Kitabı oxu: «Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory»

1

The Big One

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 canned orange juice and mahogany-coloured tea.

They cleared their plates and headed for the crew room to climb into multi-layered flying gear and pick up their parachutes. For those who needed it there was a detour to the latrines to empty their bowels before they all climbed into canvas-covered four-ton lorries that trundled them out to dispersal where the bombers loomed, casting long moon shadows on the tarmac. The ground crew had been there for hours, refuelling, bombing up, checking the control surfaces and undercarriage, fussing over the machine as if it was their own lives that were at stake.

Those flying were swaddled like Michelin men but it still felt cold. The metal tube of the fuselage carried its own special chill. They climbed the five rungs of the ladder, through the hatch behind the gun turret amidships, and struggled to their posts. Pilot, flight engineer, navigator, bomb aimer and wireless operator wriggled forward to the nose, clambering over the thick spar that pinned together the bomber’s 102-foot wingspan. The gunners settled into their solitary nests behind them.

Each man began to run through the litany of checks and drills, second nature now from years of training and practice. For the gunners it took a few minutes. For the pilot and flight engineer it was more like half an hour. Then the pilot shouted down to the ground crew that he was ‘ready for starting’. A mechanic jumped forward to work the Ki-Gas pump and prime the carburettor of the first engine. Someone swung a white torch to indicate which engine to fire up first. From his seat, squeezed in next to the pilot, the flight engineer flipped on booster coil and main ignition switches and opened the master fuel cock. The pilot thumbed the starter button and with an explosive thud and a volley of flame and smoke, one by one the Merlin engines burst into life, filling the rural silence with a deep-throated roar. In the farms and villages around the bomber bases the noise was now as familiar as birdsong.

More minutes passed before the dials showed every engine had reached the right temperature and pressure. It was a laborious business but there was no rushing it. The machine was what got you there and got you home. This day of all days, with the finishing line in sight, was no time to get careless.

A-Able was the first away. It was 5 a.m. and still pitch-black but the clear sky promised a fine day. The Lancaster moved off jerkily, stopping and starting as the pilot tested the flaps and brakes. It rolled onto the runway, waiting for the signal on the Aldis lamp mounted on the control van to flash from red to green. Lining the tarmac were the usual party of WAAFs and ground staff gathered to wave and smile and pray for a safe return. This morning there were others present. Standing among them were the BBC reporter and soundman who had been at the briefing. That evening the journalist’s report, delivered in a bright, modern voice, very different from the plummy tones of the pre-war Corporation, would go out on the evening news:

‘Hallo BBC. This is Brian Bliss with Bomber Command. It’s Zero Hour, the attack is on and the first Lancaster’s swinging into position at the head of the runway right opposite me now … here she comes … remember this is the squadron which sank the Tirpitz and now they’re off to Berchtesgaden with twelve thousand pounders. Twelve thousand pounders! And they’re taking the attack literally to Hitler’s doorstep!’7 Millions of listeners heard the engine note rising sharply as the revs climbed, then fading as Bliss, almost shouting now, announced that ‘A-Able is off … a marvellous sight as she races by!’

In Q-Queenie, rear gunner Fred Whitfield sat in his turret and waited with the rest of the crew for their turn. After thirty operations together they knew each other as well as they did their own families. They were ordinary men from all over Britain. The pilot, Ron Adams, came from Wembley, London, Larry Brown the flight engineer was from Leeds, bomb aimer Phil Jackson from Nottingham, navigator Jim Lynam from Scunthorpe, wireless operator Jack Faucheux from Romford and the mid-upper gunner Frank Stebbings from Tunbridge Wells. Fred Whitfield was a Geordie, born in South Shields.

Starting operations in the aftermath of D-Day, they had bombed V weapons sites, marshalling yards, bridges and U-boat pens, before resuming the assault on German cities. They had been shot up by a night fighter and only made it home thanks to the skill and determination of ‘Lucky’ Adams who, though only twenty-one, was in Whitfield’s eyes ‘the best pilot in the RAF’. The gunners gave as good as they got. Whitfield and Stebbings had several kills to their credit, and the crew’s ‘press-on’ spirit had earned them four Distinguished Flying Medals and one Distinguished Service Cross between them. It had needed courage, skill and the closest teamwork to come through these trials and their faith in each other was strong. The raid they were about to embark on seemed less hazardous than most. But everyone knew of a crew that had bought it on their last mission. While he waited Whitfield ‘closed my eyes for a couple of minutes and had a few words with my God’.8

Then Q-Queenie was shuddering with the pent-up kinetic energy of four Merlin engines as Ron Adams jammed on the brakes and opened the throttle to maximum revs. He eased off and the Lancaster bounded forward. At about 50 knots (57mph) Whitfield ‘felt the turret lift as the tail wheel left the ground. “90 knots, 100 knots, 120 knots,” said the engineer, reading the speed. The skipper eased back on the control column. Queenie was airborne. We climbed, slowly gaining height.’

Once all aircraft were at 10,000 feet they formed a loose gaggle, and set course for Cap Gris Nez near their rendezvous with the squadron with whom they would be spearheading the raid. 617 Squadron were friends and rivals and their base was only a few miles from Bardney at Woodhall Spa. The two operated together often, specializing in missions requiring great skill and accuracy, and as Brian Bliss reminded his listeners six months before had finished off Hitler’s last remaining battleship with a volley of ‘earthquake’ bombs as she lay crippled in Tromsø fjord. The exploit had added extra lustre to the reputation of 617, already famous as the Dam Busters. However, as their sister squadron liked to point out, they were relative sprogs in the bombing game, having been created only two years earlier, whereas 9 Squadron dated back to 1914 and had been in continuous action from the very start of the war.

The sister squadrons made up just a small part of a huge force bearing down on Berchtesgaden. The pre-dawn sky of eastern England was thick with aircraft heading in the same direction. Three hundred and fifty-nine bombers were being thrown into the attack. Guiding them were sixteen Mosquitoes from Path Finder Force, equipped with special navigation aids to fix the target, tucked, safely until now, in the folds of the Bavarian Alps. Only five years before, an armada of this size was a distant fantasy. Yet this was not even the biggest raid of the day. An even larger formation was heading off to the North Sea island of Wangerooge, to smash up shore batteries that menaced Allied shipping delivering supplies to the port of Bremen for the armies encircling Berlin.

The RAF of April 1945 bore little resemblance to the organization Jim Bazin had joined eleven years before. In that time it had expanded enormously, evolving from a tight, professional elite drawn mainly from the top layers of society into a vast structure, more than a million strong. It had long ceased to be an overwhelmingly British enterprise. Scattered among the squadrons today were Poles, Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians, Americans, Canadians, Frenchmen and Dutchmen, Norwegians and Danes, only some of the sixty nationalities which had found a home in the Air Force.

The spirit of amateurism that still flickered in the pre-war service had long ago been snuffed out by the demands of war and replaced by a ruthless professionalism. Five years and eight months before, 9 Squadron had taken part in the first proper British air raid of the war. On 4 September 1939, together with 149 Squadron, they flew in appalling weather across the North Sea to attack German warships lying near Brunsbüttel. They had only dead reckoning to get them there and their twin-engine Wellingtons were loaded with primitive bombs. Against great odds, most of the raiders managed to find the target area but it was covered with cloud and fiercely defended by flak and fighters. Only one crew claimed to have hit anything. Two 9 Squadron aircraft were brought down and all ten on board killed. There would be hundreds of other futile sorties before the RAF began to function efficiently as a war machine. Now the process was complete. The days of wasted effort and useless sacrifice were long gone and the British and American air forces enjoyed almost total mastery of the skies of Europe.

The shoals of Lancasters cruised on, dark and ominous in the moonlight, pausing to circle at their rendezvous point above the towns of Arras, Valenciennes and Laon near the Franco-Belgian border. Then, with 9 Squadron and 617 Squadron in the lead, they set off south and east towards the Alps and Berchtesgaden.

The crews had been given their specific targets at early morning briefings at nineteen bases spread over the bomber counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Norfolk. The lead squadrons had the most difficult task. Their objectives were, as Bazin warned his men, ‘very, very small indeed’9 and hidden in the pine-covered clefts of a tall mountain range. The first was the Eagle’s Nest, a spectacular pavilion, built for Hitler as a retreat and diplomatic reception centre on top of a rocky spur called the Kehlstein, 6,000 feet above sea level. The second was Hitler’s house, the Berghof, which sat, five miles down the mountain, on the shoulder of the humped ridge known as the Obersalzberg. The surrounding area was enclosed by fences and guard posts. Inside the security zone some of the leading figures of Hitler’s court – Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann and Albert Speer – had built villas and the rock beneath it was honeycombed with bomb shelters and storerooms. The complex also housed a communications centre from where Hitler could keep in touch with his commanders.

The chances of a direct hit on either target were slight. With the armament 9 and 617 Squadrons were carrying, however, perfect accuracy was not essential. At the start of the war the biggest weapon in the RAF’s armoury was the 500lb General Purpose bomb. It contained more metal than explosive and many of those produced were duds. Today the thirty-two aircraft of the lead squadrons were carrying 12,000lb ‘Tallboys’, aerodynamically optimized dart-like missiles devised by the engineering genius Barnes Wallis that plunged deep into the ground before exploding, creating an earthquake effect that devastated everything around.

Behind them came a stream of bombers from the Main Force, the workaday squadrons which had spent the last three years smashing Germany’s cities, causing and suffering appalling casualties. They would attack in two waves. Their main objective was the most prominent feature on the Obersalzberg, the barracks which housed the SS troops who guarded Hitler and his entourage.

Was he there or wasn’t he? It seemed unlikely, but it was left to squadron commanders to raise or lower the expectations of their men as they saw fit. Bazin had chosen to play down the possibility. Others decided it would be enjoyable to hint that Hitler might well be at home. Either way, this was an operation most were proud to be part of, something to tell the grandchildren they were beginning to allow themselves to believe they might one day have.

The Dam Busters were led by Squadron Leader John Brookes, who was also in overall charge of the operation. The honour should have gone to their CO, Wing Commander Johnny Fauquier but he had been told by his superiors that he had exceeded his permitted number of operations and would not be on the trip. The blunt-spoken Canadian did not bother to hide his annoyance when he spoke to Brookes at the briefing. ‘I’d like to have this target in my log book,’ he told him. ‘In fact I would like to have this target tattooed on my arse, but you have got to lead it.’10

The route took the bombers southwards towards Paris. There they turned again, south and east cruising at a steady 145 knots and ninety minutes later saw the snow glowing pink as the sun broke over the ramparts of the Swiss Alps.

At points along the way they were joined by more than two hundred Mustangs from RAF Fighter Command and the US Eighth Air Force. For most of the war the bombers had gone forth alone with only their on-board guns to protect them from flak and fighters. Now long-range escorts shepherded Allied bombers to and from their raids. Today there scarcely seemed a need for them.

