Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next

All the crews put on their ‘Mae West’ life-jackets, with parachute harnesses going over the top of them, and carried their flying helmets or hung them around their necks by the oxygen tubes and intercom cords. They then boarded the crew bus, which lumbered round the perimeter of the airfield, dropping each crew by their regular aircraft. They all looked bulky in their Mae Wests, and the gunners, in their heated flying suits, seemed even larger.

After an external inspection and a word with the ground crew, the pilot signed the Form 700 – the aircraft’s Engineering Record Book. One officer recalled the sense of isolation as he waited for take-off on an op one December night, standing around ‘warming ourselves at the ground crew’s fire, which was burning outside the little shack. It was pretty cold. Things were quiet. No sensation of being surrounded by an air armada waiting to take off. Just a small party in a corner of a big, windy field.’

Before boarding the aircraft, the crews went through their pre-flight rituals, some peeing on the tail wheel, others clutching a battered soft toy or wearing a ‘lucky’ hat, then they clambered up the ladder and through the narrow hatchway by the rear wheel, dragging their flight bags and parachute packs with them. For such a large aircraft, the interior was remarkably cramped – six men jammed into a space no bigger than the interior of a small van, with the seventh in lonely isolation in his turret at the tail – but then, the design priority had been room to house the bomb-load, not the crew. Even relatively short men had to stoop, and in their bulky kit it was a struggle to move along the narrow passageway and over the main spar of the aircraft; for a tall man like bomb-aimer John Bell it was a constant trial by ordeal, banging his head, scraping his knees and catching his clothing on protruding metal.

Take-off for the attack on the Gnome-Rhône engine factory was at nine that cold February night, and the twelve crews held off, circling at a distance from the target, while Cheshire and Mick Martin carried out the target marking. The factory employed 2,000 French civilians, mostly women, and because of the risk to them and the damaging propaganda that would ensue if large numbers were killed in a raid, it had actually been struck off Bomber Command’s list of potential targets. Two constraints had therefore been imposed on 617 Squadron: no French civilians were to be killed and, to ensure that and to maximise the damage to the factory, all bombs had to fall within the target area. One of the Lancasters was adapted so that a cine-film could be made of the raid, in the hope of providing evidence to contradict any German propaganda claims, and to generate British propaganda if the raid proved successful.

As a result of those constraints, Cheshire first made three low-level runs across the factory to give the workers inside – ‘mostly French girls’

– warning that bombs would soon be falling on it. It was a difficult, twisting approach down a narrow valley, swerving around two tall water towers and a factory chimney, but Cheshire and Martin then placed their yellow incendiaries squarely in the middle of the factory, their accuracy helped by the fact that the lights in the factory were blazing, with the blackout both there and in the town itself ‘very poor’. As the factory lights were extinguished, Cheshire called in the remainder of the squadron to bomb the burning markers. ‘I couldn’t really see the target itself most of the time,’ Johnny Johnson said. ‘You bombed the different coloured flares that Cheshire had dropped. So he would go in, drop the flare on the target, then radio to instruct us to bomb a certain coloured flare.’

The fires of the flickering markers lit up the surrounding factory buildings and cast an eerie glow across the site.

The new low-level marking technique proved devastatingly effective. All but one bomb landed inside the factory compound, and so tight was the bombing that the blast from one 12,000-pounder almost extinguished the fires started by Cheshire’s incendiaries. The factory was virtually wiped off the map. ‘We flattened the target but saved the civilians,’ Johnson says. ‘That gave us a real sense of accomplishment. Cheshire held us back until he thought they were all clear, and later he got a letter thanking him for ensuring their safety!’

In fact Johnson may be remembering a subsequent raid on a factory in Angoulême on 20 March 1944, after which they received a message from the mayor, thanking them for not killing any French people, though the mayor added that he couldn’t understand ‘why the British were firing at the street when the French were coming out and cheering us on’. But Mac Hamilton recalled, ‘As always in 617, once you dropped your bomb, you just didn’t beetle off home, you went round again and shot up flak towers and distracted the gunners while the other aircraft were coming in to bomb.’

The morning after the Limoges raid, the 617 aircrews were told the attack had been a success, and most of them realised at once that it was a defining moment. A still from the cine-film of the raid, showing Cheshire’s incendiaries landing on the factory roof, was released to the world’s press, adding fresh lustre to the growing legend of the Dambusters. ‘We sensed that this type of target marking heralded a new phase of the war for us,’ John Bell says. ‘It was good to be away from the mass bombing.’ He had had plenty of experience of area bombing.

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Even today, Bell remains tall and sharp-featured, with a high forehead and a keen, penetrating gaze, and, now entering his nineties, he still holds himself ramrod-straight. He was only sixteen years old when war was declared on 3 September 1939. During the summer he had heard his father and friends talking about the prospect of war but, Bell says, ‘it all seemed unreal. We thought that diplomats would talk our way out of the war. It couldn’t really happen, could it?’

