The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany

Then the day came that the whole family dreaded: the day of Cyril’s return to active service. Joyce always walked him to the station hand in hand. As they stood awkwardly outside the entrance, Cyril noticed the state of her nails. ‘I think you ought to use that manicure set more often, don’t you?’ He smiled. When he had arrived back from the USA two years before, he had brought Cynthia a gold watch and Joyce a gold-plated manicure set in a green leather case. It was one of her most treasured possessions.

The Pantons’ small stone gamekeeper’s cottage in Old Bolingbroke, Lincolnshire, was less than a mile away from RAF East Kirkby, the home of two Bomber Command squadrons, so the deafening roar of 3,000 rpm Merlin engines provided the soundtrack for 13-year-old Fred Panton and his younger brother Harold’s everyday life. The boys ran down the hill with rising excitement whenever they heard them, and stood with the other onlookers on the main road adjoining the runway as the lumbering machines, fully bombed up, strained to get airborne.

The pilots and flight engineers at their side always stared straight ahead, eyes fixed on the task of getting the aircraft safely off the ground, but the mid-upper and tail-end gunners often wiggled their guns to acknowledge the crowd.

Fred and 10-year-old Harold watched and waited until the bombers had gathered above them, and would not go home until they were just grey dots in the distance. Much later, the shadows of the returning planes would flit across their bedroom wall. Sometimes they were so close that Fred could make out the eerie glow cast by the instruments in the cockpit.

When the sky was silent once more, they wondered whether their big brother would be joining that night’s raid. Nineteen-year-old Chris was a flight engineer with 433 Squadron at Skipton-on-Swale, part of a maverick crew that included a Danish-born volunteer from the USA called Chris Nielsen and several Canadians. Despite his youth, Chris was already well on his way to becoming an officer and nearing the 30 ops that signalled the end of a tour. He still had dreams of being a pilot. There had been some close calls. On one trip the hydraulics on their bomb- and fuel-laden Halifax had failed on take-off, so the undercarriage and flaps would not retract. They were struggling to gain enough height to clear an oncoming hill, so Chris pumped furiously on the manual controls. They regained enough hydraulic pressure just in time to ensure the bomber cleared the hill. All on board were stunned into silence. Except for Nielsen. ‘It’s OK,’ he said in a bored American drawl. ‘I’ve got it.’

The two boys lived for the times he came back on leave. With eight children in their cramped cottage, Fred and Chris had to share a bed. Fred was always bursting with questions as they lay there, listening to the bombers return, but Chris would only talk about his experiences to their father, a veteran of the First World War. Fred sometimes heard the rumble of their conversation, but could never make out what they were saying.

Fred and Harold joined their older brother on rabbit-hunting expeditions (Chris had trained as a gamekeeper, aiming to follow in his father’s footsteps), but what he had seen and done in the skies above Germany was never discussed then either. For a few precious moments the war seemed a lifetime away, and they didn’t want to bring it rushing back. Watching the planes come and go, wave after wave, night after night, Fred knew the dangers they faced. He and Harold often visited crash sites once the bodies of the crewmen had been removed, and just stared, transfixed, at the twisted, smoking metal carcasses.

But finally, that winter’s evening, he could contain his curiosity no more. ‘Don’t you worry about crashing?’

There was a pause. ‘Not really,’ Chris replied casually. ‘It’d just be further experience.’2

His brother’s insouciance astounded Fred. He longed to know more, but didn’t dare ask. He didn’t dare ask his father either. Their late-night chats were man’s talk, to be shared only by those who had experienced the realities of war.

Once, when Chris had been home on leave, Fred had slipped on his big brother’s RAF jacket, trying to imagine what it was like to be him. His father caught him red-handed. ‘Don’t you be going out that door with that on,’ he’d said sternly. In his dad’s eyes, Fred hadn’t earned the right.

The questions would have to wait for another time, hopefully not too far off, when Chris’s tour – and the war – were over.