H-Hour had been set for 9 a.m. As the bombers droned closer, the people of Berchtesgaden blithely went about their morning routines. Hitler’s presence had seemed like a blessing at first, bringing attention and excitement to the valley. The modest villa he had first rented in 1928 had been transformed over the years into something more suited to a man of destiny. The result was what one architectural historian described as ‘a combination of faux rusticity and imposing grandeur akin to a Thurn und Taxis princess decked out in a haute-couture dirndl’.11

At the heart of the house was the Great Hall. It was the size of a hangar, furnished with elephantine armchairs and hung with tapestries and paintings by Italian masters. Set into the northern wall was a picture window, thirty yards square, which, thanks to an ingenious mechanism, wound down into a recess in the floor. It was, enthused Diana Mosley, wife of the Blackshirts’ leader Oswald Mosley, ‘the largest piece of glass ever made … through it one sees this huge chain of mountains and it looks more like an enormous cinema screen than like reality …’12

Adolf Hitler, Obersalzberg (Photo by ullstein bild/ullsteinbild via Getty Images)

As well as being the closest thing that Hitler had to a home, the Berghof made useful propaganda. It was a backdrop against which he could demonstrate his more human side. He was pictured in trilby, loden jacket and flannels, feeding deer and smiling at flaxen-haired little girls. It was a place for relaxation where he breathed the mountain air and stood at the enormous window looking out at the Untersberg, where legend had it that the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa lay sleeping, awaiting the hour when he would rise again and build a German empire that would last for a thousand years.

It was also a place of business, an ideal setting in which to impress or intimidate the politicians who trooped there in the countdown to the war. Stamped in the memories of the older airmen were images of an infamous visit that had taken place six and a half years earlier. On the morning of 15 September 1938 the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arrived at Berchtesgaden to try and avert another European conflagration. Hitler was demanding that Czechoslovakia allow the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland to unite with the fatherland or face invasion. By the end of the meeting, Chamberlain was persuaded it was worth sacrificing Czechoslovakia for the sake of a shameful peace. Twelve months later the Second World War began.

Allied bombers had since wrecked every major German city killing hundreds of thousands. Berchtesgaden had been left alone and was barely touched by the war. The local economy boomed, supplying the Nazi colony which expanded as the elite moved their families and wealth out of bomb-blasted Berlin. Hitler was a frequent visitor. Between 1939 and 1944 he spent more time at the Berghof than he did in the capital, but nine months ago he had left and not been seen again.

That Wednesday morning there was one very senior Nazi in residence, however. Hermann Goering had turned up at his villa to join his family a few days before. He left Berlin on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, and had tried to persuade the Führer to go with him to Berchtesgaden. The overture had been rejected contemptuously. As he drove out of the city and Allied air raids began, Goering and his entourage ducked into a public shelter. ‘May I introduce myself,’ he declared as the bombs rained down. ‘My name is Meyer.’ It was a bitter joke. Years before he had promised that if British bombers ever struck Germany ‘you may call me Meyer’ – a very common German, and also Jewish, name. Astonishingly, the huddled crowd burst into laughter.13

His flight brought him no nearer to safety. On arrival at the villa, Goering had made an ill-judged attempt to take over leadership of the Reich, in accordance with an agreement struck with Hitler in June 1941 that he should assume the powers of the Führer should he be captured or incapacitated. The move was interpreted as an act of treachery, and that morning two senior SS officers had showed up, pistols in hand, to arrest him.

The drama was interrupted when, up and down the valley, the air raid sirens sounded. Despite interference from the mountains on the Pathfinders’ ‘Gee’ electronic navigation systems, the lead aircraft arrived almost exactly on time, just before 9 a.m. Squadron Leader Brookes of 617 squadron was to bomb first. His target was the Eagle’s Nest. It was extremely hard to spot from the bombing height of 15–16,000 feet. Neither Brookes nor his bomb aimer were able to identify anything that was worth wasting a Tallboy on. Three of the following aircraft did drop their bombs, but none scored a direct hit.

Then it was 9 Squadron’s turn. As they approached the Berghof, the flak batteries set into the valley sides were banging away, pumping up streams of accurate flak at the bombers coming in at between 14,000 and 15,000 feet. Flight Lieutenant G. J. Campbell broadcast later on the BBC that he saw a ridge flash below him as his pilot Flying Officer J. Buckley brought him ‘almost dead ahead of the house. I had a perfect run up and released my twelve-thousand pound bomb with the house dead in the sight.’14

Campbell’s Tallboy was fuzed at twenty-five seconds.15 From a Lancaster following close behind, rear gunner Flight Sergeant E. J. Cutting watched ‘a twelve thousand pounder land about a hundred yards from Hitler’s house’.16 There was ‘a terrific flash and though we were flying pretty high we could hear the explosion above the roar of our engines and the whole plane seemed to rock,’ he told radio listeners. Then ‘great piles of earth came shooting up, high into the sky. I thought to myself well, even if that’s a bit short, it must have damaged the place. But just at that moment there was another flash, followed by a huge explosion. One of the other aircraft had planted its twelve thousand pounder bang on the target.’

By now the Main Force squadrons had arrived and the sky over the valley was dangerously crowded with huge aeroplanes. Cutting’s pilot reported at the post-operation debrief that ‘interference from other aircraft was so great’ that he was unable to identify the target on the run-in and was ordered by the master bomber controlling the operation from another Lancaster not to bother making a second effort. Another pilot, Squadron Leader James Melrose, stated that ‘just as the bomb aimer was preparing to drop the bomb, the aircraft was narrowly missed by a bomb from [an] aircraft above, and the target was accordingly overshot and it was impossible to bomb’.17 Fred Whitfield’s main concern was the anti-aircraft fire. The gunners had found their range and ‘the sky was black with flak’.18 The bomb aimer, Phil Jackson, seemed unaware of the shells rocking their kite as he talked Ron Adams in. Then Q-Queenie ‘appeared to leap a thousand feet in grateful thanks for being relieved of five tons of metal’. Relief was brief. A few seconds later he heard a ‘huge bang … we went into a steep dive. The port engine was on fire.’ Then came ‘another almighty bang’ apparently caused by one of the giant bombs hitting the top of the mountain. This blast hurled Q-Queenie upwards, blowing out the flames licking around the engine in the process. Swinging his turret to port Whitfield looked back up the inside of the aircraft for damage and saw jagged holes in the fuselage but the Lancaster flew on unperturbed. As they turned away he had a grandstand view of the Main Force attack.

