A Pathfinder at Peenemunde Sam Hall
A Minister was given the job of running the Peenemunde raid by Churchill, Duncan Sandys. We were told that it was such an important target that if we didn't get it that particular night, we'd go back until we did. For me it was one of the most memorable raids. In the Pathfinder force you had to be accurate. Your target indicators had to go down on time because the rest of Bomber Command, the main force, was waiting to see those target indicators at the time that they'd been told. Now in order to achieve your timing, you had to keep time in hand in case the winds were such that you couldn't get there at the time you expected. When you got near the target you had to get rid of that time, and one way of doing it was to do dog-legs. You would go 60 degrees to the left, say, for 2 minutes and then come back 120 degrees, and by doing that you'd have an equilateral triangle for every 2 minutes. For every 2-minute leg you lost 2 minutes along the main track. That wasn't the best way of losing, but most people did it.But in our aircraft I had an arrangement with my pilot whereby I'd say a 1-minute turn or a 2-minute turn, and he would do a 360-degree turn and then go back on track.That would get rid of the time in one fell swoop. We did this in front of the thundering herd of Bomber Command behind us, but we reckoned it was worth it. We did that manoeuvre that night and it saved our lives. When we straightened up I decided to have a look at the war, pulled the navigator's curtain back, and immediately a German fighter came across our nose so close I could see the crosses under the wings and the wheels in place. The fighter had committed himself to a curve of pursuit against us in such a way that he'd expected us to be 4 miles further on and he couldn't reorganise his curves to get behind us. After we'd bombed, the mid-upper gunner said, "There's a fighter coming in! It's got a Lanc, it's got another, it's got another!" Three Lancasters were going down in flames. You didn't waste too much time thinking about it. So many things were going on - all sorts of lights in the sky, flashes on the ground. I knew the first Master Bomber on that raid. When he got back to Wyton he was still bathed in perspiration. He'd had to fly above the target for the whole extent of the raid.'
Sam Hall,
Bomber Command Pathfinder navigator
With Dimbleby aboard John Gee
'The army was bogged down about 10 or 15 miles short of the Rhine. February came and they were anxious to break out because V2's had been bombing the south of England. The armies were going to make their final push to get across the Rhine, and Bomber Command was asked to knock out a number of targets in front of the army. Cleve was one of them.
Cleve was a little town about 4 or 5 miles west of the Rhine, 10 miles from Nijmegen. There were 295 Lancasters and 10 Mosquitoes from B Group, and we had to bomb this target because it was thought to be a road and rail junction. The town had been virtually destroyed anyway, but it was a place where Panzer reinforcements might be brought up to resist the army push. Cleve was only just in front of our own front line troops, so we had to be jolly careful that we didn't bomb our own troops.
The weather forecast was good. There was no cloud about. Richard Dimbleby came up to Scampton that day, along with his engineer and his recording equipment. As I was the senior officer flying from 153 Squadron that night I was nominated to take him. I had two extra bodies on board which made us quite a lot overweight, so to reduce it we ditched some gallons of petrol. I was tickled pink to have him with me. He came up to the squadron and we sat with him and had a meal before we took off. He was a big chap, and of course when he sat alongside me the flight engineer. who would normally be there, had to stand behind and operate all his gauges and things. We were a bit pushed. You couldn't really get past in the fuselage with all the recording gear. He had an engineer to operate it. He had to squat down in the fuselage. I can't imagine anything worse than squatting in a Lancaster for 4 or 5 hours waiting to operate equipment for probably no more than 5 minutes.
It was only when we got near the target that he started to make his commentary. We were flying at 11,000 feet and couldn't see a thing I thought, "What are we going to do? We can't drop our bombs on our own troops. "Suddenly we heard the Master Bomber calling us down below 4,500 feet. If you can imagine 295 Lancasters coming down from 17,000 to 4,500 feet through cloud. Why there was no collision I just don't know. Now they talk about a near miss if an aircraft goes within 10 miles of another. There were 295 near misses there all at one time.
There below us was Cleve, and the target was marked by the Pathfinders and searchlights were reflected off the cloud - it was like daylight. And you could see the Lancasters coming out of the cloud like darts. Then we had to bomb the target from 4,500 feet. The bombs were exploding and the aircraft was being bounced all over the place. Richard Dimbleby made his commentary, which was broadcast the next day on BBC radio. We knocked Cleve out completely, so much so that when the army advanced the next day there were so many bomb craters and so many broken roads that it quickly came to a halt.'
John Gee,
Bomber Command pilot