Читать книгу Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II - James Holland, James Holland - Страница 7

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Wednesday 3 November, 1943, a cipher clerk at RAF Leeming in Yorkshire received a signal from Bomber Command Headquarters that there would be an operation that night. There was nothing unusual about this – they often came in about this time, after the morning meeting at High Wycombe. A WAAF immediately put a call through to Wing Commander Jack Pattison, CO of 429 ‘Bison’ Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force. ‘There’s a “war” on tonight, sir,’ she told him. A few minutes later, he was in the operations room himself.

Pattison was handed the fully decoded message in silence. Another maximum effort was being called for; it was ever thus. The target: Düsseldorf, an industrial city that had been designated a ‘Primary Industrial Area’ in the Air Ministry’s directive to Bomber Command early the previous year. Even so, and despite being in the heart of the Ruhr industrial area, the city had been attacked only four times, and not since June. But that night, Bomber Command wanted six hundred aircraft to take part, a large raid indeed. A glance at the board showed that fifteen of their sixteen Halifaxes were fit to fly. Almost maximum strength – and that included the CO and his crew flying as well.

Flight Sergeant Bill Byers wandered over to the Flight Room at around 10.30 a.m., and there learnt that he would be going out that night. A notice on the board merely warned them that they were under battle orders, but nothing more – no clue to the destination or size of the raid was given. He immediately went to see the meteorological officer to try and find out what the weather was due to be like over Europe, then called his crew together. Once assembled, they took a truck – or a blood wagon, as they were known – over to their aircraft, ‘Z’ for Zebra, so they could run up the engine and go through the pre-flight tests. It was a grey, damp, cold day – the kind of day that never really grew light – and drizzling slightly. Mist shrouded the airfield. The Halifaxes around the perimeter loomed like spectres. Most of the other crews had followed suit, and despite the chill stillness of the day, RAF Leeming was now a hive of activity. As well as the jeeps and trucks rumbling by, trolleys of bombs, fuel bowsers and ammunition carts were all hurrying to the dispersal areas.

Not far away, Bill’s twin brother George was going through the same process with his crew. The brothers had only been with the squadron a month but were already considered quite a unique pair at Leeming – after all, there’d not been identical twins at the station before. Moreover, not only did they look exactly the same, they were also practically inseparable, apart only when with their respective crews and in the air. They even shared a house together. On their arrival they’d been allocated a married quarters house in Leeming. Dick Meredith, Bill’s wireless operator, shared the house with Bill and George. The twins took a room upstairs, while Dick and several other crew members took rooms downstairs. ‘They were so much alike, you could barely tell them apart,’ recalled Dick when I spoke to him some time later. ‘And so close. They never said, “Where’s my shirt or socks?” but “Where’s our shirt?”’

Shortly after the pre-flight tests, it was time for lunch – a simple but nutritious hot meal, followed by chocolate or biscuits. Bill would always take a bar of chocolate and a tin of apple juice with him on the mission, but it was important to make sure the crews were well fed before they took off. The food was a perk of the job – and there needed to be some – for while most in Britain struggled with the stringent rationing, there were fewer shortages for the bomber boys. Bill and George ate their meal with Dick Meredith and some of their other crew members in the sergeants’ mess. Strangely, although the twins were the captains of their aircraft, they were not officers, even though two members of their respective crews were, and messed separately; the social divide between officers and non-commissioned officers might have been put to one side in some theatres of the war, but not so in Britain. Not everyone felt like eating a heavy meal – nerves and apprehension gave people a nauseous sensation in their stomachs. The key was to try not to think about it too much, and to keep the conversation going. Distraction was everything.

Between the end of lunch and the final briefing there was not much time – the chance for a quick game of cards, or to write a letter, but not much more. In the Flight Rooms, they would put on silk underwear, thick pullovers and flying boots, then head to the Briefing Room. There, all the crews came together, not just from 429 Squadron, but 427 ‘Lion’ Squadron as well, also based at Leeming: pilots, navigators, flight engineers, air bombers, wireless operators and the air gunners, piling in and scraping back chairs as they sat down. Since that first message earlier in the day, more information had reached Leeming about the route, the bomb loads required, timings, and, crucially, frequent weather updates. In the Briefing Room, there were rows of desks on which pilots and crews could make notes, while on the end wall was a large map, covered over with a cloth until the Station Commander came in and announced the destination. This could be an anxious moment: the further away, and the deeper into Germany the raid, the more dangerous it was. Then the Navigation Officer spoke, explaining the forming-up procedure and the route to Düsseldorf, marked on the map with lines of white tape. The Met Officer was next. Despite the low cloud over northern England, the target area was, he assured them, expected to be clear. Bill listened carefully, jotting down a few notes on a scrap of paper. This was only his second mission as skipper and he felt his stomach tighten.

