The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

at Leeming in September 1941.⁵² His first operations were flown with a crew of sergeants who had already done several sorties. They did not speak to him all the way to the target and all the way back, and, on one occasion, he thought that they must have all baled out but he was too frightened to switch on his intercom and ask. This attitude towards new arrivals was endemic, as ‘green’ crew were inclined to make mistakes when subjected to the physical and psychological stress associated with the first few operations. A former Flight Sergeant in 75 (New Zealand) Squadron commented that one mission was a complete disaster for his aircraft because of a ‘green’ crew member, and how his aircraft was only just able to return to base.⁵³

      As good as the training organisation had become by the mid-war period, it could never fully prepare aircrew for operational reality. However, as in any war, the contrast between doctrinal expectation and wartime reality was greatest at the start of the war. As the official historians comment:

      ‘…when war came in 1939, Bomber Command was not trained or equipped either to penetrate into enemy territory by day or to find its target areas, let alone its targets, by night. There were, of course, some crews [who] had reached higher standards of navigation, bomb-aiming and gunnery. But the character of their aircraft and guns meant that it was impossible for them, however skilful and brave they might be, to face the enemy over his own territory in daytime.’⁵⁴

      The first two years of the war saw the skies being darkened by all the doctrinal chickens coming home to roost. The effects of dogma and budgetary constraint were most apparent in the quality of aircraft and supporting technologies.

      The aircraft that would have to carry the offensive to Germany were either obsolescent or obsolete (Hampden, Wellington, Whitley). All these aircraft, but especially the Hampden, were notorious for their lack of crew comfort. Crews operating the Hampden were quick to christen it the ‘Flying Coffin’. One member of 106 Squadron described the difficulties posed by the cramped conditions in the aircraft:

      ‘… if the pilot was hit or incapacitated, the second pilot – who also carried out the duties of bomb-aimer and navigator as well as being reserve pilot – had to drag him out from his seat by pulling him backwards out of his position, and then crawl into the pilot’s position; a feat which… called for a combination of strength, dexterity, and a blind faith that the aircraft would stay on an even plane during which time this hazardous operation was accomplished.’⁵⁵

      The Hampden also had a particularly draughty cockpit, and crews would return from operations numb with the cold. Frostbite was common among the crews of all these early bombers, which had rudimentary heating systems prone to failure. Having to operate at altitudes of between 15,000 and 20,000 feet, temperatures fell as low as -30 degrees C. Crews were compelled to wear bulky and restrictive clothing, and the extreme cold also affected the oxygen equipment, so that even the simplest tasks became almost impossible. A particularly graphic account exists of a Whitley crew engaged in leaflet-dropping over Frankfurt:

      ‘Everyone was frozen, and had no means of alleviating their distress. The navigator and Commanding Officer were butting their heads on the floor and navigation table in an endeavour to experience some other form of pain as a relief from the awful feeling of frostbite and lack of oxygen.’⁵⁶

      In this respect, aircrew conditions had not improved markedly over the First World War flying in open cockpits.⁵⁷

      Nor had there been any advancement in aids to navigation or bomb-aiming. At the start of the war dead-reckoning and astro-navigation were the basis of long-range navigation. The early crews had none of the radar navigational aids that ultimately appeared in Bomber Command, such as ‘Gee’ and ‘H2S’. The inter-war Air Staff had shown great indifference to, and ignorance of, long-range navigation problems, and this was highlighted by none other than Arthur Harris, when he was Deputy Director of the Plans Division in 1936:

      ‘The trouble with service navigation in the past has been the lack of knowledge and of interest in the subject evinced by senior officers in the service… pilotage and “Bradshawing” have quite wrongly been considered as adequate substitutes for real navigation.’⁵⁸

      There were many senior officers who shared the opinion of the Deputy Director of Staff Duties, Group Captain (later Air Vice-Marshal) F. H. Maynard, that navigation over long distances was a ‘comparatively simple’ exercise.⁵⁹ When changes to the navigational syllabus were proposed in 1938, this was at the behest of Coastal Command, but few of the revisions were in place by the time war broke out. As late as 1941, to provide bomber crews with an accurate target position before take-off was thought to be sufficient. But operations very quickly demonstrated that if training and equipment were lacking, such information was of little use.

      The extent of navigational error during many of these early operations is illustrated by one account of 7–8 March 1940, when Whitleys of 77 Squadron were returning from a mission over Poland. A 77 Squadron aircraft flew for 11 hours using dead-reckoning navigation before making an emergency landing in an area calculated to be near its base at Villeneuve, some 30 miles south-east of Paris. The crew was astonished to find that the language spoken by a group of farmworkers gathering around the aircraft was German. It was only then that they realised the enormity of their navigational error, and only just succeeded in restarting the Whitley’s engines as enemy troops arrived.⁶⁰ This is reminiscent of similar navigational problems faced by the RFC’s bombing crews in the First World War. For example, in December 1917, 55 Squadron lost half of its formation during one bombing operation because the crews lost their way when they were forced to navigate above cloud. Only the flight commander was able to locate the home aerodrome and land safely.⁶¹ As the official historians commented, ‘What is surprising about the years before 1942 is not that so many crews failed to find their targets, but that more of them did not fail to find England on their return.’⁶²

      Even if aircrews succeeded in locating their targets, there was no guarantee that they would be able to hit them. The early aircrews of the Second World War were reliant upon bombsights developed by the previous generation. The most common was the Course Setting Bombsight, which dated from the closing stages of the First World War, and this was only partially automatic, so that the final settings had to be done manually by the bomb-aimer in the run-up to the target. The bombsight demanded that the aircraft be kept on a straight and level approach to the target, as the slightest deviations in the air resulted in large errors on the ground, so that crews were compelled to hold their nerve if they wanted to hit a target accurately. As a consequence, aircraft fell easy prey to enemy fighters and flak, as one 10 Squadron Whitley crew found during May 1940 when they attempted to hit an oil installation at Bremen. In order to have a steady run-up to the target, the pilot made six passes over the city at less than 1,000 feet, coming under heavy fire each time. When the aircraft returned to its Yorkshire base, 700 holes were found in the fuselage.⁶³

      The real impetus to improve navigational and bomb aiming standards came with the findings of an independent report into bombing accuracy instituted by Churchill’s Scientific Adviser, Lord Cherwell. The so-called Butt report, issued in the autumn of 1941, concluded that of all the aircraft claiming to have attacked their targets, only one-third had arrived within 5 miles of them. Over the Ruhr, the proportion fell to one-tenth because of the heightened anti-aircraft defences and industrial haze obscuring targets.⁶⁴ In combination with developing Operational Research techniques, this study led to a more frank approach to operational problems experienced by aircrews. Not only was there subsequently far greater research and development into aids to navigation and bomb-aiming, which led to the introduction of radar equipment such as H2S, improved bombsights such as the Stabilised Vector Bombsight known as Mark XIV, and the specialist navigational group in Bomber Command known as the Pathfinders, but there was also a far greater understanding of the physical and psychological stresses placed on aircrew.⁶⁵

      Like so many other facets of the air war, the First World War experience cast its long shadow also in relation to attitudes towards combat stress. In the First War the prevailing view was that there was something cowardly about squadrons who lacked an offensive spirit or individuals who broke down under the strain of operations.⁶⁶ Trenchard, who was known