Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory

скачать книгу бесплатно


The large map of Europe on the wall behind the platform offered a clue. It was the first thing the crews looked at when they trooped in. The red tape that traced their route to the target ‘started at Bardney, our base, ran down to the South Coast and across the Channel,’ remembered Flight Sergeant Fred Whitfield, who, though ‘tour expired’ after completing thirty trips as a rear gunner, had volunteered to carry on.3 ‘At that point it diverted across France on a dog leg and ended up in Southern Germany.’ Whitfield’s first thought was that it ‘looked like a daylight raid on Munich’.

The orderly officer called the crews to attention and with a scraping of chairs they got to their feet as Wing Commander Bazin walked down the aisle followed by his specialist officers, stepped onto the dais and began the briefing.

Jim Bazin, DFC and bar, seemed indestructible. Born in Imperial India, raised in a comfortable middle-class family in the North East of Britain, he served as a part-timer in an RAF auxiliary squadron for four years before the war and fought from the first day to what was now surely almost the last. By any reckoning of the odds he should have been dead several times over. Whatever terrors he had experienced had left no outward mark on him. When he spoke, it was in a cultured, amused accent, more like a university professor than a warrior.

‘Well, Gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘This is the big one.’4 He explained that at this late stage in the war they were being given a chance to land a blow on the man who had started it all. They were off to bomb Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. ‘Your particular aiming point for this attack is the house where this gentleman is supposed to live,’ he told them. ‘Whether he’s there is another matter.’ He paused for a second before going on. ‘But no doubt there will be plenty of people there to benefit from it.’5 The room rocked with laughter.

They settled down as the met, navigation and intelligence officers delivered the weather forecast and took them through the technicalities of route, plan of attack and expected opposition. When they finally filed out into the Lincolnshire night, heavy with the muddy smell of the surrounding fields, everyone was talking excitedly. They had all heard of Berchtesgaden, of course. To the older ones who remembered it from pre-war newsreels, it brought back memories of Chamberlain and Munich and national humiliation. For the younger airmen it was a name from the news bulletins, one of the three main military headquarters from which Hitler directed his forces. None of those who planned Bomber Command operations had seen fit to attack it before. Now, for reasons that no one explained in the briefing, the time had finally come.

The sky was clear and the moon, one day away from fullness, silvered the ridges of the potato fields surrounding the base. The aerodrome stood just north of the village of Bardney on the plain which stretches north from the Lincolnshire fenlands to the rising hills of the Wolds. It was one of more than a hundred bomber stations built during the early years of the war, a standard pattern of three concrete runways and three hangars, interspersed with utilitarian huts and sheds where the airmen, ground crews and WAAFs ate, washed and slept.6

There were two hours to take-off and much to be done beforehand. Operations boiled down to a succession of routines which had to be followed to the letter if you wanted to succeed and survive. But first they would eat, a meal that had long ago become a cliché: bacon and eggs and wodges of bread and margarine, washed down with American canned orange juice and mahogany-coloured tea.

They cleared their plates and headed for the crew room to climb into multi-layered flying gear and pick up their parachutes. For those who needed it there was a detour to the latrines to empty their bowels before they all climbed into canvas-covered four-ton lorries that trundled them out to dispersal where the bombers loomed, casting long moon shadows on the tarmac. The ground crew had been there for hours, refuelling, bombing up, checking the control surfaces and undercarriage, fussing over the machine as if it was their own lives that were at stake.

Those flying were swaddled like Michelin men but it still felt cold. The metal tube of the fuselage carried its own special chill. They climbed the five rungs of the ladder, through the hatch behind the gun turret amidships, and struggled to their posts. Pilot, flight engineer, navigator, bomb aimer and wireless operator wriggled forward to the nose, clambering over the thick spar that pinned together the bomber’s 102-foot wingspan. The gunners settled into their solitary nests behind them.

