Members of 617 Squadron also relieved the boredom of noflying days with games and pranks that showcased their endless – if pointless – ingenuity. One much-prized skill was the ability to put a postage stamp, sticky side up, on top of a two-shilling piece and then flip the coin so that the stamp finished up stuck to the ceiling. Those with a good sense of balance could attempt to do a hand-stand, balance on their head, and in that position drink a pint of beer without spilling a drop. A trick with an even higher tariff required them to stand upright with a full pint on their forehead, slowly recline until they were flat on the floor and then get back to their feet, once more without spilling a drop of beer.
Team games included Mess Rugby, played with a stuffed forage cap for a ball and armchairs as additional opponents to be avoided while sprinting across the Mess. There was also the ascent of ‘Mount Everest’, which involved piling chairs one on top of each other with ‘the odd bod perched in them’. The ‘mountaineer’ would then climb the heap bare-footed and clutching a plateful of green jelly. When he reached the top of the stack, he placed his bare feet one at a time firmly in the jelly, and then, holding himself upside down, left the imprints of his bare feet on the ceiling. Once the stack of chairs had been removed, newcomers were left to ponder how on earth someone had managed to walk across the ceiling 15 feet above the floor.
Such mountaineering exploits did not always end well. One Canadian pilot on another squadron, Tommy Thompson, covered his bare foot with black ink, but, having successfully made his footprint on the ceiling, lost his balance, fell and broke his leg. He ‘played the role of wounded hero quite well’ in the Boston and Lincoln pubs, and never told those who bought him a drink why he was on crutches.
The Boston pubs were always packed with aircrew from the surrounding RAF bases, and for those without cars, the scramble to get aboard the last buses that all left from the Market Place at 10.15 every night was, said one airman, ‘a sight which had to be seen to be believed’. Most of them just drank beer, and it was ‘rather innocuous’ because, by government decree, beer was no more than 2 per cent alcohol – less than half pre-war strength – and, says Larry Curtis, ‘you had to drink an awful lot of it before you got merry.’ There were regular sessions in the Mess, but the aircrew also ‘really needed a place away from the station where we could go to forget about the war for a while; we had a lot to be grateful for in the English pub,’ Curtis says.20
While the officers were enjoying a life of relative luxury at the Petwood Hotel, the NCOs found they had been allocated some rather less salubrious accommodation: a row of Nissen huts and wooden huts erected just outside the airfield’s perimeter fence at the side of the B1192 road. Roofed with corrugated iron, they were bone-chillingly cold in winter. One of the NCOs recalled, ‘One of the things we had to be careful about, living in Nissen huts in England in the winter, was that if you put your hand against the wall or the roof, it stuck there [because it froze to the metal]. I’ve seen a few hands with palms left behind.’21 There was one other peril for crewmen living in the Nissen huts: the trees around them were home to a colony of woodpeckers that drove them mad and disturbed their sleep after night ops with their endless, dawn-to-dusk drilling into the trees with their beaks.
Amidst the camaraderie, the dangers and the tedium of RAF life, the war ground on, and as the Christmas festivities of 1943 faded from their memories, the men of 617 Squadron began to wonder just how long the fight would last.
A raid by 617 Squadron on a V-1 site in the Pas de Calais on 22 January 1944 – the same day that the Battle of Anzio was launched in Italy – marked another decisive moment in the evolution of the squadron. Leonard Cheshire tried to mark the target from 7,000 feet, but his bomb-aimer, Keith ‘Aspro’ Astbury – a flamboyant and spectacularly foul-mouthed Australian who was one of the most cherished characters on the squadron – was unsighted by flares bursting ahead of them at the crucial moment and the markers overshot the target.
Mick Martin had previously told Cheshire that he could ‘hit a target as small as a clump of seaweed by using his Lancaster as a dive bomber without using the bombsight’. According to another veteran of 617, Cheshire had rubbished the idea at the time, but Martin now set out to prove it. Disobeying his orders, instead of dropping his spot-fire markers from height, he dived down and placed them with precision from 400 feet instead.1 Subsequent reconnaissance photography showed substantial damage to the site, and the unusually accurate Main Force bombing seemed to justify Martin’s claims about the effectiveness of low-level marking.
With the successes they were now achieving, 617 Squadron was no longer being seen as ‘the suicide squadron’. They were hitting more targets, losing fewer aircraft, and having considerably more effect than much of Main Force. While the bulk of Bomber Command continued with the policy of laying waste to whole cities, 617 was specialising in the precision bombing of individual targets, a task requiring new techniques and new equipment to produce the spectacularly accurate navigation and weapon aiming that would be required.
The first opportunity for Cheshire himself to test the ultra-low-level target-marking technique in operational conditions came on 8 February 1944, when 617 Squadron was tasked with an attack on the Gnome-Rhône aero engine factory at Limoges in Occupied France, one of a series of ‘factory-buster’ raids the squadron made targeting crucial links in the German military production chain.
Even with all his experience, Cheshire could still learn from other pilots, and according to one crewman, ‘Micky Martin was the “Head Boy” in low level. He taught Mr Cheshire how to fly low level.’2 To his credit, Cheshire himself acknowledged his debt to Martin, describing him as ‘the greatest bomber pilot of the war’.3 That view was echoed by Martin’s crewman, Larry Curtis, who said of him, ‘Some idea of the esteem in which I hold him is that I named one of my sons after him – best pilot I ever flew with.’4
However, no one, not even Mick Martin, had quite the same degree of coolness and fearlessness over the target as Cheshire. Relying on the Lancaster’s gunners to protect their aircraft from fighters, Cheshire backed himself against the flak batteries, flying his own Lancaster in at low level – as low as 50 feet – to mark the target. He also went out of his way to minimise the risk of ‘collateral damage’ – civilian casualties – on the raids 617 made into Occupied France. However, using the lumbering Lancasters almost as dive-bombers, swooping down to mark a target and executing sharp turns and steep climbs to escape, put huge stresses on their airframes and engines, and it was a tribute to the Lancaster’s strength of construction that the aircraft flown by Martin and Cheshire did not fall apart under the strain.
The raid on Limoges was the first op with 617 for Bob Knights’ crew, and his bomb-aimer, John Bell, felt:
a frisson of excitement and a real sense of anticipation. This was what I really wanted to be doing: attacking individual installations. It was a crew job to get us all to the right target at the right height and time, but the bomb-aimer had that final role to make the attack a success and I was certainly conscious of that sense of responsibility every time we flew an op. On our previous ops for Bomber Command there were usually hundreds of aircrew at the main briefing, but now there was only a handful – quite a change!