Читать книгу Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next - John Nichol - Страница 10

While some crewmen on 617 Squadron were chafing at their inactivity, Johnny Johnson welcomed the lack of ops. ‘It meant I had more time with Gwyn, and we had so little time together that it was important to make the most of every minute.’¹

Born in 1921 near Horncastle in Lincolnshire, Johnson had been one of six children.

Unfortunately, my mother died two weeks before my third birthday, so I never really knew a mother’s love. It really affected me – I remember seeing her in the hospital bed. I was standing next to my father and another man, and my father described me to him as ‘this one is the mistake’. I remember that to this day.

I had a very unhappy childhood. He wouldn’t let me go to grammar school and was ruining my life. Eventually I went to the Lord Wandsworth agricultural college for children who had lost a parent. Again, my father had said no, but the local squire’s wife went to see him and told him in no uncertain terms that he had to let me go! I was eleven at the time.

By November 1940 Johnson was a trainee park keeper with ambitions to be the superintendent of a big London park, but with London suffering under the Blitz, he thought: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ He wanted to be part of the war, not left behind, but didn’t want to join the Army. ‘I had seen the reports of World War One trench warfare, casualties and the like, and didn’t want any of that, and I didn’t like water, so the Navy was out! So that left the RAF. I wanted to be on bombers so I could take the war to the enemy, to get at the Germans. I had no thought of any dangers back then, I just didn’t think about it.’

Like many other British aircrew, Johnson did his initial training in America because, even before Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the Americans into the war, the US government had arranged discreet support for the British war effort by secretly training British aircrew under the Arnold Scheme. To maintain the fiction of American neutrality, aircrew wore civilian clothes and travelled via Canada, before slipping across the US border.

Johnny Johnson pictured in 1947

Johnson returned to the UK in January 1942 and, desperate to get into action, volunteered to train as a gunner – the shortest training course. Testing his resolve, the president of the selection board said to him, ‘I think you’d be afraid to be a gunner, Johnson.’

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he said. ‘If I was, I wouldn’t have volunteered in the first place!’ ‘So I gave as good as I got,’ he says now, with a chuckle. ‘I was going to prove to him that I wasn’t afraid! I had no sense of fear or thoughts of what the future might hold, and certainly no idea of the losses Bomber Command would suffer.’

Johnson retrained as a bomb-aimer, not least because they earned five shillings (25p – about £10 at today’s values) a day more than gunners. As a bomb-aimer, he manned the front gun turret on the route out and only went into the bomb-aimer’s compartment as they approached the target. He then fused and selected the bombs, set the distributor and switched on his bombsight. Lying in the nose of the aircraft on the bombing run, he could see the flak coming up at him, but had to ignore that and concentrate on doing his job.

From a distance the flak bursts could seem almost beautiful, opening like white, yellow and orange flowers, but closer to, dense black smoke erupted around them and there was the machine-gun rattle of shrapnel against the fuselage and the stench of cordite from each smoking fragment that pierced the aircraft’s metal skin.

‘I don’t think I was afraid,’ he says:

but when you see the flak you have to go through, I think anyone who didn’t feel some apprehension was lacking in emotion or a stranger to the truth, but you didn’t want to let anyone down. The crew were doing their jobs and mine was to get those bombs on the target to the exclusion of all else. Once we got to the target area, I was too busy concentrating on the bombsight and dropping the bombs in the right place to worry about what else was going on.

Despite his initial scepticism about the value of a ‘special squadron’, in mid-July 1943, two months after the Dams raid, Bomber Harris proposed using 617 Squadron to assassinate the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. A letter to the Prime Minister from the Chief of the Air Staff revealed that Harris had asked permission to bomb Mussolini in his office in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, and his house, the Villa Torlonia, simultaneously, ‘in case Il Duce is late that morning … Harris would use the squadron of Lancasters (No. 617) which made the attacks on the dams. It is manned by experts and is kept for special ventures of this kind.’ It was suggested that if Mussolini were killed ‘or even badly shaken’, it might increase the Allies’ chances of speedily forcing Italy out of the war. However, the plan was vetoed by Foreign Office officials, who were unconvinced that eliminating Mussolini would guarantee an Italian surrender and feared that it might even lead to his replacement by a more effective Italian leader.²

Two days later, on 15 July 1943, 617 Squadron at last saw some fresh action, though it proved to be what one Australian rear gunner dismissed as ‘a stooge trip’ – an attack on a power station at San Polo d’Enza in northern Italy. ‘We screamed across France at practically zero level, climbed like a bat out of hell to get over the Alps, and then screamed down on to St Polo and completely obliterated the unfortunate power station without seeing a single aircraft or a single burst of flak.’³ Other crews would have been grateful even for that level of activity, one pilot complaining that after two months’ inaction, when they finally did get an op it was ‘to bomb Italy … with leaflets’. As Joe McCarthy grumpily remarked, it was ‘like selling god-damned newspapers’.⁴

There was only one thing McCarthy hated more than dropping leaflets, and that was signing forms, and one of his duties was to sign his aircrews’ logbooks every month. It was a task he seemed to find more difficult and intimidating than the most dangerous op. His education had been as much on the streets of the Bronx and the beaches of Coney Island as in the classroom, and his handwriting was laborious and painfully slow. He would put the task off as long as possible and when he could finally avoid it no longer, his crewmates would gather to watch, in fits of laughter at the sight of their huge and normally unflappable Flight Commander, with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, sweating buckets and cursing under his breath as he struggled to complete the hated task.

