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Making the best of all that you find
Leaving your cares and your worries behind
Laughing at your troubles and your trials and your strife
Yes, that is the best way of looking at life …
An air of complacency seems to have hung over the pleasant streets of Coventry in the early part of the war. Its politics were Labour, a consequence of the strong trade-union movement rooted in the factories. Coventry people made weapons but many were opposed to their use. Pacifism and the disarmament movement were strong. In Coventry, as elsewhere, a strange mood of insouciance, verging on fatalism, was noticeable as the violence grew nearer. When, in the spring of 1939, the authorities offered Anderson bomb shelters at a price of five pounds (free for the lower-paid) there were few takers. Those who accepted had their legs pulled for being ‘windy’.
In June 1940, when the first bombs dropped on Ansty aerodrome just outside the city, they were seen as a novelty. People set out in cars and on bicycles to gawp at the craters. The thrill soon wore off. Between 18 August and the end of October Coventry was attacked seventeen times, killing 176. As the casualty list lengthened, people started leaving the city at night, ‘trekking’ to the safety of the surrounding countryside. The better off went by car, the less affluent by bus. The very poorest piled bedding on to prams and walked out, sleeping under bridges.
By the time of the big raid people had grown accustomed to the howl of the sirens and the nuisance of shifting down to the basement or heading to the nearest public shelter. For the workers of the fire service and Air Raid Precautions, the attacks provided good practice. They had seen mutilated bodies and knew what an air raid felt like.
Despite the acknowledged threat, Coventry’s defences were weak, with only thirty-six anti-aircraft guns protecting the city. There were searchlights and fifty-six reassuring-looking barrage balloons wallowed over the city, but they were not much of a deterrent on the fatal night. RAF night-fighters found tracking intruders in the dark an almost impossible task and their success rate was to remain pitifully low until enough aircraft were fitted with radar.
A shelter-building programme had been accelerated as the raids continued and there was room inside them for most of the population but many of them were damp and cheaply built. The council’s emergency committee kept an informal log of what was being said in bus queues and pubs. The state of the shelters, the feebleness of the anti-aircraft defences and the absence of British fighters were consistent themes of complaint.
Coventry’s transformation from an obscure Midlands city to an international symbol of civilian suffering and the inhumanity of modern war started at dusk on Thursday 14 November when crews of the Luftwaffe Pathfinder Force Kampfgruppe 100 boarded Heinkel 111s and took off from a base at Vannes, north of Saint-Nazaire. Coventry was one of three targets that night. The others were Wolverhampton and Birmingham.
The moon began to rise over Coventry at 5.18 p.m. Everyone would later recall its extraordinary brightness. It gleamed on the cobbles of the old city and the lead roof of the cathedral. The sight made people nervous. The citizens had come to fear a bomber’s moon. At 7.10 p.m. the sirens sounded. This was early for a raid to be announced and the apprehension deepened. Ten minutes later the Germans were overhead and the bombardment began. It started with small incendiaries. They made a curious swishing noise as they fell. By now people had learned how to deal with them, picking them up with a long-handled shovel and dropping them into a bucket of water or sand.
But they came down in huge numbers and the emergency services and volunteer firewatchers were soon overwhelmed. At 9.31 p.m. the first high explosive (HE) bombs hit the ground. A firewatcher’s log recorded at 9.40 p.m.: ‘Cathedral blazing fiercely. HEs all around the city centre.’ The sirens had sent women and children hurrying out into the blacked-out streets to seek the public shelters, or down into their basements or back-garden Andersons. ‘When the sirens sounded I was doing homework in our front room,’ Dennis Field remembered. ‘The continual drone of engines and falling bombs made it quickly obvious that the raid was unusually heavy and Mum and I soon decided to go to next-door’s shelter where we had an open invitation when things looked sticky. It was cold and we took extra coats … the bombs rained down … many times we crouched down expecting the worst … occasionally there were colossal bangs and blasts which blew open the door. I wanted to go out and see what was happening and to help if I could but demurred to Mum’s pleadings and restricted myself to occasional peers outside. The sky seemed aglow with the brightest huge conflagration lighting the sky in the direction of the city centre.’
After the initial fire-raising attack lit up the city the main force of bombers converged on it in three streams, crossing the English coast at Lincolnshire, Portland and Dungeness. The raid had been planned in considerable detail. Each of the eight bomber units involved had been assigned an objective. Their targets included the Alvis aero-engine factory, the Standard Motor Company, the British Piston Ring Company, the Daimler works and the Hill Street Gasworks. The greatest destruction was done to the Daimler factory to the north of the city centre, which produced among other things rotating gun turrets. The site was struck by up to 150 HE bombs and 3,000 incendiaries. The Alvis factory was bombed flat. Altogether twenty-seven war production factories including twelve engaged in making aeroplanes were hit.
The raid reached a climax around midnight. A survivor remembered ‘a night of unforgettable horror – the scream of falling bombs – the shattering explosions – the showers of incendiaries, literally thousands, and then … perhaps the most horrifying sight of all – the sudden fires leaping up, their flames, fanned by the wind, rapidly spreading and enveloping all within reach.’
The smell of the burning city reached up to the bombers. A crewman, Hans Fruehauf, who had taken part in the first London raids, looked down on the lake of fire and wondered what he was doing. ‘The usual cheers that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats. The crew just gazed down at the flames in silence. Was this really a military target, we all asked ourselves?’
A ‘Front Reporter’ for the German propaganda service was a passenger in one of the aircraft. He had no doubts of the legitimacy of what he witnessed. ‘We could see enormous fires raging, some white and brilliant, others dark red. Then came the high spot of the raid, the dropping of the bombs … a tremor went through the machine as the bombs dropped … our bombs had hit their mark; the fires extended … it is the nerve centre of the British armament industry which had been hit, and I am proud that I witnessed this.’
