lancaster and the tirpitz

Squadron Leader Tony Iveson, DFC joined 616
Squadron at Kenley on 2 September 1940 flying
Spitfires, and was shot down over the North Sea
just after his 21st birthday. He survived, was thrown
back into the fighting, and then taught young pilots
to fly. Commissioned in May 1942, Tony’s second
operational tour was with Bomber Command. He
joined 617 Squadron (‘The Dambusters’) in 1944 and,
as well as many other arduous missions, he flew on
all three sorties against the German battleship Tirpitz
in Norway including the one that finally resulted in
its sinking on 12 November 1944. In his eighties,
Tony was made Chairman of the Bomber Command
Association in 1998, and headed an exhausting 10year campaign to successfully create the Bomber
Command Memorial in London’s Green Park. Tony
passed away in November 2013.
The Lancaster bomber and the German battleship Tirpitz were two of the most
legendary war machines of the Second World War. They symbolised their nations'
quests for victory in history's greatest-ever conflict.
Written by a former Squadron Leader of the 617 “Dambusters” Squadron, who took part
in the Lancaster-bomber raid that finally sank the Tirpitz in November 1944, and published
to commemorate the raid’s 70th anniversary, The Lancaster and the Tirpitz is a brilliantly
readable account full of first-hand memories that take you to the heart of the action.
Brian Milton worked with Tony Iveson to write this
compelling book. A journalist and broadcaster, Brian
is also an aviator, the first man to fly a microlight
aircraft around the world in 1998. He is also the author
of Andre Deutsch’s Hurricane:The Last Witnesses.
The Lancaster was Britain’s main heavy bomber – RAF
Bomber Command’s “Shining Sword” – whose role
was to take the fight to the enemy, delivering deadly
payloads to targets deep in the heart of Germany. It
was used in the famous Dambuster raid, and later in
the War carried out critically important precisionbombing missions on targets such as the V-weapons
complex at Peenemunde.
The Tirpitz was Germany’s largest warship. This
leviathan of a battleship boasted eight fifteen-inch
guns and weighed 2,000 tons more than her sister
ship the Bismarck which was sunk by the British in
1941. Stationed for most of the War in a Norwegian
fjord, Tirpitz helped deter invasion of Norway and
threatened the Arctic convoys, which were an essential
lifeline for the Soviet Union.
In this 70th-anniversary year, using first-hand veteran
accounts from both sides of the conflict,Tony Iveson and
Brian Milton have built on their painstaking research
for their biography of the Lancaster bomber, and woven
throughout the story of the battleship Tirpitz, to tell the
story of the great bomber’s extraordinary mission against
the German warship. It is all the more thrilling a tale, as
Tony Iveson was one of the courageous pilots who flew
on the sortie which finally removed the threat of that
infamous ship once and for all.
Miltary History
ISBN 978-0-233-00430-3
Front cover painting used with the kind permission of Gerald Coulson
Back cover photograph: Michael Nicholson/Corbis
9 780233 004303
Printed in Great Britain
www.andredeutsch.co.uk
£18.99
LANCASTER
THE
AND THE TIRPITZ
THE STORY OF THE LEGENDARY BOMBER AND HOW IT SUNK GERMANY'S BIGGEST BATTLESHIP
SQUADRON LEADER
TONY IVESON
DFC, FORMER PILOT, 617 SQUADRON ("THE DAMBUSTERS")
AND
BRIAN MILTON
FOREWORD
This is the story of some of the few men left alive, the ‘last witnesses’, and the
superb aircraft in which they flew in the Second World War, the Avro Lancaster.
I am proud to have been one of them.
Though all of us are aged over 80 and a few have even passed their 90th year,
it is a young man’s story. We were the cutting edge of the ‘Shining Sword’ that
‘Bomber’ Harris dubbed the Lancaster, and survivors of the Bomber Offensive in
which 55,573 young men lost their lives as we endeavoured to stop Hitler ruling
the world.
I joined the RAF straight from school in 1941, trained as a pilot in America and
entered Bomber Command to fly Lancasters in the Autumn of 1943. I loved the
Lancaster. It was a friendly aircraft in lay-out, it felt right, it handled beautifully
and was a delight to fly. If it was heavier on the controls than we now consider
proper in a modern aircraft, back then this weight gave a young pilot confidence,
and you got used to it.
By the end of the war, more Lancasters were produced than any other heavy
bomber, and it was generally acknowledged to be the finest heavy bomber of any
nation. I went on to complete over 2,000 hours on it.
Having spent over 40 years on the active list and flown a wide variety of aircraft
in the Royal Air Force inventory, including the Canberra and all three V-bombers,
I have often been asked which is my favourite aircraft?