During that summer of 1943, 617 Squadron moved from Scampton to Coningsby, where they would have the advantage of concrete runways, rather than the grass strips they had been using at Scampton. Those grass runways, camouflaged with ‘hedgerows’ painted on the turf to fool German raiders, had been less of a problem than they might have been, because the airfield was at the top of an escarpment and the natural drainage prevented Scampton from becoming boggy in all but the most relentless wet weather. However, with the squadron’s Lancasters carrying increasingly heavy fuel- and bomb-loads, a move to Coningsby was necessary, and 617’s pilots were soon airborne and familiarising themselves with the local landmarks there: a windmill in the nearby Coningsby village, Tattershall Castle to the north-west, beyond the river Bain, and, most distinctive of all, the towering St Botolph’s church, universally known as the ‘Boston Stump’. It was a rheumy, water-filled land, criss-crossed by dykes and ditches, and prone to autumn mists and winter fogs that often forced returning aircraft to divert elsewhere. There were farms dotted among the heathland and birch woods, rich pastures and water meadows, but to many of the aircrew the endless plains beneath the vast canopy of the skies seemed echoingly empty of life.

* * *

During the summer of 1943, Main Force had continued to take the war to the enemy, with Operation Gomorrah – the virtual destruction of Hamburg in a raid beginning on 24 July – creating havoc on an unprecedented scale. In one hour alone, 350,000 incendiaries were dropped there, and succeeding waves of British and US bombers over the next few days created firestorms that engulfed the city, killing 30,000 people. Elsewhere in the war, the tide was increasingly running in the Allies’ favour. The Battle of Kursk had been launched by the Nazis in early July, but it proved to be their last major offensive on the Eastern Front, and the Soviets first neutralised the attack and then launched their own counter-offensive, driving the Germans back. In the west, the invasion of Sicily began on 10 July, and within five weeks the whole island was under Allied control, while on the Italian mainland Mussolini was deposed on 25 July 1943.

617 Squadron’s long period of relative inactivity came to an abrupt end on 14 September 1943, when they were tasked with attacking the Dortmund–Ems Canal, a waterway 160 miles long, and the only one linking the Ruhr valley with eastern Germany and the ports of the Baltic and North Seas. That made it the most important canal system in Germany, a vital artery feeding Germany’s war industries with strategic materials including the crucial imports of Swedish iron ore, and transporting finished products that ranged from arms and munitions to prefabricated U-boat sections.

The canal was most vulnerable north of Münster around Ladbergen, where it ran in twin aqueducts over the river Glane. To either side of the aqueducts the canal was carried in embankments raised above the level of the surrounding land, and these, rather than the aqueducts, were designated as 617 Squadron’s targets with the first operational use of much more powerful 12,000-pound High Capacity (HC) bombs, of which three-quarters of the weight was high explosive, compared with half in the smaller bombs.

On the face of it, 617’s task was simple: bombing from 150 feet at a speed of 180 miles an hour, they were to drop their bombs on a precise aiming point within 40 feet of the west bank of the canal until a breach had been achieved. The remaining bombs were then to be dropped on alternate banks of the canal, moving north at 50-yard intervals to ensure as widespread a destruction of the canal embankments as possible. Even one bomb breaching the embankment would drain the canal, halting the flow of barge traffic, flooding the surrounding area and preventing millions of tons of Nazi supplies and weapons of war from reaching the front lines. However, the HC bombs were like elongated dustbins, built without streamlining and only small fins to enable them to fit into the bomb-bay. This made them unstable in flight and hard to drop accurately.

Six Mosquito fighter-bombers were to escort the squadron’s Lancasters, operating as ‘can-openers’ by dealing with any flak hot-spots on the route. The Lancasters were to approach the target at extreme low level – 30 feet over Holland and Germany – before climbing to 150 feet to bomb. Although they had been practising for several weeks, flying low level along English canals, first by day and later by night, not everyone was happy with the idea of another low level attack on a heavily defended target. ‘Our losses at the dams had been around fifty per cent,’ Fred Sutherland says. ‘And certainly I had doubts about this next op. My main concern was flying around at night, at very low level, with all those power cables criss-crossing everywhere.’

Born in 1923, Sutherland was Canadian, a full Cree Native American, who had volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force the minute he turned eighteen. ‘I couldn’t wait to get in the war in any way possible,’ he says. ‘Everybody wanted to get in. We were still suffering from the Depression, unemployment was high and it was a means to escape all that. All the talk was about the war and I wanted to be involved. I didn’t really understand what it would be like though, I had no idea what was to come, what I’d go through, so I suppose I was naive.’ After completing an air gunner’s course, he crewed up with Les Knight, a ‘short but very muscular’ Australian pilot, ‘strong in the shoulders and arms. He was a wonderful pilot,’ Sutherland says, ‘very quiet, but if you were out of line, he quietly told you that you’d better not do that again.’

David Maltby’s crew

One of the two four-ships – formations of four aircraft – making the raid was to be led by Squadron Leader David Maltby, a very skilful pilot who had completed thirty ops over Germany and been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross even before joining 617. Still only twenty-three, having struck the fatal blow against the Möhne dam, he was now one of the most highly decorated officers in the RAF and, like his comrades on the Dams raid, a national celebrity. A fun-loving, gentle giant over six feet tall, he was the life and soul of every party and always up for a prank; while training for the Dams raid, he had often ‘buzzed’ his wife Nina’s family farm. His first child, a son, had been born soon afterwards; the shock of Maltby’s aerobatics overhead may or may not have hastened the birth.

