by | January 27, 2012

617 Squadron’s last wartime casualties

The last wartime loss from 617 Squadron happened on 16 April 1945, when 18 Lancasters set off to attack the German cruiser Lutzow in the Kiel Canal. This was the third mission against the ship. The previous two, in the preceding days had been unsuccessful, due to poor weather conditions. Most of the aircraft attacked the ship and successfully bombed the target. (See this post from December 2009, with an account by the son of Flg Off Joe Merchant).

Even though the war was obviously nearing its end, there was strong German flak near the target. Lancaster NG228 was hit, and crashed in Karsibor woods near Swinemunde (Swinoujscie). There were no survivors.

The aircraft was piloted by Sqn Ldr John Powell, an experienced pilot, who had completed 16 operations on his second tour after joining 617 Squadron on 5 December 1944. Some of his regular crew were not available, so some spare men were added. The crew comprised:
Pilot: Sqn Ldr John Leonard Powell DFC, age 29 from Glamorgan. Joined 617 Sqn 5.12.44. Completed 16 ops of 2nd tour.
Flight engineer: Flt Sgt Henry William Felton DFM, from Teddington. Joined 617 Sqn 19.10.44; Completed 18 ops with sqn.
Navigator: Flt Lt Michael Terence Clarke DFC, age 22 from Farnham. Joined 617 Sqn 3.4.45 (2nd time). 1st op on this tour.
Bomb aimer: Flg Off Alfred Lawrence Heath, from Folkestone. Joined 617 Sqn 8.12.44. Believed to have flown on 8 ops with sqn.
Wireless operator: Plt Off Kenneth Arthur John Hewitt, from Hemel Hempstead. Joined 617 Sqn 28.1.45. Completed 7 ops with sqn.
Mid-upper gunner: Flt Sgt William Knight, from Croydon. Joined 617 Sqn 10.3.45. Completed a tour with 227 Sqn, on 1st op with 617 Sqn.
Rear gunner: Flg Off James Watson, from Peebleshire. Joined 617 Sqn 19.10.44. Completed 20 ops with sqn.

Sandra Foster (no relation of mine) is William Knight’s niece and has been researching his career over a number of years. She recently posted a number of pictures in a thread on the Lancaster Archive forum, and has kindly allowed me to reproduce them here.

Sandra told me in an email:

Will did not come from a privileged background, like many of his generation, he left school at 14. At 16 he tried his luck in Canada but could not find the opportunities and eventually got home by trying to cross into America and got deported. Apparently he was in a very sorry state when he arrived back, just the clothes he stood up in. When the war started he tried several time to join the RAF and was turned down. By this time he worked in engineering and was classed as in a reserved occupation. Eventually he succeeded. When he was lost, his wife, my Aunt Phyl, was first told he was MIA, then that he was safe and was on his way home. On the day he was expected home, she got the telegram saying it was a mistake and he had been killed.

Will had completed his missions and did not expect to fly again, he even returned his lucky rabbit’s foot to Phyl. My mum told me that on the day he was due home, the house was decked with flags and ‘Welcome Home’ banners… From what I remember from my mum, he knew he was to be made up to Pilot Officer but hadn’t told his wife as he intended surprising her when next home.

In this picture of his crew in 227 Squadron, Will is seated on the left, in the front row.

The crew was initially buried in Swinemunde, then still in Germany. It came under Polish control after the war and is now called Świnoujście. In 1949, the bodies were all disinterred and reburied in an official war cemetery in Poznan.

The local people marked the crash site with a tail fin and in the 1990s the aircraft was excavated with the assistance of the Polish Air Force who erected a more formal memorial.

Sandra and her family visited the crash site/memorial a few years ago, and also Will’s grave at Poznan. Here is her picture of the memorial in Świnoujście:

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Filed under Lutzow, Memorials

by | January 11, 2012

Bouncing bomb reaches US screens

If you haven’t yet caught up with the Windfall Films documentary Building the Bouncing Bomb, screened last May in the UK and later in Canada, you now have a chance to see it, if you live in the USA. It’s being screened on PBS’s Nova documentary channel on Wednesday 11 January at 9pm (not sure which time zone that applies to). The title has been changed to Bombing Hitler’s Dams.

