The British government first began getting reports of unusual enemy activity on the Baltic coast in the spring of 1943. Their photo reconnaissance of the peninsula was showing newly-constructed laboratories, a living site and examples of what photo interpreters considered to be missile launching pads. It was known then that German atom bomb research had made relatively little progress to that date and that they were concentrating heavily on the development of both pilotless bombers and long-range rockets at Peenemünde, “the summit of research and development,” as Churchill referred to the complex. Throughout the early summer, British intelligence material about the “V-weapons” continued to accumulate, indicating that Hitler intended to begin the new bombardment of London on 30 October He expected that, by the end of the year, London would be devastated, that the British would have surrendered, and the bulk of German military might could be focused on the Soviet Union. This new German threat against London was considered real and serious, and caused the British government to look again at the evacuation plans it had made in 1939. At the same time, the government decided that a maximum effort should be mounted to eliminate Peenemünde as a specific threat. That project, code-named Hydra, was handed to Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command.
Harris ordered, from his bunker HQ at High Wycombe, that the attack would be mounted at full strength and in full moonlight, despite the advantage to the German fighters. He said that his bomber crews were not to know the nature of the target—only that it had to be eliminated no matter how difficult the job. The bombing altitude would be between 8,000 and 12,000 feet—less than half the normal height, and a “master of ceremonies” would control the attack from over the target for the first time in a full-scale RAF raid, and that new, slow-burning Newhaven “spot fires” would be used as target markers. All across eastern England, fully 600 bomber crews were assembled in briefing rooms on the afternoon of Tuesday, 17 August.
Sergeant Jack Currie: “One of those crews was mine. We had come together in the usual random manner, responding to a call of ‘Sort yourselves out, chaps’, in an echoing hangar at the operational training unit. Within five minutes, a bomber crew was formed: three bright Australians as navigator, bomb aimer, and rear gunner, a quiet Northumbrian as wireless operator, and me. Later, converting to the Lancaster, we added two teenagers: a Welshman as mid-upper gunner and a Merseysider as flight engineer. At least I was no longer the youngest in the crew.
“We were assigned to Number Twelve Squadron, at Wickenby, near Lincoln, and they seemed to need us: they had lost four crews in seven days. Ahead lay a tour of thirty operations, and the chances of survival were roughly one in four; they improved, said the old hands, if you got through five missions. We did that, and another three; now we were ready for our ninth.
“I had come to trust the aeroplane and to know the crew. Jim Cassidy, having quietly used a sick-bag as soon as we were airborne, would navigate us to Germany and back with no further trace of frailty. He had always set his heart on being a navigator, unlike many who first aspired to be pilots; he had come out top in training and it showed. Larry Myring, with whom bloody was an all-purpose, mandatory adjective, would complain about the cold and be happy only when the target came in sight. The gunners Charlie Lanham and George Protheroe were always constantly alert; up to now, they had not been required to fire their guns in anger. Charles Fairbairn would be heard only when something urgent—a recall, a diversion, or a change of wind—came through on the radio, and Johnny Walker would do what was needed to conserve the fuel. My responsibility as captain, was to make the big decisions—like which dance hall or cinema we went to on a stand-down night.
above: A still from the film The Dam Busters, with Richard Todd, right. and Robert Shaw; below: Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, headed RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War; bottom: A bomb aimer in a Lancaster heavy bomber.
above: 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ ready for loading aboard Lancaster bombers participating in Bomber Command’s massive offensive against Germany; below: Lancaster forward fuselage sections in an Avro production facility in 1942; bottom: Fusing bombs on a hardstand of a U.S. Army Air Force base in England.
“The Hydra briefing started with a little white lie. The enemy, said the intelligence officer, were developing a new generation of radar-controlled night fighters on the Baltic coast. That was the carrot. The squadron commander took over with the stick. If we failed to clobber Pennemünde tonight, we would go again the next night and the next until we did. The attack, he continued, would comprise three ten-minute waves: the first would hit the scientists’ living quarters, the second wave the airfield (in reality, the rocket-launching sites), and the third the laboratories.
