Dambusters by Ward Chris & Andy Lee

Author:Ward, Chris & Andy Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783035199
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A New Production, a New Role

In pursuit of precision while the winter campaign continues

New Year’s Day brought the formation of 54 Base, which comprised the stations at Coningsby, Woodhall Spa and Metheringham. Changes in 5 Group’s organisation during the first third of the year would make 54 Base home to perhaps the most experienced and elite collection of airmen in the entire Command. The year began for the main force with a disappointing all Lancaster raid on Berlin on New Year’s Night. Very little damage resulted, and twenty-eight aircraft were lost. Among them was the one captained by W/C Abercromby, who had led the 617 Squadron remnant on the first Antheor Viaduct operation in September when commanding officer of 619 Squadron. He had replaced the missing W/C Hilton at 83 Squadron on the 4th of December, and taken his 5 Group attitudes with him to 8 Group. His view on the practice of weaving as a defensive measure against night fighters was to ruffle a few feathers at his new unit, most notably and appropriately those of F/O Chick, whose flying he described as cowardly. Chick refused to abandon his weaving policy, which had seen him through more than forty operations, and predicted that Abercromby would survive no more than three weeks if he flew straight and level. Chick completed his tour on forty-eight operations shortly afterwards, and lived to see his prophecy fulfilled.

Twenty-four hours later a similarly ineffective return to the Capital cost twenty-seven Lancasters. The Pathfinders in general and 156 Squadron in particular were taking a beating. There is little doubt though, that the beleaguered inhabitants of Berlin were also suffering, and shared the common hope with the hard-pressed crews of Bomber Command that their city would cease to be the main focus of Harris’s attention. However, proud of their status as Berliners first and Germans second, they were a hardy breed, and just like their counterparts in London under the blitz of 1940, they bore their trials with fortitude and humour. During this, their ‘winter of discontent’, they taunted their tormentors by parading banners through the shattered streets, proclaiming, ‘You may break our walls, but not our hearts’. They also sang along to the most popular song of the day, Nach jedem Dezember kommt immer ein Mai, (after every December comes always a May), the sentiments of which held promise of a change of fortunes with the onset of spring.

617 Squadron opened its 1944 account on the evening of the 4th of January with an operation by eleven aircraft to a flying bomb site in the Pas de Calais. Cheshire once more took the lead in DV380, taking with him as a passenger the not inconsiderable bulk of the Coningsby station commander, G/C ‘Tiny’ Evans-Evans. It was typical of Evans-Evans to want to mix it with the enemy, having been an ‘operational type’ earlier in the war. Since commanding 3 Group’s 115 Squadron for the first six months of 1941 he had occupied a non-operational post, but his desire to remain ‘one of the boys’ and operate against the enemy had never left him.

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