His father had served in Egypt during the Great War but never spoke about it and, like most people then, didn’t expect the war to last long. He thought that all the men rushing to join up would soon be back looking for jobs, so he told his son he’d be better off starting a career before the competition got too intense. Bell began training as an accountant but, not wanting to be left out of the war effort, he also joined the Home Guard, ‘so I was doing a bit of parading around with a rifle and no bullets,’ he says with a smile. He was also trained in sabotage in case the feared German invasion took place.

Bell was living in Surrey and working in London, and once the ‘phoney war’ had ended with the onset of the Blitz, he had a close-up view of the impact of the war. One night as he was walking home, some bombs fell close by and he ended up sheltering under a park bench. ‘The air-raid sirens were howling, the anti-aircraft guns were firing and shrapnel from the shells was falling all around me,’ he says. ‘I think that was more dangerous than the German bombs – chunks of hot metal fizzing down around you. It was certainly scary, but there was nothing you could do about it – it was happening everywhere.’

However, seeing its effects so close at hand made him determined to play his full part in the war. ‘I’d seen the Army come back from Dunkirk in tatters,’ he says, ‘watched the Battle of Britain raging over my head, and seen the results of the bombing: the destruction, flattened buildings and smoking ruins. It made me want to be part of the fight, to hit back at the Germans who were attacking our country.’

Like all recruits to the RAF, Bell had hopes of being a pilot but they were soon dashed. At six feet four inches tall, he was ‘deemed to be too long in the leg’ to get out of a cockpit in a hurry and began training as an observer and navigator in South Africa. He knew nothing of the country other than what he had read in magazines, and ‘imagined jungles and wild animals everywhere’, he says smiling. ‘We were all wide-eyed boys going out there, very naive!’

He returned to England as a fully trained observer, but was then informed that he would be a bomb-aimer instead. Being so tall always made it awkward to get into his bomb-aimer’s position, but ‘twenty years old and skinny, I could manage to get through a lot of difficult places’. Even when he’d got himself into position, it remained an uncomfortable experience for Bell, with no room to stand upright in the compartment. Fortunately, the bomb-aimer was the only member of the crew who could see directly beneath the aircraft through the bulbous Perspex ‘goldfish bowl’ in the nose, so he had a grandstand view of the bombs going down and the flak coming up.

After completing his training, he went to an Operational Training Unit where he ‘crewed up’. Pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers and gunners were all assembled in a hangar and then told to form into crews. Bell was talking to a Canadian navigator, Harry Rhude, when a much older man, a rear gunner, joined them and said he’d found a pilot. ‘I know he’s had a crash during his training,’ he said, ‘so I think he’ll be a bloody sight more careful in future!’

The rear gunner introduced them to their pilot, Bob Knights, with the words ‘I’ve found you a navigator and a bomb-aimer.’

‘Oh good,’ Knights said. ‘All we need now is a wireless operator,’ and promptly went off to look for one. ‘It seemed pretty haphazard,’ Bell says, ‘but I don’t think there was any other way to do it. My only thought was: You are choosing the people you’ll spend the next few years with, live with, possibly die with. So who would you trust most?’

Having crewed-up, they were sent to a Heavy Conversion Unit where they flew a Lancaster for the first time. Bell liked everything about the aircraft except the long trek back to the Elsan chemical toilet at the rear of the aircraft. ‘It was a good aircraft, very robust, and never really gave us any trouble.’ The Elsan was obviously not an option for the pilots, who had to make alternative arrangements. The Australian pilot Bruce Buckham’s crew ‘very kindly kept the tops of the smoke floats we were tossing out’, so if his bladder was bursting, he’d use one of those, then open the chute they used for dropping Window, and the suction was so strong that it would go straight down the chute. ‘Unfortunately the second time I used it,’ Buckham recalled, ‘I spilled some and it went all over the bomb-aimer down below. He was not pleased. That’s where the expression comes from – though Guy Gibson introduced it – “pissed on from a great height”!’

John Bell’s crew were posted in June 1943, joining the newly formed 619 Squadron. As they arrived at their base at Woodhall Spa, Knights murmured, ‘I wonder how long we’re going to last here.’

‘I remember that to this day,’ Bell says.

It was an off-the-cuff remark, but we knew the losses that were being suffered by Bomber Command, though I was quite surprised to hear Bob referring to it. As a rule we never discussed losses, and every time we heard of them, it was always a number of aircraft, not people. I’d hear on the radio ‘Bomber Command lost thirty aircraft last night,’ but I never translated that into numbers of people at the time. Years later I did think about it, knowing that thirty aircraft meant over two hundred people had been killed. You’d see empty spaces at breakfast or beds being cleared away, but you didn’t let it affect you. We all had the same attitude: It won’t happen to me. Of course, later on, I realised that there were around fifty-five thousand men who had said the same thing, and it did happen to them.

