pilot described ‘Spam’ Spafford as a great bomb-aimer, ‘but he was not too hot at map-reading’. ‘Hutch’, the wireless-operator, was ‘one of those grand little Englishmen who had the guts of a horse’, despite being often airsick. George Deering, the Canadian front-gunner who was a veteran of thirty-five operations, was ‘pretty dumb, and not too good at his guns, and it was taking a bit of a risk taking him, but one of our crack gunners had suddenly gone ill and there was nobody else’. If pilot and bomb-aimer had ever caroused together, there is no record of it. For all the ‘wingco’s’ leadership skills, to most of his comrades, and especially to subordinates, little Gibson – on the ground, it was impossible to fail to notice his lack of inches – was a remote figure, respected but not much loved, especially by humbler ranks. A gunner said sourly, ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you that your buttons were undone.’ By the time Gibson wrote his book, however, both he and Chastise had become legends. Thus, he described a close relationship with his crew as a fitting element of the story.
Reality was that five of the six young men sharing G-George with their squadron commander that night were bleakly aware that they were committed to one of the most hazardous missions of the war, in the hands of a pilot with whom they had never flown over enemy territory. More than that, he was an authentic hero; and heroes are immensely dangerous to their comrades.
Now they were over the North Sea: ‘Our noses were going straight for the point at which we had to cross the Dutch coast. The sea was as flat as a mill-pond, there was hardly a ripple … We dropped lower and lower down to about fifty feet so as to avoid radio detection … After a time I tried to light a cigarette. In doing so we again nearly hit the drink and the boys must have thought I was mad. In the end I handed the thing to Pulford to light for me.’ Gibson was flying in shirtsleeves, wearing a Luftwaffe Mae West, spoils of war that he had picked up in his fighter days. Although they were operating far below the height at which oxygen was necessary, they were still obliged to wear masks, because these contained microphones for the intercom and VHF link between aircraft – Gibson hankered in vain for throat mikes such as the USAAF employed.
He wrote in 1944, looking back to that unforgettable night: ‘One hour to go, one hour left before Germany, one hour of peace before flak. I thought to myself, here are 133 boys who have got an hour to live before going through hell. Some of them won’t get back … Who is it will be unlucky? … What is the rear-gunner in Melvin Young’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? What’s the bomb-aimer in Henry Maudslay’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? … One hour to go, one hour to think of these things, one hour to fly on a straight course and then it will be weaving and sinking to escape the light flak and the fury of the enemy defence.’ A few months later, he chose as one of his favourite records on BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’: ‘it’s exciting, it’s grandiose, it’s … rather terrible. It reminds me of a bombing raid.’ Then Guy Gibson thought about his dog, which was newly dead; and about the epic experience ahead, which would make him one of the most famous fliers in history. ‘This was the big thing,’ he wrote. ‘This was it.’
1
1 THE BIG PICTURE
In May 1943 the Second World War was in its forty-fifth month. While it was evident that the Allies were destined to achieve victory over Germany, it was also embarrassingly obvious to the British people, albeit perhaps less so to Americans, that the Red Army would be the principal instrument in achieving this. The battle for Stalingrad had been the dominant event of the previous winter, culminating in the surrender of the remnants of Paulus’s Sixth Army on 31 January. The Russians had killed 150,000 Germans and taken 110,000 prisoners, in comparison with a mere nine thousand Axis dead, and thirty thousand mostly Italian prisoners taken, in Montgomery’s November victory at El Alamein.
Day after day through the months that followed, newspapers headlined Soviet advances. To be sure, British and American forces also made headway in North Africa, but their drives from east and west to converge in Tunisia embraced barely thirty divisions between the two sides, whereas in the summer of 1943 two million men of Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies would clash at Kursk and Orel. Axis surrender in North Africa came only on 13 May, months later than Allied commanders had expected.
Almost four years after Britain chose to go to war, and eighteen months after America found itself obliged to do so, the bulk of their respective armies continued to train at home, preparing for an invasion of the continent for which no date had been set. The Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy, assisted by the Ultra codebreakers and latterly by the US Navy, had performed prodigies to achieve dominance over Dönitz’s U-Boats: the Atlantic sea link was now relatively secure, and a vast tonnage of new shipping was pouring forth from American shipyards. But this was a defensive victory, its importance more apparent to Allied warlords than to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s peoples.
Among the latter, even after its North African successes the standing of the British Army remained low: memories lingered, of so many 1940–42 defeats in Europe, North Africa and the Far East. Many Americans viewed their Anglo-Saxon ally with a disdain not far off contempt. A July 1942 Office of War Information survey invited people to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 per cent answered, the US; 30 per cent named Russia; 14 per cent China; 13 per cent offered no opinion. Just 6 per cent identified the British as the hardest triers. ‘All the old animosities against the British have been revived,’ wrote an OWI analyst. ‘She didn’t pay her war debts for the past war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland, while her outposts are lost to the enemy … Phrases such as “The British always expect someone to pull their chestnuts out of the fire” and “England will fight to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.’
Thoughtful British people saw that in almost three years since Dunkirk in June 1940 their army had accomplished relatively little, while the Russians endured the most terrible and costly experiences in the history of war. In 1942 Winston Churchill’s reputation as a war leader fell to its lowest ebb, in the face of new British humiliations. The sister of RAF pilot John Hopgood, a future dambuster, was an ATS officer who wrote to her mother in August that she had been cheered by the proclaimed success of the recent Dieppe raid: ‘the feeling that at last we were taking the offensive and that my uniform would mean something. A feeling I had very strongly at the beginning of the war, but it has gradually diminished since we have been on the defensive. This is not the talk of a defeatist, but I think it is the truth which most of us have experienced lately. I hope that [Dieppe] was a dress rehearsal and that the performance [D-Day in France] will follow shortly.’ Which, of course, it did not.
Belated successes in North Africa delivered Churchill from a real threat of eviction from his post as minister of defence. It was plain that the German flood tide on the Eastern Front was ebbing; that the Russians had survived the decisive crisis of their struggle. But the British people had seen little about their own war effort in which to take pride since the RAF’s sublime triumph in the 1940 Battle of Britain. An unusually reflective young airman afterwards looked back upon an early-1943 conversation with friends: ‘It was pleasant to sit there and rest a while and think that the worst was behind … The evening had been pleasant and we had practically “won” the war. But we wouldn’t have been so pleased if we had known of the big battles that were to be fought; the heavy casualties to be borne … The tide had turned, but it was a leap year tide.’ This was Guy Gibson, who in those days led 106 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command.
It is hard to overstate the impatience felt by millions on both sides of the Atlantic for action against Hitler on a scale to match the efforts
