rear gunner introduced them to their pilot, Bob Knights, with the words ‘I’ve found you a navigator and a bomb-aimer.’
‘Oh good,’ Knights said. ‘All we need now is a wireless operator,’ and promptly went off to look for one. ‘It seemed pretty haphazard,’ Bell says, ‘but I don’t think there was any other way to do it. My only thought was: You are choosing the people you’ll spend the next few years with, live with, possibly die with. So who would you trust most?’
Having crewed-up, they were sent to a Heavy Conversion Unit where they flew a Lancaster for the first time. Bell liked everything about the aircraft except the long trek back to the Elsan chemical toilet at the rear of the aircraft. ‘It was a good aircraft, very robust, and never really gave us any trouble.’ The Elsan was obviously not an option for the pilots, who had to make alternative arrangements. The Australian pilot Bruce Buckham’s crew ‘very kindly kept the tops of the smoke floats we were tossing out’, so if his bladder was bursting, he’d use one of those, then open the chute they used for dropping Window, and the suction was so strong that it would go straight down the chute. ‘Unfortunately the second time I used it,’ Buckham recalled, ‘I spilled some and it went all over the bomb-aimer down below. He was not pleased. That’s where the expression comes from – though Guy Gibson introduced it – “pissed on from a great height”!’
John Bell’s crew were posted in June 1943, joining the newly formed 619 Squadron. As they arrived at their base at Woodhall Spa, Knights murmured, ‘I wonder how long we’re going to last here.’
‘I remember that to this day,’ Bell says.
It was an off-the-cuff remark, but we knew the losses that were being suffered by Bomber Command, though I was quite surprised to hear Bob referring to it. As a rule we never discussed losses, and every time we heard of them, it was always a number of aircraft, not people. I’d hear on the radio ‘Bomber Command lost thirty aircraft last night,’ but I never translated that into numbers of people at the time. Years later I did think about it, knowing that thirty aircraft meant over two hundred people had been killed. You’d see empty spaces at breakfast or beds being cleared away, but you didn’t let it affect you. We all had the same attitude: It won’t happen to me. Of course, later on, I realised that there were around fifty-five thousand men who had said the same thing, and it did happen to them.
Their aircraft’s designation letter was T, and Knights, who had recently seen the Disney film Bambi, released in 1942, christened his aircraft ‘Thumper’ and had Bambi’s rabbit friend painted on the nose. Their first op in T-Thumper on 24 July 1943 would have been memorable to them for that reason alone, but it also happened to be the launch of Operation Gomorrah – a series of mass bomber raids on Hamburg by Bomber Command and the USAAF that in the course of eight days and seven nights effectively destroyed Germany’s second city. It was also the first time that Window was dropped to give false signals to German radar, which was ‘a bit of luck for me’, Knights later said, ‘because the bombing was more or less unopposed.’
John Bell’s crew before a raid on Frankfurt
They’d flown out over the featureless darkness of the North Sea and the blacked-out landscape of Germany. The first lights John Bell saw in the far distance were the beams of searchlights piercing the night sky over Hamburg, the flashes of exploding flak shells and the glow of the drifting smoke from the shell-bursts as it was caught and illuminated in the searchlight beams. As they flew closer, he saw the first fires and burning buildings on the ground from the bombing force ahead of them, but also the mass of flak-bursts through which they would also have to pass:
Stuck in my Perspex bubble in the nose, surrounded by nothing other than flimsy plastic that offered no protection at all, I had the best view of the flak. It looked pretty threatening, and someone would always say: ‘Looks like the natives are a bit unfriendly tonight!’ The flak barrage was in full swing when we arrived and we had to fly into that – me first! It was lighting up the residual smoke, so it looked both alarming and spectacular – it may have been dangerous but you just have to get on with the job. I was apprehensive, but I don’t remember any real fear. I just thought, How are we going to get through that? Then I just concentrated on the bombing run and ignored everything around me.
He had a clear view of the bombing’s impact on the city below them. ‘I’d seen the impact of bombing close up in London, but looking down on this mass of burning buildings was my first sight of what Bomber Command could do, and it was an awesome – and awful – sight. I didn’t think about the people on the ground at that time – I did later – but back then, it was all just part of the war. When we came out the other side, I just heaved a sigh of relief and told the pilot to climb higher and get out.’
At the end of the week-long Operation Gomorrah, Hamburg had been almost completely destroyed. The hot, dry weather and the mainly wooden construction of the houses fuelled the firestorm ignited by thousands of tons of incendiaries and high-explosive bombs. Generating temperatures of 800° C and wind-speeds of 150 miles an hour, it created a ferocious vortex of fire that rose over 1,000 feet into the air and swept across the city, consuming everything in its path. The tarmac of the streets burst into flame, and spilled fuel oil ignited as it spread across the surface of the canals and harbour, making it seem as if even the water was on fire. Even air-raid shelters and deep cellars offered no protection; people sheltering in them were suffocated as the firestorm consumed the oxygen. Operation Gomorrah killed over 40,000 people and left a million more homeless.
Of all the Main Force ops that Bell flew, he retains the strongest memories of that first raid on Hamburg, though he also vividly recalls Berlin, because it was so heavily defended and they attacked it so often. The impact of one of those mass raids on Berlin in November 1943 was vividly described by a Swedish businessman who found himself trapped in the city as the bombs fell. His account gives a powerful insight into the horrific experiences of German civilians pinned under Bomber Command’s relentless onslaught:11
‘The fire brigades and ARP personnel are powerless to cope with the situation. Day has been turned to night by the billowing clouds of evil-smelling smoke which fill the streets. The sky is blotted out.’ The Ministries of Propaganda and Munitions were badly damaged, the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse was wrecked, as was the gigantic Air Ministry building in Leipzigerstrasse – ‘Göring’s pride and joy’. The Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden districts were burning so ferociously that ‘firemen have given up the hopeless struggle. They have cordoned off whole blocks of buildings and simply left them to burn themselves out. Armed guards equipped with gas masks against the suffocating smoke are stationed at the cordons.’
The once beautiful, tree-lined Unter den Linden was ‘a shambles’, with almost every building on fire. ‘There was a sound of hissing as light rain fell on the flames.’ The University State Library and the Bristol Hotel – one of Berlin’s finest – were destroyed. The Adlon Hotel, requisitioned for the homeless, was still standing, but all its windows had been blown out. The Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse and the headquarters of the Berlin police were both badly damaged. There was an SS cordon round the workers’ quarters north of the Alexanderplatz to prevent workers leaving the factories and escaping to the country, and armed guards also surrounded Berlin’s zoo in the Tiergarten, while troops armed with rifles and machine guns hunted the leopards, elephants, bears, tigers and lions which had escaped after the zoo was hit by bombs. ‘Berliners, fatalistic, now believe that the RAF will return every night until Berlin is in ruins.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен
