Nos remerciements au Flight Lieutenant Thomas J
Maxwell DFC, du 622 Squadron de la RAF,
qui nous a donné l’autorisation de reproduire le récit de son aventure,
survenue au retour d’une mission sur Stuttgart, dans la nuit du 15 au 16 mars
1944. L’équipage, qui en était à sa sixème mission, volait à bord d’un
Lancaster Mk I, le LL828 GI-J. Quatre membres d’équipage ont réussi à s’évader,
trios ont été faits prisonniers par les Allemands. Engagé volontaire, Thomas
Maxwell n’avait alors que 19 ans. Bien qu’ayant suivi une formation de pilote,
il occupait le poste de mitrailleur arrière.
The take off, in a
Lancaster with full fuel and a full bomb load totaling anything up to 65,000
lbs+ (one third of the weight was fuel)
was not always straight
forward and the aeroplane could be wayward in strong crosswinds
The clearance to
take-off came from the Runway Caravan by a steady green Aldis lamp signal and
meant only that the aeroplane ahead was safely airborne. The usual group
of well-wishers from WAAF’s to Wing Commanders huddled together in the driving
rain and were just visible in
the green glare, the same faithful would be there up to give a “thumbs-up” what
ever the weather conditions.
'Snaking' on take
off or when taxiing may have been seen as 'normal' and 'under control' by the
pilot and other crew up front, but in
the darkness of the rear turret, sitting almost over the tail wheel it was something different! It
sometimes felt as if the tail wheel was made of wood everything at the back end
strained, banged, shook and rattled, and it was a tense hold on to everything few moments, including the stomach.
Ammunition jostled and rattled in the fuselage as the turret swayed shook and
vibrated
it was the closest
one could get to being airsick on the ground. When the tail of the aeroplane
lifted into the air one could then relax.
A 'trip' to the
southern German target of Stuttgart on October
19th 1944 had a touch of the déjà vu about it, well not so much
a touch, more of a gnawing
apprehension, compared to the previous visit. This was my third visit to this engineering city which
produced diesel engines for enemy Tanks
and U Boats etc.
The times taken to
get to the same target and back to base would nearly always be similar if
one was to navigate as the crow flies, but it was never like that. Targets were
reached and bombed from various compass points. Bombers were routed sometimes
towards ‘spoof ‘ targets and then turned away towards the intended area.
Sometimes a mission would be flown towards a specific target, then flown past
only to return from a different and hopefully unsuspected heading, hoping if
nothing else to confuse the enemy defences on the ground.
Constant
adjustment to planned tracks was the Navigators task because of
head or tail winds, forecast or
not, engine malfunctions, airframe
icing, known flak areas, or new ones ,searchlights and evasive action and not forgetting 'Gremlins’
Gremlins were wee
fellas, like Pixies, and they were invisible. They could get into everything
and cause terrible trouble. Their
current equivalents would be called bugs or glitches.
The Bomb-Aimer
often sat in the right hand seat beside the pilot , if a second or screen pilot
wasn't carried. On this Gremlin
occasion both the navigator and the pilot were getting edgy because of apparently unnecessary and too
frequent track deviations called dog legs (if a delay was needed, or cutting a
corner if behind time).
The navigator could
not understand it, and the pilot swore that he was flying the headings
precisely as instructed. Known pinpoints were not where they should have been
or were being reached late or too early. The atmosphere up front was not normal
and a bit tense. The intercom provided the running commentary and it appeared
that 'time on target' was going to be a hit or miss affair. Someone asked if
the compass had been “swung” recently.
Bombing too
early or late brought additional
hazards and being a 'straggler' was not recommended.
The navigation
errors were ultimately resolved when the pilot remarked to the bomb-aimer
'What's that?' pointing to his left boot. The bomb-aimer had been sitting since
take off with a heavy metal torch stuck down the side of his left flying boot
virtually within inches of the P4 compass. The air was a dark shade of blue for
a short period. Gremlins had obviously put this metal object in the flying boot
near the compass when the owner wasn't looking.
The three ops to
Stuttgart in my logbook are logged in red ink as follows (all night flying was
entered into crew logbooks in red and day flying in black):
March 1st
7 hrs 30 mins:
March 15th 6 hrs 10 mins: October 19th 7 hrs 10 mins
The difference in
over an hour for the March 15th trip is significant for two reasons.
The time of 6 hrs 10 mins was entered in a strange
hand and the logbook was annotated: 'FAILED TO
RETURN.
The thing about
bailing out, in total darkness at
night, from a crippled aircraft or
splashing your 25 ton Lancaster into a raging sea swell was that you didn’t get any practice lessons beforehand, so it
was a bit of a new thing. The nearest one got was about a year before was
jumping off the top diving board in the warm water and brightly lit baths in
Brighton in a flying suit and
Mae West.