Each man began to run through the litany of checks and drills, second nature now from years of training and practice. For the gunners it took a few minutes. For the pilot and flight engineer it was more like half an hour. Then the pilot shouted down to the ground crew that he was ‘ready for starting’. A mechanic jumped forward to work the Ki-Gas pump and prime the carburettor of the first engine. Someone swung a white torch to indicate which engine to fire up first. From his seat, squeezed in next to the pilot, the flight engineer flipped on booster coil and main ignition switches and opened the master fuel cock. The pilot thumbed the starter button and with an explosive thud and a volley of flame and smoke, one by one the Merlin engines burst into life, filling the rural silence with a deep-throated roar. In the farms and villages around the bomber bases the noise was now as familiar as birdsong.

More minutes passed before the dials showed every engine had reached the right temperature and pressure. It was a laborious business but there was no rushing it. The machine was what got you there and got you home. This day of all days, with the finishing line in sight, was no time to get careless.

A-Able was the first away. It was 5 a.m. and still pitch-black but the clear sky promised a fine day. The Lancaster moved off jerkily, stopping and starting as the pilot tested the flaps and brakes. It rolled onto the runway, waiting for the signal on the Aldis lamp mounted on the control van to flash from red to green. Lining the tarmac were the usual party of WAAFs and ground staff gathered to wave and smile and pray for a safe return. This morning there were others present. Standing among them were the BBC reporter and soundman who had been at the briefing. That evening the journalist’s report, delivered in a bright, modern voice, very different from the plummy tones of the pre-war Corporation, would go out on the evening news:

‘Hallo BBC. This is Brian Bliss with Bomber Command. It’s Zero Hour, the attack is on and the first Lancaster’s swinging into position at the head of the runway right opposite me now … here she comes … remember this is the squadron which sank the Tirpitz and now they’re off to Berchtesgaden with twelve thousand pounders. Twelve thousand pounders! And they’re taking the attack literally to Hitler’s doorstep!’7 Millions of listeners heard the engine note rising sharply as the revs climbed, then fading as Bliss, almost shouting now, announced that ‘A-Able is off … a marvellous sight as she races by!’

In Q-Queenie, rear gunner Fred Whitfield sat in his turret and waited with the rest of the crew for their turn. After thirty operations together they knew each other as well as they did their own families. They were ordinary men from all over Britain. The pilot, Ron Adams, came from Wembley, London, Larry Brown the flight engineer was from Leeds, bomb aimer Phil Jackson from Nottingham, navigator Jim Lynam from Scunthorpe, wireless operator Jack Faucheux from Romford and the mid-upper gunner Frank Stebbings from Tunbridge Wells. Fred Whitfield was a Geordie, born in South Shields.

Starting operations in the aftermath of D-Day, they had bombed V weapons sites, marshalling yards, bridges and U-boat pens, before resuming the assault on German cities. They had been shot up by a night fighter and only made it home thanks to the skill and determination of ‘Lucky’ Adams who, though only twenty-one, was in Whitfield’s eyes ‘the best pilot in the RAF’. The gunners gave as good as they got. Whitfield and Stebbings had several kills to their credit, and the crew’s ‘press-on’ spirit had earned them four Distinguished Flying Medals and one Distinguished Service Cross between them. It had needed courage, skill and the closest teamwork to come through these trials and their faith in each other was strong. The raid they were about to embark on seemed less hazardous than most. But everyone knew of a crew that had bought it on their last mission. While he waited Whitfield ‘closed my eyes for a couple of minutes and had a few words with my God’.8

Then Q-Queenie was shuddering with the pent-up kinetic energy of four Merlin engines as Ron Adams jammed on the brakes and opened the throttle to maximum revs. He eased off and the Lancaster bounded forward. At about 50 knots (57mph) Whitfield ‘felt the turret lift as the tail wheel left the ground. “90 knots, 100 knots, 120 knots,” said the engineer, reading the speed. The skipper eased back on the control column. Queenie was airborne. We climbed, slowly gaining height.’

Once all aircraft were at 10,000 feet they formed a loose gaggle, and set course for Cap Gris Nez near their rendezvous with the squadron with whom they would be spearheading the raid. 617 Squadron were friends and rivals and their base was only a few miles from Bardney at Woodhall Spa. The two operated together often, specializing in missions requiring great skill and accuracy, and as Brian Bliss reminded his listeners six months before had finished off Hitler’s last remaining battleship with a volley of ‘earthquake’ bombs as she lay crippled in Tromsø fjord. The exploit had added extra lustre to the reputation of 617, already famous as the Dam Busters. However, as their sister squadron liked to point out, they were relative sprogs in the bombing game, having been created only two years earlier, whereas 9 Squadron dated back to 1914 and had been in continuous action from the very start of the war.