“ ‘Hey, skip,’ Myring whispered, ‘What’s our squadron motto?’
“I glanced at him. ‘You know perfectly well.’
“ ‘Yeah. Leads the field. So how is it we’re always in the last bloody wave?’
“The PFF would employ the Newhaven method, which meant visual ground marking—and would ‘re-centre’ the markers on each successive aiming point. We were to listen out on channel C for the MC’s instructions, and follow them to the letter. Purely as a precaution, in case the markers should be temporarily obscured, we were to approach the target on ‘time-and-distance’ runs from Cape Arkona on Rügen Island, forty miles north of Peenemünde. The outbound route would keep us clear of known flak concentrations, and the target defences were expected to be light. And, as for the enemy night fighters, they would be diverted by no less than eight Mosquitoes bothering Berlin at the time of the attack.
top: Captain John Godfrey; centre: Major Howard ‘Deacon’ Hively, both members of the 4th Fighter Group at Debden, England; below: Major John England on his return from a combat mission in ‘Nooky Booky IV’, in his 357th Fighter Group P-51 Mustang; above: the entire crew of a B-17F bomber arriving at the aircraft for a mission to a German target.
“After the navigation leader had specified the courses, heights, and airspeeds, the weatherman performed his magic-lantern show of cloud tops and bases. ‘Looks good,’ said Cassidy. ‘Larry should get plenty of visual pinpoints.’ He looked meaningfully at the bomb-aimer, whose map-reading ability he had sometimes questioned. Myring then grunted: for him, the main business of the briefing began only when the bombing leader took the stage. He licked his pencil, and made a careful note of how his five-ton load would be disposed.
“The signals leader spoke in an apologetic undertone:‘I would like to see all wireless operators for just a few minutes after briefing.’ I leaned across to ask Fairbairn ‘What’s all the secrecy, Charles? Why can’t he tell everybody?’
“ ‘It’s just technical stuff, Jack. A pilot wouldn’t understand.’
“The veteran gunnery leader, with a battered service cap worn at an angle, advised constant vigilance. Defying popular belief, he saw the moonlight as being to our advantage:‘A fighter will stick out like a sore thumb. Just keep your eyes peeled and make sure you see him before he sees you.’
The primary fighter types used by the American air force in World War Two England—above: The Lockheed P-38 Lightning; below: the North American P-51D Mustang; bottom: The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt.
“The station commander strolled onto the stage, one hand in his pocket, the other smoothing a sleek, dark moustache. He was sure he didn’t have to emphasize the importance of the target, and anxious that there should be no early returns. ‘Your flying meals will be ready at nineteen-thirty hours, transport to the aircraft at twenty-fifteen. Good luck, chaps.’
“The trouble with the Lancaster, apart from being cramped for space and deathly cold at altitude, was that it had a tendency to swing left on takeoff. If you overcorrected, it swung back to the right, and the more you tried to straighten up, the more it deviated. The trick was to eliminate the swing by leading with the throttle of the port outer engine until the speed was high enough to get the rudders in the airflow for directional control. That was what I did at thirty minutes after nine, and PH-George 2 climbed away at maximum boost and 2,850 rpm. At fields all over Lincolnshire, in Yorkshire, and in East Anglia, 595 pilots did the same. Theoretically, if every aircraft stayed within a two-mile radius of base, their climbing orbits should never coincide: in practice, they occasionally did, and we took precautions. Apart from the navigator, busy at the gee-box, every man kept watch.
“We reached 8,000 feet in under twenty minutes, and that was not too bad. Climbing in a circle wasted lift and thrust: aeroplanes climbed better in nice straight lines. When George 2 was straightened out on course, she gained another 3,000 feet in the next five minutes (it was a curious convention with aircraft as with ships that, no matter how obviously masculine their names, they were always female to their crews.)
“Beneath us there was nothing to be seen. The coastal crossing point at Mablethorpe did not exist as houses, streets, and shoreline, but as 53.20N 00.16E on the navigator’s chart. At two minutes before ten, I switched off the navigation lights and the IFF, and George 2 headed out across the unseen waters in a straight line for ‘point A’, seventy miles west of the North Frisian Islands.
