All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [309]
In 1944–45, the Anglo-American bomber offensive became the supreme expression of the two nations’ industrial might and technological prowess. Much of eastern and southern England was transformed into a chequer-board of air bases overlaid on farmland, ringed by concertina wire, and variously designated for training, transport, fighters or bombers. There were 110 USAAF and RAF airfields in Norfolk alone, each occupying six hundred acres of flatland; a Bomber Command station was manned by some 2,500 ground personnel, around four hundred of them women, and a revolving cast of 250 aircrew. This was war conducted by timetable, in accordance with a deadly daily routine sustained for years.
In the last months, USAAF and RAF losses over Europe fell steeply, but operational flying never became a safe activity. Alan Gamble’s crew, a characteristic national mix of the period – Australian pilot, American tail-gunner, Scots navigator and mid-upper gunner, the rest English – began operations in February 1945 eager to be ‘in at the finish … We hoped to make a name for ourselves.’ All had completed earlier tours with Bomber Command. On 7 February, they took off with a force of a hundred Lancasters for a daylight attack on an oil refinery at Wanne-Eickel. Crossing the French coast, they saw ahead of them an angry black cloud, and climbed to maximum altitude in an attempt to avoid it. Instead, the plane began to ice up dramatically. It was soon ‘waffling about like a drunken duck’, in Gamble’s words.
They pressed on, but after a debate on the intercom decided to make for nearby Krefeld, in the Ruhr. The plane was at 8,500 feet and they had just released their bombs when there was a violent lurch as the starboard wing began to buckle ‘as if it was going to wrap itself around us’. The Lancaster rolled over and began to spin. ‘Prepare to abandon aircraft!’ called Geoff, the pilot, as he struggled to regain stability. Gamble, convinced of imminent death, thought, ‘Dear God, this is it – I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’ Suddenly, the plane momentarily righted itself. The crew seized parachutes and one by one leapt from the forward hatch. Gamble was alarmed to find himself descending towards a turbulent river, but managed to steer away onto land. His crew was unusually lucky: all landed alive, and survived the ensuing three months as prisoners.
Until the end, cities were pounded mercilessly. A woman in Braunschweig wrote on 9 March 1945: ‘The planes are over Berlin every day, sometimes twice a day. The poor, poor people. How do they stand such suffering? Everyone is totally worn out.’ A Berliner, Karl Deutmann, wrote of one USAAF attack: ‘We heard, behind the metre-thick walls of our bunker and for more than an hour, nothing but the awful rumbling and thunder of the carpet of falling bombs, with the lights flickering and sometimes almost going out … When we left the bunker the sun had disappeared, the sky darkened with clouds. Fed by numberless small and big fires, a vast sea of smoke hung over the whole of the inner city … In the Neuburgerstrasse … the girls’ trades school had been hit; hundreds of girls had been sheltering in the cellar. Later the parents were standing in front of the shattered bodies, mangled and stripped naked by blast, no longer able to recognise their own daughters.’ In Hagen a diarist wrote on 15 March 1945: ‘Fear and panic rule among the public. There is no public building left in the town, no business, and hardly any street. Only mountains of rubble and debris. I am churned up to the depths