Alan Payne, a bomb aimer with 630 Squadron, was part of one of the crews Fred and Harold had seen straining to take off at East Kirkby. On the early evening of 29 March, Alan was preparing to leave his parents’ home in Wendover. He gave his mother a final cheery wave before putting on his helmet and climbing on to his motorbike.

For the entire week they had not spoken once about his experiences with Bomber Command. They never asked and he never told them, and that suited him just fine. He knew the truth would only upset them and cause them to worry even more than they already did.

The rain started to pour as he saddled up. It was going to be a long ride back to East Kirkby in this weather. While he felt the usual sadness of leaving his loved ones, at least he was returning to his surrogate family. Alan and his crew, like so many others in Bomber Command, were tight. They spent all their time together, more often than not at The Red Lion in nearby Revesby. And while they sank their pints, their conversations, like those with his real family, rarely turned to war. They knew all too well that young men like them were being lost every night, in ever-increasing numbers, during the winter of 1943–44. But they kept those thoughts at bay as they laughed and joked around the bar. The prospect of death never weighed heavily on Alan. He always felt there was a gap in the sky where he and his crew would find safety

The rain hammered down and the wind howled around his ears as Alan tore up the A1. He headed straight for the Peacock Hotel in Boston, where, sopping wet, he found time for a couple of pints before catching a bus to the camp, where Pat was waiting for him. She was a young Geordie girl who served the crews’ meals in the mess, and they had been courting for a few weeks; she had joined him and his crew at the pub so often she had almost become their eighth member. They had a quick chat and then it was time to get out of his wet clothes, unpack his bag and get some sleep.3

Tomorrow was 30 March. Yet another day at the cutting edge of Bomber Command.

CHAPTER 2

Sowing the Wind

Rusty Waughman

On a Sunday evening in December 1940, in the middle of the Blitzkrieg, Sir Arthur Harris, then the Air Ministry’s Deputy Chief of Air Staff, stood on the roof of his Kingsway HQ. Around him, German aircraft rained incendiaries on the nation’s capital. The City was a sea of flame; only the luminous dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rose from it untouched.

He called for Air Marshal Charles Portal, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, to share the terrible sight. As the two men watched London burn, oblivious to the threat to their own safety, ‘Bomber’ Harris felt the first stirrings of vengefulness. ‘They are sowing the wind,’ he muttered.4

By March 1944, at least according to Harris, the German forces, and their civilian population, were reaping the whirlwind. He was now Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command and a fervent believer – along with Winston Churchill – in the effectiveness of area bombing. Harris believed the most efficient path to victory was to raze Germany’s biggest cities to the ground, obliterate the enemy’s capacity to equip its forces, and destroy the morale of its people.

He believed that the long-range bomber had fundamentally altered the nature of warfare. He had flown over the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendaele during his service in the Royal Flying Corps and had no time for those whose outdated views he remained convinced would lead to a reprise of the mass slaughter of the First World War.

‘If the ancient and ivory-headed warriors are permitted to have their way, another one to six million of the flower of the youth of this under-populated country, and of America, will be unnecessarily massacred in proving for the second time that these Ancient Soldiers and Mariners were wrong. It is but cold comfort to realise in the circumstances that not only is the Bomber the only thing that can win the War for us, but that it is going to win the War for us eventually, in spite of all the procrastinations and futile diversions which the old battle-horses are determining to stage in the interim.’5

Harris acknowledged the many dissenters: those who believed it was morally wrong to bomb strategic cities rather than focus on purely industrial and military targets. He was also acutely aware of the toll his strategy was taking on his young crews. But he knew too that since the Luftwaffe had killed thousands of civilians and destroyed vast swathes of London, Coventry, Liverpool and Bristol, the opposition to area bombing had become less strident.

