Heroes: The Greatest Generation and the Second World War

Shortly after, George heard that he was to be posted to another air base in Manitoba. When Bill discovered this, he wanted to be posted with him. Luckily for them there was a new warrant officer at Saskatoon who knew there was a section in the King’s Rules that said brothers could stay together if they so desired. ‘From then on,’ said Bill, ‘we pretty much stayed together all the way through.’

Around that time, it was decided that groundcrew should sometimes fly in the aircraft they were working on – this was seen as a means of ensuring their work was up to scratch. Bill enjoyed this aspect of the job and could soon tell when the pilots were making mistakes. He began thinking it would be more fun to be flying and so suggested to George that they re-muster as aircrew. To get in, they had to pass an IQ test, but they’d done several of these back at school and knew the form. Both of them finished their exam in half the time allowed and both passed, and so they were sent to Ground School at Edmonton in Alberta. Their subsequent medicals revealed them to have perfect 20:20 eyesight, and so having scraped through their algebra and geometry tests, they were sent to High River, Alberta, to begin training as pilots.

Initially, they flew Tiger Moths, open cockpit biplanes, before progressing to twin-engined Cessnas. As long as there wasn’t too much snow about – and for the most part they were training during the summer months – Canada was an ideal place to learn, with its vast open expanse of country. In December they both passed their wings examination and were told they’d been earmarked to become instructors. The brothers had both been hoping they would be going to England and so were disappointed. ‘We were gung-ho,’ Bill admitted. They were saved, however, by a couple of Australians who’d been training with them, and who had fallen in love with Canadian girls and were desperate to stay in Canada. ‘I don’t know whether it was the girls or they just didn’t want to go into combat,’ said Bill, ‘but we told them that if they could arrange it, we were happy to switch. They did, and so we went overseas.’

That was in January 1943, but before they left for war, they were given a couple of weeks’ leave and were able to spend one last Christmas with their family. Their mother was worried about them going, but Bill was not especially apprehensive. ‘We had no idea what war was about,’ he said. They crossed the Atlantic on board the former liner, Queen Elizabeth, zigzagging all the way to avoid the Wolf Packs. By the time they reached Scotland, however, Bill was starting to feel pretty ill. Before he knew it, he was in hospital in Glasgow with acute appendicitis. Worse, he’d been separated from his brother again, who had been sent with the others to a holding camp in Bournemouth while they waited to be posted elsewhere. Bill got out of hospital as quickly as he could – a few days after his operation he told the civilian doctor that he was discharging himself. ‘You can’t,’ the doctor told him, but Bill insisted, so the doctor sent him to the RAF for a medical. ‘What’s all the bother about?’ asked the Medical Officer.

‘I want to get to my brother,’ Bill told him.

‘Where is he?’

‘In Bournemouth.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ the MO told him. ‘I’m going down there myself in three weeks,’ and with that, he let Bill go. He wasn’t really up to it though. Having had his stomach muscles cut to reach his appendix, Bill was suffering from the undue stress this was placing on his back. ‘It was at least a month before I was really fit to fly,’ he confessed. But he did find his brother – eventually. Unbeknown to him, George had moved into a private boarding-house. Nonetheless, Bill worked out that most of the airmen had to walk past the park on their way to the mess, so he went there and sat on a bench and waited. Eventually he saw two WAAFs walking with a familiar-looking Canadian pilot – about five-foot-eight, and with his dark brown hair combed back into a neat quiff.

‘Hi George,’ said Bill as they walked up.

‘Bill, you’re here!’ exclaimed George.

Bill recalled the WAAFs’ surprised faces. ‘They looked at him and then they looked back at me,’ he told me. ‘It was funny – they were thunderstruck.’

