of the squadron and its role in special operations. Maybe the accolades we had received because of the Dams op meant we had to get on and do more, be more successful. But those accolades were a hindrance here.’17
Only six crews – including those of Mick Martin, Dave Shannon, Les Munro and Joe McCarthy, who were veterans of the Dams raids – now remained on the squadron. Desperate to atone for the failures, Martin volunteered to return to the target the following night, flying solo to complete the job, but he was overruled by his superiors and, apart from an abortive attempt to bomb the Anthéor railway viaduct in southern France the following night, the Dortmund–Ems Canal raid proved to be 617 Squadron’s last for almost two months.
The heavy losses they had suffered at the canal were proof that their signature operations – low-level, night-time, precision-bombing raids – were no longer viable. They had been lucky at the dams, albeit still with the loss of almost half their force. At the Dortmund–Ems Canal their luck had run out. ‘It was a big blow to the squadron,’ one crewman says. ‘We lost so many that night that it seemed to affect the thinking of the powers that be. It was a very traumatic experience.’18
There were to be no more low-level attacks. From now on 617 Squadron would operate at high level, using a new tachometric precision bombsight, the SABS (Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight), to ensure accuracy. It was one of the world’s first computerised bombsights and a complex, hand-built piece of equipment, consisting of a mechanical computer mounted to the left of the bomb-aimer and a stabilised sighting head fitted with an optical graticule. The sight was connected to a Bombing Direction Indicator (BDI) mounted on the pilot’s instrument panel, which indicated the amount of left or right turn required to bring the sight to bear on the target. Once the sight had been programmed with the necessary data – the aircraft’s speed and altitude, and the wind-speed and direction – the bomb-aimer had only to keep the target centred in the graticule and the sight itself would then automatically release the bomb at the right moment.
However, while they could achieve impressive accuracy with the sight, and attacking from height made them less vulnerable to flak, it also made them much more vulnerable to German night-fighters, particularly when attacked from below, the Lancaster’s blindspot. In the early stages of the war, anti-aircraft guns had claimed far more victims than fighters, but that was quickly reversed and by 1943, Bomber Command losses to night-fighters were twice those caused by flak.
German night-fighter pilot Peter Spoden – these days a great-grandfather living in a care home with his wife – brought down twenty-four four-engine British bombers during the war, and he cries as he reflects on the deaths of the crews inside them, young men of his own age. The aircraft he shot down never even knew he was there: he approached from behind and below them, flew 50 or 60 feet underneath their fuselage and unleashed the two upward-firing guns the German pilots called Schräge Musik. (Translating literally as ‘slanting music’, Schräge Musik was their slang term for jazz.) Spoden recalls one night where he was talked in by his radio operator and suddenly saw ‘this black shadow above me … in ten minutes I shot down three Lancasters – I was completely out of my mind.’19 However, the firing wasn’t all one way. One Lancaster gunner has vivid memories of shooting down a fighter at close quarters: ‘I could see my bullets hitting him. I couldn’t miss him – not at that range.’20
617 Squadron’s shocking rate of losses had led to their sarcastic nickname ‘The One Op Squadron’ being replaced with a new one, ‘The Suicide Squadron’, and the deaths of so many crewmates dealt what could easily have been a terminal blow to morale. ‘Those losses had a big effect, there was a sense of distress and shock, and possibly even dissatisfaction that we were asked to do something which should never have been attempted,’ Johnny Johnson says. But although morale was inevitably affected in the short term, confidence soon recovered. ‘Morale slumped because they were rather staggering losses,’ Larry Curtis adds, ‘but one did tend to throw these things off very quickly. Going from low level to high level made all the difference; losses were very slight after that.’21
* * *
While their comrades were trying to come to terms with the disaster, two of the survivors of Les Knight’s crash had been captured, but the remaining five, including Sidney Hobday and Fred Sutherland, were on the ground in the Occupied Netherlands, trying to evade the Nazis. They were separated from each other, and the knowledge that he was now alone in the heart of enemy territory, facing capture or perhaps even death if he were found, almost paralysed Hobday at first. However, realising that the greatest danger of discovery lay in remaining close to the wreckage of his downed aircraft, he climbed down from the tree he had landed in and set off south, away from the burning Lancaster.
He walked through dew-soaked meadows and along a canal bank, carrying on until it started to get light, when he hid in a small wood. However, his feet were soaked, and, sitting on the wet grass, he began to feel very cold. ‘Not wishing to get pneumonia,’ he began walking again, but as he approached a metalled road, the sound of galloping hoofs terrified him and he dived behind the nearest hedgerow, imagining ‘a couple of dozen mounted Jerries looking for me’. When he risked peering out, he saw that the ‘hoof-beats’ were actually the noise made by some Dutch children’s wooden clogs as they ran along the road to school. As he waited for them to pass, he glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty in the morning. ‘Twelve hours before, I had been strumming the piano in the Mess.’22
Before setting out along the road, he took off his brevet and his other RAF markings, trying to make his battledress look as civilian as possible. Hobday knew that his name and those of his comrades decorated after the Dams raid had been published in the English newspapers, and as a result they had all been put on a Nazi blacklist. He knew that if he was taken prisoner, he was unlikely to remain alive for long.
He had not walked far when he saw two farmworkers cycling towards him. He bent down, pretending to tie his laces, but they stopped. Not speaking Dutch, he couldn’t understand them, but after a few moments of gut-gnawing indecision, he decided to risk telling them who we was. He said ‘RAF’ several times without any sign of recognition from them, and then began flapping his arms about to mimic flying. They now seemed to understand and, having looked carefully up and down the road, gave him half their food, ‘black bread with some queer stuff in it which I could not stomach’. He gave them a couple of cigarettes in return from the packs he always carried on ops, in case of just such an eventuality.
Heartened by their friendliness and realising the impossibility of crossing Europe alone and unaided, Hobday decided to seek more help from civilians where he could, hoping they would put him in touch with the Dutch Resistance. After a few more hours of walking he tried to hitch a ride in a little cart, but the driver shook his head, indicating by sign language that the Germans would slit his throat if they caught him. However, he gave Hobday some more black bread before driving off.
A little further down the road, he saw the same cart driver in urgent conversation with a woman, who then passed Hobday on her bicycle a couple of times, studying him carefully without speaking. Once more he was left fearing betrayal to the Nazis, but he kept walking and was then overtaken by some young men, who spoke to him in ‘slow schoolboy English’. They gave him some apples and a tall man then brought him a civilian suit. It would have ‘fitted a man five inches taller than myself,’ Hobday said, but he changed into it and the Dutchmen took his RAF uniform away. They also insisted on shaving off his moustache, saying it made him look ‘too English’.
Hobday was then told to make his way alone to a railway station 10 miles away, as it was too dangerous for them to accompany him. By the time he arrived, he was close to exhaustion. He hadn’t slept for thirty hours and had walked for another twelve with almost no rest. The tall man was waiting for him and gave him a train ticket to a town 100 kilometres away with a list of the times of the trains he had to catch. He also gave him a note in Dutch that said: ‘This man is deaf and
