Authors: Patrick Bishop
‘Already he was rolling over into a steep dive to cut off the Messerschmitts, which were sliding directly over the Tempests on the port side,’ wrote Beamont’s biographer.
‘He glanced quickly over his shoulder for the reassuring, companionable sight of the rest of 3 Squadron slanting down the sky with him. The sun was right behind. It was the perfect
“bounce”.’
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Eight hundred yards behind and still overtaking, he switched on the illuminated gunsight and the camera gun. ‘Black crosses were growing plainly visible on the target. How long can this
last? he wondered. How unsuspecting can they be! He selected his target . . . he had to get this Hun.’
At last the Germans realized the peril they were in. ‘Black smoke spurts from their exhaust as they ram open wide their throttles, and reverse violently across the path of the Tempests in
a scurry for the cloud tops.’ It was too late. ‘Beamont rudders his gunsight on to the last aircraft in the formation. Bead slightly above the cockpit. Halfway along the wing for
fifteen-degree angle deflection. Now! His thumb tightens and the Tempest shudders with the recoil of the cannon. Hell! He’ll never forgive himself. He has missed.’ But in his
desperation to get away, the 109 pilot twisted back under Beamont’s guns. ‘This time there is no mistake. The range is less than two hundred yards . . . dusty puffs of shell bursts rise
from the 109’s tail, fuselage and cockpit, and the sight of them stokes a concentrated desire, an overwhelming compulsion to destroy. The climax of the hunt is hot in his blood.’
Then Beamont’s windscreen filled with smoke and he pulled up sharply to avoid collision. He rolled the Tempest over and looked down to see the Messerschmitt ‘still on the same
heading, but with yellow flames streaming from the cockpit to the tail. For a few seconds he watches, fascinated. Slowly the port wing crumples and folds back, and the 109 drops vertically,
trailing thick oily smoke, jet black against the whiteness of the cloud.’ A few seconds later Beamont was hit himself, but managed to return to base in one piece. A few months later he was
shot down and taken prisoner, proof that the Luftwaffe, although utterly dominated,
showed the same manic doggedness as their comrades on the ground.
In the main, however, in the Normandy campaign, the fighter pilots would wreak havoc with abandon. Beamont may not have written the purple words above, but the prose is authorized and it
reflects the joy Allied airmen felt at leading the charge to what now seemed inevitable victory. Lightnings, Mustangs, Tempests, Typhoons, Thunderbolts and Spitfires roamed the skies, arriving at
any time, and literally out of the blue, to bomb and blast, generating a fog of dread that hung over every German soldier, so that no one paused for a smoke or to empty their bowels without having
one ear cocked for the menacing note of a Packard or Napier or Merlin engine and an eye trained for the rapidly growing speck in the sky.
The mayhem they caused is recorded in the cine-gun film. Even in grainy black and white you can sense the surge of rockets as they power away from under the wings of the Typhoons, either singly
or in devastating salvos, trailing ribbons of white smoke as they race towards earth to explode in the targets hidden in the fields, orchards, lanes and hedgerows of bucolic, summer Normandy.
No one was safe, not even the German commander Erwin Rommel. At 6 p.m. on 17 July, after a day-long tour of the Front, he was heading for the Army Group B headquarters. Allied aircraft had just
been busy and the road was piled up with wrecked vehicles. His driver turned off on a side road but, according to his aide Captain Helmuth Lang, as they approached Livarot, ‘suddenly Sergeant
Holke our spotter,
warned us that two aircraft were flying along the road in our direction. The driver, Daniel, was told to put on speed and turn off on a little side road to
the right, about a hundred yards ahead of us, which would give us some shelter. Before we could reach it, the enemy aircraft, flying at great speed only a few feet above the road, came up to within
500 yards of us and the first one opened fire.
‘Marshal Rommel was looking back at this moment. The left-hand side of the car was hit by the first burst. A cannon shell shattered Daniel’s left shoulder and left arm. Marshal
Rommel was wounded in the face by broken glass and received a blow on the left temple and cheekbone, which caused a triple fracture of the skull and made him lose consciousness immediately.’
The driver lost control and the car hit a tree stump and turned over. The unconscious Rommel was thrown out. As he lay ‘stretched out in the road’ about twenty yards from the car, a
‘second aircraft flew over and tried to drop bombs on those who were lying on the ground’.
