A Piece of Cake (Part 2)

‘A Piece of Cake’- part 2
A conversation with Rob Marchment
Wireless Operator W ‘Bill’ Wareham’s
Story of Flying in Lancaster's at RAF Waddington in 467 Squadron

Part 2

Bombing

You had to keep the aircraft straight and level, with bomb aimers now taking it over, who would wait for their horizontal lines to come to the position they wanted, to ‘make the cross’ before they pressed their lever/release. Once this was pressed, it set a camera of automatically, which would take five shots. This was two before the aiming point, the aiming point itself and two after. On that film would be shown your heading, so what you couldn’t say, for instance, when you got back, that you’d followed instructions and went in on the heading that you were told to because it would be detailed on this strip of film. You did have a ‘creepback’, because what used to happen was that obviously you wanted to get rid of your bombs, because it was quite a frightening few minutes, where your bomb doors were open and the aircraft was very vulnerable. You were making these corrections and the aircraft was going at a minimum speed, with the open doors adding to the drag. Everyone is getting at the bomb aimer to get rid of the bombs. Some bomb aimers, and ours, would at times, instead of getting to the centre, drop their bombs on certain fires that had been created by people that had gone before you. So you did tend to get this ‘creepback’. I think it was fear, as much as anything and wanting to get the job done.

There was a tremendous amount of flak around some of these targets. You would see, silhouetted in this enormous fire the shapes of aircraft, of Lancaster's. You could see them below you. You were anxious to get these bombs away. When you did, you would go up, as if someone was pulling you up with a string. The bomb doors would close; the bomb aimer would shine a torch down the bomb bay to see if there were any ‘hang-ups’. You would do a turn out of the target on a heading out of the target. You could hear the pilot saying: ’Ron. What’s the heading out of the target?’ You can imagine it — the adrenaline’s flowing, you want to get away! The aircraft’s speed would be increased enormously, because of the loss of weight, and you’ve used a lot of petrol. So, you get up to two hundred knots, you see, even more so if you went slightly downhill. Everybody was of that mind — get in and get out!

What sort of dangers lay in wait for you, from bombing to getting home?
Obviously, the night fighters were waiting, but the thing was you were going much faster. You were more confident, because of this added speed. So the fighter had to be on his mettle because, though they were faster than you were, with the Junkers 88 being supercharged and capable of about two-fifty, you had more chance. So once you had got rid of the bombs and if you were alert, you were sort of charged up by the fact that you had survived by what you considered to be the major part of the job that is bombing the target. Now, you were on a sort of survival course. You wanted to get home, so all seven of you were absolutely focused. I used to watch the radar screen for fighters. I would never take my eyes of it. As soon as I saw a blip come up, I’d inform the gunners immediately and they would pick it up. Most times, we’d take evasive action. The night fighter, if he knew he had been spotted, he’d tend to go off for some easier prey.

Could these night fighters steal up on you unawares?

Yes, they could. This was the problem. Coming back to being alert. They’d come up behind you or up underneath you and fire upwards. If you were alert, you could probably pick him up before he got to that point, on your radar screen. This instrument covered the whole of the aircraft apart from the front. The fighters wouldn’t attack from the front. It would be too dangerous for them. So they would come from behind, the quarters and the beams. The equipment we had covered that, you see. So if the wireless operator was alert, and I just did not take my eyes of it, you’d see it. It was a round Cathode ray tube with a centre line. The background of the tube was green. The centre line was calibrated. An aircraft would show up in the form of a blip on that centre line. If it were one of yours, which more often than not it was, it would be moving at the same speed as you were. So it would stay put. But if it were a fighter, with the intention of attacking you, it would be coming in, much faster.
So if the line was in the middle of the blip, the bloke was dead behind you. But if was to one side or the other, in the port quarter or the starboard quarter, which it invariably was, you’d see it coming down the screen, at a fair speed, and you could say: ‘Aircraft approaching from starboard quarter!’ The gunners would train their eyes in that particular area and they’d spot it, long before the fighter could attack you.

So, that’s what happened. They’d spot it. You would take evasive action. They wouldn’t fire at it, because the tracers from your guns would give your position away. It was a question of evasion, if you were sensible. So, we just evaded and when we did have this problem, we got away with it. There were times when they did fire and you saw the tracer rockets they used, going over the top or underneath you. Most times, they did not bother to persevere, because there were so many other bombers about.

Was there ever an occasion when an enemy fighter did persevere?
Yes, we did have one, I remember, from the whole tour, which did follow us all the way to the Dutch coast. He made a number of attacks. It must have meant that their radar was picking us up and he was being guided onto us. But our rear gunner had wonderful eyesight. He was very fortunate, as his night vision was fantastic. So, with the help of the radar equipment that I was operating, we were able to pick him up, before he tended to fire his guns. But then they would fire at a greater distance, so, of course, they had less chance of hitting you. This is what happened to us and we were turning the aircraft all over the sky. The pilot, a big, strong Australian chap was doing this, who said: ‘If he follows us all the way back to bloody Waddington, he’s not going to get us!’ In the event, we lost him. He obviously went off over the Dutch coast. We’d had about half an hour of this bloke. We were all at our ‘limit’, bearing in mind we were tired, because we had been flying for about five or six hours.

