From the very first day of the Second World War, right up until the final week of hostilities in Europe more than five and a half years later, Royal Air Force Bomber Command operated on nearly every date in the calendar. It fought an exceptionally long war.
It was an exceptionally dangerous one, too. More than 125,000 aircrew served in Bomber Command; of those, at least 55,573 were killed in action or training. Thousands of the bombers that took off on bombing raids failed to return; from the majority of bombers that were lost there were no survivors.
Bomber Command fought in a way war had never been fought before, and in a way in which it will never be fought again. It was the biggest, most powerful aerial armada the world had ever seen – right up until the moment the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and rendered the whole operation instantly obsolete. There are several experiences that most veterans will mention when you ask them about their time in Bomber Command, things that together made the force a unique product of its time, place and context.
Some of these things might be the way you formed your own crew, for example, and the extraordinarily strong bonds that typically developed between the airmen thus joined. The high tension of the briefing room, with the collective gasps as the curtain was flung aside to reveal a long red ribbon stretching into the very heart of Germany. The ‘operational egg’, a genuine treat in severely rationed wartime Britain, and the predictable jokes about who would get yours if you didn’t come back tonight. The female drivers who ferried you out to your aeroplane, and the dread of waiting before take-off, with nothing to do except think about the upcoming operation. The sudden churning of your stomach as you heard the rear gunner’s voice in your headphones saying “corkscrew port, go!” The bomb aimer over the target, calmly guiding the pilot: “left left, steady, steeeaaaady… OK bombs gone, let’s get out of here!” The sudden silence and palpable sense of relief as the engines shut down after landing, and the dog-tiredness as you fell gratefully into bed as the sun came up. And then doing it again and again, all the while watching others simply disappear and knowing full well the high probability that you, too, would join them on the list of the missing well before you reached the magic number of thirty operations that entitled you to a rest.
It’s hard for anyone today to fathom just how dangerous a job it was. Consider this: in very rough numbers, your chances of dying by accident or some other external cause, on any one day, is approximately one in a million. The average RAF bomber aircrew, on the other hand, faced the same level of risk of violent death that you or I face in an entire day – one in a million – each and every second that they were in the air during an operation[1].
The longest operation in Jack Purcell’s logbook is a raid to Munich in April 1944 that lasted for a little over ten hours, or more than 36,000 seconds. That’s 36,000 times the daily risk of death for the average man on the street. Or, to put it another way, it would take you or I close to 100 years to be exposed to the same risk of death by external causes that a bomber crew faced on that single raid. And that was one raid, on one night, of a very long war.
This is something that still astonishes me, every time I think about the aircrew of Bomber Command. They were volunteers, every last one of them. They saw other bombers blowing up, they saw the empty places at the table the next morning. They could do the maths: five percent loss rates from every operation. 30 operations required for a tour. As one of them said, “we sort of end up owing them something…”[2] They knew the danger – and yet they went anyway, night after night.
What was it like, I wondered? What was it like to be a member of a bomber crew during the Second World War? What was it like to go to the other side of the world? To live on a wartime airfield? To knowingly face that level of risk, night after night?
What happened to these men happened within a unique and very specific intersection of place, time and context. Those things all combine with individual experiences to make what we call history. I suspect we cannot ever truly know wer es eigentlich gewesen – how it actually was – if we weren’t there, at that time, in that place, and influenced by that context. But any historical event leaves echoes that can be heard if you listen closely enough.
We can’t travel back in time. But nowhere, perhaps, are the echoes of the past stronger than in the places where the past happened. And that is somewhere to which we can go.
This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series here, and an evolving list of contents here.
[1] Taken from Blastand & Spiegelhalter (2013), The Norm Chronicles: Stories and numbers about danger. Profile Books Ltd Great Britain. p.17. They base the “one in a million” calculation on 18,000 recorded accidental deaths out of a population of 54 million in the UK in 2010. The RAF calculation is based on 55,000 deaths, 364,000 sorties and an average crew size of six. The figure is necessarily an approximation, but it’s a vivid illustration for our purposes.
[2] Charlwood, Don (2002), Australians at War Film Archive #0666. Accessed from http://www.australiansatwarfilmarchive.gov.au/aawfa/interviews/1767.aspx 13SEP12
Something Very Big 