Their target was the SS barracks, about a hundred yards from the Berghof. From the bellies of the aircraft, 4,000lb, 1,000lb and 500lb bombs tumbled out. Some fell on a hotel next door to the Berghof used for housing visitors, others on the villa of Martin Bormann who had managed to secure a prime spot for his house right next to his master. Emmy Goering was in her bedroom when she heard the first explosion. Her first thought was for her daughter and she ‘ran to Edda’s room but the governess had already taken her to the shelter’, in the cellar of the house.19 Next, she sought her husband and found him shaving, apparently unconcerned. He told her to go to the shelter but said he would not be joining her. When she insisted on staying with him, he relented. Had he not, his story might have ended there. One bomb landed in the swimming pool a few yards from the window of his study. The blast brought down the roof of the villa and collapsed the main staircase.

The bombs fell on innocent and guilty alike. When the sirens sounded school children were ordered to return home. Ten-year-old Irmgard Hunt was hurrying back with her sister Ingrid and friends when they ‘began to hear the droning of bombers overhead’.20 They were given a lift by a passing SS driver who let them out near their house. As the car drove off the first explosions erupted. The noise of the bombs was ‘hellish’. It was followed by ‘an enormous storm-like wind that would have blown me off my feet had I not gripped the rough bark of the nearest spruce and pressed myself against it … We waited for a pause after each explosion to race to the next tree before the blast of air hit us.’

They reached home and crouched with their mother in the basement flinching from the ‘horrendous noise that engulfed us, even in the cellar’. Next day Irmgard and Ingrid walked back to school. ‘As the Obersalzberg came into view we saw the devastation. The plateau had become a chaotic brown-and-black mess of tree stumps that looked like charred matchsticks, dark craters and smoking ruins. “It’s all gone”, I said to myself.’

Half of the SS barracks was demolished. The villas of the elite were wrecked. Emmy Goering had left her jewellery in the house and was relieved when a servant found it among the wreckage. The Berghof had been gutted and the great picture window that had delighted pre-war guests was no more than a hole in the wall. The bombs had killed thirty-one in their usual indiscriminate fashion, with local civilians and foreign slave workers as well as SS troops among the casualties.

The raiders had suffered, too. Two Lancasters were brought down by flak. One crash-landed without casualties. Another, F-Freddie from 619 Squadron, provided a last story of heroism from the RAF’s war. With the machine fatally damaged, the Canadian pilot Wilf DeMarco ordered the crew to jump while he held the aircraft steady. Three got out alive. The other three went down with their skipper.

The bombers landed at their home bases between noon and two o’clock. Because of the battering it had received, Q-Queenie was excused joining the queue of aircraft circling the base and given permission to land at once. Ron Adams made a smooth touchdown and taxied to dispersal where they were met by the ground crew eager to hear their adventures and dispensing cigarettes. After eight hours without a smoke, Fred Whitfield remembered, the first puff ‘was pure nectar’.21 When, in bomber bases up and down the east of England, the crews sat down to be debriefed by station intelligence officers, the same observation was repeated over and over. During the entire eight-hour trip they had not seen a single German aeroplane.

The exploit covered the front pages of the following day’s newspapers. ‘Hitler’s Chalet Wrecked’ was the headline in The Times. The Daily Express lead announced: ‘Hitler Bombed Out – 5-tonners right on der Fuhrer’s house’, adding that ‘Berchtesgaden was the target that every bomber pilot had longed to attack for nearly six years’.

Nobody asked why it had never been hit before now. Nor was the military usefulness of the exercise questioned. The truth was that the Berghof had been mentioned frequently when target lists were being drawn up but had always been rejected. Allied intelligence knew about the deep bomb shelters dug to protect the leadership and reckoned the negative publicity of a failed attempt to finish Hitler was not worth the effort. Later the calculation changed. The fear now was that the bombers might succeed, and the defence of Germany would pass to the hands of someone more competent and rational.

On 25 April 1945, with Hitler’s empire reduced to a few square miles in the heart of a burning city, there was less reason than ever to attack Berchtesgaden with such extravagant force. None was offered. The raid on Hitler’s mountain retreat was an overwhelmingly British operation, in conception and execution, with American aircraft playing only a secondary role. Its purpose was thus symbolic and the message was from Britain to the world. Hitler had started the war, and it was the British alone who had stood out against him. It had taken a great coalition to defeat him but without that initial defiance there might have been no victory. Smashing Berchtesgaden was a reminder of that truth. It was fitting that it was the Royal Air Force that delivered the blow.

2

A Cottage or a Castle?

One afternoon in the middle of the war Group Captain Arnold Wall sat down to tea and biscuits with Lord Trenchard, who was revered as the ‘Father of the Royal Air Force’. Wall taught at the RAF Staff College and was preparing a lecture on the early history of the service. Among the questions he had for the great man were two that were ‘pretty trivial’, but which he ‘felt personal curiosity about’.1 The first was how it was that the RAF got its famous blue uniform.

There were ‘two legends about this, both picturesque’ in circulation, and he hoped Trenchard might be able to settle the matter once and for all. One claimed that in 1917 the textile mills of Bradford had received an order to weave a million yards or so of light blue cloth for the Tsar of Russia’s cavalry. After the October Revolution, this was left on their hands. Thus, when the RAF officially came into being on 1 April 1918, there was a vast stock of surplus material going cheap that suited their requirements.

