We headed out across the North Sea, thinking of home. Soon we were there.
Later we learned that more than forty British bombers had been shot down during the raid on Cologne before the German guns fell silent. Each plane had carried five, six or seven young men. The arithmetic of loss was all too easy to work out, but impossible to understand.
Two nights later, June I, we went back to Germany. Once again Bomber Command put up a force of one thousand bombers, the target this time the industrial city of Essen in the heart of the Ruhr valley. Later in the same month we returned to Essen, then twice more. We called it ‘turning over the rubble’, thinking that after the first raid there could be nothing left standing, but whenever we went back the German guns blazed out with terrific ferocity. The morale of the German people remained intact, their wish to take revenge on us more sharply defined with every raid. So we overwhelmed them, then flew home in the dark. What were we achieving?
I was approaching the end of my tour of duty, the one that had started at the outbreak of war. There was one more mission I had to fly. This was to Emden, a port on the north coast of Germany that was easy to locate because of its unique position: it faced south across an inlet bay. Even so, with such a compact target, so readily identifiable, the raid turned out to be another ‘failure’ for Bomber Command. Most of the bombs were later discovered to have fallen in the open countryside between the target and Osnabruck, some eighty miles away. Nine British aircraft were shot down for the sake of it. At the end of the raid I landed the Lancaster safely at Tealby Moor, and the next day I went on leave. By the time I returned to the squadron a week later my crew, whose own tours still had several missions outstanding, had dispersed.
I was re-posted within a few days, this time to 19 OTU, based near Liskeard in Cornwall. Like all pilots who completed a tour, I was to act as an instructor of new pilots for the next few months. A second tour of active duty would follow. I travelled down to Cornwall full of misgivings. For the next few weeks I went through the motions of being an instructor, but I was not good at it. Some people are born to be teachers, others are not.
The only consolation during those weeks was that I was not the worst instructor at the unit.
Deeper worries were nagging away inside me, though. My recent experiences had made me think about the way we were fighting our air war, what we were trying to achieve with it, whether or not it was the right thing to be doing.
I began to question my own motives and abilities. I suspected that such a mental process was part of the reason why crews were taken out of the front line: after thirty operations most aircrew were in a state of burn-out. A spell at an OTU gave you an opportunity to recover, rebuild your morale, think things out, then, in theory at least, return to operational flying not only refreshed but with a wealth of experience. Experience was a key to survival. The wastage of new crews was terrible. Even by mid-1942 it was known that the average number of sorties a crew-member would survive was only eight. After three raids you were considered to be a veteran. Few men completed thirty flights.
As I worked with the new pilots I could not get these facts out of my mind. I knew that most of the young recruits I was working with would soon be dead.
So there was that burden. But in addition my own fears were growing. So long as I kept flying, I did not think about it. The fear was there all the time, but once a mission was under way, once the plane was on track and working well and the target was in sight, then I could take the dangers in my stride. Away from the action, though, there was too much time to think.
Why were we constantly attacking civilian areas of cities while tactical raids were comparatively infrequent? Why did we seem never to attack the U-boat construction yards or their service pens? Why were aircraft- and tank-factories, oil refineries and pipelines, shipbuilding yards, power stations, army bases, fighter stations never targeted, except when they happened to be in some more general target zone? Surely these were the very engines of Hitler’s war machine?
Why were we trying, night after night, to damage civilian morale when every ordinary person in Britain knew from their own experience that the effect on civilians was to make them more, not less, determined? What was the point of it all?
25
After my spell of duty at the OTU I reported to my new-squadron, this one being 52 Squadron, based at RAF Barkston Ash, in Yorkshire. Not long after arrival I was assigned to a Lancaster and a crew, and I returned to operations.
We were at the end of summer in 1942 and Bomber Command was stepping up its campaign against Germany. There was a new commander-in-chief: the legendary, notorious and widely feared Air Marshal Arthur Harris, ‘Bomber’ Harris to the press, but ‘Butch’ (short for ‘Butcher’) to the crews who flew under his command.
Harris reorganized Bomber Command and introduced many changes. For all the increased danger to which Harris exposed us, morale began to improve. A sense of purpose surrounded what we were doing. Not only was the size of the bomber fleet increasing rapidly, the planes were being fitted with ever more complex electronic navigation, defence and target-locating devices. Certain top squadrons were designated as ‘pathfinders’, reaching the aiming zones ahead of the bomber stream, finding the targets, then laying down markers for the other planes to bomb. All pretence that we were trying to hit industrial or military targets was finally abandoned: the RAF followed a clear policy of area bombing, in which the houses, schools, hospitals and jobs of the German civilian population were what we were out to destroy.
I settled down to my second tour of duty with a sense of grim determination, closing my mind as far as possible to my doubts.
Gradually my number of completed missions began to notch up. I went to Flensburg, Frankfurt, Kassel, Bremen, Frankfurt again. At least two hundred bombers visited every target, and sometimes twice that number were sent, or even more. Our accuracy was improving, the percentage of aircraft we lost on each raid began to decline. The cities we visited were hit with increasing ferocity. They fought back when we arrived, they glowed like hot coals when we left.
It did not bear thinking about, so we thought only of ourselves, of our own survival. There was no end in sight to the war, so we were not due to finish yet.
In the middle of September 1942, after a raid on Osnabrück, I was given a weekend leave. I rode around the country lanes for a few hours on the motorbike before returning to the airfield. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. Two nights later, 52 Squadron was one of a dozen squadrons that visited Berlin. The big city, we called the place. Its size made it seem indestructible, but every time we went there we did our best to destroy it. That night we left the big city behind us, glowing in the dark, the smoke pouring into the moonlit sky.
I flew back to Germany another night and dropped bombs and incendiaries on the people who lived in Kiel. Later we went to Ludwigshafen, to Essen, to Cologne, to Dusseldorf, doing to them what we had come to do, overwhelming them from the air, then abandoning them to burn behind us as we flew home through the long nights. Next was Wuppertal. With three hundred other RAF planes, we dropped bombs and incendiaries on the people who lived there. We overwhelmed the defences, then left the place burning in the night as we set off for home.