The anti-aircraft guns soon ran out of ammunition and there was no sign of RAF night-fighters so the Germans were free to bomb as they pleased, swooping in low to improve accuracy. As mains were shattered and hydrants buried under rubble, the firemen’s hoses ran dry. Crews drafted in from outside watched impotently as Coventry burned. The fire was fiercest in the old city centre. John Sheldon who owned a stables in Little Park Street described the din of ‘falling walls, girders, pillars, machinery crashing four storeys, the droning of the planes as they let go their bombs and the rattling of shrapnel on corrugated sheeting’. It seemed to him that no one caught in the open could possibly have survived.
The fire created weird effects. In Broadgate, in the heart of the city, the smell of roasting meat from burning butcher shops mingled with the scent of fine Havanas from the tobacconists, Salmon and Gluckstein. Inside the shelters, the air was thick with plaster and brick dust shaken loose by the pounding, and the stench of filth from the primitive or non-existent latrines. The overwhelming feeling was of powerlessness. It was better to be outside doing something. The ARP and Auxiliary Fire Service workers, the ambulancemen, doctors and nurses found they were too busy to be afraid. The urge to not let oneself down, to be seen to be coping and doing one’s best was a strong antidote to fear or at least a help in suppressing it. ‘Everyone was working as a member of a team,’ said a student nurse at Gulson Road Hospital which was inundated with casualties after the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital suffered heavy damage. ‘Even the consultants who were normally treated like little gods and who to us poor nurses never seemed to be in the best of moods became human.’ During her training she had dreaded having to assist at an amputation and had arranged to be off duty when such operations were scheduled. ‘The blitz on Coventry changed all that for me. I didn’t have time to be squeamish.’
Despite the ferocity of the attack, rescue workers struggled on. Instead of reducing the value of life, the scale of the slaughter seemed to increase it. Every death averted, every existence saved, was a small victory. The hope of preserving a life drove the rescue teams to extraordinary lengths of selflessness. Les Coleman, an air-raid warden, heard a baby crying from beneath the rubble of a demolished house. He and his mates scrabbled for hours at the pile of bricks, fearful of using picks and shovels in case they hurt the child. Overhead the Luftwaffe were busy and the bombs fell steadily. They only stopped digging when the crying faded to silence.
The all-clear sounded at 6.16 p.m., eleven hours after the first warning. Few heard it. Most of the electricity cables that powered the sirens were cut. Gradually people crept from the shelters into a drizzly morning and a changed world. The first thing they did was to look for their houses. Dennis Field found his, ‘like most around, with windows out and roof damaged and clearly uninhabitable.’ At least it was still standing. Whole streets had disappeared and landmarks vanished. The town seemed to have dissolved. The survivors walked through mounds of smoking debris flickering with flame, around craters big enough to swallow a bus. The most shocking sight was the cathedral. It lay open to the sky. The roof and the pillars had collapsed and everything inside the nave had burned to ash, piled up within the sagging external walls. All that remained was the spire and tower.
Coventry had been hit by 503 tons of high explosive, 56 tons of incendiaries and 127 parachute mines. The city was like others which had expanded during the Industrial Revolution. The workers’ houses were huddled along the flanks of the factories they worked in. It was inevitable that the German bombs, no matter how well aimed, would hit them. Altogether 42,904 homes were destroyed or damaged, 56 per cent of the housing in the city. The number of dead was put at 554. Another 863 were seriously injured.
This was the most concentrated attack of the Blitz to date. To Britain and its allies it seemed that the Germans had set a new standard in ruthlessness. Those who took part in the raid believed they were engaged in a respectable act of war. At the pre-operation briefing, crews were told by their commander that Coventry was ‘one of the chief armament centres of the enemy air force and has also factories which are important for the production of motor vehicles and armoured cars.’ If the raid succeeded, he said, ‘we shall have dealt another heavy blow to Herr Churchill’s war production.’
The raid was indeed a great success. Eight hours after it ended, German radio listeners were told that bombers had ‘inflicted an extraordinarily heavy blow on the enemy’ and that Coventry had been ‘completely wiped out’. In the broadcast a notorious word was heard for the first time. What the bombers had done was to koventrieren, to Coventrate, the city.
Until now civilian spirits had held up well in air attacks. Coventry provided a new and sterner test of morale. The raids on London so far had been heavy but scattered. The attacks on places like Liverpool and Southampton had been limited and of much shorter duration. The violence against Coventry seemed more focused and therefore potentially more traumatic than anyone else had experienced. It was here that the question of whether Britain could take it might be answered.
The first evidence was troubling. As people struggled to recover, a feeling of numb hopelessness appears to have set in. By now there were reporters around to record the city’s mood. Hilde Marchant, a thoughtful and courageous Daily Express correspondent who had witnessed the war in Spain, arrived while fires still burned and buildings toppled. She came across a dazed-looking group standing helplessly in the street, ‘occasionally asking when bread was coming into the city. There was no clamour, just sullen resentment at the inconvenience. They had patience because they were too weary to be angry.’ Outside the Council House, the municipal headquarters, she saw a long queue. ‘Men without collars and still in their carpet slippers. Women in woollen dressing gowns and slippers just as they had come from the shelter … asking for food and money.’
