Heroes: The Greatest Generation and the Second World War

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Bill glanced out of his side window and saw that some of their aircraft were under attack from night-fighters. One Halifax he saw plummet in flames. He pushed on, through the flak of the Dutch coast, until he was well into Germany. The anti-aircraft fire was pretty heavy over the target, but although the Halifax rattled and shook as shells exploded all around them, they dropped their bombs over the marker flares and climbed out of the fray without so much as a scratch. Their bombs, like those of most of the bomber force, landed to the centre and south of the city, destroying a number of industrial buildings as well as homes in the area.

Nearly four hours after they had taken off they were approaching Leeming once more, along with the rest of the bomber stream. Three had already returned home early with technical problems, but of those who had made it to Düsseldorf, the first landed back just before ten o’clock. Wing Commander Pattison and his crew touched down at 10.04 p.m. Bill called up Leeming flying control and told them they would shortly be joining the planes circling the airfield waiting their turn to land.

Most had landed by half-past-ten, but Bill had continued circling, waiting to hear George’s voice crackle through his headset. But there was no sound of his brother. ‘Skipper, I think you’d better land,’ said Jim Moore, the Flight Engineer, eventually, ‘we’re getting low on fuel.’ Reluctantly, Bill did so, the sixteen-ton bomber touching down with a lurch and a screech of rubber. Z for Zebra was the fourteenth aircraft from 429 Squadron to make it safely back. Bill hung around for as long as he could, and then made his report to the Intelligence Officer. Tots of rum and cups of tea were handed out to the exhausted crews, but as soon as Bill had changed out of his flying kit, he made his way over to the control tower, and waited. Minutes passed. Eleven o’clock came and went, then midnight; but there was nothing. No distant beat of engines, just a dark and empty sky.

He waited up all night for his brother, but in his heart of hearts, Bill knew that night that George wasn’t coming back. The following morning, Wing Commander Pattison offered him some compassionate leave – everyone knew how close the twins had been – but Bill turned the offer down. The CO accepted his decision, but insisted on accompanying him on a twenty-minute flight to see how he was holding up. All right it seemed – but even so, Pattison did not send the crew out again for a fortnight.

His crew did their best to help him, but it was difficult. ‘There was little I could say,’ said Dick Meredith, who moved into George’s old bed to keep Bill company. ‘We did do a bit of praying back then, and secretly I couldn’t help thinking that the Lord could not possibly be cruel enough to take both George and Bill. I thought Bill had to come through, and that gave me a sense of reassurance really. It was probably the wrong thing to think, but I couldn’t help it.’

Somehow, Bill kept going. On 18 November, they were on another mission, this time part of a raid on Mannheim. Strong winds of over a hundred knots pushed them way off course and so they hit Frankfurt instead. The following night, unusually, they were out again, this time to Leverkusen. ‘I think that if I had stopped I might have broke down,’ Bill told me. He also wanted to be there in case any news did come through. There was a chance George and his crew had been made prisoners of war – lots of them had, and it usually took about four to six weeks for word of POWs to filter through to the Red Cross. Six weeks came and went, but still Bill refused to give up all hope.

The rest of the crew never mentioned it. Some had lost good friends. Everyone lost someone. The statistics of the Allied bomber offensive are chilling: just over 110,000 men flew with the RAF’s Bomber Command; 55,000, almost exactly half, lost their lives. The US Eighth Air Force, joining the battle in 1942, lost 26,000 young men. Over 15,000 Allied bombers never came back – a staggering number, and a figure that equates to three-quarters of the numbers of Spitfires that were ever made. That Bill survived and George did not was simply conforming to the law of averages. ‘I don’t know what makes you press on,’ Bill sighed, ‘but you just do. There’s something in us…you know it’s crazy, but you still do it. It’s life itself. You know it’s dumb and stupid but you press on.’

