W D Tweddle. Tape Two

W D Tweddle. Tape Two

Doug Tweddle was awarded an immediate DFC because he flew on all three operations to attack the Tirpitz. This was delivered to him at his home four years later. While attempting an emergency landing at RAF Waddington he was told that because he was carrying a Tallboy bomb he had to attempt an emergency landing at RAF Carnaby. He knew he was dangerously low on fuel and asked that the airfield be well lit for him because as he said he was, ‘Coming in from the sea and coming in once.’ Amongst his other operations was against the Urft Dam.

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01:31:33 audio recording

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ATweddleWD[Date]-020001, ATweddleWD[Date]-020002, ATweddleWD[Date]-020003, ATweddleWD[Date]-020004

The [guard rail] had gone for a burton flying with one of the 8th Army squadrons on a daylight on Berlin. So, he was a nice lad. He was an extrovert and I was sorry when I heard what had happened. The, the incidents and the, the whole business was so educational in a way. You’d go out to a Yak-9 and see about four Russians standing around in overalls or what have you and for the life of you, you couldn’t pick the pilot out. Then suddenly someone picked up a, picked up a helmet and jumped inside and off he went, you know. On another occasion I saw the driver of the CO, the Russian CO bump the tail of a light aircraft and push it several yards along the ground and then without anything more than a casual kick in the loop someone again jumped in that and took off, you know. Had the bloody tail fallen off he’d have been killed. I know what would have happened. They just shrugged their shoulder and said hard luck you know. It was obvious in that part of the world and with those people that life is pretty cheap.
[recording paused]
Having filled our time in on the island waiting for the weather to change the Mossie came back one day and, I think it was a Thursday, it was the 15th of September and said that the target was clear and that we could make our trip. When you think about it of course he might have been letting them know what was going on. It was very interesting that as an aside it was very interesting that when we flew over I think we had made a propaganda point that it was aircraft flying stores and assistance to Russia and that seemed to satisfy them that the cover for our passage from [Lofoten] to Archangel in the first case. But I think —
[recording paused]
The Mossie would go up and have a look and as I say he came back and said the weather was good. Now, we knew that the problem there was to get a clear view of the Tirpitz because the hun had got a lot of smoke pots set up in a valley up into the hills above the anchorage and if he had time and warning about approach he would set off this smoke and it would come down the valley and cover the anchorage. He had [unclear] winds. My geography is getting a bit loose but that was the score. In other words to try and get there quickly before he could really get his smoke going. Well, the trip out across the White Sea towards the mainland again, across Finland heading in a direct line for North Cape was quite a trip. I remember watching three of the 617 boys. Willie Tait of course led this show and some of the original 617 were with him. The [unclear] and Micky Martin and Shannon, Dave Shannon. The original. Really the bright boys of 617 and three of them went down on the water in a [unclear] and they were flying so low they were actually sort of whipping up wind lanes with their props. They must have been right down on the deck. Honestly, that never quite appealed to me. I must have been a born bomber pilot. Keep the sky above you and the ground below. But anyway, we made this trip and he had got sufficient notice to, to get his smoke going and by the time we got over the target you got glimpses of it but not the kind of picture that you want to do a really destructive steady job. We got our bombs away, our bomb away rather and we didn’t know at the time but obviously had hit it and then sufficient damage for him to decide to move it back towards I suppose back towards Germany but as you remember he moved it down to Tromso. This was a very silly mistake because by doing that he put it within reach of Lossiemouth and Kinloss assuming that we stuck our long-range Wellington tanks in and we could, we could make that trip. So that wasn’t a very clever thing for him to do but I suppose he had some reason for it. So we went back to, we flew immediately back to Archangel and the technique then was the Russkies were refuelling with fifty gallon drums which they hauled up and poured in with funnels in the top which when you consider a Lanc has a two thousand one hundred and something gallon thirst these lads were busy and there was no order of battle in which to go back. It had been decided that as you were refuelled you just set off and went home. So the order of refuelling worked out I suppose just where you were parked. But I was fortunate. I got refuelled fairly early on so we took off and I do recall that it was a Saturday night and what happened of course were the kites that were dispersed and damaged and broken obviously there was some spare crews. Incidentally we had no fatalities which was quite remarkable when you think of it. But having got some spare crews these were shared out amongst the ones that were going and I thought right if I’ve got a bit of luck I’ll get another pilot but that wasn’t so. I’d been bragging to Jim Bazin that my George was a good one and then out of the eleven hours trip plus George had done most of it. So he said, ‘Well, if George is that good then you can stick him in again.’ So he gave me an engineer and I got George [Campsell’s] engineer Edwards who was a big policeman. A hell of a burly lad but a lad who gave you a great deal of confidence. So on my return trip I had two engineers and that was that. Well, we’d also figured out that the best thing to do was just to come back straight. There was no need to plan a fancy route. We worked on the argument that the hun wouldn’t expect us to be coming up the backside of him and that as such we were probably quite safe. So we took off from Archangel and came down over the Gulf of Bosnia towards Finland, Sweden and I recall coming across the bottom end. [unclear] seems to ring a bell but of course Sweden was lit up being neutral and we flew over Sweden, the Baltic and came out over Jutland. Well, I subsequently found out when I was in the Auxiliary Air Force and in my summer camp out in that part of the world that now, what’s it name again now but it was the shooting range for the, all the German fighter squadrons and our fighter squadrons. Oh, Sylt. That’s right. Sylt. That’s the land, the German Westerland. I simply found out we flew over there and for the first time I got a blip on my night fighter early warning lamp. In a Lanc at that stage we carried what looked like a red ignition lamp for flak, predicted flak and a yellow one which was supposed to be predicted night fighters. Well, I’d had plenty of the red ones so I knew that worked. But I’d never before had a flash on the yellow one. Well, I got it on this occasion and as we flew out Ken, my rear gunner called up that there was a twin engine which he took to be an 88 behind. But as we were heading out to sea, the North Sea then and he was coming away from the land I think he got chicken and he never pressed his case any further and that was that. Well, we, we had decided when we left we had a bomb, the bombing leader was a chap called Campbell who said he was the biggest rag and bone man in Melbourne. But Bill Campbell was also the bar officer at 9 in Bardney and he had said to the sergeant, ‘Don’t serve any bottled beer while I’m away.’ He said, ‘Get rid of all that rubbish in the barrels.’ So, and he also promised us that when we got back to Bardney regardless of the time of day or what have you he would open up the bar. Well, it turned out to be 5 o’clock on a Sunday morning which didn’t mean much really and we did exactly as Bill said. We opened up the bar and we got stuck in. Now, the Nissen hut, the Mess room at Bardney then was a big Nissen hut with a brick, a rustic brick fireplace which stretched across most of the top end with a big open fire and we started to put the empties at one end and as we drank along we just stacked them up. So we were in a pretty mellow pickle by about 9 o’clock, half eight, 9 o’clock. So, Benny Taylor who was another old dear friend of mine, subsequently flew for BOAC, Benny and I decided to go back to our billets and we were pushing our bicycles and we, for the Russian trip we had a rucksack and also for the first time we were carrying our 38 Smith and Wesson revolvers on a lanyard around our necks. These were issued to us normally but most pilots I think adopted my opinion about that was that if we were liable to bail out over Germany you didn’t want anything that looked like a revolver hanging around your neck. The odds are you were going to get your head split open with a shovel anyway and to have a revolver on you was an open invitation for someone to kill you and then say, ‘Well, this man was armed.’ But on that Russian trip we were advised that probably if we’d come down in northern Finland it might have been the only way to eat would have been to shoot your food. So in addition to our revolvers we took a 303 rifle because there was about ten thousand rounds of ammunition of course in our 303 in our guns and what have you. So that was why we were complete with lanyard. Anyway, as we came around the corner to go back to our billets sort of propping each other up with two bicycles we came across the Church Parade. Now, we had an adjutant there, a squadron leader who was a bit of a [pause] knitting away.