When an aeroplane appeared overhead there was a wild scramble and women hauled their children to the nearest shelter. The aircraft shifted in the sky to reveal RAF roundels, but it was some time before anyone was persuaded to come out. Some people had never left the shelters after the all-clear. Peering into one, Marchant saw two adults and two children ‘with greenish faces, so still that they looked dead’. A team from the pioneering social study group Mass Observation, veterans of bomb attacks on London and elsewhere, arrived in Coventry on Friday afternoon less than a dozen hours after the raid finished. Their report claimed the attack had caused ‘unprecedented dislocation and depression’, compared with what they had seen before. ‘There were more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis observed than during the whole of the previous two months together in all areas,’ it said. ‘Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman and so on. The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness. The tremendous impact of the previous night had left people practically speechless in many cases. And it made them feel impotent. There was no role for the civilian. Ordinary people had no idea what they should do (original emphasis).’
The lack of organization or direction was unsurprising given the power of the attack. The mayor and his officials, the men who ran the city’s services, had all suffered the same experience as everyone else. An individual report by a Mass Observation representative suggested that Coventry’s relative smallness meant the ‘shock effect of the bombing was much greater than in London … everybody knew somebody who was killed or missing … everybody knew plenty of people who had been rendered temporarily or permanently homeless. And these subjects occupied literally 90 per cent of all conversation heard throughout Friday afternoon and evening. Even in Stepney at the beginning of the Blitz there was not nearly so much obsession with damage and disaster.’
This was to be expected and no indication of despair. But the observer also noted that people seemed anxious to leave Coventry behind, reporting that ‘the dislocation is so total in the town that people easily feel that the town itself is killed (original emphasis).’
This was the reaction that the authorities had feared, opening the way to anarchy. It was particularly disastrous if it happened in Coventry. If the city descended into chaos and flight, who would man the war factories when they were rebuilt, as they would have to be if the struggle was to continue?
Senior government figures rushed in to test the mood themselves. The Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Health Ernest Brown and the Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook converged on Coventry. The city officials who met them were angry. They demanded to know why there had been no night-fighters to protect them and so few guns. Morrison wrote later that he found ‘an almost total lack of will or desire to get the town moving again’ and detected an ‘air of defeatism’. This was desperately unfair. The men in front of him were still in shock from an experience that was unknown to the men from London. The chief fire officer, who showed up covered in grime from the smoke, fell asleep at the table.
Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born press baron and crony of the prime minister, seemed particularly unsympathetic. Instead of offering any apology for the absence of fighters he made a florid speech, reminding the officials of their duty to get Coventry working again. This was the brutal truth. Coventry was essential to the war effort and the resumption of production was given precedence over easing the plight of survivors. The first major decision was to set up an organization under the chairmanship of a powerful local car manufacturer, William Rootes, to oversee the restoration of gas, water, electricity and transport so that the war factories could function again.
Apprehension rather than defiance was the prevailing sentiment in Coventry’s shattered streets on the morning after the Blitz. There was no reason to doubt that the Germans would be back again that night and no expectation that anyone would be able to stop them. The story went round that they had deliberately left the cathedral spire intact to provide an aiming point for the next bombardment.
As the short day wore on the city emptied. It reminded Hilde Marchant of what she had seen in Spain and Finland. ‘Yet this was worse … these people moved against a background of suburban villas, had English faces … they were our own kind.’ Both sides of the road were filled with ‘lorries, cars, handcarts and perambulators … the lorries were packed with women and children sitting on suitcases or bundles of bedding … the most pathetic of all were those who just leaned against the railings at the roadside, too exhausted to move, their luggage in heaps around them and a fretful tired child crying without temper or anger …’ Those with relations round about were hoping they would have room to take them in. Those without were looking for cheap or free lodging with strangers and often they found it. Church halls and Scout huts opened up to supplement the existing emergency centres. Some gave up looking and slept under hedges or against walls.
But over the following days, people began to drift back. Many spent the day in town then trekked back to the country in the evening. There was no real choice but to return. Coventry was where their lives were. There, they joined a significant number who had stayed put, either because their duties demanded it or out of a refusal to be driven out. The pride involved in having endured quickly asserted itself. Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of Mass Observation, arrived on Friday afternoon and found the city in low spirits. ‘It would be an insult to the people of Coventry to ballyhoo them and exaggerate their spirit,’ he said in a talk broadcast after the BBC Nine O’clock News the following night. The most common remark he had heard from people as they first surveyed the mess of their city was ‘poor old Coventry’. But by Saturday, he found the mood had changed. ‘I was out in the streets again before daylight. It was a mild clear morning and the first thing I heard was a man whistling. Soon people began crowding through the town but today they were talking, even joking about it. Instead of the despair I heard them say “we’ll recover – life will go on, we can get used to it.” People still felt pretty helpless but no longer hopeless. The frightened and nervous ones had already left. Those left behind were beginning to feel tough – just as the people of London had felt tough before them.’
A week later a visitor noticed a card in the window of a half-wrecked baby-clothes shop.
BUSINESS AS USUAL
KEEP SMILING
There will always be an ENGLAND
It was the spirit of Sydney James, the Rialto troubadour.
The story of what had happened in Coventry was played down in the BBC’s first big news broadcast of the day at 8 a.m. By 1 p.m. it was being given unusually full treatment. For the first time, the Ministry of Information allowed a blitzed city other than London to be mentioned by name. This was gratifying for those who endured the raid but the official version of what had happened differed sharply from what they had experienced. According to the BBC ‘the enemy was heavily engaged by intensive anti-aircraft, which kept them at a great height and hindered accurate bombing of industrial targets.’ It did admit heavy casualties – a figure of a thousand was given – and that many buildings had been destroyed and damaged. The attack, it emphasized, was an ‘indiscriminate bombardment of the whole city’. This account was repeated in the following day’s newspapers. T. S. Steele of the Daily Telegraph described the operation as a ‘terror raid’. He accused the Germans of seeking ‘to reproduce the Spanish tragedy of Guernica on a larger scale’, a reference to the Condor Legion’s destruction of the Basque capital in 1937.