Even though Harris’s tactics were by no means universally popular, and despite the enormous losses they were suffering on a daily basis, the remarkable young men whose duty it was to carry out his orders had great faith in their Commander-in-Chief. To them he was always ‘Butch’ and never ‘Bomber’ Harris. Dick Starkey, a Lancaster pilot, remembers a lecture he gave at a local school after the war: ‘One of the children asked me if I regretted what I did. I said that I was proud of my contribution. I regret the death and the suffering, but I’m not sorry. I think the criticism of Bomber Command is terrible, because we were doing a job that had to be done at the time and there was nobody else to do it. We were fighting the Nazi enemy when no one else could.’6

Ever since Dunkirk, aerial bombardment was one of the ways Britain could signal to its allies and its own citizens that she intended to stay in the fight and carry it to the Germans. But by the winter of 1943 Harris was no longer interested in sending signals. He finally had the technology and fire-power at his disposal that he believed would bring hostilities to an end, in the shape of an aircraft designed to transport vast amounts of explosive over long distances while offering its crew hitherto unavailable levels of protection: the Avro Lancaster.

In 1942 Harris had inherited 400 front-line bombers, nowhere near enough to carry out his planned offensive. He increased production immediately and within a few months could call on a new range of four-engine heavy bombers such as the Stirling and Halifax, with a far greater range and ordinance than their twin-engine predecessors. But it was the arrival of the Lancaster that convinced Harris he could now press for a decisive victory.

The Lancaster boasted a 33-foot bomb bay which enabled it to carry the 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ bomb, capable of creating a shockwave that could devastate large areas of buildings. With further modifications, it would hold the 12,000-pound ‘Tallboy’, capable of penetrating 100 feet into the ground before exploding, and, by the latter stages of the war, the 22,000-pound Grand Slam, the most destructive weapon available before the invention of the atomic bomb.

The Stirling, in the process of being phased out of frontline service, could only carry a 14,000-pound bomb load. After overcoming some early concerns about its performance, the destructive power of the Halifax was still hampered by its sectional bomb bay. And despite its huge payload, the Lancaster handled much more easily than its unwieldy predecessors, a telling advantage over heavily defended targets or when evading night fighters, especially for inexperienced personnel.

Lancaster crews felt they could rely upon their aircraft more than any other. The Mark I and Mark II Halifax had a tendency to go into uncontrollable spins at low speeds through a lack of rudder response, and though the Mark III was a fine aircraft, much loved by those who flew it, a new Lancaster was definitely a step up. The Lancaster offered reassurance. ‘It was a beautiful aircraft to fly,’ Dick Starkey says, ‘a pilot’s aeroplane. It handled very lightly, could reach 22,000 feet fully loaded, and even maintain height on two engines … It had no vices, except for a slight swing to port on take-off, and was nearly impossible to stall.’

Rusty Waughman, a pilot with 101 Squadron, called the aircraft the Queen of the Sky. ‘If the Lanc looked somewhat menacing and clumsy on the ground, she was quite a different picture in the air. Compared with modern machines she was rather crude, but efficiently laid out … Aircrew, particularly the pilots, had every faith in the Lanc; very seldom did anything go drastically wrong due to faulty design. In fact, she was often flown in states of damage that were, I’m sure, beyond imaginable limits.’7

They were also equipped with the latest navigational aids, essential for deep, penetrative raids over heavily guarded German territory. Before the introduction of the Ground Electronics Engineering (GEE) system, navigators had to depend on ‘dead reckoning’ – following a set course and compensating periodically for the disrupting effect of the wind. But as wind speed and direction were often inaccurately forecast and fluctuated wildly during an operation, they regularly found themselves some distance from their intended target. The GEE system picked up electronic signals pulsed from England and displayed them on a small, black cathode-ray screen on the navigator’s table. Though the curvature of the earth rendered the reading less accurate the further they got from base, interpreting these blips and entering them into specially created GEE charts allowed a navigator to fix their current position with greater accuracy.

At the briefing before his first operational flight with XV Squadron Mildenhall, Chick Chandler was told to ‘throw out Window one-a-minute, then two-a-minute 40 miles from the target’. When he asked what ‘Window’ was, one of his engineers showed him the thin strips of foil designed to ‘bugger up the enemy’s radar’.8 The metallic strips were designed to reflect German radar signals, disrupting the picture the operators received on their screens and making the bombers more difficult to track.

