Текст книги "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943"

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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9. The First Strike

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi ¹

At air bases across the eastern half of England it was a beautiful summer’s day. Clear blue skies and bright sunshine had brought most of the young men from their quarters early, and for the first few hours of the day they passed the time in whatever way suited them best: reading, sharing cigarettes outside their quarters, or playing cricket on the wide-open spaces of the aerodrome. There was an atmosphere of expectancy in the air: operations had been cancelled for two days in a row, and if they were cancelled again there would be the chance of a day out in one of the local market towns. They could dash for the bus to York or Nottingham, Lincoln or Cambridge or even take a train to London. They might perhaps catch a matinée at the cinema, then have a quick meal before they joined the many other servicemen at one of the pubs or Saturday-night dance-halls. For those with wives or girlfriends, it would be a chance to spend valuable time together; for those without, it would be an opportunity to meet some of the local girls. Unlike those in the other armed services, the men in Bomber Command were not quite so restricted by the discipline of barrack duties, and when they were not on operations their time was generally their own. It was a good life for a young man – as long as he remained on the ground.

The cancellation of the previous two operations, both on Hamburg, had been frustrating for everyone. Thursday had been particularly bad. Many crews had taken their aeroplanes to the end of the runways and were about to take off when the trip had been cancelled. Some had already swallowed caffeine pills or benzedrine, dispensed by the station medical officer, to keep them awake during the long flight across the North Sea and back. It was too late to get to any of the local towns to blow off steam, so those who could had made their way to the village pubs to counteract the action of the drugs in their system with alcohol. Others settled down in the mess, or tried to get an early night. Even those who hadn’t taken the MO’s ‘wakey-wakey’ pills often found it difficult to sleep. Having geared themselves up for action throughout the day, they found it difficult to let go of all the accumulated anxiety. They knew that any cancellation of operations was only a temporary reprieve: if they didn’t fly on their first, tenth or twentieth operation tonight they would only have to do it tomorrow or the day after.

While most of the young airmen relaxed in the morning sunshine, a few, usually the skippers of the aircraft, would make their way to the station office to hear the results of the morning’s ‘group tie-up’ with Bomber Command Headquarters. Others would go to the messes, where the battle order was pinned to a board whenever operations were on. When they discovered that ‘ops’ were indeed on, there was a general sigh. There was no indication of what the target would be, but the fuel loads designated for each plane were the same as yesterday so it was probably Hamburg again. There would be no chance of a trip to Betty’s Bar, or the Snakepit, or the Windmill Theatre this Saturday night. Reluctantly, they headed back out on to the airfield to relay the news to their air crews on the grass.

Once a crew knew that ops were on, a change came over them: the frivolity of a cricket match would be replaced with an air of purpose – they had a job to prepare for. They would leave off what they had been doing and make their way out to where their planes were standing, round the perimeter of the airfield. Here, trains of bombs would be arriving, ready to be fused by the station armourers, then loaded into the planes. That morning something else was waiting for them too: stacks and stacks of brown-paper parcels, piled up on the runway beside each plane. Many of the men were used to taking propaganda leaflets on a raid, but this was different. Unable to contain their curiosity some of the men opened the packages, but what they found inside perplexed them. Each package contained nothing but bundles of paper strips – about fourteen inches long and an inch wide – silver on one side, black on the other. Speculation about what they might be was rife. ‘We couldn’t make head nor tail of it,’ said Harold McLean, of 427 Squadron. ‘One chap peed on it to see if it reacted. It didn’t.’ ²

While the airmen were puzzling over the packages, the ground crew – the ‘erks’, as they were affectionately known – were busy checking the aircraft. After a while the airmen climbed into the machines to join them. No matter how curious they might be about the enigmatic parcels, there was work to be done on the plane – equipment to be checked, mechanisms to be tested. This was the machinery on which their lives depended, and few crews neglected their preparations for a night on ops. The gunners would oil their guns, and perhaps realign them so that they converged at the right point. The bomb-aimer would check his instruments, as would the wireless operator and the navigator. Then, perhaps, the pilot and the flight engineer would take the machine up for a quick air test, to make sure it was flying smoothly, before returning to base for lunch and the long, slow wait till dusk.