The background to the documentary was extensively covered in this blog at the time it was shot, in October 2010, and when it was released in the UK, in May 2011. Go back to the posts from those two months if you want further information.

My favourite picture from that time is the shot of Dambuster Grant MacDonald (rear gunner in Ken Brown’s AJ-F) visiting the site of the shoot. Here it is again!

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Filed under Modern documentaries

by | January 8, 2012

The Dam Busters – Heffer’s view

If you watched The Dam Busters earlier today on ITV4, and are now paying your first visit to this blog, welcome.

You may be searching for more information about the remake of the film, which is in the hands of Peter Jackson, in which case I can tell you quite categorically, there is no news. There are rumours aplenty, but all we can currently say is that it seems unlikely that he will make much progress on the project until he has got his Hobbit blockbuster out of the way – and that will last well into next year.

But in the meantime we can report that in the more rarefied atmosphere of the BBC Radio 3 studios, there will be a radio talk this week on the original film by the well known pundit, Simon Heffer. This is one of a series he is doing on British war films of the 1950s. You can catch it on Wednesday 11 January at 10.45pm.

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Filed under Dam Busters 1955 film, Dambusters remake

by | December 24, 2011

Christmas is all around me, and so the feeling grows…

…and so the immortal words of Billy Mack from Love Actually ring out as another year draws to a close.

This blog has just had its most successful year, with nearly 100,000 visits. So let me wish all of you, whether you’ve followed us from the beginning or have only recently come across us, a very merry Christmas and a peaceful and happy New Year.

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by | December 21, 2011

Bill Townsend obituary

Wartime portrait by Cuthbert Orde, published in The Tatler, September 1943

The last pilot to land his aircraft safely on the night of the Dams Raid was Bill Townsend, pilot of AJ-O. He had been detailed as one of the five mobile reserves, taking off from Scampton at 0014 on Sunday 17 May. He was sent to one of the raid’s secondary targets, the Ennepe Dam, which he and his crew attacked — after three attempts — at 0337. Although it bounced twice, the mine exploded short of the dam which remained intact. They hung around for a while waiting to see if others would arrive, but then set off for home. They passed over the Möhne, saw for themselves the extent of the devastation already wreaked and then set off as fast as they could.

With dawn breaking, AJ-O had a very hairy journey back to base. As they approached Texel on the Dutch coast the Germans depressed a heavy flak gun on them and deliberately bounced shells off the water, a tactic which navigator Lance Howard later described as ‘not cricket’. (You imagine that he was being ironic, given the weapon that they had bounced off the Ennepe lake a few hours previously!) They finally landed, with only three engines working, at 0615 and were met on the hardstanding by a group of Bomber Command’s most senior officers, including AOC ‘Bomber’ Harris, whom Townsend failed to recognise and pushed past. It was however, as his crew later recalled, a piece of ‘superb flying’ which had brought them home.

After the war, Townsend had a quiet life. At one point he and his wife owned a pub, but he later worked as a civil servant, including a spell in the Department of Employment in Bromsgrove. Although he died as recently as 1991, there doesn’t seem to have been any obituary published in the national press. However one from a local (unnamed) Bromsgrove newspaper has now been unearthed by members of the WW2Talk Forum. Poster ‘Spidge’ started a thread three or four years ago trying to identify all the final resting places of the 129 Dambusters who are no longer with us, and one of his colleagues, Geoff, put up this snap:

Like so many of his generation, Bill Townsend was a modest man who rarely spoke of his part in the RAF’s most famous ever bombing operation. He surely deserves to be more widely celebrated.

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by | December 14, 2011

Dams Raid: how Cleveland heard the news

Dom Howard continues to add to his impressive collection of contemporary reports of the Dams Raid. Here’s the latest, from Cleveland, Ohio, dated 17 May 1943. You can check out the full array of scans on his Photobucket page.