By the end of November, the Battle of Berlin had begun. Bill’s fifth mission was what was labelled the ‘the first thousand-bomber raid’ on the German capital. In fact, only 764 aircraft took part, but the British press was happy to help with the propaganda. With the enemy capital deep in Germany, they could only get there by adding auxiliary fuel tanks at the expense of some of their bomb load. When they finally arrived, after nearly four hours in the air, Berlin was covered. The flak was intense, but despite the poor visibility, they could just about make out the red target indicator markers and the thousands of explosions pulsing orange and crimson through the cloud.

The bitingly cold winter and endless cloud and rain did not help Bill’s sense of gloom. ‘Boy, it was cold,’ he said. It was early in the New Year that he took his crew out on a flight above the clouds, just so they could see some sunlight.

And he also tried to keep his days busy, and to keep his mind on the job in hand. Routine helped. He’d be out of bed some time around seven or eight in the morning, then he’d shower, get dressed and head over to the mess for a breakfast of porridge and perhaps some toast. Then he would wander over to the Flight Room, where he would chat and wait with the rest of the crews, wondering whether they’d be sent out on a ‘war’ that night. There could be days without a mission, but they still made sure they looked at the daily routine orders. They might have to take their aircraft to the maintenance hangars or any number of tasks. After he was commissioned in December 1943, Bill ran the station post office for a while. ‘I didn’t know a damn thing about it,’ he said, ‘and it was in a hell of a mess when I took it over.’ It was another thing that kept his mind busy.

But he was rarely leaving the base. Just before Christmas, he decided it was time he tried to get out a bit, and so with a few of the others, went to a dance at the Catholic Hall in Northallerton. It was there that he first saw Lil.

Lil had been listening on and off to our conversation, sometimes sitting down with us in the lounge, sometimes attending to something in the adjoining kitchen. She now brought through some tea. ‘Tea,’ said Bill, his face brightening. ‘We always drink plenty of tea here!’ Then he got up and disappeared – he had some pictures and other bits and pieces to show me, but had to dig them out from the study next door. I asked Lil about this first meeting. ‘It wasn’t that night. He saw me, but I didn’t see him. I remember it was so crowded you could hardly move,’ she told me. She’d been taken by a young sailor friend and they began dancing. ‘But he was all over me and I thought, “This is no good,” so we left.’

Soon after, Bill was back, jiggling his leg up and down and sipping his tea, so I asked him about his side of the story. He grinned. ‘She walked in with her head held high,’ Bill said, ‘and she had nice long blonde hair.’ He immediately decided he had to dance with her, but he couldn’t reach her – by the time he got to her side of the dance-floor, she was gone. Still, it gave him an incentive to go again, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later she was there once more – and this time there was no sign of the sailor. Plucking up his courage, he went over to her and asked her to dance.

Afterwards, he walked her home. She, too, had lost a brother – a Flight Engineer and also on bombers – and in the weeks that followed, they began to see more and more of each other. Every fifth week, the crew would be given seven days’ leave. Some went to London, while others, like Bill Morison, would play golf, sometimes at Ferndown near Bournemouth, sometimes even at St Andrews, in Scotland. Bill, however, spent his leave with Lil, at her parents’ house in Northallerton. Then, in the spring, he asked her to marry him, although he told her they should wait until after he had finished his combat tour. ‘We were losing a lot of guys,’ said Bill, ‘and I was still operational.’ Did Lil worry about Bill? ‘No,’ she said quite firmly. ‘You have faith. It was a way of life; you took one thing at a time.’