That afternoon was a nervous one for many. Until briefing in the evening there was nothing to do but hang around and try not to think of the night that lay ahead. They were barred from leaving the base, so there was no chance of distracting themselves with a trip to the local village. Instead they would take to their quarters and try to catch an hour’s sleep, or lie on the grass in the bright summer sunshine, gazing across the airfield at the petrol bowsers pumping fuel into their aircraft, at the erks cycling round the perimeter track, or the WAAF drivers bringing bomb trains to the hangars. Many airmen describe feeling strangely divorced from all the purposeful activity that surrounded them during the long hours of the afternoon, as if it had nothing whatsoever to do with them. And yet, subconsciously, they were aware that it had everything to do with them – that they, indeed, were the reason for it. It was impossible to forget that in a few hours’ time they would be taking off in those huge, forbidding machines, and the peaceful English afternoon would be transformed to a nightmare of flak and fighters in the skies over Germany.

Experienced airmen would try to avoid thinking of what lay ahead, and distract themselves with games of chess or football, or by laughing at the latest buffoonery of Pilot Officer Prune in Tee Emmagazine. It was best not to think of all the narrow escapes of previous sorties over the cauldron of Essen and the other cities of the Ruhr valley. And yet the thought inevitably surfaced: perhaps tonight their luck would run out. Bomber Command losses were running at almost five per cent at the time – in other words, one in every twenty planes on any given night would not come back. A standard tour was thirty operations. It did not take a mathematician to work out that the odds of finishing it alive were stacked against any airman.

For inexperienced crews the prospects were even worse: there was always a far higher proportion of losses among those who were on one of their first five operations. Brand new crews, or ‘sprogs’, as they were known, would have felt especially nervous about what lay ahead. All the training in the world could not prepare a young man for the stress of combat, and many were worried about how they might react. If a pilot panicked or a gunner froze at the wrong moment, it might mean not only his own death but that of his crewmates. It is important to remember that many airmen were still in their teens when they began flying – the average age of a new recruit into the training schools was twenty one – and many viewed their first operation as an important rite of passage into manhood. ³At this stage of the war they were aware that a significant number would be blown out of the sky.

At last, around five o’clock, the men were called. The crews would filter into the briefing room and take their places in the rows of chairs, some talking and joking to take their minds off the night ahead, but the majority gazing quietly at the board at the end of the room, curious about what lay beneath the sheet that covered it. Once the door was closed behind them there would be a roll-call, and then the officer in charge of operations – usually one of the flight commanders, but occasionally the commanding officer (CO) – would pull down the cover to reveal the target map. Across the room men would crane forward to see where the red line of ribbon on the map led to. For the benefit of those at the back, the officer would declare, in a loud, clear voice, ‘Your target for tonight, gentlemen, is Hamburg.’

For many crews there was a sense of at least partial relief on seeing the target. After numerous flights to the Ruhr, where the defences were second only to those at Berlin, it would make a welcome change: the flight to Hamburg was mostly over the North Sea, so there was less chance of being caught by flak on the journeys in and out. On the other hand, in some squadrons Hamburg was as notorious as anything the Ruhr could offer. In 57 Squadron, for example, Hamburg had a particularly bad reputation. They had not attacked the city since March, when the CO, Freddie Hop-croft, and his crew had almost been killed. Ever since then the CO had briefed other targets with the words, ‘Now, boys, the defences are nothing like as good as Hamburg’s, so you should be all right.’ After several months of this the strengths of the Hamburg defences had gained near-mythical status, and to learn that they were flying to the city naturally filled 57 Squadron crews with trepidation. ⁴

After a general briefing by the CO, describing their route, the time of attack and so on, a variety of other officers would take the stage. The meteorological officer would advise on weather conditions over the target and on the journey in. The armament officer would detail bomb loads, and the signals officer would brief them on what radio countermeasures they would use. Tonight, for the first time, the ground stations would be transmitting average windspeeds (or ‘Zephyrs’, as they were codenamed) to all the crews at regular intervals to help with navigation.