Maltby’s personal good luck token was a filthy, oil-stained forage cap. He had worn it on the night of the Dams raid, never flew without it, and even wore it on parade. He donned it once more as he prepared to lead Operation Garlic – the raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal. It would be his crew’s first operation since the dams, and they would be flying at low level, straight into anti-aircraft gunfire, just as they had at the dams. The op was scheduled as a night-time raid on 14 September 1943, and eight Lancasters took off around midnight, but were recalled within forty minutes because of cloud obscuring the target. However, that ‘boomerang’ order resulted in tragedy. After acknowledging the order to return to base, Maltby’s Lancaster crashed into the North Sea 8 miles off Cromer on the Norfolk coast, killing everyone on board. Famed as the man who breached the Möhne dam, Maltby had now joined the mounting tally of the squadron’s dead.

Although the official accident report mentioned ‘some obscure explosion and a fire’ before the aircraft’s fatal crash, it was believed for many years that Maltby had simply misjudged his height and dipped a wing into the sea, with fatal consequences. However, a rival theory has recently been advanced, claiming that he collided with a Mosquito from 139 Squadron that was returning from a separate raid on similar routing, and was also lost without trace that night.⁵

Dave Shannon circled over the crash site for over two hours until an air-sea rescue craft arrived, but Maltby’s body was the only one ever to be recovered; his fellow crew members were lost in the depths of the North Sea, and are listed simply as having ‘no known grave’. Their average age was just twenty. David Maltby is buried in a quiet corner of St Andrew’s churchyard at Wickhambreaux near Canterbury, the church in which he had married Nina just sixteen months earlier. His son, just ten weeks old at the time of Maltby’s death, would now never know his father.

The following night, the surviving members of the squadron returned to the Dortmund–Ems Canal, with Mick Martin’s crew replacing Maltby’s. ‘Crews as a whole accepted the loss of a friend as a downside of the war in the air they were engaged in,’ Les Munro says, a view echoed by Larry Curtis. ‘One accepted the fact that you weren’t coming back from this war. I did and most people did and it helped a lot. You were frightened but you knew it had to be done, so you did it.’⁶ However, Maltby’s death had given some of the aircrews pause for thought, and there was considerable trepidation about the op. ‘I knew Dave Maltby,’ Johnny Johnson recalls. ‘He and Les Munro were on 97 Squadron with us, so when he’d been lost the night before, there was already a sense of it being a dodgy op.’⁷

The nervousness about the op only served to strengthen the importance of the pre-flight rituals or superstitions that almost all the crews followed. Every aircraft was carrying eight men rather than the usual seven, with an extra gunner aboard to ensure that all the gun turrets would be manned at all times throughout the flight. Unlike most of the other crews, one of Les Knight’s crew’s rituals was not peeing on the rear wheel before boarding their aircraft, and when Les Woollard, the extra gunner they were carrying, began to do so they all rushed over and pulled him away. ‘We were not really bothered though,’ Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland says, ‘we were just fooling with him.’ Sutherland thinks his crew was not superstitious, but then adds, ‘but we always did the same routine. I always ate my chocolate bar when we were charging down the runway, and I always wore the same socks that my girlfriend, now my wife, had knitted for me.’

Eight Lancasters, all carrying 12,000-pound delayed-action bombs, and flying in two four-ships, took off at midnight on a beautiful, clear moonlit night. As they crossed the North Sea, the lessons learned on the Dams raid led them to adopt a new method of crossing the hostile coastline. Instead of flying a constant low level approach, they climbed before reaching the coast, but then went into a shallow dive back to low level, building up speed before flashing over the coastal flak batteries. ‘And it really was low level,’ wireless operator Larry Curtis recalls. ‘I can remember the pilot pulling up to go over the high-tension cables.’⁸ ‘What was really scary for me were the power wires,’ adds Fred Sutherland, who had the closest view of them from his gun turret under his aircraft’s nose. ‘Even if there was moonlight, you couldn’t see the wires until you were practically on them, and once you hit them, that was it, you were done for.’

George Holden led the formation, with Mick Martin on his starboard flank and Les Knight to port. Rear gunner Tom Simpson heard Martin and his bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, complaining that Holden was flying too high, allowing the searchlights to pick them up. ‘We seemed to be getting into a lot of trouble and I had never experienced such intense ground fire.’ Just before reaching the small German town of Nordhorn, Martin was, as usual, flying ‘lower than low’, squeezing between some factory chimney stacks, ‘the top of the stacks being higher than we were’, but Holden, still much higher, was drawing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Fred Sutherland, front gunner in Les Knight’s crew, whose job was to attack ‘any ground flak units that started firing at us, tried to return fire but couldn’t depress my gun enough because we were right on top of it’.

