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.