my chances of making it home, but it was worth a try. The Dutch people were risking their own lives to help me. Without them I would have been captured or dead and I can never thank them enough for that. And when I was on the ground – seeing the Nazis close up – that’s when I realised we had to win this war; regardless of the cost.
* * *
For the families of the dead, the ramifications of the disastrous Dortmund–Ems raid went on for months as they struggled to come to terms with their loss, and to understand how their loved ones had perished. David Maltby’s father, Ettrick, received a letter from the mother of Maltby’s navigator, Vivian Nicholson, desperate to find out how her own son had died. She was heartbreakingly eloquent in her expression of her grief.
‘I scarcely know how to write this letter,’ Elizabeth Nicholson wrote.
We would like to know the true facts of what they did that night and would be gratefully thankful for any news you could give us. We have a photo of your gallant son and our boy together. It is indeed a terrible wound for us to see them so young, happy and beautiful. Our boy was conscientious, very guarded about his duties. Please, if your son told you anything [about our son], we would indeed be grateful if you could let us know. I know you will understand my yearning for news, and I have the worry of our second son aged 19 on the submarine HMS Seanymph. The world owes so much to these gallant young men. We can only wait patiently till we can understand why they are taken from our homes, where their places can never be filled.24
Many of the young men taking to the skies that night had left ‘last letters’ to be delivered to their loved ones if they were killed. Maltby’s wireless operator, Antony Stone, was no exception. His mother received her son’s final letter shortly after his death. ‘I will have ended happily,’ he wrote, ‘so have no fears of how I ended as I have the finest crowd of fellows with me, and if Skipper goes I will be glad to go with him.’25
Many more letters, to parents of the bereaved, and from those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, would be delivered before the war was over.
Bomber Command’s Main Force had continued to pound Germany during the autumn and early winter of 1943, including a raid on Kassel on 22/23 October that caused a week-long firestorm in the town and killed 10,000 people, and the launch of the ‘Battle of Berlin’, a six-month bombing campaign against the German capital, beginning on 18/19 November. Over the course of the campaign some 9,000 sorties would be flown and almost 30,000 tons of bombs dropped. Bomber Harris’s claim that though ‘it will cost us between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war’1 proved optimistic; the aircraft losses were over twice as heavy and the bombing campaign did not destroy the city, nor the morale of its population, nor the Nazis’ willingness to continue the war. In contrast, the heavy losses sustained by Main Force during this period undoubtedly had an effect on morale.
Following George Holden’s death at Dortmund–Ems, Mick Martin had been put in temporary charge of 617 Squadron, but because he had jumped two ranks from Flight Lieutenant direct to Wing Commander, some felt his face still did not fit, and on 10 November 1943 he was replaced by a new commander, a tall, dark-haired and gaunt-faced figure: Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. Still only twenty-six, Cheshire was one of the RAF’s most decorated pilots and its youngest Group Captain, who had taken a drop in rank in order to command 617.
Cheshire made a dramatic entrance to his new squadron. Gunner Chan Chandler was in his room at the Petwood Hotel when there was a shot directly outside his window. ‘I looked out and saw this chap with a revolver in his hand, called him a bloody lunatic and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. He replied that he thought the place needed waking up! It turned out he was the new CO and my first words to him were to call him a bloody lunatic! However, we got on famously after that.’2
Leonard Cheshire
At his first squadron meeting Cheshire told his men that ‘If you get into trouble when you’re off duty, I will do what I can to help you. If you get into trouble on duty, I’ll make life a hell of a lot worse for you.’
‘So we all knew where we stood from the start,’ Johnny Johnson says. Far more approachable and friendly than Guy Gibson, Cheshire was soon highly thought of by all. ‘He developed the techniques for marking, for instance,’ Johnson says, ‘so the efficiency of the squadron was improved. That was always his objective: to get things absolutely right.’
Larry Curtis found Cheshire ‘very quiet, very relaxed, but at the same time, you did what you were told; he just approached it in a different way.’3 Malcolm ‘Mac’ Hamilton witnessed this new approach when he joined the squadron. His crew had achieved an impressive bombing accuracy of 70 yards before joining 617, and when he met Cheshire for the first time, Cheshire said, ‘Oh, Hamilton, I see your crew have won the 5 Group bombing trophy three months running.’
Hamilton acknowledged this, ‘putting my chest out, because I was quite proud’.
Cheshire frowned. ‘Well, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you six weeks to get your accuracy down to twenty-seven yards, or you’re off the squadron.’4
He was only half-joking. On 617 Squadron, everything revolved around accuracy in bombing. Before they were allowed on ops, every new crew was required to carry out at least three six-bomb practice drops on the ranges at Wainfleet on the Wash in Lincolnshire. The crew’s accuracy was assessed and the results added to the Bombing Error Ladder kept by the Bombing Leader. Crews with the highest accuracy – and the results of even the most experienced crews were continually updated – were assigned the most ops and the most important roles on those ops, and those with poorer records would find themselves left out, or even transferred off the squadron altogether, if their results did not improve. Cheshire was relentless in raising standards, but he set himself the highest standards of all, and was universally admired and even loved by the men under his command. ‘He was a great man,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘and the finest commander I served under.’5
* * *
In the autumn of 1943, during the continuing lull in ops that followed the disaster of Dortmund–Ems, 617 had been practising high-level bombing with new 12,000-pound ‘Blockbuster’ HC bombs – the equivalent of three 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ bolted together.
One of the squadron’s rear gunners, Tom Simpson, was lugging his Browning machine guns to the firing range one morning with 400 rounds of ammunition draped around his neck, when a ‘silver-haired, mature gentleman’ approached. A civilian on the base was an unusual sight, but the man seemed to know his way around. He asked if he could walk with Simpson and helped to carry one of the guns. After Simpson had installed the guns in the practice turret and fired off a few bursts himself, he noticed the stranger’s ‘deep blue eyes gleaming’ and asked, ‘Would you like to sit in here and have a little dab yourself?’
The man didn’t need a second invitation. Having watched him fire both guns singly, Simpson invited him to fire off the last hundred rounds using both guns together. After doing so, he was ‘trembling with excitement and pleasure’ as he climbed out of the turret. ‘That was really fantastic,’ he said. ‘I had no idea of the magnitude and firepower a rear gunner has at his disposal.’ Only later did Simpson realise