Steele repeated the line that a fierce anti-aircraft barrage had kept the raiders five miles above the city. ‘There was not even a pretence at an attempt to select military targets,’ he wrote. ‘For ten hours raider after raider flew over at an immense height and dumped bombs haphazard (sic) at the rate of nearly one a minute on the town. The result is that factories which are legitimate military targets have escaped comparatively lightly. The brunt of the destruction has fallen on shopping centres and residential areas – hotels, offices, banks, churches and – no Nazi raid is complete without this – hospitals.’
Much of the information contained in the reports came from a Ministry of Home Security communiqué. Faced with the magnitude of the raid, the government had chosen to play the story up. The wisdom of publicizing the attack was questioned at the War Cabinet meeting on Monday 19 November. The Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, had listened to Harrisson’s Saturday night talk on the BBC and felt it had ‘been a most depressing broadcast’. The prime minister disagreed. The effect of the publicity had been considerable in the United States and in Germany he said.
American correspondents indeed covered the raid in detail and seized on the city’s ordeal as a symbol of British steadfastness and Nazi barbarity. The Germans responded by claiming that 223 had been killed by the RAF during a raid on Hamburg carried out the night after the Coventry attack (the true number was in fact twenty-six who died when bombs hit the Blohm and Voss shipyard). The assumption was that transatlantic indignation at what had been done to Coventry had stung Germany into insisting that its civilians were also suffering. To one watching American, it seemed clear what was coming next. Raymond Daniell of the New York Times told his readers that people in Britain now found it difficult to escape a feeling that a ‘war of extermination is beginning. Each bomb that falls intensifies hatred and stimulates the demand for retaliation in kind.’
The note of the all-clear siren had barely faded before calls for retribution began. When King George visited the city less than two days afterwards a man in the crowd called out to him: ‘God bless you. Give them what they gave to us! We can take it.’
The intelligence reports reaching the city’s emergency services during the raids that preceded the big attack suggested that people had thought bombing attacks would be worse than they in fact were. As a result, ‘more people than hitherto now feel that indiscriminate bombing of Berlin would be an unwise policy.’
That attitude had now changed. Hilde Marchant had been one of the first to report the calls for revenge. She had issued one of her own. ‘The Nazis added one more word to the English language – “Coventrated”,’ she wrote. ‘Let us add one more – “Berliminated”.’ Her observations had been contradicted by Harrisson in a throw-away remark at the end of his broadcast. ‘I see some reporters stressing the fact that Coventry is clamouring for reprisals,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t borne out by my own observations … it only makes Coventry realize that this sort of thing doesn’t end the war and only makes it more bitter.’
This judgement was not supported by the findings of his own teams. A fortnight after the raid they asked people in the streets of the city what they would like the government to do. ‘Knock bloody hell out of them,’ said a forty-five-year old man, described as middle class. ‘For every one he gives us, we ought to give him twenty,’ said a sixty-year-old working-class male. Another, youngish man replied. ‘We’re fighting gangsters, so we’ve got to be gangsters ourselves. We’ve been gentlemen too long.’
Whatever gentlemanly attitudes lingered among those making Britain’s war decisions were about to disappear for the duration of the war. It was a month before the government moved to avenge Coventry. The attack took place on the night of the 16/17 December and the target was Mannheim, an industrial town that straddles the Rhine in south central Germany. There were 134 aircraft on the raid, the biggest force to be used so far. At first sight there is nothing in the operations book or subsequent intelligence reports to suggest that the purpose of the raid was any different to many that had preceded it. The order was to attack the industrial centre of the town and the primary targets were the Mannheim Motorenwerke and naval armaments factories. The clue to the special nature of the raid lay in the bombs that the aircraft were carrying. There were a few 1,000-pound bombs and many more 500- and 250-pounders, packed with high explosive and designed to knock down walls and collapse roofs. But by far the largest number of bombs were incendiaries, weighing only four pounds each but capable when dropped in sufficient numbers, as Coventry knew all too well, of setting a city ablaze.
The raid was led by eight Wellingtons which carried nothing but incendiaries in their bomb bays, flown by the most experienced crews available. The aircraft that followed them were to use the light of the fires they started as their aiming point and in the words of Sir Richard Peirse, who succeeded Portal as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, ‘to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the centre of the town.’ It was a perfect moonlit night over Mannheim and the returning crews thought they had done well. More than half the aircraft claimed to have hit the town. Some reported later that when they flew away at 3.30 a.m., the target area was a ‘mass of fires’.
In fact the raid was only a partial success. The first Wellington ‘fire-raisers’ failed to accurately identify the centre of the city and many incendiaries fell in the suburbs which were then bombed by the following aircraft. Other bombs fell on Ludwigshafen on the western bank of the Rhine. The city authorities reported 240 buildings destroyed or damaged by incendiaries and 236 by high explosive. They included thirteen shops, a railway station, a railway office, one school and two hospitals. The total casualty list was thirty-four dead, eighty-one injured and 1,266 bombed out of their homes. Of the dead eighteen were women, two were children, thirteen were male civilians and one was a soldier.
The Cabinet had given their approval for the plan three days before. If they had hoped for destruction to match that done to Coventry the reconnaissance photographs told another story. It was a disappointment and the exercise was not repeated for some time. But it was the shape of things to come.
3 ‘To Fly and Fight’ (#ulink_913de8c5-43e1-50c6-bbad-ebfef692bdf1)
Bomber Command was poorly equipped to face the challenges of this new and vulnerable phase of its existence. In one respect, though, it was extraordinarily rich. The quality and quantity of men available to it were the best Britain and its overseas Dominions could provide. The Bomber Boys were all volunteers and the supply of aircrew candidates never slackened, even when losses were at their most daunting.
