of an obstacle course on a drill, but they missed the warm gear. The smell of fuel hung heavy in the air, together with the mustiness that attested to the bomber’s age, and at times like this they still envied crews who had been treated to one fresh off the production line, its cockpit pristine, without the slightest hint of a scratch on the Perspex or the dials, a complete absence of oily smears or dust, and the delicious, leathery scent of factory goodness in the air.
They took up their positions for the drill. Bert Winn, the rear gunner, turned left, the only man on board to do so. He crawled through the tail on hands and knees and slid his legs through the doors to his cramped Frazer Nash turret. Once in, that was it: facing away from the direction of travel, he would barely move for the rest of the flight, his gloved fingers gripping the twin triggers of his four Browning machine-guns.
The rest of the crew made their way through the fuselage. Eric Page, the mid-upper gunner, took his station just forward of the main entrance. His ceiling turret was armed with two Browning machine-guns. When he and Bert swung into action the staccato rattle of their weapons could be heard throughout the aircraft, and the lingering smell of cordite would mingle with the Lancaster’s perpetual cocktail of hot oil, glycol and sweat.
Roland Luffman took his position at the wireless operator’s desk on the port side of the cabin, forward of the wing. Next to the inner engine, it was the warmest part of the plane, and so where the crews often kept their ‘pee can’. On one raid, Rusty Waughman, of 101 Squadron, remembers a bomber below them exploding, ‘which rolled us a half roll over’. As he fought to regain control of the plane, Taffy, his wireless operator, started to scream ‘Blood! Blood!’ over the intercom. He thought he had been hit. In fact the pee can had been turned over during their dive and emptied on his head.
Sam Harris eased himself behind the navigator’s table, hidden behind a curtain on the starboard side, just behind Ken and flight engineer ‘Mac’ Mackenzie, and lit by an Anglepoise lamp. Chalky White, the bomb aimer, slid down the steps into the nose and lay flat on the ice-cold floor. Things would get a damn sight hotter for him when the flak crackled around him and the aircraft lurched and veered its way on the final run in to the target.
Once at their posts, they went through the usual drills. After cries of ‘Prepare to abandon aircraft’, then ‘Abandon aircraft! Abandon aircraft!’ they threw open the escape hatches and slithered over the wings to practise a ditching at sea. Nothing could mimic the real challenges of trying to escape a bomber in a vertiginous spin, pinned to the sides or the roof by massive g-forces, unsure which way was up and which way was down. But it was something – certainly better than surrendering their fate entirely to chance – and it might buy them the precious seconds that could separate life from death.
They paused for a smoke and a chat, ran through a final crash landing drill, and headed back to the mess for those newspapers. After lunch there were no rides into town because there was no definitive word on whether there would be an op that night. No word meant staying on camp, idling away time, catching a nap, playing cards, stealing some coke for the stove or writing a letter home.
Then the base Tannoy sprang to life.
‘All crews to report to their squadrons.’
The poor weather had seen three successive operations cancelled, which meant that Rusty Waughman and his crew had just enjoyed their third good night’s sleep in succession – all except their rear gunner, Harry ‘Tiger’ Nunn. The previous night’s op had been scratched just prior to take-off, and by then Harry had taken a ‘wakey-wakey’ pill, the methamphetamine cocktail intended to make sure he would be alert for the whole flight. As his mates got their heads down, he had spent the whole night pacing the floor of their hut, talking to himself, too manic to even lie on his bed.
Rusty Waughman, the 20-year-old son of a Durham colliery worker, had worked hard to become a pilot. Like Cyril Barton, he had been a sickly child. He had suffered bouts of diphtheria and tuberculosis and had a heart murmur, and his mother, a Royal Red Cross-winning matron at a military hospital during the First World War, constantly had to nurse him back to health. He missed out on many things as a result, football and swimming amongst them, so he always felt an outsider – and when he was old enough to join up he seized his chance to be part of something rather than feel left out once again.
Like the Bartons, his parents worried about him constantly, but when he told them about his plans to follow his father into the Navy they weren’t unduly concerned, confident that his childhood illnesses would render him unfit to serve. When Rusty filled in the medical form at the recruiting centre, he omitted to mention his tuberculosis but included everything else. Then, on the spur of the moment, he decided to try his luck with the RAF instead. Their medical examination was less stringent and he was accepted immediately.
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