“Skipper from mid-upper, okay to test the guns?’
“ ‘Go ahead.’
“The Lancaster trembled as the gunners fired short bursts from their Brownings, and the sharp smell of cordite filtered through my mask. Climbing steadily, I followed the eternal visual routine: clockwise round the panel, clockwise round the sky. ‘Cultivate the roving eye, Coo-ree,’ were the words that 1st Lt Sena, USAAC, had constantly intoned when he was teaching me to fly the Vultee BT-13. Then, there were only ‘needle, ball, and airspeed’ and the clear, blue sky of Georgia for the eye to rove around, but the principle held good.
“I leveled out at 18,000 feet, and Walker brought the pitch back to cruising rpm. George 2 reached point A at twenty minutes after eleven. ‘Pilot from navigator, turn onto one-zero-seven magnetic,’
“ ‘One-zero-seven. Turning on.’
“ ‘I’m losing the gee signals now, but I think we’re pretty well on track.’
“I conjured up a mental map of the Frisian Islands. ‘Let’s try not to overfly Sylt, Jim.’
“ ‘No. She’ll be all right, Jack. We should be well north of it.’
“Someone switched a mike on. With two of the crew, I knew who it was before he spoke: Myring, because his mask never seemed to keep the slipstream noises out, and Fairbairn, because he always gave two low whistles—pshew, phsew—to check that he had switched from radio to intercom. This was Myring. ‘Can’t we have the bloody heat up a bit? It’s cold enough down here to freeze the …’ I said, ‘No chatter, Larry,’ but I had to admit he had a point. The aircraft’s fabric wore a ghostly film of frost; ice crystals sparkled on the aerials and guns. I was beating alternate hands on knees to retain some sense of touch, and was starting to lose contact with my feet.
“ ‘Wireless op, is the cabin heat on full?’ Cassidy answered for him. ‘He’s on WT, listening out for the group broadcast.’
“ ‘Aw, it’s pretty well up now, Jack.’
“ ‘Not enough. The outside air temperature is less than minus twenty.’
It was all right for Fairbairn. He sat nearest to the hot air vent. He could have flown in his underwear if he didn’t have to move around the aircraft now and then. Cassidy was all right too. His navigation desk, forward of the wireless set, was never really cold. Walker and I, farther forward in the cabin, were only ever warm when we were flying at low altitude on a summer’s day, and Myring’s station in the nose was colder than a tax collector’s heart.
“ ‘Pilot from navigator. Enemy coast coming up in two minutes.’
“ ‘Roger. Let’s have an intercom check. Bomb-aimer?’ ‘Loud and clear, skip.’
“ ‘Wireless op?’ ‘Phsew, phsew. Strength five.’
“ ‘Mid-upper?…’
“At eleven-fifteen, the moon showed its head above the northeastern horizon. Myring, mindful of the navigator’s hint, came through on the intercom. ‘Bomb-aimer, Jim. We’re crossing the coast now—fairly well on track.’
“ ‘I need it exactly, Larry.’
“ ‘Oh yeah. Well, about fifteen miles south of Esbjerg, or whatever they call the bloody place.’
“ ‘Lat and long, Larry, and the time.’
“ ‘Christ, Jim. It’s not that easy down here, trying to use me bloody torch an’ look at the bloody map, and—’
“I cut in. ‘Do your best, bomb-aimer.’
“As George 2 headed east-southeast across the southern plains of Denmark, Lanham called from the rear turret: ‘Flak astern of us, ten degrees to starboard.’
“ ‘Roger’ Some airmen behind us were a little south of track, and the guns of Sylt were making them aware of it.
“Walker checked the fuel. George 2 was half a ton lighter than her takeoff weight.
“ ‘Let’s reduce the revs a bit,’ I suggested.
“ ‘We should be able to maintain airspeed at twenty-three hundred.’
“Walker inched the levers down, and I turned the elevator trim minutely back. George 2 reacted badly to the trivial economy. Her indicated airspeed fell by nearly five miles per hour, and she handled like a ship without a rudder.’
