The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany. John Nichol
with applause and the crowd joined in the chorus.’
Not everyone could use these diversions to escape the feeling of impending doom. Chick Chandler’s pre-war job – manufacturing parts for anti-aircraft guns – was a protected occupation, but everyone he knew had joined up and he didn’t want to be left out. ‘I can’t say I really enjoyed life in Bomber Command. It was always in the back of your mind that tomorrow might be the day that you might die. Even when you were going out, there was always the thought that it might be the last time: that this would be your last pint, or this might be your last dance. I wanted to join up and be part of the war effort, but the reality wasn’t quite as I imagined. Nobody told me they shot back!’
The other release was female company. The objects of their desire were the girls in the local town who might have an eye for a young man in uniform. There were also the WAAFS, members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force who worked alongside the men on base, doing clerical jobs in operations and control rooms and working in technical, electrical and mechanical roles to free the men for flying duties.
Norman ‘Babe’ Westby had been a virgin when he joined Rusty Waughman’s crew. ‘Taffy, our mischievous wireless operator, took it upon himself to introduce him to the ways of the flesh. He knew of a full-bosomed woman in Grimsby called “Luscious Lil” with a penchant for revealing outfits, who’d be the ideal target for Norman’s first operational sortie with the opposite sex.’ He organised a pub crawl. ‘By the end, Norman was rubbing his hands with excitement. The sight of her black stockings with the thin black lines at the back made it almost impossible to bear. Needless to say, the evening concluded satisfactorily as far as most parties were concerned, and Taffy took great pride in his achievement of turning a boy into a man.’
The married men worried about those they had left behind, and might leave behind permanently. When they were bombed out of their home in Portsmouth, Ron Auckland’s family moved to Porchester. Another family who had also suffered the same fate lived two doors away, and Ron became friendly with Sheila, a friend of their daughter. ‘As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the girl for me.’
She was equally smitten. ‘I felt safe with him.’
They became engaged in 1942, shortly before Ron was posted to America for his pilot training. A year later they married. Ron’s best man was Alan Barnes, another pilot whom he had met during the recruiting process at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Their group had been assembled in alphabetical order and the two men ended up next to each other in line – it was the chance start of a great friendship. They were soon stationed together as trainee pilots and became inseparable. Posted to different squadrons, they vowed to try and meet up every time they were on leave.
In January 1944 Ron called Alan’s base to put a date in the diary for a pint. He was told Alan had gone missing on a raid over Berlin. ‘I knew he was dead. It really brought home what we were all facing.’
Alan’s body was never found.
Sheila had only met him at their wedding, but his last words to her were: ‘If anything happens to Ron, I’ll always look after you.’
Ron and Sheila Auckland’s wedding
‘It was a great shock,’ Ron recalled. ‘Of course people you knew were dying all of the time. In Portsmouth I went to a lot of the Navy dances and we lost many of our friends when one of the ships got torpedoed. We knew the war. We understood it.’
She and Ron never discussed the dangers. ‘Sheila obviously knew what I was doing in Bomber Command but I didn’t speak to her about the operations or the losses. I never wanted to worry her. She just expected me to turn up when we’d agreed.’
Sheila also did her best not to distress him. ‘I cried every time he left but I never let him see me cry. When I saw him off at the railway station, he kept opening the door to say goodbye one last time. The porter shouted out, “Close that door and put that light out!” But Ron kept on opening it. In the end I said to him, “You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” It was so hard. My sister’s husband was in the Navy, so we both used to cry together.’
They ended up living together. ‘I could talk to my sister about it. We would listen to the radio and some bad news would come on and we’d end up crying. She’d say to me, “Let’s sleep together tonight,” for comfort. But the men never knew about any of this.’
On one occasion Ron came back to the house unexpectedly to find Sheila in tears. ‘I was upset because he saw me crying. I tried to be the brave girl because I didn’t want him to worry. That was the wartime attitude. But it affects people on such a personal level – the fear that I had was being replicated by hundreds of thousands people across the country night after night, day after day. But you never showed it. No, we went dancing to take our mind off it.’
Each day Ron was away, Sheila lived in fear of the ‘telegram boy’ and what he might bring. ‘One day he arrived with an envelope and I didn’t want to take it. I thought it was telling me Ron was missing or dead. My aunt opened it. It was from Ron. He was telling me he’d won the Distinguished Flying Cross. The silly man sent me a telegram!’
The unceasing tension took its toll. Rusty Waughman was forced to replace his first flight engineer. ‘He was fine in training, but as soon as we were on operations he would just sit on the floor and quiver. He was incapable of carrying out his duties. I stuck with him for a couple of ops, but during one our starboard engine was on fire and the poor guy was unable to do anything about it. I had to take all the emergency actions myself. It reached the point where it was affecting our safety, so I reported him to the CO, and he left the station that afternoon so as not to affect the morale of others. I don’t know if he was made LMF or not, but he should never have been because, although he knew of his condition, he never refused to fly on ops.’
LMF – shorthand for ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ – was the label given to those deemed to have lost the will to fight, branded as cowards and removed from operations in disgrace. The threat of it was the sword of Damocles that hung over every airman’s head. During the operation in which Chick Chandler had become confused about how much Window to throw out of the plane, their Stirling bomber developed a technical fault. The crew began to argue over whether they should turn back or continue to the target. ‘We were facing mortal danger, but we were more worried about what would happen if we returned. I knew we didn’t have a chance of surviving, but someone said: “They’ll say we’re LMF.” It was an ever-present fear in Bomber Command. They were more scared of being called a coward than they were of flying. People were willing to risk their lives to avoid being branded LMF.’
Any early return from an op came under the kind of scrutiny that induced many to press on regardless. One can only speculate upon the number of aircraft which might have perished because the crew decided that dealing with any mechanical problems was a less daunting prospect than the disgrace of being labelled cowards. Bomb aimer Campbell Muirhead recorded an account in his diary of the treatment of a sergeant who had refused to fly: ‘There he was standing out in front, all on his own, in full view of every person in the unit, to be stripped of his wings and then his sergeant’s tapes. They had all been unstitched beforehand so they came away easily when they were ripped from his uniform. He was immediately posted elsewhere.’26
Alan Payne was sent to find and bring back his mid-upper gunner, who ran away after two operations. On the return journey, once he had assured them he wouldn’t try to escape, they attempted to lighten the mood by taking him to a dance hall in Nottingham. It only provided a temporary respite, however; once they got back to Lincolnshire, the gunner was stripped of his stripes and brevet and posted to a camp in Sheffield to be ‘retrained’.
Alan and his crew were sympathetic, but didn’t dwell on his fate. Once gone he was barely mentioned; there was always another operation, and life in Bomber Command was hazardous enough without having someone on board who might be incapable of carrying out his job at a critical moment.
Andy Wiseman had the misfortune to see what went on