They were an extraordinarily varied bunch. Most were British. There was a sprinkling from the diaspora of the defeated nations, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, French and Belgians, wanting their revenge on Germany. They were outnumbered by large numbers of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, the ‘colonials’ as they were mockingly but affectionately called, whose lands were not directly threatened by Nazism but who, driven by a sense of adventure or fellow-feeling for their British cousins, nonetheless offered themselves for what it was soon understood were among the most dangerous jobs in warfare.
For imaginative boys growing up in the 1930s, the prospect of going to war in an aeroplane carried an appeal that the older services could never match. Aviation was only a generation old and flying glowed with glamour and modernity. In the years before the war Peter Johnson, languishing in a hated job as a breakfast-cereal salesman, looked at this world and longed to join it. ‘I read aviation magazines,’ he wrote, ‘watched the activities at an RAF aerodrome from behind a hedge and even once penetrated into a flying club on the pretext of finding out the cost of learning to fly. That, needless to say, was well out of my income bracket but the contact with the world of flight, the romantic instructors in their ex-RFC leather coats, the hard, pretty girls with their long cigarette holders, the rich young men boasting about their adventures, fitted perfectly with my picture of a dream world to which, if I joined the Air Force, I could find a key.’
By the time the great wartime expansion began, the RAF’s aura of chic had faded. There was little that was dashing about Bomber Command. The new aircraft were big, blunt and utilitarian and the men who flew in them were unmistakably sons of the modern age.
The pre-war professionals were, on the whole, skilled and conscientious fliers, but they masked their seriousness behind a show of pseudo-aristocratic insouciance. The new boys were much less sophisticated. They came from all backgrounds and classes, and the prevailing ethos was democratic and popular. In their writings, in their work and play, they seem sterner, more earnest and more grown-up. The white flying-suited paladins of the RAF of the 1920s and early 1930s had joined to fly rather than to fight. The newcomers had signed up to do both.
On the outbreak of war, young men flocked to join the air force. In the initial rush, the recruiting staff were sometimes overwhelmed. Edward Johnson, who went on to fly as a bomb-aimer on the Dams Raid, was working for J. Lyons, the bakers, in Leeds when war broke out. ‘I tried very hard to join up but in the initial stages they kept sending me back because they had nowhere to send people that were volunteering … it was a case of calling regularly to see if they’d made up their minds they were going to let us join.’
As an eighteen-year old trainee surveyor, Arthur Taylor joined the Territorial Army before the war and was called up on the day war was declared. Within a few months he was bored and responded eagerly to an official circular announcing the RAF was looking for volunteers. So too did many of his companions. ‘About twenty-two applied immediately,’ he wrote. ‘Understandably our colonel took a poor view of this and pointed out that few of us were bright enough to be accepted. The number of applications then dropped dramatically to fifteen.’
In the month of September 1939, the Aviation Candidates Board at Cardington near Bedford interviewed 671 young men. The recruiting officers were delighted at the quality of the applicants. The board could afford to be choosy. Of the 671 who presented themselves, 102, or 15.2 per cent, were rejected.
The surplus of suitable manpower persisted throughout the war. In the first quarter of 1944, when Bomber Command was suffering terrible losses during the Battle of Berlin, the board still felt able to turn away 22.5 per cent of the volunteers who applied. The great majority of applicants had not waited for an official summons before stepping forward. A much smaller proportion had chosen the RAF after being called up. There were also a number seeking a transfer from the army. The general standard of education of the army candidates tended to be lower than that of the pure volunteers, the board’s head, Group Captain Vere Bettington, observed, and a higher percentage of rejections was to be expected. RAF personnel working on the ground also responded well to appeals to ‘get operational’.
At first, candidates were required to hold the School Certificate, the multi-subject examination taken by sixteen-year-olds before going on to higher education, but by August 1940 this proviso had been dropped. Nor was leaving school before the age of sixteen considered a bar. The initial test included intelligence, mathematics and general knowledge papers. But Bettington never rejected an applicant on educational grounds alone. ‘A candidate’s desire to fly and fight,’ he declared, is ‘of primary importance.’
The old RAF’s sensitivity about its arriviste origins had given it a tendency to snobbery. This was dissolved in the flood of men from modest and poor homes taking up the flying duties that had formerly been the preserve of the sons of the military, clerical, medical and colonial middle classes. Harry Yates, who left school at fourteen and worked as a junior clerk in the offices of a printing company in the south Midlands, wondered as he waited for a reply from the RAF whether his lack of education would disqualify him. ‘Could it be,’ he wrote, ‘that, in reality, becoming one of these pilot types required a university education or even an old school tie? Was it the preserve of the sons of the well-to-do? But this, as I was to discover, was far from true. Terrible thing though it was, the war brought opportunity. The great British class system counted for surprisingly little. I saw nothing of it in all my RAF days.’
The impulse to fly had been stimulated in many applicants by an early encounter with aeroplanes. Brian Frow went to the 1932 Hendon Air Show with a friend from his south-London prep school. ‘I was spellbound,’ he remembered. ‘A hostile fort was bombed with live missiles; balloons forming life-sized animals were chased by big game hunters in fighter aircraft and eventually shot down.’ In the school holidays he cycled to Croydon aerodrome with an aircraft recognition book in his satchel, identifying and recording everything that flew. The fact that his eldest brother, Herbert, had been killed in action flying in the First World War did not dent his enthusiasm. Herbert’s loss was commemorated by a shrine in the family home made out of the wooden propeller of his doomed aircraft.
