A New Year turns (and a happy one to all readers of this blog) but there is no word yet on how the remake of The Dam Busters is going. Screenplay writer Stephen Fry is currently in New Zealand, but is working on a BBC nature documentary, rather than the movie. All the industry gossip about Peter Jackson’s current workload is to do with his forthcoming film version of Tintin, to the cast of which Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are the latest additions. Christian Rivers who is due, as they say in film circles, to ‘helm’ the Dambusters project is currently working on a film called The Laundry Warrior about an Asian warrior assassin. Where does this leave the remake of Britain’s 11th favourite war movie? As there has been no word at all on a cast, I’m not budging from my prediction that it won’t hit the cinema screens until 2011.
Author: dambusters
Posts will be light …
… and probably non-existent over the next few days. The most seasonal interwebnet link I can find is this one, which shows figures who may well be officers from a Bomber Command squadron playing in the snow outside the Petwood Hotel, sometime during the war. No guarantee that anyone from 617 Squadron was involved!
Back in the New Year. Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all friends of this blog — Charles Foster.
RAF Coningsby briefing room, wartime view
Jennie Gray’s set of web pages about 97 Squadron’s role as a Pathfinder squadron date cover a period starting in late 1943, just after David Maltby and his crew were killed on the aborted Dortmund Ems raid. However, there are a number of connections between 97 and 617 Squadrons. David Maltby had done a full tour in 97 Squadron between June 1941 and June 1942. Most of the rest of his crew had been allocated to 97 Squadron at RAF Coningsby in March 1943 when they qualified as aircrew, but none of them ever flew an operation in their short time there. A bunch of ‘sprogs’, crewed up with an experienced pilot, they were all posted to Scampton as part of the new squadron for the Dams Raid. Another two crews came with them, mostly survivors of an almost complete tour, in the form of Joe McCarthy, Les Munro and their crews.
By the end of August 1943, 97 Squadron had moved from Coningsby to RAF Bourn, and were replaced in their old home by 617 Squadron. Scampton was to be given new concrete runways.
It was therefore presumably in this briefing room in Coningsby that David and his crew got their instructions for Operation Garlic on the night they died.
Question time
For some time Ron Lapp from Winnipeg has been trying to find out the answer to a question of detail about the Dams Raid:
When the Lancaster nose turret guns were fired, as they certainly were on the Dams raid, were the empty cases and links collected somehow, or did they just fall to the floor of the nose and get collected later? I have seen a picture showing the expended cases and links on the bottom of the nose, but I am not sure if this was common practice. I have also read that canvas bags or a flexible sleeve may have been used, but have not seen pictures of either of these possible collection methods. In the case of the Dams raid, with a gunner in the nose turret and the bomb aimer at his position, I would not think that the bomb aimer would want to be distracted by having spent cases and links falling over him during the bomb run.
Fortunately, I knew someone who would have the answer: Fred Sutherland, the front gunner in Les Knight’s aircraft, AJ-N – the aircraft which dropped the mine which broke the Eder Dam. Fred obliged with an almost immediate definitive response:
There were bags under each gun to catch the spent cases. There were several reasons for this. First, each gun fired 20 rounds a second and even with a short burst the empty cases soon built up a great pile.
Then there was at times, the violent evasive action where the empties could get air borne and foul up the works.
In the front turret which was designed for one person they would have showered down on the B/A. After a long burst [of fire] the cases became very hot.
So, there we have it. Another small mystery resolved!
John Wilkinson
John Wilkinson was the wireless operator in Vernon Byers’s aircraft, AJ-K, on the Dams Raid. This was the third aircraft to take off on the night of 16 May, and the first to be lost. Off course, it crossed the Dutch coast at Texel Island, a well known flak position, and was shot down.
This photograph was sent to me by John Cotterill, whose father was a good friend of John Wilkinson’s. It was given to him in 1993 by John Wilkinson’s brother, Tom, when the two met up for the first time in 43 years. I have also posted details on a new page on the Breaking the Dams website, which you can find here.