What were your chances of survival if hit by a night fighter?
Not a lot! We might be lucky and get blown out of the aircraft. We had only then to pull our ripcord and we might be home and dry…

What happened when you finished the raid?

We didn’t just get out of the plane and go to bed! It was actually very difficult to describe the feeling of touching down. It was a fantastic sense of elation. I’m speaking for myself now, but I’m sure other chaps felt the same.
We’d taxi round our dispersal, the ‘frying pan’, switch off and get out. There would be a truck there to take us back for briefing. When we got back to the briefing room, everybody would be talking at once — mostly nonsense! We were ‘high’, really, like somebody taking drugs.
We had this very attractive WAAF officer, who had been a film star. She would be there with this great urn of tea, laced with rum. This was the first thing presented to us!
We looked around and there would be all these chaps coming in. We would all have this black ring over our noses. It was from our oxygen masks, where the rubber had melted a bit, with perspiration and heat! So there would be this babble, an excited babble.

Then we would be called to a table, all seven of us. There would be a couple of intelligence officers, who would do the de-brief. They would want to know: how much fuel we’d used; what we’d encountered with night-fighters and flak; had we seen any aircraft go down — the navigator would answer this, giving the lat and long, and the time when these aircraft were shot down. They then asked about the target, whether the flares had gone down on time and so on. Most of what they wanted was just factual stuff. They’d ask us if we went in on the heading, for example. This would be shown on the photograph, so there was no point in lying. We would just detail what had happened to us, as a crew. They’d ask me if I had received all the Bomber Command messages, about wind speeds, for example. These I would pass on to the navigator. And that would be that.

Then we would get rid of our gear, go back to the mess, have some eggs and bacon and then go to bed. We’d wake up the next day and go to lunch. We never operated two nights in succession — it wasn’t possible, really. Because we had to work on our aircraft all day meant that we couldn’t do it. We would often be on the day after, but invariably it would be a two or three daybreak.

Is there any raid that stands out in your mind?

Well, the one that I remember was when I flew with another crew, when my skipper was injured. I wasn’t very happy about this, because I was the only spare WOP on the station, but I had to do it. It was May 10th and we went to a place called Maille de Campe (?), where there was a large German Panzer division. This was just a few weeks before D-Day. This intelligence had been fed back by the French Resistance.
So that was that. I was going on this raid, with a strange crew. It wasn’t a very long trip, only about four hours there and back. We got to the target and — it wasn’t marked! So we had all these bombers milling around. So we had to put our navigation lights on, to avoid collisions. We were milling around this target for about half an hour. It was probably less, but it seemed like forever. We went on to lose about forty aircraft on this raid…Soon I decided to put my parachute on, as I really didn’t think we were going to make it this time.

Eventually the master bomber came up and told us to bomb on the reds or the greens, whatever it was. Once these flares went down, everybody wanted to get in. all the navigation lights went out. We were in a good position when these flares went down, which meant that we could get on the bombing run quickly, get in and get out.
The forty that we lost, we watched them go down, all hit by night fighters.

The next day, I went to have a look at the aircraft I had flown in. It was marked all over by the flak. We could hear this stuff hitting us. Bearing in mind the noise in a Lancaster was so intense — the roar of these four Merlin engines — that other noises had to be really severe for you to notice them.

A Tour

Thirty was the recognised number of Ops on a tour. But sometimes we would do short trips, which would only be counted as half a trip, such as a jaunt into France. In any event, we did thirty-six raids, because amongst those we did some short trips, three-hour jobs, for example. Then we would have six months rest. We would go back for a second tour of twenty. But in my case, we didn’t finish until September 1944 because the pilot was injured and September 7th 1944 was our last trip. The nigh of the 6th, actually. By the time our six month’s rest was up the war was virtually over and there were plenty of aircrew anyway so I wasn’t called back.

How did you know that you had finished your first tour?

Well, what happened was, in my case, we did a short trip, which was our thirty sixth trip. We got back in the usual way, had the de-briefing, came out of that and it was light. It was September 7th. The Old Man, the Wing Commander, was there, stood near his car. There were several of us. He said: “You lads — you’re finished!” That was it — finished…we were tour expired. I had no idea this was going to happen.
In my case, I went back to the Sergeants’ Mess, to have my eggs and bacon and I saw this great big message in chalk to the effect that my wife had given birth to a baby daughter that morning! So I nipped straight back to the Flights and the Old Man was still there. “Ah, congratulations, Wareham!” He got his pad of passes out and gave me a forty eight hour pass to come straight home. My daughter’s name was Susan.

Postscript: ‘A Piece Of Cake’

The Bomb Aimer — his mother used to send him over these fruit cakes, in these taped-up tins. He was very generous and used to share these cakes with us. But there was one tin he never touched… we never mentioned this. It was there and that was that. So, when we finished our tour, we all went round to Johnny’s and he duly got this tin down and said: “I expect why you blokes have been wondering why I haven’t shared this with anyone…I used to put my hand on this tin and say: ‘Don’t worry Johnny, it’s a piece of cake!’ “ He was now able to finally share it round.

This completes Bill Wareham's tale.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.