The Squadron That Died Twice Read online

  On 26 May 1940, it was decided by the War Cabinet to evacuate the BEF by sea, along with any of the French and Belgian forces that could be saved. The order for Operation Dynamo was given at 18.57 hours.

  A couple of pontoon bridges destroyed may have delayed the German advance but next day it had reached St Omer, 20 miles from Dunkirk, and that’s where 82 and 21 Squadrons were sent, mid-afternoon on 27 May. German lorries and tanks were assembled in considerable numbers on the eastern side of St Omer, near Arques and Blendeques, and there was a likely looking warehouse, so they picked their targets and hit them. Whether the targets were really important the leaders could not have said, but the risks were clear enough, from the flak and from a flight of Me110s. When AC1 Crozier, with P/O McKenzie, saw one firing at another of his section, he banged away with no fewer than 1,000 rounds at it. ‘The Me110 half rolled and fell away into the cloud, and did not renew the encounter.’

  On the way back, crews saw Stukas dive-bombing Calais. It was by air power that the Germans expected to produce the surrender of that town, now under siege, and destroy the BEF in their last stronghold, Dunkirk.

  It was St Omer again next day at dawn, as the great embarkation began, with the BEF falling back towards the port from its defensive line. The Germans were coming from every direction, from above – although the weather and the RAF prevented them from ever claiming complete air superiority at Dunkirk – from Boulogne to the west, Ostend and Antwerp to the east, Lille to the south. The flyers of 82 picked up their fighter escort at Northolt and, crossing what was now the enemy coast, encountered enough flak to split them all up, bombers and fighters. Still, nobody went down so they could press on to attack more of the never-ending stream of armour, while Joe Hunt, now a squadron leader, could delight Fred Thripp and the long-suffering observer Sgt Bish Bareham, with a spectacularly successful, ‘thorough and accurate’ reconnaissance of the German lines from Watten to Aire.

  King Leopold of the Belgians announced their capitulation on that day, 28 May, which removed a large part of the BEF’s support to the north. As the evacuation continued, the Luftwaffe cursed the bad weather that hindered their bombing of Dunkirk, while 82 Squadron called it ‘excellent cloud cover’ for a raid deep into Belgium, on a road headed for the coast through Diksmuide and neighbouring village Esen. Frank Wyness and Walter Sutcliffe had had their medals pinned on them by King George three days before. Now Sutcliffe went in very low, wrecked a few vehicles and knocked a house down that blocked the road. They saw a single Me110 but it stood off.

  All that mattered now was to keep the enemy at bay long enough for the BEF to get on their armada of ships and boats, large and small. There was no longer any thought of beating the Germans back, but at least 2 Group could deploy every resource to holding them up. That the resource was only three-score light bombers didn’t come into it. Losses hadn’t been so bad lately, only nine since the 25th.

  There were no losses today, either, the 30th, although there was flak damage as the cloud forced the bombers down to 400 feet so they could see what they were hitting, which was more tanks and transport between Veurne (Furnes) and Diksmuide. Nine crews attacked seven different targets, while five other squadrons put in fifty-eight sorties between them, so that was just about everything 2 Group could offer.

  The Luftwaffemeister Göring had not delivered an air-imposed Dunkirk submission as promised but the Wehrmacht was massing for a major offensive against the town. So far, some superbly brave fighting by French units had delayed the Germans, as of course had the RAF, but the enemy was attacking hard. They came up against defensive forces along the 1914 Belgian–German front line, from Nieuwpoort on the coast, inland through the village of Pervijze, which had been destroyed in the Great War, to Diksmuide, and tried to drive in from the east between Diksmuide and Poperinge.

  At dawn on 31 May, the first raids for 82 Squadron were on that latter area, close to Vleteren, where the Trappist beer comes from. They also hit the Pervijze–Diksmuide road and other targets, the eight Blenheims led by Paddy Bandon bombing wherever there was a possibility of useful wrecking. The squadron, desperately stretched, also sent nine in the afternoon to bridges at Nieuwpoort. Two of the crews had already been on the morning raid; one pilot went again with a different crew, and one WOp/AG went again with a different pilot; three of the squadron’s aircraft did both trips. Bish Bareham and Fred Thripp, after breakfast with Bandon, spent teatime with Joe Hunt. They missed the bridges but blocked the roads leading thereto, and these efforts on Nieuwpoort, followed up by other 2 Group squadrons, actually succeeded in bringing the Germans to a temporary halt.

