Chastise. Max Hastings

weeks, in truth, since inception, but such a span represented an eternity to very young men, crowding what should properly have been a lifetime’s experience into a fraction of a natural span: Gibson considered entitling the later memoir of his career as a bomber pilot Four Years Lifetime – ‘a mission which was going to do a lot of good if it succeeded’. The chiefs of the RAF had promised the aircrew of 617 Squadron that breaching the dams would inflict damage upon Germany’s war industries greater than any previously achieved by an air force.

Among the sharpest contrasts between the environment of twentieth-century war and that of twenty-first-century peace is colour. We live in a world of reds and whites, blues, silvers, oranges. Allied airmen bombing Europe in 1943 existed by day under sunshine and bright skies, then fought their battles in a universe that was darkened, shaded, shadowed, unless or until it erupted into flame. The undersides and flanks of night bombers were painted matt black; their upper surfaces disrupted foliage-greens and earth-browns. Once airborne, Gibson and his kin inhabited cramped, stunted workspaces, crowded with technology and control mechanisms, black or green save where paint had been worn away by human friction and hard usage to reveal streaks of dull metal.

      He wrote: ‘The pilot sits on the left on a raised, comfortably padded seat … usually flies the thing with his left hand, resetting the gyro and other instruments with his right, but most pilots use both hands when over enemy territory or when the going is tough. You have to be quite strong to fly a Lancaster. The instruments sit winking. On the Sperry panel, or the blind-flying panel as bomber pilots call it, now and then a red light, indicating that some mechanism needs adjusting, will suddenly flash on … The pilot’s eyes constantly perform a circle from the repeater to the Air Speed Indicator, from the ASI to the horizon, from the horizon to the moon, from the moon to what he can see on the ground and then back to the repeater. No wonder they are red-rimmed when he returns.’

Gibson himself had much to be red-rimmed about. Since 1940, he had been almost continuously making war. Two months earlier he completed a tour as 106 Squadron’s commander, during which he flew its most hazardous operations. He was now among the most decorated pilots in the RAF, holding two Distinguished Service Orders, two Distinguished Flying Crosses. In the seven weeks since he began to form 617 Squadron he had grappled with relentless administrative and personnel problems; directed specialised crew training; raced between Scampton, Weybridge and Reculver to discuss the dam-busting bomb with its creator and to witness the mixed fortunes of its trials. He had flown low-level tests by day and night; hastened to and from the Grantham headquarters of 5 Group for tactical conferences; delivered the most important briefings of his life; and now, taken off for Germany in the dying light of a lovely English spring Sunday.

      Exhaustion most conspicuously manifested itself in an inflamed foot condition which caused pain on the ground, worse in the air. In a conversation with Gibson that morning, the station medical officer felt unable to prescribe medication, lest it impair the pilot’s reflexes. Meanwhile Gibson’s three-year marriage to an older showgirl had become a poor thing. His only relaxation in weeks had been a snatched trip to a Grantham ‘flickhouse’ with a WAAF girlfriend to see Casablanca. Like a host of young men of all the nations engaged in the Second World War, he had aged years beyond the twenty-four cited in RAF records.

That night of 16 May, he wrote of himself and John Pulford, the flight-engineer on the folding seat beside him in the Lancaster’s ‘glass house’: ‘two silent figures, young, unbearded, new to the world yet full of skill, full of pride in their squadron, determined to do a good job and bring the ship home. A silent scene, whose only incidental music is provided by the background hiss of air and the hearty roar of four Merlin engines.’ He described Pulford as ‘a Londoner, a sincere and plodding type’. He embraced Fred ‘Spam’ Spafford, the bomb-aimer, as ‘a grand guy and many were the parties we had together’. His rear-gunner, Richard Trevor-Roper, silent in the remoteness of the tail, was ‘Eton, Oxford’, to which his pilot added that ‘Trev’ ‘was probably thinking what I was thinking. Was this the last time we would see England?’

      Gibson wrote of his crew as if he knew them intimately, yet in truth this was the first operation that any save wireless-operator Bob Hutchison had flown with him, and it would also be the last. Most of what he stated about the others was wrong. Trevor-Roper attended Wellington College, not Eton, and never Oxford; Pulford, dismissed in the author’s original as ‘a bit of a dummy’, was a Yorkshireman, not a Londoner. Like all 617’s engineers, he was a former ‘erk’, a ground crewman, maid of all work: monitoring the throttles and dials, moving around the aircraft to deal with small problems, check on the rear-gunner or investigate an intercom failure. Every twenty minutes it was his job to log engine temperatures, fuel state. That morning, Sgt. Pulford had received extraordinary permission from Gibson to attend his father’s funeral in Hull, an hour’s drive from Scampton, to which he had been accompanied by two RAF policemen to ensure that he said not a word to anyone about what he was to do that night.

The pilot described ‘Spam’ Spafford as a great bomb-aimer, ‘but he was not too hot at map-reading’. ‘Hutch’, the wireless-operator, was ‘one of those grand little Englishmen who had the guts of a horse’, despite being often airsick. George Deering, the Canadian front-gunner who was a veteran of thirty-five operations, was ‘pretty dumb, and not too good at his guns, and it was taking a bit of a risk taking him, but one of our crack gunners had suddenly gone ill and there was nobody else’. If pilot and bomb-aimer had ever caroused together, there is no record of it. For all the ‘wingco’s’ leadership skills, to most of his comrades, and especially to subordinates, little Gibson – on the ground, it was impossible to fail to notice his lack of inches – was a remote figure, respected but not much loved, especially by humbler ranks. A gunner said sourly, ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you that your buttons were undone.’ By the time Gibson wrote his book, however, both he and Chastise had become legends. Thus, he described a close relationship with his crew as a fitting element of the story.

      Reality was that five of the six young men sharing G-George with their squadron commander that night were bleakly aware that they were committed to one of the most hazardous missions of the war, in the hands of a pilot with whom they had never flown over enemy territory. More than that, he was an authentic hero; and heroes are immensely dangerous to their comrades.

      Now they were over the North Sea: ‘Our noses were going straight for the point at which we had to cross the Dutch coast. The sea was as flat as a mill-pond, there was hardly a ripple … We dropped lower and lower down to about fifty feet so as to avoid radio detection … After a time I tried to light a cigarette. In doing so we again nearly hit the drink and the boys must have thought I was mad. In the end I handed the thing to Pulford to light for me.’ Gibson was flying in shirtsleeves, wearing a Luftwaffe Mae West, spoils of war that he had picked up in his fighter days. Although they were operating far below the height at which oxygen was necessary, they were still obliged to wear masks, because these contained microphones for the intercom and VHF link between aircraft – Gibson hankered in vain for throat mikes such as the USAAF employed.

He wrote in 1944, looking back to that unforgettable night: ‘One hour to go, one hour left before Germany, one hour of peace before flak. I thought to myself, here are 133 boys who have got an hour to live before going through hell. Some of them won’t get back … Who is it will be unlucky? … What is the rear-gunner in Melvin Young’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? What’s the bomb-aimer in Henry Maudslay’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? … One hour to go, one hour to think of these things, one hour to fly on a straight course and then it will be weaving and sinking to escape the light flak and the fury of the enemy defence.’ A few months later, he chose as one of his favourite records on BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’: ‘it’s exciting, it’s grandiose, it’s … rather terrible. It reminds me of a bombing raid.’ Then Guy Gibson thought about his dog, which was newly dead; and about the epic experience ahead, which would make him one of the most famous fliers in history. ‘This was the big thing,’ he wrote. ‘This was it.’

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