Once his Lancaster was high above the channel en route to Mannheim, Chick started to carry out what he took to be his instructions, but didn’t realise that ‘one a minute’ meant one bundle. Instead he threw out one solitary strip – not even enough to register a single blip on the enemy screens, let alone turn them into an incomprehensible snowstorm, under cover of which the bomber stream could approach the target without detection.

And in order to concentrate the maximum amount of firepower in the shortest possible time, the bombers would leave their bases across eastern England and form up over the North Sea. They were each given a height and a time slot designed to minimise the chances of collision. The entire stream, once assembled, could be anything up to 70 miles long.

As January 1944 dawned, despite only having completed a third of their tour, flight engineer Jack Watson’s crew was the second most experienced on XII Squadron. This was a bad omen: on recent raids the crew with the second highest number of ops to their name had gone missing. This sense of foreboding might explain why, as the snow crunched beneath Jack’s feet on his way to a briefing in Wickenby for a raid on Stuttgart, he experienced ‘the most uncanny feeling I have ever experienced in my life. I knew that if we didn’t leave XII Squadron, we wouldn’t survive. We went into the briefing, we did the trip, we got back and the next morning we were called into the flight office. The Flight Commander said, “You have got two options: you can either volunteer for the Pathfinder Force or we will send you,” so we volunteered. From then on I was quite convinced that all the time I was with that crew we were safe.’9

To enhance the accuracy of the bomber stream, a special force had been created to find and mark the target. Manned by crews of the calibre of Jack Watson’s, the Pathfinders flew ahead of the main force in Lancasters and Mosquitoes. Their very existence was initially a source of tension within Bomber Command. Harris feared that they would drain his squadrons of their best men, and thus also drain their morale – and he believed his bombers were accurate enough without them. His protests, however, failed to dent the determination of the forthright Australian, Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett.

Bennett was a former operational pilot who had been shot down while trying to bomb the Tirpitz, the iconic German warship, but had escaped from Norway and returned to England to continue his war. His desire to be in the thick of it never deserted him. Even when he was appointed the Pathfinder chief, he sometimes waved his crews off and then took to the skies himself to orbit the target. When they returned from a raid to be debriefed, he would be waiting for them, often more aware of what had happened than they were.

Bennett’s candour was as renowned as his brilliance as a pilot and navigator. Harris, who knew a thing or two about blunt speaking, once said of the Australian: ‘[He] could not suffer fools gladly, and by his own high standards there had been many fools.’10 As his campaign wore on, Harris reassessed his earlier scepticism; the Pathfinders became a much-valued part of his strategy, and Bennett a loyal if perennially outspoken member of his command.

By March 1944 the Pathfinder Force under Bennett’s control consisted of seven Lancaster squadrons, five Mosquito squadrons and the Meteorological Flight. Many aircraft had been fitted with two bespoke items of navigational equipment. Oboe, like GEE, was fed by electronic signals transmitted from England to guide the aircraft to the aiming point; H2S was a radar set that gave the navigator a rough picture of the terrain over which they were flying, giving the crew an even greater level of accuracy in position fixing and target location.

Emboldened by these technological and tactical advances, Harris launched an all-out attack on Hamburg in August 1943. During the course of four raids over 10 nights, Bomber Command dropped nearly 11,000 tons of bombs on Germany’s second largest city and biggest port: 22 pounds of explosives for each of its 1.75 million residents. The last operation, codenamed Gomorrah, caused a firestorm so severe that it was reported to have melted glass in windows, while ‘sugar boiled in bakery cellars and people escaping from underground shelters on to the streets were trapped in quagmires of molten asphalt’.11 The death toll was more than 40,000, and approximately a million people fled the city. Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments, advised Hitler that another six raids of similar scale and destructive power on other major cities would lose them the war.

Harris was unaware of Speer’s assessment, but he knew the raid had struck a severe blow to German morale. He increased the number and the intensity of their attacks, and turned his gaze in November 1943 towards Berlin. The series of raids he launched on the ‘Big City’ marked the start of a relentless onslaught designed to crush German resistance once and for all. He was so confident that a winter of ferocious bombing would bring the Germans to their knees that he set a date for victory: 1 April 1944.

