Sensations of a Bombing Raid

I thought I’d share this excellent article that i found in a copy of the New Zealand Observer, dated the 3rd of January 1945. The article does not credit the writer, and I am unsure if he survived the campaign. The article is as follows:

Airman’s Reflections While Over the Continent of Europe — “A Great Deal of Flying is Sheer Boredom”— Physical Discomfort and Lack of Space to Move

– Following are some extracts from a recent letter to relatives in New Zealand by a Wellington airman at present serving in Great Britain. In it he attempts to explain some of the sensations which would be felt by a layman during a bombing raid on a target on the Continent.

You asked me a while ago to give you an idea of what it feels like to go on a bombing raid. I suppose you mean that you really want something different from the usual rather uninformative accounts. As a matter of fact, I have read nothing in this war which has really conveyed both the physical and mental feelings of somone in the aircrew of a bomber when he goes on one of his first operational missions. There have been a good many attempts, too, some of them quite good, but none really detailed enough to make a civilain understand what happens.

There is a tendency to romanticise, in most of the books and stories I’ve read about the Air Force. Natural enough, I suppose, because most of them have not been written by the men themselves.

The trouble is that very few airmen either can or will write or say anything very much about the kind of thing you want. For one thing, there is a feeling that, if they did, they would be “shooting a line”, as the eternal saying is, and that becomes more and more guarded against, consciously or subconsciously, as time goes on.

The avoidance of “shooting a line” has always been, as you know, a fetish in the R.A.F. The idea, of course, is perfectly right, though I think it can be carried to extremes – as it usually is, with the result that, to the general public, the feelings of aircrews are somewhat of a closed book. They (the public I mean) may think they know something about what it feels like, from a few stories or books or newspaper articles or films. But the unpleasant side – I don’t mean men being killed or wounded, but the actual physical discomfort of flying – is almost always left out.

Perhaps this is because, after long training, aircrews simply don’t notice it, or get so keyed up that it’s unimportant. Anyway, really good airmen don’t try to analyze their feelings, but to forget them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be first-rate types.

Well, as far as I can remember, one of the first missions I went on was to bomb airfields in France. It seems a long time ago now, and on that trip I had nothing in particular to do but watch. I was a sort of observer – not in the technical sense, but only because the crew was already complete, and I had permission to go along and have a look before actually joining another aircraft as one of the crew and starting my “tour”.

I suppose you know what happens when an aircrew is “briefed”. The movies give a pretty good idea of that, anyway. Well, I drove round to the aircraft in a jeep, accompanied by the pilot. The machine was parked in a kind of circular bay, just off one of the runways, with some of the ground-crew working on it. The pilot wandered off to check up and have a yarn with the fitters, and another bloke I didn’t know came up and introduced himself as the co-pilot – on his first raid, incidentally, which didn’t make me feel any the happier. I began to tell him that I hadn’t yet been on ops., anyway, and that he was no worse off than I was, but it suddenly occurred to me that later on I might be in danger myself because he had no experience. So I stopped talking, and looked at him suspiciously. But he looked all right and seemed confident.

After a while a group of men drove up in a truck, each carrying one or two machine-gun stocks. They put them on the ground and proceeded to clean them. It was about an hour before the aircraft finally moved onto the runway.

I found myself stationed in the nose, surrounded by guns and ammunition, on a sort of counter normally used by the navigator, who was sitting on a box of ammunition studying his maps with a pair of dividers. The compartment was shaped roughly like the nose of a bullet and was mostly of glass. It was chock-a-block with belts of ammunition stored in big wooden frames overflowing higgledy piggledy on the floor.

Right up in the nose itself sat the air-gunner, on another case of ammunition. He was making some adjustments on an instrument panel. But the whole aircraft was in a stateof terrific vibration and discomfort. You know how a heavy bomber looks from the ground when it takes off? It just seems to drift into the air, doesn’t it? But inside it’s quite different. It’s much more noisy and – not jerky, but not what it looks from the ground.

The aircraft was crawling towards the take-off point. I can remember being suddenly scared that I’d left my parachute behind. But I hadn’t. It was handed to me to put on my lap, because there was no room to put it anywhere else. All the crew were very preoccupied, fiddling about with their instruments, with no time to waste looking at anyone else. I remember feeling a bit light-headed.

One of the three enormous machine-gunswas banging about uncomfortably near my head, and grazed it slightly from time to time. There’s precious little room for a superfluous passenger, as you can see.

