Bowman - Bomber Command: Reflections of War: Volume 1: Retaliation 1939: 1941

Other volumes in this series

RAF BOMBER COMMAND: REFLECTIONS OF WAR

Volume 2: Live To Die Another Day (June 1942 summer 1943)

Volume 3: Battleground Berlin (July 1943 March 1944)

Volume 4: Battles With the Nachtjagd (30/31 March September 1944)

Volume 5: Armageddon (27 September 1944 May 1945)

First Published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
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Copyright Martin W Bowman, 2011

9781783032716

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Table of Contents

We were men before a firing squad of erratic marksmen.
Kill us tonight or tomorrow night they might;
kill us by next month they could scarcely fail to do.

No Moon Tonight by Don Charlwood

Acknowledgements

Gebhard Aders; Harry Andrews DFC; Frau Anneliese Autenrieth; Mrs Dorothy Bain; Gnther Bahr; Charlie Jock Baird; Harry Barker; Irene Barrett-Locke; Raymond V Base; Don Bateman; Steve Beale; A D Don Beatty; Jack Bennett; Andrew Bird; Peter Bone; Alfons Borgmeier; Jack Bosomworth; Len Browning; Don Bruce; George Burton; Jim Burtt-Smith ; Maurice Butt; Philip J Camp DFM; City of Norwich Aviation Museum (CONAM); Bob Collis; Jim Coman; B G Cook; John Cook DFM; Rupert Tiny Cooling; Dennis Cooper; Ray Corbett; Coen Cornelissen; Leslie Cromarty DFM; Tom Cushing; Hans-Peter Dabrowski; Rob de Visser; Dr. Karl Drscheln; J Alan Edwards; Wolfgang Falck; David G Fellowes; Elwyn D Fieldson DFC; Karl Fischer; Sren C Flensted; Vitek Formanek; Stanley Freestone; Ian Frimston; Prof. Dr Ing. Otto H Fries; Air Vice Marshal D J Furner CBE DFC AFC; Ken Gaulton; Jim George; Margery Griffiths, Chairman, 218 Gold Coast Squadron Association; Group Captain J R Benny Goodman DFC* AFC AE; Alex H Gould DFC; Hans Grohmann; Charles Hall; Steve Hall; Jack F Hamilton; Eric Hammel; Erich Handke; James Harding; Frank Harper; Leslie Hay; Gerhard Heilig; Bob Hilliard; Peter C Hinchliffe; Neville Hockaday RNZAF; Werner Red Hoffmann; Ted Howes DFC; Air Commodore Peter Hughes DFC; John Anderson Hurst; Zdenek Hurt; Ab A Jansen; Karl-Ludwig Johanssen; Wilhelm Wim Johnen; Arthur Johnnie Johnson; John B Johnson; Graham B Jones; Hans-Jrgen Jrgens; Erich Kayser; George Kelsey DFC; Les King; Christian Kirsch; Hans Krause; Reg Lawton; J R Lisgo; Chas Lockyer; Gnther Lomberg; Peter Loncke; George Luke; Ian McLachlan; Nigel McTeer; B L Eric Mallett RCAF; Len Manning; The Honourable Terence Mansfield; Eric Masters; Bernard Max Meyer DFC; Cyril Miles; Colin Moir; Frank Mouritz; Friedrich Ostheimer; Maurice S Paff; Simon Parry; Path Finder Association; Wing Commander David Penman DSO OBE DFC; Richard Perkins; Peter Petrick; Karl-Georg Pfeiffer; Eric Phillips; Vic Poppa; John Price; Stan Reed; Ernie Reynolds; Peter Richard; Albert E Robinson; Heinz Rkker; Squadron Leader Geoff Rothwell DFC; Fritz Rumpelhardt; David M Russell; Kees Rijken; Eric Sanderson; Klaus J Scheer; Dr. Dieter Schmidt-Barbo; Karl-Heinz Schoenemann; Jerry Scutts; Johan Schuurman; Group Captain Jack Short; Leslie R Sidwell; Don L Simpkin; SAAF Assn; Albert Spelthahn; Dr Ing. Klaus Th. Spies; Dick Starkey; Squadron Leader Hughie Stiles; Mike Taff Stimson; Ted Strange DFC; Maurice Stoneman; Ken Sweatman; Paul Todd; Fred Tunstall DFC; Hille van Dieren; George Vantilt; Bob Van Wick; Andreas Wachtel; Georg Walser; David Waters; H Wilde; John Williams; H J Wilson; Henk Wilson; Geoffrey and Nick Willatt; Dennis Wiltshire; Louis Patrick Wooldridge DFC; Fred Young DFM; Cal Younger.

