Tonight, as we remember the heroes of Operation "Chastise", we must not forget that heroism was not confined to 617 Squadron.
I have no doubt that Les Munro, "Johnnie" Johnson et al would be the first to acknowledge that every man who volunteered for RAF Aircrew duties (and they were all volunteers) was a hero.
My father was such a man.
He was
a member of 619 Squadron, stationed at Dunholme Lodge, the next airfield to 617's Scampton. Unlike 617, created for one special operation, 619 was just a "bog-standard" 5 Group squadron. Apart from escaping from a searchlight cone on his second operation
by "corkscrewing" so violently that (it was later found) he popped two rivets on the main spar, and losing so much height that he put a 500lb-er through Krupp's roof from 2500 feet instead of 16000, he had, until the spring of 1944, had a relatively
uneventful war.
Then someone had the bright idea of dive-bombing V1 launch sites in daylight.
The Avro Lancaster Mk1 was not a dive-bomber. It was designed for high altitude night bombing. Not only did it offer a big, slow-moving target,
but its airframe could not cope with the stresses of dive-bombing. I believe the boffins determined that the maximum safe dive angle was 30 degrees, so what was proposed might charitably be described as semi-dive-bombing. The one modification
for daylight "ops" was the removal of the exhaust shrouding.
On a glorious spring day six Lancasters from 619 attacked a
V1 launch site near Calais. It did not begin well. The first aircraft dived, missed the target, was hit, and continued its 350mph power-dive into the ground. The second scored a near-miss and headed home. The third was hit and exploded before
releasing its load. Dad should have been number four, but seeing that if he continued his dive he would fly through the debris from the explosion, he aborted and went round again. In the meantime, numbers five and six attacked, and were destroyed. By
the time he dived again, not only had the Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunners got their range, but his was the only aircraft in the sky. He could actually see the muzzle-flashes as they fired, and for the only time in his RAF career thought, "Oh well, any moment
now......"
The Bomb-aimer "pressed the tit". The view through the bomb sight was the last thing he saw. A second
later he was blinded by a red-hot piece of shrapnel. No.3 engine stopped dead and No.4 burst into flames. Suddenly the controls were so heavy that it took the combined strength of my father and his flight engineer to pull out of the dive. Not a man given to
exaggeration, he remained convinced to his dying day that they were so low that, if the undercarriage had been lowered at the time, it would have dragged in the sea.
The rear gunner did not respond to the intercom, and the door to his turret appeared to be jammed.....
The Lancaster became harder and harder to control as the slipstream tore at its damaged control surfaces, but Dad nursed her home, and made a perfect "three-pointer" at the nearest airfield (Hawkinge, I believe).
The previous night, "Taff", the rear gunner, had been singing in the pub, accompanied by my father on piano. Now, Dad stood and watched as two men washed what was left of
him off the inside of his turret with a hosepipe. A little heap of what looked like lumpy raspberry jam formed on the concrete, surrounded by an expanding pool of pink water......
Of the forty-two men who set out on that operation, thirty died.
Oh yes,
and here's the punchline: because of the short distance it only counted as half an "op".
17/5/2013