Bill liked Bournemouth. They were just kicking their heels but they played a little golf and went to shows and he soon began to build his strength back. The life of leisure soon came to an end, however. Since their arrival they’d hoped they would be sent to fly fighters, but it was not to be. Both Bill and George were to be trained as bomber pilots. It was at RAF Pershore that they were allocated their crews. Bill Morison, Bill’s navigator, remembers how hard it was to tell the brothers apart. ‘They really were identical,’ he said, when I spoke to him on the phone. ‘It caused quite a bit of confusion to start with.’ After a further three months flying Oxfords and Wellingtons, they were then sent to Croft, for conversion onto Halifaxes. This was quite a jump. Four engines were a lot more to handle than two. Furthermore, the aircraft was that much bigger. ‘The Halifax was a pretty fair-sized airplane,’ pointed out Bill, ‘and you had to get used to the different attitudes. On take-off, for example, there was slight swing, and you needed more speed to get airborne. There were all kinds of different settings. And when you landed, because the Halifax was so much taller, you hit the ground sooner.’

Bill and George joined 429 Squadron at the very end of September 1943. The squadron had been formed in November the previous year at East Moor, some ten miles north of York, then flew its first operational mission over the Ruhr two months later. In August the squadron had moved to Leeming, further north between Richmond and Northallerton, and by then the operational centre of the all-Canadian 6 Group of Bomber Command. The twins arrived at a time when the American Eighth Air Force and British Bomber Command were bombing enemy targets round the clock, the Americans by day and the British by night. The bomber war would prove fearsomely dangerous for every man that took part until the very end of the war, but in the autumn of 1943, Nazi Europe was still heavily defended by an enormous array of over 50,000 anti-aircraft guns, many of which operated in conjunction with tracking radar. In the German industrial area of the Ruhr, some anti-aircraft guns were even mounted on railway cars, which followed incoming bomber streams and kept them under continuous attack. And the skies were still held by the Luftwaffe. Particularly perilous for the night-time bomber crews were the German night-fighters, guided by increasingly sophisticated radar systems. By the autumn of 1943, forward German radar units on the Atlantic and North Sea coast were tracking the radio traffic of squadrons as they took off, with individual aircraft selected for interception. Unbeknown to a bomber crew, its fate might already have been marked before it had barely heaved itself into the sky. German night-fighters were fast, agile and ferociously armed; skilled bomber pilots could and did successfully evade them but the odds were not good, to put it mildly.

Bill and George knew little about any of this. Like most new crew, they were hopelessly ignorant and naïve with regard to what lay in store for them. They had no access to the kind of information enjoyed by those higher up the chain, and although they were aware of the basic aims of the bomber war, they did not think about any wider issues such as the relationship between the British and the Americans, or the overall strategy, or whether these endless bombing raids were actually achieving very much. Rather, they arrived eager to get on and do their bit and excited to be finally part of a real, active, front-line squadron.

Unlike the Americans, Bomber Command sent its aircraft up over Europe with only one pilot, but new arrivals were not given the controls straightaway; rather, they spent a couple of missions as a ‘2nd Pilot’ in order to give them an idea of what to expect. Bill and George went on their first combat missions over Europe as 2nd Pilots on 3 October 1943, George getting airborne at 6.45 p.m., Bill, the next in line, just three minutes later. The target was Kassel, an industrial centre to the east of the Ruhr. It was a good day for the squadron. Two aircraft returned early because of mechanical failure, but the rest reached their intended destination, dropped their bombs and returned home safely, just under six hours after they’d set off.

Bill and George were sent out as 2nd Pilots the following night as well. This time the target was Frankfurt and 429 Squadron were part of a four-hundred-strong raid that would be the first serious attack on the medieval city. Visibility was good, and the red flares of the bomb markers were clearly visible. Just as Bill’s aircraft began its run in to the target a massive explosion erupted from the ground, and a huge spout of flame burst into the sky. After they had dropped their own bombs and turned for home, Bill could still see the flames of the burning city glowing from as far as fifty miles away.

George, meanwhile, was suffering a far more alarming mission. Before they reached Frankfurt, they came under repeated attack by a night-fighter, and although they managed to escape as they came into reach of the enemy anti-aircraft guns, it was not before they’d lost one of their engines and suffered a succession of hits. There were fires on board and as they began their bomb run, they realized the electrics for the bomb doors had been damaged. This meant they had to open them manually, which was time-consuming and so they were delayed in releasing their bombs until after they’d left the target. Fortunately, they were not attacked again on their return trip and managed to make it to England with just three engines. But the situation was still perilous. Before reaching Leeming, it became clear they did not have enough fuel left to get them home. Furthermore, their landing gear had also been shot up and was now inoperable. There was only one option: they would have to bail out. Six managed it safely. Two did not: the Air Bomber and the Flight Engineer both crashed to their deaths along with the aircraft, exploding on impact in a field just short of Leeming.