In the other version, the staff officer charged with choosing the colour was the beau of a musical comedy star named Lily Elsie, famous for starring in the London version of The Merry Widow. When samples were brought to him for a decision he decided to consult his girlfriend. ‘This is it,’ she is alleged to have replied, picking out the shade that the RAF has worn ever since, ‘because it matches the colour of my eyes.’ Trenchard was ‘most apologetic’ but could throw no light on the matter.

On the second subject – the origin of the RAF ensign – he was more helpful, saying ‘Yes, yes. I can tell you something about that.’ Trenchard recalled his staff coming to him with a sketch of the design. It featured the RAF red, white and blue roundel, originally devised to deter trigger-happy Tommies from blasting at friendly aircraft from their trenches, set on a sky-blue background. They warned him, however, that the Royal College of Heralds had ruled the roundels unacceptable as they were ‘not heraldry’. Trenchard resolved to take the matter up with the King. On his next meeting with him he brought the design along and explained the difficulty. ‘Well, Trenchard,’ said George V, ‘if it wasn’t heraldry before, it will be from now on.’ And he signed the drawing there and then.

Lily Elsie (Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo)

The ensign anecdote sounds plausible enough. Trenchard was not the man to make up a tale about his sovereign. The truth of the origin of Air Force Blue remains obscure, though gossip certainly favoured the second version. John Slessor, who went on to be one of the outstanding figures of the wartime RAF, recalled being summoned one evening in October 1918 with other senior officers to a meeting in Salisbury to discuss sending reinforcements to France where the Germans were in full retreat. Before the main business began there was some light relief. Mark Kerr, a former senior naval officer who had switched to the Air Force, was to model the first uniform. As Kerr stepped forward into the light of a reading lamp in the new rig, the audience reacted with mirth and incredulity. ‘[It] was terrible,’ Slessor recalled, ‘a nasty pale blue with a lot of gold all over it, which brought irresistibly to mind the gentleman who stands outside the cinema.’2 He reported that ‘rumour had it that it was a joint design by Mark Kerr and Miss Lily Elsie, though I’m sure that this was a libel on a beautiful and talented lady who has far too good taste ever to have been party to such an atrocity. Fortunately, it was short lived …’

These foundation stories say much about how the RAF saw itself – and how it wanted others to see it – in the first years of its existence. Unpicking the Russian story – the yarn about the yarn – reveals some enduring components of the RAF image. One is an aura of romance. The Air Force was being linked to what was traditionally the most dashing arm of the military. The message was that aviators were the aerial equivalent of the cavalry, bold, colourful and brimming with elan, éclat and all the other French words that go with sabre-wielding men on horseback. But there is also a suggestion that they were the target of some resentment from their dowdier colleagues. The implication was that the authorities had decided that, rather than weave a new cloth for the new service, they would have to make do with a quartermaster’s windfall.

The second version reinforces the element of romance and introduces a raffish note. Lily Elsie was a big star of the day whose picture was plastered over mass-circulation illustrated papers. She was also married (as was Mark Kerr). Perhaps significantly, her playboy husband’s fortune came from a family business that made textile machines. Here the RAF is presented as the sort of outfit that has in its upper ranks officers who hang out with beautiful celebrities. The tale gives the impression of modernity and a devil-may-care attitude to traditional proprieties.

Without stretching things too far, the ensign anecdote also carries a subtext. In this submerged narrative, the infant service, whose values are illustrated in an attractive and innovative design, runs up against the dreary forces of tradition in the form of the heralds. But where there’s a will there’s a way and help is at hand from an unusual quarter. Young and brash the newcomers may be, but the King recognizes them for the loyal liegemen that they are. At a stroke the hindrance is removed. There will be plenty more obstacles across their path in the journey ahead, the tale implies, but they will be approached and dealt with in the same undaunted manner.

The RAF’s image developed naturally from the activities of the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War. The first task it was given was one that traditionally had been done by the cavalry – scouting the movements of the enemy. Once the front lines had solidified and trench warfare began, airmen mapped the battlefield, spotted for the artillery and clashed with enemy aviators trying to do the same thing.

At this stage they were a mere adjunct of the ground forces and did what the Army asked them to. But the nature of their activities meant they received a disproportionate amount of attention.

Aerial combat over the trenches seemed a clean, chivalrous business compared to the industrial carnage below. The isolated nature of much air fighting drew attention to individual warriors and the ‘ace’ was born. Both sides’ propaganda boosted their own airmen heroes. In Britain William Leefe-Robinson, Mick Mannock, Albert Ball and James McCudden, all VC winners, were household names. The last three died flying. Aerial combat was clearly a very dangerous business but outwardly at least the airmen displayed a cheerful fatalism: ‘Here’s a toast to the dead already’ ran a favourite song in the RFC’s well-lubricated messes, ‘three cheers for the next man to go.’

The airmen very quickly formed an identity that set them apart from soldiers and sailors. It was an attractive one, a blend of gallantry, individualism and insouciance in the face of death. The small-scale, tactical work they did was unsuited to the sort of regimented discipline that shaped the Army and Navy. They were old-fashioned warriors in modern fighting machines. These perceptions would persist long after this early ‘heroic’ age of air fighting was over.

Between 1917 and 1939 the Air Force would move from the periphery to the centre of British military thinking, planning and expenditure. The development was the result of two growth spurts, both of them brought about by fear of German air power. The Royal Air Force itself was conceived in the panicky atmosphere generated by continuing German air raids on Britain. Attacks by Zeppelins killed 500 civilians by the end of 1916 and diverted 17,000 servicemen from other duties. In the summer of 1917 long-range Gotha bombers struck London, killing and wounding nearly six hundred people in the initial raid. The fear felt on the streets spread upwards. ‘One would have thought the world was coming to an end,’ sniffed the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir William Robertson after attending an emergency cabinet meeting in July. ‘I could not get a word in edgeways.’3

Something had to be done. The War Cabinet appointed the South African soldier-statesman Jan Smuts to investigate. His first, short recommendations arrived quickly and focused solely on improving the air defences of the London area.