“ ‘No go, Johnny, try twenty-three-fifty.
“Ten minutes passed while we struggled to regain George 2’s good will. Five minutes before midnight, Myring came through with a pinpoint; ten minutes later he produced another ‘Fifty-four forty-eight north, twelve thirty-nine east, time … er, bloody hell … zero-zero-zero-five.’
“ ‘Good on yer, Larry,’ said Cassidy.
“I began a gradual descent to the bombing height as George 2 crossed the southern Swedish islands and continued east-southeast. The moonlight showed the shapes of other bombers, well scattered, moving like a ghostly skein of geese across the Baltic Sea.
above: Captain Richard Bynum, 388th Bomb Group; below: Staff Sergeant S. J. Malinowski, 385th Bomb Group, 8th USAAF
“ ‘The wind’s picked up a bit,’ said the navigator We’ll be early at point C. Can you reduce the speed?’
“ ‘Can’t go much slower than one-fifty, Jim. I can make an orbit. How much time do your want to lose?’
“ ‘Three minutes ought to do it.’
“It was not a manoeuvre I would have cared to make in total darkness or in cloud but, in the moonlight, it was not too hazardous. While the crew watched out, George 2 completed a wide descending circle without bumping into any other aeroplanes. Shortly before we reached the turning point at Cape Arkona, Myring saw the first green spot fires burning on Peenemünde. The time was seventeen minutes after midnight, and we had fifty miles to run.
“The last wind velocity Cassidy had found was from 290 degrees at forty miles per hour. Myring fed the numbers into the bombsight’s calculator. Now the curve of the coast was perfectly distinct, and a white line of surf showed on the shore. The scene ahead was much less serene. The detonating ‘cookies’ made bright, expanding circles, like heavy stones dropped into pools of liquid fire; searchlights were waving, flak bursts were twinkling, and fires were taking hold. Not so many searchlights, nor so much flak as we were accustomed to, but a lot of smoke—more than the fires would seem to justify. The people on Peenemünde were putting up a smoke screen. It was a nice try, and it might have been successful—if the wind hadn’t blown it out to sea.
“From 9,000 feet, in the light of the full moon, the target was much closer, and warmer, than the norm. I told Fairbairn to reduce the cabin heat, and Walker turned the oxygen to ‘high.’ On the starboard beam an interlacing pattern of tracer bullets appeared and disappeared. The voice of the MC sounded on the radio, the cool, clear voice of someone accustomed to command. It was strange, and rather comforting, to hear that English voice in the headphones, high above the Baltic, six hundred miles from home. ‘Come in, third wave, and bomb the centre of the green TIs. Let’s have a good concentration. Aim right at the centre of the greens.’
Captain Don Gentile, with his crew chief and their P-51 Mustang ‘Shangri-La’ at Debden, Essex, England.
“ ‘Switches on,’ said Myring, in the special, growling tone he adopted for the moment—his moment of all moments. ‘Bombs fused and selected.’
“I took a deep breath and a fresh grip on the wheel. A spatter of light flak danced around George 2:1 tried to pretend it wasn’t there. ‘Running in nicely, skip,’ said Myring, ‘Steady as she goes.’
“ ‘Third wave, don’t bomb short. Make sure you aim at the centre of the greens.’ I turned down the volume; from now on Myring was in charge.
“ ‘Bomb doors open, skip.’
“I pushed the lever The roar of the slipstream made a deeper sound as the bombbay gaped. George 2 tried to raise her nose, and I stilled her with the trim tab. ‘Lanc on fire at four o’clock level,’ said Lanham. ‘It’s going down.’
“ ‘Steady,’ Myring growled, ‘Left, left… steady, steady … a touch left, and steady, steady … bombs gone!’
“Down went the 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ six 1,000-pounders, and the two 500-pounders. George 2 lifted as they fell. Cassidy logged the time: thirty-eight minutes after midnight. ‘Bomb doors closed,’ called Myring. ‘Steady for the camera.’ In the last few minutes he had uttered thirty words without a single bloody. He really was a changed man with a bomb-tit in his hand.