A fortnight later, both brothers had been given crews and their own aircraft. On 22 October, the target was once again Kassel. George had technical problems opening his bomb doors, so once again missed the target and was forced to jettison his bomb load later. Both, however, made it back safely. As Bill recorded, ‘Appeared to be a good raid.’ Even so, of the eleven crews that took off that night, only nine returned home. As the twins were discovering, bombing missions over Germany were hazardous in the extreme.

Bill and George were settling in well, however. As a pre-war station, Leeming had more extensive facilities than many of the other airfields, such as Croft. Even better, the twins were delighted to be able to share a room in their house in the town, a house that had a coal fire and a bathroom. The coal store was outside and was guarded, but they would raid it anyway. The guards never troubled them. ‘It was a great joke,’ said Bill.

It was about half-past-five on the night of 3 November 1943, and the bombers of 6 Group were now crossing over the Channel and beginning to meet up with the rest of the raiding party. The bombers – a mixed force of mostly Halifaxes and Lancasters, but with Mosquitoes leading the way – did not fly in formation as such, but kept roughly close together in what was known as a bomber stream. There were dangers all along the way. German night-fighters lurked over the Channel. Gunners strained into the darkness, but very often the first they knew about coming under attack was when cannon fire started clattering around them. Then came the coastline anti-aircraft fire and more night-fighters, and finally an intense flak barrage over the target itself.

Bill glanced out of his side window and saw that some of their aircraft were under attack from night-fighters. One Halifax he saw plummet in flames. He pushed on, through the flak of the Dutch coast, until he was well into Germany. The anti-aircraft fire was pretty heavy over the target, but although the Halifax rattled and shook as shells exploded all around them, they dropped their bombs over the marker flares and climbed out of the fray without so much as a scratch. Their bombs, like those of most of the bomber force, landed to the centre and south of the city, destroying a number of industrial buildings as well as homes in the area.

Nearly four hours after they had taken off they were approaching Leeming once more, along with the rest of the bomber stream. Three had already returned home early with technical problems, but of those who had made it to Düsseldorf, the first landed back just before ten o’clock. Wing Commander Pattison and his crew touched down at 10.04 p.m. Bill called up Leeming flying control and told them they would shortly be joining the planes circling the airfield waiting their turn to land.

Most had landed by half-past-ten, but Bill had continued circling, waiting to hear George’s voice crackle through his headset. But there was no sound of his brother. ‘Skipper, I think you’d better land,’ said Jim Moore, the Flight Engineer, eventually, ‘we’re getting low on fuel.’ Reluctantly, Bill did so, the sixteen-ton bomber touching down with a lurch and a screech of rubber. Z for Zebra was the fourteenth aircraft from 429 Squadron to make it safely back. Bill hung around for as long as he could, and then made his report to the Intelligence Officer. Tots of rum and cups of tea were handed out to the exhausted crews, but as soon as Bill had changed out of his flying kit, he made his way over to the control tower, and waited. Minutes passed. Eleven o’clock came and went, then midnight; but there was nothing. No distant beat of engines, just a dark and empty sky.

He waited up all night for his brother, but in his heart of hearts, Bill knew that night that George wasn’t coming back. The following morning, Wing Commander Pattison offered him some compassionate leave – everyone knew how close the twins had been – but Bill turned the offer down. The CO accepted his decision, but insisted on accompanying him on a twenty-minute flight to see how he was holding up. All right it seemed – but even so, Pattison did not send the crew out again for a fortnight.

His crew did their best to help him, but it was difficult. ‘There was little I could say,’ said Dick Meredith, who moved into George’s old bed to keep Bill company. ‘We did do a bit of praying back then, and secretly I couldn’t help thinking that the Lord could not possibly be cruel enough to take both George and Bill. I thought Bill had to come through, and that gave me a sense of reassurance really. It was probably the wrong thing to think, but I couldn’t help it.’