Ken Newman, another south-London boy, also made regular pilgrimages to Croydon, which was only a mile or so from his home. ‘As a boy, and like so many others of my generation, I had been fascinated by aeroplanes,’ he recalled. ‘They were seldom seen in the sky and caused open-mouthed surprise when they were … I used to go and watch, from the roof of the airport hotel next to the terminal and flight control building.’ Sometimes an hour or more would pass between the arrivals of the Imperial Airways and KLM airliners ‘but every take-off and landing was exciting, particularly when the aeroplanes came close to the hotel building.’
In opting for the RAF, volunteers were exercising a choice, and choices were rare in wartime. By doing so, they avoided being drafted into a less congenial branch of the services, and in 1939, there was no more unattractive option than the army.
The young men arriving at the recruiting centres had been born during, or just after, the end of the First World War. They had heard tales of the Western Front from their fathers and male relations. Dennis Field, the Coventry boy who had witnessed the Blitz from his back-garden shelter, had an uncle who had been in the trenches. ‘His pugnacity and bitterness were apparent even to a youngster,’ he wrote. ‘My friend’s father was a signaller in France and only reluctantly talked of the moonscape devastation, or mud, barbed wire, shell holes, bodies and rats and lice and drownings in mud and filth. My youthful picture was overwhelmingly one of revulsion.’
In the streets, the sight of men who had lost limbs, the wheezing and hacking of gas-damaged lungs, told young men what they could expect. Aeroplanes were intrinsically dangerous, everyone knew that. But they were also exciting. And death in an aeroplane seemed quicker and cleaner in comparison with what they would face on land.
Jim Berry, who became a Pathfinder pilot, used to look with fascination and a tremor of fear at a German bayonet which his father had brought back from the trenches. ‘[He] used to tell us stories about the first war and it sounded horrific to me,’ he said. ‘The mud and the mess. It was something we looked at with a fair amount of horror as children. I thought that’s not for me at any price. If I had been made to go I would have had to go but I thought, well, I’m going to volunteer so I volunteered and (went for) aircrew.’
The RAF, as Group Captain Bettington said, was looking for people who were eager not only to fly but to fight. The First World War had generated a hatred of conflict and yearning for peace that was evident in the great popularity of the pacifist movement. Yet the hope amongst the young that they would not be called on to take part in another great war seldom hardened into a determination not to do so. Charles Patterson, born in 1920 and brought up in middle-class comfort by his mother and sister after his parents separated, found that his early childhood ‘was overshadowed by the terrible First World War and the appalling suffering and sacrifices which were implanted in me not just by my mother but by all the grown-ups with whom I came into contact.’ It was ‘something so appalling that it just could not be ever allowed to happen again, because if it did, it would be virtually the end of the world.’
He felt, nevertheless, that ‘if another war came I would inevitably have to join up as soon as it began, to try and fight. It was very firmly implanted in my mind that the greatest sacrifices in the first war had been endured by the ordinary Tommy. What I believed and was taught was that if these young, working-class boys could show such courage it made it absolutely imperative on me to not let them down, or at least make an effort to live up to what they had done should another war come.’
As the war approached Patterson considered his choices. It was quite simple really. ‘I could never have stood up to the rigours of fighting on land and in dust and heat and dirt and so on. That simply would have been quite beyond me.’ He knew something about flying from his brother-in-law, an RAF pilot who had taken him up in a Gypsy Moth when he was ten. Like many others he had seen Dawn Patrol, a remarkably bleak and unidealized story of First World War aviators which nonetheless pushed many adolescent boys into the arms of the RAF. ‘[It] had a tremendous influence on me. It struck me that although the casualties were very heavy it was much the most exciting and wonderful way to go to war.’
The decision to fight was made easier by the seeming inevitability of the conflict. The Germans had left Britain with no choice. To the older airmen, this came as no surprise. Peter Johnson, who was nearly five when the first war broke out and whose naval officer father was killed in 1914, felt that ‘mass hatred … was inoculated into my generation against the Germans’.
He was at least ten years older than most of his comrades in Bomber Command. The writings and recollections of the younger men do not reveal much evidence of instinctive loathing for the Hun.
A surprising number of them had some direct or indirect contact with events in Germany. When he was about fourteen, Ken Newman made friends with a German boy called Erich Strauss who had come from Stuttgart to visit his grandmother. ‘It was during one of our walks around Mitcham Common that he told me he and his family were Jewish and that the Jews in Germany were being given a very hard time by the Nazis,’ he wrote. ‘I was not quite sure whether he was telling the truth or was exaggerating to impress me.’ In 1938 he visited Germany with a school party, travelling by boat and train to Cologne then sailing up the Rhine to Mainz, staying in youth hostels along the way. ‘In every one were parties of Hitler Youth who marched about in military-style uniforms, and every morning and evening attended a flag raising or lowering ceremony with arms raised and shouts of “Heil Hitler!”’ Even so, they seemed friendly enough to the English visitors. Every young person he met ‘repeated again and again that the last thing they wanted was another war with Britain and France.’
Informal attempts had been made to forge friendly links with Germany in the years between the wars through school trips and exchanges. Sometimes they were too successful. In the spring of 1936 thirteen-year-old Ken Goodchild went on a visit with some schoolmates from No. 6 Central School in Morden, Surrey. They were in the Rhineland when the Germany army marched in, and visited Cologne, which he was to pass through seven years later as a prisoner. On their return their families were surprised to see they were wearing swastika lapel badges. In 1937 Ken went again and was present in Düsseldorf when Hitler arrived to open an exhibition. The Führer exchanged some friendly words with the master accompanying the boys and patted some of them on the head. Goodchild was perhaps the only Bomber Command airman to have stared the enemy leader in the face.
