Bomber Command Read Free Page B

Vann was an exception. Most officers were happy to let Command dictate the leisurely pace and nature of their training and showed little professional curiosity.
    They were, on average, three or four years older than the twenty-and twenty-one-year-olds who would be the mainstay of Bomber Command at the height of its offensive five years later, but then that later generation was older by so many seasons’ experience of war. These young men of 9 Squadron and their kin were the innocents. Even their faces in the inevitable squadron photographs look somehow different from those who followed in 1943, 1944 and 1945: Challes, Fordham, Lines, Allison, Bailey – these were young men who cut their hair short and cultivated rakish little moustaches, precursors of the later handlebars. They drank at The Angel in Bury St Edmunds and The Bell at Thetford – always beer. Once a month they climbed into formal messkit for Dining-In nights, and when they were paid they cashed a cheque for five pounds and sped off to London crammed into somebody’s car for a night of noisy, gauche wickedness that usually ended unconscious on a bed at the Regent Palace Hotel. In the early summer of 1939, 9 Squadron represented the RAF at the Brussels International Air Exhibition, where they exchanged warily chivalrous compliments with their Luftwaffe counterparts, and were then sent to stage a ‘Show The Flag’ flight the length of France and back. Even since the outbreak of war, there had been plenty of social diversions. That autumn the Duke of Grafton did his bit for the war effort by inviting the whole of Honington officers’ mess to Euston, his stately home near Thetford. Then, one winter morning, the first contingent of Women’s Auxiliary Air Force girls, the WAAFs, arrived at the airfield, creating unprecedented excitement and causing the Station Commander to make one of his rare public appearances to supervise the rigging of barbed-wire entanglements round their quarters. The only discordant note, forerunner of manymore social upheavals to come, was struck when the most glamorous and sought-after of the girls ended up, of all places, in the arms of a non-commissioned sergeant pilot.
    Even by the standards of the other two services, the young prewar RAF pilot was the least long-sighted of warriors. At least a few of the young men who joined the British army and the Royal Navy did so because they aspired to end up as generals or admirals. Those who came to the RAF did so because they passionately, single-mindedly, unashamedly wanted to fly. The Hendon Air Displays, the barnstormers of the 1920s and 1930s, the hugely publicized exploits of Lindberg, Hinckler, Amy Johnson, all these had seized the imagination of their generation. Above all, perhaps, they captured that of young grammar-school boys, of modest, conventional lower-middle-class backgrounds from which they yearned to escape. Some day there is an intriguing essay to be written on the social origins of senior British airmen of this period, and the effects of these on their attitudes to the other two services. It is enough here to say that pre-war RAF officers’ messes offered young men a unique opportunity to be paid for living the life of gentlemen fliers, and yet public school boys seemed slower to take it up than Lord Trenchard and his colleagues had hoped. There was a rueful prewar air force chestnut about the young man who told his mother he had become a pianist in a brothel rather than reveal that he had joined the RAF.
    But they behaved as English public school boys of the period were expected to behave. One messnight, they locked a racehorse in James Smalley’s bedroom, and bravely faced the difficulties the next morning when it was found impossible to get it out again. They were woken in the morning by civilian batmen who had already run their baths, and who uncomplainingly collected the debris of the previous night’s revels, ironed the clothes while their owners soaked, then made