The sister squadrons made up just a small part of a huge force bearing down on Berchtesgaden. The pre-dawn sky of eastern England was thick with aircraft heading in the same direction. Three hundred and fifty-nine bombers were being thrown into the attack. Guiding them were sixteen Mosquitoes from Path Finder Force, equipped with special navigation aids to fix the target, tucked, safely until now, in the folds of the Bavarian Alps. Only five years before, an armada of this size was a distant fantasy. Yet this was not even the biggest raid of the day. An even larger formation was heading off to the North Sea island of Wangerooge, to smash up shore batteries that menaced Allied shipping delivering supplies to the port of Bremen for the armies encircling Berlin.

The RAF of April 1945 bore little resemblance to the organization Jim Bazin had joined eleven years before. In that time it had expanded enormously, evolving from a tight, professional elite drawn mainly from the top layers of society into a vast structure, more than a million strong. It had long ceased to be an overwhelmingly British enterprise. Scattered among the squadrons today were Poles, Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians, Americans, Canadians, Frenchmen and Dutchmen, Norwegians and Danes, only some of the sixty nationalities which had found a home in the Air Force.

The spirit of amateurism that still flickered in the pre-war service had long ago been snuffed out by the demands of war and replaced by a ruthless professionalism. Five years and eight months before, 9 Squadron had taken part in the first proper British air raid of the war. On 4 September 1939, together with 149 Squadron, they flew in appalling weather across the North Sea to attack German warships lying near Brunsbüttel. They had only dead reckoning to get them there and their twin-engine Wellingtons were loaded with primitive bombs. Against great odds, most of the raiders managed to find the target area but it was covered with cloud and fiercely defended by flak and fighters. Only one crew claimed to have hit anything. Two 9 Squadron aircraft were brought down and all ten on board killed. There would be hundreds of other futile sorties before the RAF began to function efficiently as a war machine. Now the process was complete. The days of wasted effort and useless sacrifice were long gone and the British and American air forces enjoyed almost total mastery of the skies of Europe.

The shoals of Lancasters cruised on, dark and ominous in the moonlight, pausing to circle at their rendezvous point above the towns of Arras, Valenciennes and Laon near the Franco-Belgian border. Then, with 9 Squadron and 617 Squadron in the lead, they set off south and east towards the Alps and Berchtesgaden.

The crews had been given their specific targets at early morning briefings at nineteen bases spread over the bomber counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Norfolk. The lead squadrons had the most difficult task. Their objectives were, as Bazin warned his men, ‘very, very small indeed’9 and hidden in the pine-covered clefts of a tall mountain range. The first was the Eagle’s Nest, a spectacular pavilion, built for Hitler as a retreat and diplomatic reception centre on top of a rocky spur called the Kehlstein, 6,000 feet above sea level. The second was Hitler’s house, the Berghof, which sat, five miles down the mountain, on the shoulder of the humped ridge known as the Obersalzberg. The surrounding area was enclosed by fences and guard posts. Inside the security zone some of the leading figures of Hitler’s court – Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann and Albert Speer – had built villas and the rock beneath it was honeycombed with bomb shelters and storerooms. The complex also housed a communications centre from where Hitler could keep in touch with his commanders.

The chances of a direct hit on either target were slight. With the armament 9 and 617 Squadrons were carrying, however, perfect accuracy was not essential. At the start of the war the biggest weapon in the RAF’s armoury was the 500lb General Purpose bomb. It contained more metal than explosive and many of those produced were duds. Today the thirty-two aircraft of the lead squadrons were carrying 12,000lb ‘Tallboys’, aerodynamically optimized dart-like missiles devised by the engineering genius Barnes Wallis that plunged deep into the ground before exploding, creating an earthquake effect that devastated everything around.

Behind them came a stream of bombers from the Main Force, the workaday squadrons which had spent the last three years smashing Germany’s cities, causing and suffering appalling casualties. They would attack in two waves. Their main objective was the most prominent feature on the Obersalzberg, the barracks which housed the SS troops who guarded Hitler and his entourage.