Eventually the intelligence officer took the stage. He commanded the men’s attention far better than the others because he told them where the danger spots would be on the outward flight and why they were going after this particular target. Hamburg, he explained, was not only a major hub of manufacturing, it was also Germany’s main centre of submarine production. If they could knock the city out of the war it would deal a blow not only to the Germans at home but to their effort in the battle of the Atlantic.

That day, however, the intelligence officer had something else to tell them. Once he had finished his normal spiel, he explained the secret behind the brown-paper packages that the crews had seen being loaded into the aircraft earlier. The silvery strips inside the parcels were called Window, he said, and they were a new and simple measure designed to confuse German radar defences.

‘You will already have been told how to drop Window,’ the intelligence officer continued; ‘it has been worked out as carefully as possible to give you maximum protection, but there are two points which I want to emphasize strongly. Firstly, the benefit of Window is a communal one: the Window which protects you is not so much that which you drop yourself as that which is already in the air dropped by an aircraft ahead. To obtain full advantage, it is therefore necessary to fly in a concentrated stream along the ordered route.

‘Secondly, the task of discharging the packets of Window will not be an easy one. You are hampered by your oxygen tube, intercom connections, the darkness and the general difficulties of physical effort at high altitudes. Despite these hardships, it is essential that the correct quantities of Window are discharged at the correct time intervals.’

He went on to explain that Window was considered so important that the Air Ministry was already developing machines to ensure a steady flow from the aircraft. In the meantime, however, it was up to the airmen themselves to maintain a ‘machine-like regularity’ when dropping the bundles down the flare chute.

‘When good concentration is achieved,’ he continued, ‘Window can so devastate an RDF defence system that we ourselves have withheld using it until we could effect improvements in our own defences, and until we could be sure of hitting the enemy harder than he could hit us. The time has now come when, by the aid of Window in conserving your unmatched strength, we shall hit him even harder.’ ⁵

During briefings the intelligence officer was often a figure of fun. Whenever he claimed that an operation would be a ‘piece of cake’, or that the route out to a target would be free from flak, he was greeted with jeers from the more cynical airmen. Today, however, his speech was greeted by a respectful silence. While some of the old hands privately doubted that a few bundles of silvered paper would protect them from the ferocity of the German defences, most crews seemed to accept the speech at face value. The secrecy that had so far surrounded the new device had obviously impressed them: this was not merely intelligence guesswork but something that had been worked out scientifically. Most of the airmen knew enough about radar to recognize its limitations; that it could be jammed by clouds of foil strips seemed plausible. Only time would tell.

Then the CO took the stage once more and asked if anyone had any questions – but by now they had been well briefed, and few had anything to ask. He told them to synchronize their watches, wished them luck and left the room.

As the men filtered out of the main briefing room there was no time to talk about the unusual speech they had heard, even if it had been seemly to do so. Many had now to go to shorter, specialist briefings, to make sure that all the minutiae of their duties were fixed firmly in their minds. Navigators would be given the exact route to and from the target, along with details of turning points, the winds they were likely to encounter and so on. Wireless operators were told which German frequencies they would be jamming, and reminded to listen out for the ‘Zephyr’ transmissions, while bomb-aimers were informed of what colour target indicators they would see, and which were the right ones to bomb.

It was only when all the crew members came together for their flight meal in the mess, at around seven o’clock, that they were able to discuss the forthcoming operation. By now, though, most were tired of it, and wanted to talk about something else. The only mention of the job that faced them would come in typical RAF gallows humour: they would shake their heads and run a finger across their throats to imply that another crew would be shot down. The anxious questions of new crews would be greeted with callous replies: ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. You’re not going to make it tonight anyway…’ ⁶As they collected their trays of bacon and eggs, beans, tomatoes and even fruit juice – rare luxuries in British civilian life in 1943 – some would use their sense of impending doom to flirt with the girls behind the counter, and entreat them to give them extra-large helpings. After all, they’d say, this might be their last meal. It wouldn’t do to die on an empty stomach: the least the kitchen staff could do was to fatten them up, like lambs for the slaughter, before they went out into the hellish skies over Germany.

