Bomber Boys:
 

A tad late with this but Channel 5 are putting out a documentary at 2100 tonight called "Bomber Boys: Revealed." It will stress that only one in 20 survived a raid.

PPP

Also on Radio 4 extra tomorrow from 2.30pm onwards and then across the day there is a drama documentary starring Samuel West about a RAF Bomber Command raid on Germany in 1943. It will be broadcast in real time and includes interviews with the men and women involved on both sides.

Are you sure about that statistic Pop? Should that not have been "survived a Tour" (30 OPs)?

It starts at 20:00 in my neck of the woods.

Quote from the Radio Times:-

" ......... it took a heavy toll on air crews: in every raid, one in 20 didn't return."

Based on Len Deighton's book 'Bomber'. Heard it the first time round. Excellent.

The one in twenty figure - or 5% - was a working figure for acceptable losses. The raid losses did not necessarily represent fatalities and many successfully bailed out. Where the loss rate on a particular raid was much higher than 5% then they became very worried.

The Augsberg raid was a case in point. Other raids early in the war with Wellingtons, Blenheims or Hampdens suffered much higher losses.

The thousand bomber raids however often had much lower loss rates as the concentration of force saturated the defences.

The final overall loss of life was around 50%.

A late friend of mine flew just one mission from which he failed to return. as a sgt nav it was his one and only Op and that the raid immediately following the inundation of the Ruhr and the predicted absence of flak, searchlights etc. Int had overlooked the fact that flak batteries used generators.

Caz, that was the figure quoted in the Radio Times. And as Pontious states. there were included in that figure over 10,000 who were taken prisoner.

Speak. You are right 2000 was correct of course. I thought it informative but it lacked something...........I am not sure what.

PPP

Ah, PP, but what Caz was objecting to was the sentence you actually posted, which is:
That's a 95% fatality rate on every raid!

Ooops and ooops again. :O

Those who have read the book will know that one of the central characters, Flt Sgt Lambert DFM, withdraws himself from flying duties after the raid, and is made to suffer the indignity of being reduced to the ranks and being put on sanitary duties for his "Lack of Moral Fibre (LMF)" as combat fatigue was then known.

During 30 years of running a militaria shop I had hundreds of conversation with war veterans. Many were quiet heroes, some were obvious fantasists, but on only one occasion did I have a long conversation with a bomber pilot who had suffered the same fate as Lambert. After 40 years the experience still haunted him, and he was obviously bitter about the way he had been treated after his nerve finally cracked. In some ways I respected him more than any of the others I had met.

Great book and a great radio version - catch it if possible.

Or indeed get the CD version. It bears repeated listening.

90 ops
 

I have just finished a book called"pathfinder squadron".its the real story of a navigator on a Mosquito pathfinder squadron.He survived 90 operationd crashing on the last one.I will not say any more of the story only that he suffered a heart attack after it at the age of 22 due to stress!!Cracking good book!

I would wholeheartedly recommend buying the CD version of 'Bomber' - there are moments of great pathos particuarly when the 'fiction' is intertwined with recollections of aircrew and groundcrew - what debt we owe and they never even gave them a campaign medal.

Later comments from others mean that I stand corrected regarding the medal situation - thanks chaps.

Yes they did - it's called the Aircrew Europe Star. No-one else got a "special" medal. Once you open that can of worms you'll be getting the Fighter Command Medal, The Coastal Command medal, the submarines medal, the commandos medal and the Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all medal.

Best left as it is.

Replaced by the France and Germany Star for Ops after 6 June 1944.

Which ignores Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg et cetera!!

One of the best projects of my career, helping organise the Pathfinder 50th Anniverasry Weekend at Wyton in 1992. Absolutely amazing.

According to Wiki: '55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4% death rate)'.

RAF Bomber Command - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Only the U-boat crews had a worse loss rate (28,000 of 40,000 - 70%).

My dad flew with Bomber Command and did 29 ops in 1942/43. I asked a squadron historian who had the records if there was anything noteworthy about my father's operations. 'No', he said, 'except he survived'.

In 1942 the Air Ministry worked out the chances of someone surviving one tour or two tours.

For Heavy and Medium Bombers it was 44% one tour and 19.5% two tours.

For Torpedo Bombers it was 17.5% one tour and only 3% two tours.

I believe I have heard that the Lancaster was relatively narrow and hard to get out of in an emergency compared to the B-17 and B-24.

I noticed that the same Wikpedia which listed 55,573 killed out of 125,000 also listed 9,838 as prisoners of war a ratio of 5.6 to 1 killed vs. POW. For the U.S. Eight Air Force it shows 26,000 killed out of 350,000 and 23,000 prisoners of war for a ratio of close to 1 to 1. I am curious as to whether that difference is to the ability of escaping the aircraft flown.

Quality. Had no idea that some of our aircrew ended up in Concentration Camps.

Anyone read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Better than the film.

TN.

Bevo,

You're right, and the chances of bailing out of a Lancaster (and indeed a Halifax) were made worse through a lack of available emergency exits. The act of getting away from one's crew position, strapping on a parachute, fighting through a narrow fuselage (and clambering over the main spar) and getting out of a small door at the rear of the fuselage could not have been easy. Mix with darkness, fire and perhaps the aircraft manoeuvering out of control and one can see why the loss rate in Bomber Command was disproportionally high. Oh for a decent escape hatch located in the forward fuselage.

American bomber crews had a much higher chance of escape, certainly from a B17. As well as more built-in exits, the crew could even egress directly through the open bomb bay. Of course, the B17 had design flaws, and the lack of a front turret in the early versions was quickly exploited by the Luftwaffe whose favoured tactics employed head-on attacks. The chances of the pilots was not helped by oxygen tanks located at head-height behind their seated positions! It took a while for the Luftwaffe to correlate the numbers of Army Air Corps air gunners who ended up in their POW camps compared to the front end crew (pilots, navigator and bombadier) who were killed in the head-on attacks. Later versions of course embodied the chin turret.