[recording interrupted]
He decided that the squadron, the group captain everyone was away off the station that this was an excellent opportunity to run a Church Parade as he said it ought to be run. So he had all the, the airmen and air women they were obviously not employed because we were off the station. He had them all lined up in beautiful serried ranks ready to march off when Taylor and Tweddle came around the corner pushing two bikes, got halfway across the top of the parade ground and never made it. We fell down I gather in a big heap and when he got up, pulled out his revolver and threatened to shoot him. Not seriously but sufficient to cause a little bit of panic. So our batman who happened to be at that time on the parade sought permission to come and sort us out. So he came along and with his help we got our bikes up again and sort of exit on the left and the parade then resumed itself. I believe there was a lot of tittering going on. It was quite an interlude. But we found out later about the result of the whole business. That it was possibly damaged and it wasn’t until much later of course that we found out where they had brought it to, to open up the sort of the next stage of the Tirpitz outing. That was the return to base was the 16th of September and I’ve got that down as a, it would be about a ten hour trip. Yeah. I suppose. More direct than the outgoing trip. The 23rd of that month, September we did an operation on the Dortmund Ems Canal with a Tallboy. Now, this was the first time we’d tried to burst the canal, the Dortmund Ems with these Tallboys and we went down to Woodhall, Woodhall Spa for that briefing from Willie Tait and 617 because we were both working on that together again. And I recall the briefing from Tait that we were not to go below about eleven thousand five hundred because the safety height of a Tallboy if you worked on the argument that a thousand foot for a thousand pounds meant that it wasn’t safe to be dropping those from lower altitude. Anyway, the weather was a bit doubtful so we went up on that trip. Again we came back. I brought mine back because I got down to eleven and I couldn’t see a gap so we brought the bomb home which was quite a normal practice with Tallboys. They gave us permission to land with a great haul of weight because we used to bring that bomb back more often then we dropped it. But that night we lost two crews and what made it more personally upsetting was they were both in my billet. There was Jock Scott and Andy Begg. Jock Scott was a Glaswegian and he was on his twenty ninth. He was on his last trip and he didn’t come out and Andy Begg, another young Scot who was on his thirteenth and I remember you know when you come back off a trip it wasn’t long before you realised who wasn’t going to make it. In about fifteen or twenty minutes you soon found out who was diverted and who hadn’t got away with it and only the last month this [Arthur] friend of mine Cooper has come up with the information just a month ago that Jock Scott’s crew with the exception of the bomb aimer again who got away with it and baled out and he’s given me his address in this country. I haven’t as yet checked up on it. Jock Scott’s crew are buried. I think it’s a place called Holten. It’s either Germany or Holland. They’re pretty close around there and Andy Begg was missing and never accounted for. He’s on the Runnymede Memorial. But it was a pity about Jock. He was a friend of mine. Rather closer than most and we [pause] there it was. Well, the photographs the next day proved that the canal was drained and it had had two hits on it. So we were inclined to believe that Begg and Scott pressed on just a shade more keenly than they ought to have done and we think there were either flak or night fighter but they were certainly out. But of course out comes our friends with ten thousand shovels and Russians again and in no time the damage to the canal was repaired and the thing was back in order and this happened on more than one occasion. Just sheer, sheer manpower and if any of the Russians fell in while they were doing it well they just left them in. The [pause] that took us towards October and on the 7th of October, again with Y, all of these are now with Y we did a trip on West Capell and Flushing. The, the big island off the mouth of the Scheldt. The ground troop, the ground troops Montgomery and that had decided that they should open up Antwerp and [pause] but unfortunately the big island [unclear] the entrance to the Scheldt was still in German hands and any shipping of course that came down there was going to get into trouble. So it was decided and I can’t imagine that the Dutch were pleased about it that we would try with Tallboys to burst the sea dyke and let in the water which is, and flood them out. Well, I was given this wind finding business again. The prominent point about the [unclear] to use as the wind finding point was a red tiled building on the north west corner. I subsequently found out that it was the Anglo-Dutch repeater station which is interesting because in Civvy Street telecommunications with both the Post Office and the Generating Board it was my cup of tea. So I was interested to know that the type of building that I spent a lot of my time in was the one that I was, a similar building was one that I was using as the marker point. Well, as each squadron of the group came in to bomb we gave them the new wind and then finally joined them at the end and bombed again and we did in fact let the water in. And there were two trips. One was the 7th at Flushing and one was the 17th at West Cappell. The Flushing one, actually there is a small lake hidden behind the dyke so the object was to knock out the dyke and let the water in that way. The one I remember more vividly was the West Cappell end. The top end and the water of course did indeed flood Holland and went right across as far as Middelburg which I think is the, probably the largest city in that particular island. It took the Dutch a hell of a long time after the war to pump all that out and recover it from an agricultural land point of view. The interesting thing about that was that I spent that afternoon flying up and down over this repeater station roof at no higher than five thousand feet. But we weren’t bombing from a great height to find the winds and I had a quiet day and later one of my friends did this similar job. In fact, he did it in my aircraft and he was chased by a Fokker Wulf 190. I know he was using mine because his gunners fired my guns and my gunner’s guns and didn’t clean them afterwards and my gunners were furious about this. But later they decided that they would put a commando group or a Naval group of these commandos across on to the beach and they went in because there were, they found out there were eighty eight millimetre guns stacked along there. And the gunners decided not to give way on his position when we were stooging up and down all afternoon because when the commando group went in later they got a hell of a dusting up and we realised we’d been sitting on the top of a furnace and we just decided not to say anything about it. Which, you know you, you‘ve got to have a bit of luck. That was the October the 17th. Now, I said earlier on with, with Tirpitz that they then brought it around to Tromso and it was off an island in Balsfjord. That was rather well named, in Tromso. So we were