Then the water had loads of noisy laughter and PT life-saving instructors to help if one got into difficulty.
It was 1.30 in the
morning and pitch black, the top board was about 8 000 feet vibrating and
descending rapidly, and spewing fuel and oil from ruptured fuel tanks. No friendly life-savers etc, but the
reality that our fuel was being
exhausted even faster than calculated
had now replaced the 'ditching' idea and bailing- out, (and pretty soon at that) was the only option
left. We, or certainly I was
already well into a personal
life preservation situation.
I was personally totally disenchanted when the channel rowing
exercise in total darkness was muted as a possibility.
I never found the
idea of hitting the English Channel at 100 mph
in total darkness ,with sea and swell conditions unknown, and with an
indeterminate amount of fuel, to be in
the least ,appealing. The idea did
nothing for my morale at all. My lack of
enthusiasm for swimming, anywhere, but
especially in the dark would appear to have been quite realistic.
Six of the crew all landed in an area 40 miles North east of
Rouen and all reasonably close, within a kilometre or so of each other, but
they left the aircraft I was
already on the way down some 20 kilometres further back, representing several
minutes. The reason for their delay
will never be known, but after 57 years almost to the day it has just been established that the
aeroplane crashed within a couple of miles from where some of the crew were
taken POW[1].
Of the four who
returned to England on May 22 nd on a DC3 from Gibraltar to Bristol
(Whitchurch)
I only met up later with Peter Jezzard. Both of us returned to operational flying with
our original Squadron 622, Peter finishing his 'tour' in November 1944 on 35 'trips' and myself on 32, finishing on New Years Day 1945.
Emergency exit from
the Lancaster was usually made from either the front escape hatch or the main
entrance door. The procedure when leaving from the rear door was to dive out
with your head down to avoid hitting the tail plane (I was definitely there
and awake the day they told us that),
but there were a lot of ‘if’s and buts’. To exit by the main door was going to
take time, which I/we didn't have, and
I was just as much averse to queuing as swimming I was quickly getting my wits together Get the parachute! Quick glance! Yes its there in the fuselage, an arm’s length away Okay,
open turret doors and hope they don't jam (they sometimes did) that's it - drag the chute carefully
into the turret (it wouldn't have been the first time a parachute had accidentally deployed inside an aircraft) -
consternation ! there's no room to put
it on. This situation wasn’t in the design
and Hey! You know your lower
harness is loose, well you cant do
anything about it now so get on! rotate the turret 90 degrees, otherwise you'll
be bailing out into the fuselage.
I flew sometimes
with lower parachute harness straps
loose because
The systems and the
training were working ok , but they
didn’t tell us there was no room to get the chute onto the harness inside the
turret, with the turret now at right angles to the fuselage, the slipstream
gale was grabbing, tearing and tugging
at the flapping parachute back pack,
the spewing fuel whipping past me and there was nothing now but Hobsons Choice,
go back into the pitch black fuselage or stick your rear end into
This 120 knot growling wind. They always used phrases like keep a cool head, its dead easy, it’s a piece
of cake don’t worry, its dead easy I was thinking what’s all this dead
stuff ? I’m only nineteen maybe they knew something and didn’t tell,
and I wondered how many times they had ever been in this situation. I didn’t want to know about dead but I did know this wasn’t
easy . There was no spare space. I
had one parachute hook engaged but with the ‘chute’ at 45 degrees. The gun sight and controls were blocking any
progress to get close to the remaining clip engaged. I edged an inch or two into the howling blackness and just as I
was about to make fast the other parachute
clip I was gone! A sharp chug
that felt like a broken neck reminded me about the helmet and intercom lead,
and I tumbled into the night clutching
the parachute in my left arm
When they told us that bailing-out was dead
easy . Its that dead bit again and they said count 'seventy-one, seventy-two seventy.' So that
you wouldn’t hit some part of the aeroplane, or its trailing aerial stupid I thought there’s nothing behind me but blackness. Almost immediately after the Indian neck
massage I pulled the D ring (rip cord)
in the only knowledge that Long John Silver managed with one hook and one was better than none. Life is simplified when there are no
options. The crunch as the drag-chute
came out and parachute 'woofed' into it's canopy above was great to feel, and
it felt that I was being taken back up. I did say 'thanks'. The dangling harness strap found its
mark
The loose harness
caught more than my breath but the fear
that I was spinning brought an added urgency to the situation as I tried to
turn myself in the opposite direction. To this day I don't know whether I
pulled myself up to the pack and hooked it or I pulled the parachute down
towards me, but I was relieved that I was now descending in a more controlled
manner with both parachute hooks now firmly in place. Adrenaline achieves great things. It is easy now in old age
to make light of some of the , what was it ? It wasn’t fear or terror,
more awe, consternation or dread.