The briefing over, the crews collected the rest of their kit – flight suits and Irvins, flak jackets, Mae West lifejackets, as well as chocolate and apple juice, then clambered once more into the blood wagons and set off for their aircraft. It was nearly four o’clock by the time they reached their Halifaxes, and the light was already beginning to fade. Once aboard their aircraft they waited for nearly half an hour. In the cockpit, some twenty-two feet off the ground, Bill went through final checks. It was cold in there, without the heat from the engines to warm it up. It smelled of metal, dust and oil. And it was quiet; there was no more joking, no laughter. The mood amongst all the crew was now serious, their thoughts directed to the job in hand. Christian names and nicknames were replaced with their proper titles: Navigator, Upper-Mid Gunner, Skipper – with communication through the aircraft’s intercom. The minutes seemed to have slowed. As Bill was discovering, this half-hour before they took off was the worst part of the whole trip. He felt scared – of course he did. Anyone who said they weren’t was a liar as far as he was concerned.

At last the signal came and Bill started the four Rolls-Royce engines, licks of flame flicking from the exhaust outlet brightly against the darkening sky. The great aircraft shook and they moved into line, taxiing onto the perimeter track running around the left side of the airfield. Further away, 427 Squadron were lining up on the right. The first Halifax from 429 thundered down the runway at 4.25 p.m., then off went a plane from 427, the two squadrons feeding in turns from their respective sides of the main runway. Bill inched his aircraft forward. George was two ahead. At a quarter-to-five, he watched his brother reach the top of the runway, pause, then accelerate and lumber into the air. Three minutes later, it was his turn. As he taxied round, he saw the usual groups of groundcrew and WAAFs along the edge of the airfield. As Bill pushed open the throttle and felt the Halifax clatter and surge forward he could see them waving and holding their thumbs up in a sign that meant good luck. With both hands, he gently pulled back the control column and felt the Halifax lift from the ground, the perimeter hedge disappearing beneath them. Trees, roads, villages rushed by and then they were in cloud and climbing high into a dark and uncertain sky.

The first time I met Bill Byers was on a warm but blustery day in May 2002 at Croft Racing Circuit in North Yorkshire, England. He was there with a number of veterans and their families for the unveiling of a plaque dedicated to the men of the Royal Canadian Air Force who had flown from there during the war. I noticed Bill because he stood out so obviously from the other veterans. Wearing a baseball jacket and cap, he moved about easily and when he talked it was with a quiet but animated Canadian accent that sounded many years younger than his eighty-two years. Wandering over, I introduced myself and we soon got chatting. He’d only been at Croft a short while during the war. It was not long after his arrival in Britain in the summer of 1943. He and his identical twin brother George had been sent there to convert from twin- to four-engine bombers. After that they’d both joined 429 ‘Bison’ Squadron, RCAF, based down the road at Leeming, flying Halifaxes. He told me about the weather that winter. ‘Boy, it was cold,’ he said. When it wasn’t snowing it was raining. Because they always flew their bombing missions at night, the lack of sunshine started to really get him down. At one point, he realized he’d not seen a hint of sunlight in over two weeks, so with no ops that evening, told his crew they were going for a practice flight and took them high above the clouds. ‘I just needed to see some sunlight,’ he told me. ‘We flew up and down the country, and felt much better after that.’

We were still talking when someone started pointing to a dot in the sky beyond the trees at the end of the circuit. Then we heard the faint thrum of engines and in what seemed like no time at all, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Lancaster was humming past. After one flypast we began to talk again, but then the Lancaster slowly banked and turned in for another sweep over our heads. Everyone gazed skywards, mesmerized, as it then circled again and came back for a third pass. Once it had disappeared over the horizon, I turned back to Bill who introduced me to his wife, Lil. They’d met during the war. She had been a young girl from nearby Northallerton, and when Bill finished his combat tour they’d got married and after the war she’d journeyed with him back to his native Vancouver.