Was he there or wasn’t he? It seemed unlikely, but it was left to squadron commanders to raise or lower the expectations of their men as they saw fit. Bazin had chosen to play down the possibility. Others decided it would be enjoyable to hint that Hitler might well be at home. Either way, this was an operation most were proud to be part of, something to tell the grandchildren they were beginning to allow themselves to believe they might one day have.

The Dam Busters were led by Squadron Leader John Brookes, who was also in overall charge of the operation. The honour should have gone to their CO, Wing Commander Johnny Fauquier but he had been told by his superiors that he had exceeded his permitted number of operations and would not be on the trip. The blunt-spoken Canadian did not bother to hide his annoyance when he spoke to Brookes at the briefing. ‘I’d like to have this target in my log book,’ he told him. ‘In fact I would like to have this target tattooed on my arse, but you have got to lead it.’10

The route took the bombers southwards towards Paris. There they turned again, south and east cruising at a steady 145 knots and ninety minutes later saw the snow glowing pink as the sun broke over the ramparts of the Swiss Alps.

At points along the way they were joined by more than two hundred Mustangs from RAF Fighter Command and the US Eighth Air Force. For most of the war the bombers had gone forth alone with only their on-board guns to protect them from flak and fighters. Now long-range escorts shepherded Allied bombers to and from their raids. Today there scarcely seemed a need for them.

H-Hour had been set for 9 a.m. As the bombers droned closer, the people of Berchtesgaden blithely went about their morning routines. Hitler’s presence had seemed like a blessing at first, bringing attention and excitement to the valley. The modest villa he had first rented in 1928 had been transformed over the years into something more suited to a man of destiny. The result was what one architectural historian described as ‘a combination of faux rusticity and imposing grandeur akin to a Thurn und Taxis princess decked out in a haute-couture dirndl’.11

At the heart of the house was the Great Hall. It was the size of a hangar, furnished with elephantine armchairs and hung with tapestries and paintings by Italian masters. Set into the northern wall was a picture window, thirty yards square, which, thanks to an ingenious mechanism, wound down into a recess in the floor. It was, enthused Diana Mosley, wife of the Blackshirts’ leader Oswald Mosley, ‘the largest piece of glass ever made … through it one sees this huge chain of mountains and it looks more like an enormous cinema screen than like reality …’12

Adolf Hitler, Obersalzberg (Photo by ullstein bild/ullsteinbild via Getty Images)

As well as being the closest thing that Hitler had to a home, the Berghof made useful propaganda. It was a backdrop against which he could demonstrate his more human side. He was pictured in trilby, loden jacket and flannels, feeding deer and smiling at flaxen-haired little girls. It was a place for relaxation where he breathed the mountain air and stood at the enormous window looking out at the Untersberg, where legend had it that the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa lay sleeping, awaiting the hour when he would rise again and build a German empire that would last for a thousand years.

It was also a place of business, an ideal setting in which to impress or intimidate the politicians who trooped there in the countdown to the war. Stamped in the memories of the older airmen were images of an infamous visit that had taken place six and a half years earlier. On the morning of 15 September 1938 the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arrived at Berchtesgaden to try and avert another European conflagration. Hitler was demanding that Czechoslovakia allow the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland to unite with the fatherland or face invasion. By the end of the meeting, Chamberlain was persuaded it was worth sacrificing Czechoslovakia for the sake of a shameful peace. Twelve months later the Second World War began.

Allied bombers had since wrecked every major German city killing hundreds of thousands. Berchtesgaden had been left alone and was barely touched by the war. The local economy boomed, supplying the Nazi colony which expanded as the elite moved their families and wealth out of bomb-blasted Berlin. Hitler was a frequent visitor. Between 1939 and 1944 he spent more time at the Berghof than he did in the capital, but nine months ago he had left and not been seen again.