Bill was also extremely lucky to have the crew he had. Crews tended to find each other on arrival at their Operational Training Units. There had been five of them at first, then at Croft, when they converted to four-engined bombers, two more had joined them. The same seven men had stayed together ever since. Close friends on the ground, they discovered a perfect working relationship that depended on mutual respect and complete trust. ‘All of them were brilliant,’ Bill admitted. Once the war was over, they all kept in touch, despite going their separate ways. The sense of camaraderie they had felt had been intense. Bill freely admits they were the closest friendships he ever made. Sixty years on, only Bill, Bud Holdgate (the mid upper gunner), and Bill Morison are still alive; Dick Meredith died in November 2005. They don’t see each other so often now – Bill Morison is in North York, Ontario, although Bud is from Vancouver – but they do speak regularly. Bill gave me Bill Morison’s and Dick Meredith’s numbers and when I was back in England, I called them. Both were anxious to help and equally quick to heap praise on Bill and their other friends in the crew. ‘Once the engines were running, we became a real team in every sense,’ said Bill Morison, in his gentle and measured voice. ‘We welded perfectly.’ Dick Meredith had been a farmer before the war, a reserved occupation, and could have avoided active service, but admits that he would not have missed the experience for anything. ‘They were all great guys,’ he told me, ‘and we were a dedicated bunch. We were a very good crew, all of us, and we never stopped learning.’

As the weeks and then months passed, so the crew’s number of missions began to steadily mount – ten were chalked up, then fifteen, then twenty. They went from being the new boys to the most senior and experienced crew in the squadron. Bill was commissioned in December, while at around the same time Bill Morison became the squadron’s navigation leader: it was now up to him to not only help plan their routes to the target, but also improve the standard of the less experienced navigators.

Casualties during the Battle of Berlin, which lasted from November to the end of March 1944, were particularly high – 1,128 Allied bombers were shot down during this period, a staggering number. Yet every time they went out on a ‘war’, Bill and his crew miraculously seemed to make it back in one piece. ‘Once you’d done five or six,’ said Bill Morison, ‘your chances were improved, but you could still get shot down at any time. The fact that you were a very experienced crew didn’t guarantee anything.’ On 24 May 1944, the squadron took part in an attack on the German town of Aachen. Fifteen aircraft took off, Z for Zebra included, and made it safely to the target. There was little flak – the raid appeared to be one of their more straightforward missions, but on the return home, they came under repeated attack by night-fighters, and three of the squadron’s Halifaxes were shot down. All those lost had been experienced crews, the backbone of the squadron for many months. One had even been on their last mission – had they made it back to Leeming, their tour of duty would have been over.

Yet although Z for Zebra continued to make it back almost unscathed, these missions were not without incident for the crew. On one occasion Bill had thought they would never even manage to get airborne. There had been a strong crosswind and the aircraft had started to swing so badly as they hurtled down the runway that he’d thought he would lose control and flip the plane. Another time one of his port engines caught fire almost as soon as they’d left the ground. It was 30 March 1944, and they were due to bomb Nuremberg.

‘That was scary,’ he admitted. ‘Fire in the air like that is scary. You can’t just land again – not with all those bombs and full tanks of fuel.’ A pipe had burst and petrol was spewing everywhere. Bill had to cut the engine immediately, but ahead was a small hill and with a quarter of their power gone, it looked as though they were not going to get enough lift and so fly straight into it. Somehow, though, he managed to clear it, and was able to get to the North Sea and discard his bomb load. He still had to burn off much of the fuel, so circled for a couple of hours before finally turning back to Leeming. They’d had a lucky escape. The girls in the control tower thought they must have crashed and so when he called up and gave his call-sign, ‘Must We’, they thought they were talking to a ghost.

Landing was potentially more dangerous than taking off. Although they never flew in formation, aircraft could frequently land within minutes of each other. Often the Halifaxes would be damaged, and were nearly always low on fuel. ‘One night my hydraulics were shot away and I couldn’t use the flaps and even the undercarriage didn’t want to come down.’ This was where experience came in. Bill eventually got the wheels down by diving the aircraft and then pulling back up; the force of gravity eventually locked them into place. Even so, without flaps, he hit the ground at 170 knots rather than 130. ‘I went off the end of the runway,’ he said.

