Ron and Sheila Auckland’s wedding
‘It was a great shock,’ Ron recalled. ‘Of course people you knew were dying all of the time. In Portsmouth I went to a lot of the Navy dances and we lost many of our friends when one of the ships got torpedoed. We knew the war. We understood it.’
She and Ron never discussed the dangers. ‘Sheila obviously knew what I was doing in Bomber Command but I didn’t speak to her about the operations or the losses. I never wanted to worry her. She just expected me to turn up when we’d agreed.’
Sheila also did her best not to distress him. ‘I cried every time he left but I never let him see me cry. When I saw him off at the railway station, he kept opening the door to say goodbye one last time. The porter shouted out, “Close that door and put that light out!” But Ron kept on opening it. In the end I said to him, “You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” It was so hard. My sister’s husband was in the Navy, so we both used to cry together.’
They ended up living together. ‘I could talk to my sister about it. We would listen to the radio and some bad news would come on and we’d end up crying. She’d say to me, “Let’s sleep together tonight,” for comfort. But the men never knew about any of this.’
On one occasion Ron came back to the house unexpectedly to find Sheila in tears. ‘I was upset because he saw me crying. I tried to be the brave girl because I didn’t want him to worry. That was the wartime attitude. But it affects people on such a personal level – the fear that I had was being replicated by hundreds of thousands people across the country night after night, day after day. But you never showed it. No, we went dancing to take our mind off it.’
Each day Ron was away, Sheila lived in fear of the ‘telegram boy’ and what he might bring. ‘One day he arrived with an envelope and I didn’t want to take it. I thought it was telling me Ron was missing or dead. My aunt opened it. It was from Ron. He was telling me he’d won the Distinguished Flying Cross. The silly man sent me a telegram!’
The unceasing tension took its toll. Rusty Waughman was forced to replace his first flight engineer. ‘He was fine in training, but as soon as we were on operations he would just sit on the floor and quiver. He was incapable of carrying out his duties. I stuck with him for a couple of ops, but during one our starboard engine was on fire and the poor guy was unable to do anything about it. I had to take all the emergency actions myself. It reached the point where it was affecting our safety, so I reported him to the CO, and he left the station that afternoon so as not to affect the morale of others. I don’t know if he was made LMF or not, but he should never have been because, although he knew of his condition, he never refused to fly on ops.’
LMF – shorthand for ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ – was the label given to those deemed to have lost the will to fight, branded as cowards and removed from operations in disgrace. The threat of it was the sword of Damocles that hung over every airman’s head. During the operation in which Chick Chandler had become confused about how much Window to throw out of the plane, their Stirling bomber developed a technical fault. The crew began to argue over whether they should turn back or continue to the target. ‘We were facing mortal danger, but we were more worried about what would happen if we returned. I knew we didn’t have a chance of surviving, but someone said: “They’ll say we’re LMF.” It was an ever-present fear in Bomber Command. They were more scared of being called a coward than they were of flying. People were willing to risk their lives to avoid being branded LMF.’
Any early return from an op came under the kind of scrutiny that induced many to press on regardless. One can only speculate upon the number of aircraft which might have perished because the crew decided that dealing with any mechanical problems was a less daunting prospect than the disgrace of being labelled cowards. Bomb aimer Campbell Muirhead recorded an account in his diary of the treatment of a sergeant who had refused to fly: ‘There he was standing out in front, all on his own, in full view of every person in the unit, to be stripped of his wings and then his sergeant’s tapes. They had all been unstitched beforehand so they came away easily when they were ripped from his uniform. He was immediately posted elsewhere.’26
Alan Payne was sent to find and bring back his mid-upper gunner, who ran away after two operations. On the return journey, once he had assured them he wouldn’t try to escape, they attempted to lighten the mood by taking him to a dance hall in Nottingham. It only provided a temporary respite, however; once they got back to Lincolnshire, the gunner was stripped of his stripes and brevet and posted to a camp in Sheffield to be ‘retrained’.
Alan and his crew were sympathetic, but didn’t dwell on his fate. Once gone he was barely mentioned; there was always another operation, and life in Bomber Command was hazardous enough without having someone on board who might be incapable of carrying out his job at a critical moment.
Andy Wiseman had the misfortune to see what went on in an ‘LMF camp’, though as a visitor and not an inmate. ‘I remember seeing one of the bases they used for people who were branded LMF. They were allowed to be drilled for 55 minutes, and they had cold showers in the morning in winter. It was terrible. LMF was one of the great unfairnesses of the war. Though I suspect that some of the LMF people were cowards, most of them were just deeply affected by their experiences and couldn’t cope any more. I think it took more courage to admit you were afraid and couldn’t go on. Bravery only lasts for so long …’
Men could serve on so many operations before the bank of courage from which they had drawn was empty. Some found the will to carry on regardless, perhaps because they were too ashamed to admit to their fear and dreaded the accusations of cowardice that might follow. Harry Evans served his early ops with a mid-upper gunner, ‘a proper Jack-the-lad’, who soon found it difficult to cope. ‘The crew didn’t tell me till much later, but he went to the Gunnery Officer and asked to go. The officer talked him out of it. On ops he would have panic attacks, especially if we were being shot up. He’d start shouting: “We’re all going to get killed!” or “There’s holes in the tail!” We’d just say, “Shut up, you …” But he got stuck in from then on. I look at it in two ways: he wasn’t the best mid-upper gunner because of the panic. On the other hand, he was too scared to doze off at his position …’
Rusty Waughman believed the mental scars were worse than any physical wounds. ‘I know one airman who pressed on. When they were damaged by flak during an op, he blacked out, left his seat and wandered to the back of the aircraft. The rest of the crew tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t speak and he had no further recollection of the op. He was transferred to the hospital at Matlock, where he was unconscious for several days until a nurse dropped a metal dish. He woke up screaming, “There’s another poor sod going down. Look at the flames! Look at the flames!”’ The man was eventually invalided out of the service.
When men suffered a nervous breakdown because of the stress and exhaustion of incessant ops, they were given medical and psychiatric treatment rather than punishment – and given the relentless nature of life in Bomber Command it is surprising that so few men suffered psychological problems. Only 0.3 per cent of aircrew were officially classified as showing a Lack of Moral Fibre, though countless more suffered from a spectrum of what we would now term post-traumatic stress disorders.
Jack Watson’s crew was joined by a Mosquito squadron on base at Upwood. Jack was in his room in the old married quarters when a Mosquito which had become lost in the fog careered into one of the adjoining buildings. ‘The house was ablaze, and as we were running towards it we could see three of our lads who had just come back from a raid sitting on the bed. We could see them sitting there; they still had their uniforms on. They couldn’t get out and we couldn’t get in to help them – and there wasn’t