  It is impossible to overstate the courage of these men, flying into a curtain of hot metal in the morning, somehow surviving, then filling up with petrol and bombs and doing the whole thing again in the afternoon. Each time they went, it was in the knowledge that other young men, some of them known personally, had been doing just the same thing when they were killed yesterday.

  Meanwhile, the stiff social strata of RAF ranks were being shaken slightly. An Air Ministry directive was issued on 1 June 1940 that all aircrew below the rank of sergeant were to be promoted to that rank, which meant a pay rise of an extra shilling and sixpence a day or even more. This was all much to the shocked disgust of long-serving RAF regular sergeants who had taken ten or fifteen years to get those tapes on their arms. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry, no matter how wet behind the ears, was a sergeant if he was aircrew. The sergeants’ mess, depending on who was in, could often become a mess of two parts. Never mind officers and other ranks; sergeants and erks had never mixed much before. So, Fred Thripp was a sergeant.

  The great evacuation of Dunkirk was passing its peak and there was a change in the objectives of operations. There was a recco of Terneuzen area – nothing much to report – and no ops on 2 June, then a major one on the 3rd, bombing shore installations of guns aimed at the last of the rescue fleet. With fighter cover, the Blenheims took it in turns to fly low over the batteries, keeping them quiet with bombs and bullets.

  The Germans could have made their own embarkation, with greatly superior numbers in army and in air force to cover, and invaded Britain. The French were not going to strike back. Instead, Hitler chose to complete his demolition of France and leave the British for later.

  Whatever the timescale, there was no doubting the new threat posed by the Luftwaffe on its many new and advanced air bases, and the British war bosses thought it would be good if some of that threat could be forced back into Germany, on the defensive. The night bombers were already flying to German targets. Could the day bombers, the Blenheims of 2 Group, add to the effect? Yes, but only on cloudy days.

  Watton station was given a list of oil refineries at Hanover, Bremen and so on, and a start date: 5 June. The other stations had their own lists, and missions were to be flown every third day, in between continuing with the work they had been doing, attacking armoured columns as they drove further into France. The oil-in-Germany attacks were to be sporadic and widely spaced. The Germans were to suffer the pain of a thousand small cuts.

  Despite the order for promotion, on 3 June Messrs Thripp, Crozier, Clarke and Co were still listed as aircraftmen; but on the 8th it was Sergeant John Byatt who was brought home dead in P/O Percival’s machine after they’d been found by a flock of Me109s while blowing up a petrol dump at Abbeville. That aircraft never flew again, and neither did Sergeant Brian Burt, the only crew member killed when P/O Robertson’s Blenheim was also the victim of fighters on the same op, and it was Sergeant Clarke, flying with P/O Keeble, who had the rare achievement of shooting down a Messerschmitt from a Blenheim.

  Earlier in the day, it had been Sergeant Crozier taken prisoner with P/O McKenzie when they were shot down on another raid against AFVs near Noyon, and on the 9th it was Sergeant Thripp who was wounded by flak, on a similar op against transport and infantry.

  Fred was posted to an OTU (Operational Training Unit) as an instructor. He would come back t
o 82 Squadron in February 1941, fly his fiftieth op in the April, then move to Malta with 110 Squadron. After scoring direct hits on a power station at Tripoli, his Blenheim would be shot down by an Italian fighter, a Fiat CR42, and crash into the sea.

  Frederick Samuel Thripp, of Totternhoe, Bedfordshire, still only twenty years old, a lad who had been on so many ops and narrowly avoided death so many times by Me109 cannon, was killed by machine-gun fire from a 1930s fixed-undercarriage biplane. The CR42 was exceptionally fast for a biplane, with a top speed similar to the Blenheim’s, and so manoeuvrable that Spitfire and Hurricane pilots avoided getting into close-combat dogfights, but Fred’s captain was a greatly experienced wing commander who must have been taken by surprise.

  The German oil-refinery plan, optimistically expanded to include daylight raids on all kinds of industrial targets, was never going to be worthwhile. Certainly it didn’t start on time; after early cloud, 5 June was a beautiful sunny day, one of many in that glorious summer, and the weather was too fine for flying the next day too, but by the 7th matters were deemed so desperate that the Blenheims had to go, clear skies or not. The enemy had turned his attention from Dunkirk and the BEF to Paris and the French.

