The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany. John Nichol

had not been promising. Someone had painted 84 yellow bombs beneath the pilot’s position on the port side to mark each completed trip, and the rest of the ageing veteran’s outer skin was crisscrossed with patches covering the plethora of holes, gouges and scrapes from the flak. Inside it was dirty, scruffy, unkempt and unloved. She had been inherited from 103 Squadron, who shared Elsham, because no one wanted her.

      As a member of the ground crew first showed them around, he announced with a grin that because they were a new crew no one expected them to last long, so there was little point in wasting a new aircraft on them. No one laughed. Ken had bristled. ‘We’ll show you what a new crew can do,’ he said.

      Their first couple of ops hadn’t endeared the plane to them. She was slow to climb, her auto-pilot was unreliable and she needed a longer take-off distance than any other Lancaster on the squadron. Mac called her ‘horrible, ancient’, and Ken was so fed up that he complained to their Commanding Officer. The response was similar to the line they got from the ground crew, minus the humour: ‘A sprog crew doesn’t expect to get a new Lancaster. You’ll be lucky to last five trips.’

      Against the run of the dice they had survived the ill-fated raid on Leipzig; they overshot the target because of the winds and flew back with bombers being shot out of the sky all around them. At that point it occurred to them that, for all its discomforts, this old girl knew how to get back from an op, and from that moment they started to love their creaking but reliable Lancaster. They lived with the constant awareness that an aircraft could be their coffin, but they knew a good one could be their saviour.

      While the night veiled many of her flaws, G-George always looked older and more frayed in the cold light of dawn, and this morning was no exception. She looked like a blown rose next to the sleeker machines alongside at dispersal. They climbed aboard via a small ladder to an entry hatch forward of the tail. Prior to an op they had to squeeze along the fuselage, trying to avoid banging their heads on the roof, their flying suits and kit snagging and banging on the sides of the cold metal frame. It was less of an obstacle course on a drill, but they missed the warm gear. The smell of fuel hung heavy in the air, together with the mustiness that attested to the bomber’s age, and at times like this they still envied crews who had been treated to one fresh off the production line, its cockpit pristine, without the slightest hint of a scratch on the Perspex or the dials, a complete absence of oily smears or dust, and the delicious, leathery scent of factory goodness in the air.

      They took up their positions for the drill. Bert Winn, the rear gunner, turned left, the only man on board to do so. He crawled through the tail on hands and knees and slid his legs through the doors to his cramped Frazer Nash turret. Once in, that was it: facing away from the direction of travel, he would barely move for the rest of the flight, his gloved fingers gripping the twin triggers of his four Browning machine-guns.

      The rest of the crew made their way through the fuselage. Eric Page, the mid-upper gunner, took his station just forward of the main entrance. His ceiling turret was armed with two Browning machine-guns. When he and Bert swung into action the staccato rattle of their weapons could be heard throughout the aircraft, and the lingering smell of cordite would mingle with the Lancaster’s perpetual cocktail of hot oil, glycol and sweat.

      Roland Luffman took his position at the wireless operator’s desk on the port side of the cabin, forward of the wing. Next to the inner engine, it was the warmest part of the plane, and so where the crews often kept their ‘pee can’. On one raid, Rusty Waughman, of 101 Squadron, remembers a bomber below them exploding, ‘which rolled us a half roll over’. As he fought to regain control of the plane, Taffy, his wireless operator, started to scream ‘Blood! Blood!’ over the intercom. He thought he had been hit. In fact the pee can had been turned over during their dive and emptied on his head.

      Sam Harris eased himself behind the navigator’s table, hidden behind a curtain on the starboard side, just behind Ken and flight engineer ‘Mac’ Mackenzie, and lit by an Anglepoise lamp. Chalky White, the bomb aimer, slid down the steps into the nose and lay flat on the ice-cold floor. Things would get a damn sight hotter for him when the flak crackled around him and the aircraft lurched and veered its way on the final run in to the target.

      Once at their posts, they went through the usual drills. After cries of ‘Prepare to abandon aircraft’, then ‘Abandon aircraft! Abandon aircraft!’ they threw open the escape hatches and slithered over the wings to practise a ditching at sea. Nothing could mimic the real challenges of trying to escape a bomber in a vertiginous spin, pinned to the sides or the roof by massive g-forces, unsure which way was up and which way was down. But it was something – certainly better than surrendering their fate entirely to chance – and it might buy them the precious seconds that could separate life from death.

      They paused for a smoke and a chat, ran through a final crash landing drill, and headed back to the mess for those newspapers. After lunch there were no rides into town because there was no definitive word on whether there would be an op that night. No word meant staying on camp, idling away time, catching a nap, playing cards, stealing some coke for the stove or writing a letter home.

      Then the base Tannoy sprang to life.

      ‘All crews to report to their squadrons.’

      The poor weather had seen three successive operations cancelled, which meant that Rusty Waughman and his crew had just enjoyed their third good night’s sleep in succession – all except their rear gunner, Harry ‘Tiger’ Nunn. The previous night’s op had been scratched just prior to take-off, and by then Harry had taken a ‘wakey-wakey’ pill, the methamphetamine cocktail intended to make sure he would be alert for the whole flight. As his mates got their heads down, he had spent the whole night pacing the floor of their hut, talking to himself, too manic to even lie on his bed.

      Rusty Waughman, the 20-year-old son of a Durham colliery worker, had worked hard to become a pilot. Like Cyril Barton, he had been a sickly child. He had suffered bouts of diphtheria and tuberculosis and had a heart murmur, and his mother, a Royal Red Cross-winning matron at a military hospital during the First World War, constantly had to nurse him back to health. He missed out on many things as a result, football and swimming amongst them, so he always felt an outsider – and when he was old enough to join up he seized his chance to be part of something rather than feel left out once again.

      Like the Bartons, his parents worried about him constantly, but when he told them about his plans to follow his father into the Navy they weren’t unduly concerned, confident that his childhood illnesses would render him unfit to serve. When Rusty filled in the medical form at the recruiting centre, he omitted to mention his tuberculosis but included everything else. Then, on the spur of the moment, he decided to try his luck with the RAF instead. Their medical examination was less stringent and he was accepted immediately.