I am particularly grateful to my friend and colleague Theo Boiten, with whom I have collaborated on several books, for all of the information on the Nachtjagd or German night fighter forces contained herein. And, aviation historians everywhere owe a deep sense of gratitude to his and all the other valuable sources of reference listed in the end notes; in particular, those by the incomparable W R Bill Chorley, Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt and Oliver Clutton-Brock. Finally, all of the late authors books, as listed, who are beyond compare. This book is dedicated to their memory and all of the casualties in the Appendices.

PROLOGUE

Almost an Epitaph

by Irene Barrett-Locke

My two sons and grandchildren seem to have what I can only describe as a sort of second hand nostalgia for the Second World War. I have sometimes wondered why and the only conclusion I can come to is that it is similar to my own questions to my father and his friends about life in the trenches in the First World War (perhaps a yearning for a time when issues in life were simpler). Their recollections always seemed rather disjointed and I was invariably disappointed. One of my grandsons at West Point military academy in the States asked me about this and I pointed out that a RAF officers wife was hardly the person to consult on strategic matters. My own memories are equally disjointed. It would be nice to think that fifty years later my thoughts have become crystallized: that I have gained some perception or insight from living on the fringe of Bomber Command. But even today I have not reached any special conclusions and cannot provide them with a coherent version of it all. The simple fact is, it was a vivid but disjointed series of events and remains so in my mind.

I was watching one of those old black and white wartime romance films on television one night. There was a whole spate of them produced in the late forties early fifties. You know the sort of thing the chance meeting on a darkened wartime railway station, the dim lights, the elegant young woman in her pill box hat and veil pretending she is older and more sophisticated than her years. Through the steam drifting across the platform from the waiting railway engine emerges the dashing young airman. All very romantic and about the only part of the whole film I could relate to because you see that is how I met him, Daniel Angus Barrett, born 11 February 1919. He was a WOp/AG.

The next six years of my life bore very little resemblance to the rest of the film and if there were people like Jack Hawkins or Trevor Howard on aircrew then, I must have missed them, because for the most part they were quite ordinary men caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

I left my home in the Forest of Dean at seventeen in 1937 for London. The general feeling seemed to be that I was about to embark on a life of sin, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I had very little idea of what Sin entailed. Sometimes innocence is its own protection and if Sin was lurking around the corner it must have missed me altogether. London was certainly a very civilized place to be in the late thirties. Looking back on it today I find it amusing that my mothers letters to me often recounted some thoroughly lurid goings on amongst the news from Gloucestershire but would end up with severe and dire warnings about the perils of life in London. I had virtually no qualifications and the idea of learning to type or work on a switchboard did not appeal to me. One thing, which was not lost on me as a little girl from the country, was that I possessed a very pretty face and quite nice legs. It took me sometime to realize this. I traded on these assets quite ruthlessly and Im sure it is the same today, womens lib notwithstanding. (Say one thing about being over seventy, one can afford to be objective.) The net result was that I became the first dining car stewardess on the Great Western Railway. It was quite an interesting job working between Paddington and Worcester a breakthrough at the time and my picture appeared in the London papers in my smart uniform. Rather the equivalent today of becoming an air hostess.