Rather than skirting a white-painted church with a high steeple near the town centre at low level, Holden opted to fly over it. Moments later, his aircraft was hit by lines of red and green tracer that flashed upwards, biting into his starboard wing. Almost immediately the aircraft was engulfed in flames. ‘There was poor old Holden up about four hundred feet or more, being shot to blazes and on fire.’⁹

Holden’s aircraft went out of control, diving and veering sharply to port. Les Knight had to haul on the controls to avoid a collision with his leader’s aircraft and within seconds Holden’s Lancaster had crashed and exploded with the loss of everyone – Guy Gibson’s Dambusters crew – on board. It was Holden’s thirtieth birthday. ‘They just dived down, nearly hitting us on the way,’ Fred Sutherland recalls, ‘straight into the ground with a huge explosion. It was some sight – eight guys just dying in front of my eyes. They didn’t have a hope. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Your friends are getting killed and you are scared as hell but you can’t let it bother you; if you did, you could never do your job. You just think, “Thank God it wasn’t us.”’

The blast from the crash almost brought down the two Lancasters flying close behind him, but, fortunately, his delay-fused 12,000-pounder didn’t explode. Had it detonated on impact, all the other aircraft in his formation, flying as low as 30 feet above the ground, would almost certainly have been destroyed as well. Instead an unfortunate German family whose farm was the site of Holden’s fatal crash suffered a tragic blow when the bomb detonated fifteen minutes later. Alerted by the anti-aircraft fire and the thunder of the approaching bombers, the farmer, his wife and their six children had been sheltering in a cellar beneath their farmhouse when the crash occurred. However, a few minutes later, the parents decided to go back upstairs to fetch some warm clothing for their shivering children. They were still above ground when the bomb exploded. The farmer survived, sheltered by one of the few pieces of wall to survive a blast that demolished every farm building and set fire to an avenue of oak trees, but his wife was killed instantly. She was the only German fatality from the raid.¹⁰

The remaining aircraft re-formed, with Mick Martin taking over as leader, but ran into low-lying mist and fog over the Dortmund area, at times reducing visibility to as little as 500 yards. The haze was reflecting the moonlight and ‘making the whole scene appear like a silver veil. We could see practically no ground detail when flying into-moon.’¹¹ They were supposed to bomb from 150 feet at two-minute intervals, but the fog and haze meant that the only time they could actually spot the canal was when they were already directly overhead and too late to drop their bombs on it. They kept circling, hoping for a break or eddy in the fog that would give them a sight of the target, but with no sign of the Mosquitos that were supposed to act as ‘can-openers’, suppressing the air defences, the Lancasters were making themselves ‘sitting ducks for the air defences putting up a wall of flak’, and the prowling night-fighters. They soon lost another aircraft, when Mick Martin’s rear gunner suddenly called out, ‘There goes Jerry Wilson.’ Flight Lieutenant Harold ‘Jerry’ Wilson’s Lancaster had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crashed into the canal bank, killing himself and all his crew.

‘There was only us and Micky Martin left by then from our formation,’ Les Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland, says. ‘It was a desperate scene unfolding around us; it was pretty scary.’ Soon afterwards, squinting into the fog, Sutherland froze as ‘trees atop a ridge just appeared in front of me, rushing towards me. Someone else screamed for Les to climb but it was too late.’ Sydney Hobday, the crew’s navigator, remembered the moment all too clearly, ‘To my horror,’ he says, ‘I saw the treetops straight ahead and thought we had at last “bought it” – after quite a good run for our money I admit!’

The trees hit them on the port side, puncturing the radiators of both port engines and damaging the tail. Both port engines overheated and had to be shut down, and the starboard inner engine then began to fail as well.

Knight fought to control his badly damaged aircraft as Edward ‘Johnny’ Johnson – not the member of Joe McCarthy’s crew married to Gwyn, but another bomb-aimer with a similar name – jettisoned the 12,000-pound bomb, praying that the delayed-action fuse would work, because, if not, they’d be blown to pieces as it detonated. It fell away silently and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The crew also threw out their guns and ammunition to lose weight as Knight tried to nurse his battered aircraft back to England, alternately feathering the port engines to cool them and then briefly restarting them as the aircraft dropped towards stalling speed.

He called his rear gunner, Harry ‘Obie’ O’Brien, forward to haul on the exposed controls from the starboard rudder pedal to ease the strain on Knight’s leg as he battled to hold the damaged aircraft in straight and level flight, but it was a hopeless task. With the two port engines virtually useless and the starboard ones over-revving as they strained to keep the Lancaster airborne, the aircraft was constantly being pushed to port and still losing altitude, with the glide angle increasing steadily. Fear of what was to come gripped them all. ‘There was no smoke or flames,’ Sutherland says, ‘but we knew we didn’t have long.’ As they passed over Den Ham in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Knight realised he couldn’t control the aircraft much longer and ordered his men to bale out. Looking out, Sutherland thought they were over water, but once more it was just the moonlight reflecting from the layer of cloud below them, and when he pulled back the blackout curtain he saw the ground in front of them.

The crew baled out one by one. ‘Bomb-aimer going, cheers, Les,’ Edward Johnson said.

‘Cheers and good luck, Johnny,’ Knight said, his voice showing none of the emotion he must have been feeling.

Obie O’Brien also said his farewell and baled out from the rear hatch, and was followed moments later by Sutherland, who called, ‘Mid-upper gunner going out the back door, Les.’ He didn’t have his parachute on, but ‘quickly clipped it on and just jumped out the back door’. The extra gunner, Les Woollard, on his first flight with Knight’s crew, jumped at the same time, though Sutherland lost sight of him at once.

