Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next. John Nichol
biting into his starboard wing. Almost immediately the aircraft was engulfed in flames. ‘There was poor old Holden up about four hundred feet or more, being shot to blazes and on fire.’9
Holden’s aircraft went out of control, diving and veering sharply to port. Les Knight had to haul on the controls to avoid a collision with his leader’s aircraft and within seconds Holden’s Lancaster had crashed and exploded with the loss of everyone – Guy Gibson’s Dambusters crew – on board. It was Holden’s thirtieth birthday. ‘They just dived down, nearly hitting us on the way,’ Fred Sutherland recalls, ‘straight into the ground with a huge explosion. It was some sight – eight guys just dying in front of my eyes. They didn’t have a hope. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Your friends are getting killed and you are scared as hell but you can’t let it bother you; if you did, you could never do your job. You just think, “Thank God it wasn’t us.”’
The blast from the crash almost brought down the two Lancasters flying close behind him, but, fortunately, his delay-fused 12,000-pounder didn’t explode. Had it detonated on impact, all the other aircraft in his formation, flying as low as 30 feet above the ground, would almost certainly have been destroyed as well. Instead an unfortunate German family whose farm was the site of Holden’s fatal crash suffered a tragic blow when the bomb detonated fifteen minutes later. Alerted by the anti-aircraft fire and the thunder of the approaching bombers, the farmer, his wife and their six children had been sheltering in a cellar beneath their farmhouse when the crash occurred. However, a few minutes later, the parents decided to go back upstairs to fetch some warm clothing for their shivering children. They were still above ground when the bomb exploded. The farmer survived, sheltered by one of the few pieces of wall to survive a blast that demolished every farm building and set fire to an avenue of oak trees, but his wife was killed instantly. She was the only German fatality from the raid.10
The remaining aircraft re-formed, with Mick Martin taking over as leader, but ran into low-lying mist and fog over the Dortmund area, at times reducing visibility to as little as 500 yards. The haze was reflecting the moonlight and ‘making the whole scene appear like a silver veil. We could see practically no ground detail when flying into-moon.’11 They were supposed to bomb from 150 feet at two-minute intervals, but the fog and haze meant that the only time they could actually spot the canal was when they were already directly overhead and too late to drop their bombs on it. They kept circling, hoping for a break or eddy in the fog that would give them a sight of the target, but with no sign of the Mosquitos that were supposed to act as ‘can-openers’, suppressing the air defences, the Lancasters were making themselves ‘sitting ducks for the air defences putting up a wall of flak’, and the prowling night-fighters. They soon lost another aircraft, when Mick Martin’s rear gunner suddenly called out, ‘There goes Jerry Wilson.’ Flight Lieutenant Harold ‘Jerry’ Wilson’s Lancaster had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crashed into the canal bank, killing himself and all his crew.
‘There was only us and Micky Martin left by then from our formation,’ Les Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland, says. ‘It was a desperate scene unfolding around us; it was pretty scary.’ Soon afterwards, squinting into the fog, Sutherland froze as ‘trees atop a ridge just appeared in front of me, rushing towards me. Someone else screamed for Les to climb but it was too late.’ Sydney Hobday, the crew’s navigator, remembered the moment all too clearly, ‘To my horror,’ he says, ‘I saw the treetops straight ahead and thought we had at last “bought it” – after quite a good run for our money I admit!’
The trees hit them on the port side, puncturing the radiators of both port engines and damaging the tail. Both port engines overheated and had to be shut down, and the starboard inner engine then began to fail as well.
Knight fought to control his badly damaged aircraft as Edward ‘Johnny’ Johnson – not the member of Joe McCarthy’s crew married to Gwyn, but another bomb-aimer with a similar name – jettisoned the 12,000-pound bomb, praying that the delayed-action fuse would work, because, if not, they’d be blown to pieces as it detonated. It fell away silently and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The crew also threw out their guns and ammunition to lose weight as Knight tried to nurse his battered aircraft back to England, alternately feathering the port engines to cool them and then briefly restarting them as the aircraft dropped towards stalling speed.
He called his rear gunner, Harry ‘Obie’ O’Brien, forward to haul on the exposed controls from the starboard rudder pedal to ease the strain on Knight’s leg as he battled to hold the damaged aircraft in straight and level flight, but it was a hopeless task. With the two port engines virtually useless and the starboard ones over-revving as they strained to keep the Lancaster airborne, the aircraft was constantly being pushed to port and still losing altitude, with the glide angle increasing steadily. Fear of what was to come gripped them all. ‘There was no smoke or flames,’ Sutherland says, ‘but we knew we didn’t have long.’ As they passed over Den Ham in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Knight realised he couldn’t control the aircraft much longer and ordered his men to bale out. Looking out, Sutherland thought they were over water, but once more it was just the moonlight reflecting from the layer of cloud below them, and when he pulled back the blackout curtain he saw the ground in front of them.
The crew baled out one by one. ‘Bomb-aimer going, cheers, Les,’ Edward Johnson said.
‘Cheers and good luck, Johnny,’ Knight said, his voice showing none of the emotion he must have been feeling.
Obie O’Brien also said his farewell and baled out from the rear hatch, and was followed moments later by Sutherland, who called, ‘Mid-upper gunner going out the back door, Les.’ He didn’t have his parachute on, but ‘quickly clipped it on and just jumped out the back door’. The extra gunner, Les Woollard, on his first flight with Knight’s crew, jumped at the same time, though Sutherland lost sight of him at once.
Navigator Sidney Hobday baled out of the hatch in the nose and flight engineer Bob Kellow followed a heartbeat later. He’d disconnected his intercom and so couldn’t speak to Knight, but gave him a thumbs-up sign, and saw Knight’s answering signal before he tumbled out of the hatch.12
None of Knight’s crew had ever talked about being shot down. Sutherland says:
I don’t think we ever talked about the possibility, or what we would do. I remember Johnson always wore special shoes whenever we flew low level so he could walk out if we came down – he was prepared. But for me, whatever was going to happen would happen. I didn’t think too much about it. No one talked about it. We just hoped that the op would be over quickly, and we’d survive and get back to the Mess for a beer! 13
However, the first thing that every aircrew member found out about a new aircraft was ‘how to leave the plane in a hurry’. At one time crews practised baling out from a static aircraft on the ground, but ‘this produced so many twisted and broken limbs that it was put on hold’. An instructor at OTU – the Operational Training Unit, which all ranks had to attend before joining a unit on active service – also had a warning for trainee aircrew who baled out over the UK: ‘Remember to hold on to the ripcord handle and bring it back or you will be charged five bob for its replacement!’
Like the rest of his crew, Sutherland had never used a parachute before, but after a heart-stopping pause when he pulled on the ripcord, his chute opened safely. ‘I hit the ground and stood up,’ he says. ‘A few hours before I’d been in England, now I was standing in enemy territory. It was quite a shock. I thought about my family getting a telegram to say I was missing, what would they think?’ As he did so, he saw Les Knight attempting a forced landing a quarter of a mile away, but sadly, by waiting for his crew to bale out, time had run out for Knight himself, ‘a classic example of the pilot sacrificing his life to allow the others to escape’.14 His stricken aircraft hit the trees, crashed and burst into flames, killing Knight instantly. His body, still at the controls, was retrieved by Dutch civilians who, in defiance of the German occupiers, buried him after conducting a funeral for him. ‘I owe my life to Les,’ Sutherland says. ‘He kept the aircraft steady as long as he could, so we could get out. Without him, I’d have been dead.’
Sidney