All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [298]
Allied aircrew, once deployed on operational fighter or bomber squadrons, until the last eighteen months of the war confronted a statistical probability of their own extinction. Romantic delusions faded as they learned to anticipate a destiny as a bloody jam of crushed flesh and bones, or surmounting a petrol-fuelled funeral pyre. To be sure, their daily lives on the ground were privileged; they were spared the mud and discomfort to which foot soldiers were subjected. But they were less likely to survive; Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘A man approached death rather decently in the air force. He died well-fed and clean-shaven.’
More than half the RAF’s heavy bomber crews perished, 56,000 men in all. The USAAF’s overall losses were lower, but among 100,000 of its men who participated in the strategic offensive against Germany some 26,000 died, and a further 20,000 were taken prisoner. ‘You were resigned to dying every night,’ said a British Whitley bomber pilot, Sid Bufton. ‘Before setting out you looked around your room: golf clubs, books, nice little radio – and the letter to your parents propped up on the table.’ Unsurprisingly, Allied casualties were proportionately heaviest when the Axis dominated the war, and fell steadily once the tide turned. From 1943 onwards, it was the turn of German and Japanese airmen to do most of the dying: less than 10 per cent survived until the end.
The Allied air chiefs’ principal preoccupation was strategic assault on Germany – the offensive against Japan began in earnest only in March 1945 – by which they aspired to win the war on their own. The RAF was obliged to abandon daylight bombing after a bloody initiation in 1939–40. Thereafter, its squadrons mounted a night offensive, which made little material impact on Germany until 1943: they lacked mass as well as navigational and bomb-aiming skills. The first British bombs which fell on Berlin at the end of August 1940 inflicted only random damage, though they shocked the capital’s inhabitants and killed a few civilians. One young mother retired to a shelter when the warning sirens sounded, but was reluctant to disturb her two sleeping children, whom she left in bed: they perished when the house received a direct hit. After that story was published, Berliners took more heed of sirens.
An RAF squadron commander described Bomber Command’s early operations over Germany as ‘groping’. This was exemplified by the experience of Sgt. Bill Uprichard, who flew a Whitley of 51 Squadron on a mission against oil refineries at Politz on the Baltic in poor weather on the night of 29 November 1940. Outbound, after spending 2½ hours in thick cloud over the North Sea, suddenly the sky opened to reveal a brilliantly-lit city below. Uprichard and his crew realised they must be passing neutral Sweden, and hastily reset their course. They blind-bombed Politz by dead-reckoning – estimating their own time over target – then turned for home in impenetrable cloud. Without warning they found themselves facing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Uprichard wrote:
I woke up! The wind had been stronger than I thought and we were flying a course taking us straight over the heavily defended Friesian Islands. We crossed the North Sea still in cloud and it was difficult to get a pinpoint on anything. I spent a lot of time – probably too much – flying up and along the Yorkshire coast hoping to see a break. It was raining heavily … By this time our fuel was very low – only about 20 mins. left – so for the first time I put out an emergency signal PAN-PAN-PAN and in two ticks Linton-on-Ouse came up with a magnetic course. We were then on the verge of abandoning the aircraft. It was a matter of a long time-glide home. We made it, but the refuelling party told me we had virtually nothing left in the tanks.
Throughout 1940–41, naïveté persisted within the RAF about the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s operations. ‘The briefings were very,