Navigator Sidney Hobday baled out of the hatch in the nose and flight engineer Bob Kellow followed a heartbeat later. He’d disconnected his intercom and so couldn’t speak to Knight, but gave him a thumbs-up sign, and saw Knight’s answering signal before he tumbled out of the hatch.¹²

None of Knight’s crew had ever talked about being shot down. Sutherland says:

I don’t think we ever talked about the possibility, or what we would do. I remember Johnson always wore special shoes whenever we flew low level so he could walk out if we came down – he was prepared. But for me, whatever was going to happen would happen. I didn’t think too much about it. No one talked about it. We just hoped that the op would be over quickly, and we’d survive and get back to the Mess for a beer! ¹³

However, the first thing that every aircrew member found out about a new aircraft was ‘how to leave the plane in a hurry’. At one time crews practised baling out from a static aircraft on the ground, but ‘this produced so many twisted and broken limbs that it was put on hold’. An instructor at OTU – the Operational Training Unit, which all ranks had to attend before joining a unit on active service – also had a warning for trainee aircrew who baled out over the UK: ‘Remember to hold on to the ripcord handle and bring it back or you will be charged five bob for its replacement!’

Like the rest of his crew, Sutherland had never used a parachute before, but after a heart-stopping pause when he pulled on the ripcord, his chute opened safely. ‘I hit the ground and stood up,’ he says. ‘A few hours before I’d been in England, now I was standing in enemy territory. It was quite a shock. I thought about my family getting a telegram to say I was missing, what would they think?’ As he did so, he saw Les Knight attempting a forced landing a quarter of a mile away, but sadly, by waiting for his crew to bale out, time had run out for Knight himself, ‘a classic example of the pilot sacrificing his life to allow the others to escape’.¹⁴ His stricken aircraft hit the trees, crashed and burst into flames, killing Knight instantly. His body, still at the controls, was retrieved by Dutch civilians who, in defiance of the German occupiers, buried him after conducting a funeral for him. ‘I owe my life to Les,’ Sutherland says. ‘He kept the aircraft steady as long as he could, so we could get out. Without him, I’d have been dead.’

Sidney Hobday, who was a Lloyds clerk in peacetime, had also landed safely – albeit 30 feet up in the branches of a tree – and saw his skipper’s last moments. ‘I imagine that when he let go of the stick, the plane dived straight to the deck … I shall never forget how he wished me good luck before I left … he was a good lad.’¹⁵

Mick Martin had lost sight of Knight’s aircraft in the fog and did not know what had happened to him. He eventually identified the target ‘after stooging around for about an hour, but it was very hairy’, and he had to make thirteen passes over it before his bomb-aimer was sufficiently confident to release their bomb.

Meanwhile, more of their comrades were being shot down. Flying Officer William Divall’s Lancaster came down a few miles away after being hit by flak. Having dropped his bomb into the canal, Divall crashed into the bank and the ensuing explosion flattened the trees flanking the canal and blew the rear turret, with the rear gunner’s body still inside it, right across to the opposite bank. All the crew died in the blast.

Flight Lieutenant Ralf Allsebrook’s Lancaster was also hit by flak as he flew over the canal. A veteran of two tours with 49 Squadron, Allsebrook had joined 617 Squadron a few days after the Dams raid, and was not to survive his first op over Germany with them. He tried to make an emergency landing, but hit the roof of a house and then smashed into a crane on the canal bank, decapitating himself and killing his crew.

The lethal anti-aircraft fire and the crashes caused by low-level flying in such poor visibility made it unsurprising that only two bombs – dropped by Mick Martin’s and Dave Shannon’s crews – landed anywhere near the target, one hitting the towpath, the other falling in the water without doing any significant damage to the canal. Even worse, the abortive raid had seen five of the eight Lancasters shot down or crash, leaving a trail of burning aircraft across the German countryside, and causing the loss of forty-one men’s lives, including thirteen of the survivors of the Dams raid that had made the squadron’s reputation. The op had also claimed the lives of David Maltby and his crew the previous night, making a total of six out of nine aircraft and their crews lost – a loss rate of two-thirds compared with the 5 per cent losses that the supposedly more vulnerable Main Force bombers were suffering on their mass raids on heavily defended German cities.

The first two major ops by 617 Squadron had therefore cost the lives of fourteen crews. The death rate on the Dortmund–Ems Canal op was equivalent to that of the triumphantly received Dams raid, and as Johnny Johnson remarked, ‘In many ways it was not dissimilar to the Dams, apart from those very heavy defences and the difficulty of getting at the target. That was the killer.’¹⁶ Yet while the Dams raid had been hailed as one of the greatest successes of the war, the failure to destroy the target this time caused Dortmund–Ems to be regarded as an unmitigated disaster. The margins between great success and total failure were proving to be vanishingly small.

Johnny Johnson was ill and had played no part in the raid, but hearing about the losses, he was desperate to find out if his pilot, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of his usual crew had been involved. ‘It was a worrying time, these men were my family,’ he says, but to his great relief he found that they had not taken part in the raid, with both McCarthy and Les Munro temporarily grounded on the orders of the Medical Officer.