Finally we got moving, and passed the meat-waggon (ambulance to you). It always seems to me that it would be more tactful to keep them out of sight, but maybe it’s a good idea to have them right on the spot.

Once in the air, I had a bit of time to look around and get my bearings – when it was possible to move without disturbing the others. We were flying just to the right of and behind the leading aircraft. The navigator told me where to move when he wanted to use one or other of the guns. I remember feeling very irresponsible. It was pleasant not to have to take any decisions for a change – quite different from my normal job, part of the aircrew, an interdependent team.

After a while the gunner went aft, and at last I had a perfect, uninterrupted view through the glass nose. There was a large, irregular hole in the glass, which had been patched up before we took off. The result of shrapnel, no doubt. There was a bit of tactlessness, at the briefing, as it seemed to my perhaps jaundiced ears. It hardly seemed the time for the group-captain to complain about the faults in gunnery, even minute ones, or to paint horrific pictures of the vulnerability of aircraft flying in loosened formation.

As this was summer-time, I was not over-dressed. Just a summer flying suit over boots, actually. The others were wearing a bit more than I was, though. The navigator was still absorbed in his work, doing advanced geometry. No one told me anything – no one had time to, I imagine. There were 15 other “heavies” out to the right of our machine: I had just noticed them, though probably they had been there for quite a time. I had to admit that I wasn’t a howling success as an observer.

After a time we approached a solid bank of cloud, and I suddenly noticed a group of 18 “heavies” away to our left. Must be a big show. The land below began to disappear. It felt like suddenly being marooned on an island in the Antarctic.

The navigator called out to me that we were “going up”, and told me to put on my oxygen-mask. I wriggled it on, but heard the navigator tell the gunner to check my oxygen guage, which he didn’t think was working properly.

Some time later the mission was cancelled, because the weather wasn’t clear enough for the pin-point bombing we had been told to do. I felt very disappointed, to my surprise, for I thought I’d be relieved. But nothing of the sort. The atmosphere catches hold of you. It seemed a pity to have all those hours of flying only to turn round and come back. But that, in case you don’t know, is easier said than done. We had to fly several hundreds of miles and then go through all the business of circling round waiting for our turn to land.

Then, when you landed, instead of feeling satisfied at having done the job, we (or rather I) felt just plain ludicrous.

Next day I tried again, though in a different aircraft this time. The conditions were much the same, except that the new nose was roomier, and seemed more open. I was given a box of ammunition to sit on. Unfortunately the box was lidless, and wasn’t filled to the brim, so I had to sit suspended. Through my headphones I could hear all the arrangements being made. There were more aircraft around us than yesterday…

I had on my oxygen-mask again. Nothing much had happened, and almost the only thing I had to do was watch whether my oxygen guage was working all right.It was. The aircraft began to bump about a bit, and I could just hear the guns being tested. They made hardly any noise against the roar of the engine.

Suddenly the other people in the aircraft seemed to have become frantically busy. The compartment I was in seemed much too small, and I found myself hard put to it to justify my presence there. I was kneeling, which was very appropriate, to be sure, but extremely uncomfortable. Crouched sitting on my right heel, I couldn’t see a thing, being afraid of getting in the way. In addition, I couldn’t move back, because I was almost at the end of my oxygene-tube tether.

Every minute I felt more and more foolish. I tried to take a look out from time to time, but whenever I got to the window there was nothing in sight. I seemed to be leading a useless sort of existence.

Parts of my body felt very hot, and parts very cold. Presently I found a way of half-lying, which still further restricted my view, but reduced the intense muscular fatigue I felt. You’ve no idea how screamingly tired I got, in that position. But the weather was wonderfully sunny.

The formation out to our left was going through heavy flak; little bursts of dark smoke appeared all round them.

Dotted all over the sky there were groups of aircraft – British, American and a few german, plunging purposefully about their business. It seemed rather like a market day, or a lot of people hurrying off to their work. There wasn’t any particular sense of massed power; even the “heavies” ahead looked quite small and innocuous, though their guns were shooting all over the sky. It seemed absurd to think of all the work and organisation which had brought all the groups to fly here this sunny afternoon. I got very tired and fed up before we returned. My face grew painful, my oxygen mask too tight. A lot of flying is sheer boredom, I can assure you.

THE END

I hope you found this of interest.