Bomber Command by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online

accepted that Wellingtons must be provided with beam guns and self-sealing tanks. But granted these measures, it seemed to them that the elements of Kellett’s formation which stuck rigidly together as ordered had fared astonishingly well. Only one of Kellett’s own section of four aircraft had been lost, and an impressive list of enemy fighters destroyed was accepted. Of the six aircraft on the starboard side, it seemed reasonable to assume that all would have survived the battle had they been fitted with self-sealing tanks.
    Why therefore had the port and rear sections of the formation fared so badly? Air Vice-Marshal Baldwin’s report to Ludlow-Hewitt contained no breath of criticism of the strategic and tactical concepts underlying the operation:
I am afraid [he wrote firmly on 23 December] there is no doubt that the heavy casualties experienced by 9 and 37 Squadrons were due to poor leadership and consequent poor formation flying. Squadron-Leader Guthrie is reported as being almost a mile ahead of his formation. For some unknown reason Hue-Williams, who, I thought, was a very sound leader, appears to have done the same thing . . .
I have not by any means given up hope of being able to drive home the lessons learnt . . . I have already taken steps to prevent a repetition, but I was allowing a certain period to elapse before pinning results on to individual actions, although instances of bad leadership have already been pointed out to all units.
     
    3 Group’s summary of the lessons to be derived from the events of 18 December concluded: ‘There is every reason to believe that a very close formation of six Wellington aircraft will emerge from a long and heavy attack by enemy fighters with very few, if any, casualties to its own aircraft.’
    3 Group’s Operational Instruction No. 21 of 23 December 1939 stated: ‘With the intention of combining useful training and operations, sweeps will continue to be carried out . . . If enemy aircraft are encountered, gunners will be able to practise shooting at real targets instead of drogues . . .’
    On 2 January 1940, Air Vice-Marshal A. T. Harris, the future C-in-C of Bomber Command, then serving as AOC of 5 Group, told HQ at High Wycombe that so long as three bombers were in company in daylight, the pilots ‘considered themselves capable of taking on anything’.
    Peter Grant was sent to lecture to a Bomber Command gunnery school on the realities of facing fighter attack in daylight. On his return, he was reprimanded for having given ‘an unpatriotic talk likely to cause dismay and demoralization’.
    The Germans at Wilhelmshaven were unaware that Ruse had dropped his bombs in the sea before crashing, and were therefore bewildered to find that his Wellington had apparently flown the operation unloaded. The only logical conclusion that they couldreach about the behaviour of Kellett’s formation was that the British had been carrying out some suicidal form of exercise, which was indeed not far from the truth.
    On the night of 18 December, there was a knock on the door of Mary Jones’s little flat in Feltwell. It was 37 Squadron’s adjutant, struggling to mask his embarrassment in harshness: ‘You know your husband’s not coming back, don’t you?’ That night Mary dreamt of Harry’s golden hair floating on the sea. She was quickly gone from Feltwell. The station made it apparent that it was anxious to rid itself of its dreadful crop of widows as hastily as possible. It was weeks before she heard confirmation of German radio claims that Harry, with May and Ruse, was a prisoner. It was Christmas 1945 before the Joneses sat down together to eat the pudding that she had made that winter of 1939, and which she stored so hopefully through the six Christmases of war that followed.
    Most of the other men who survived 18 December were killed on operations in the years that followed. Bill Macrae, 9 Squadron’s tough little Canadian, died perhaps most pathetically of all, on