Probably best known as…
The recent demise of Reg Varney saw another rash of newspaper articles recalling someone half-remembered from way back when. Even though he had been the star of at least two well known TV series (not just the awful On the Buses but also the earlier, and funnier, The Rag Trade) the obituaries still had to remind many of us as to who exactly he was, falling back on the old clichés: ’15 minutes of fame …’, ‘probably best known as …’. Happily still around, even if not acting any more, is Mr Jon Dixon whose 90 seconds of fame played a significant part in the way in which the Dambusters have come to define Britishness. I hope the repeat fees from all those ‘100 Best TV Ads’ documentaries are some sort of compensation.
National differences in Remembrance Day customs
Interesting article by a British academic in the New York Times about different attitudes to Remembrance Day in different countries. It goes under a number of different names: Armistice Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day. In the USA, the day is more about celebrating lives of those who survived. In Poland, it is a day of national rejoicing as it marks the day in which the nation was reborn. In both France and Britain, however, it is more about remembering those who died.
Video of Lancaster in flight
I’ve only just caught up with this article in the Canadian Hamilton Spectator which appeared back in September. On the twentieth anniversary of its restoration, it tells the story of how one of the only two airworthy Lancasters in the world was saved from the scrapheap and brought back into flying condition.
Some splendid video footage and fascinating interviews. The newspaper’s main site also has video footage of the Remembrance Day service held at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Centre.
Remembering Remembrance Days
The Remembrance Day poppies I was given as a child were the old type, stiff red paper with a wire stalk. Adults wore them in their button holes, twisting the wire behind the lapel to keep it secure. Children pushed them through the wool of itchy school jumpers. When I was a teenager, boarding at St Edward’s School in Oxford in the 1960s, someone would come round selling them the week before during evening prep. Then on the actual Remembrance Day itself we would wear them while our Sunday chapel service was moved outside, clustered round the school’s war memorial. We would shuffle uncomfortably in our charcoal grey Sunday suits, trying to stay warm, minds drifting. Sundays meant a revolting roast lunch, straight after chapel, which I used to make a pretence of eating, but the latter part of the day did bring greater pleasures: a free afternoon, iced buns at teatime and, best of all, the cymbal signature tune which marked the Light Programme’s Pick of the Pops.
The war memorial was a tall stone cross outside the chapel. However, the names of the boys killed in the two world wars were inside, on a series of plaques on its side walls. There were hundreds of names, and I whiled away many a sermon reading and rereading those nearest my pew. Most meant little to me, but it was easy to spot those who were likely to have been brothers: L Q T T de O P T Tollemache and L S D O F T T de O P Tollemache being obvious examples. The school’s only VC, G P Gibson was also listed, of course, and was further honoured with a stained glass window.
As eleven o’clock chimed on those cold November Sundays I would dutifully try and think about the uncle I never knew, killed in the war. But I don’t think I ever really appreciated the hurt that my mother and her parents must have felt for the rest of their lives, that dull pain that never went away. And the pain of those unknown other parents and siblings, the Tollemaches, the Gibsons, the other names I have forgotten.
Was their pain ever assuaged by the national rituals of Remembrance Sunday? A day which, in the words of Professor Anthony Smith, has institutionalised our ‘collective identity through the rites of death and commemoration’? (Chosen Peoples, OUP 2003, p.246.)
The way in which these national rituals have developed was explored in a recent Guardian article by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who is much the same age as me. After a meeting with one of the few British veterans remaining from the First World War, Harry Patch, he wrote:
… it’s already abundantly clear there’s no danger of the war being suddenly forgotten, or made to seem irrelevant to our sense of what Europe and the world has to avoid repeating. In fact, during the last generation or so, and for reasons that have to do with much more than the survival of Harry and a few other veterans, the first world war has been identified by common consent as one of the great turning points in our history.