Their aircraft’s designation letter was T, and Knights, who had recently seen the Disney film Bambi, released in 1942, christened his aircraft ‘Thumper’ and had Bambi’s rabbit friend painted on the nose. Their first op in T-Thumper on 24 July 1943 would have been memorable to them for that reason alone, but it also happened to be the launch of Operation Gomorrah – a series of mass bomber raids on Hamburg by Bomber Command and the USAAF that in the course of eight days and seven nights effectively destroyed Germany’s second city. It was also the first time that Window was dropped to give false signals to German radar, which was ‘a bit of luck for me’, Knights later said, ‘because the bombing was more or less unopposed.’

John Bell’s crew before a raid on Frankfurt

They’d flown out over the featureless darkness of the North Sea and the blacked-out landscape of Germany. The first lights John Bell saw in the far distance were the beams of searchlights piercing the night sky over Hamburg, the flashes of exploding flak shells and the glow of the drifting smoke from the shell-bursts as it was caught and illuminated in the searchlight beams. As they flew closer, he saw the first fires and burning buildings on the ground from the bombing force ahead of them, but also the mass of flak-bursts through which they would also have to pass:

Stuck in my Perspex bubble in the nose, surrounded by nothing other than flimsy plastic that offered no protection at all, I had the best view of the flak. It looked pretty threatening, and someone would always say: ‘Looks like the natives are a bit unfriendly tonight!’ The flak barrage was in full swing when we arrived and we had to fly into that – me first! It was lighting up the residual smoke, so it looked both alarming and spectacular – it may have been dangerous but you just have to get on with the job. I was apprehensive, but I don’t remember any real fear. I just thought, How are we going to get through that? Then I just concentrated on the bombing run and ignored everything around me.

He had a clear view of the bombing’s impact on the city below them. ‘I’d seen the impact of bombing close up in London, but looking down on this mass of burning buildings was my first sight of what Bomber Command could do, and it was an awesome – and awful – sight. I didn’t think about the people on the ground at that time – I did later – but back then, it was all just part of the war. When we came out the other side, I just heaved a sigh of relief and told the pilot to climb higher and get out.’

At the end of the week-long Operation Gomorrah, Hamburg had been almost completely destroyed. The hot, dry weather and the mainly wooden construction of the houses fuelled the firestorm ignited by thousands of tons of incendiaries and high-explosive bombs. Generating temperatures of 800° C and wind-speeds of 150 miles an hour, it created a ferocious vortex of fire that rose over 1,000 feet into the air and swept across the city, consuming everything in its path. The tarmac of the streets burst into flame, and spilled fuel oil ignited as it spread across the surface of the canals and harbour, making it seem as if even the water was on fire. Even air-raid shelters and deep cellars offered no protection; people sheltering in them were suffocated as the firestorm consumed the oxygen. Operation Gomorrah killed over 40,000 people and left a million more homeless.

Of all the Main Force ops that Bell flew, he retains the strongest memories of that first raid on Hamburg, though he also vividly recalls Berlin, because it was so heavily defended and they attacked it so often. The impact of one of those mass raids on Berlin in November 1943 was vividly described by a Swedish businessman who found himself trapped in the city as the bombs fell. His account gives a powerful insight into the horrific experiences of German civilians pinned under Bomber Command’s relentless onslaught:

‘The fire brigades and ARP personnel are powerless to cope with the situation. Day has been turned to night by the billowing clouds of evil-smelling smoke which fill the streets. The sky is blotted out.’ The Ministries of Propaganda and Munitions were badly damaged, the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse was wrecked, as was the gigantic Air Ministry building in Leipzigerstrasse – ‘Göring’s pride and joy’. The Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden districts were burning so ferociously that ‘firemen have given up the hopeless struggle. They have cordoned off whole blocks of buildings and simply left them to burn themselves out. Armed guards equipped with gas masks against the suffocating smoke are stationed at the cordons.’

The once beautiful, tree-lined Unter den Linden was ‘a shambles’, with almost every building on fire. ‘There was a sound of hissing as light rain fell on the flames.’ The University State Library and the Bristol Hotel – one of Berlin’s finest – were destroyed. The Adlon Hotel, requisitioned for the homeless, was still standing, but all its windows had been blown out. The Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse and the headquarters of the Berlin police were both badly damaged. There was an SS cordon round the workers’ quarters north of the Alexanderplatz to prevent workers leaving the factories and escaping to the country, and armed guards also surrounded Berlin’s zoo in the Tiergarten, while troops armed with rifles and machine guns hunted the leopards, elephants, bears, tigers and lions which had escaped after the zoo was hit by bombs. ‘Berliners, fatalistic, now believe that the RAF will return every night until Berlin is in ruins.’