an external inspection and a word with the ground crew, the pilot signed the Form 700 – the aircraft’s Engineering Record Book. One officer recalled the sense of isolation as he waited for take-off on an op one December night, standing around ‘warming ourselves at the ground crew’s fire, which was burning outside the little shack. It was pretty cold. Things were quiet. No sensation of being surrounded by an air armada waiting to take off. Just a small party in a corner of a big, windy field.’6
Before boarding the aircraft, the crews went through their pre-flight rituals, some peeing on the tail wheel, others clutching a battered soft toy or wearing a ‘lucky’ hat, then they clambered up the ladder and through the narrow hatchway by the rear wheel, dragging their flight bags and parachute packs with them. For such a large aircraft, the interior was remarkably cramped – six men jammed into a space no bigger than the interior of a small van, with the seventh in lonely isolation in his turret at the tail – but then, the design priority had been room to house the bomb-load, not the crew. Even relatively short men had to stoop, and in their bulky kit it was a struggle to move along the narrow passageway and over the main spar of the aircraft; for a tall man like bomb-aimer John Bell it was a constant trial by ordeal, banging his head, scraping his knees and catching his clothing on protruding metal.
Take-off for the attack on the Gnome-Rhône engine factory was at nine that cold February night, and the twelve crews held off, circling at a distance from the target, while Cheshire and Mick Martin carried out the target marking. The factory employed 2,000 French civilians, mostly women, and because of the risk to them and the damaging propaganda that would ensue if large numbers were killed in a raid, it had actually been struck off Bomber Command’s list of potential targets. Two constraints had therefore been imposed on 617 Squadron: no French civilians were to be killed and, to ensure that and to maximise the damage to the factory, all bombs had to fall within the target area. One of the Lancasters was adapted so that a cine-film could be made of the raid, in the hope of providing evidence to contradict any German propaganda claims, and to generate British propaganda if the raid proved successful.
As a result of those constraints, Cheshire first made three low-level runs across the factory to give the workers inside – ‘mostly French girls’7 – warning that bombs would soon be falling on it. It was a difficult, twisting approach down a narrow valley, swerving around two tall water towers and a factory chimney, but Cheshire and Martin then placed their yellow incendiaries squarely in the middle of the factory, their accuracy helped by the fact that the lights in the factory were blazing, with the blackout both there and in the town itself ‘very poor’. As the factory lights were extinguished, Cheshire called in the remainder of the squadron to bomb the burning markers. ‘I couldn’t really see the target itself most of the time,’ Johnny Johnson said. ‘You bombed the different coloured flares that Cheshire had dropped. So he would go in, drop the flare on the target, then radio to instruct us to bomb a certain coloured flare.’8 The fires of the flickering markers lit up the surrounding factory buildings and cast an eerie glow across the site.
The new low-level marking technique proved devastatingly effective. All but one bomb landed inside the factory compound, and so tight was the bombing that the blast from one 12,000-pounder almost extinguished the fires started by Cheshire’s incendiaries. The factory was virtually wiped off the map. ‘We flattened the target but saved the civilians,’ Johnson says. ‘That gave us a real sense of accomplishment. Cheshire held us back until he thought they were all clear, and later he got a letter thanking him for ensuring their safety!’9
In fact Johnson may be remembering a subsequent raid on a factory in Angoulême on 20 March 1944, after which they received a message from the mayor, thanking them for not killing any French people, though the mayor added that he couldn’t understand ‘why the British were firing at the street when the French were coming out and cheering us on’. But Mac Hamilton recalled, ‘As always in 617, once you dropped your bomb, you just didn’t beetle off home, you went round again and shot up flak towers and distracted the gunners while the other aircraft were coming in to bomb.’10
The morning after the Limoges raid, the 617 aircrews were told the attack had been a success, and most of them realised at once that it was a defining moment. A still from the cine-film of the raid, showing Cheshire’s incendiaries landing on the factory roof, was released to the world’s press, adding fresh lustre to the growing legend of the Dambusters. ‘We sensed that this type of target marking heralded a new phase of the war for us,’ John Bell says. ‘It was good to be away from the mass bombing.’ He had had plenty of experience of area bombing.
* * *
Even today, Bell remains tall and sharp-featured, with a high forehead and a keen, penetrating gaze, and, now entering his nineties, he still holds himself ramrod-straight. He was only sixteen years old when war was declared on 3 September 1939. During the summer he had heard his father and friends talking about the prospect of war but, Bell says, ‘it all seemed unreal. We thought that diplomats would talk our way out of the war. It couldn’t really happen, could it?’
His father had served in Egypt during the Great War but never spoke about it and, like most people then, didn’t expect the war to last long. He thought that all the men rushing to join up would soon be back looking for jobs, so he told his son he’d be better off starting a career before the competition got too intense. Bell began training as an accountant but, not wanting to be left out of the war effort, he also joined the Home Guard, ‘so I was doing a bit of parading around with a rifle and no bullets,’ he says with a smile. He was also trained in sabotage in case the feared German invasion took place.
Bell was living in Surrey and working in London, and once the ‘phoney war’ had ended with the onset of the Blitz, he had a close-up view of the impact of the war. One night as he was walking home, some bombs fell close by and he ended up sheltering under a park bench. ‘The air-raid sirens were howling, the anti-aircraft guns were firing and shrapnel from the shells was falling all around me,’ he says. ‘I think that was more dangerous than the German bombs – chunks of hot metal fizzing down around you. It was certainly scary, but there was nothing you could do about it – it was happening everywhere.’
However, seeing its effects so close at hand made him determined to play his full part in the war. ‘I’d seen the Army come back from Dunkirk in tatters,’ he says, ‘watched the Battle of Britain raging over my head, and seen the results of the bombing: the destruction, flattened buildings and smoking ruins. It made me want to be part of the fight, to hit back at the Germans who were attacking our country.’
Like all recruits to the RAF, Bell had hopes of being a pilot but they were soon dashed. At six feet four inches tall, he was ‘deemed to be too long in the leg’ to get out of a cockpit in a hurry and began training as an observer and navigator in South Africa. He knew nothing of the country other than what he had read in magazines, and ‘imagined jungles and wild animals everywhere’, he says smiling. ‘We were all wide-eyed boys going out there, very naive!’
He returned to England as a fully trained observer, but was then informed that he would be a bomb-aimer instead. Being so tall always made it awkward to get into his bomb-aimer’s position, but ‘twenty years old and skinny, I could manage to get through a lot of difficult places’. Even when he’d got himself into position, it remained an uncomfortable experience for Bell, with no room to stand upright in the compartment. Fortunately, the bomb-aimer was the only member of the crew who could see directly beneath the aircraft through the bulbous Perspex ‘goldfish bowl’ in the nose, so he had a grandstand view of the bombs going down and the flak coming up.
After completing his training, he went to an Operational Training Unit where he ‘crewed up’. Pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers and gunners were all assembled in a hangar and then told to form into crews. Bell was talking to a Canadian navigator, Harry Rhude, when a much older man, a rear gunner, joined