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Rommel survived, only to be made to
commit suicide in October 1944 for his connection with the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler. Such was the plethora of Allied air activity in the area that three pilots from three separate
squadrons were later to claim the credit for having dished the Desert Fox.
Bomber Command threw its thunderbolts into the cosmic chaos. Its size, power and efficiency now made its gallant but puny efforts at the start of the conflict a distant memory. On the night of
8–9 June, 617 Squadron went to work with a new weapon. It was the 12,000 lb ‘Tallboy’ bomb, another product
of the mind of the inventor Barnes Wallis. The
Tallboy was made of strong, light molybdenum steel, twenty-one-feet long, tapering to a point that was as sharp as a pencil and fitted comfortably into the bomb bay of a Lancaster. Wallis had given
his bomb a perfect aerodynamic shape and arranged the fins so that they would impart an increasingly rapid spin. As Tallboy passed through the speed of sound it attained a velocity that drove it a
hundred feet into the earth. Wallis had established that shock waves rippled more powerfully through earth and water than they do through air. Thus, the bomb did not have to score a direct hit to
destroy a target.
The objective that night was the main railway line running from the south-west – where German units were held in reserve, including the soon-to-be-notorious Das Reich division – and
Normandy. The aim was to bring down a bridge and collapse a long tunnel in the area of Saumur on the Loire to block the flow of reinforcements. Four Lancasters from 83 Squadron were to drop flares
and deal with the bridge. The tunnel was reserved for 617. The target was marked by Leonard Cheshire, Dave Shannon, an Australian veteran of the Dams Raid, and Gerry Fawke in Mosquitoes. Nineteen
Tallboys were dropped, collapsing not just the tunnel but the whole hillside above it.
Four days later Hitler ordered the first of his ‘revenge weapons’, the V-1 flying bombs or ‘doodlebugs’, to be despatched to fall randomly on London and the South East.
It was a measure of desperation. The assault was unexpected and had a particularly demoralizing effect on a population who were starting to believe the war was nearly over. Great effort went
into dealing with the V-1. For the next two months, half of Bomber Command’s operations went into trying to neutralize the rocket launching sites, until the Allied
ground advance eventually swept over them. The sites were well-hidden, buried under thick layers of concrete and heavily protected, and about 3,000 Allied airmen would die in the campaign to
destroy them.
In that time the Germans managed to fire 2,579 V-1s at England, half of which fell in the London area. Fighter squadrons were on guard over the approaches to London and managed to shoot down a
total of 1,771. The Tempests proved to be particularly adept executioners, accounting for 638.
In the great effort to break out of the landing zone, air power could change the course of a major battle. On 7 August 1944 the German counter-attack at Mortain in the Falaise pocket was stopped
by Typhoons dropping bombs, and, above all, firing rockets which delivered the same punch, it was said, as a broadside from a destroyer.
The Luftwaffe was incapable of mounting a serious challenge to Allied air supremacy, but it could never be completely written off. On 16 December the German army launched its last desperate
counter-offensive in the Ardennes. Operation Bodenplatte had been intended to provide limited air superiority to cover the thrust, but it was repeatedly delayed by bad weather. It was not launched
until New Year’s Day 1945, when, having somehow scraped together more than 750 fighters and enough fuel to keep them airborne, the Germans mounted a surprise attack. To the astonishment of
the Allies, waves
of aircraft arrived over seventeen airfields in the Lowlands, destroying 150 aircraft and killing forty-six, most of them ground crew members. It was an
impressive act of defiance, but made no difference. German losses were heavy and unsustainable. About 270 German aeroplanes were destroyed. Adolf Galland, the fighter ace who became a Luftwaffe
general, regarded this as the pointless, last gasp of his force. ‘In this forced action we sacrificed our last substance,’ he wrote. ‘The Luftwaffe received its death blow at the
Ardennes offensive.’
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The Allies now had the air to themselves. The power they had accumulated was demonstrated by an event that would become synonymous with the indiscriminate destructiveness of the strategic air
campaign. On the morning of Monday, 13 February 1945, Roy Lodge, a twenty-one-year-old bomb aimer with 51 Squadron, and his crew were told they were on ‘ops’ that night. They got on
with routine preparations, while waiting to learn the target. That afternoon in the briefing room, Lodge recalled, ‘the CO addressed us with, “Gentlemen, your target for tonight is . .