“ ‘Bomb doors closed’ I echoed, pulling up the lever and rolling back the trim. Thirty seconds passed while the photo plates ticked over, and before I turned George 2 away, away from the brightly burning debris that was Peenemünde. ‘New course, Nav?’
“ ‘Two-nine-five degrees magnetic.’
“Turning on. Give me twenty-eight-fifty, Johnny, and we’ll grab some altitude.’
“George 2 climbed away smoothly and headed to the west. We had no way of knowing that the Nachtjagd controllers, aware now that the Berlin raid was no more than a feint, had redirected all their available Messerschmitts and Junkers to our homeward route.
“The Lancaster’s electronics included a receiver that picked up transmissions from the Lichtenstein radar sets in the German fighters. The radar device was code-named Boozer, perhaps because the red lamp it lighted on the panel was reminiscent of a heavy drinker’s nose. At 18,000 feet over Stralsund, thirty miles west of Peenemünde, the roving eye picked the glow up straight away.
“ ‘Rear gunner from pilot, I have a Boozer warning.’
“ ‘Rear gunner watching out astern.’
“Boozer also read transmissions from the ground-based Würzburg radars, which could be quite a nuisance when you were flying in the stream; at all times, however, you had to heed the signal. It was as well we did: seconds later, Lanham spoke again. ‘Fighter at seven o’clock low. Stand by to corkscrew.’
“ ‘Standing by.’
“ ‘Mid-upper from rear gunner. There could be a pair. I’ll take care of this one, you watch out.’
“I didn’t like the sound of that remark. It would be difficult enough to evade one fighter in the moonlight, let alone two. I sat up straight, and gently shook the wheel. Don’t get excited, George 2, but you might be doing some aerobatics any minute now.
“ ‘Prepare to corkscrew port, Jack … corkscrew port… go!’
“ ‘Going port.’
“I used heavy left aileron and rudder, elevators down, held the diving turn through fifteen degrees. I pulled out sharply, and turned hard to starboard halfway through a climb. George 2 responded like a PT-17—a PT-17 weighing twenty-five tons.
“ ‘Foxed him, Jack. He’s holding off, level on the starboard quarter’
“Protheroe then came through, ‘Another bandit, skipper four o’clock high, six hundred yards. It’s an Me 210 …’
“Lanham broke in, ‘Watch him, George, here comes number one again. Corkscrew starboard … go!’
“According to the navigator’s log, the combat continued for another eight minutes: to me it seemed longer. After each frustrated pass, the attacker held off, content to occupy the attention of one gunner, while his partner came on in. I longed to have the heat turned down—the sweat was running down my face—but I dared not interrupt the gunners’ running commentary. The sound of heavy breathing was sufficiently distracting, and I knew that it was mine.
“My wrists and forearms were reasonably strong, but I was no Charles Atlas, and George 2 wasn’t feeling like a Stearman anymore. It occurred to me that these two fighter pilots were just playing games with us, biding their time until I was exhausted. Then they would rip the Lancaster to shreds. The sheet of armour plate behind me seemed pitifully small, and there was a lot of me it failed to shield. If only our Brownings had a greater range; if only I could find a layer of cloud to hide in; if only the moonlight wasn’t quite so bright…
“ ‘Corkscrew port… go!’
“Throwing George 2 into another diving turn, I looked back through the window. There was the Messerschmitt again, turning steeply with me as the pilot tried to bring his guns to bear. I could see his helmet and his goggles, looking straight at me. Staring back at him, I felt a sudden surge of anger, and a change of mood. You’re not good enough, Jerry, I thought, to win this little fight. You’re a bloody awful pilot and a damned poor shot. ‘Well, for Christ’s sake, George, shoot that bastard down.’
“ ‘I think you got him,’ I said. ‘Where’s the other one?’
“ ‘Falling back astern,’ said Lanham. He’s clearing off. Probably out of ammo or fuel.’
“ ‘Good shooting, George. What kept you?’