The night of 18 November 1943 saw the first raid of what became known as the Battle of Berlin. It was swiftly followed by two more before the end of the month. Their combined death toll was 4,330, and more than 400,000 people were forced from their homes. ‘Hell seems to have broken loose over us,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary.

The Germans were forced to reorganise their defences and alter their tactics. On the first Berlin raid, 2 per cent of the bomber stream had been lost, only nine Lancasters. A month later, on 16 December, that figure rose to 9.3 per cent, a total of 55 bombers. Some crews began to dread the afternoon briefings – the revelation that the evening’s target was to be the Big City. As the losses mounted, so did the demand for replacement crews. On 23 December, Harry Evans, a navigator with 550 Squadron, was sent there on his first operation. He was initially stood down that evening while his crew was shared across the squadron as stand-ins for members of other crews who had fallen ill or were unable to fly. An hour before take-off that plan was scratched; Harry and his crew were told they were going together. ‘I’d missed briefing so I had to rush to get my pre-flight log and chart prepared. I raced to the aircraft, which was waiting at the end of the runway with its engines running.’12 Harry tried to run across the tarmac, but his flying suit and boots, ‘Mae West’ lifejacket and parachute harness, large satchel, sextant and flying helmet (complete with oxygen mask and intercom lead) meant that he could barely walk. He was almost blown over by the slipstream, then ‘the pilot throttled back the two starboard engines and the mid-upper gunner helped to haul me aboard and we roared down the runway before I even had time to get to my desk’.

Harry Evans (front left) and crew

When they were finally airborne, one of their gunners saw a blinding flash of light to one side of them. Two aircraft from their squadron had collided – the two that most of Harry’s crew would have been on if the original plan had remained in place. The margin between life and death in Bomber Command was small, and luck and chance were often the defining factors.

Harry and his crew flew on to Berlin. ‘It was as black as black. The only light came from the odd flash of machine-gun fire as gunners tested their weapons, or the red-hot glow of an exhaust stub from one of the other bombers around us. Up front the phosphorescent dials on the engineer’s panels cast a glow so bright that I feared it might be visible to enemy aircraft. No chance of that with the green blips on my GEE set. There were none. It had been jammed by the enemy.’

Few words were said as they flew over mainland Europe. All eyes apart from Harry’s and his pilot’s were scanning the night sky for fighters. Around 50 miles from Berlin a bank of searchlights swept across the sky, aiming to ‘cone’ a British bomber, so that it was caught in the beams of all the searchlights in a battery below. For the men on board it was as if they had moved from a dark room into blinding sunshine. The brightness over the target was intensified by the Pathfinders’ marker flares and the fires rampaging where the leading aircraft had already dropped their bombs. Harry thought: ‘This is like going down Regent Street at night.’

Their Lancaster started to tilt and vibrate, throwing the crew around ‘as though we were travelling over a cobbled road at high speed’. This was the effect of flak – the relentless barrage of fire from 50,000 anti-aircraft guns which protected the skies around the major German cities. Often guided by radar, these ground defences blasted thousands of explosive shells skywards at the bombers as they flew towards their target. A direct hit could destroy an aircraft, and shells that exploded nearby caused them to veer and lurch as the murderous shrapnel smashed against – and often through – the fuselage. Harry thought of the 4,000 pounds of high explosive in the bomb bay just inches beneath him, and wondered what would happen if the flak scored a direct hit there. A few minutes later he had his answer: a nearby bomber erupted in a shower of flame. He watched, awe-struck, as the aircraft spun to the ground leaving a corkscrew-shaped trail of smoke behind it. Looking down at the city, Harry could see that the streets were burning too.

Once over the target, their bomb aimer gave a series of instructions to the pilot to ensure their bombs were dropped as accurately as possible. For the rest of the crew ‘the next few minutes were agony’ as they flew as straight and level as possible, desperate to give him the best chance, but feeling they were easy prey for the guns down below. The seconds felt like minutes, until the bomb aimer announced their load was gone and the aircraft lifted, freed of its burden. The pilot then brought the nose of the aircraft down and they turned and fled back into the welcoming darkness.