For those who were not part of it, it’s hard to comprehend. Of the 125,000 aircrew who served in Europe with the RAF’s Bomber Command in the second world war — including more than 10,000 Australians — 44 per cent were killed. It was the highest rate of attrition of any service and in any theatre of the war. The average age of those killed was just twenty-three. Another 28 per cent of all aircrew were seriously injured or become prisoners of war.
Night after night, thousands of young men willingly flew off into the war’s heart of darkness knowing full well how short the odds of survival were, how any moment over enemy-controlled territory they might be shot down, blown apart or, having miraculously survived the jump from a crippled or burning aircraft, held for years in a German prisoner of war camp.
Much has been written celebrating the quiet heroism of these men, and rightly so, but much less has been heard about those who failed to meet the exacting standards demanded of them through their tours of duty — the unaccounted casualties of a relentless conflict.
“Each year there are about 3000 cases of nervous breakdown in air crew and about 300 cases of lack of confidence,” reported the RAF’s director-general of medical services, Sir Harold Whittingham, in April 1945. “A third of the neurosis cases occur in Bomber Command.” A large proportion of those cases were in training units where the men had yet to be exposed to the perils of combat operations but were being tested in extreme flying conditions. More than 8000 airmen were killed in training accidents or other non-operational flying during the war.
“Lack of Moral Fibre,” or LMF, was the punitive designation promoted by the RAF leadership throughout the war to stigmatise aircrew who refused to fly on operations, avoided operations or did a boomerang — flew home early from a sortie without a persuasive excuse.
By early 1940, senior officers had become concerned that medical staff were excusing too many men from flying duties. A memorandum issued by the air ministry to all commands in April sought to limit the definition of mental incapacity by promoting the alternative, if unspoken, diagnosis of cowardice. A revised version in September 1941 stipulated that airmen, “who though not medical cases, come to forfeit the confidence of their Commanding Officers without having been subjected to any exceptional strain of operational flying … must be proved to be lacking in moral fibre.”
The service records of those classified as LMF cases would be stamped with a large red “W” for “waverer.” All would be stripped of their flying badges, sometimes publicly in front of their peers. Officers would lose their commissions and be refused ground jobs in the RAF. Non-commissioned officers would be demoted to aircraftmen second class — the lowest rank in the service — and assigned menial tasks for at least three months.
From 1944, LMF cases could be sent to work in coal mines or drafted into the army. Many RAF psychiatrists, while accepting the policy’s deterrent effect, thought it was wrong not to take account of individual conditions and mitigating circumstances. Their disquiet was ignored. Senior commanders, including Bomber Command chief Sir Arthur Harris, regarded it as an essential measure to maintain discipline and aircrew numbers.
Christopher Kingdon of the University of Chicago would write in the Chicago Journal of History in 2013: “RAF Command had an obsessive predilection, based upon Freudian concepts, that rises in neurotic rates were attributable to the character deficiencies of its wartime recruits, and not to the combined effects of prolonged exposure to combat stress and high attrition rates.”
In a report to Air Command in July 1943, Edward Jewesbury, an RAF psychiatric specialist, articulated the force’s intolerance and lack of sympathy for those airmen who suffered severe combat stress: “The airman thereafter developed symptoms of an anxiety state and was treated in sick quarters for a month without improvement. In previous wars he would probably have been shot for cowardice. Today he is a ‘medical case’, albeit a medical nuisance.”
The rules were often ruthlessly applied. The authorities ignore the reality that the mental trauma causing some airmen to be unwilling or incapable of flying was often well beyond their control. Historian Richard Overy, in The Bombing War, describes the official embrace of the notion of LMF as “a stigma designed as an emasculating deterrent to any sign of weakness.” As with the victims of “shell shock” in the first world war, the label often became a cover for the reality of a mental condition yet to find a name, post-traumatic stress disorder.
While relatively few of the tens of thousands of men who flew with Bomber Command were sidelined or disabled by trauma, there is little doubt that many of them were deeply affected by the terrible things they were required to do and experience night after night, day after day in the skies over German-occupied Europe. Not to be afraid was not to be human — and not to be afraid could expose crews to even greater levels of danger than were part of their basic job description if it sapped the confidence and focus of men whose survival often depended on it.
Many aircrew would simply sublimate the stress or become fatalistic, according to Bruce Buckham, a highly decorated Australian pilot who flew on two tours of combat operations with Bomber Command and took part in the final raids to sink the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway in November 1944.
“There was no counselling,” Buckham recalled. “If the boys felt the need to talk to someone then sometimes they might go along to the padre and have a bit of a chat with him and a cup of tea. But I don’t think I saw too many people looking for relief that way. It’s an unfortunate thing that so many had reached the point where they said, ‘Ok. It will be up any time now.’ But others would say, ‘Bugger that. Let’s have another beer. We’ll forget about it and let it stay forgotten.’ But it was hard for some.”
Life at the Bomber Command stations was deliberately structured if not to condition airmen to the almost daily toll of death then to at least avoid as much as possible contemplation of that fact by those who might be next to fall. Early each morning the names of those crews that had failed to return from operations were quietly scrubbed from the blackboard where they had been listed for operations the night before.
Funerals and memorial services were never held for those known to have been killed over Europe. The slender hope that all or some of a missing crew might have survived crashing or bailing out of a stricken aircraft to be taken prisoner often was embraced to avoid having to confront the probability that they were dead. For those known to have perished, a glass raised quietly in the mess or at the pub would be their farewell.
