleutnant Köberich also shot down ND406, flown by Warrant Officer J. A. Murphy. Murphy and five of the crew who were on the 19th operation of their second tour were killed. One man survived and was taken prisoner. A night fighter shot down ND492 flown by Pilot Officer L. Lindley. Lindley survived but all six of his crew died. A night fighter, probably flown by Oberleutnant Martin ‘Tino’ Becker of I/NJG 6, shot down ND466 flown by Squadron Leader P. R. Goodwin. Four of Goodwin’s crew, who were on the 17th operation of their second tour, were killed. Goodwin and the two others were taken prisoner. 514 Squadron had dispatched 19 Lancasters. Four were shot down by night fighters and two crashed, one near Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, and the other at Waterbeach, and one Lancaster was damaged. Twenty men were killed, 10 taken prisoner and six injured in the crashes. Pilot Officer Evan W. Chitty, RAAF, was making his final approach at Waterbeach when his crew heard the control tower in their earphones. ‘Who’s that bloody fool making a right-hand circuit?’ Another pilot was desperate to get down and had cut in. Chitty had no option but to open up his engines and overshoot but at that moment, a flurry of snow caused him to lose sight of the ground. A few seconds later there was a horrible shudder as the wheels were torn off and then the Lancaster, in a nose-down attitude, hit the ground hard. Chitty and four more escaped with various injuries. It was some time before Sergeant J. Shepherd, the mid-upper gunner could be found and lastly the body of Sergeant A. B. Pattison, the bomb-aimer, lying crushed under a wing. It was never discovered how he had got into this position. See The Bomber Command War Diaries by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt. Chitty formed another crew and he and this crew were lost without trace on the operation to Caen on 30 July 1944.
13
W5006 piloted by Flying Officer J. G. R. Ling was shot down by Oberleutnant Martin Drewes, Staffelkapitän, 11./NJG 1 with the loss of all except one of the crew, who were on their 25th operation.
14
See Middlebrook, op. cit.
15
The Nuremberg raid took Nachtjagd’s; total for March to 269 RAF bombers destroyed. Oberleutnant Martin Drewes, Staffelkapitän, 11./NJG 1 claimed three Lancasters. Oberleutnant Witzleb and Oberleutnant Walter Prues of III./NJG 1 each claimed a Viermot at 00.12 and 00.31 hours respectively. Oberleutnant Helmuth Schulte of 4./NJG 5 achieved four victories and Feldwebel Rudolf Frank of 3./NJG 3, three. Nachtjagd lost just nine Bf 110s and Ju 88s (four of which went down to return fire). Since the start of the Battle of Berlin Bomber Command had lost 1,047 aircraft and another 1,682 returned with severe battle damage.
16
Flight Lieutenant J. A. Forrest and five of his crew were KIA on the night of 24/25 June 1944 on the raid on Prouville. A seventh crew member survived and he was taken prisoner.