Thanks, Cliff.
Just mentioning the "Yorkshire Hussars" brought back memories of some wonderful "after op" thrash ups there when we descended on Leeds , which was far enough from Snaith to need transport. Sciatica still bad but easing a little . I think it is from a slipped disc as I have been already diagnosed as having degeneration of two lumbar vertebrae. We shall see.
Talked to Andy tonight and I am sending some photos which he will "process" and then dsend back to me. So I will continue with my long winded story. .....
I was talking about the dodgy "George" in my last thread but it was'nt really that dodgy. It worked quite well but I always thought that it was the cause of many casualties. A lot of our trips were of very long duration , Berlin was from seven and a half hours or even more than eight. You could count on five hours as being the shortest (The Ruhr). Munich and Nurenburg between eight and a half to the infamous one of well over nine when we lost 94 Aircraft with headwinds so strong.
So continuous "weaving" for 90% of these trips was a very hard and tiring task as the Halifax was not power assisted on the controls and was a very heavy aircraft to fly manually ,let alone "Corkscrew", Remember there was no second pilot to give you a respite.
Nevertheless, from the beginning , I resisted the temptation to engage George and even Corkscrewed all the time over enemy territory which was virtually 90% of the trip. The Corkscrew was a prescribed manoeuvre of diving and turning, losing up to two thousand feet and turning 25 to 30degrees right or left as you preferred then climbing and turning again then repeating the procedure trying not to maintain a pattern .. Not easy for the crew and especially for the Navigator but I am sure that it did a lot to get us through the ever present menace of the German ME110 armed with fixed angle upward firing guns who would position themselves unseen under the blind spot of an unsuspecting four engined bomber and let blast their "NachtMusak" as they called this procedure. This invariably got the central fuel tank and the resulting explosion could be seen for many miles away and invariably caused panic.
The Ops mounted up. We were operating every two or three nights and we had many close shaves. On October 8th.1943 we were briefed to attack Hanover. Taken all round this was one of the most dangerous and yet successful trips that we did because from the time that we crossed the Dutch coast, on the way in until we recrossed it again , going out we were constantly harried and followed by fighters, searchlights and flak. We saw many combats and many aircraft going down in flames. There was a "spoof" attack going on at Bremen and, as we passed south of it we could see Stirlings were really giving it a pounding. Hanover, itself had hundreds of searchlights. We were one of the first aircraft over the target and we went over it with two other Halifaxes followed by three Me 109's spotted by Tommy Walker, our rear gunner but they made no attempt at attacking us for some reason Just after releasing our bombs over Hanover, which was already blazing fiercely, there was an almighty crash and the whole aircraft shuddered. I thought that we had been hit by flak but I managed to control the aircraft. I sent the Flight Engineer back to investigate and called out to him, as an afterthought, "Put your parachute on ". It was just as well that I did because he nearly fell through the hole caused by a large bomb from another aircraft that had gone through the roof and out through the floor just aft of the mid upper turret, leaving it's outline, still horizontal, showing that the other aircraft could not have been very far above us and yet had not been seen by the midupper gunner.
It did not seem to affect the flying of the aircraft but it did not help matters that arriving over Snaith we could not land because of fog and had to divert to Leconfield where we were the main attraction on dispersal where practically the whole station came to look at the holes. They reckoned that it would have been a 2,000lb. bomb. As a matter of interest the trip time was 6:05 hours, all night flying.
Without wishing to be called a "Lineshooter" anyone who was in on these raids ,which were the result of Bomber Harris trying to make our raids as concentrated as possible in order to cut down on the losses caused by the previous system of crossing the target in ones and twos over along periods, will tell you that it was quite commonplace to get back to base and find sticks and even boxes of incendiaries, stuck in the wings of one's aircraft. Collisions, of course, were commonplace and it was quite normal for you to suddenly find yourself battling to control the aircraft to counter the effects of another aircraft's slipstream. As an example of the concentration I remember, vividly a raid over Dusseldorf when 640 four engined aircraft bombed the city in just twenty minutes That would have been in November 1943. That was one of the shorter trips and is in my log book as 5:35 mins.
On September 6th. 1943 over Munich, a burst of flak under the tail put the aircraft into an inverted dive. It was the most horrible feeling looking up over my head and seeing Munich, blazing, and coming down towards us. Many thousands of feet later after wrestling with the controls and all my instruments useless I managed to roll it out and regain control but the inverted "G" force in the pull out nearly forced the rear gunner out of his turret. We got back safely after a long,long haul of 9:35 hrs . We were very tired because we had also been busy the night before ,Sept.5th.1943, on a very long trip to Mannheim. This time we had a very uneventful run to the target which wqs already blazing when we got there and could be seen from a hundred miles away. But... we dropped our bombs and were leaving the target when there was a burst of fire that rattled through the aircraft and I dived away,very steeply, towards the burst which came from the portside. We clearly saw a ME110 and could also see that it was being hit by the return fire of our rear Gunner, Tommy Walker. We had the satisfaction of seeing it go all the way down and crash. |The mid upper gunner was slightly wounded by the initial burst of fire. He was very lucky because he had, like a lot of the gunners were wont to do, taken out the armour plating that was placed just before his face in order to have better visibility, and I had noticed this in my preflight and told him to replace it. The German's first burst of fire had hit squarely on the plating and Roy, the Canadian mid upper, had received a splinter in his shoulder but it was a very slight wound. That was 8:10 hrs. all night flying .
I must have been given some sympathetic leave after that one because I see that my next trip was October 3rd 1943.
I think that my sciatica is telling me "enough, enough". I hope that I have succeeded in giving a small idea of what it was like. Don't forget, if you knew, but we were all non commissioned and Snaith was not a "peacetime station" so we got back to a single pot bellied stove heated Nissen Hut accomodating up to twenty four people, with straw "biscuits" for mattresses and greatcoats for extra warmth over the issue blankets.
The "esprit de corps" was magnificent but, do not kid yourselves ,quarrels among crews were rare but between crews were fairly common but never went very far and were usually settled around the local bar over the watery beer that was wartime Britain.