Great Britain. Royal Air Force - Bomber County

Bomber County

DANIEL SWIFT

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

HAMISH HAMILTON

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First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010

First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2010

Copyright Daniel Swift, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Muse des Beaux Arts, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The papers of Flying Officer Frank Blackman, by kind permission of Mr Philip Mileham. The papers of Sergeant John Riley Byrne, by kind permission of Mr John Johnson. Excerpts from The Firebombing, taken from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 194592 by James Dickey, copyright James Dickey, 1992. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Excerpts from Little Gidding, from Collected Poems, 19091962 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts from Eighth Air Force, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Losses, Second Air Force and The Lines, taken from The Complete Poems by Randall Jarrell, copyright 1969, renewed 1997 by Mary von S. Jarrell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from The Collected Letters of Wilfred Owen, edited by Harold Owen and John Bell (1967), by permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpt from For Johnny by John Pudney, reprinted by permission of the Estate of John Pudney. Excerpts from The Air Raid across the Bay, Thoughts during an Air Raid, Rejoice in the Abyss and Responsibility: The Pilots Who Destroyed Germany, Spring 1945, taken from New Collected Poems by Stephen Spender, copyright 2004. Reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Stephen Spender. Excerpts from A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London, Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred and And Death Shall Have No Dominion, from Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas; and a letter to Vernon Watkins dated summer 1940, taken from Collected Letters by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Dylan Thomas.

The following have been reprinted with permission as chapter-head images: (1) The Library, Holland House, Kensington, London, 1940, reproduced by permission of English Heritage, NMR; (2) Trainee Airmen, 11 OTU , no. 25 course, courtesy of The National Archives, ref. AIIR 29/644; (3) Preparations for a Raid Over Hamburg, used with the permission of The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London ( CH .10712); (4) Sketch, copyright Edward Ardizzone, 1974, from Diary of a War Artist, first published by the Bodley Head, permission granted by the artists estate; (5) Bomb Damage, St Pauls, 1940, copyright Cecil Beaton (190480), courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sothebys; (6) RAF Bomber Pilots Dashboard, used with the permission of The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London ( CH .10708); (7) James Eric Swift and Jeremy Swift, 1943.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-14-195963-4

For my father

Can you read all this my writing my dear is getting worse and worse. Doing too much writing flying I expect.

James Eric Swift, 16 June 1941

No war poetry can be expected from the Royal Air Force.

Robert Graves, 23 October 1941

The beach where the body washed up is wide and white, with cafs raised on stilts and couples drinking beer in the sand. There are windsurfers; children smacking the waves. He came to land in the middle of a summer holiday, and the mismatch is startling after the calm of the cemeteries where my father and I have spent the day. We buy ice creams in Callantsoog, the mall of a town that leads from the beach, and climb the high dunes.

Ice creams are ijscoupes in Dutch. My father and I keep on our shoes as we walk on the sand, although we are surrounded by swimming costumes. There are promisingly sombre and warlike defences, great lines of black granite stretching out into the sea, and we marvel at them for a moment. What we are doing on the beach is looking for the memory of a corpse. But there is no sense of him here for there is no sense of debt. These are happy holidaymakers, and they are turning leisurely away.

The cemeteries scattered along the strange curve of land that is Noord-Holland are rich with duty. He died that we may live, read so many of the gravestones, and the visitors books are a chorus of insistent remembrance. We will not forget you, the visitors write. On these hot days in June we are alone in the cemeteries.

In the first week of June 2007, my father and I took a trip. We went to Holland for an imperfectly marked anniversary, for on 12 June sixty-four years earlier my grandfather, my fathers father, was killed. He was the pilot of a Lancaster bomber on a raid on Mnster, and his plane never returned. Rather, his body washed up on a beach in Holland, and is buried there today.

Of the fall, little is known. The letter from the Air Ministry to my grandmother explains that his body was found at Callantsoog on 17 June 1943, and two days later buried at Huisduinen cemetery. In 1946, the corpse was disinterred and moved a hundred miles south, to Bergen op Zoom. There were six other men on the plane. On 14 August 1943, the body of Sergeant J. J. Anderton washed ashore twelve miles south, at Bergen aan Zee. Anderton was the rear gunner on the Lancaster; the bodies of the five remaining crew members were never found. All we had was a date and a place, so we went to look and to work out what these words meant, the strange Dutch names with too many vowels.

We start in Brussels and drive north. The landscape is washed out; there is not very much of it, here. Holland is so flat that it looks like an airfield, and this effect is deepened by its most striking characteristic, the great new windmills, each a hundred feet high with huge white propellers. The plain of reclaimed land, sea-flat, round the archipelago of Zeeland leads to the spike of Noord-Holland, stretching north of Rotterdam. On one side is the North Sea, and the other is the IJsselmeer, the inland sea.