Inferno - Max Hastings [302]
Airmen became intimately familiar with the stench of hot rubber and petrol in the planes, sometimes also of cordite from their hammering guns and vomit from frightened men. Several times, Owen’s wireless operator threw up as the aircraft took violent evasive action. “If you were coned [by searchlights], you’d fly towards somebody else in the hope they’d pick them up instead of you. There was a tremendous element of cynicism and callousness—‘Thank Christ it’s someone else.’ I honestly can’t remember the names of many of the men who got the chop. They were only there about a fortnight. We were quite slow to realise that flying was becoming a dangerous occupation; that element of excitement kept us going, and morale was high. There were problems, of course, but I never blamed higher authority because I felt that we were all learning together.”
The intimacy of the relationships between members of bomber crews is a cliché, but it was by no means universally valid. B-24 navigator Harold Dorfman respected his pilot’s skill, but “we hated each other … After a row on a training flight, we never talked to each other except about the mission.” Jack Brennan, from Staten Island, was twenty-one when he joined the air force, to his family’s fury. “ ‘We could have kept you out,’ they said. But I was one of the kids who wanted to be a hero.” The experience of flying twenty-four missions against Germany with an incompetent and cowardly pilot cured him of such delusions. “All the time, I wished I had gone into something else. We got hit almost every trip. The only good thing was that we had decent living conditions compared with the guys on the ground.” His crew’s combat experience ended ingloriously, when the pilot persuaded them to parachute over Sweden while on a mission to Berlin. Brennan was one of three survivors, and he revelled in the comfort and safety of his subsequent experience as an internee: “It was like a summer camp.”
The nature of life and death on bomber stations discouraged relationships outside a man’s own crew. “If you had losses to the degree we had losses, you didn’t get terribly attached to people,” said Etienne Maze, who flew RAF Halifaxes. “They came and they went. By the time you had done ten ‘ops,’ you were a very old boy.” On the day Ted Bone saw some acquaintances on a “missing” list, he merely recorded in his diary: “Good bods Pyatt, Donner etc. Cleaned bike, wrote home, had crumpets and cocoa for supper in the billet.” An American B-17 crewman wrote: “We learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago, as simply as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for another.”
Bomber operations imposed unique stresses upon participants, who knew the odds against surviving a “tour.” They boarded their planes at calm, well-regulated bases; flew out into the whitest heat of war over Europe; landed back amid the fields of Norfolk or Lincolnshire; visited the pub among local yokels the following evening; then did it all again two or three days later. Pilots, especially on night operations, enjoyed considerable personal latitude which they could exercise for good or ill. Most displayed remarkable determination and devotion to duty, but some faltered. Air Vice-Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, 5 Group’s commander, personally interviewed one pilot who turned for home when approaching Hamburg: the man offered as his only excuse that he found his aircraft drifting away from the main “stream.” This man told the group commander that the crew had discussed their choices over the intercom and agreed to abandon the mission. “When I asked him why he, as captain, didn’t take the decision, he replied that they were all members of the sergeants’ mess, and it was their lives as well as his, so obviously he had to consult them.”
Ron Crafter, an electronic countermeasures operator aboard a Halifax, was hit in the face by shell splinters during an attack on V1 launching sites in June 1944. “The wounds were superficial, but I panicked. I have since found it rather difficult to live with—the