The squadron’s relative inactivity since the Dams raid and the attendant ‘one op’ gibes from other squadrons may have led to the target and the method of attacking it being hastily chosen, with too little thought about the potential pitfalls, and as successor to the now legendary Guy Gibson, George Holden may also have been eager to win his own spurs. ‘There was a sense that we had to get back on ops,’ Johnny Johnson now says. ‘Squadron Leader Holden wanted to do it to keep the reputation of the squadron and its role in special operations. Maybe the accolades we had received because of the Dams op meant we had to get on and do more, be more successful. But those accolades were a hindrance here.’¹⁷

Only six crews – including those of Mick Martin, Dave Shannon, Les Munro and Joe McCarthy, who were veterans of the Dams raids – now remained on the squadron. Desperate to atone for the failures, Martin volunteered to return to the target the following night, flying solo to complete the job, but he was overruled by his superiors and, apart from an abortive attempt to bomb the Anthéor railway viaduct in southern France the following night, the Dortmund–Ems Canal raid proved to be 617 Squadron’s last for almost two months.

The heavy losses they had suffered at the canal were proof that their signature operations – low-level, night-time, precision-bombing raids – were no longer viable. They had been lucky at the dams, albeit still with the loss of almost half their force. At the Dortmund–Ems Canal their luck had run out. ‘It was a big blow to the squadron,’ one crewman says. ‘We lost so many that night that it seemed to affect the thinking of the powers that be. It was a very traumatic experience.’¹⁸

There were to be no more low-level attacks. From now on 617 Squadron would operate at high level, using a new tachometric precision bombsight, the SABS (Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight), to ensure accuracy. It was one of the world’s first computerised bombsights and a complex, hand-built piece of equipment, consisting of a mechanical computer mounted to the left of the bomb-aimer and a stabilised sighting head fitted with an optical graticule. The sight was connected to a Bombing Direction Indicator (BDI) mounted on the pilot’s instrument panel, which indicated the amount of left or right turn required to bring the sight to bear on the target. Once the sight had been programmed with the necessary data – the aircraft’s speed and altitude, and the wind-speed and direction – the bomb-aimer had only to keep the target centred in the graticule and the sight itself would then automatically release the bomb at the right moment.

However, while they could achieve impressive accuracy with the sight, and attacking from height made them less vulnerable to flak, it also made them much more vulnerable to German night-fighters, particularly when attacked from below, the Lancaster’s blindspot. In the early stages of the war, anti-aircraft guns had claimed far more victims than fighters, but that was quickly reversed and by 1943, Bomber Command losses to night-fighters were twice those caused by flak.

German night-fighter pilot Peter Spoden – these days a great-grandfather living in a care home with his wife – brought down twenty-four four-engine British bombers during the war, and he cries as he reflects on the deaths of the crews inside them, young men of his own age. The aircraft he shot down never even knew he was there: he approached from behind and below them, flew 50 or 60 feet underneath their fuselage and unleashed the two upward-firing guns the German pilots called Schräge Musik. (Translating literally as ‘slanting music’, Schräge Musik was their slang term for jazz.) Spoden recalls one night where he was talked in by his radio operator and suddenly saw ‘this black shadow above me … in ten minutes I shot down three Lancasters – I was completely out of my mind.’¹⁹ However, the firing wasn’t all one way. One Lancaster gunner has vivid memories of shooting down a fighter at close quarters: ‘I could see my bullets hitting him. I couldn’t miss him – not at that range.’²⁰

617 Squadron’s shocking rate of losses had led to their sarcastic nickname ‘The One Op Squadron’ being replaced with a new one, ‘The Suicide Squadron’, and the deaths of so many crewmates dealt what could easily have been a terminal blow to morale. ‘Those losses had a big effect, there was a sense of distress and shock, and possibly even dissatisfaction that we were asked to do something which should never have been attempted,’ Johnny Johnson says. But although morale was inevitably affected in the short term, confidence soon recovered. ‘Morale slumped because they were rather staggering losses,’ Larry Curtis adds, ‘but one did tend to throw these things off very quickly. Going from low level to high level made all the difference; losses were very slight after that.’²¹

* * *

While their comrades were trying to come to terms with the disaster, two of the survivors of Les Knight’s crash had been captured, but the remaining five, including Sidney Hobday and Fred Sutherland, were on the ground in the Occupied Netherlands, trying to evade the Nazis. They were separated from each other, and the knowledge that he was now alone in the heart of enemy territory, facing capture or perhaps even death if he were found, almost paralysed Hobday at first. However, realising that the greatest danger of discovery lay in remaining close to the wreckage of his downed aircraft, he climbed down from the tree he had landed in and set off south, away from the burning Lancaster.

He walked through dew-soaked meadows and along a canal bank, carrying on until it started to get light, when he hid in a small wood. However, his feet were soaked, and, sitting on the wet grass, he began to feel very cold. ‘Not wishing to get pneumonia,’ he began walking again, but as he approached a metalled road, the sound of galloping hoofs terrified him and he dived behind the nearest hedgerow, imagining ‘a couple of dozen mounted Jerries looking for me’. When he risked peering out, he saw that the ‘hoof-beats’ were actually the noise made by some Dutch children’s wooden clogs as they ran along the road to school. As he waited for them to pass, he glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty in the morning. ‘Twelve hours before, I had been strumming the piano in the Mess.’²²

Before setting out along the road, he took off his brevet and his other RAF markings, trying to make his battledress look as civilian as possible. Hobday knew that his name and those of his comrades decorated after the Dams raid had been published in the English newspapers, and as a result they had all been put on a Nazi blacklist. He knew that if he was taken prisoner, he was unlikely to remain alive for long.