set up to go again because we then, we’d taken our mid-upper turrets out and we’d found a long overload tank which had been formerly used on Wellingtons. It was a strange tank. It was quite long. Probably eight or ten foot long or more but the height and width were quite small but it would just carry the extra few gallons because we were then trying to do what was a two thousand one hundred mile trip with two thousand one hundred gallons and as you are aware if you were getting a mile a gallon out of a Lanc you weren’t doing too badly and this left us with no margin whatsoever. In fact, even with the overloads that was, that risk was still there. So on this occasion we were flying out of Kinloss and we flew up to Kinloss on the 28th of October two hours ten minutes and then we did the trip on the 29th and I’ve got it down as eight hours daylight, five hours ten at night which at thirteen hours ten minutes is probably one of our longest trips. It's a long way. And of course it was very much the same as the other part of it. Out of Kinloss, up the Moray Firth past the Shetlands, the Orkneys and Shetlands the Strait of [unclear] straight to Tromso. We did the same technique as we used later. There was a radar gap on that coast which we hoped that if we went through this we would get away with it and we also flew up at about a thousand feet to try and fly below this radar cover and then do a stiff climb over the coast to get up to about sixteen thousand. At that stage we were obviously discovered and then fly from a rendezvous point sort of north northwest down the fjord which is quite a long fjord and Tirpitz was at the end with if you can imagine Tromso itself, the town over on the shore to the east. My tea is getting cold.
[pause]
Well, we had the same problem. They had this smoke cover and they also had these fjords are notorious for their own private weather and when we flew in there we couldn't see a damn thing so we just came back. Again, we brought the bomb back and I see that on the 30th of October I flew from Kinloss to base in two hours thirty. Back to Bardney and brought the bomb back. Now, the next entry is on the 4th of November when we went to Lossiemouth again to attempt to do this trip but the weather was such that we never even left Lossie and we returned on the 6th of November back to Lincolnshire again. I seem to remember that was a lost weekend I think. When we knew the weather was out we just got tiddled. On the 11th of November we went back to Lossiemouth again. Well, you are aware Lossiemouth and Kinloss are very close to each other. We went back to Lossiemouth again and we flew a tanker on the 12th, the following day. At that stage we were half convinced that the weather man was bending the isobars. It was getting late in the year and we really didn’t think that we would get any clear weather to make this Tirpitz trip at all likely. And yet of course if we didn’t the thing represented [pause] represented a problem. At least that was our, again our nautical system and while that was there four battle wagons of the largest kind were in Scapa because the Navy got such a scare when the Bismark came out. They got such a scare with the Bismark as to the Tirpitz being the sister ship they were terrified of the prospect of it getting loose in the Atlantic again. But I can’t quite understand where the intelligence went wrong in the assessment of its suitability to go to sea and do anything serious. But that’s another of these ones you know. But anyway, off we went on the 12th and again we did eight forty in daylight and four hours at night. Well, this trip turned out to be a bit of a shambles because it was very cold and freezing and as far as 9 Squadron were concerned Jim Bazin had given instructions that the kites should be de-iced. And whether the ground crew were in trouble, hadn’t started soon enough or hadn’t got the instruction early enough but in fact not all the air, not all the kites were de-iced and with that petrol load and that bomb load we needed every inch of the runway. So in fact of all people the CO himself didn’t get airborne and about another a half a dozen of 9 Squadron’s kites never got off the ground. Well, we did. It was the blackest of nights as I recall but having got off the ground and turned out over the Moray Firth we got up to our thousand foot and we ran into an ice inversion and the ice and everything and everything cleaned off. Then it was very pleasant. In that part of the world you could always get a diversion to the Moray Firth from Northern Germany. The cloud gets down there to about a thousand feet and it’s probably one of our best diversion [pause] diversion fields in Great Britain. It still is because my son in law was up there with the Nimrods and people still sneak in there when it’s, when it’s doubtful elsewhere. Anyway, we, I remember I was, I was wind leader on this wind finding so I flew out a little earlier than 9 and really rendezvoused two or three minutes earlier over the rendezvous lake in order to do this wind finding which meant this two or three minute orbit. And I remember seeing 617 led by Willie Tait steaming into the rendezvous late. Incidentally, we sneaked up a little bit of Sweden on this trip. Very irregular but that was the way it worked out and then we ran down the fjord and I fell in again towards the back having wind found and passed on the information. So 617 bombed first and 9 came in behind. There was a difference in equipment. 617 were the only, the only squadron that were equipped with semi-automatic bombsights, SABS and these were a sight which had almost towards the release point the navigator, the bomb aimer gave like a direction on the pair of needles upstairs to the pilot and he virtually let itself go whereas we were on Mark 14As which were sort of gee’d up standard bombsights and we needed this good wind but then having said that we were also carrying, 9 we were carrying a bomb which is a sort of a bomb mine of which very little was said about it. In fact, I haven’t seen a great deal ever written about it since. But it was known as a Johnnie Walker and what it was was it was a bomb in its first capacity that if it dropped inside the protective net it could then bob up and down as a mine and they thought well there was a bit of a double bet on this but I myself carried a Tallboy. I recall I think I bombed about 0946 and a half because I was just looking at the Battle Order sheet of which I’ve got a copy and I saw that there had been a hit fairly early on in the attack. Certainly not the first two bombs but fairly well up in the 617 was the first hit and the second hit I think was one of ours right towards the end of the sortie. In fact, at the last big reunion meeting at Waddington when Cooper in the Operations Room was showing us some films and giving us a talk about this the 9 Squadron and the present 9 he marked me down. He marked our Y down as the kite in which it has been given the probable on that second hit which we didn’t know anything about for thirty years. So until someone disputes it that’s what was said. I’m not claiming it but we were certainly there very adjacent. And the, we weren’t, we had no time on juice in which to linger on the target so by the time we turned port to come away over the [Lofoten] we got a glimpse from the port side of my kite and I could see the Tirpitz and as I was watching it I could see the freeboard increasing and I concluded it was slowly capsizing. I remember calling out on the RT to Squadron Leader Williams, Bill Williams who had taken over command of 9 when Jim Bazin never got off the ground and telling him that the freeboard was increasing. Well, for a Cornishman he didn’t know what I was talking about and I said, ‘Well, it’s [pause] it’s turning over.’ But when we got back and were debriefed by Willie Tait and Groupie MacMullen and what have you I was one of the few who was very confident that that thing was sunk. Was turning over. I suppose the amount of time we’d spent chasing this thing we were a little reluctant to be too positive about it. But I said, I repeated what I said about the freeboard. In fact, we were in Lossiemouth in the bar and we were just about going to lay some bets on this thing when the first print came in because there being a PRU Spit had gone up and the wet print came in and there it was upside down. So I’d have won my money if I’d got in on and I wanted a drink anyway. As it was old [MacMullen, Groupie MacMullen] put a blank cheque on the bar and said to the boys, ‘Drink that lot up.’ And again a good night was had by all you know. But one or two things emerged and some are still a mystery. For example there’s a field up there, Bardufoss. In fact, Bardufoss still features prominently in the NATO defence in that part of the world and we knew and had been briefed that on Bardufoss there were Fokker Wulf 190s. On that particular morning when we flew in over the coast it was the most glorious day. Snow on the hills, sunshine and we must, to an ambitious fighter we must have looked like, like bugs on a white sheet. They should have been able to take us all out. Especially when you think that we had no mid-uppers neither. Any, any two or three determined fighters could have seen off the force but to our good fortune there was no fighters there but there were fighters on the field. Now, I’ve subsequently tried to find out why this so happened. One or two stories. Some that the field wasn’t fit to fly off and that’s possibly true but its most unlikely that fighters, a fighter squadron leaves a field not sufficiently clear. But and there was also reference in the logbook of the Tirpitz which I think they have now got which said that requests had been made to the Air Force for assistance and allowing my nautical prejudice I’ve come to the conclusion that the cooperation between the German Navy and the German Air Force was just as good as it was between ours. That no one interfered with the other fellow’s show. And in case you think that that is a rather a prejudiced view I would ask you to recall that the Navy themselves made an attack on Tirpitz and they used Barracudas which let’s face it couldn’t blow the washing off the line. And these Barracudas were launched off Carriers inshore very close in land and they were given a Corsair and a Seafire escort by the Navy and they did nothing. Mind you in the silent way that the Navy have of functioning it didn’t stop them marching down the Strand having a lunch with the Lord Mayor and a suitable dish out of DSOs and DFCs which is the wont of our silent service. But when we went in to take out this menace to them I wasn’t aware and I can’t find any proof that there was ever any offer to put the Carriers inshore and to give us an escort. And if those FW 190 had got off the ground would we have needed it? Well, things always keep popping up. At one of our last reunions at Waddington when we unveiled the Memorial in Bardney village a plane of Norwegians came over with a general, the present NATO Norwegian general from [Bodo] and he was the English speaker of the group and he brought with him an old boy who was eighty and a tall silver haired man who was in his very late seventies. It turned out that the old boy was the town clerk of Tromso and he had actually taken some photographs with a box camera on the shore of the attack. Now, Cooper tells me that as yet these photographs have not been published but he hopes they will be. The tall silver haired man who I was introduced to was the wireless operator that we knew in our briefing had been watching the anchorage and was informing this country where Tirpitz was and all about it. But the old boy himself was the leader of the Underground group in that area and he was known as [Scippio ] and he brought over a piece of stone with a little brass plate on with the word Scipio on and its now part of the 9 Squadron Memorial at Bardney. Just below the prop that is set on the rustic brick wall is a simple plate. And this old boy and his friend came to the dinner. We were very very pleased about this. But they could no more give me an explanation of the lack of fighter interference and he said, ‘It’s very interesting. I’ll try and find out more.’ But I wouldn’t be at all surprised at my non-cooperative guess is nearer to the truth. All we got from our dear friends in dark blue was a congratulatory telegram saying they were very pleased. Oh, I’m not quite fair to them. They put out on track two hundred miles north of Uist which is [unclear] the most northerly tip of Shetland on which there is a lighthouse and an aerial. They put a destroyer on track two hundred miles north of that in case any of us coming back were short of juice and their argument was you put down alongside this destroyer. I rather gathered I was probably one of the few that actually did see it but we did and we circled it and my wireless op gave them a burst on the Aldis lamp. But we reckoned afterwards that was rather foolish because anything with four engines they need to be a Fokker Wulf Condor and I might well have got shot down. But there we are. The, the only satisfaction we got out of this was that the four battle wagons in Scapa Flow were immediately posted away to the Pacific so I suppose it’s an ill wind. Anyway, that was the big one away and it seemed to give us I suppose a great weight off our back. Old Cocky and everyone was very chuffed about that. Incidentally the way you fool politicians. Sir Archibald Sinclair came up to the squadron to congratulate the squadron on their work. Well, we had, we were knocking off with a swift forty eight and we’d gone home so the station mustered all the other people, all the other aircrew and otherwise who hadn’t been in on the trip put them in a big hangar, put them in the briefing room rather and Archibald Sinclair told them what a wonderful bunch of guys they were and no one was ever the wiser. I mean that’s alright. He felt happy and we didn’t mind. We were at home. That was, we are getting to the end of this lot now. At least the wartime part of it. That was the 12th of November. On the 21st I did the twenty sortie check that I was telling you about when they see if you are falling to pieces or if you are still managing. Pete [Landon] was the check pilot then. I’ve seen him since. On the 8th of December we went to the Urft Dam, U R F T, Urft Dam with the Tallboys again. This was one of the dams that had missed the big dams smashing business much earlier on but it was in fact a difficult dam to burst because it had a concrete core and supports so really it was difficult to get a bomb into it to burst it and as subsequently proved we didn’t. But what we were worried about with that was that the Urft Dam retained enough water to be able to flood the valley down [unclear] way.