Somehow, Bill kept going. On 18 November, they were on another mission, this time part of a raid on Mannheim. Strong winds of over a hundred knots pushed them way off course and so they hit Frankfurt instead. The following night, unusually, they were out again, this time to Leverkusen. ‘I think that if I had stopped I might have broke down,’ Bill told me. He also wanted to be there in case any news did come through. There was a chance George and his crew had been made prisoners of war – lots of them had, and it usually took about four to six weeks for word of POWs to filter through to the Red Cross. Six weeks came and went, but still Bill refused to give up all hope.

The rest of the crew never mentioned it. Some had lost good friends. Everyone lost someone. The statistics of the Allied bomber offensive are chilling: just over 110,000 men flew with the RAF’s Bomber Command; 55,000, almost exactly half, lost their lives. The US Eighth Air Force, joining the battle in 1942, lost 26,000 young men. Over 15,000 Allied bombers never came back – a staggering number, and a figure that equates to three-quarters of the numbers of Spitfires that were ever made. That Bill survived and George did not was simply conforming to the law of averages. ‘I don’t know what makes you press on,’ Bill sighed, ‘but you just do. There’s something in us…you know it’s crazy, but you still do it. It’s life itself. You know it’s dumb and stupid but you press on.’

By the end of November, the Battle of Berlin had begun. Bill’s fifth mission was what was labelled the ‘the first thousand-bomber raid’ on the German capital. In fact, only 764 aircraft took part, but the British press was happy to help with the propaganda. With the enemy capital deep in Germany, they could only get there by adding auxiliary fuel tanks at the expense of some of their bomb load. When they finally arrived, after nearly four hours in the air, Berlin was covered. The flak was intense, but despite the poor visibility, they could just about make out the red target indicator markers and the thousands of explosions pulsing orange and crimson through the cloud.

The bitingly cold winter and endless cloud and rain did not help Bill’s sense of gloom. ‘Boy, it was cold,’ he said. It was early in the New Year that he took his crew out on a flight above the clouds, just so they could see some sunlight.

And he also tried to keep his days busy, and to keep his mind on the job in hand. Routine helped. He’d be out of bed some time around seven or eight in the morning, then he’d shower, get dressed and head over to the mess for a breakfast of porridge and perhaps some toast. Then he would wander over to the Flight Room, where he would chat and wait with the rest of the crews, wondering whether they’d be sent out on a ‘war’ that night. There could be days without a mission, but they still made sure they looked at the daily routine orders. They might have to take their aircraft to the maintenance hangars or any number of tasks. After he was commissioned in December 1943, Bill ran the station post office for a while. ‘I didn’t know a damn thing about it,’ he said, ‘and it was in a hell of a mess when I took it over.’ It was another thing that kept his mind busy.

But he was rarely leaving the base. Just before Christmas, he decided it was time he tried to get out a bit, and so with a few of the others, went to a dance at the Catholic Hall in Northallerton. It was there that he first saw Lil.

Lil had been listening on and off to our conversation, sometimes sitting down with us in the lounge, sometimes attending to something in the adjoining kitchen. She now brought through some tea. ‘Tea,’ said Bill, his face brightening. ‘We always drink plenty of tea here!’ Then he got up and disappeared – he had some pictures and other bits and pieces to show me, but had to dig them out from the study next door. I asked Lil about this first meeting. ‘It wasn’t that night. He saw me, but I didn’t see him. I remember it was so crowded you could hardly move,’ she told me. She’d been taken by a young sailor friend and they began dancing. ‘But he was all over me and I thought, “This is no good,” so we left.’

Soon after, Bill was back, jiggling his leg up and down and sipping his tea, so I asked him about his side of the story. He grinned. ‘She walked in with her head held high,’ Bill said, ‘and she had nice long blonde hair.’ He immediately decided he had to dance with her, but he couldn’t reach her – by the time he got to her side of the dance-floor, she was gone. Still, it gave him an incentive to go again, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later she was there once more – and this time there was no sign of the sailor. Plucking up his courage, he went over to her and asked her to dance.

