drop bombs on them, I thought. It was a necessary evil, though, to overcome the greater evil of Nazism and Fascism.
However, keen to remain on ops, he volunteered for 617 Squadron, which instead bombed ‘only single factories, submarine pens and other military targets’, and persuaded his crew to join with him. Two other squadron leaders promptly put the wind up some of them by telling them that 617 was ‘a low-level flying suicide squadron’, but Knilans merely shrugged and told them that he wasn’t concerned about that, since ‘nobody had managed to live long enough to finish a tour’ on their present squadron either.
The RAF regarded a loss of around 5 per cent of the aircrews on each combat trip as acceptable and sustainable. After a quick mental calculation, Nick Knilans had ‘figured it out that by the end of a first tour of thirty trips, it would mean 150 per cent of the crews would be lost. Suicide or slow death, it did not make much difference at that stage of the war.’
Two other pilots and their crews from 619 Squadron, Bob Knights and Mac Hamilton, followed his lead, telling him that ‘they did not like bombing cities indiscriminately either’. It was a short move over to 617 Squadron, as it was in the process of transferring to Woodhall Spa, ensuring that Knilans could continue to enjoy the comforts of the Petwood Hotel Officers’ Mess: ‘the best damn foxhole I would ever find for shelter’.
Knilans and his crew were allocated Lancaster R-Roger as their regular aircraft while on 617 Squadron. The ground crew thought it should be called ‘The Jolly Roger’ and wanted to paint a scantily dressed pirate girl ‘wearing a skull and cross bones on her hat’, but Knilans refused. ‘I did not want a scantily clad girl or a humorous name painted on the aircraft assigned to me. This flying into combat night after night, to me, was not very funny. It was a cold-blooded battle to kill or be killed.’
Knilans did not lack a sense of humour, however, and ‘carried away one day with the exhilaration of flying at treetop level at 200 mph’, he could not resist buzzing the Petwood Hotel. ‘We roared over the roof two feet above the tiles. It must have shook from end to end.’ It was teatime and a WAAF was just carrying a tray of tea and cakes to the Station Commander’s table. ‘The sudden thunderous roar and rattle caused her to throw the tray into the air. It crashed beside the Group Captain, my Commanding Officer. He was not amused. Wingco Cheshire told me later that he had quite a time keeping me from being court-martialled by my irate CO.’
* * *
On Boxing Day 1943 the last great battle of the sea war ended with the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst, but in terms of the final outcome of the war, an event had taken place a month earlier that, though known to only a handful of people at the time, was to prove far more decisive. At the Tehran Conference of 28 November, Roosevelt and Churchill had at last agreed to meet Stalin’s constant demands that a second front should be opened in the land war against Germany, and the invasion of France, code-named Operation Overlord, was set to begin in six months’ time, in June 1944.
617 Squadron’s transfer to their new home, Woodhall Spa, took place in early January 1944. A former out-station of RAF Coningsby, it was now a permanent base in its own right for 617’s crews and their thirty-four Lancasters. If the new base’s prefab buildings were less solid than the brick-built facilities at Scampton and Coningsby, their new airfield at least had three concrete runways and thirty-six heavy-bomber hard-standings, with three hangars, a bomb dump on the northern edge of the airfield and the control tower on the south-eastern side. The roads crossing the Lincolnshire flatlands around the base were all but deserted – petrol was strictly rationed and few had any to spare – but the skies overhead were always busy with aircraft, black as rooks against the sky, though, unlike rooks, the aircraft usually left their roosts at sunset and returned to them at dawn.
Officers based at Woodhall Spa were billeted in some style in the Petwood Hotel, originally a furniture magnate’s mansion and built in a half-timbered mock-Tudor style with a massive oak front door, windows with leaded lights and acres of oak panelling. The grounds included majestic elms, rhododendron-lined avenues, manicured lawns, sunken gardens and a magnificent lily pond. There was also an outdoor swimming pool, tennis courts, a golf course, and even a cinema – The Kinema in the Woods, or ‘The Flicks in the Sticks’ as it was christened by 617’s irreverent crews – in a converted sports pavilion on the far side of the Petwood’s grounds. The most highly prized – and highly priced – seats were the front six rows, where you sat in deckchairs instead of conventional cinema seats. The Petwood’s beautiful grounds and timeless feel could almost have made the aircrews forget the war altogether, had ugly reality not intruded so often. As Nick Knilans remarked, ‘One day I would be strolling about in this idyllic setting with a friend and the next day he would be dead.’
Inside the hotel there was a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room adapted for use as a bar, a billiard room and two lounge areas with roaring log fires, though other parts of the building were sealed off and the most valuable paintings and furniture removed – a wise precaution given the boisterous nature of most off-duty aircrews’ recreations.
The Petwood provided the aircrew with a comfortable base to escape the rigours of the war – a luxury the men of Bomber Command held dear. On a visit to one bomber base, the great American correspondent Martha Gellhorn described their preparations for an approaching operation:
A few talked, their voices rarely rising above a murmur, but most remained silent, withdrawing into themselves, writing letters, reading pulp novels, or staring into space. Though they were probably reading detective stories or any of the much-used third-rate books that are in their library, they seem to be studying. Because if you read hard enough, you can get away from yourself and everyone else and from thinking about the night ahead. 16
Cheshire himself almost became the squadron’s first casualty at Woodhall Spa while carrying out an air test on 13 January 1944. Just after take-off, he flew into a dense flock of plovers and hit several of the birds. One smashed through the cockpit windscreen, narrowly missing Cheshire, while another struck and injured the flight engineer who was the only other person on board. Cheshire made a low-level circuit and managed to land his damaged aircraft safely. 617 Squadron mythology claims that at least twenty plovers were on the menu at the Petwood Hotel that night!17
The thin Perspex of the canopy and the bomb-aimer’s ‘fish-bowl’ in the nose were very vulnerable. ‘The last thing you want as you are tearing down the runway at a hundred-plus and about to lift off is a flaming bird exploding through the canopy; for one thing it makes a hell of a bang, and sudden loud noises are not popular in an aircraft, especially in the middle of a take-off.’ If they did hit a bird, the bomb-aimer and the flight engineer were ‘liable to get a faceful of jagged bits of Perspex and a filthy mess of blood, guts and feathers to clear up’, said Gunner Chan Chandler.18 Bird-strikes were a serious problem and at Scampton, Coningsby and Woodhall Spa there were scarecrows, bird-scarers and regular shooting parties with half a dozen shotgun-toting aircrew touring the perimeter of the base in a van and shooting every bird they saw. ‘There were no rules about it being unsporting to shoot sitting birds – slaughter was the order of the day, and slaughter it was.’19
Members of 617 Squadron also relieved the boredom of noflying days with games and pranks that showcased their endless – if pointless – ingenuity. One much-prized skill was the ability to put a postage stamp, sticky side up, on top of a two-shilling piece and then flip the coin so that the stamp finished up stuck to the ceiling. Those with a good sense of balance could attempt to do a hand-stand, balance on their head, and in that position drink a pint of beer without spilling a drop. A trick with an even higher tariff required them to stand upright with a full pint on their forehead, slowly recline until they were flat on the floor and then get back to their feet, once more without spilling a drop of beer.
Team games included Mess Rugby, played with a stuffed forage