His follow-up report, delivered only a month later, went much further. From the flimsy evidence of the air raids, Smuts drew a vision of the future. He was now convinced that there was ‘absolutely no limit’ to the use to which aeroplanes could be put. ‘The day may not be far off,’ he predicted, ‘when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.’4

This was quite a claim to advance on the basis of a few air raids. By making it, Smuts set a pattern for extravagant extrapolations, unsupported by serious data, of what air power might do that persisted through the years ahead and which profoundly shaped the development and condition of the Royal Air Force as it prepared for the next big war.

His prophecy was followed by an equally momentous proposal. He recommended that henceforth the RFC and its maritime equivalent, the Royal Naval Air Service, should no longer be tied strictly to the tactical needs of the Army and Navy and the two should be amalgamated in a single Air Force under the political control of a new Air Ministry. The Smuts plan was adopted and implemented with a speed that was remarkable even in wartime. The Royal Air Force came into being on 1 April 1918, the first – and for some years the only – independent air service in the world.

The original set-up was makeshift. The Air Ministry was initially sited in the Cecil Hotel, a second-class establishment in the Strand, before moving to a Portland stone block at No. 1 Kingsway, named Adastral House after the wonderful motto the RAF had inherited from the RFC – Per Ardua ad Astra. But the first great leap had been made and the airmen had their chance at reaching for the stars.

In less than four years the status of airmen had soared. Initially the lackeys of the traditional services they were now their nominal equals. The grant of independence had come out of nowhere. No one serving in the air had asked for it. Indeed, there were some in the RFC, including initially Trenchard himself, who were sceptical of the value of a third service, though it did not take him long to change his mind.

The airmen had been handed independence on a plate. They soon learned they would have to fight to keep it. The Army and Navy saw the measure as a temporary aberration. Once the flap was over and the war won, they set about trying to kill off the upstart and claw back control of their air assets.

The fight for survival that ensued had a profound effect on the fundamental character and outlook of the RAF. From birth it was forced to develop theories and practices that justified its existence and techniques for fending off a predatory Army and Navy, both operating from positions of massive institutional strength.

The Navy was particularly persistent. The Admiralty had a solid claim that as the Fleet was central to Britain’s defences, anything connected to it should come under its control. The creation of the Fleet Air Arm in 1924 still left naval aviation in the hands of the RAF and it was not until May 1939 that the Admiralty won it back. The Army felt that it had not been properly compensated for the loss of the RFC and senior officers complained constantly that the RAF showed no interest in providing for its legitimate needs. The belief that the Air Force was primarily out for itself ran deep in the traditional services. It was true that the RAF fought its corner hard in the early years of its existence, but self-interest was essential for self-preservation.

Mutual suspicion and misunderstanding, breaking occasionally into open bureaucratic warfare, placed a heavy strain on relations between the services that would last into the early years of the next war, hampering Britain’s ability to fight it.

The RAF had to tread carefully in the post-war atmosphere of military cost-cutting that slashed budgets to the bone, a general loathing of war and a deep reluctance to contemplate the dreadful thought that Britain might one day have to fight another one. The newcomers were last in the queue for resources. Even getting kitted out in the new blue uniforms was a struggle. The Royal Army Clothing Department which dealt initially with supply, appeared unwilling to accept the change. ‘Without presuming to criticize the decision of the Air Council, I venture to submit to you the following considerations,’ wrote its director, General Sir Benjamin Johnson, in July 1918.5 He went on to urge them to make sure they were happy with their choice as ‘nothing could be worse for the prestige of the Air Service than the adoption of a colour which it might be found faded, went shabby or showed dirt and dust marks easily’. Eight years after the birth, the Treasury were still complaining that they had not been consulted about the clothing costs (which admittedly came to about £1.5 million).6

In the face of this resentment and a government which begrudged every shilling of military expenditure, the RAF needed outstanding leadership to keep it on its feet. It was provided by Hugh Trenchard who, as Chief of the Air Staff, was the professional head of the RAF for eleven of the first twelve years of its life. ‘Boom’ Trenchard dominates the story of the early days, simultaneously forbidding and benign, the patriarchal figure of the foundation myth. He claimed to dislike being referred to as the ‘Father of the RAF’ but had no difficulty accepting all the other accolades that would be heaped upon him over the years. Trenchard was a failure until he was forty. He was born in 1873, the son of a soldier turned failed West Country solicitor and a mother whose father had been a naval officer. He was supposed to join the Navy but flunked the entrance exam to Dartmouth then twice failed to pass muster for the Army academy at Woolwich. He finally scraped into the Royal Scots Fusiliers and spent the next nineteen years in India and Africa.

His career was going nowhere when in 1912, inspired by a letter from a brother officer describing ecstatically his experiences with the newly formed Royal Flying Corps at their aviation school on Salisbury Plain, he decided to try it for himself. He was immediately entranced – not with flying for he was too big and clumsy to be a good pilot – but with the opportunities it offered, for the military and for himself. Qualities the Army overlooked were appreciated in the RFC and promotions came rapidly. Three years later he was officer commanding in France.

Trenchard inspired something close to adulation among the generation of officers who led the RAF into the war and his thinking pervaded their outlook. Even after he was long gone from office, his protégé Arthur Tedder, who, as deputy to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was one of the busiest men in the world, still found time during the 1944 invasion to write to the old man asking for his advice.

