All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [301]
One morning he reported sick with acute head pains, and was sent to another hospital near Newcastle. ‘They took away my uniform and gave me an ill-fitting blue suit, white shirt and red tie. Apart from a sergeant brought back from Tobruk, all the rest of the patients were army privates, misfits who had slipped through the call-up by mistake. None of them had ever seen a gun, they discussed getting their “ticket” [out of the service] all day, and they nearly all did.’ Raynes was discharged from the air force in 1943; he suffered severe psychiatric difficulties for the rest of his life, but received only a 30 per cent disability pension.
Some men whom the RAF branded ‘LMF’ – ‘Lacking Moral Fibre’ – were given menial ground jobs; others were dispatched to ‘Aircrew Refresher Centres’ – punishment barracks – of which the most notorious was located outside Sheffield. Ken Owen said: ‘You joked about getting the chop, about flying reciprocal courses, but never about Sheffield.’ Yet Owen was among a small minority of aircrew who not only survived a ‘tour’ of thirty operations, but undertook a second, with a new crew in a Lancaster. ‘For the second tour,’ he said, ‘we were far more cynical and suspicious. [We asked ourselves]: “What sort of rear-gunner is this Macpherson? Let’s hope the little bastard can stay awake.” We were far more efficient, far more determined to be efficient, far more determined to survive; there was more talk about collisions over the target; we knew the German night-fighter system had improved enormously.’ One night Owen and his crew came back from a raid on the German rocket-development site at Peenemunde with two engines knocked out and the plane riddled with shrapnel holes inflicted by flak. They abandoned it over Norfolk, and were lucky enough to parachute safely to the ground, where they all met in Hunstanton police station. ‘I hated the whole business, then.’
American aircrew flying daylight missions found it especially harrowing to witness at close quarters horrors invisible to the RAF’s night fliers. A B-17 pilot wrote of one mission: ‘When a plane blew up, we saw [its crew’s body] parts all over the sky. We smashed into some of the pieces. One plane hit a body which tumbled out of a plane ahead. A crewman went out of the front hatch of a plane and hit the tail assembly … No chute. His body turned over and over like a bean bag tossed into the air … A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somersault through our formation. No chute.’ If wartime aircrew were indeed an elite, they paid a terrible price for their privileges, facing greater risks than any other combatants save infantry riflemen and submariners.
2 TARGETS
Until 1943, the most important achievement of the Allies’ strategic air offensive was that it obliged the Germans to divert growing numbers of their fighters and dual-purpose 88mm guns from the Eastern Front to defence of the Reich. Berlin alone was defended by a hundred batteries of sixteen to twenty-four guns, each manned by crews of eleven. Though many gunners were teenagers ineligible for the front, the diversion of firepower and technology was important. Richard Overy argues convincingly that the German war effort suffered severely from the need to commit resources to home defence. Bomber Command and the USAAF made an important contribution by obliging the Luftwaffe to divert almost its entire 1943–45 fighter strength to Germany, conceding near-total air superiority over both eastern and western battlefields to the Allies. It is also plain that, while Albert Speer contrived to increase output even amid the massive air attacks of 1944, vastly more weapons would have been built – with serious consequences for the Allied armies