The Pantons’ small stone gamekeeper’s cottage in Old Bolingbroke, Lincolnshire, was less than a mile away from RAF East Kirkby, the home of two Bomber Command squadrons, so the deafening roar of 3,000 rpm Merlin engines provided the soundtrack for 13-year-old Fred Panton and his younger brother Harold’s everyday life. The boys ran down the hill with rising excitement whenever they heard them, and stood with the other onlookers on the main road adjoining the runway as the lumbering machines, fully bombed up, strained to get airborne.
The pilots and flight engineers at their side always stared straight ahead, eyes fixed on the task of getting the aircraft safely off the ground, but the mid-upper and tail-end gunners often wiggled their guns to acknowledge the crowd.
Fred and 10-year-old Harold watched and waited until the bombers had gathered above them, and would not go home until they were just grey dots in the distance. Much later, the shadows of the returning planes would flit across their bedroom wall. Sometimes they were so close that Fred could make out the eerie glow cast by the instruments in the cockpit.
When the sky was silent once more, they wondered whether their big brother would be joining that night’s raid. Nineteen-year-old Chris was a flight engineer with 433 Squadron at Skipton-on-Swale, part of a maverick crew that included a Danish-born volunteer from the USA called Chris Nielsen and several Canadians. Despite his youth, Chris was already well on his way to becoming an officer and nearing the 30 ops that signalled the end of a tour. He still had dreams of being a pilot. There had been some close calls. On one trip the hydraulics on their bomb- and fuel-laden Halifax had failed on take-off, so the undercarriage and flaps would not retract. They were struggling to gain enough height to clear an oncoming hill, so Chris pumped furiously on the manual controls. They regained enough hydraulic pressure just in time to ensure the bomber cleared the hill. All on board were stunned into silence. Except for Nielsen. ‘It’s OK,’ he said in a bored American drawl. ‘I’ve got it.’
The two boys lived for the times he came back on leave. With eight children in their cramped cottage, Fred and Chris had to share a bed. Fred was always bursting with questions as they lay there, listening to the bombers return, but Chris would only talk about his experiences to their father, a veteran of the First World War. Fred sometimes heard the rumble of their conversation, but could never make out what they were saying.
Fred and Harold joined their older brother on rabbit-hunting expeditions (Chris had trained as a gamekeeper, aiming to follow in his father’s footsteps), but what he had seen and done in the skies above Germany was never discussed then either. For a few precious moments the war seemed a lifetime away, and they didn’t want to bring it rushing back. Watching the planes come and go, wave after wave, night after night, Fred knew the dangers they faced. He and Harold often visited crash sites once the bodies of the crewmen had been removed, and just stared, transfixed, at the twisted, smoking metal carcasses.
But finally, that winter’s evening, he could contain his curiosity no more. ‘Don’t you worry about crashing?’
There was a pause. ‘Not really,’ Chris replied casually. ‘It’d just be further experience.’2
His brother’s insouciance astounded Fred. He longed to know more, but didn’t dare ask. He didn’t dare ask his father either. Their late-night chats were man’s talk, to be shared only by those who had experienced the realities of war.
Once, when Chris had been home on leave, Fred had slipped on his big brother’s RAF jacket, trying to imagine what it was like to be him. His father caught him red-handed. ‘Don’t you be going out that door with that on,’ he’d said sternly. In his dad’s eyes, Fred hadn’t earned the right.
The questions would have to wait for another time, hopefully not too far off, when Chris’s tour – and the war – were over.
Alan Payne, a bomb aimer with 630 Squadron, was part of one of the crews Fred and Harold had seen straining to take off at East Kirkby. On the early evening of 29 March, Alan was preparing to leave his parents’ home in Wendover. He gave his mother a final cheery wave before putting on his helmet and climbing on to his motorbike.
For the entire week they had not spoken once about his experiences with Bomber Command. They never asked and he never told them, and that suited him just fine. He knew the truth would only upset them and cause them to worry even more than they already did.
The rain started to pour as he saddled up. It was going to be a long ride back to East Kirkby in this weather. While he felt the usual sadness of leaving his loved ones, at least he was returning to his surrogate family. Alan and his crew, like so many others in Bomber Command, were tight. They spent all their time together, more often than not at The Red Lion in nearby Revesby. And while they sank their pints, their conversations, like those with his real family, rarely turned to war. They knew all too well that young men like them were being lost every night, in ever-increasing numbers, during the winter of 1943–44. But they kept those thoughts at bay as they laughed and joked around the bar. The prospect of death never weighed heavily on Alan. He always felt there was a gap in the sky where he and his crew would find safety
The rain hammered down and the wind howled around his ears as Alan tore up the A1. He headed straight for the Peacock Hotel in Boston, where, sopping wet, he found time for a couple of pints before catching a bus to the camp, where Pat was waiting for him. She was a young Geordie girl who served the crews’ meals in the mess, and they had been courting for a few weeks; she had joined him and his crew at the pub so often she had almost become their eighth member. They had a quick chat and then it was time to get out of his wet clothes, unpack his bag and get some sleep.3
Tomorrow was 30 March. Yet another day at the cutting edge of Bomber Command.
Rusty Waughman
On a Sunday evening in December 1940, in the middle of the Blitzkrieg, Sir Arthur Harris, then the Air Ministry’s Deputy Chief of Air Staff, stood on the roof of his Kingsway HQ. Around him, German aircraft rained incendiaries on the nation’s capital. The City was a sea of flame; only the luminous dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rose from it untouched.
He called for Air Marshal Charles Portal, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, to share the terrible sight. As the two men watched London burn, oblivious to the threat to their own safety, ‘Bomber’ Harris felt the first stirrings of vengefulness. ‘They are sowing the wind,’ he muttered.4
By March 1944, at least according to Harris, the German forces, and their civilian population, were reaping the whirlwind. He was now Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command and a fervent believer – along with Winston Churchill – in the effectiveness of area bombing. Harris believed the most efficient path to victory was to raze Germany’s biggest cities to the ground, obliterate the enemy’s capacity to equip its forces, and destroy the morale of its people.
He believed that the long-range bomber had fundamentally altered the nature of warfare. He had flown over the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendaele during his service in the Royal Flying Corps and had no time for those whose outdated views he remained convinced would lead to a reprise of the mass slaughter of the First World War.
‘If the ancient and ivory-headed warriors are permitted to have their way, another one to six million of the flower of the youth of this under-populated country, and of America, will be unnecessarily massacred in proving for the second time that these Ancient Soldiers and Mariners were wrong. It is but cold comfort to realise