“ ‘Sorry, skipper. I had my sights on him all the time. I guess I just forgot to pull the trigger’
“ ‘Pilot from nav. Let me know when you’re back on course.’
“ ‘Roger.’
“ ‘Bomb-aimer, skip. I was ready for the buggers, but they never came in bloody range of the front bloody guns.’
“Larry was himself again. I checked the compass, and turned toward the coast of Lübeck Bay. I was thinking of the Welshman sitting in the turret with the fighter in his sights. He had fired a lot of rounds on training ranges and at air-towed drogues, but he had never fired a bullet at another human being. That was rather different, and I thought I understood why he had needed the command to open fire.
“ ‘Nav from pilot. Back on course. Let’ all settle down.’
“I held the wheel loosely and stroked the rudder pedals with the balls of my feet. George 2 was flying head-on into the wind, and her speed across the water was a mere 176 mph. It was going to be a long ride back to Wickenby, but I believed that we would make it. At twenty minutes after one, Lanham reported in that the Peenemünde fires could still be seen.
“Forty-three minutes later, a searchlight reared ahead, pale in the moonlight but no less dangerous for that. I really hated searchlights. Over the target you just had to ignore them, but I did my best to dodge them when we were on our own. If that master beam latched on, its two slaves would quickly follow, and few aircraft, once coned, returned to base unscathed. On the way home from Hamburg two weeks earlier, we had got away with it—more by luck than judgment. I didn’t want to try our luck again. ‘Going ten degrees starboard for two minutes, Jim.’ The beam waved toward us, like a finger feeling for a keyhole in the dark; it groped for a while and then disappeared. Back on course, George 2 began her second crossing of the cold North Sea.
Members of the 336th Fighter Squadron, 4th Fighter Group, Debden, England in their disperal hut crew room in 1944.
above: Mustang pilots of the U.S. Eighth Air Force after a bomber escort mission in 1944; below: 357th Fighter Group Mustang pilot ‘Gentleman Jim’ Browning.
“Just after three o’clock, the gee-box showed its first good signals since they faded at point A four hours ago. Cassidy plotted the position. For close on a thousand miles, by dead reckoning, a bearing on Polaris, and three or four pinpoints, he had navigated George 2 to within a mile of where she ought to be. He gave no sign of being surprised. ‘Pilot from nav. We’re pretty well on track. ETA base is zero-four-zero-five.’
“I liked the sound of that; now the journey could be thought of in terms of minutes, not of hours. I could begin the descent, engage the autopilot, and drink a cup of coffee. I might even struggle back to the Elsan for a piddle.
“Walker reduced the rpm. The vertical speed indicator showed a descent rate of three hundred feet a minute. If I maintained that flight path, we should arrive over Wickenby more or less at circuit height and all set for a landing, provided I remembered to lower the undercarriage. Nothing then could keep us from breakfast or from bed. Not that the gunners could relax. There could be no worse anti-climax than to get chopped by an intruder in the airfield circuit.
“ ‘Pilot to crew. We’re below oxygen height. Smoke if you can afford it.’
“At about four o’clock the Mablethorpe searchlight stood erect, the only searchlight I was ever glad to see. I switched on the navigation lights and the IFF, and Fairbairn stood ready with the colours of the day. Ten minutes later, a beacon twinkled dead ahead. It read dit-dit-dah-dah-dit-dit, the code for Wickenby. I told Walker to turn the oxygen up to the 20,000 foot level, and pushed the R / T button A. ‘Hello, Orand, this is Nemo George 2, are you receiving me, over.’
“ ‘Hello, Nemo George 2. This is Orand. Receiving you loud and clear, over.’
“ ‘Orand, George 2 approaching from the east, fifteen-hundred feet. Permission to join the circuit, over.’
“George 2, the circuit is busy. You’re clear to join at 4,000 and stand by. Left-hand orbit, two aircraft at that height, over.’
“ ‘Shit,’ said Walker. ‘We’re in the flipping stack.’
“ ‘Yeah,’ snarled Myring. ‘That’s the bloody snag with being in the last bloody wave.’