Afterwards, he walked her home. She, too, had lost a brother – a Flight Engineer and also on bombers – and in the weeks that followed, they began to see more and more of each other. Every fifth week, the crew would be given seven days’ leave. Some went to London, while others, like Bill Morison, would play golf, sometimes at Ferndown near Bournemouth, sometimes even at St Andrews, in Scotland. Bill, however, spent his leave with Lil, at her parents’ house in Northallerton. Then, in the spring, he asked her to marry him, although he told her they should wait until after he had finished his combat tour. ‘We were losing a lot of guys,’ said Bill, ‘and I was still operational.’ Did Lil worry about Bill? ‘No,’ she said quite firmly. ‘You have faith. It was a way of life; you took one thing at a time.’

Bill was also extremely lucky to have the crew he had. Crews tended to find each other on arrival at their Operational Training Units. There had been five of them at first, then at Croft, when they converted to four-engined bombers, two more had joined them. The same seven men had stayed together ever since. Close friends on the ground, they discovered a perfect working relationship that depended on mutual respect and complete trust. ‘All of them were brilliant,’ Bill admitted. Once the war was over, they all kept in touch, despite going their separate ways. The sense of camaraderie they had felt had been intense. Bill freely admits they were the closest friendships he ever made. Sixty years on, only Bill, Bud Holdgate (the mid upper gunner), and Bill Morison are still alive; Dick Meredith died in November 2005. They don’t see each other so often now – Bill Morison is in North York, Ontario, although Bud is from Vancouver – but they do speak regularly. Bill gave me Bill Morison’s and Dick Meredith’s numbers and when I was back in England, I called them. Both were anxious to help and equally quick to heap praise on Bill and their other friends in the crew. ‘Once the engines were running, we became a real team in every sense,’ said Bill Morison, in his gentle and measured voice. ‘We welded perfectly.’ Dick Meredith had been a farmer before the war, a reserved occupation, and could have avoided active service, but admits that he would not have missed the experience for anything. ‘They were all great guys,’ he told me, ‘and we were a dedicated bunch. We were a very good crew, all of us, and we never stopped learning.’

As the weeks and then months passed, so the crew’s number of missions began to steadily mount – ten were chalked up, then fifteen, then twenty. They went from being the new boys to the most senior and experienced crew in the squadron. Bill was commissioned in December, while at around the same time Bill Morison became the squadron’s navigation leader: it was now up to him to not only help plan their routes to the target, but also improve the standard of the less experienced navigators.

Casualties during the Battle of Berlin, which lasted from November to the end of March 1944, were particularly high – 1,128 Allied bombers were shot down during this period, a staggering number. Yet every time they went out on a ‘war’, Bill and his crew miraculously seemed to make it back in one piece. ‘Once you’d done five or six,’ said Bill Morison, ‘your chances were improved, but you could still get shot down at any time. The fact that you were a very experienced crew didn’t guarantee anything.’ On 24 May 1944, the squadron took part in an attack on the German town of Aachen. Fifteen aircraft took off, Z for Zebra included, and made it safely to the target. There was little flak – the raid appeared to be one of their more straightforward missions, but on the return home, they came under repeated attack by night-fighters, and three of the squadron’s Halifaxes were shot down. All those lost had been experienced crews, the backbone of the squadron for many months. One had even been on their last mission – had they made it back to Leeming, their tour of duty would have been over.

Yet although Z for Zebra continued to make it back almost unscathed, these missions were not without incident for the crew. On one occasion Bill had thought they would never even manage to get airborne. There had been a strong crosswind and the aircraft had started to swing so badly as they hurtled down the runway that he’d thought he would lose control and flip the plane. Another time one of his port engines caught fire almost as soon as they’d left the ground. It was 30 March 1944, and they were due to bomb Nuremberg.

‘That was scary,’ he admitted. ‘Fire in the air like that is scary. You can’t just land again – not with all those bombs and full tanks of fuel.’ A pipe had burst and petrol was spewing everywhere. Bill had to cut the engine immediately, but ahead was a small hill and with a quarter of their power gone, it looked as though they were not going to get enough lift and so fly straight into it. Somehow, though, he managed to clear it, and was able to get to the North Sea and discard his bomb load. He still had to burn off much of the fuel, so circled for a couple of hours before finally turning back to Leeming. They’d had a lucky escape. The girls in the control tower thought they must have crashed and so when he called up and gave his call-sign, ‘Must We’, they thought they were talking to a ghost.