Sadly I ended up being over the word limit and the prologue got the arse, on the basis that it was redundant. My supervisor called it 'murdering your darlings' - nice prose falling victim to the practicalities of history. But I was still disappointed. Not only was it (IMO) a nice little tidbit, it also set the grim tone that persisted for the rest of the piece.
Although it's a bit presumptuous, this links into a wider debate occurring in historical circles. Some historians are arguing that in a quest for impartiality and under influence from the social sciences, faculties are deliberately destroying the vivid writing of history. Tom Griffiths wrote an excellent essay, 'The Poetics and Practicalities of Writing', in which he bemoaned the way in which historical writing had declined - "it's because so many scholars compromise communication with pompous posturing; they are too busy staking out intellectual territory and warding others off it...they are so furiously in pursuit of 'objectivity' that they delete themselves from their scripts and employ a weird passionless prose."
Griffiths references Judith Brett and her article on 'The Bureaucratisation of Writing' as an example. Brett suggests academics still have something important to say but do not have the urgency or the correct picture of their audience to say it well. Taking this further, Griffiths argues it is Universities who are at fault - they 'reward us for writing obscurely for distant, small, specialised audiences made up of people educated exactly as we are!' I'd agree to this with an extent but I think the changing nature of education and society as a whole has an effect. Alistair Horne springs to mind immediately as a historian whose education in the classics and the humanities as a whole has left him with a powerful pen - even when applied to modern subjects such as Verdun in Price of Glory and Algeria in A Savage War of Peace. Manning Clark and Alan Clark are two others who, despite their pretty gaping flaws as historians, were able to bring their narratives to light through writing that echoed the flare and scope of more classical writers. On the other hand, my favourite historian is Richard Overy and whilst he could hardly be accused of the 'pompous posturing' Griffiths attacks he's not much of a novelist, either. In his case, I think, brevity is a strength; he's more of an analyst than a storyteller and thus keeping it sharp and clear suits his purposes.
But enough of me. What have you? Murder the darlings or let the pen run riot?
One Particular NightOn the evening of the 9th of April, 1944, the airfield of Binbrook on the Lincolnshire wolds reverberated to the sound of engines. Fourteen Lancasters of 460 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force left their dispersal areas in the dusk and taxied onto the runway. At the appointed hour, the pilot and flight engineer of the first – ‘helmeted, masked and confined in perspex cages’ - opened the throttles, released the brakes and sent the enormous plane thundering down the runway. Thirteen aircraft made it airborne. The fourteenth, piloted by F/Sgt McKenzie, crashed on takeoff. It was the crews first mission; all aboard were killed. The remainder joined the enormous throng of aircraft orbiting north-east England. Two went south, toward France, part of two big raids on railyards in Lille and Villeneuve-St-Georges. The other eleven turned east, out over the North Sea.
Yet it was characteristic of the bomber offensive that each squadron, cut off on its lonely airfield somewhere down the lengthy of eastern England, lived in its own private world and knew little of what went on outside…Bomber Command could sometimes have a disastrous night, losing scores of aircraft, yet a squadron came home unaware of anything amiss, having attacked in a wave that missed the nightfighters. Conversely, on one trip a squadron for no definable reason could lose four, five, six aircraft – far above Bomber Command’s average.
- Sir Max Hastings, Bomber Command.
Their target was the Gulf of Danzig, their cargo five mines. Mining operations were generally seen as an easy way to familiarise new crews with ‘ops’, but the length of the flight – a nine hour round trip – made it a difficult mission. As with most Bomber Command targets, the Gulf was being attacked to fulfil multiple aims. It would disrupt U-Boat training, an important aim in the lead-up to D-Day; and it would menace German lines of communication to forces on the Eastern Front, an important political sop in the absence of the long-awaited Second Front. Heavy flak greeted them over the Gulf, and both P/O Wade and F/Lt Willis had to struggle to bring their badly damaged Lancasters back to Binbrook.
The flak was just a precursor, though, to the carnage over Denmark. AR-Q, piloted by P/O Burke D.F.C, was attacked by a nightfighter over the Kattegat and destroyed; one of the gunners, F/Sgt Sydney Cooper, was the only man to bail out successfully. At 3.30, AR-M, piloted by F/Lt Peter Crosby, was attacked as they approached the east coast of Jutland. Crosby sounded the bailout order at 18,000 feet, but another attack by the persistent nightfighter saw the Lancaster plummet in a spin. Righting the aircraft, Crosby again told his crew to ‘hurry up and get out, we’re below 6,000 feet.’ The rear-gunner, F/Sgt Stanley Hodge, tumbled from his turret and made a safe descent to earth. Shortly after he did so, AR-M exploded; the navigator, F/O Charles Suffren, was found badly injured nearby, and died in February 1945 in a German hospital. To complete 460’s sortie, P/O Robert Proud’s Lancaster was shot down half an hour later. There were no survivors.