  For the next week or so, the squadron was in the air every day looking for panzers and transport, always attacked by flak, often attacked by fighters even when there were escorts, and ever further on to the south-west as the armour closed on the river Seine. At the RAF wireless school in Wiltshire some of the students had unexpected news. A young fellow called John Bristow was ordered to the office and told that they were short of WOp/AGs at 82 Squadron because so many had been lost at Gembloux. Bristow:

  I hadn’t actually finished the wireless course, although that didn’t matter too much because I’d been working as a radio engineer before I joined, but I was now an air gunner and I had never seen a machine gun. That was June 9th, when I was AC1 Bristow. Next day, I was Sergeant Bristow.[The squadron was attacking near Rouen, beside the Seine, not that he knew that.]

  Turning up at Watton I was taken down to the firing range and shown a Vickers K. I thought it was the worst put together bit of ironmongery I’d ever seen, but we had to fire it and strip it down, and the following day, would you believe it, I was joe’d to use the damn thing on an op.

  Bristow, like all his WOp/AG colleagues in those days, had to know a great deal about the workings and practicalities of wireless to be able to get his unreliable and temperamental kit to work in the unforgiving circumstances of hostile flight. Now he had a similarly unreliable gun in his charge that he knew almost nothing about. At least he could be comforted with the thought on this first trip that his pilot and observer, whom he was supposed to defend with said gun, had both been on ops before. Anyway, they went to Le Havre, the Seine estuary. They saw no tanks, and they were not disturbed by fighters so Sgt Bristow remained a machine-gun virgin, and they came home with their bombs.

  On 12 June, as the Germans entered Paris, Bristow was up again but with a different crew just north of Le Havre, again no losses for the squadron, but that run of luck finished at Le Gault la Forêt, way over to the east of Paris in the Reims/Épernay area, where an allegedly huge concentration of tanks brought raids all day. The promised French fighter cover did not materialise and three out of nine 82 Squadron Blenheims were shot down, with two of 21 Squadron flying from Bodney, plus five France-based Battles.

  Why the 82 Squadron crew captained by Sergeant Albert Merritt should fall into the Waddenzee, well north of Amsterdam, can only be guessed at. Being so far off track on a ‘routine’ daylight raid, even though there was rain and cloud about, must have meant damage over the target, possibly a dead or wounded observer, or a wrecked turret meaning no wireless to get a fix.

  There were three categories of fix at this time. A first-class fix was obtained when three ground stations on the UK mainland bounced a radio signal off the aircraft and, receiving a strong signal back, found their intersecting point. The position was calculated, probably within a mile, and transmitted to the aircraft. Lesser degrees of confidence, due to weakness of signal or fewer ground stations receiving, produced second- and third-class fixes. As bad weather interfered with the process, poorer quality fixes had to be given when precision was most needed.

  UX/X crashed near the target with only the WOp/AG, Ken Harris DFM, being killed. Charlie Breese and his observer were taken prisoner. P/O Eyton-Williams, a new pilot, kept his machine up long enough to reach more friendly territory but was injured in the crash. The observer, Sgt Carbutt, was anything but new. He’d seen all that action on 17 May with Morrison. He, the officer and his mate, WOp/ AG Sgt Augustus Spencer Beeby, kept ahead of the Germans and returned to Watton. Gus Beeby was one of the new boys brought in immediately after Gembloux, so he’d only been on the squadron three weeks. He stated: ‘Our skipper was wounded by the flak but he managed to crash-land about three miles beyond where the Germans were. We got him out, set fire to the aircraft, and looked for help. There was a French officer in a van that we stopped, and he arranged an ambulance for the skipper to take him away.’

  The rest of the journey was a bit of a muddle. Every time Beeby and Carbutt reached a place where they thought their captain would be, he’d been moved on.

  ‘We made our way towards the coast, travelling on trains and cattle trucks with the refugees, until we reached Bordeaux, where we got a boat home.’

