David Hearsey, DFC, was a bomber pilot. Here he recalls participating in a raid over Leipzig in his Handley Page Halifax in February 1944.
We set out on an easterly heading across the North Sea towards the Danish coast. I told the gunners, Wally and Ted, to test their guns and fire a few rounds — mainly because I found the smell of burnt cordite through the aircraft comforting. I have a theory that combatants can stand the awfulness of battles such as Waterloo or Jutland because the smell of explosives acts as an anti-depressant drug.
The crew had many ways to contain fear. Steve, wireless operator, read cowboy paperbacks; Colin, bomb aimer, stood up all the time with his front Lewis machinegun looking for something to shoot at; Bill, the navigator, kept duplicate charts to impress ‘Intelligence’; I never knew what Wally and Ted did except grumble about being cold. Me, I just flew the bloody aeroplane to keep between shell fire, searchlights and tracer fire from bastard German fighters, and to keep out of the way of falling British bombers as they spun down in flames with burning aluminium spraying down in a many-coloured cascade. Quite an artistic display really if you didn’t think about the poor chaps burning inside.
We had for several months carried a ‘device’ as well as bombs. Our particular aircraft was fitted with microphones in each of the four engines and we could broadcast this deafening racket over German transmitter wavelengths and drown out any communication from the ground. Thus marauding German fighter planes would fail to hear precise directions as to where we, the bombers, were. The problem was that the German radio ground staff could pick us up and took only two minutes to get a fix on us when every anti-aircraft gun for miles around would cone on us, and we wouldn’t last more than a few minutes before being blown high out of the sky. Some boffin had overcome this problem by fitting the device with a Meccano clockwork motor which our wireless operator would have to wind up every half-hour. This would shut our transmitter down after a minute and a half, then start it up again.
A few miles into the Baltic I turned to starboard on a south-easterly heading and flew between L
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