‘We’ve made the trip back to England about twenty times since the war,’ Bill grinned. ‘I love it here. And you see, my mother was English too. She met my dad during the First World War, so I’ve always felt attached to the place.’

We met again some eighteen months later at their home in Redwood City, a few miles south of San Francisco in California. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, but in Carmel Drive it was warm and, for the most part, sunny. They’d moved there over forty years ago – his job with the Post Office had been ‘boring as anything,’ and his cousin, Hal, had always wanted him to come on down to California. So finally that’s what they did, with Bill buying into Hal’s masonry business in November 1959. It turned out to be a good move. ‘We did reasonably well,’ Bill told me, ‘and we’re secure financially. We’ve been able to do what we wanted to.’

He suddenly leant forward, his fingers together. There was still a lot of energy there; he never seemed to sit still for long. ‘But you want to hear about the war,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

Let’s go back to the beginning, I suggested. I was interested to know about his background, about what shaped him, and what led him to fly bombers from an icy airfield in northern England.

There were no other brothers or sisters, just Bill and George. ‘My mother’s first husband was killed during the First World War,’ said Bill. ‘Then she met my dad and followed him back to Canada. Then my brother and I were born.’ His dad was in lumber mills, for most of the time working around Vancouver, although when the twins were six, they moved to Burbank in southern California for a few years before returning to Canada. Their childhood was, he admitted, pretty happy. He and his brother did most things together and although they had occasional spats, were very close most of the time. ‘Our thoughts were often identical,’ said Bill. ‘Whether it was some kind of telepathy I don’t know, but if we thought about some problem, we’d be sitting there looking at each other and both get the same idea at the same time. That would happen loads of times.’ Neither was particularly keen on class work and they took far greater interest in woodwork and the more practical subjects. ‘I hated Shakespeare until I got to England,’ said Bill. ‘Now I think he’s the greatest.’ They left school and both went straight into a course in aeronautics, part of the Dominion Provincial Youth Training Scheme. They’d been there about six months when war broke out. The RCAF was soon recruiting hard and both Bill and George were accepted, although as groundcrew rather than pilots. Their training took them to bases all around the country, but they were at Saskatchewan when they turned twenty-one. ‘It wasn’t a big deal at all,’ said Bill. ‘In wartime they don’t give you a day off for your birthday.’

Shortly after, George heard that he was to be posted to another air base in Manitoba. When Bill discovered this, he wanted to be posted with him. Luckily for them there was a new warrant officer at Saskatoon who knew there was a section in the King’s Rules that said brothers could stay together if they so desired. ‘From then on,’ said Bill, ‘we pretty much stayed together all the way through.’

Around that time, it was decided that groundcrew should sometimes fly in the aircraft they were working on – this was seen as a means of ensuring their work was up to scratch. Bill enjoyed this aspect of the job and could soon tell when the pilots were making mistakes. He began thinking it would be more fun to be flying and so suggested to George that they re-muster as aircrew. To get in, they had to pass an IQ test, but they’d done several of these back at school and knew the form. Both of them finished their exam in half the time allowed and both passed, and so they were sent to Ground School at Edmonton in Alberta. Their subsequent medicals revealed them to have perfect 20:20 eyesight, and so having scraped through their algebra and geometry tests, they were sent to High River, Alberta, to begin training as pilots.

Initially, they flew Tiger Moths, open cockpit biplanes, before progressing to twin-engined Cessnas. As long as there wasn’t too much snow about – and for the most part they were training during the summer months – Canada was an ideal place to learn, with its vast open expanse of country. In December they both passed their wings examination and were told they’d been earmarked to become instructors. The brothers had both been hoping they would be going to England and so were disappointed. ‘We were gung-ho,’ Bill admitted. They were saved, however, by a couple of Australians who’d been training with them, and who had fallen in love with Canadian girls and were desperate to stay in Canada. ‘I don’t know whether it was the girls or they just didn’t want to go into combat,’ said Bill, ‘but we told them that if they could arrange it, we were happy to switch. They did, and so we went overseas.’