When an airman failed to return, a group of officers known as a Standing Committee of Adjustment, would gather the missing man’s personal effects and forward them to a central RAF depository, eventually to be returned to the family. Frequently the empty bed would be filled by a new crew member within a day or two.
While these rituals could seem callous, many airmen already too aware of their own mortality appreciated not being required to dwell on the fate of those whose luck had run out. Bruce Buckham was one: “We honoured them silently in our own minds. We’d have a drink the next night and the equanimity of life was restored straight away. You wouldn’t dwell on it. You couldn’t, because you had to keep going.”
Part of the answer to why these men were able to stare death in the face and carry on lies in who they were and why they enlisted. All aircrew were volunteers, many from throughout the Commonwealth who signed on as patriots determined to fight an enemy that threatened the freedom of the mother country and therefore the freedom of their nations.
Training bonded them, not least the Australians, whose mateship that infused their national identity was strengthened by the sense of mutual responsibility that flourished in the Australian squadrons of the RAF. But that spirit would be severely tested at times when the airmen thought the commanders were indifferent to the losses of their comrades, according to Bruce Buckham.
“There was no evidence, any sign at all, of sympathy when things went wrong and a lot of crews were lost,” said Buckham, who died in 2011. “The attitude seemed to be, ‘Oh well, too bad, we won’t do that again,’ or it was, ‘Well, let’s try something else.’ The force was only a number of bodies who were sent out to do a job. That’s the way they looked at it. We had bigger and bigger forces going out. They built up a thousand-odd planes for Hamburg. They burnt that out. There were a couple of thousand-bomber raids on Cologne. There were many other raids of 800 and 900 aircraft. To the commanders it was just bodies and numbers of bodies that were involved.”
Early in his operational career, Buckham would keep a diary noting the losses of other aircraft after each mission. He soon concluded that this was not a constructive exercise.
“After about half a dozen trips I stopped. I realised this was crazy. All I was doing was taking a note of the ‘birds’ that were not coming back. And I tell you what, it was a bit heart rending when you have to go down to the flight next morning and wipe out half the names on the board where the crew were listed. The board had three lines for each crew and not many were able to fill those three lines — thirty trips. I didn’t like it. There was no time differential between life and death. I worked out that I was worrying about something that wasn’t manageable. And so I stopped keeping a count. I never thought about luck and I never thought about the lack of luck. I couldn’t. Every split second of life out there had to be dealt with at the time as you saw fit.”
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Many airmen were convinced they had no hope of survival. Don Charlwood would write in his celebrated memoir No Moon Tonight: “We even became accustomed to the idea that to reach thirty ops was no longer possible, that home was a place for which we could afford no longings.” Phil Eyles, who was the navigator of later Pathfinder Force commander Don Bennett when they were shot down over Norway in early 1942, was another fatalist: “Everybody seemed to have the impression that they were going to cop it. That is why, right from the start when I joined up, I wanted twelve shillings and sixpence a day [as a sergeant] instead of being an AC2 [aircraftman second class] on a shilling a day, and that was all I wanted. There was going to be a pension for my wife and child.”
Many airmen relieved the intense stress of operations by drinking hard and playing hard in their free time. The Australians were notable for their excess on both counts. RAAF 463 Squadron commander Rollo Kingsford-Smith liked to drink and found that teetotallers who were often alone when not flying did not cope as well with the stress of operations as those who drank.
“Drinking (draught beer only — spirits were nearly unprocurable), the company at the bar and forgetting about the war was important therapy,” Kingsford-Smith would write in his memoir, I Wouldn’t Have Missed it for Quids. “Many misinformed English people did not really warm to Australian aircrews’ hijinks when not on duty. My enduring memory of most of my aircrew is of young men who, between fighting and dying, lived wildly, played exuberantly, and loved sometimes imprudently.”
The exhilaration of battle while dicing with death would drive a lot of airmen to perform the super-human feats they often carried out. But even the toughest and most stoic of airmen could be brought undone by dramatic events.
Jamaican Billy Strachan flew a tour as a wireless operator/air gunner before retraining as a pilot and joining 576 Squadron, based at RAF Fiskerton near Lincoln, in the final months of the war. His flying career came to an abrupt end one night, soon after his Lancaster took off carrying a 12,000 bomb.
“Our flight path was over Lincoln Cathedral,” Strachan would recount. “It was a foggy night, with visibility about 100 yards. I asked my engineer, who stood beside me, to make sure we were on course to get over the top of the cathedral tower. He replied: ‘We’ve just passed it.’ I looked out and suddenly realised that it was just beyond our wingtips, to the side. This was the last straw. It was sheer luck. I hadn’t seen it at all — and I was the pilot! There and then my nerve went. I knew I simply couldn’t go on — that this was the end of me as a pilot. I flew to a special ‘hole’ we had in the North Sea, which no allied shipping ever went near, and dropped my ‘big one.’ Then I flew back to the airfield.”
Strachan’s navigator that night was Len Dorricott, who had earlier won the Distinguished Flying Medal on operations with 460 Squadron RAAF aboard the fabled “G for George” Lancaster. In his flying logbook, Dorricott would note with great understatement, “Pilot ill.”
Following the incident, Strachan was sent to a large country house in Coventry where he stayed for forty-eight hours. A psychiatrist who interviewed him attributed his breakdown to “war weariness,” a gentler variation of LMF. Billy Strachan never flew again and was never awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross that undoubtedly was his due after such long and brave service with Bomber Command. After the war he became a famous communist and leader of the black rights movement in Britain. •