In the immediate aftermath, people did what they could to put it behind them – as they did again after the second world war. (My own father, in a way that was typical of his generation, said almost nothing to me about his life in the army, no matter how much I prodded him.) But in the long western European peace since 1945, the first world war has loomed larger and larger in our imaginations. It was once described as the war to end all wars. Over time, it has become the war by which most others are measured – in spite of all the obvious differences in weaponry, motive, duration, everything. In the process, it has also become more and more clearly the event which made us “modern” – both in the sense that it accelerated the growth of our democratic structures, and loosened old class strictures, and because it made the whole population familiar with barbarity, suffering and loss on a scale never seen before. Ninety years on from the Armistice, we look at the events of 1914-18 and think we are examining our national psychic wound.
That’s why Remembrance Day parades and ceremonies are given so much press and other kinds of attention these days (perhaps even more attention than previously, but these things are hard to measure). They exist to commemorate the dead of all wars, but they invariably revolve around images associated with the trenches – the heart-jolting pictures of people like Harry Patch floundering in the mud, or scrabbling over the lip of a trench and almost immediately being shot down. And throughout the rest of the year they are fed by other elements of national life. By the pathos and ubiquity of the large-scale memorials in our cities, and the smaller monuments in our villages – often recording the deaths of several members of the same family. By the way poetry of the first world war is drip-fed from the national curriculum into almost all our children as they become teenagers. (To the extent that even the best poets of other wars, such as Keith Douglas, are not studied at all, or made to seem somehow less good, because they don’t conform to the criteria of war poetry established by Owen, Sassoon, et al.)
All these are reasons for thinking that when Harry Patch is no longer with us, the Great War will keep its eagle-grasp on our imaginations. Unlike the Hundred Years War, or the Napoleonic wars, it’s feeling of closeness is continually refreshed by the monuments that stand at the heart of our communities, and by the fact that very many families cherish the memories of ancestors who were involved. Unlike more recent and contemporary wars, shocking as these are, it still feels on our doorstep, recollected in landscapes we recognise, and involving our neighbours as well as ourselves.
This year, as I have done in most recent years, I will watch Sunday’s Cenotaph service on TV. It’s a ceremony that has its own rituals. Impeccable timing, which sees the last main celebrants arriving just a few seconds before Big Ben strikes 11. The view through the falling autumn leaves down Whitehall. The grey-coated Guards band, coaxing beautiful music from their silver instruments (the swelling sound of Nimrod almost too emotional to bear). The medley of camera shots during the two minutes silence, which always ends with the gun salute in Hyde Park. The Last Post played on bugles. The dignity of an eighty-something monarch and her spouse, who both lived through the last war, as they lay their wreaths.
Then, after the official service, come the massed ranks of old men and women. These must have been waiting for hours in the cold, marching, marching, many still in step. The bowler hats. The berets. The British Warm overcoats. The sensible V-neck sweaters worn under regimental blazers. The wreaths which pile slowly against the Cenotaph.
With this march past, as Smith notes, the mood changes:
This part of the ceremony is more personal. It focuses on families, regiments and small groups of friends, their contributions, experiences, and memories. Here love for friends and family is felt to be part of the loyalty to the community of the nation, and, conversely, national devotion and loyalty are seen as extensions of the solidarity felt by family and friends. Family and nation are also linked by the bitterness at the senseless waste of war and, perhaps, at the excesses of state patriotism; the sense of personal bereavement becomes an expression of a wider national grief. (Smith, p.249.)
The survivors of the first Great War, the war to end all wars as it was laughingly called, are nearly all gone. In a few years time those who took part in the Second may all be too frail to participate. The rest of us will then, as Andrew Motion says, echoing Wilfred Owen, need to work harder to remember why we have had the good fortune to have lived in a largely peaceful Europe, and find our memories ‘in the stones, and statues, and archives, and, on Remembrance Day, in the notes of bugles calling from sad shires.’
