Inferno - Max Hastings [303]
Many men who flinched were treated with considerable harshness, because their superiors feared that indulgence would promote emulation. Reg Raynes was a wireless operator, the sole survivor of a Hampden that crashed on a Norfolk beach in 1941 after returning badly shot-up from Berlin: “I clearly remember the complete silence as we went down. Both engines were gone and the rest of the crew never spoke.” His next memory was of finding himself at a psychiatric hospital at Matlock in Derbyshire, from whence he was posted back to a bomber station, automatically demoted in rank. “I was unfit for flying duties, and no one seemed to know what to do with me. All they could see was a Wop/air gunner walking about in a rather aimless manner, and I don’t think they ever realised I was mentally ill.”
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 percent 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 airmen 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 Peenemünde 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 the Hunstanton police station. “I hated the whole business, then.”
American airmen 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 airmen were indeed an elite, they paid a heavy price for their privileges, facing greater risks than any other combatants save infantry riflemen