In the same year, Leonard Cheshire, a restless, rather wayward eighteen-year-old, who had just left Stowe public school, went to stay with a German family in Potsdam before he went up to Oxford. The head of the household was a retired admiral called Ludwig von Reuter. He was not a supporter of the Nazis but shared some of their opinions, telling Cheshire that 95 per cent of humanity were worthless and war was a valuable means of keeping them down. Cheshire went on to become one of the most dedicated and ruthless pilots in Bomber Command.
Before the war it was still possible to differentiate between Nazis and ‘decent’ Germans. ‘How I loathed the Nazis,’ wrote Guy Gibson. ‘How could the common people of Germany allow such a world-conquering crowd of gangsters to get into power and stay in power? Ruthless and swaggering, domineering brutality, that was their creed.’ His anger was directed with almost equal vigour against British politicians, the ‘rotten Governments, the Yes men and the appeasers’ as well as those who voted for them.
Gibson blamed the older generation for allowing another war to happen. But he was also concerned about the willingness of his contemporaries to fight it. On 1 September 1939, having been called back from leave to rejoin his squadron, he passed through Oxford with his friend Freddy Bilbey who had been studying biology there. After a lengthy session in a pub they went to have dinner. ‘It was fairly late and we were pretty hungry, and fed like kings with some excellent 1928 burgundy, but what a rotten crowd to be seen at that place – drunken, long-haired, pansy-looking youths, mixed with foppish women. They so disgusted me that I asked Freddy if they were undergraduates … “Good Lord, no!” he said. “They are the types who try to look like undergraduates.”’
Gibson’s doubts about some ‘varsity men may have stemmed from the Oxford Union debate of a few years before in which the motion that the house would not fight for King and Country had been carried. The event had been treated as if it was a genuine barometer of young, privileged opinion. It turned out to be utterly misleading.
Robert Kee, a handsome, rather bohemian history undergraduate, might possibly have attracted a suspicious glare from Gibson had he encountered him in an Oxford pub. But Kee was as contemptuous as Gibson was of the appeasers and as eager to get to grips with the Nazis. ‘At the time of Munich all of us at Oxford hated what was going on,’ he said. ‘We all thought [the politicians] were doing exactly what the Nazis wanted them to.’ He was in France with his tutor A. J. P. Taylor when war was declared and rushed back to sign up for the RAF.
Whatever subtleties of feeling might have existed towards the Germans in 1939 faded with the end of the phoney war, and they became, simply, the enemy. Soon they were all too visible, in the skies over Britain. The Battle of Britain provided the most effective recruiting sergeant the RAF could have hoped for. Michael Beetham was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy in the summer of 1940. At the start of the holidays he went to stay with his father, a company commander with the York and Lancaster Regiment then based on the hills just outside Portsmouth at Hillsea barracks. ‘It was a lovely summer and the Battle of Britain was just beginning with the German bombers bombing Portsmouth naval base,’ he said. ‘God, it was spectacular. We went outside and saw the bombers going in and the Hurricanes and Spitfires diving in and having a go at them. I said to my father, that’s what I want to do. He obviously wanted me to join the army. I couldn’t put my name down until I was eighteen but I did it as soon as I could. I joined the air force to be a pilot. I’d never flown in my life but I wanted to do what those chaps were doing.’
At the same time Edward Hearn, a young estate manager, was watching dogfights in the skies over his home in Folkestone, Kent. ‘I thought at that time that if I’ve got to go to war then I’ll go in an aircraft.’ He decided to keep his decision from his parents in order not to add to their burden of worry. All his siblings were in the process of joining up. He signed on in Maidstone. ‘When I got back my mother said why aren’t you at work? I told her, and she said well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.’ Eddie ended up a member of the crew of Michael Beetham, 50 Squadron’s bombing leader.
Bruce Lewis was standing with his friends outside the tuck shop during mid-morning break at Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire when ‘we heard the grinding growl of unsynchronized German aero-engines … the Battle of Britain was at its height and schoolboys knew all about these technical matters. The twin-engine Luftwaffe bomber flew low over the school, and then, thrill of thrills, came the shapely little Spitfire in hot pursuit, the distinctive whistle from its Merlin engine sounding almost like the wind itself.’ Later they heard the bomber had been shot down. Amazingly, the victorious fighter pilot was an old boy of the school, Eric Marrs, who destroyed six German aircraft before being killed the following year.
At that moment Lewis jilted the Royal Navy, his first preference, and chose the RAF. It was two years before he could join up. He had a talent for drama and got a job as a radio actor with the BBC. His father, a professor who had been badly wounded at the Somme, wanted him to go to university which would gain him exemption from war service for three years. To Bruce, ‘such an existence would have been impossible – to sit studying in complete safety while others of my age were dying for their country was not on.’
The start of the Blitz reinforced the realization that the air was now a crucial battlefield as well as the belief that it was in the sky that the war would be decided. Bill Farquharson, who had been raised in Malaya where his father was in the colonial service and was awaiting call-up, was serving with Air Raid Precautions in Birmingham when he was ordered to rush to Coventry to help out after the raid. The experience made him ‘angry and yet dead scared’. He felt no particular desire for revenge. He had already made up his mind to go into the air force and the experience ‘confirmed the fact that I preferred to be up [in the air] rather than down there’.
Len Sumpter, a Corby steelworker and former Grenadier who had been recalled to the colours at the start of the war, was training recruits at the Guards Caterham depot when it was hit by German bombs. ‘We took a real hammering,’ he said. ‘A lot of people were killed there.’ When advertisements appeared calling for volunteers for aircrew he applied, impelled by the thought of ‘a little bit of excitement’ and ‘a bit of personal anger’.
