the spire of some French parish church, or drowning in somebody’s swimming pool, I was dumped unceremoniously into a ploughed field and a relatively soft landing. The field was full of piles of manure. There is a saying: “It matters not whether you’re in the s**t or out of it, it’s only the depth that varies.” At this point, I was quite happy to be in it.’
Following Stuttgart there were two huge raids on Frankfurt, and a final onslaught on Berlin on 24 March, during which the weather forecast proved inaccurate once again. Chick Chandler had a ring-side seat once more. ‘By some dreadful mistake we arrived early over Berlin. The rear gunner said we had no option but to circle. Circle over Berlin! What a disaster! We were only at 13,000 feet, so we had a bird’s eye view of the whole thing. We saw at least four Pathfinder bombers blow up as they were going round. Seeing all those aircraft going down made me realise what we were doing. Although I was the baby of the crew, I knew just what the dangers were, and how easy it was to be shot down and killed.’
Strong winds had scattered the stream across a wide area and pushed many of them towards heavy flak defences they would otherwise have missed. Seventy-three aircraft were lost, an estimated 50 from flak. It was another bad night for Bomber Command.
By 30 March the Battle of Berlin was about to end, but Harris was determined to make one last attempt to score his decisive, symbolic victory. ‘Yet, the March that had entered like a lamb was destined to go out like the proverbial lion. The ill-wind of death had still to be sated.’15
Ron Auckland
The average member of a Bomber Command crew had a 30 per cent chance of being killed before they completed their first 30-op tour. Of a total of 125,000 aircrew, 55,573 were killed: an overall death rate of 44.4 per cent; another 8,400 were wounded and some 10,000 taken prisoner. In no other branch of the armed forces were the chances of dying so high, or the combatants called into action night after gruelling night. Yet every one of the 125,000 recruits who took to the skies to wage war by night was a volunteer.
There were those whose fathers had fought in the First World War and who wanted to avoid the gruesome grind of trench warfare. There were others who were seduced by the glamorous modern image portrayed by the RAF, given added lustre by the glorious victory of ‘The Few’ in the Battle of Britain. For many, such as Ron Auckland from Portsmouth, who had experienced the damage wreaked by the Luftwaffe earlier in the war, there was an element of revenge.
Ron had witnessed the first German raid on the docks of his home town, where he worked as a civil servant. On duty as a fire officer, he had carried out the dead and rescued the injured after an enemy bomb fell down the air vent of a crowded air-raid shelter. During another, he and his family were bombed out of their home. That was enough; he signed up. ‘I’d seen a lot and knew just what the Germans could do. I was in a reserved occupation but I still wanted to join up. I wanted to be part of the war effort.’16
George Prince grew up in New Malden, Surrey, the son of a garage owner. He left school at 14 to work for his father as a mechanic, a job in which he learned many skills that would prove useful when he became a flight engineer. He coveted a green, four-seat 1934 MG PA in his father’s showroom and was mortified when a German bomb shattered the windows and riddled the car body with shrapnel. George was only 15, but his father told him that if he repaired the MG he could have it.
‘I mended the bodywork lovingly, and filled the holes in the radiator with putty. I couldn’t drive it, but it became my pride and joy.’17 George, like his near neighbour Cyril Barton, dreamed of being a pilot, but when he signed up his superiors decided that his experience in his father’s garage was too valuable to sacrifice, so he became a flight engineer. The MG would come into use later, when he was operational and old enough to drive it. ‘The whole crew would get in: two in the front, and the rest would squeeze in the back and hang out over the side.’
As a 16-year-old Londoner, Harry Evans had watched in awe as the night sky above his home city glowed red during the Blitz. That image and the sound of the Heinkel 111s were imprinted on his soul. One day a German bomb landed on his street. ‘It demolished the house just to our right. The whole house shook like there had been an earthquake; all the windows were blown out and the ceilings came down. Some of the neighbours were killed. Once you’ve experienced something like that you never forget it. Shortly after my 18th birthday I volunteered for the RAF. My father had been in the Navy on submarines in the First World War and it didn’t sound very appealing to me. I wanted to be one of the Brylcreem Boys!’
Bomber Command recruits also came from far-flung corners of the Empire. Ron Butcher grew up in Middle Sackville, a village near New Brunswick in Canada. He joined the RAF because all of his friends were doing it, even though there was no pressure for them to volunteer; just a sense of duty towards their ancestral home and ally. Britain needed their help against the Nazi terror, and to stand idly by seemed like an act of cowardice.
Andy Wejcman did not come from any corner of the Empire. He was born in Berlin in January 1923. When Hitler and the Nazis gained power in 1933 and revealed their virulent brand of anti-Semitism, his father, a politically active lawyer and intellectual Polish Jew, moved the family to Poland. In 1939, just before the German invasion, Andy was sent to England to learn the language. Despite having an American mother, the only English phrase he knew was ‘Stick ’em up!’ – from watching a cowboy film. Ironically, she insisted that he travel by train and boat because she believed flying to be too dangerous. On the day he left, his entire family came to wave him off at the station. It was the last time he saw his father.
Andy learned English at a school in Hampshire and proved to be such a good student that he was offered a place at Oxford University. He turned it down, even though he knew his mother would be appalled. ‘I decided I would join the Air Force, and if you’re going to join the Air Force you might as well fly. I knew what the war meant; I heard the bombs and I’d seen the results of bombing and the destroyed buildings. I certainly wanted to help overthrow Hitler. I felt it was my moral and physical duty to do so.’18
Being a member of Bomber Command had benefits the Army and Navy couldn’t offer. Even though most nights were spent dodging fighters and flak, the crews slept in a bed on British soil. It was a shorter journey home on leave. They could also enjoy their familiar comforts: pubs, dances, the cinema, and, for those who were single, local girls whose eye might be caught by a young man in uniform.
Once they signed up, the mundaneness of day-to-day training dispelled any notions that RAF life might be any more glamorous. Harry Evans joined in the summer of 1941, at the Yorkshire Grey pub in Eltham, where the ballroom had been converted into a recruiting centre. It was the end of the year before he was summoned to the Air Crew Selection Centre on the Euston Road, where he was tested, interviewed and given a thorough medical. Eventually he was accepted and kitted out as an Aircraftman 2nd Class, the lowest rank in the entire Air Force. When he was sent to digs near Regent’s Park his spirits lifted; the airmen were billeted in luxury flats overlooking the park, where businessmen, bankers and diplomats once lived before the Blitz. Once inside, it became clear that this was just an accident of geography; it was the middle of winter, there was no heating, the interior doors had been removed and, despite the expensive tiles and fittings, nothing worked. The flats had become filthy and neglected, and the meals served to the airmen were in keeping with their surroundings.
A few days later, Harry was asked to report to another prestigious address. The Pavilion
