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 alclass="underline" ‘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.