  It had taken them a fortnight. Eyton-Williams too reached Blighty somehow and he was put on the Active List, that is, generally restricted to non-flying duties but could be called upon in an emergency. There is no record of 82 Squadron calling upon him. The other two were soon flying on ops again – Carbutt with another returner, Sq/Ldr Delap, although he would crew up regularly with P/O Fordham, who had survived 17 May and many other scrapes and could be said to be a lucky skipper.

  Beeby’s first after evading would be with the new CO, Wing Commander Lart, on 7 July, a quite remarkable flight (see below). Aircrew flying with Lart found him a very exciting driver indeed, and for Beeby this would prove a fateful relationship.

  Paddy Bandon’s last op was an anti-climax, an early morning tank job when he had to turn his two sections back because the weather was too good without fighter escort, but after 18 June when they hit the roads to Cherbourg, there were no more tank raids for 82 Squadron. The battle for France was almost over. The French asked for armistice terms on the 17th and it was time for another battle to begin.

  RAF attacks began on ex-Allied airfields; the British were getting their retaliation in first and, in effect, starting the Battle of Britain. The squadron went to Merville aerodrome, and Amiens, where they set aircraft on fire and wrecked hangars. They came back from Schiphol because there was no cloud at all and, in the middle of the newly appreciated invasion threat, resumed German industrial duties. To avoid losses, the latter type of raid could only be mounted in poor weather, which also made it more difficult to find the targets. If the weather turned fine, crews had to abort. Frequently, the result was a frustrated returning crew dropping their bombs on Schiphol or similar. ORB, 21 June:

  10 aircraft despatched singly to attack targets in the Ruhr and at Bremen and Hanover. Sq/Ldr Hunt attacked oil refineries at Bremen. Sq/Ldr Sutcliffe approached the Ruhr but returned owing to uncertainty of balloon positions. He released his bombs on Haanslede aerodrome on the return journey. Sgt Watkins bombed Schipol [sic] aerodrome. Other aircraft returned owing to lack of cloud cover.

  Watkins was John Bristow’s pilot. Bristow:

  One of the worst targets we had at that time was Schiphol, which was quite highly defended. We went there one day, just a single aircraft, and got in and dropped our bombs. We actually hit the drome but whether we hit the aircraft or the hangars we didn’t quite know. A squadron of 109s came up and intercepted us. Luckily, there was a cloud bank over the airfield which we dived into very quickly and headed for home, but every time we put our nose out of the clouds two Messerschmitts would
dive on us.

  This must have gone on for about an hour. I really don’t know how we got away. At one stage I was firing at a 109 on our starboard quarter, banging away happily although he was really out of range of that rubbish gun, and when I turned to look on the port side there was another 109 about 20 yards away. I could see the pilot quite clearly. I whipped the gun down and fired. I think I hit him but I couldn’t swear to it. It all happened so quickly. He didn’t fire, so maybe he’d run out of ammo after chasing us for so long. After that we dived down and hedgehopped back to Watton.

  These German raids were futile. Each crew was given a specific target but the small loads they could carry were not going to cause much damage, even if they found it and, similarly difficult, hit it. In any case, there were barges gathering in Dutch harbours and the Luftwaffe was populating captured aerodromes in large numbers. The new instructions from RAF HQ were clear, if ambitious: ‘The enemy are using airfields and landing grounds in France, Belgium and Holland. The intention is to destroy as many aircraft as possible on the ground thus forcing the enemy to withdraw.’

  This order came with a rider: again, aircrew were not to pursue missions if there was insufficient cloud cover. How much cloud was sufficient, and where in the mission the decision to abort should be made, were not specified. Now that the enemy occupied aerodromes on the North Sea and Channel coasts, and was able to expand his Freya radar operation into occupied countries, where was the danger line to be drawn?

  CHAPTER SIX

  DIFFERENT SORT OF CHAP ALTOGETHER

  Strictly speaking, it was not necessary for the officer commanding a squadron to go on operations. Almost all of them did, irregularly rather than frequently, if only to maintain morale, and Paddy Bandon had done that as much as he thought necessary. He was a courageous airman to whom the squadron and the air force meant everything, a good organiser, a formidable opponent, a natural commander, but his main way of keeping spirits up was personal – outgoing, jolly, good for a laugh, good for a pint in the mess, everybody liked him and he liked everybody. That was how he had rebuilt the squadron, through force of personality. His replacement, arriving on 1 July 1940, seemed to be a different kettle of fish – and, at first anyway, a cold one.