I’m not as certain as Andrew Motion that we will succeed. These national rituals come easier to people like me, born in the 1950s, because we remember the war even though we didn’t live through it. We know instinctively that it was not all cheery Cockney banter and make do and mend. Neither was it ‘Take that, Nazi schweinehund’ and ‘Jolly good show, chaps’. It was dirty, and brutish, and many people died. We know that our parents’ brothers and sisters were lost, and we can just about comprehend what this meant to those who lived. But will it mean as much to our grandchildren, yet unborn?
Back in the air, aged 89
The campaign for belated recognition of the wartime efforts of those who served in Bomber Command is gathering pace. At a recent parliamentary question time, Tom Harris MP elicited a reply from the government that a new memorial was under serious consideration.
Scandalously, the aircrew of Bomber Command were never awarded their own campaign medal – the reason given at the time that because they were fighting from bases inside the UK, the Defence Medal would suffice. As Patrick Bishop has written:
The war had been a triumph for morality and civilized values, of light and darkness. The presence of Bomber Command loomed awkwardly over this legend. From then on, the political establishment colluded to keep it to the margins of the story [and] … when it came to awarding medals, care was taken not to identify the strategic bombing offensive as a distinct campaign. (Bomber Boys, Harper Press, 2007, p.368)
The Daily Telegraph has got in on the act with a fine new portal page on its website. There’s lots of great stuff here: archive pages from wartime issues, including the whole front page from the day after the dams raid, and a great piece about 617 Squadron’s Tony Iveson, a pilot who joined the squadron in late 1943, and took part in many operations later on in the war. He is now the chair of the Bomber Command Association. In his beautifully written article, with accompanying video, Gordon Rayner describes how he accompanied the 89-year-old Iveson on a flight in the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster. When the pilot asked Iveson if he wanted to take over the controls for a short while, he leapt at the chance.
The link on the Telegraph’s portal page doesn’t seem to show the whole article, so I have taken the liberty of copying and pasting the whole 1300 words below. It repays reading!
The last time Squadron Leader Tony Iveson flew a Lancaster on operations, his bomber was so badly shot-up by a German fighter over Bergen that three of his seven crew bailed out, certain they were just moments from crashing. But the 25-year-old pilot wasn’t about to be beaten; despite losing an engine and with many controls out of action, Mr Iveson, determined not to become a prisoner of war, kept the stricken bomber in the air for several nerve-shattering hours before making an emergency landing on Shetland.
His courage that day in January 1945 earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross and signalled the end of his war, in which he had flown more than 20 missions over enemy territory with 617 Squadron, “The Dambusters”. He was one of the lucky ones. Of the 125,000 men who flew with Bomber Command, with an average age of 22, a total of 55,573 were killed, the heaviest losses of any unit in the Second World War.
Yet their sacrifice has never been recognised by a memorial, and as chairman of the Bomber Command Association, Tony Iveson is one of the veterans spearheading the campaign to raise the 2 million pounds needed to build a memorial in central London. The Telegraph’s Forgotten Heroes appeal, launched today, calls on readers to help fund that permanent symbol of our nation’s gratitude.
“Never a day goes by when I don’t think about the friends that I lost,” said Mr Iveson, who became a pilot with BOAC before joining Granada TV, where he rose to be head of publicity. “It becomes more poignant the older you get, because you realise all the more how lucky you were and how much of life those young men missed out on.”
After he had come so close to losing his life in a Lancaster, I was unsure how Mr Iveson would react when I asked him whether he might like to fly in one again. “I’d love to,” came his excited reply when I rang him at his home in Oxted, Surrey. At the age of 89, it was clear that his boyish enthusiasm for flying remained undimmed, as did his fondness for an aircraft that got him home safely so many times.
Within weeks, Mr Iveson, a widower with three daughters and six grandchildren, would not only be airborne but at the controls of a Lancaster, becoming the oldest person to fly the RAF’s most famous bomber. It would be one of his most moving post-war experiences. The chance to fly in the Lancaster of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight had been offered by Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, the Chief of the Air Staff and a keen supporter of the memorial campaign.
