William Tweddle Audio memoir. Three

William Tweddle Audio memoir. Three

Doug Tweddle flew on the successful operation to sink the Tirpitz.

00:46:53 audio recording

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ATweddleWD770915-0003

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]
I think 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. It had katabatic 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. I must say 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. Luleå 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. Westerland, 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 merry 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 when the squadron, the group captain and 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 airwomen though 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 fifteen. 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 of a thousand foot for a thousand pounds meant that it wasn’t good sense 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 author 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 the 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 [unclear] to use as the wind finding point was a red tiled building on the northwest 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 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, 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 was 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 and straight up 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 to fly below his 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. Now, 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 systems 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 ability 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 and 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 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 but 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 09:46 and a half. 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 607 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 to 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 [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 it on. I’d have won the drink anyway. As it was old MacMullen, Groupie McMullen put a blank cheque on the bar and said to the boys, ‘Drink that lot up.’ And again a thick night was had by all you know. 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 had 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 the general 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 that 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 deemed 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 Cochy 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 on the trip put them in a big hangar, 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 whether 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 —