The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany. John Nichol
for 55 minutes, and they had cold showers in the morning in winter. It was terrible. LMF was one of the great unfairnesses of the war. Though I suspect that some of the LMF people were cowards, most of them were just deeply affected by their experiences and couldn’t cope any more. I think it took more courage to admit you were afraid and couldn’t go on. Bravery only lasts for so long …’
Men could serve on so many operations before the bank of courage from which they had drawn was empty. Some found the will to carry on regardless, perhaps because they were too ashamed to admit to their fear and dreaded the accusations of cowardice that might follow. Harry Evans served his early ops with a mid-upper gunner, ‘a proper Jack-the-lad’, who soon found it difficult to cope. ‘The crew didn’t tell me till much later, but he went to the Gunnery Officer and asked to go. The officer talked him out of it. On ops he would have panic attacks, especially if we were being shot up. He’d start shouting: “We’re all going to get killed!” or “There’s holes in the tail!” We’d just say, “Shut up, you …” But he got stuck in from then on. I look at it in two ways: he wasn’t the best mid-upper gunner because of the panic. On the other hand, he was too scared to doze off at his position …’
Rusty Waughman believed the mental scars were worse than any physical wounds. ‘I know one airman who pressed on. When they were damaged by flak during an op, he blacked out, left his seat and wandered to the back of the aircraft. The rest of the crew tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t speak and he had no further recollection of the op. He was transferred to the hospital at Matlock, where he was unconscious for several days until a nurse dropped a metal dish. He woke up screaming, “There’s another poor sod going down. Look at the flames! Look at the flames!”’ The man was eventually invalided out of the service.
When men suffered a nervous breakdown because of the stress and exhaustion of incessant ops, they were given medical and psychiatric treatment rather than punishment – and given the relentless nature of life in Bomber Command it is surprising that so few men suffered psychological problems. Only 0.3 per cent of aircrew were officially classified as showing a Lack of Moral Fibre, though countless more suffered from a spectrum of what we would now term post-traumatic stress disorders.
Jack Watson’s crew was joined by a Mosquito squadron on base at Upwood. Jack was in his room in the old married quarters when a Mosquito which had become lost in the fog careered into one of the adjoining buildings. ‘The house was ablaze, and as we were running towards it we could see three of our lads who had just come back from a raid sitting on the bed. We could see them sitting there; they still had their uniforms on. They couldn’t get out and we couldn’t get in to help them – and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it. Suddenly the house crashed down and collapsed on them and they disappeared into a cloud of flame and smoke. One of our mates tried to get in to help them out, but he got badly burnt and in the end he had to jump out.
‘At the end of the terraced houses there was a little brick wall and I went down there to find the navigator and pilot of the Mosquito. They had come straight through the top of the aircraft canopy and had hit this wall. They were just lying there. That’s something which shook me. They were a real mess, but they were still completely in their flying kit, which virtually held them together. And when they put them in a blanket it just folded up into a ball … I have never seen anything like it.’
The next morning was warm and sunny. A group of airmen sat on the lawn ruminating on the events of the night before. Jack Watson was among them. One of the men turned to another. ‘You know, I could see you sitting there in that house burning like that last night.’ It was crass thing to say, but it had been meant as a joke. ‘We used to say stupid things like that,’ Jack explains.
They were young and gauche, and gallows humour provided another release. But the recipient of the comment did not see the funny side; he stood up and walked away. They never saw him again.
Sam Harris (front row, right) and crew
At the end of March 1944 Britain had yet to emerge from a long and harrowing winter, but the newspapers were still trying to kindle optimism in any way possible. The front page of the Daily Mirror led with the story of the Russian Army’s progress across southern Poland under the headline ‘Soviet Racing for Czech Border’, while ‘“Eat Your Words” challenge to MPs’ reported a piece of political brinksmanship by Winston Churchill on the home front to help shore up his coalition government. The Daily Express also found time to report the story of Harry P. Mclean of Windsor, Ontario, who threw $1,000 into the street from his fourth-floor window. ‘I like to see people happy,’ he said.
Happiness on the home front was still in short supply. The British people were enduring their fifth year of war, and rationing had bitten deep. Londoners had just come through a ‘Baby Blitz’, Hitler’s attempt to repeat his terrorisation of the capital four years earlier by dropping 2,000 tonnes of explosive, and feared further attacks. One story that was not reported was the recapture of 73, and subsequent execution of 50, of the 76 Allied prisoners-of-war who had escaped through a tunnel at Stalag Luft III.27
Against this backdrop, Sir Arthur Harris made his way to his operations room in an underground bunker at RAF High Wycombe just before 9 a.m. on 30 March. As he did each day, he greeted the officers of Bomber Command’s Air Staff with a brisk ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’28 sat down at his desk and lit the first in a chain of cigarettes. Peering over his half-moon glasses, he would then growl, ‘Did the Hun do anything last night?’ before taking his opening drag. He would occasionally substitute ‘Boche’ for ‘Hun’, but his dislike of the enemy was never less than clear.
Harris was driven; he took his responsibility so seriously he never dreamt of delegating it, and didn’t take any leave in three and a half years. He was determined to carry out his job to the best of his ability and bore the enormous strain that accompanied it without complaint. Those who worked with him lived in fear of his thunderous roar whenever they were late or failed to answer a question, and he made frequent enemies of politicians and Air Ministry civil servants. But he did not care. Winning the war was what counted.
The three children from his failed first marriage might have found him similarly uncompromising. They were cut from his life – or at least the version of it he gave to his biographer, Henry Probert. Yet the man who made the most combat-hardened Wing Commanders tremble melted at the sight of his five-year-old daughter. Jackie was a regular visitor to High Wycombe, and Joan Dally, a WAAF Corporal in the HQ Met Office, was occasionally asked to look after the little girl when her mother went shopping. ‘Others might have been in awe of him, but I saw a different side of Harris – a kindly father of a little girl. I would sometimes go into his famous office and Jackie would be playing there. I could see by the way he looked at her that he adored her.’29
Once his question about the activities of the Germans had been answered, the morning conference followed a set pattern. Harris read out the report of the previous night’s operations. That March morning there had been no major raids for three nights because of poor weather conditions, so it was brief.
He was followed by Magnus Spence. Making predictions about the weather over a distant patch of Europe based on scant information was a challenge that Spence and his meteorologists faced daily. Harris took a special interest in the forecasts. Joan Dally remembers his frequent visits to the Met Office. ‘He would come in and say things like, “Now, when are you chaps going to find me some decent weather so I can send my boys out?” He always referred to the aircrew as “my boys”. You could tell by the way he spoke about them how much he cared for them. He’d say, “I don’t want my boys to run into bad weather tonight.”’
Spence’s report encouraged Harris to believe in the possibility of some cloud cover towards