[recording paused]
Because to commit their armour to attack across this valley and it was the German intention to flood it so they asked us to try and take it out first and we had a go. They made a big mistake. They let the main force that was supporting us go in first and of course they just created a great deal of dirt which made accurate aiming with Tallboys afterwards rather difficult. So not a very clever thing and we were diverted that night to Odiham on the way back because of bad weather. The next sortie, I was getting now towards the end of my thirtieth. I was on about my twenty eighth and at that stage of the game we hadn’t made our mind up whether we were going to go on to forty five or back up to thirty. And at that time Margaret, my first daughter was about to be born. Anne. Well, not about to be but it was in the, in the air and I thought well it might make life a little easier if I’m not operating. So the crew said, ‘Well, whatever you do Dougie is ok with us.’ So when I said to Jim Bazin, ‘I rather feel at the moment, Jim that in fairness to Margaret I ought to give it a rest.’ So he said, ‘Oh, in that case, Doug get it over with quickly.’ So that accounts for my next two entries which were December the 17th and December the 18th when I took a twelve thousand pound bomb to Munich but not the twelve thousand pound Tallboy but an HC bomb. High capacity bomb. Which really was a fancy way of saying three four thousand pound cookies bolted together and it was a long bomb as you can imagine. The bomb stretched the full length of a Lanc bomb bay. But then it was down to have a devastation area of a quarter of a mile square. Well, we gathered old Butch was rather annoyed that Munich had had a bit of a pasting but there was a piece of Munich between 12 o’clock and about 2 o’clock using clock square as not touched and this was rather unacceptable to Butch. So, he wanted this particular piece taken out so it was decided that the markers would go down in the [Sportsplatz] in Munich and that we would fly with our big ones who would do timed runs over the markers. If you can imagine running up towards 12 o’clock, the next line running at a minute past twelve, two minutes past twelve and you gradually take out the segment and then on a time basing you would drop so many seconds after markers and drop them along the line you might say of the direction. I know I haven’t explained that very well but that’s what it’s about. Well, I remember that night we, we went the long way around and took it out from the bottom. We went past Mont Blanc and I remember seeing it absolutely clear like in a photograph when looking down. Then we flew across the north plain of Italy. The Milan. As a matter of fact subsequently I was walking along that [unclear] to Venice on many occasions and we flew along there and then turned northwards and came up to Munich via the Brenner. And as you appreciate on these trips towards the end of the war the whole crew was to stick absolutely on timing and in order to, to keep yourself clear of night fighters. That whole business there was done in about two or three minutes. H hour, I think, I’m guessing now but I think H hour was about 1 o’clock in the morning and the whole business had to be finished by about three minutes past. And that was the way to do it because if you lingered and you were five or ten minutes later the odds are that if you hadn’t got it right in the first place a night fighter controller would have his kites up quickly and you were in trouble. So I remember that was done rather, well per book and we got back. The only thing that surprised me was that we came back, we passed [unclear] on the left and [unclear] had been taken out that night by the Halifaxes from 4 Group and it was on fire all right. And again on my post war trips I remember staying at a place called [unclear] near [unclear] in a little village place. I think what really happened there was that they decided to rebuild the place again almost. But what happened again we were, we were fired at on what we took to be the wrong bombing line. We always had an idea where our ground forces were and we were getting shot at by what we took to be our territory and subsequently I think we found that that was when the hun had gone through Ardennes, the Belfort Gap and was in fact well beyond what we took to be the line. I remember a little joke about that later. I was listening to, to [Coleman] the sports laddie talking about the Munich Olympics about the time when it was on and he said that this magnificent stadium of course when they’d cleaned a lot of the bombing rubbish out of Munich they had taken it outside and this had been the bulk of the aggregate and what have you for the construction of this magnificent place. And I remember saying to Margaret well I would have thought that being one of the principal contractors the least they can do to us is to send us a couple of tickets for the Olympics complimentary. But I don’t know. I never did think they had a sense of humour probably in that part of the world. So we never made it. However, that was the only occasion that I dropped one of those twelve thousand pound HC bombs. As a matter of fact I don’t think many of them were dropped but they were certainly a vicious looking thing. No streamlining at all. The Tallboy was a beautiful bomb but this HC thing was, was really a villain. Now, the next day I was saying I went on two nights. The next was December the 18th and we went to Gdynia in Poland. You know Gdansk where it was all happening. We went there chasing the Lützow which was one of the cruisers of that time. I think we were getting rather ambitious and I was wind finding again on that trip and it was a long one because we went up over the Baltic and I remember again cutting across the bottom tip of the Swedish neutral part and I was flying about twenty minutes ahead of the main force on this, on this wind finding lark and I was finding the wind in, in the bay there off Konigsberg and north of Gdynia. And on this occasion the only occasion not only had we got a fixed point in which to orbit my rear gunner we got a [unclear] out under the water and used that as a fixed point. Anyway, we got a wind. I don’t recall that the trip was very successful. I seem to remember later when we went in we got a bit of flak from a long narrow peninsula above Gdynia. I’ve an idea it’s called Hel. H E L. Because some considerable time after the war, it’s a few years ago now I took a rugby side to Poland for their fiftieth rugby anniversary time. That’s my sport actually and I went with two other [unclear] with a bunch of the lads and we went to play a week of rugby in Poland and we, we played a couple of our games up in Gdynia Gdansk area which is very pretty and they were nice people. An independent type of people. I can see why they caused trouble in Poland. They’ve got a streak of marine thinking in them. But we went and I remember standing on the dockside looking towards this Hel peninsula affair and I thought well I had a different view of that on the last occasion. But that was the 18th and I think we made up our minds about that time that we’d probably go on anyway. So I see it must have been around Christmas time too, December the [pause] yes where are we now? Yes. December the 28th and also probably a lot of bad weather about then because and I probably had some leave. But I notice my next entry was a ferrying trip up to Lossiemouth on the 26th of January. Of course, what was happening, John, what was happening about this time was as the more senior crews were becoming more clued up about Tallboy dropping that they were keeping us off main force targets because we had new crews coming in and they could cut their teeth on those.