At the end of last month, having spent the night at the Petwood Hotel in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire (which had served as 617 Squadron’s officers’ mess in 1944), Mr Iveson and I set off in thick fog for nearby RAF Coningsby, home of the memorial flight. Awaiting us was Lancaster PA474, one of only two airworthy examples of the 7,373 built, and the only one in Europe.
Up close the Lancaster seems a living, brooding beast, carrying nobility and menace in equal measure. “It really was a weapon of war,” said Mr Iveson as we climbed aboard. “It looks so big from the outside, but it’s quite cramped because of all the weaponry. It was a tough machine. I flew 25 different types of aircraft during my career, from Spitfires to heavy bombers, and there was nothing better than the Lancaster for getting the job done. It would take a lot of punishment and still be able to fly, and that was comforting to know when we set off on operations.”
PA474 has been beautifully maintained and still looks ready for battle. It even has racks filled with hundreds of bullets running down the inside of the fuselage to feed the four machine guns in the rear turret. Was it as Mr Iveson remembered it? “The smell is there and that brings it all back,” he said. “But I can’t believe how small the cockpit is. Did I really spend all those hours in such a tight space?”
Mr Iveson flew Spitfires with 616 Squadron during the Battle of Britain, and survived being shot down and landing his fighter in the North Sea before his transfer to Bomber Command and more than 20 raids with 617 Squadron, including the sinking of the Tirpitz in 1944.But on this occasion, as Flight Lieutenant Mike Leckey fired up the four Merlin engines, Mr Iveson would have to squash into the wireless operator’s seat at the back of the cockpit. Fiddling mischievously with the Bakelite morse code sender, he said: “I’d never sat in this position before. It really is a tight squeeze and it’s only now that I realise how difficult it must have been for the wireless operator, sitting here for up to 12 hours at a time.”
With engines idling, the floor began to judder, and as Mr Leckey opened the throttles, the aircraft accelerated with surprising speed down the runway, pinning me back into my seat. Suddenly the juddering stopped, we were airborne and the Lancaster rose effortlessly above the Lincolnshire countryside. As Mr Iveson stared out across the wing, I asked him what memories were running through his mind.
“Flying was a huge thrill, and it was a great privilege to fly with my squadron,” he said. Then, with the compulsory understatement of the war veteran, he added: “It wasn’t pleasant at night over Germany. We lost 70 aircrew during my time on the squadron. It was something you lived with and tried not to dwell on.”
I tapped the metal skin of the aircraft, not much thicker than a tin can, thinking just how exposed the men inside a Lancaster must have felt. I couldn’t help comparing it with the Volvo I had been driving an hour earlier, with its chunky doors and airbags to cocoon me from the perils of the M11, and suddenly felt faintly ridiculous.
Nor did Lancaster crews have such luxuries as a pressurised or heated cabin. Flying at altitudes where the outside temperature could be minus 40C, they relied on several layers of thick clothing, a flask of coffee and a ration of chocolate.
Half an hour into the flight came our moment of history. Mr Leckey invited Mr Iveson to slide into the flight engineer’s seat next to him, where he sprang the surprise of asking whether he fancied taking the controls. There was never any doubt what the answer would be. “It feels wonderful,” said a remarkably composed Mr Iveson as he gripped the control column and put his feet on the rudder pedals. “I never thought I would get the chance to do this again. It’s quite overwhelming to have this machine in my hands once more. It takes me right back to when I would fly over the North Sea at the crack of dawn.”
During the flight, adrenalin kept Mr Iveson focused on the job, but back on the ground his eyes began to well up as he was hit by the enormity of what his younger self and comrades had gone through. “Having the controls of the aircraft again affected me in a way I hadn’t expected,” he confided. “I really don’t know how we did what we did. It’s a sobering thought that we lost three and a half thousand Lancasters. This flight made me realise for the first time in 50 years just how lucky I am, because no matter how skilful you were, it was the luck of the draw whether you survived. It makes me all the more determined to ensure that we build a memorial to those 55,000 men who didn’t make it back.”
© Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2008
Dambusters Blog 