That Wednesday morning there was one very senior Nazi in residence, however. Hermann Goering had turned up at his villa to join his family a few days before. He left Berlin on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, and had tried to persuade the Führer to go with him to Berchtesgaden. The overture had been rejected contemptuously. As he drove out of the city and Allied air raids began, Goering and his entourage ducked into a public shelter. ‘May I introduce myself,’ he declared as the bombs rained down. ‘My name is Meyer.’ It was a bitter joke. Years before he had promised that if British bombers ever struck Germany ‘you may call me Meyer’ – a very common German, and also Jewish, name. Astonishingly, the huddled crowd burst into laughter.13

His flight brought him no nearer to safety. On arrival at the villa, Goering had made an ill-judged attempt to take over leadership of the Reich, in accordance with an agreement struck with Hitler in June 1941 that he should assume the powers of the Führer should he be captured or incapacitated. The move was interpreted as an act of treachery, and that morning two senior SS officers had showed up, pistols in hand, to arrest him.

The drama was interrupted when, up and down the valley, the air raid sirens sounded. Despite interference from the mountains on the Pathfinders’ ‘Gee’ electronic navigation systems, the lead aircraft arrived almost exactly on time, just before 9 a.m. Squadron Leader Brookes of 617 squadron was to bomb first. His target was the Eagle’s Nest. It was extremely hard to spot from the bombing height of 15–16,000 feet. Neither Brookes nor his bomb aimer were able to identify anything that was worth wasting a Tallboy on. Three of the following aircraft did drop their bombs, but none scored a direct hit.

Then it was 9 Squadron’s turn. As they approached the Berghof, the flak batteries set into the valley sides were banging away, pumping up streams of accurate flak at the bombers coming in at between 14,000 and 15,000 feet. Flight Lieutenant G. J. Campbell broadcast later on the BBC that he saw a ridge flash below him as his pilot Flying Officer J. Buckley brought him ‘almost dead ahead of the house. I had a perfect run up and released my twelve-thousand pound bomb with the house dead in the sight.’14

Campbell’s Tallboy was fuzed at twenty-five seconds.15 From a Lancaster following close behind, rear gunner Flight Sergeant E. J. Cutting watched ‘a twelve thousand pounder land about a hundred yards from Hitler’s house’.16 There was ‘a terrific flash and though we were flying pretty high we could hear the explosion above the roar of our engines and the whole plane seemed to rock,’ he told radio listeners. Then ‘great piles of earth came shooting up, high into the sky. I thought to myself well, even if that’s a bit short, it must have damaged the place. But just at that moment there was another flash, followed by a huge explosion. One of the other aircraft had planted its twelve thousand pounder bang on the target.’

By now the Main Force squadrons had arrived and the sky over the valley was dangerously crowded with huge aeroplanes. Cutting’s pilot reported at the post-operation debrief that ‘interference from other aircraft was so great’ that he was unable to identify the target on the run-in and was ordered by the master bomber controlling the operation from another Lancaster not to bother making a second effort. Another pilot, Squadron Leader James Melrose, stated that ‘just as the bomb aimer was preparing to drop the bomb, the aircraft was narrowly missed by a bomb from [an] aircraft above, and the target was accordingly overshot and it was impossible to bomb’.17 Fred Whitfield’s main concern was the anti-aircraft fire. The gunners had found their range and ‘the sky was black with flak’.18 The bomb aimer, Phil Jackson, seemed unaware of the shells rocking their kite as he talked Ron Adams in. Then Q-Queenie ‘appeared to leap a thousand feet in grateful thanks for being relieved of five tons of metal’. Relief was brief. A few seconds later he heard a ‘huge bang … we went into a steep dive. The port engine was on fire.’ Then came ‘another almighty bang’ apparently caused by one of the giant bombs hitting the top of the mountain. This blast hurled Q-Queenie upwards, blowing out the flames licking around the engine in the process. Swinging his turret to port Whitfield looked back up the inside of the aircraft for damage and saw jagged holes in the fuselage but the Lancaster flew on unperturbed. As they turned away he had a grandstand view of the Main Force attack.