All of this
sequence - from the moment I aligned the rear turret with the fuselage, reached
for the parachute until now when I began for the first time to feel safe, seems, as I write, to have taken ages. In
fact it the whole sequence of events
could not have taken more than half a
minute.
Many things were
going in and out of the brain so quickly - but a recurring apprehension of becoming impaled on a church spire,
landing in a river lake or a reservoir ( it was that swimming thing again)
marshy ground or getting hung up on some tall building or electricity pylons or
wires. You had to think of something and I was a born pessimist. As I was falling I was oddly glad of the
darkness. I was definitely thinking that I should have gone to church more
often, or even occasionally -but I would fix it ,and that I should have written
home more often. I will put that right as well, I promise!
Things were
definitely better now, and I must be down to about 3000 feet or so, onwards
downwards nicely. There was just a bit of moonlight now, and instead of being
rent by the roof of some French Parish church, or drowning in somebody’s
swimming pool, I was dumped
unceremoniously into a ploughed field and a relatively soft landing.
I felt nauseous and wished I had
tolerated the tighter parachute
harness.
There was moonlight now It was mid-March in 1944, still a bit frosty
in the early morning it was about 0140
and the piles of manure were in the fields ready for spreading
There is a saying: "It matters not whether you're in the
***t or out of it, it's only the depth
that varies."
At this point, I
was quite happy to be 'in it'.
The territory was
enemy but the ground smelt fresh and friendly in the early hours. Two days later I was told by my French
helpers that there was a German garrison just
500 metres away from where I landed.
37 Broken and bent
Lancasters and Halifaxes were lying on the ground scattered about Germany and France that night - lost as were many many young lives. I reflected on my situation some
days later and how things might have
subsequently turned out for us. I was told by the French Family who
sheltered me, and took great risks in doing so
that Nurnberg had been bombed and
97 aircraft of Bomber Command
had been lost. I thought how
lucky I was.
I returned to
Stuttgart again seven months later and though not uneventful, this trip was by comparison dead easy
.
© Thomas J Maxwell
DFC
Dedicated to the Memory of
Warrant Officer Peter Jezzard DFM
(Wireless Operator of LL828)
who died
5th April 1948
when his Wellington crashed into
the North Sea
If anyone has any information
about the loss of Wellington XR504 please email me
Postscript:
Looking back now some 60 years
later , If asked would I do it all again ?
My answer would be NO! let the politicians who
invent wars, DO IT.
Le Lancaster
:
Utilisé en
masse par le Bomber Command (7356 exemplaires construits), le Lancaster, assure
l’essentiel des missions de bombardement sur l’Allemagne. Il est, de par ses
dimensions, comparable au B 17 américain, mais ses capacités d’emport sont bien
supérieures : jusqu’à 11 tonnes. En revanche, son plafond est
inférieur : 24 500 pieds contre 35 000 pieds pour le B 17.
La motorisation est assurée par 4 moteurs V 12 à refroidissement liquide,
ces mêmes Rolls Royce Merlin qui équipent les chasseurs Hurricane et Spitfire.
L’équipage est composé de 7 hommes : 1 pilote; 1 bombardier, 1 navigateur,
1 opérateur radio, 1 mécanicien et 2 mitrailleurs. De tous les postes, c’est
sans doute celui de mitrailleur arrière qui est le moins enviable.
Particulièrement exposé, il se trouve confiné dans une tourelle exigue, n’ayant
avec le reste de l’équipage, d’autre lien que l’interphone Il doit lutter
contre un froid paralysant : à 7 000 m d’altitude, la température
extérieure descend en-dessous de – 30° C. C’est pourquoi il porte une
combinaison et des gants chauffants. Les missions durent en moyenne plus de 7
heures, dont au minimum 5 heures de vol en altitude, pendant lesquelles l’ équipage
doit supporter le froid, et porter le masque à oxygène.
Autres sources
Le pilote, Peter Thomson, qui a été fait prisonnier, a publié son récit The
Ides of March 1944 dans Silk and Barbed Wire.- Perth (Australia) :
Royal Air Force Ex-Prisonners of War Association, 2000., p. 202-221.
Lejeune-Pichon, Jocelyne.- Nous combattons de nuit au Squadron
622 : RAF Bomber Command 1943-1945.- J. Lejeune-Pichon (17 place des
Halles, 78910 Orgerus, France), 2000.
[1] Le Lancaster LL 828 GIJ a poursuivi sa route et
s’est écrasé dans le Bois du Château de
Beaulieu, sur le territoire de la commune de Lannoy-Cuillère (Oise).