* * *

After their meal, the men made their way to the parachute store to pick up their parachutes and don their flying gear. They would empty their pockets of everything personal – even the stub of a cinema ticket could give away important intelligence if they were captured – then fill them with everything they might need: escape kits, foreign currency, perhaps a penknife for emergencies, and the all-important flying rations to stave off hunger on the way home. The gunners and bomb-aimers looked strangely inflated: wearing several layers of jackets, including an electrically heated one, it was a miracle that they fitted into the confined spaces of the gun turrets.

As the crews waited for the trucks to come and take them to dispersal there was much laughing and joking – but the station staff, who had seen hundreds of air crews fly off never to return, knew it was all bluff. Even the most blaséairmen were exhibiting nerves, and each of the many different ways they found to fight down their fear had its own poignancy. Some lay on the grass, smoking pipes and gazing out into the dusk. Others flirted shamelessly with the WAAF drivers who came to pick them up, snatching a last opportunity to speak with a woman before taking off into the unknown. For the many New Zealanders, Australians and Canadians among the crews it sometimes helped to talk about their homes, thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. Superstition was rife. Some men were laden with lucky charms and dolls; when they lost or forgot one, they might fall into a blind panic. Many slavishly followed a little ritual as they prepared themselves – always wishing their crew members luck with the same words, always buttoning their coats in the same order, always taking the same seat in the truck to where their plane was waiting for them, huge and silent in the dusk by the perimeter track.

Out on the airfield, with half an hour to go before the engines were started, the airmen’s anxiety mounted still further. For Bill McCrea this was the worst time. Surrounded by the smell of kerosene and engine oil, the grey-blue mass of the aeroplane looming over him, there was nothing left to dispel his rising nerves:

You had to hang around at dispersal, and talk to the ground crew. That was very, very bad. We’d talk about anything, anything at all. Anything apart from what you had to do – the job. Sometimes I felt physically sick… It wasn’t what was happening at the time that was the problem. Whenever anything happened you could fight it, you had things to do. It was the thought of what mighthappen – that was the worrying thing. ⁷

As the sun was sinking over the horizon, the crews indulged in their last ritual of the evening – relieving their bladders against the huge wheels of the aircraft – then climbed into their positions inside. The pilot and flight engineer would run up the great Merlin engines in the correct order, one by one: ‘Starboard inner: contact.’ A press on the starter button, and the engine would roar into life. ‘Starboard outer…’ With all four engines running, the pilot and flight engineer checked the oil pressure, tested the throttles and magnetos for each engine. The navigator spread his maps, and the gunners crammed themselves into the turrets that would be their cages for the next six hours. On a signal from the flight engineer, the ground crew would pull away the wooden chocks from in front of the wheels and the aircraft would start to taxi round to the dispatcher’s caravan, where groups of WAAFs had gathered to wave goodbye to each plane as it headed off down the runway. A green light was flashed as the signal for take-off – radio silence was imperative, even now, in case the Germans got wind of the impending attack – and, with a roar, the first of 792 Lancasters, Stirlings, Halifaxes and Wellingtons took off into the gathering dusk.

Kenneth Hills, a bomb-aimer with 9 Squadron, remembers this moment as the most nerve-racking of all: ‘Taking off was always a sobering moment, bearing in mind what a tyre burst would do for you when you were full of high explosive and 100-octane fuel, bumping down the runway, seeing the perimeter hurtling at you, waiting for the lift-off which seemed endless, then suddenly you’re clear, no bumps, no tyre burst, just a lovely sound from the Merlins, and you’re on your way.’ ⁸

The first plane to leave the ground was Sergeant P. Moseley’s Stirling of 75 (New Zealand) Squadron at 9.45 p.m. He was soon overtaken by the faster Lancasters of the Pathfinder Force, who would be leading the attack. Of the hundreds of planes that headed down runways across England that evening, only one failed to take off; forty-five more would return to their bases with technical difficulties – an average figure for this time in the war.