And then of course there was flak, which levelled the odds irrespective of the crew position.

When reviewing the statistics...it should be remembered that take-off, landings and running out of fuel were far higher in the list of losses than enemy fire...

Ditching in the sea at night, having run out of fuel due to over range (less often) or bases with low visibilty (more often) probably cost more lives than any of the others....

Personally, great uncle had no bloody chance in a Hudson 1 with two Messers on his tail...While his uncle had all the luck (or frustration)...joing RFC in 1917 and retiring in 1937...guess that's the way life goes...for you or against you....

Was in the area yesterday, 10 Nov 11, and spent a peaceful hour or so at the RAF Memorial where many of the Bomber Boys are remembered.

http://www.pro-patria.co.uk/01.jpg

http://www.pro-patria.co.uk/02.jpg

http://www.pro-patria.co.uk/03.jpg

http://www.pro-patria.co.uk/04.jpg

While that is bad enough, I seem to recall reading somewhere that 10,000 died due to non-combat losses; ie, in training, accidents over the UK on returning from ops and such. Are those numbers part of the 55,000, or in addition to?

November 4

Thank you for posting those photos.

The first one makes one remember how young they were.

All very sad.

TTN your story about the pilot with battle stress is also one of those overlooked but true facts that should never be forgotten.

amcp

Nov 4

Lovely photos. Re training accidents, I was at the Yorkshire Air Museum the other day, and they have a poignant map showing all aircraft crashes in the county. A large number of them were bomber training sorties.

Non-combat losses in training etc were 8,305 and are included in the 55,000 total.

Quote: Yes they did - it's called the Aircrew Europe Star. No-one else got a "special" medal. Once you open that can of worms you'll be getting the Fighter Command Medal, The Coastal Command medal, the submarines medal, the commandos medal and the Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all medal.

My understanding is that Aircrew Europe included ANY aircrew flying on ops. over hostile soil. This would of course include:

Fighter Command, Coastal Command and the FAA at least.

So, no medal for the Bomber boys as such.

The Lancaster had an escape hatch in the forward fuselage. It was right by the bomb aimer's feet. There was a pull ring on a spigot on the left side. I was very nervous that it would open when it shouldn't.

Or Fighter, or maritime, or merchant marine etc etc, only theatre medals.

Now no one, as far as I know, has campaigned for the proper award of the Burma and Pacific Star. Similarly no one has campaigned for a medal for the mercantile marine in the years immediately after the war when there was a significant risk from uncharted mine fields or drifting mines. Life rafts were not removed until around 1948-49.

PN,

You're quite correct about the escape hatch located under the Bomb Aimer's position. However, I understand it was relatively small, especially for a crew member togged up with flying gear, mae west and parachute. It was also still a struggle for the Nav and Wireless Operator to get right the nose of the aircraft as I understand their crew positions were located in a relatively central position of the fuselage, compared to the Halifax.

To put things into context, the stats for shot down bombers record that the number of men surviving a Lancaster crew averaged 1.3. The number from a Halifax, again assuming a 7 man crew, was 2.45. One reason for the higher number of Halifax crew survival rates may have been the Nav and Wireless Operator were located in the forward fuselage, under and ahead of the cockpit, and much closer to the forward escape hatch.

But whichever way you look at it, I can not imagine the horror of being in that situation, and I think night must have only have made the chances of survival even more slim.

Ref casualties in training. A couple of years ago I was given a copy of the F540 for 9 Servicing Flying Training School, RAF Hullavington for September 1941

Ladies and gentleman - we are privileged to have among this fraternity a former wartime 61 Sqn Lancaster crewman - Hugh Spencer. Perhaps we should, humbly, ask him how he had planned to afford a bit of distance between himself and a Lancaster. Are you there, Hugh, sir?

langleybaston & PN - that was my point, really. All aircrew flying on operations over Europe received the Aircrew Europe Star (or the France & Germany Star after D-Day as Exascoteer correctly pointed out). A myth seems to have arisen, however, that Bomber Command were somehow uniquely snubbed in not getting some medal which everyone else got - this is probably tied up up with the shabby treatment meted out to Bomber Harris post 1945. As PN says, all the WW2 campaign stars were theatre awards, there were no special cases, unless I suppose you include the 'Battle of Britain' clasp on the 1939-45 Star ribbon. Of course some would argue for a special medal for Bomber Command, but as I said initially, that would pave the way for plenty of other 'special cases'.

Fair point, tankertrash. What was the opinion among the post-war 'heavy' crews, such as your own distinguished squadron when you were flying? Or is this all a latter-day, 'benefit of hindsight' push for a specific medal?

It was also a factor of the number of emergency exits, US aircraft being rather better served than ours.

Thanks for that.

Interesting programme. :ok:

One question however,and one I have never really been able to ascertain a definitive answer to.

How long, both in theory and in practice, would it have taken for a crew to complete a tour ?.

When I was a Gnat stude, occasionally the chief MPBW / DOE bloke would turn up for a few quiet drinks in the OM. Any loud mouthed aspirant FJ stude who pontificated about 'the old blunty at the end of the bar' was soon put right - the old boy had been a Halifax pilot in the Second World War and had been blown out of his aircraft over a German city. He was one of the lucky ones; whilst 'in the bag' he had been treated fairly and properly. After the war he'd made friends with several of the inhabitants and would often pop over to stay with them.

Although once his wife remarked upon the spacious roads and well laid-out nature of the city to her hosts....:rolleyes: Whereupon the German replied "Ach Ja! But, you see, your husband was one of our chief town planners!".