Britain’s vulnerability was brought home to Ken Newman when in August 1940, a month after his eighteenth birthday, he watched Croydon airport being attacked by waves of Stuka dive-bombers. When the Blitz began he made his way each day from his home in Norbury to the City where he worked in the accounts department of a mortgage company. One Sunday night in October, the sirens sounded and he hurried his parents to their air-raid shelter. He was ‘just closing the door when I heard bombs screaming down towards us. There was no mistaking they were about to hit us or fall very close indeed and I must admit that I was very frightened and thought our end had come. Crump went the first bomb, quite near … accompanied by the sound of splintering wood, smashing glass and falling masonry …’ So it went on. When quietness returned he opened the shelter door. The air was swirling with brick dust and the house was gone. There was ‘no sleep for us at all that night. My mother was weeping in a corner of the shelter, partly over the loss of her much-loved home and also in relief that we had survived.’ Later, when asked for his reasons for wanting to join the RAF he told the chairman of the selection board that he was ‘keen to become a bomber pilot in order to have my revenge’.
Those who had already joined up were glad they had done so when they heard the news from home. Doug Mourton, a wallpaper salesman before the war, was undergoing his RAF training at Abingdon when on 17 September his mother wrote to him from south London. ‘Things are very uncomfortable here at present but we are getting used to it … they don’t give us five minutes’ peace. [Aunt] Beat’s house was bombed and they have come to live with us. There [are] fourteen of us living in the cellar …’
The recruits went off to war in a spirit of optimism. Joining up dispelled the feeling of impotence that aerial bombardment generated and the air force provided the most immediate means of hitting back. There were some restless spirits who welcomed the excitement and openings that war has always offered.
When the storm finally broke Leonard Cheshire was leading what would seem to many an enviable existence, studying law, none too diligently, at Oxford. He was easily bored and game for challenges, which had led him to join the University Air Squadron. His log book recording his flights paused at the end of August 1939. Under the heading WAR he wrote: ‘a heaven-sent release … a magic carpet on which to soar above the commonplace round of everyday life.’
By the end of 1940 every Briton was faced with an unavoidable truth. There could be no accommodation with the Nazis. If Britain was to remain Britain it would have to fight and after the fall of France the RAF was the only force in the world that was directly attacking the Germans on their own ground.
Thousands of miles away, across oceans and hemispheres, this conviction was felt almost as deeply as it was at home. Imperial attitudes and arrangements were changing. Colonies had become Dominions and were taking their first steps to independence. Yet the cultural and emotional fabric of the empire was still densely woven and strong. At the start of the war, the official instinct of Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia was to rally to Britain, even though their interests were, for the time being at least, unthreatened by Hitler’s foreseeable ambitions. They immediately offered their young men to bolster the ranks of the RAF.
Altogether 130,000 men from the Dominions served as airmen in the RAF, almost 40 per cent. One in four of the Bomber Command aircrews was from overseas and 15,661 lost their lives. Of those, 9,887 were from Canada. Canada’s cultural ties with Britain were less established than those of other Dominions. Volunteers tended to think of themselves as answering a call to fight for their own country, rather than going to the aid of a faraway mother nation. Ralph Wood came out of church in Woodstock, New Brunswick, on the morning of Sunday 11 September to find newsboys hawking special editions of the local newspaper, the Telegraph-Journal, announcing that Canada was at war with Germany. As he walked back to the home of the parents of his girlfriend Phyllis he confronted the choices before him.
I knew I had fear of being labelled [a] coward or yellow if I didn’t volunteer my services to my country. I knew also that I had fear of losing my life if I did volunteer. There was no contest. All that remained was to choose the service I would join. The Navy? No way! I’d probably be seasick before we left the harbour, let alone battling those thirty-foot waves at sea … The Army? Well according to stories of World War I, which was the only reference we had to go by, this meant mud, trenches, lice, bayonets, etc. This was definitely not my cup of tea. Air Force? This was more appealing as it presented a picture of your home base in a civilized part of the country accompanied by real beds with sheets, fairly good food, local pubs with their accompanying social life with periodic leaves to the larger centres and cities. The hour of decision was at hand but it didn’t take me an hour to decide on the Royal Canadian Air Force. Being a fatalist, I was pretty sure my number would come up, and in the air it would be swift and definite.
Wood was volunteering out of a sense of duty to Canada and it seems that, at first, he expected to be doing his fighting at home. If the discovery that he was to be sent to England caused him or his comrades any concern there is no mention of it in his frank and cheerful memoir.
Australians and New Zealanders seem to have had a more developed feeling of kinship with Britain and a stronger sense of a shared destiny. Don Charlwood was proud of his English ancestry. His great-grandfather had been a bookseller in Norwich until 1850, when he transferred the business to Melbourne. As soon as Charlwood was able, he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force, in the knowledge that it meant crossing the world to go to the rescue of a country he had never visited.
Like Charles Patterson he felt that his generation ‘never really emerged from the shadow of the shadow of the First World War … the rise of Nazism was a lengthening of the same shadow over our youth. When this threat was faced by Britain in 1939, the response in Australia was not only that we, too, must face Nazism, but that we must stand by the threatened “Homeland”.’
The Dominion airmen sometimes appeared to feel an attachment to the British Empire that was stronger than that of the British themselves. One of Bomber Command’s great leaders, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Don Bennett, raised in the Great Dividing Range town of Toowoomba in Queensland, spoke of the ‘true British, of … Australia, of Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia and the Old Country itself.’
By the end of 1940, then, the push of the war and the pull of the air was driving tens of thousands of young men towards Bomber Command. They were rich, middling and poor and they came from every corner of Britain and its empire. They were the best of their generation and they were heading for one of the worst tasks of the war.
