The War in the West, Volume 1 by James Holland

Author:James Holland
Language: ara, eng, eng, spa
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-10-07T16:10:24+00:00

CHAPTER 31

Crossing the Water

STILL IN ENGLAND was the US Army Air Force’s Colonel Toohey Spaatz, who was there officially as ‘Assistant Air Attaché’. He had been spending some time with Bomber Command, basing himself on a Wellington station where its squadrons were not just attacking Luftwaffe airfields, but rather had been spreading their net pretty wide into Germany itself. On 10 June, the day Mussolini declared war, British bombers had wasted no time in flying all the way to Italy to attack targets there, and had done so again on the night of 15–16 August, when more than sixty Wellingtons had been sent to attack Germany, but thirty-five Whitleys had flown to Turin, Italy’s most industrialized city. Italy had so far played no part in the air battle over Britain but was talking tough and threaten­ing Egypt. A key part of Bomber Command’s policy was to show that Britain was not simply going to sit back.

The Whitleys included those from 10 Squadron, now commanded by Wing Commander Sydney Bufton, who had successfully made it home from France, where he’d been a staff officer for the Advanced Air Striking Force. Based at Leeming in Yorkshire in the north of England, they refuelled at an airfield further south en route and headed off. Safely flying over France, they found the city lights of Switzerland helped guide them, then slid past Mont Blanc – Bufton could see its ice cap glowing in the darkness and thought its vastness seemed to dwarf their plane. There was cloud in the Po Valley, but it was clearer over the target.

As they flew over the city, the navigator could clearly see the Fiat factory and dropped the flare with unusual accuracy. ‘Crumbs! Navigator to Skipper,’ he said, ‘the flare has dropped plumb on to the factory roof. It’s lighting it up like day!’

That certainly made life a lot easier for them as Bufton swept around and began his run at only around 4,000 feet.

‘Hold her there, Skipper,’ called out the Navigator. ‘Bomb doors open.’

The aircraft lurched then steadied as the bomb bay opened, while the Navigator continued to give Bufton instructions to move right a bit, then steady, then right again, then left until eventually he called out, ‘Bombs gone.’ The aircraft lifted with the lightening of the load and they began to climb and head back for home. From fifteen miles away, the tail gunner reported he could still see fires. They landed back down again at around 6.30 a.m. having been airborne for nine hours and forty-five minutes, but it had been a successful raid, with most of the attackers hitting their target.

Bomber Command had been predominantly targeting factories, shipyards and airfields but had never worried too much if civilian houses got in the way. In contrast, Hitler had strictly forbidden any attacks on civilian targets in Britain because he believed it was a policy more likely to induce the British to come to the peace table, and Göring had, since Adlertag, repeatedly stressed the need to focus on destroying the RAF.

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