Chastise by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-07-31T09:55:38+00:00

2 GETTING THERE

Gibson’s section crossed the Suffolk coast at Southwold at 2229, forty minutes after take-off. Its three Lancasters then flew onwards in a fashion few had ever experienced, so low that the rushing aircraft shapes were reflected on the sea beneath them. The accustomed pattern of night bomber operations, the received wisdom of their war, was that height conferred improved prospects of survival, so that all the way to Germany pilots clawed at the sky, welcoming every few extra feet of altitude. Yet now this squadron, for this one mission, was flying the entire route to the target below the five-hundred-foot threshold at which German radar must pick them up. Cochrane’s planners believed, undoubtedly correctly, that on a moonlit night which would be suicidal for Main Force bomber operations, only a low-level approach might spare Gibson and his squadron from slaughter by night-fighters. The acknowledged rule of the game was that once a fighter engaged a victim, unless an alert gunner cried a warning, precipitating a drastic ‘corkscrew’ descent, the bomber and its crew were probably dead meat. Only a minority of aircraft survived attack by a Ju88 or Bf110, and there could be no corkscrewing from an altitude of less than a hundred feet.

Yet while most of Goering’s night-fighters stayed on the ground until scrambled following a radar alert, ten thousand flak guns of all calibres were continuously manned. Concentrations of 88mm heavies, Flak 30 and Flak 38 automatic weapons were clustered in belts between the Dutch coast and the dams. The lighter guns had no need of radar to alert them – they could hear heavy bombers coming. And whereas USAAF B-17 Flying Fortresses were heavily armoured for daylight operations, British bombers relied on darkness for protection. The Lancaster was a superb aircraft, but the price of carrying its impressive bombload was that its airframe could withstand much less punishment than its American counterparts from cannon or machine-gun fire.

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