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by | December 4, 2011

BFI shows off Dam Buster stills

The British Film Institute has revamped its stills website, so that it now displays many more items from its collection. The first thing I searched for was, of course, The Dam Busters, where there are 24 items including most of the well known film stills and posters.

What is still missing, however, are those extra unused stills from cinematographer Erwin Hillier’s personal collection which turned up a couple of years ago, on which I reported at the time.

 

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Filed under Dam Busters 1955 film, Erwin Hillier

by | November 28, 2011

Hay spells it out

[Picture from The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill, Evans Brothers, 1951 edition]

Anyone who has read the later chapters of Paul Brickhill’s book The Dam Busters may recall the chapter devoted to a gadget called the Stabilising Automatic Bomb Sight (SABS). This had been invented in 1941 to enable aircrew drop big bombs more accurately, but for it to work an aircraft had to run straight and level for ten miles in the period immediately before the bomb was dropped. It was claimed that if the sight was used properly a bomb could be dropped from 20,000 feet with an accuracy of under a hundred yards.

617 Squadron’s “Bombing Leader” was Flt Lt Bob Hay, bomb aimer in Mick Martin’s crew. Each squadron had a “Leader” for each of the specialist jobs in an aircrew – Bombing, Signals, Navigation, Engineering and Gunnery. Their job was to co-ordinate specialist training and other matters across the squadron, sorting out problems and schedules, liaising with the Flight Commanders and so on.

Hay therefore had to deal with the man Brickhill calls “Talking Bomb”, a Sqn Ldr Richardson who arrived at Coningsby to train the crews in the use of the SABS. It was hard work and required intense practise, but eventually the crews got quite good at its use, with Hay himself setting the standard with an average deviation of just 64 yards.

Hay was therefore called upon to write an article for the 5 Group’s internal newsletter, 5 Group News, in order to spread the word amongst other squadrons in the group. This article has recently come to light, and the text has been reproduced  on the Stirling Aircraft Forum website. You can read the full article there, but here is a short extract:

The Secret of 617 Squadron’s High Standard of Practise Bombing – the S.A.B.S. Pilot/Navigator/Air Bomber Team (By Flt Lt Hay)

The excellent results gained by crews of 617 Squadron using the S.A.B.S. have only been achieved by the fullest, most practical use of the ‘bombing team’. Before any bombs are dropped, some 4 hours training on the specially adapted A.M.B.T. are carried out by the pilot and air bomber to give manipulation practise to the latter and to familiarise the pilot with the B.D.I. (Bombing Direction Indicator).

The SABS was used successfully on a number of raids but sadly Bob Hay was not around long enough to share in any glory. He was killed in February 1944, when Martin’s aircraft was badly damaged by anti-aircraft guns on an attack on the Antheor viaduct in Italy, and is buried in Sardinia. He was the only member of Martin’s Dams Raid crew who did not survive the war.

[Hat tip: PAFG, SAS Forum]

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by | November 23, 2011

Vincent MacCausland – new pictures

I last wrote about Vincent MacCausland some eighteen months ago, and reported on some letters and pictures which had been found in Canada by Joel Joy. Joel has now pulled everything together in a Flickr page, and added some more pictures which he has come across.
Joel is doing a grand job researching the lives of the Canadian Dambusters, and we can expect more material as and when he unearths it.

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by | November 12, 2011

Dambuster pictures from the Bomber County

Deep in the heart of Lincolnshire lives Anna Haworth, photographer extraordinaire. She has a particular fascination with all things aeronautical, and most especially the Dambusters. There are loads of pictures on her Flickr page, which you can see here. And here is the link to her Dambusters collection, which contains stunning shots from trips over the Derwent dam, atmospheric pictures from the Petwood Hotel, the collections at Metheringham, East Kirkby, Scampton and Coningsby, to name just a few. Plus some other oddities that she has come across, such as the decorated scooter shown above.

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Filed under Dambuster memorabilia, Modern photographs