12,000-pound bomb, praying that the delayed-action fuse would work, because, if not, they’d be blown to pieces as it detonated. It fell away silently and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The crew also threw out their guns and ammunition to lose weight as Knight tried to nurse his battered aircraft back to England, alternately feathering the port engines to cool them and then briefly restarting them as the aircraft dropped towards stalling speed.
He called his rear gunner, Harry ‘Obie’ O’Brien, forward to haul on the exposed controls from the starboard rudder pedal to ease the strain on Knight’s leg as he battled to hold the damaged aircraft in straight and level flight, but it was a hopeless task. With the two port engines virtually useless and the starboard ones over-revving as they strained to keep the Lancaster airborne, the aircraft was constantly being pushed to port and still losing altitude, with the glide angle increasing steadily. Fear of what was to come gripped them all. ‘There was no smoke or flames,’ Sutherland says, ‘but we knew we didn’t have long.’ As they passed over Den Ham in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Knight realised he couldn’t control the aircraft much longer and ordered his men to bale out. Looking out, Sutherland thought they were over water, but once more it was just the moonlight reflecting from the layer of cloud below them, and when he pulled back the blackout curtain he saw the ground in front of them.
The crew baled out one by one. ‘Bomb-aimer going, cheers, Les,’ Edward Johnson said.
‘Cheers and good luck, Johnny,’ Knight said, his voice showing none of the emotion he must have been feeling.
Obie O’Brien also said his farewell and baled out from the rear hatch, and was followed moments later by Sutherland, who called, ‘Mid-upper gunner going out the back door, Les.’ He didn’t have his parachute on, but ‘quickly clipped it on and just jumped out the back door’. The extra gunner, Les Woollard, on his first flight with Knight’s crew, jumped at the same time, though Sutherland lost sight of him at once.
Navigator Sidney Hobday baled out of the hatch in the nose and flight engineer Bob Kellow followed a heartbeat later. He’d disconnected his intercom and so couldn’t speak to Knight, but gave him a thumbs-up sign, and saw Knight’s answering signal before he tumbled out of the hatch.12
None of Knight’s crew had ever talked about being shot down. Sutherland says:
I don’t think we ever talked about the possibility, or what we would do. I remember Johnson always wore special shoes whenever we flew low level so he could walk out if we came down – he was prepared. But for me, whatever was going to happen would happen. I didn’t think too much about it. No one talked about it. We just hoped that the op would be over quickly, and we’d survive and get back to the Mess for a beer! 13
However, the first thing that every aircrew member found out about a new aircraft was ‘how to leave the plane in a hurry’. At one time crews practised baling out from a static aircraft on the ground, but ‘this produced so many twisted and broken limbs that it was put on hold’. An instructor at OTU – the Operational Training Unit, which all ranks had to attend before joining a unit on active service – also had a warning for trainee aircrew who baled out over the UK: ‘Remember to hold on to the ripcord handle and bring it back or you will be charged five bob for its replacement!’
Like the rest of his crew, Sutherland had never used a parachute before, but after a heart-stopping pause when he pulled on the ripcord, his chute opened safely. ‘I hit the ground and stood up,’ he says. ‘A few hours before I’d been in England, now I was standing in enemy territory. It was quite a shock. I thought about my family getting a telegram to say I was missing, what would they think?’ As he did so, he saw Les Knight attempting a forced landing a quarter of a mile away, but sadly, by waiting for his crew to bale out, time had run out for Knight himself, ‘a classic example of the pilot sacrificing his life to allow the others to escape’.14 His stricken aircraft hit the trees, crashed and burst into flames, killing Knight instantly. His body, still at the controls, was retrieved by Dutch civilians who, in defiance of the German occupiers, buried him after conducting a funeral for him. ‘I owe my life to Les,’ Sutherland says. ‘He kept the aircraft steady as long as he could, so we could get out. Without him, I’d have been dead.’
Sidney Hobday, who was a Lloyds clerk in peacetime, had also landed safely – albeit 30 feet up in the branches of a tree – and saw his skipper’s last moments. ‘I imagine that when he let go of the stick, the plane dived straight to the deck … I shall never forget how he wished me good luck before I left … he was a good lad.’15
Mick Martin had lost sight of Knight’s aircraft in the fog and did not know what had happened to him. He eventually identified the target ‘after stooging around for about an hour, but it was very hairy’, and he had to make thirteen passes over it before his bomb-aimer was sufficiently confident to release their bomb.
Meanwhile, more of their comrades were being shot down. Flying Officer William Divall’s Lancaster came down a few miles away after being hit by flak. Having dropped his bomb into the canal, Divall crashed into the bank and the ensuing explosion flattened the trees flanking the canal and blew the rear turret, with the rear gunner’s body still inside it, right across to the opposite bank. All the crew died in the blast.
Flight Lieutenant Ralf Allsebrook’s Lancaster was also hit by flak as he flew over the canal. A veteran of two tours with 49 Squadron, Allsebrook had joined 617 Squadron a few days after the Dams raid, and was not to survive his first op over Germany with them. He tried to make an emergency landing, but hit the roof of a house and then smashed into a crane on the canal bank, decapitating himself and killing his crew.
The lethal anti-aircraft fire and the crashes caused by low-level flying in such poor visibility made it unsurprising that only two bombs – dropped by Mick Martin’s and Dave Shannon’s crews – landed anywhere near the target, one hitting the towpath, the other falling in the water without doing any significant damage to the canal. Even worse, the abortive raid had seen five of the eight Lancasters shot down or crash, leaving a trail of burning aircraft across the German countryside, and causing the loss of forty-one men’s lives, including thirteen of the survivors of the Dams raid that had made the squadron’s reputation. The op had also claimed the lives of David Maltby and his crew the previous night, making a total of six out of nine aircraft and their crews lost – a loss rate of two-thirds compared with the 5 per cent losses that the supposedly more vulnerable Main Force bombers were suffering on their mass raids on heavily defended German cities.
The first two major ops by 617 Squadron had therefore cost the lives of fourteen crews. The death rate on the Dortmund–Ems Canal op was equivalent to that of the triumphantly received Dams raid, and as Johnny Johnson remarked, ‘In many ways it was not dissimilar to the Dams, apart from those very heavy defences and the difficulty of getting at the target. That was the killer.’16 Yet while the Dams raid had been hailed as one of the greatest successes of the war, the failure to destroy the target this time caused Dortmund–Ems to be regarded as an unmitigated disaster. The margins between great success and total failure were proving to be vanishingly small.
Johnny Johnson was ill and had played no part in the raid, but hearing about the losses, he was desperate to find out if his pilot, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of his usual crew had been involved. ‘It was a worrying time, these men were my family,’ he says, but to his great relief he found that they had not taken part in the raid, with both McCarthy and Les Munro temporarily grounded on the orders of the Medical Officer.
The squadron’s relative inactivity since the Dams raid and the attendant ‘one op’ gibes from other squadrons may have led to the target and the method of attacking it being hastily chosen, with too little thought about the potential pitfalls, and as successor to the now legendary Guy Gibson, George Holden may also have been eager to win his own spurs.