Having finally landed and switched off the engines, a van would arrive and take them off for debriefing. There was coffee and a slug of rum, but Bill never touched either. Back then, he was not a great drinker. ‘I can make an ass of myself without drinking,’ he says, ‘that’s the way I look at it.’ The Intelligence Officer would ask them about the mission. What did they see? Were they attacked? What was their view over the target? Each of the Halifaxes had a camera. As soon as the bombs were released they would take pictures, with the fourth snapping as the bombs hit the ground. ‘You couldn’t come back and say, “We definitely hit the target.” You had to wait for the pictures to be developed for that.’ Bill tells me about the time one aircraft went out on a mission then flew up and down the North Sea. Unbeknown to the pilot, he was being tracked by British radar and when he returned had not taken any pictures either. ‘He was scared. There were people…sometimes people broke down.’ Not that Bill ever saw anyone really fall to pieces. Those suffering from shattered nerves were whisked away off the station immediately, before the other men could see. ‘LMF,’ said Bill. ‘That’s what they called it. Lack of Moral Fibre. But you could only take so much; everyone will break down after a while.’

But not Bill, despite chalking up over thirty missions in ten months of front-line duty. ‘I was lucky. A very lucky pilot,’ he told me. One time, they were flying over Germany. It was quite dark – they were nowhere near their target – when tracer started streaming past and cannon shell bursts exploded in front of them. They’d been picked up by radar and now had a night-fighter attacking them. Bill immediately changed course, weaving back and forth as shells continued to explode either side of him. In the end he was forced to ‘corkscrew’ and eventually managed to shake off the enemy fighter. Another time they were flying over a city and flak – anti-aircraft shell bursts – began exploding all around. A near explosion could severely jolt the aircraft, but on this occasion Bill had just dropped his bombs and had selected the bomb doors to close, when the flak burst beneath them and flipped the Halifax onto its back. ‘The gyro was telling me I was upside-down, and we were falling fast, so I immediately rolled out of it.’ But they were still in a dive, with the airspeed indicator pointing at over 300 miles per hour, far in excess of the Halifax’s maximum speed. ‘I thought, “I’d better not pull out too fast or I’ll pull the wings off,” so I kept the throttle back and let her slow down a bit.’ Eventually they levelled out and began climbing once more. But in that short space of time, they’d dropped around 5,000 feet. ‘I heard a hell of a noise from the airplane, but the strangest thing was we suffered no damage at all. We checked everything. The crew had been holding their breath and I heard a loud “Pheww!” once everything had been ticked off.’ Bill chuckles. Another time they came back and there were 173 holes in the plane. But they’d still made it home.

They could often be in the air for long periods of time, especially if flying to Germany and back. Not only did he have to concentrate on piloting and be ready to take evasive action at any moment, he had to do so in freezing temperatures. At the kind of height they were operating from – and the higher they flew the safer they were and the better the engines ran – temperatures could drop to fifty below. ‘There was heat coming off the engine,’ said Bill, ‘but no insulation. When it’s that cold, you soon feel it.’ He always wore silk underwear, silk gloves and a long white silk scarf under his flying jacket, so managed to keep his upper body warm enough. The problem was his feet, with which he operated the rudder. ‘Most of the time, I couldn’t really feel them.’ Despite the length of some journeys and the mental and physical exhaustion these missions entailed, he rarely felt too tired to fly. ‘If I did, I’d open the side window and that cold air would slap me round the face.’

As well as relieving himself before he got into the plane, he also always needed to go as they began the bomb run. ‘It was strange. I’ve never had the strongest kidneys, but I’d have to pull out and pee into this pipe. It led straight out and would just suck out the moisture. So I peed on every German city I flew over…’

What about dropping bombs on civilians? I ask him. ‘You don’t think about the people getting hit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t build the airplanes; I didn’t build the bombs; I didn’t gas them – I just went there and back – the guilt was shared by all of us, you know.’ He paused again, then said, ‘You can’t help but feel a certain amount – well, you wished it never happened, at any rate. You can’t divorce yourself from it because you had something to do with it, but I don’t feel responsible for the whole thing.’