That was in January 1943, but before they left for war, they were given a couple of weeks’ leave and were able to spend one last Christmas with their family. Their mother was worried about them going, but Bill was not especially apprehensive. ‘We had no idea what war was about,’ he said. They crossed the Atlantic on board the former liner, Queen Elizabeth, zigzagging all the way to avoid the Wolf Packs. By the time they reached Scotland, however, Bill was starting to feel pretty ill. Before he knew it, he was in hospital in Glasgow with acute appendicitis. Worse, he’d been separated from his brother again, who had been sent with the others to a holding camp in Bournemouth while they waited to be posted elsewhere. Bill got out of hospital as quickly as he could – a few days after his operation he told the civilian doctor that he was discharging himself. ‘You can’t,’ the doctor told him, but Bill insisted, so the doctor sent him to the RAF for a medical. ‘What’s all the bother about?’ asked the Medical Officer.

‘I want to get to my brother,’ Bill told him.

‘Where is he?’

‘In Bournemouth.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ the MO told him. ‘I’m going down there myself in three weeks,’ and with that, he let Bill go. He wasn’t really up to it though. Having had his stomach muscles cut to reach his appendix, Bill was suffering from the undue stress this was placing on his back. ‘It was at least a month before I was really fit to fly,’ he confessed. But he did find his brother – eventually. Unbeknown to him, George had moved into a private boarding-house. Nonetheless, Bill worked out that most of the airmen had to walk past the park on their way to the mess, so he went there and sat on a bench and waited. Eventually he saw two WAAFs walking with a familiar-looking Canadian pilot – about five-foot-eight, and with his dark brown hair combed back into a neat quiff.

‘Hi George,’ said Bill as they walked up.

‘Bill, you’re here!’ exclaimed George.

Bill recalled the WAAFs’ surprised faces. ‘They looked at him and then they looked back at me,’ he told me. ‘It was funny – they were thunderstruck.’

Bill liked Bournemouth. They were just kicking their heels but they played a little golf and went to shows and he soon began to build his strength back. The life of leisure soon came to end, however. Since their arrival they’d hoped they would be sent to fly fighters, but it was not to be. Both Bill and George were to be trained as bomber pilots. It was at RAF Pershore that they were allocated their crews. Bill Morison, Bill’s navigator, remembers how hard it was to tell the brothers apart. ‘They really were identical,’ he said, when I spoke to him on the phone. ‘It caused quite a bit of confusion to start with.’ After a further three months flying Oxfords and Wellingtons, they were then sent to Croft, for conversion onto Halifaxes. This was quite a jump. Four engines were a lot more to handle than two. Furthermore, the aircraft was that much bigger. ‘The Halifax was a pretty fair-sized airplane,’ pointed out Bill, ‘and you had to get used to the different attitudes. On take-off, for example, there was slight swing, and you needed more speed to get airborne. There were all kinds of different settings. And when you landed, because the Halifax was so much taller, you hit the ground sooner.’

Bill and George joined 429 Squadron at the very end of September 1943. The squadron had been formed in November the previous year at East Moor, some ten miles north of York, then flew its first operational mission over the Ruhr two months later. In August the squadron had moved to Leeming, further north between Richmond and Northallerton, and by then the operational centre of the all-Canadian 6 Group of Bomber Command. The twins arrived at a time when the American Eighth Air Force and British Bomber Command were bombing enemy targets round the clock, the Americans by day and the British by night. The bomber war would prove fearsomely dangerous for every man that took part until the very end of the war, but in the autumn of 1943, Nazi Europe was still heavily defended by an enormous array of over 50,000 anti-aircraft guns, many of which operated in conjunction with tracking radar. In the German industrial area of the Ruhr, some anti-aircraft guns were even mounted on railway cars, which followed incoming bomber streams and kept them under continuous attack. And the skies were still held by the Luftwaffe. Particularly perilous for the night-time bomber crews were the German night-fighters, guided by increasingly sophisticated radar systems. By the autumn of 1943, forward German radar units on the Atlantic and North Sea coast were tracking the radio traffic of squadrons as they took off, with individual aircraft selected for interception. Unbeknown to a bomber crew, its fate might already have been marked before it had barely heaved itself into the sky. German night-fighters were fast, agile and ferociously armed; skilled bomber pilots could and did successfully evade them but the odds were not good, to put it mildly.

