Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland
that were ever made. That Bill survived and George did not was simply conforming to the law of averages. ‘I don’t know what makes you press on,’ Bill sighed, ‘but you just do. There’s something in us … you know it’s crazy, but you still do it. It’s life itself. You know it’s dumb and stupid but you press on.’
By the end of November, the Battle of Berlin had begun. Bill’s fifth mission was what was labelled the ‘the first thousand-bomber raid’ on the German capital. In fact, only 764 aircraft took part, but the British press was happy to help with the propaganda. With the enemy capital deep in Germany, they could only get there by adding auxiliary fuel tanks at the expense of some of their bomb load. When they finally arrived, after nearly four hours in the air, Berlin was covered. The flak was intense, but despite the poor visibility, they could just about make out the red target indicator markers and the thousands of explosions pulsing orange and crimson through the cloud.
The bitingly cold winter and endless cloud and rain did not help Bill’s sense of gloom. ‘Boy, it was cold,’ he said. It was early in the New Year that he took his crew out on a flight above the clouds, just so they could see some sunlight.
And he also tried to keep his days busy, and to keep his mind on the job in hand. Routine helped. He’d be out of bed some time around seven or eight in the morning, then he’d shower, get dressed and head over to the mess for a breakfast of porridge and perhaps some toast. Then he would wander over to the Flight Room, where he would chat and wait with the rest of the crews, wondering whether they’d be sent out on a ‘war’ that night. There could be days without a mission, but they still made sure they looked at the daily routine orders. They might have to take their aircraft to the maintenance hangars or any number of tasks. After he was commissioned in December 1943, Bill ran the station post office for a while. ‘I didn’t know a damn thing about it,’ he said, ‘and it was in a hell of a mess when I took it over.’ It was another thing that kept his mind busy.
But he was rarely leaving the base. Just before Christmas, he decided it was time he tried to get out a bit, and so with a few of the others, went to a dance at the Catholic Hall in Northallerton. It was there that he first saw Lil.
Lil had been listening on and off to our conversation, sometimes sitting down with us in the lounge, sometimes attending to something in the adjoining kitchen. She now brought through some tea. ‘Tea,’ said Bill, his face brightening. ‘We always drink plenty of tea here!’ Then he got up and disappeared – he had some pictures and other bits and pieces to show me, but had to dig them out from the study next door. I asked Lil about this first meeting. ‘It wasn’t that night. He saw me, but I didn’t see him. I remember it was so crowded you could hardly move,’ she told me. She’d been taken by a young sailor friend and they began dancing. ‘But he was all over me and I thought, “This is no good,” so we left.’
Soon after, Bill was back, jiggling his leg up and down and sipping his tea, so I asked him about his side of the story. He grinned. ‘She walked in with her head held high,’ Bill said, ‘and she had nice long blonde hair.’ He immediately decided he had to dance with her, but he couldn’t reach her – by the time he got to her side of the dance-floor, she was gone. Still, it gave him an incentive to go again, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later she was there once more – and this time there was no sign of the sailor. Plucking up his courage, he went over to her and asked her to dance.
Afterwards, he walked her home. She, too, had lost a brother – a Flight Engineer and also on bombers – and in the weeks that followed, they began to see more and more of each other. Every fifth week, the crew would be given seven days’ leave. Some went to London, while others, like Bill Morison, would play golf, sometimes at Ferndown near Bournemouth, sometimes even at St Andrews, in Scotland. Bill, however, spent his leave with Lil, at her parents’ house in Northallerton. Then, in the spring, he asked her to marry him, although he told her they should wait until after he had finished his combat tour. ‘We were losing a lot of guys,’ said Bill, ‘and I was still operational.’ Did Lil worry about Bill? ‘No,’ she said quite firmly. ‘You have faith. It was a way of life; you took one thing at a time.’
Bill was also extremely lucky to have the crew he had. Crews tended to find each other on arrival at their Operational Training Units. There had been five of them at first, then at Croft, when they converted to four-engined bombers, two more had joined them. The same seven men had stayed together ever since. Close friends on the ground, they discovered a perfect working relationship that depended on mutual respect and complete trust. ‘All of them were brilliant,’ Bill admitted. Once the war was over, they all kept in touch, despite going their separate ways. The sense of camaraderie they had felt had been intense. Bill freely admits they were the closest friendships he ever made. Sixty years on, only Bill, Bud Holdgate, (the mid upper gunner), and Bill Morison, are still alive; Dick Meredith died in November 2005. They don’t see each other so often now – Bill Morison is in North York, Ontario, although Bud is from Vancouver – but they do speak regularly. Bill gave me Bill Morison’s and Dick Meredith’s numbers and when I was back in England, I called them. Both were anxious to help and equally quick to heap praise on Bill and their other friends in the crew. ‘Once the engines were running, we became a real team in every sense,’ said Bill Morison, in his gentle and measured voice. ‘We welded perfectly.’ Dick Meredith had been a farmer before the war, a reserved occupation, and could have avoided active service, but admits that he would not have missed the experience for anything. ‘They were all great guys,’ he told me, ‘and we were a dedicated bunch. We were a very good crew, all of us, and we never stopped learning.’
As the weeks and then months passed, so the crew’s number of missions began to steadily mount – ten were chalked up, then fifteen, then twenty. They went from being the new boys to the most senior and experienced crew in the squadron. Bill was commissioned in December, while at around the same time Bill Morison became the squadron’s navigation leader: it was now up to him to not only help plan their routes to the target, but also improve the standard of the less experienced navigators.
Casualties during the Battle of Berlin, which lasted from November to the end of March 1944, were particularly high – 1,128 Allied bombers were shot down during this period, a staggering number. Yet every time they went out on a ‘war’, Bill and his crew miraculously seemed to make it back in one piece. ‘Once you’d done five or six,’ said Bill Morison, ‘your chances were improved, but you could still get shot down at any time. The fact that you were a very experienced crew didn’t guarantee anything.’ On 24 May, 1944, the squadron took part in an attack on the German town of Aachen. Fifteen aircraft took off, Z for Zebra included, and made it safely to the target. There was little flak – the raid appeared to be one of their more straightforward missions, but on the return home, they came under repeated attack by night-fighters, and three of the squadron’s Halifaxes were shot down. All those lost had been experienced crews, the backbone of the squadron for many months. One had even been on their last mission – had they made it back to Leeming, their tour of duty would have been over.
Yet although Z for Zebra continued to make it back almost unscathed, these missions were not without incident for the crew. On one occasion Bill had thought they would never even manage to get airborne. There had been a strong crosswind and the aircraft had started to swing so badly as they hurtled down the runway that he’d thought he would lose control and flip the plane. Another time one of his port engines caught fire almost as soon as they’d left the ground. It was 30 March, 1944, and they were due to bomb Nuremburg.
‘That was scary,’ he admitted. ‘Fire in the air like that is scary. You can’t just land again – not with all those bombs and full tanks of fuel.’ A pipe had burst and petrol was spewing everywhere. Bill had to cut the engine immediately, but ahead was a small hill and with a quarter of their power gone, it looked as though they were not going to get enough lift and so fly straight into it. Somehow, though, he managed to clear it, and was able to get to the North Sea and discard his bomb load. He still had to burn off much of the fuel, so circled for a couple of hours before finally turning back to Leeming. They’d had a lucky escape. The girls in the control tower thought they must have crashed and so when he called up and gave his call-sign, ‘Must We’, they thought they were talking to a ghost.
Landing