On D-Day, he and his crew took part in their first-ever daylight mission. Nearly a thousand of Bomber Command’s aircraft were directed against the Normandy coastal batteries. Crossing the Channel as dawn was breaking, navigator Bill Morison suddenly noticed hundreds of white blips on his H2S radar set. Informing his skipper, they soon after saw the sea full of ships from one end of the horizon to the other. Like everyone else, they had been kept in the dark about exactly when the landings would be. Despite this exciting bird’s eye view of the invasion, they found the experience unsettling. In order to improve their accuracy, they flew over the target at 10,000 feet, far lower than they were used to. ‘There were not many enemy fighters,’ recalled Bill Morison, ‘but the flak was definitely a problem.’

They flew a number of other missions over Normandy, until, on 18 July 1944, they chalked up their final and thirty-fourth mission as a crew – Bill had flown two more than the rest. It was an attack on German flying-bomb sites near Caen, and was largely uneventful – they found their markers, dropped the bombs, then Bill banked the plane, pulled back on the control column, climbed the Halifax to safety, and turned for home. Afterwards, there was a little bit of rejoicing, but not too much. Their relief at surviving was marred by the knowledge that they would now be split up and sent to different parts of the country. Their services were now needed as instructors to train the final batches of crews in the endgame to the bomber war. They were briefly reunited a few weeks later, however. Although the war still had ten months to run, Bill’s combat flying career was now over so he and Lil decided to marry right away. ‘It was a very happy occasion,’ said Bill Morison, who, in the absence of George, was the best man.

Bill still hadn’t given up complete hope for his brother, and when the war was finally over, he went back down to the south coast to meet the POWs coming back. ‘I talked to lots of them – some I even knew. I wanted to check whether anyone had heard anything about my brother’s crew.’ They hadn’t. By the time he finally returned home to Vancouver, he had become ‘300 per cent certain’ his brother had gone down into the sea that night. ‘You’ve got to have hope and your mind rolls over all kinds of possibilities, but eventually…’ George’s navigator came from British Columbia too. He’d been married with a couple of kids and his father came down to see Bill. He wanted to know whether there was any chance that his son was still alive. ‘And even though you want to give them hope, I said no. No way.’

It was, he admitted, a hard thing to say, but added, ‘Well, wars make you hard. I used to take care of the chart that listed the crews. When the guys got shot down it was my job to take them off and put a new name on there. The first time I rubbed a guy’s name off – gee whiz, it hurt me. He’s gone. Shot down. No more. But after a while I was just going through the motions. I’m telling you: people get hard.’

We looked through Bill’s old photographs. There were a number of him and George together from their flying training days. It’s uncanny, but they really did look identical. Same smile, same eyes, same hair. You could see why any girl would have fallen for them. There was his citation for his DFC, and old newspaper cuttings, too. Local newspapers often proudly reported the progress of their gallant sons and the Byers’s corner of Vancouver was no exception. One piece was about them joining 429 Squadron together. ‘When they arrived on the squadron, the boys craved action. They got it. Within 24 hours they were off on their first operation. “We sure are glad we have been able to stay together,” said Bill.’

Bill still thinks a lot about George. ‘I wonder what kind of life I would’ve had if he’d been here. He was the only brother I had and we were so close, you know.’ And what about the war? Do you still think about it a lot? I asked. He paused a moment and said, ‘The war seems like a dream now. After the war, nobody talked about anything – it wasn’t until about ten years after that you started to get some books on it, but it takes thirty or forty years before a person wants to tell his experiences or say anything about it and then it relieves him somewhat.’ He paused again. ‘It makes it easier as time goes on; your mind gets a little more reasonable with it. I don’t mind talking about it now. Time heals. In a way it’s better to share it with somebody. It helps you.’ Another pause and Bill looked at some distant spot on the wall. ‘I think it does anyway.’