Part 23. In colour!
August, 1940
GATE-CRASHING A GERMAN BALLOON BARRAGE
BY A PILOT OFFICER OF A HEAVY BOMBER SQUADRON
We had a bit of excitement a few nights back when we ran slap into the middle of a German balloon barrage. Our luck was in. Not only did we get away with it, but we brought one of the balloons down.
Our target that night was a synthetic oil plant at a place called Gelsenkirchen which is in the middle of the Ruhr. It was a dark night—very dark—and we had come down to about 6,000 feet to find the target. We dropped our flares and located and bombed the works, then we climbed and went back to see what results we'd had. My second pilot was flying the plane. I'd been down in the bomb aimer's position, which is in the nose of the aircraft, doing the bombing.
Suddenly I saw a long dark shape silhouetted against the clouds; then, as the searchlights played across them, I saw three more. They looked rather sinister and they were on the port beam and port quarter about a hundred yards away. By now I'd gone up from the bomb aimer's position and was standing beside the second pilot. I gave instructions to the gunners to open fire at the balloons and we started to turn away to starboard to get away from them. Immediately afterwards the second pilot threw the aircraft into a very steep right-hand turn for he'd seen another balloon coming straight up in front of him. It had loomed up out of the darkness dead ahead and our wing tip just caught the fabric. If the pilot hadn't yanked the aircraft over quickly we should have flown right into it, the envelope would have wrapped itself round the plane, and that would have been the end of the trip, but all that happened was that the aircraft bucked a bit, then there was a terrific explosion which we could hear even above the roar of the engines and I imagine the Germans were minus one balloon, though we couldn't see what happened.
After the explosion, when we climbed up higher, we found we'd been flying along a row of balloons right in the thick of 'em. It was pretty amazing that we hadn't hit a few more, for when we'd been bombing, we must have been among all the cables. I knew there were balloons in the area—we'd been warned about them before we started—but the only way to find the target was to come down fairly low, so we had to take the odd chance. When we examined the aircraft the next day we found it hadn't been damaged at all.
Another raid which I shan't forget in a hurry happened just before this balloon incident. On this occasion we were bombing the railway marshalling yards at Hamm. There's an important railway traffic centre here and it seems to be selected as a target most nights in the week. When we took off, the weather was pretty poor and at 7,000 feet it was freezing. Over the North Sea we struck heavy banks of cloud. I climbed to 14,000 feet, but even at that height we couldn't get out of it—so we just carried on flying through cloud; there was nothing else we could do about it. When we were about fifteen minutes away from our target, the port engine began to splutter and the engine revolu-tions dropped. This time again I was down in the bomb aimer's position preparing the bomb sight. I realized that we'd probably got ice in the carburetter, so I came back to the second pilot. The starboard engine spluttered and soon both engines ceased to give any power at all. Our air speed indicator packed up, so did the altimeter. We didn't know whether we had flying speed or how high we were. The second pilot and I were flying the machine between us while he was fixing the warm air control which had become disengaged. This is an arrangement by which the air, instead of being sucked straight in, is warmed up by the heat of the engine before being passed through to the carburetter. He'd got both his hands on the warm air lever, forcing it down as far as it would possibly go and he'd got his feet on the rudders while I grabbed the stick, keeping the aircraft on an even keel. I could tell by the feel of it that we were going down very quickly.
We were heavily iced up; the wings had a thick layer of ice on them and one couldn't see through the windscreen because that too was covered in ice. It didn't matter very much about that because it was so dark and we were still in cloud, so we wouldn't have been able to see anyway. I decided that if the engines didn't come on within another four or five seconds, I'd give the order to abandon the aircraft. I'd got the words on the tip of my tongue, when the port engine spluttered a couple of times and began to pick up again. It would still have been impossible to maintain height with the amount of ice we had on the aircraft, but I decided to hang on a little longer before giving the order to bale out. The starboard engine picked up, and after a bit more spluttering, both engines started working normally again.
We flew on for another half minute or so and then the altimeter started registering. I looked at the height and found it was approximately 4,000 feet, that meant that we'd come down in a dive about 11,000 feet. We were just recovering from this when we ran into an electrical storm. The effect was so weird that I began to wonder whether we hadn't arrived in another world. The others said afterwards that they began to think the same thing too. Everything seemed outlined in a blue haze. The pro¬pellers made shining spinning circles. The two guns in the front turret were pointing up in the air and there was the same blue haze round them too. The front gunner reported that there were sparks jumping from one gun to another. The rear gunner after¬wards said, that for a minute he thought his guns were actually firing and he couldn't understand it. As I looked at the second pilot's face, I saw that it was ringed with blue. The tips of his fingers had the same blue haze around them. It covered the instrument panel and ran along the leading edges of the wings. That lasted about two minutes. It was one of the weirdest experiences I have ever had. I was very glad when we got out of the storm.
We flew on and arrived over our target area. The cloud was still so heavy that it was impossible to locate the marshalling yards, so we turned and came back, and on the way we bombed the alternative military target which had been allotted to us.
Three fighters picked us up near Rotterdam. First of all the rear gunner reported one enemy aircraft apparently trailing us, then he was joined by a couple of his pals. We got all set for a bit of a scrap but nothing happened. They didn't attack and we arrived back at the base without further incident.
Last minute preparations on a Whitely Bomber.