Their target was the SS barracks, about a hundred yards from the Berghof. From the bellies of the aircraft, 4,000lb, 1,000lb and 500lb bombs tumbled out. Some fell on a hotel next door to the Berghof used for housing visitors, others on the villa of Martin Bormann who had managed to secure a prime spot for his house right next to his master. Emmy Goering was in her bedroom when she heard the first explosion. Her first thought was for her daughter and she ‘ran to Edda’s room but the governess had already taken her to the shelter’, in the cellar of the house.19 Next, she sought her husband and found him shaving, apparently unconcerned. He told her to go to the shelter but said he would not be joining her. When she insisted on staying with him, he relented. Had he not, his story might have ended there. One bomb landed in the swimming pool a few yards from the window of his study. The blast brought down the roof of the villa and collapsed the main staircase.

The bombs fell on innocent and guilty alike. When the sirens sounded school children were ordered to return home. Ten-year-old Irmgard Hunt was hurrying back with her sister Ingrid and friends when they ‘began to hear the droning of bombers overhead’.20 They were given a lift by a passing SS driver who let them out near their house. As the car drove off the first explosions erupted. The noise of the bombs was ‘hellish’. It was followed by ‘an enormous storm-like wind that would have blown me off my feet had I not gripped the rough bark of the nearest spruce and pressed myself against it … We waited for a pause after each explosion to race to the next tree before the blast of air hit us.’

They reached home and crouched with their mother in the basement flinching from the ‘horrendous noise that engulfed us, even in the cellar’. Next day Irmgard and Ingrid walked back to school. ‘As the Obersalzberg came into view we saw the devastation. The plateau had become a chaotic brown-and-black mess of tree stumps that looked like charred matchsticks, dark craters and smoking ruins. “It’s all gone”, I said to myself.’

Half of the SS barracks was demolished. The villas of the elite were wrecked. Emmy Goering had left her jewellery in the house and was relieved when a servant found it among the wreckage. The Berghof had been gutted and the great picture window that had delighted pre-war guests was no more than a hole in the wall. The bombs had killed thirty-one in their usual indiscriminate fashion, with local civilians and foreign slave workers as well as SS troops among the casualties.

The raiders had suffered, too. Two Lancasters were brought down by flak. One crash-landed without casualties. Another, F-Freddie from 619 Squadron, provided a last story of heroism from the RAF’s war. With the machine fatally damaged, the Canadian pilot Wilf DeMarco ordered the crew to jump while he held the aircraft steady. Three got out alive. The other three went down with their skipper.

The bombers landed at their home bases between noon and two o’clock. Because of the battering it had received, Q-Queenie was excused joining the queue of aircraft circling the base and given permission to land at once. Ron Adams made a smooth touchdown and taxied to dispersal where they were met by the ground crew eager to hear their adventures and dispensing cigarettes. After eight hours without a smoke, Fred Whitfield remembered, the first puff ‘was pure nectar’.21 When, in bomber bases up and down the east of England, the crews sat down to be debriefed by station intelligence officers, the same observation was repeated over and over. During the entire eight-hour trip they had not seen a single German aeroplane.

The exploit covered the front pages of the following day’s newspapers. ‘Hitler’s Chalet Wrecked’ was the headline in The Times. The Daily Express lead announced: ‘Hitler Bombed Out – 5-tonners right on der Fuhrer’s house’, adding that ‘Berchtesgaden was the target that every bomber pilot had longed to attack for nearly six years’.

Nobody asked why it had never been hit before now. Nor was the military usefulness of the exercise questioned. The truth was that the Berghof had been mentioned frequently when target lists were being drawn up but had always been rejected. Allied intelligence knew about the deep bomb shelters dug to protect the leadership and reckoned the negative publicity of a failed attempt to finish Hitler was not worth the effort. Later the calculation changed. The fear now was that the bombers might succeed, and the defence of Germany would pass to the hands of someone more competent and rational.

On 25 April 1945, with Hitler’s empire reduced to a few square miles in the heart of a burning city, there was less reason than ever to attack Berchtesgaden with such extravagant force. None was offered. The raid on Hitler’s mountain retreat was an overwhelmingly British operation, in conception and execution, with American aircraft playing only a secondary role. Its purpose was thus symbolic and the message was from Britain to the world. Hitler had started the war, and it was the British alone who had stood out against him. It had taken a great coalition to defeat him but without that initial defiance there might have been no victory. Smashing Berchtesgaden was a reminder of that truth. It was fitting that it was the Royal Air Force that delivered the blow.