Bill and George knew little about any of this. Like most new crew, they were hopelessly ignorant and naïve with regard to what lay in store for them. They had no access to the kind of information enjoyed by those higher up the chain, and although they were aware of the basic aims of the bomber war, they did not think about any wider issues such as the relationship between the British and the Americans, or the overall strategy, or whether these endless bombing raids was actually achieving very much. Rather, they arrived eager to get on and do their bit and excited to be finally part of a real, active, front-line squadron.

Unlike the Americans, Bomber Command sent its aircraft up over Europe with only one pilot, but new arrivals were not given the controls straightaway; rather, they spent a couple of missions as a ‘2nd Pilot’ in order to give them an idea of what to expect. Bill and George went on their first combat missions over Europe as 2nd Pilots on 3 October, 1943, George getting airborne at 6.45 p.m., Bill, the next in line, just three minutes later. The target was Kassel, an industrial centre to the east of the Ruhr. It was a good day for the squadron. Two aircraft returned early because of mechanical failure, but the rest reached their intended destination, dropped their bombs and returned home safely, just under six hours after they’d set off.

Bill and George were sent out as 2nd Pilots the following night as well. This time the target was Frankfurt and 429 Squadron were part of a four-hundred-strong raid that would be the first serious attack on the medieval city. Visibility was good, and the red flares of the bomb markers were clearly visible. Just as Bill’s aircraft began its run in to the target a massive explosion erupted from the ground, and a huge spout of flame burst into the sky. After they had dropped their own bombs and turned for home, Bill could still see the flames of the burning city glowing from as far as fifty miles away.

George, meanwhile, was suffering a far more alarming mission. Before they reached Frankfurt, they came under repeated attack by a night-fighter, and although they managed to escape as they came into reach of the enemy anti-aircraft guns, it was not before they’d lost one of their engines and suffered a succession of hits. There were fires on board and as they began their bomb run, they realized the electrics for the bomb doors had been damaged. This meant they had to open them manually, which was time-consuming and so they were delayed in releasing their bombs until after they’d left the target. Fortunately, they were not attacked again on their return trip and managed to make it to England with just three engines. But the situation was still perilous. Before reaching Leeming, it became clear they did not have enough fuel left to get them home. Furthermore, their landing gear had also been shot up and was now inoperable. There was only one option: they would have to bail out. Six managed it safely. Two did not: the air Bomber and the flight Engineer both crashed to their deaths along with the aircraft, exploding on impact in a field just short of Leeming.

A fortnight later, both brothers had been given crews and their own aircraft. On 22 October, the target was once again Kassel. George had technical problems opening his bomb doors, so once again missed the target and was forced to jettison his bomb load later. Both, however, made it back safely. As Bill recorded, ‘Appeared to be a good raid.’ Even so, of the eleven crews that took off that night, only nine returned home. As the twins were discovering, bombing missions over Germany were hazardous in the extreme.

Bill and George were settling in well, however. As a pre-war station, Leeming had more extensive facilities than many of the other airfields, such as Croft. Even better, the twins were delighted to be able to share a room in their house in the town, a house that had a coal fire and a bathroom. The coal store was outside and was guarded, but they would raid it anyway. The guards never troubled them. ‘It was a great joke,’ said Bill.

It was about half-past-five on the night of 3 November, 1943, and the bombers of 6 Group were now crossing over the Channel and beginning to meet up with the rest of the raiding party. The bombers – a mixed force of mostly Halifaxes and Lancasters, but with Mosquitoes leading the way – did not fly in formation as such, but kept roughly close together in what was known as a bomber stream. There were dangers all along the way. German night-fighters lurked over the Channel. Gunners strained into the darkness, but very often the first they knew about coming under attack was when cannon fire started clattering around them. Then came the coastline anti-aircraft fire and more night-fighters, and finally an intense flak barrage over the target itself.

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 Nuremburg.

‘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 5000 feet. ‘I heard a hell of 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.’