He had not walked far when he saw two farmworkers cycling towards him. He bent down, pretending to tie his laces, but they stopped. Not speaking Dutch, he couldn’t understand them, but after a few moments of gut-gnawing indecision, he decided to risk telling them who we was. He said ‘RAF’ several times without any sign of recognition from them, and then began flapping his arms about to mimic flying. They now seemed to understand and, having looked carefully up and down the road, gave him half their food, ‘black bread with some queer stuff in it which I could not stomach’. He gave them a couple of cigarettes in return from the packs he always carried on ops, in case of just such an eventuality.

Heartened by their friendliness and realising the impossibility of crossing Europe alone and unaided, Hobday decided to seek more help from civilians where he could, hoping they would put him in touch with the Dutch Resistance. After a few more hours of walking he tried to hitch a ride in a little cart, but the driver shook his head, indicating by sign language that the Germans would slit his throat if they caught him. However, he gave Hobday some more black bread before driving off.

A little further down the road, he saw the same cart driver in urgent conversation with a woman, who then passed Hobday on her bicycle a couple of times, studying him carefully without speaking. Once more he was left fearing betrayal to the Nazis, but he kept walking and was then overtaken by some young men, who spoke to him in ‘slow schoolboy English’. They gave him some apples and a tall man then brought him a civilian suit. It would have ‘fitted a man five inches taller than myself,’ Hobday said, but he changed into it and the Dutchmen took his RAF uniform away. They also insisted on shaving off his moustache, saying it made him look ‘too English’.

Hobday was then told to make his way alone to a railway station 10 miles away, as it was too dangerous for them to accompany him. By the time he arrived, he was close to exhaustion. He hadn’t slept for thirty hours and had walked for another twelve with almost no rest. The tall man was waiting for him and gave him a train ticket to a town 100 kilometres away with a list of the times of the trains he had to catch. He also gave him a note in Dutch that said: ‘This man is deaf and dumb. Please help him.’

The journey tested Hobday’s nerves to breaking point. He first almost blundered into a carriage reserved for Wehrmacht troops and then, when he found an empty carriage, a ‘German Luftwaffe man and his girl’ got in and sat next to him. Luckily they were more interested in each other than the strange man sharing the compartment, and with the aid of his ‘deaf and dumb’ note, Hobday made it safely to his destination, where a young member of the Dutch Resistance met him. Having questioned Hobday searchingly to make sure he was not a German spy, he led him out of town to a place where eight members of the Resistance were in hiding, living in a crude hut deep in the heart of dense woodland. They had been carrying out minor acts of sabotage and raiding German stores, assembling ‘quite a collection’ of firearms, explosives, uniforms, blank visas and identity cards.

Twenty-four hours later, Hobday was reunited with Fred Sutherland, who had also managed to make contact with the Resistance. Fred had walked a few miles from the Lancaster’s crash site when, realising that ‘walking all the way to the south of Europe was never going to work’, he hid behind a barn and then jumped out as a girl about his own age was cycling towards him. ‘She nearly jumped out of her skin!’ he says. ‘She couldn’t speak any English so I tried to communicate with sign language that the Germans would cut my throat if they caught me.’ She took him to a boy who could speak a few words of English, and he contacted the Resistance. ‘After the war, I was told that this girl had actually been dating a German soldier!’ Sutherland says. ‘So I guess I was lucky because she didn’t tell anyone.’

Fred Sutherland

Sutherland and Hobday were comfortable enough living in the hut, sleeping on stolen German blankets and straw beds. Their food was largely potatoes, although one day a Dutchman caught some tiny eels in a nearby canal. The Resistance had begun making arrangements for the two RAF men to be returned to England via France and Spain, but the long chain of helpers was vulnerable to infiltration or arrest by the Nazis, and it proved a lengthy and fear-ridden process. Twice they were almost discovered, once when German troops began holding infantry manoeuvres in the woods, and the other when they escaped a Gestapo raid on the hut by the skin of their teeth.

After three weeks, frantic to contact his wife, who he knew would believe that he had been killed, Hobday had to be prevented from setting off for Spain on his own, but a week later arrangements were finally in place. The night before their departure, their hosts staged a farewell party for them, fuelled by a bottle of gin and some beer. The next day they set off, first travelling to Rotterdam, escorted by a woman dressed as a nurse.

They then travelled to Paris by train, armed with new fake identity papers showing that they were labourers for the Todt Organisation working on an aerodrome near Marseille. (As the Third Reich’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Fritz Todt ran the entire German construction industry. His Organisation Todt built the West Wall that guarded the coast of German-occupied Europe, as well as roads and other large-scale engineering projects in occupied Europe.) They went via Brussels and had ‘some shaky moments’ at the two frontiers, surviving a close examination of their fake identity papers at a German checkpoint. When the German officer held them up to the light for a better look, Sutherland’s hands were shaking so much that he had to ball his fists and brace his elbows against his side to hide them. ‘My heart was pounding and I was really scared,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to be nonchalant when you are facing your enemy.’ However, with the help of their Dutch escorts, who, at considerable risk to their own lives, kept up a stream of distracting conversation with the German frontier guards, the fake papers passed scrutiny.

‘I can’t begin to describe the courage of the people who helped us in Holland and France,’ Sutherland says. ‘They took us into their homes, fed us and cared for us at tremendous risk to themselves and their families. The Germans had infiltrated the Underground and people did not know who they could trust, and yet still they helped us, even knowing that, while we would likely be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, they and their families would be shot.’