He was seen to possess a quality that was not obvious in any other military figure of the time. ‘There are some rare people in whose presence one instinctively and immediately feels: here is a really great man,’ declared ‘Jack’ Slessor who first met him when a young RFC officer in France.7 ‘I felt it [then] … and I have felt the same about him ever since. It is difficult to define that quality of real greatness. Self-confidence without a trace of arrogance, a contemptuous yet not intolerant disregard for anything mean or petty; the capacity to shuffle aside non-essentials and put an unerring finger on the real core of a problem or the true quality of a man, a sort of instinct for the really important point; a selfless devotion to the cause of what he believed to be true or right.’

Those who served with him felt they had been gilded by the association. ‘I’m one of the Boom boys,’ boasted Air Marshal Sir Hugh Walmsley in later life. ‘He put the fear of God into me but by God I loved him.’8 He even managed to be a hero to his valet. The humorous, intelligent Maurice Baring, who as his adjutant saw him at very close quarters in the First World War, thought him ‘one of the few big men of the world’.9

Trenchard had many failings. He could be bombastic, dogmatic and often got things badly wrong. He shamelessly interfered in Air Force matters long after leaving office, with the result that ‘all his successors up to the end of the war had to cope with his promptings and criticisms’.10 And despite his military disdain for civilian manoeuvrings, he could intrigue as enthusiastically as any grubby politician if he thought the cause was worth it.

In many ways, though, his reputation is deserved. He was a formidable operator in the corridors of Whitehall, forceful with officials but knowing when to bend, and showed a subtle understanding of political realities, tending to tell his masters what they wanted to hear. His methods intensified friction with the other services, but they worked. The historian Malcolm Smith, who took a sceptical view of the great man, nonetheless concluded that ‘Trenchard’s extraordinary personality was, without doubt, one of the greatest assets of the RAF in its fight for survival … when it was likely to have been wound up, if the other services had had their way’.11

His claims to greatness went further than that. He devised the institutions and established the traditions that enabled the Air Force to merge quickly into Britain’s institutional landscape. He oversaw the development of the strategic theory that – rightly or wrongly – placed offensive air power at the centre of Britain’s defence arrangements. Above all, he gave the RAF its identity, its self-belief and its credo, which was implanted in the DNA of the service in the years after the Great War by a cohort of disciples, suffusing the RAF ‘with a vigour and aggression, a mixture of dogmatism and iconoclasm, characteristic of the Father of the Royal Air Force’ himself.12

Trenchard initially stuck loyally to the Army chiefs’ view that aeroplanes should be strictly subordinated to their own terrestrial needs. He began to change his mind after being given command of the ‘Independent Force’, which emerged from the deliberations of the Smuts inquiry. Its purpose was to give the Germans a taste of their own medicine by launching air raids into enemy territory to attack war industries. The campaign achieved little apart from killing German civilians but the notion of using aircraft to pursue strategic rather than simply tactical war aims was planted. Trenchard would end up the most energetic and effective preacher of the primacy of air power in future conflicts and the need to place an offensive air policy at the centre of all planning, organization and procurement.

Trenchard was a notoriously bad speaker but he had a physique and presence that more than made up for his inarticulacy. No one who met him forgot the experience. Many did meet him, for he clung to his baby long after his guardianship was ended, and he pops up often in memoirs and diaries, carrying out inspections and delivering pep talks, indulged by his old protégés who were reluctant to suggest his visitations might be inconvenient.

Arnold Wall, the officer who quizzed Trenchard about the origins of Air Force Blue, remembered a freezing day in December 1926 when he came to the RAF College at Cranwell to inspect the passing-out parade. Even at this early stage Trenchard’s stature was immense. Wall, a young New Zealander in his first term as a cadet, noted every detail as he passed by. His first impression ‘was of bigness. He was a tall man, heavily built, bearishly, this accentuated by his great-coat, his head seeming on the small side for a man of his size. Heavy eyebrows, shaggy; eyes deep set and rather close set, very keen in expression but friendly; greying moustache worn rather more heavily than was fashionable. His whole bearing was kindly and interested; an amiable Great Bear.’13

The parade trooped into the gymnasium for prize giving and speeches. All the cadets knew that Trenchard’s nickname was ‘Boom’ on account of his penetrating voice. They ‘were curious to discover whether he would speak to us in the voice of a howitzer, but in this he was a disappointment. He was gruff, certainly, and loud and clear but not a boomer …’

Early in 1929 Wall went to RAF Uxbridge to hear Trenchard, who was stepping down as Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), deliver a farewell speech. ‘I don’t remember much of what he said, but one of the metaphors sticks in the mind,’ he wrote. ‘He stressed that all he and his contemporaries had been able to do since the RAF was formed was to lay “foundations (long pause), foundations for the future (pause). For you fellows to build on (pause). Could be a cottage, could be a castle. I don’t know (pause). Nobody knows. Whichever it is, hope you’ll find that the foundations are sound, strong …”’

Laying a ‘sound framework on which to build the service’ had been one of Trenchard’s main aims when he resumed the post of CAS in the spring of 1919 (a brief earlier stint had ended in his resignation after repeated clashes with the Air Minister, Lord Rothermere). The other was to find a role for the RAF that would justify its existence. Unlike his predecessor and rival Frederick Sykes, he understood the need for modesty and frugality. He came up with a proposal for how an Air Force, now pared down to a tenth of the size it had attained by the end of the war, could be employed in a way that projected military power effectively and cheaply.

The concept was called ‘force substitution’. It meant simply that instead of relying on expensive ground forces to keep down rebellious natives in hot and dusty corners of the empire, the RAF could do the job by deploying a few aeroplanes. Inevitably, the idea raised Army hackles. The new boys were seeking to take over work that had previously been done by soldiers. Winston Churchill, who was both War and Air Minister, backed the idea, however, and henceforth the RAF would be engaged heavily in imperial policing.