For those who were left on the ground, take-off was always an impressive sight. ‘About twenty yards away we could just discern a vast dinosaurish shape,’ wrote one American observer on a similar night, as he watched the last of the stream of planes leaving the airfield.

After a moment, as if stopping to make up its mind… it lumbered forward, raising its tail just as it passed us, and turning from something very heavy and clumsy into a lightly poised shape, rushing through the night like a pterodactyl. At this instant, a white light was flashed upon it and a Canadian boy from Vancouver who was standing beside me, put down its number and the moment of departure. It vanished from sight at once and we stood staring down the field, where in a few seconds a flashing green light announced that it had left the ground…

A great calm settled over the place as the last droning motors faded out in the distance and we all drove back to the control room where staff hang onto the instruments on a long night vigil… I went to sleep thinking of the… youngsters I had seen, all now one hundred and fifty miles away, straining their eyes through the blackness relieved only by the star-spangled vault above them. ⁹

An hour later, just after 11.00 p.m., the last of the huge fleet of aircraft took to the air. The battle of Hamburg was about to begin.

* * *

Once each plane was airborne everyone’s nerves subsided. Each member of the crew had a job to do, and there was a sense of relief that the operation was finally under way. In the cockpit the pilot held the controls in both hands, wrestling the aircraft up into the sky, while the flight engineer advanced the throttles for one side or the other, to correct any swing that had developed after take-off. Flying a four-engined heavy bomber in 1943 was a physical business, and required brute strength, especially when taking off or landing.

Behind the pilot and the flight engineer, curtained off from the cockpit, the navigator sat, sideways on, at his table. Charts and log books were laid out before him, lit by a small Anglepoise lamp as he took his first reading of the night. ‘First course, Skipper, 032 degrees,’ he bellowed, through the intercom. It was difficult to hear one another over the deafening noise of the aircraft engines, and the men often had to speak loudly and clearly to make themselves understood.

Just behind the navigator, separated by banks of equipment, sat the wireless operator. Unlike the other members of the crew, he often spent the flight in his shirtsleeves: the Lancaster’s heating system had a hot-air outlet right beside him and he was the only member of the crew to stay warm throughout the trip. Beyond him was the main spar, which in the Lancaster was a waist-high wall of metal between the two wings – and beyond that were the stacks of Window, piled up next to the Elsan chemical toilet, ready to be dropped down the flare chute. A narrow ladder led up to the turret, where the mid-upper gunner scanned the sky above for the possibility of intruding German night fighters.

The final two members of the crew sat in the extremities of the plane. In the nose, beneath the cockpit, the bomb-aimer faced downwards, with nothing but a sheet of Perspex between him and a drop of thousands of feet to the ground. At the very back the ‘tail-end Charlie’ – the rear gunner – had nothing to look at but the fading glow of the sunset on the western horizon. Separated from the rest of the crew, he faced a lonely night. It was cold too: it was all too easy to mistake a smudge on the glass for an approaching night fighter, so the rear turret had a square section cut out of the Perspex in front of the gunner’s face, called a ‘clear-view panel’. The rear gunner was literally flying with a window open. At 20,000 feet temperatures could fall to –30°C and lower, and even his electrically heated suit could not always take the edge off a chill like that. Besides, some rear gunners either did not wear their heated suits or did not plug them in because they found the warmth made them drowsy. Rear gunners were often the only members of the crew to spot an approaching night fighter, and when the long dreary night could be interrupted in a split second it was better to remain alert, even if it meant shivering in Arctic temperatures.

* * *

There were four main types of British bomber in use at this stage of the war. The newest and most effective was the Avro Lancaster: a huge, sleek machine capable of flying to Berlin and back laden with over six tons of bombs. Its long, cigar-shaped fuselage was punctuated by five Perspex blisters, through which its crew would constantly scan the skies for attackers. Four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines along its wings could carry it to a height of 22,000 feet and above, and at speeds of 266 m.p.h. The Lancaster was unquestionably the best night bomber of the Second World War.

