major German cities. Often guided by radar, these ground defences blasted thousands of explosive shells skywards at the bombers as they flew towards their target. A direct hit could destroy an aircraft, and shells that exploded nearby caused them to veer and lurch as the murderous shrapnel smashed against – and often through – the fuselage. Harry thought of the 4,000 pounds of high explosive in the bomb bay just inches beneath him, and wondered what would happen if the flak scored a direct hit there. A few minutes later he had his answer: a nearby bomber erupted in a shower of flame. He watched, awe-struck, as the aircraft spun to the ground leaving a corkscrew-shaped trail of smoke behind it. Looking down at the city, Harry could see that the streets were burning too.
Once over the target, their bomb aimer gave a series of instructions to the pilot to ensure their bombs were dropped as accurately as possible. For the rest of the crew ‘the next few minutes were agony’ as they flew as straight and level as possible, desperate to give him the best chance, but feeling they were easy prey for the guns down below. The seconds felt like minutes, until the bomb aimer announced their load was gone and the aircraft lifted, freed of its burden. The pilot then brought the nose of the aircraft down and they turned and fled back into the welcoming darkness.
The New Year came and went with no pause in the offensive; there were six operations on Berlin in January alone. The only respite came when the moon was full; training exercises took the place of providing the enemy night fighters with little-needed target practice.
By February 1944 the RAF was averaging two heavy – 550 aircraft – raids per week. Their losses were beginning to increase, leading to renewed criticism of Harris’s tactics. On 19 February Bomber Command experienced its worst night thus far during a Leipzig raid.
Rusty Waughman, with 101 Squadron, took off at 11.44 p.m. The first indication that things were not going as planned was when his navigator told him they were 20 minutes ahead of schedule. The wind was much stronger than forecast, blowing them towards the target before the allocated bombing time. There would be no Pathfinder markers, nothing to aim at, so they decided to ‘dog-leg’, flying in a zigzag fashion, to bleed time.
When they arrived, the sky was a riot of searchlight beams and flares dropped by enemy night fighters. Rusty watched as a Lancaster in the distance blew up in mid-air: another direct hit. Corralled by the winds, hundreds of their comrades had arrived prematurely over the target and started to orbit, waiting for the Pathfinders to arrive and illuminate the target. ‘Like fish caught in an ever-shrinking net, the bombers were being picked off one by one.’ There was a sound like a clap of thunder as they started their bombing run. Two circling bombers had collided and were now just shards of burning metal falling from the sky.
Rusty was able to drop his bombs, leave the danger area and head back to England without damage, but 79 others were lost that night. The brunt of the blame was borne by the Met Office, but their job – to predict the weather on the way to and over a target hundreds of miles away, based on very little data – was unenviable.
Leipzig was a major setback and yet, even as criticism of the campaign, both in the press and within the Air Ministry, started to mount, Harris remained defiant. His critics claimed there was no sign of deterioration in the mood or morale of the German public. They remained ‘apathetic’ about the bombing of their towns and cities. On 25 February, in a combative internal memo, Harris challenged his critics in typically robust fashion, giving those around him no doubt that his faith in the heavy bombing of German cities securing an Allied victory was as robust as ever. If anything, he was even more determined to intensify the attacks. Under the heading ‘Reactions of German Morale to the Bomber Offensive as described in official documents and the Press’, he wrote:
1. I have the honour to refer to numerous accounts now current both in official documents and in the public Press on the reactions of German morale in heavily attacked areas to the Combined Bomber Offensive and to state my conviction that these reports seriously misrepresent the state of mind of the German populace at the present time.
2. I understand that incontestable evidence derived from Most Secret sources exists to show that the continuance and probable intensification of the Offensive is regarded in the highest Nazi circles as something which, in the absence of unpredictable errors by the Allies, will certainly ensure a German defeat comparatively quickly by producing a collapse of morale as well as production on the Home Front.
3. To my mind this belief, which is certainly confirmed by the efforts of the German propaganda machine to divert our bombing by any means from industrial targets in Germany and to convince the Germans that these efforts will shortly be successful, is inconsistent with the widely and officially disseminated view that the prevalent attitude to bombing in Germany is ‘apathy’…
4…This view is manifestly false…There have been a vast number of indications that the attitude of the German population to the bombing, so far from being apathetic, is one of the utmost despair, of terror and of panic not always held in control by the authorities.
5. It is a depressing fact that this slogan as to the “apathetic” reaction of the German population should receive as it does the widest publicity in official documents and statements, whereas any impartial interpretation of the mass of information coming out of Germany, if it was properly weighed up, would inevitably show a condition of affairs such as I have outlined above and certainly no condition of ‘apathy’. 13
Despite his convictions, the brutal losses of that winter caused a change in attitude within the Air Ministry. The faith they had shown in Harris and his Combined Bomber Offensive was starting to waver. Harris was handed a new list of targets, centres of industry rather than of symbolic significance – Schweinfurt, Leipzig, Brunswick, Regensburg, Gotha and Augsburg – that should assume priority over any others. However, his obstinacy remained: there would be no immediate raids on any of the targets suggested to him. Harris still believed that his main offensive would bring the victory he had promised, even if the date by which he had predicted ‘a state of devastation in which surrender was inevitable’ was rapidly approaching.
The raids continued on his favoured targets – the largest so far on Stuttgart, with 116 sorties. On their return, Thomas Maxwell, an 18-year-old rear gunner on his sixth mission with 622 Squadron, was forced to bale out after his Lancaster was hit by enemy fire. He feared the flames would start licking at his turret, the most cramped and claustrophobic part of the plane, with only a Perspex shield between him and the 20,000-foot abyss below him. Like all rear gunners, he had to crawl into his ‘cold hole’, where there was so little room to turn that another crew member had to shut the doors behind him.
‘I didn’t have time to exit by the main door. I had to get my wits together quickly. First I needed a parachute. It was in the fuselage, an arm’s length away. So I opened the turret doors and hoped they didn’t jam. Then I dragged the ’chute carefully into the turret in case it deployed. Then I rotated the turret 90 degrees, otherwise I’d have baled out into the fuselage. But there was no room to put the ’chute on! With the turret now at right angles to the fuselage, the slipstream gale was grabbing, tearing and tugging at the flapping parachute backpack, the spewing fuel whipping past me. There was nothing now but Hobson’s Choice: go back into the pitch-black fuselage or stick your rear end into this growling 120-knot wind.’14
Thomas managed to clip one parachute hook on, but as he was contorting his body to fasten the other he fell backwards into the night, his parachute under his left arm. ‘I pulled the rip cord: Long John Silver managed with one hook, and one was better than none. Life is simplified when there are no options. There was a crunch as the drag-chute came out and the parachute woofed into its canopy above.’
Somehow, falling through the sky from 8,000 feet, Thomas managed to attach the other hook and within a few seconds was floating securely down to the