They remained in Paris for nearly a fortnight, staying in the tiny flat of an elderly French lady, at huge risk to herself, and eventually they were taken to a clearing house for escaping aircrew and PoWs. There they were given yet more new papers and then set off in small groups for the journey to the Pyrenees.

When they arrived at Pau, they got themselves French-style berets and then took a small train through ‘the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen’ to Sainte-Marie and were driven on from there in a car powered by gas made from charcoal. At the foot of the Pyrenees they lodged overnight in a barn where other escapers were already waiting and began the climb of the mountains the next day. Apart from their guide and his dog, there were ten escapers: three Americans, three Frenchmen, a Dutchman, an Australian, the Canadian Sutherland and Hobday, the only Briton.

Following weeks in hiding, on a very poor diet and with little chance of exercise, Hobday was very unfit. Even worse, after climbing for six hours over the rocky paths, his shoes fell apart. Fortunately the guide had a spare pair, though they were too small and ‘hurt like hell’. They climbed all night, a perilous ascent with no light to guide them, following narrow, twisting paths with the mountainside rising sheer above them on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Only the thought of the fate that awaited them if they were found by the Nazis spurred them on. They had little rest and even less food, and suffered a frustrating and frightening delay when a shepherd, recruited by the guide to show them a short cut to the Spanish side of the mountains, became completely lost and left them in driving rain 7,000 feet up on the mountainside, while he tried to discover where they were.

They had started climbing the mountains at seven o’clock on Wednesday evening and did not reach the Spanish side until the Saturday morning. Having already passed through the Netherlands and right across France, in constant fear of discovery by the Gestapo, they had then dragged themselves right over the Pyrenees. Their epic escape was ‘the toughest thing I’ve ever done’, Sutherland says. Completely spent, they rested for the remainder of that morning and swallowed some food and wine, though it ‘came up as fast as it went down’.

In the afternoon they walked down to the nearest village, Orbaizeta. By then Hobday was so stiff he could hardly walk, and his companions were little better. Although Spain was ruled by Franco’s fascist regime, it was professedly neutral in the war, but there was a tense atmosphere as they encountered the Spanish carabineros for the first time. However, they treated the escapers well enough, and they remained in the ‘dirty little village’ until the Monday, though Hobday had to sell his watch to pay for food for Sutherland and himself. The shop where they ate was ‘a general store, very much like the Wild West saloons of the old cowboy films, complete with liquor, shepherds, singing and a bit of good-natured scrapping. On the Sunday they all came in with their week’s money and proceeded to get rid of it on booze.’ The place was filthy and there were pigs and chickens wandering everywhere, indoors and out.

The escapees were then taken to Pamplona, where they were met by the Red Cross, who escorted them to Madrid, a journey that took a further fortnight. There staff at the British Embassy gave them a train ticket to Gibraltar, where, to their enormous relief, they were at last back on British soil. Hobday’s first action was to cable his wife to tell her he was alive. They were flown home a few days later, on 6 December 1943, almost three months after they had been shot down.

If Hobday needed any reminder of how fortunate they had been to come through that marathon journey unscathed, the fate of a Dutchman he had befriended provided it. He attempted to cross the Pyrenees a week after Hobday but was caught in a snowstorm and got lost. Suffering from frostbite, he was captured by a German frontier guard and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.²³

Fred Sutherland, speaking from his home in Canada seventy years on, perhaps encapsulates the emotions of all those wartime evaders:

The whole experience was quite unreal, just like living in a movie. It was all very nerve-racking and I didn’t rate my chances of making it home, but it was worth a try. The Dutch people were risking their own lives to help me. Without them I would have been captured or dead and I can never thank them enough for that. And when I was on the ground – seeing the Nazis close up – that’s when I realised we had to win this war; regardless of the cost.

* * *

For the families of the dead, the ramifications of the disastrous Dortmund–Ems raid went on for months as they struggled to come to terms with their loss, and to understand how their loved ones had perished. David Maltby’s father, Ettrick, received a letter from the mother of Maltby’s navigator, Vivian Nicholson, desperate to find out how her own son had died. She was heartbreakingly eloquent in her expression of her grief.

‘I scarcely know how to write this letter,’ Elizabeth Nicholson wrote.

We would like to know the true facts of what they did that night and would be gratefully thankful for any news you could give us. We have a photo of your gallant son and our boy together. It is indeed a terrible wound for us to see them so young, happy and beautiful. Our boy was conscientious, very guarded about his duties. Please, if your son told you anything [about our son], we would indeed be grateful if you could let us know. I know you will understand my yearning for news, and I have the worry of our second son aged 19 on the submarine HMS Seanymph. The world owes so much to these gallant young men. We can only wait patiently till we can understand why they are taken from our homes, where their places can never be filled.²⁴

Many of the young men taking to the skies that night had left ‘last letters’ to be delivered to their loved ones if they were killed. Maltby’s wireless operator, Antony Stone, was no exception. His mother received her son’s final letter shortly after his death. ‘I will have ended happily,’ he wrote, ‘so have no fears of how I ended as I have the finest crowd of fellows with me, and if Skipper goes I will be glad to go with him.’²⁵

Many more letters, to parents of the bereaved, and from those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, would be delivered before the war was over.