460’s horror night goes some way to demonstrating the myriad dangers faced by the men in Bomber Command. F/Sgt McKenzie discovered, tragically, the inherent dangers in attempting to lift a complex piece of machinery laden beyond the point of safety with bombs and fuel. The four-engined heavies needed the entirety of the runway to safely lift off; the loss of an engine and consequently power was almost always fatal. Pilot inexperience, as always, could also play a big role. If pilots did not build up sufficient speed before attempting to lift off, they risked stalling and a fiery end. The danger of mid-air collision was also ever-present; the bomber ‘stream’ typically concentrated five hundred to eight hundred aircraft over the target within a fifteen minute window, minimizing the exposure to German defences but in conditions of darkness greatly increasing the chances of collision.
The German defences remained the greatest threat, however. Flak – an abbreviation of Flugabwehrkanone, aircraft defence cannon – was present at virtually every target the bombers visited. It was a tremendously inefficient method of destruction, requiring thousands of shells for every hit. Yet a direct hit from the 88 or 105mm guns used was an experience few bombers or their crews were likely to survive. By far the biggest threat to crews, however, were the Luftwaffe nachtjager, or nightfighters. It was the men of Nachtjagdgeschwader 3 who got amongst the Lancasters over Denmark, claiming nine of the bombers in just under half an hour. Faster and more manoeuvrable than the prey they stalked and equipped with a devastating combination of cannon and radar, single nightfighter crews could shoot down five or six bombers in a single night.
All told, 9 of the 103 Lancasters dispatched on the mining mission failed to return. Three were from 460; of the twenty one men aboard, only two survived. The loss of F/Sgt McKenzie and his crew brought the totals up to four and twenty eight, respectively. Bomber Command did not measure it losses in lives, however; what was considered important was the loss rate per sortie, expressed as a percentage. Viewed in isolation, 460s was positively catastrophic – 28.5% of the aircraft dispatched to Danzig had failed to return. In comparison, the raid on Nuremberg in March 1944 was considered the Command’s biggest defeat of the war, with a loss rate of 11.9%. Yet taken as a whole, the night was considered a success for Bomber Command. 697 sorties were flown and 11 aircraft lost, a rate of 1.6% - more than acceptable for those at Bomber Command headquarters at High Wycombe.
At Binbrook, the casualties sustained over Denmark were quickly submerged in the relentless tempo of operations. New crews arrived from the Operational Training Units to take the places of those who had been lost, new Lancasters from the factories scattered through the northern districts. By April 1944 the machinery for replacing losses was well oiled; in the previous six months Bomber Command had lost more aircraft than it had on strength in November but had still grown in size. The psychological mechanisms for coping with such losses were less certain, but life in Bomber Command left no room for open grief. The night after 460’s disaster over Jutland, thirteen Lancasters went to the Aulnoye marshalling yards. The night after that, five went to Aachen.
Yet while the 9/10th April was soon remembered as just another night in Bomber Command’s long war, consequences of that night over Denmark persisted long after the last Lancaster had straggled home to Binbrook. James ‘Jim’ Brooks had been on Burke’s Lancaster, and had done twenty two trips – including ten to Berlin. He had grown up next door to his cousin Robert in Mackay in far north Queensland. Robert flew his first mission with 49 Squadron the same night Jim was killed and vividly describes the jolt it gave him. He completed a tour with the Pathfinders – no mean feat, even in 1944 – and eventually returned home to Australia. Exiting the train in Mackay, the first people he saw were his Uncle and Aunt – and Jim, standing behind them:And just behind them was Jim, standing there and he said straight out, "I'm not coming home." Well that's the end of it. I can't tell you any more. I can't even remember giving my mother a hug or a kiss or anything. I can't remember anything else.
The spectre of his dead cousin would continue to haunt Robert Brooks dreams for years after the end of the war, a powerful reminder of the tragic cost of Bomber Command’s war.
The crews of all three Australian Lancasters were buried in Esbjerg Cemetery over the next few months; by the end of the war, thirty four Australians would be interred there, alongside another 238 Commonwealth servicemen. All were airmen, almost all of them from Bomber Command. Peter Crosby’s parents visited his grave in 1957. Their only clue to their son’s exact fate was in a letter from the only surviving member of the crew, Stanley Hodge. But Hodge’s memories were maddeningly slim; he had only heard his skipper’s frantic bail out order before he had exited the aircraft, and had not heard AR-M explode. While the Crosby’s were at least able to visit their son’s grave – many Bomber Command aircraft and their crews simply disappeared, and Esbjerg alone had the remains of twenty-five unidentified airmen within it – there would always be the lingering doubt of just how he died.
Peter Crosby and the other young men who died with him over Denmark are remembered in two very different ways. As members of Bomber Command, their war has been well documented. Hundreds of books have been published detailing the lifestyle and experiences of men in Bomber Command, the aircraft they flew, the targets they bombed. Controversy continues to rage about both the morality of area bombing and its effectiveness. In many ways, the war over German skies remains one of the most visible parts of the Second World War some sixty years on. But as Australians, Peter Crosby and his comrades remain virtually invisible. Despite the fact they made up over 20% of Australia’s combat deaths, the men who served in Bomber Command have been forgotten in their own country.