The first success came early in 1920 when they crushed an uprising by the Dervish leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan in Somaliland. The ‘Mad Mullah’ was defeated in a few weeks at a cost of £77,000 – ‘the cheapest war in history’ it was said.14

In one year, 1929, the RAF was in action in Iraq, Aden, Sudan, and the North-West Frontier. Its achievements were vaunted by the Air Minister Samuel Hoare in the House of Commons. In Iraq, it was ‘the encroachment of certain tribes many miles over the Iraq frontier and the butchery of large numbers of men, women and children’ that triggered operations. In Aden, it was ‘the kidnapping of two sheikhs friendly to Britain’. In Sudan, it was ‘the murder of a British Commissioner, a Greek trader and several natives’. The results were very satisfactory. ‘The operations were carried out successfully with scarcely any casualties amongst either the Air Force or the native population,’ Hoare reported. As a result of all this activity the RAF lost only one man. As for cost, the Aden mission came to £8,000, where ‘under the older conditions of warfare the expenditure would have run into perhaps £6 millions’.15

These operations were of little use in preparing aircrews for modern warfare. Few of the tribesmen they subdued had ever seen an aeroplane, let alone had the means to shoot one down. Nor did they provide much practice in Army–Air Force co-operation. They did, however, have the beneficial effect from the airmen’s point of view of keeping the RAF firmly in the public eye and in the minds of politicians.

At home Trenchard was anxious to establish and build up an institutional framework that would consolidate the Royal Air Force’s independence forever. He set out to form a new generation of officers and airmen by training them from the outset in Air Force thought and method.16 Cranwell – the first air academy in history – opened in February 1920. Alongside it was established the School of Technical Training to provide a pool of skilled ground crews.

The first Cranwell cadets were housed in a hutted camp formerly occupied by the RNAS planted on the windswept plain of south Lincolnshire. In time it would grow into a grand establishment that could hold its own with Sandhurst or Dartmouth. In October 1934, the Prince of Wales opened the new College Hall. The architect Sir James Wood had chosen the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, home to Army pensioners since 1692, for inspiration. The structure was a gigantic metaphor for Trenchard’s approach. The brick and stone elevations and large dome looked as if they had been there for centuries. In fact, the classical exterior was all façade and the building was held up by thoroughly modern steel beams.

Cranwell graduates were, as the founder intended, a small and exclusive clique, ‘the very heart and centre from which the RAF derives her vitality’, as an inter-war Air Secretary Lord Londonderry described it.17 This was the nucleus around which the service would grow. Trenchard made the ability to fly an aeroplane well a basic condition of entry to the RAF’s future elite. As well as being a flying school, the college taught aviation technology and aeronautics alongside a basic academic curriculum. The course lasted two years and at the end the graduates passed out as ‘General Duties Officers’ ready to take their place wherever the service required them and in time to rise to the summit of the RAF.

There were two entries a year, and in the period between the wars the total number of annual entrants never exceeded seventy-one.18 Entrance was by competitive examination, the same one sat by candidates for Dartmouth and Sandhurst, followed by interview. The college preferred candidates who came towards the top of the list (Sandhurst was prepared to consider anyone in the first hundred).19 Before the college opened an Air Ministry Committee under Lord Hugh Cecil was set up to consider what sort of boy they were looking for. It concluded that RAF officers required a higher technical ability than was needed in the Army. As to character, they were seeking those with ‘the quality of a gentleman’.20 By this they did not mean ‘a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain character’. This sounded egalitarian, a statement that the RAF was a modern service in tune with the democratic mood of the age. The problem was, as the Cecil report admitted, how to find candidates with the required education and qualities ‘without excluding from the service men of small and humble means’.

Cranwell cost money – a hundred pounds a term, which was the same as the fees to a good public school. Parents also had to find another hundred pounds for uniform and books. This was far beyond the means of most British households. Six full scholarships worth £105 were awarded each year. But even if a grammar school boy’s parents could scrape the funds together he was still at a disadvantage. Many public schools had separate, specialized curricula for boys trying for Sandhurst and Dartmouth and it was easy for them to extend the service to Cranwell aspirants.

In practice then, the selection process and entry requirements meant Cranwell was dominated by the sons of the affluent middle and upper classes and the products of the public school system. Of the 929 schoolboy entrants who passed through between 1920 and 1939, all but ninety-three went to fee-paying schools.21 The public schools represented at Cranwell ranged from Eton, which sent twenty cadets, to small, long-vanished colleges for the sons of the shabby genteel, which sent one or two. The biggest block came from the Victorian foundations which sprang up in the nineteenth century to raise the soldiers, sailors and administrators needed to run Britain and its empire. Wellington, built as a national monument to the Iron Duke, provided the most with fifty. Other schools with strong military traditions were well represented. Cheltenham sent twenty-eight, Tonbridge and Imperial Service College twenty-two, and Marlborough and Haileybury twenty. Of military-minded schools, only Harrow, with five entrants, was under-represented.

The Cranwell course was rigorous and for much of the period the conditions were spartan. The cadets were marooned in the back of beyond. Sleaford, the nearest town, offered few temptations; one reason Trenchard had chosen the site was its distance from the fleshpots of London. After the rigours of boarding school, most of the entrants found it easy to cope. Peter Townsend, son of a colonial civil servant, arrived at Cranwell in 1933 from Haileybury where life at the outset at least was ‘hard and sometimes cruel [and] there was no one to help us but ourselves … Survive your first two years at Haileybury and you could survive anything.’22 At Cranwell he ‘submitted, gladly for the most part, to the intensive and variegated process which was to mould me as a pilot, an officer and a gentleman’.