The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany. John Nichol
the Pathfinders became a much-valued part of his strategy, and Bennett a loyal if perennially outspoken member of his command.
By March 1944 the Pathfinder Force under Bennett’s control consisted of seven Lancaster squadrons, five Mosquito squadrons and the Meteorological Flight. Many aircraft had been fitted with two bespoke items of navigational equipment. Oboe, like GEE, was fed by electronic signals transmitted from England to guide the aircraft to the aiming point; H2S was a radar set that gave the navigator a rough picture of the terrain over which they were flying, giving the crew an even greater level of accuracy in position fixing and target location.
Emboldened by these technological and tactical advances, Harris launched an all-out attack on Hamburg in August 1943. During the course of four raids over 10 nights, Bomber Command dropped nearly 11,000 tons of bombs on Germany’s second largest city and biggest port: 22 pounds of explosives for each of its 1.75 million residents. The last operation, codenamed Gomorrah, caused a firestorm so severe that it was reported to have melted glass in windows, while ‘sugar boiled in bakery cellars and people escaping from underground shelters on to the streets were trapped in quagmires of molten asphalt’.11 The death toll was more than 40,000, and approximately a million people fled the city. Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments, advised Hitler that another six raids of similar scale and destructive power on other major cities would lose them the war.
Harris was unaware of Speer’s assessment, but he knew the raid had struck a severe blow to German morale. He increased the number and the intensity of their attacks, and turned his gaze in November 1943 towards Berlin. The series of raids he launched on the ‘Big City’ marked the start of a relentless onslaught designed to crush German resistance once and for all. He was so confident that a winter of ferocious bombing would bring the Germans to their knees that he set a date for victory: 1 April 1944.
The night of 18 November 1943 saw the first raid of what became known as the Battle of Berlin. It was swiftly followed by two more before the end of the month. Their combined death toll was 4,330, and more than 400,000 people were forced from their homes. ‘Hell seems to have broken loose over us,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary.
The Germans were forced to reorganise their defences and alter their tactics. On the first Berlin raid, 2 per cent of the bomber stream had been lost, only nine Lancasters. A month later, on 16 December, that figure rose to 9.3 per cent, a total of 55 bombers. Some crews began to dread the afternoon briefings – the revelation that the evening’s target was to be the Big City. As the losses mounted, so did the demand for replacement crews. On 23 December, Harry Evans, a navigator with 550 Squadron, was sent there on his first operation. He was initially stood down that evening while his crew was shared across the squadron as stand-ins for members of other crews who had fallen ill or were unable to fly. An hour before take-off that plan was scratched; Harry and his crew were told they were going together. ‘I’d missed briefing so I had to rush to get my pre-flight log and chart prepared. I raced to the aircraft, which was waiting at the end of the runway with its engines running.’12 Harry tried to run across the tarmac, but his flying suit and boots, ‘Mae West’ lifejacket and parachute harness, large satchel, sextant and flying helmet (complete with oxygen mask and intercom lead) meant that he could barely walk. He was almost blown over by the slipstream, then ‘the pilot throttled back the two starboard engines and the mid-upper gunner helped to haul me aboard and we roared down the runway before I even had time to get to my desk’.
Harry Evans (front left) and crew
When they were finally airborne, one of their gunners saw a blinding flash of light to one side of them. Two aircraft from their squadron had collided – the two that most of Harry’s crew would have been on if the original plan had remained in place. The margin between life and death in Bomber Command was small, and luck and chance were often the defining factors.
Harry and his crew flew on to Berlin. ‘It was as black as black. The only light came from the odd flash of machine-gun fire as gunners tested their weapons, or the red-hot glow of an exhaust stub from one of the other bombers around us. Up front the phosphorescent dials on the engineer’s panels cast a glow so bright that I feared it might be visible to enemy aircraft. No chance of that with the green blips on my GEE set. There were none. It had been jammed by the enemy.’
Few words were said as they flew over mainland Europe. All eyes apart from Harry’s and his pilot’s were scanning the night sky for fighters. Around 50 miles from Berlin a bank of searchlights swept across the sky, aiming to ‘cone’ a British bomber, so that it was caught in the beams of all the searchlights in a battery below. For the men on board it was as if they had moved from a dark room into blinding sunshine. The brightness over the target was intensified by the Pathfinders’ marker flares and the fires rampaging where the leading aircraft had already dropped their bombs. Harry thought: ‘This is like going down Regent Street at night.’
Their Lancaster started to tilt and vibrate, throwing the crew around ‘as though we were travelling over a cobbled road at high speed’. This was the effect of flak – the relentless barrage of fire from 50,000 anti-aircraft guns which protected the skies around the major German cities. Often guided by radar, these ground defences blasted thousands of explosive shells skywards at the bombers as they flew towards their target. A direct hit could destroy an aircraft, and shells that exploded nearby caused them to veer and lurch as the murderous shrapnel smashed against – and often through – the fuselage. Harry thought of the 4,000 pounds of high explosive in the bomb bay just inches beneath him, and wondered what would happen if the flak scored a direct hit there. A few minutes later he had his answer: a nearby bomber erupted in a shower of flame. He watched, awe-struck, as the aircraft spun to the ground leaving a corkscrew-shaped trail of smoke behind it. Looking down at the city, Harry could see that the streets were burning too.
Once over the target, their bomb aimer gave a series of instructions to the pilot to ensure their bombs were dropped as accurately as possible. For the rest of the crew ‘the next few minutes were agony’ as they flew as straight and level as possible, desperate to give him the best chance, but feeling they were easy prey for the guns down below. The seconds felt like minutes, until the bomb aimer announced their load was gone and the aircraft lifted, freed of its burden. The pilot then brought the nose of the aircraft down and they turned and fled back into the welcoming darkness.
The New Year came and went with no pause in the offensive; there were six operations on Berlin in January alone. The only respite came when the moon was full; training exercises took the place of providing the enemy night fighters with little-needed target practice.
By February 1944 the RAF was averaging two heavy – 550 aircraft – raids per week. Their losses were beginning to increase, leading to renewed criticism of Harris’s tactics. On 19 February Bomber Command experienced its worst night thus far during a Leipzig raid.
Rusty Waughman, with 101 Squadron, took off at 11.44 p.m. The first indication that things were not going as planned was when his navigator told him they were 20 minutes ahead of schedule. The wind was much stronger than forecast, blowing them towards the target before the allocated bombing time. There would be no Pathfinder markers, nothing to aim at, so they decided to ‘dog-leg’, flying in a zigzag fashion, to bleed time.
When they arrived, the sky was a riot of searchlight beams and flares dropped by enemy night fighters. Rusty watched as a Lancaster in the distance blew up in mid-air: another direct hit. Corralled by the winds, hundreds of their comrades had arrived prematurely over the target and started to orbit, waiting for the Pathfinders to arrive and illuminate the target. ‘Like fish caught in an ever-shrinking net, the bombers were being picked off one by one.’ There was a sound like a clap of thunder as they started their bombing run. Two circling bombers had collided and were now just shards of burning metal falling from the sky.
Rusty was able to drop his bombs, leave the danger area and head back to England without damage, but 79 others were lost that night. The brunt of the blame was borne by the Met Office, but their job – to predict the weather on the way to and over a target hundreds of miles away, based on very little data – was unenviable.