Again, I have tried to see things through the eyes of the players, relying wherever possible on contemporary documents, diaries and letters and, where they are not available, memoirs and reminiscences. I was lucky enough to meet and interview many veterans during my earlier research and could draw on their memories of other parts of their service not covered in previous books. There is, I was pleased to discover, still much rich material lying undiscovered in the archives which provides new evidence and insights.
This book is about many things but a recurrent theme is the special relationship that the Air Force enjoyed with the nation at this uniquely testing time in its history. For much of the war the RAF was Britain and Britain was the RAF. The conflict arrived in the middle of a time of great transformation, when British characteristics and attitudes were undergoing profound changes.
Davis Estates advert, 1930s (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)
Among the girls who responded to ‘Just An Airman’ was Joyce Robinson of Firstway, Raynes Park, London SW20. She, too, was an Air Force fan, admiring ‘the spirit of adventure which prompts a man to join’.16 The street is half a mile from where I grew up. It was built in the 1920s by an energetic master builder called George Blay who turned much of what was then countryside into suburbia. It is a tree-lined cul-de-sac of nice, three-bedroomed terraced houses, with bay windows, timberwork on the façades and ample back gardens. They cost £675 (with 85 per cent mortgages available) and were a few minutes’ walk from Raynes Park station on the Southern Electric railway which ran straight in to Waterloo. Thousands of streets like Firstway were springing up around Britain’s cities at the same time.
The families who lived in them were members of the most overlooked and underappreciated stratum of the social layer cake – the lower-middle class. The cautious patriarchs of these ‘quadrants’, ‘crescents’, ‘drives’ and ‘walks’ left each morning for their jobs as clerks, draughtsmen, shopkeepers and minor civil servants while Mum stayed home to clean and cook. Their children raised their eyes to broader horizons. I have not managed to discover anything about Joyce Robinson but I have imagined her: playing tennis at the club round the corner in Taunton Avenue, watching Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind at the Raynes Park Rialto, taking the District Line to Hammersmith to dance at the Palais, perhaps driving with a boyfriend to a roadhouse on the Kingston by-pass.
It was this emerging Britain which provided the wartime Air Force with much of its man- and womanpower as well as enriching its identity and ethos. There were fewer men and women in Air Force blue than there were in Navy blue or khaki. The Second World War was nonetheless in many ways an RAF show. From the beginning to the end it was the spearhead of almost every action and effort. Not only did it lead the way to victory, it shaped the contours of peace.
1
The faint feeling of dread that was always there in the bad old days was absent this morning. Dawn was still several hours away and inside the chilly briefing room eighteen crews from 9 Squadron were gathered to hear their orders. They smoked and chatted, waiting for the CO to arrive to reveal the location of the target. Occasionally there was a burst of laughter. Today the hilarity sounded unforced and not just a cover for jangling nerves. The date was 25 April 1945 and Germany was in its death throes. One precious thought united the 126 men present: in twelve hours’ time their war might be over and they would never have to do this again.
If so, it seemed likely they were going out with a bang. The previous evening the CO had toured the messes advising drinkers to take it easy as ‘something special’ was in the offing.1 The word from Flights was that the fuel order was for 2,154 gallons per aircraft.2 That meant an extra-long trip. And what was the BBC doing here? Next to the platform at the front of the room a reporter and technician were fiddling with microphone and disc recorder.
The large map of Europe on the wall behind the platform offered a clue. It was the first thing the crews looked at when they trooped in. The red tape that traced their route to the target ‘started at Bardney, our base, ran down to the South Coast and across the Channel,’ remembered Flight Sergeant Fred Whitfield, who, though ‘tour expired’ after completing thirty trips as a rear gunner, had volunteered to carry on.3 ‘At that point it diverted across France on a dog leg and ended up in Southern Germany.’ Whitfield’s first thought was that it ‘looked like a daylight raid on Munich’.
The orderly officer called the crews to attention and with a scraping of chairs they got to their feet as Wing Commander Bazin walked down the aisle followed by his specialist officers, stepped onto the dais and began the briefing.
Jim Bazin, DFC and bar, seemed indestructible. Born in Imperial India, raised in a comfortable middle-class family in the North East of Britain, he served as a part-timer in an RAF auxiliary squadron for four years before the war and fought from the first day to what was now surely almost the last. By any reckoning of the odds he should have been dead several times over. Whatever terrors he had experienced had left no outward mark on him. When he spoke, it was in a cultured, amused accent, more like a university professor than a warrior.
‘Well, Gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘This is the big one.’4 He explained that at this late stage in the war they were being given a chance to land a blow on the man who had started it all. They were off to bomb Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. ‘Your particular aiming point for this attack is the house where this gentleman is supposed to live,’ he told them. ‘Whether he’s there is another matter.’ He paused for a second before going on. ‘But no doubt there will be plenty of people there to benefit from it.’5 The room rocked with laughter.
They settled down as the met, navigation and intelligence officers delivered the weather forecast and took them through the technicalities of route, plan of attack and expected opposition. When they finally filed out into the Lincolnshire night, heavy with the muddy smell of the surrounding fields, everyone was talking excitedly. They had all heard of Berchtesgaden, of course. To the older ones who remembered it from pre-war newsreels, it brought back memories of Chamberlain and Munich and national humiliation. For the younger airmen it was a name from the news bulletins, one of the three main military headquarters from which Hitler directed his forces. None of those who planned Bomber Command operations had seen fit to attack it before. Now, for reasons that no one explained in the briefing, the time had finally come.
The sky was clear and the moon, one day away from fullness, silvered the ridges of the potato fields surrounding the base. The aerodrome stood just north of the village of Bardney on the plain which stretches north from the Lincolnshire fenlands to the rising hills of the Wolds. It was one of more than a hundred bomber stations built during the early years of the war, a standard pattern of three concrete runways and three hangars, interspersed with utilitarian huts and sheds where the airmen, ground crews and WAAFs ate, washed and slept.6
There were two hours to take-off and much to be done beforehand. Operations boiled down to a succession of routines which had to be followed to the letter if you wanted to succeed and survive. But first they would eat, a meal that had long ago become a cliché: bacon and eggs and wodges of bread and margarine, washed down with American