“ ‘Shut up’ I counseled. ‘It’s a lovely night for flying. Twenty-eight-fifty rpm, engineer.’
“For the next thirty minutes, George 2 orbited the beacon, gradually descending in five-hundred-foot stages at Orand’s command. Later in the tour, I would learn to take some shortcuts, to make a better speed, and to arrive at Wickenby before the stack began, but in those days, a green sergeant pilot, I didn’t know the score. At last the call came through:‘George 2, you’r cleared to one-thousand feet and number two to land. Runway two-seven. Queenie-Fox-Easy one-zero-one-two. Call downwind, over.’
“I set the altimeter and began the landing drill. ‘Trailing aerial in, Charles. Brake pressure, Johnny? Fuel?’
“ ‘Plenty of both.’
“ ‘Rad shutters open. Check M gear.’
“At 1,000 feet, a mile south of the field, I turned parallel with the twin lines of the runway lights, and reduced the power.
“ ‘Orand, George 2 downwind, over’
“ ‘George 2, you’re clear to funnels, one ahead.’
“ ‘Wheels down, Johnny.’
“The undercarriage lamps shown red as the up-locks disengaged, and the nose dropped a fraction as the airflow hit the wheels. The locks engaged with a jolt, and the lamps turned to green. ‘Flap fifteen. Booster pumps on.’
“When the last set of lights at the runway’s downwind end were level with the port wingtip, I brought the airspeed back to 140 and turned toward the field. Halfway through the turn, the funnel lights on the port quarter beckoned like the gates of home. As the nose swung into line, I inched the throttles back and let gravity do its stuff. ‘George 2, funnels, over.’
“ ‘George 2, you’re clear to land. Wind is eighteen degrees from your right at ten knots, over.’
“ ‘Half flap, Johnny. Pitch fully fine.’
“I held the nose down to counteract the lift and steered a mite to starboard to compensate for drift. The lights of the runway seemed to widen at the threshold and to taper in the distance up ahead. ‘Full flap. Stand by for landing.’
“As George 2 crabbed across the threshold, Walker held the throttles back against the stops. I kicked the nose straight and pulled the wheel into my lap. The tyres squealed on the tarmac at 04:49.
“The record showed that 560 aircraft reached the target that night and dropped 1,800 tons of bombs, eighty-five percent of which were high explosive. When the truth was revealed about the Baltic base, it was said that Hydra set the V-weapon programme back by several months and reduced the scale of the eventual attack. Certainly, no flying bombs fell on England until June 1944, and no rockets until the following September. General Dwight Eisenhower wrote later: “If the Germans had succeeded in perfecting and using these new weapons six months earlier, our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.”
“One-hundred and eighty Germans, mostly scientists and technicians, died in the attack and General Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, committed suicide the next day. Sadly, the first Newhaven markers went down on the camp where the slave workers were sleeping, and over five-hundred unhappy lives were lost.
“The Nachtjagd, it transpired, had deployed a new device: twin upward-firing cannon mounted behind the cockpit of the Me 110 and fired by the pilot with the aid of a reflector sight, enabled the fighter crew to attack the bomber’s blind spot underneath the fuselage. This deadly piece of weaponry, known as Schräge Musik, was believed to have inflicted some of the losses suffered on the night: twenty-three Lancasters, fifteen Halifaxes, two Stirlings, and one of the Mosquitos.
“For the future, an airborne MC or master bomber, would control all major raids, and the innovative tactics for ‘recentering’ ground markers were to be retained. Peenemünde would be the target for three U.S. Eighth Air Force missions in July and August 1944, but Hydra was, and would remain, the RAF’s only full-scale precision attack in the last two years of the war.
“Knowing nothing of these matters, we drank our cocoa with a tot of rum and attended the debriefing. The crew were in good spirits: we had hit a vital target, dodged the searchlights and the flak, outflown one Messerschmitt and destroyed another—well, possibly destroyed. It seemed a shame to remind them, as we ate our eggs and bacon, that we hadn’t yet completed one third of our tour.”