Slightly bigger and more temperamental in the air was the Handley Page Halifax. With a ceiling of 20,000 feet, the Halifax was relatively safe from flak, but its blind spot beneath the back of the aircraft made it vulnerable to fighters coming from behind and below. Despite its impressive ceiling, and top speed of over 275 m.p.h., it could carry only just over half the bomb load of a Lancaster.

The Short Stirling was often described as a ‘gentleman’s aircraft’: it was easy to handle, and capable of absorbing an enormous amount of punishment before it succumbed to flak or fighter fire. Without the waist-high spars that the Lancaster had in its interior, it was also relatively easy to escape from – which was fortunate, because its lamentable ceiling of only 16,000 feet made it the first target of all the German flak batteries. There are tales of Lancaster and Halifax crews cheering when they heard that Stirlings would be accompanying them on an operation, because they drew German fire away from the higher-flying machines.

The last type of aeroplane that flew to Hamburg that night was the twin-engined medium bomber, the Vickers Wellington. This unfortunate aircraft was virtually obsolete by this stage in the war, and seemed to combine all the worst drawbacks of all the four-engined ‘heavies’. It was slower, smaller, and had fewer guns to defend itself. It flew at a similar height to the Stirling, but could carry less than half its bomb load. Seventy-three of these aeroplanes had taken off for Hamburg that evening, with a further twelve tasked with minelaying in the Elbe estuary and dropping propaganda leaflets over France.

For the first part of the trip, the main force would also be accompanied by a small force of light bombers: eleven De Havilland Mosquitos would follow them across the North Sea, then peel off to attack alternative targets in Kiel, Lübeck, Bremen and Duisburg. These additional targets were merely diversions, designed to keep the Germans guessing about the main force’s true destination.

At first glance such diversionary missions looked extremely dangerous for the crews concerned: bombers are like herd animals – safe in numbers but vulnerable when they venture out alone. If one considers that the Mosquito was made only of plywood, and usually had no defensive armament, then those four diversionary raids looked like a suicide mission. However, Mosquitos were so fast, and capable of flying at such extreme altitudes, that they were virtually untouchable. All would return unscathed to England the next morning.

This, then, was the force that took off from airfields across England on 24 July. Its first task was to climb as high and as quickly as possible – the higher they were, the safer. As they did so, they set course for their crossing points on the English coast: 4 Group and the Canadians of 6 Group headed towards Hornsea, 1 and 5 Groups made for Mablethorpe, on the coast of Lincolnshire, while 3 Group and the Pathfinders of 8 Group headed for Cromer, in Norfolk.

Over those seaside towns all the separate squadrons in each group would merge into a wide stream heading out to sea. For those in the vanguard it was possible to make out many of the other aircraft filling the sky around them. By now it was well after ten o’clock, but with double summertime bringing the clocks forward two hours the sky was still fairly light, especially to the north and west. For those coming later it was already too dark to make out any of their fellow aeroplanes. Only the occasional blink of green and red navigation lights told them that they were not alone, but as they headed out to sea even those lights were extinguished, rendering almost eight hundred aircraft virtually invisible in the night.

As they made for the darkness of mainland Europe, the atmosphere inside each aeroplane was professional, businesslike. Each member of the crew was left to perform his duties in his own way. In general, strict radio silence was observed, and crews did not speak to each other on the intercoms unless there was something important to report. The only sound was the constant drone of the aircraft engines as they continued to climb as high as they could go, but in the thin, warm air of summer many aeroplanes struggled to reach their operational ceilings.

Leading the bomber stream were the Pathfinders of 8 Group. Behind them, spreading back over almost two hundred miles, was the rest of the force. They were heading to a point about eighty miles from the German coast – 54°45N, 07°00E – where the three separate streams of bombers were to merge into one, then turn towards the south-east and their target. The lead aircraft had already been in the air for two and a half hours. They turned at about twenty past midnight and headed towards the German coast on a bearing of 103°.