[recording paused]
And the old boys were more useful on, for the Tallboy targets. You see they didn’t allow 9 Squadron to pull out of the general work. We did specialised targets working most of the time with 617 but we also were available for main force general work. So you can imagine our armourers had a hell of a rough time because they would bomb up the kites for Tallboys and they were so heavy that they used to have a special trolley with hydraulic pumps on the end of it and they would load that up on to the kite and then someone would say, ‘Oh, that trip is cancelled. Take it down and bomb it up for fifteen ones or a cookie and something for a general target.’ And they would change their mind again and down came the armourers. I don’t think they ever got any sleep. But another point of course was that by the time you fuelled up and put a Tallboy on board if you stood too long you wouldn’t do the Oleo legs any good and we didn’t have enough trolleys to run under the kite, jack it up and take the weight off. So all in all our armourers worked like hell. Every now and again Jim Bazin if we had a weekend stand down he’d come around the crews and get a quid a piece from us and he’d say we’ve given the armourers a drink tonight in the Jolly Sailor which was our pub at Bardney. Bardney village. We would go down and get the armourers drunk you know because they worked very hard. All of them did but in particular they had a bit of a job. So the younger crews who came in they sort of doubled up in a way and I remember at the time that a young Australian called [unclear] he’s, I forget which which part of Australia he was in, he came along and he came, he used to fly Y. Fly Youngers when I didn’t have it. You can imagine he got a hell of a briefing about what he must not do to it and to be fair to the lad he got himself as equally devoted to Y-Youngers as I was myself and he did a good job and he kept it out of trouble for which I’m very grateful. And later on he became somewhat more clued up himself and I’m not quite sure if he in turn didn’t get allocated the aircraft. You couldn’t monopolise these. You couldn’t say that’s mine and when I’m not flying when I’m on leave no one else can have it but which accounts for the fact that though I ultimately did thirty seven trips and I got the kite when it had done about twelve so we’re talking about forty nine, fifty’ish. In fact, Y went on to do somewhere in the region I think of eighty two because they were very keen that before it went in for its first, for its big stripped down major that it beat whatever squadron record between majors which was about eighty I think. So that’s why we honour the name of peers as flying it you know. But I was first choice but only on those specific kinds of targets when we began to segregate Tallboy work from general work. That takes us to February the 3rd is my next entry and this was another trip back to Ijmuiden again. That was the Dutch place I was telling you about that we were chasing the E-boat pens. Well now we went after the pens again with a Tallboy and I was wind finding again on that and that was my thirtieth. That was my first tour completed but we had agreed that we would go on. So that was the end of that. We just carried on. So the next one is the 6th of February and this was interesting. This was a day that I should definitely have stayed in bed and pulled the blankets over your head but I didn’t and it was a real day I was down to be out. We were going to Paderborn. At this stage of the game 617 and 9 were taking out the big bridges behind the Rhine. Montgomery was going to do his Rhine crossing and in order to slow down his supplies, the German supplies there were some big bridges to be taken out. They were still standing of course because there were three bridges with four lines of rail on them and the Americans and ourselves early on had been there with the ordinary thousand pounders and frankly they weren’t the things for moving them. And when you flew over them they were peppered with small craters but this still meant that he could get his traffic in or behind the Rhine. So we were given some targets and 617 were given their share. They, Bielefeld was the one that got the Grand Slam on it later on, the twenty two thousand and we got ours and Paderborn was the one that we went for on the 6th of February. It was a viaduct, a big viaduct we burned down with a twelve thousand pound Tallboy. I was wind finding and we abandoned that. Oh no. This wasn’t the one when I nearly got written off. We abandoned that because of ten tenths cloud and we were diverted to Woodbridge. I remember this was amusing because we were flying, we used to fly then in like eighteen of us say nine and we would fly on like two stepped down columns through nine a piece and I remember we were at the back at the time because it was easier to peel off for the wind finding. And Jim Bazin called up from the front and asked my navigator, asked me if our navigator would give a course to turning point so and so. And then we quickly realised that he was leading and Doug Melrose who was deputy leader, something had gone wrong somewhere and old [unclear] was very chuffed to be navigating the squadron he said from the back. But when we got there it was still all ten tenths and we were diverted into Woodbridge. That’s that big wide long runway which the Americans have got at the moment down in the bottom corner of Norfolk. You know. Around, [unclear] and that way. Well, I don’t know whether you’ve ever come in on a runway like that but its about six hundred yards of undershoot grass. Three thousand yards of asphalt which was a lot in those days and then about another five or six hundred yards of overshoot grass at the top end of that. There was one there at Woodbridge. There was another at Manston in Kent and there was one at Carnaby in Yorkshire and they were all on the sea coast. You could come in over the water. But the object was to bring in damaged and distressed crews. It wasn’t unusual that a kite would call up and say, ‘Well, I’m flying this thing but I happen to be the navigator or the engineer and the skipper at the moment is either A dead or B badly injured. What do I do?’ And believe it or not successful landings were made at a place like that with a bit of instruction and a bit of confidence because it had a lot of field and a lot of go and everyone had some idea what to do. So it was deemed worthwhile. There was only one interesting thing about it was it was about two hundred and fifty yards wide those runways. It was very wide and it made you realise what is important when you land anything is really your appreciation of width out of the corner of your eye in a way. It seemed the same when you probably remember you come in on a grass field you begin to see the height of the grass almost. Well, when you come into a normal standard two thousand yard Bomber Command runway of less width than these your hold off point for touching down and you used to repoint a Lanc if you wanted. The holdoff point was very much determined about the side vision. The result was every kite I saw tried to land on the Woodbridges and Carnaby’s held off at eight foot and fell in without fail. So it was so wide that if you were in a hurry and you were always going there on a bad weather diversion you could actually put almost two or three kits. You could put two or three kites down together. Perhaps even three if you were fine but you could get a lot of kites in quickly and that was why they were constructed. Another little, well more gruesome aspect was that the surface if there was a hole it was a softish kind of asphalt that they had the necessary gear to very quickly fill it in and smooth it out again too ready for the next lot. Anyway we were diverted to Woodbridge and I recall sitting around there trying to get something to eat and the Americans were there with their Fortresses and they were sitting around with those little caps of theirs with the edge pointed upwards you know and I remember one chap saying to me, ‘We’ve been all over Europe today, Bud.’ He said, ‘And I don’t think our leaders had a bloody clue where we were.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.’ I said, ‘It happens to us all.’ I didn’t want to let the side down by saying we were doing precisely the same but near enough. Anyway, we got diverted to Woodbridge so we were there overnight. We slept in a big heap somewhere. We came back the following day. And on the 10th I got my new bomb aimer Doug Jennings who I was telling you about that jumped out on his first trip and he came to join me because having completed his thirty Jack went back to Canada and consequently got his DFC and we were all very pleased. But he, incidentally I didn’t say that Cas Shields and I the navigator and myself got our immediate awards after Tirpitz which was about our twenty third trip and we got an immediate award because it worked out that we were on all three attacks. That was the attack from Russia and the unsuccessful one and the final sinking from Kinloss and Lossiemouth. A bit of good fortune in a way because by going on leave we may well have missed one of these trips. But anyway, another skipper called [Stohl. Stohl ]and I were the only two crews that made the three trips plus the wind finding extra that we did and Cas and I got immediate DFCs in ’44. As a matter of interest I said to Margaret, ‘Well, you’ll look a pickle if we go to the palace very pregnant.’ But that wasn’t to be and I was presented with my DFC by my postman in 1948. Four years later, on the doorstep and he came up and he said, ‘You have a very interesting package Doug. It’s got a Buckingham Palace postmark on it.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I know what that is. It’s been a hell of a time arriving.’ And when I unpacked it I had a little, a little, a little half sheet of note paper with the Buckingham Palace postmark with George VI’s signature on the bottom saying, “I’m very sorry that I was unable to present this personally but I wish you well.” And, you know, Bob’s your uncle. So I just, just a few weeks ago I had the laddie at my local shop to put a frame around this and he made, you may not believe this, you may not like the taste but I was digging amongst my old photographs and I picked a sample of them out along with that palace one and this Cooper lad got me a copy of my citation which I didn’t know existed but there is a proper form in which your citation is written on. First my station commander, second by the base commander and finally by Cocky recommended the award. Well Cooper, just a matter of course about twelve months ago now got me a copy of this from Air Works so I got a few of these and photographs, two of which I’m sending to you. I framed them and I said to my wife Margaret I’ve always been ambitious that these photographs along with the Humane Society Award is something to go up in my toilet because when you think about it where can you get a captive audience without running? I mean if you hung them up in your hallway or in your lounge people would say hello big head but when they’re up on the walls in the toilet there is plenty of time to read them and if it takes longer than normal there’s nothing wrong with that. So that’s where they are. And I thought well the right thing to do I’m going to Dymotype and type up, “Operations Room,” and so instead of WC on my upstairs toilet you’ve got Operations Room stamped on it. I’ve two walls. I’m hoping to add to it before things are over. But I’m not the first one to put things like that in the toilet. Anyway, that was the February the 6th . Then I was practice bombing on the tip of the 10th of February with Doug Jennings my new bomb aimer and I just realised when I read that that I gave you the wrong name. When I said that I took Cochrane to Tollerton to bomb instead of Wainfleet it wasn’t. It was to Epperstone. It’s in the same area. Epperstone. E P P E R S T O N E. And I drove past that not long ago. I saw a signpost pointed to it. One day I think I’ll go and have a look at that but that was the range we used. So on the 10th Doug introduced himself to the crew and we practice bombed but I remember Bazin, when he told me that this lad was joining me he said, ‘He's going to be one of two things Doug.’ Having jumped out of the first one, he said, ‘He’s going to be pretty good or pretty awful.’ Well, he turned out to be marvellous. A great deal. Very efficient. He, when we were doing daylights which most of ours were he was always pointing out suburbs and parts of Brussels when we went that way where he had stayed and ridden on trams. At one stage of the game he was billeted with a jeweller in a jeweller’s shop and when the Germans came in with their broken watches Doug used to give them a little talk on there was a mainspring problem and if they came back later he’d get it fixed. He could talk a little German and got away with it. He was a good boy. So we saw off the rest of our time with Jennings doing Jack Singer’s job. We went again to Paderborn on the 14th and again we abandoned it and we went again. We practice bombed again on the 20th and on the 22nd of February we finally bombed Paderborn. That was our third sortie to that viaduct with the same Tallboy. So we finally got rid of it. And you couldn’t, they were so expensive, the castings were done in America I believe and you couldn’t throw those away. Old Cochrane would sack you. March. March the 9th we practiced bombing again at Epperstone. There was no let up on this. It didn’t matter how much you were doing. Now, we were doing some fighter affiliation with, occasionally did that with cameras and with a fighter. With another fighter. Now, this was the day that I said I should have stayed in bed. March the 13th. Lancaster Y operations Arnsberg. That’s another bridge. Again a Tallboy and we were wind finding and that morning I took off in the Lanc and as I was going down the runway it suddenly swerved to the left and I couldn’t straighten it up. Not immediately. And down the left-hand side of our runway there was some [sodium] lights, quite big things but by really good luck and what have you we sort of picked our way between them and we definitely had the fourth wheel off the runway and I jiggled around. I got it back on again and we actually got airborne but with obviously with reduced power and I just got up to about two or three hundred feet and then throttled back as you normally would do, you know. Well, we were flying then these upgraded Merlins. I think they were Merlin 24 but they were high powered. The highest powered Merlin. It had no going through the box at the top. You just opened it straight up and I remember the Rolls Royce man who used to live with us at 9. Rolls Royce civvy engineer used to say, ‘For God’s sake get the revs up because you’re really pushing that engine, you know.’ But when I throttled back on this this flame that had dived out of my starboard inner quietened down and I felt that I could sort of manage so I continued and joined up and went off and did the sortie. But again we didn’t drop it. We ran into bad weather again and we were bringing the bomb back. Well, the weather was very poor and that was the day that 617 were going to for Bieldefeld with the big bomb. The twenty two. And they were diverted to Carnaby which was the Yorkshire field and 9 tried to get back in on its own field, Bardney which most of them did but when I came to the field and was going on the downwind leg when you dropped your undercart and opened up the rev the pitch again I got this big flame again and had to feather the starboard. The starboard inner. I called up and told them the problem and they diverted me to Waddington. They said, ‘No one is operating out of Waddington. You’ve got the field to yourself. See if you can get down there.’ So I went over to Waddington which is quite close to our base command base station and called up Waddo. Identified myself. The usual patter, ‘Have you got any hangups?’ from the girl in the tower. She said, ‘Have you got any hangups?’ I said, ‘Yes. One.’ She said, 'What is it?’ I said, 'It’s a twelve thousand pound Tallboy.’ At which I could sort of hear the consternation that went on by the tone of her voice and she came back, ‘Go to Carnaby. Clear.’ I said, ‘I can’t go to Carnaby. My navigator, my engineer and navigator tell me we are down to a hundred and fifty gallons.’ At which you normally thought about getting out of a Lanc. ‘And we can’t go to Carnaby.’ In the meantime before, I tried about three times to line up on the main runway at Waddington and I kept drifting away. I had no, certainty there that I could control there. So my navigator figured out that, he said, ‘Doug, if we go in a straight line to Carnaby without any [pause] without any frills we might just make it.’ So I said, ‘Right, we’re going. Tell them by the way to put all the lights on. The lot. Because I’m coming in from the sea and I’m coming in once.’ So that’s true. It was like Blackpool Illuminations. So I came in over the sea on three engines with a Tallboy doing a hundred and thirty knots. I wasn’t going to stall on that one. And I was telling you the length of these fields. Well, I used the lot. I used the entire length of the main runway, taxied up from the top and the taxi track was a great big horseshoe shape and I taxied around on that and parked and there were all the 617 people including these two Lancasters with no [unclear] in the nose, no bomb bays, no mid-upper and had, instead of where the bomb bay should be virtually a stream lined hole and this enormous Grand Slam just like a hen sitting on a big egg you know. Anyway, I remember sneaking into the billet in this emergency billet and I heard them in the darkness saying, ‘Who the hell is this 9 man that’s here?’ Because there was always a tremendous rivalry between the two squadrons. They worked together but we had a lot of rivalry. There still is. It’s all in good fun but you know what shape it can take. So I just deemed it diplomatic to keep quiet in the dark and Bob’s your uncle. Well, the next morning I didn’t expect to get attended to until they got the wizz kids out of the way with these two big ones and they were going back to Bieldefeld again because the weather had picked up and they still had the bombs. Well, I was witness to the very interesting episode which has since been, I’ve seen written once but it just reminded me that my memory’s a good one. I was parked near to the CO of 617 at the time and it was this man, this Canadian Group Captain Fauquier who had taken over command of 617 from Billie Tait. Now Billie, Willie Tait rather. Not Billie. Willie Tait had moved on and Fauquier to his credit had a big background of operational tours. Two I believe in 6 Group. The Canadians. But he was a very different type of person to both Cheshire and Willie Tait. When he turned up at, they’d gone down then to Woodhall Spa. When he turned up to command 617 I don’t know whether it was a defence that pitched him against the brass he found there but you were always impressed when you met particularly the earlier bunch of 617. They were men like [unclear] Martin who subsequently went on to Air Chief Marshall and Shannon and [unclear] Men with [unclear] men with two tours behind them and they were all squadron leaders there and when 617 had a problem, had a job to do one imagined that Willie Tait threw it on to the table and said, ‘What do you think of that?’ And, ‘What are we going to do about this one?’ And they sort of hammered out obviously the correct answers because of this real collection of talent. The, he seemed to, Fauquier seemed to adopt the view that well you might be brilliant at so and so but you’re not going to be a bunch of arty crafty types with me and he actually had them out practice bombing and sitting out with their kite waiting for the weather to improve. Where we practice bombed there was no harm in that but I think he would appear to have regarded them as a bunch of prima donnas who wanted sorting out. I know I heard them both. They weren’t terribly excited about him but on this particular trip that I’m talking about he had one of the specially converted Lancs and he had got of course they were taking off from Carnaby and they were returning after the trip to Bieldefeld to their own base. Rumour had it that he had all the Press ready to welcome and publicise the man who got the first big one. The Grand Slam. The twenty two thousander. But the other man who was going to drop it with him was Wing Commander Calder. Incidentally, if you are looking at this, the June 30th to July 13th issue of the Royal Air Force News there’s a drawing just being prepared by Maurice [unclear] Gardner who was one of the big ones for drawing paintings of the Grand Slam being dropped by Calder on that particular day, the 14th of March which when I look in my logbook was the day that I went up to Carnaby from the base. We had more trouble there that I’ll tell you about in a moment. But there they were very close to where I was parked at Carnaby and Fauquier was running up his Lanc and we were watching him from ours. We’d nothing else to do. And believe it or not you don’t often see this with a Rolls Royce engine he must have stuck a conrod through the motor or something because he stopped with an almighty thump and what have you fell below. Well, apparently, and I could see one part of this he was getting his crew out quickly with the intention of going across and taking over Calder’s kite. Well, Calder did the old Nelson touch on him and quietly taxied away and thereby became the first man to drop the first operational twenty two thousand on Bieldefeld. I see in this RAF News he’s a [Morayshire] man and he had a DSO and bar, a DFC later on. Part of it then I’ve no doubt and he went on to stay twenty seven years in the Air Force. So this particular Gardner’s painting has been signed by Calder. It’s one of these limited edition ones. Well, I obviously didn’t see the one dropped that day but I did on one of our later bridges see one of these go down and we were accompanied then by a Mosquito who was photographing then and I must say again that although the Tallboy is a big bomb this other thing was unbelievable. Well, on the day of the 14th when the 617 boys finally got away all except Fauquier I got hold of the engineer and said, ‘Well, what have you found wrong with mine?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s alright.’ I said, ‘You must be joking.’ He said, ‘Oh yes. I’ve run it up and it’s alright.’ So I told him what it had done to me. I said, ‘It’s tried to kill me twice. Three times yesterday.’ I said, ‘Now, what are we going to do?’ So anyway he signed my travelling 700 and vouched to me that the thing was right. So I said, ‘Well, now it’s all quiet and the mighty have departed,’ I said, ‘I’ll go down to the bottom right-hand corner of the main runway —