. Dresden.”’ The news produced some groans and whistles. The target was distant, requiring a round trip of eight and a half hours. Lodge, a Cambridge undergraduate before volunteering
for Bomber Command, read later that some of those who took part experienced beforehand ‘a sense of foreboding, as though they felt some terrible act was about to be committed’. For him
and his crew, however, ‘Dresden was just another target, though a long, long way away.’
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The British – and the Americans who also took part in the operation – were acting at the request of the Soviets,
who were concerned at the build-up of German
troops in the town, threatening their advance. Operation Thunderclap would turn out to be a catastrophic success. Two waves of aircraft, more than 800 in all, dropped 2,600 tons of bombs. Roy
Lodge, in the second wave, was a hundred miles from Dresden when he saw the horizon throbbing with light. ‘As I drew closer I saw the cause of the glow,’ he wrote. ‘Ahead was the
most enormous fire. Ahead, and then below us were great patches, pools, areas of flame.’ Lodge’s crews were meant to be dropping markers, but it hardly seemed necessary. ‘We added
our own long line of flares to those already across the target. I saw white flashes of bomb explosions and more sparkling incendiaries. As we completed our run across the target and turned away on
our homeward journey, I could see the pools of flame were joining up in one huge inferno.’
The firestorm Lodge witnessed consumed about 25,000 people. Coming so close to the end of the conflict, the vast toll of mostly innocent lives sparked unease, then embarrassment, then guilt.
Churchill was soon seeking to distance himself from the massacre, noting in a memo to Portal and the Chiefs of Staff Committee at the end of March that ‘the destruction of Dresden remains a
serious query against the conduct of the Allied bombing’. It was the start of a process that was to make the strategic bombing campaign an awkward subject in the post-war years, and
historians overlooked the vast contribution made by Bomber Command to the Allied victory and the liberation of Europe. For decades it meant that the honour
and respect due to
the 55,000 young men who died in its operations were withheld. Even today it is rarely admitted that it was the scale of destruction suffered by Germany – largely wrought by the bombers
– that brought about the Germans’ conversion to the path of peace and democracy.
Dresden cast a tragic shadow over the RAF’s extraordinary achievement. At the start of the war only Fighter Command could be said to be in a condition to face the tasks ahead. By the end
of the conflict all branches were operating with superb efficiency, laying waste an evil enemy and protecting the innocent over land and sea. By VE Day the RAF had more than 9,000 aircraft on
charge, and more than a million men and women in its ranks, from all across the British dominions. The contribution of the ground crews, ‘the forgotten ones’ as Philip Joubert called
them in his book commemorating their deeds, was vital. In the words of John Terraine, a great historian of the RAF, many would ‘rather die than admit to any pride in their part in what they
would like to present as a most almighty “eff-up” from beginning to end’.
As for those who flew, ‘in those young men we may discern the many faces of courage, the constitution of heroes; in lonely cockpits at dizzy altitudes, quartering the treacherous and
limitless sea, searching the desert’s hostile glare, brushing the peaks of high mountains, in the ferocity of low-level attack, or the long, tense haul of a bombing mission, in fog, in deadly
cold, in storm, on fire, in a prison camp . . . in a skin-grafting hospital.’
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It is hard to disagree with his judgement that in
Britain’s great battle for the freedom of the world, it was the
RAF that held the traditional place of honour in the order of battle on the Right of the Line.
With Germany’s collapse Bomber Command turned from taking life to giving it. From April onwards, Lancasters and Mosquitoes flew nearly 3,000 missions on Operation Manna, delivering 7,000
tons of food to the starving population of Western Holland. This was followed by Operation Exodus to airlift the 75,000 British servicemen in German prisoner-of-war camps.
Then began the same great dismantling that had followed the end of the last conflict. In their hundreds of thousands the non-professionals who made up the vast majority of the air forces handed
in their uniforms, received back a demob overcoat, sports coat, flannels and pair of shoes and stepped out into the real world. It was a battered and shabby world and not particularly welcoming.
But it was what they wanted and what they had fought to save.