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