I always reply, the Lancaster. It was my first love at the age of 20 in 1943 and
has remained my favourite throughout my flying career.
The Lancaster, with its four beautiful Merlin engines that saw so many of us
through our tours, was almost the perfect aircraft.
There are not many of us left now, with experience of flying and fighting in it.
In another few years, inevitably, none will be left, and historians will be able
to throw their opinions around with the insouciant knowledge that those of us
who were actually there will not be able to contradict them.
Tony Iveson is right to dub us – a generation 70 years older than the young
men alive today – the ‘last witnesses’.
To those of us who shared the unique experience of flying and fighting in
Lancasters, we have a common bond.
We commend the values of that bond to the younger generations that follow us.
Sir Michael Beetham GCB CBE DFC AFC
Marshal of the Royal Air Force
8
fo r e w o r d
In this land of ours a same people has lived for generation to generation up till now.
They, by their courage and their virtues, have handed it on to us, a country that is free.
They certainly deserve our praise, for it was not without blood and toil that they handed
it down to us of the present generation. We are capable of taking risks and of estimating
them beforehand. The man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who knows
best the meaning of what is sweet in life, and then goes out undeterred to meet what
is to come. In the fight, they thought it more honourable to suffer death than to save
themselves. Remember, posterity can only be for the free, and that freedom is the sure
possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.
Pericles, Greek statesman
(As Admiral of the Athenian fleet in 430BC, Pericles gave a funeral oration for the young Athenians
who had fallen in action during the first era of the Peloponnesian Wars.)
When I look around to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure
path. We have no continental army which can defeat the German military power. The
blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia, and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be
repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop
him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an
absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country
upon all of the Nazi homeland.
Winston Churchill
(Churchill wrote this on 8 July 1940, and it is quoted by his biographer Martin Gilbert in
Finest Hour [William Heineman Ltd, 1983]. In 1982, Sir Arthur Harris commented to Gilbert:
‘It was the origin of the idea of bombing the enemy out of the war. I should have been proud of it.
But it originated with Winston.’)
C h a pte r O ne
Tirpitz – The Threat
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he wanted to rebuild the German military,
but devoted much of his demonic passion to the Luftwaffe and the German
Army. These both posed immediate land threats to France and other countries
bordering Germany. It was only when Hitler ordered the building of a powerful
German fleet that there was a direct threat to Britain. As an island nation,
Britain’s vital interests have always challenged any other European nation that
built a significant navy. When it was the French who did so in the 18th century,
France was Britain’s enemy. When Germany – first united in 1871 – started the
race before the First World War to build dreadnoughts (powerful battleships)
there was only one real enemy the Germans had in mind. Sooner or later, the
Second Reich, the German Imperial Navy, driven by Admiral Alfred Von Tirpitz,
had to test the resolve and strength of Great Britain, and Britain had to respond
to that test. The Royal Navy between 1914 and 1918 was the only armed service
that could lose the whole war in an afternoon. If Germany controlled the
seas around the British Isles, Britain would starve. By return, the Royal Navy
mounted a blockade to try and starve out Germany.
In the only genuine test of strength, battleship against battleship, the British
Grand fleet met the German High Seas fleet at the Battle of Jutland over a two-day
period, 31 May to 1 June 1916. The Royal Navy threw 151 ships into the fight
including 28 battleships, 9 battlecruisers, 8 armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers,
8 destroyers and a seaplane carrier. The Imperial German fleet mustered 16
battleships, 5 battlecruisers, 6 pre-dreadnoughts, 11 light cruisers, 61 torpedo
boats and a seaplane carrier. They clashed twice directly, with great loss of life.
On paper, the Germans won. The Royal Navy lost more than twice as many
sailors as the Imperial German fleet, and 14 great ships to the German’s 11. Both
sides claimed victory, but the Germans had been intent on breaking the power of
the Royal Navy in the North Sea and the Atlantic, and that did not happen. The
Germans retreated into their relatively safe haven in the Baltic Sea, and continued
to pose a threat, but avoided any other fleet-to-fleet conflict thereafter. The Royal
Navy swaggered up and down the North Sea, looking for another fight, but at the
end of 1916 the German Navy turned to unrestricted submarine warfare to try and
starve Britain into surrender. One consequence of this, in March 1917, was that one
ship in every four bound for Britain was sent to the bottom by U-boats. But the
following month, largely because of outrage at this method of fighting a war, the
Americans entered the war on the British side.
10
c h a pte r one
After the Great War ended on 11 November 1918, 70 warships from the German
Navy were escorted to the Royal Navy’s base in Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands
north of Scotland. Peace negotiations dragged on for months, but the British
decided to seize the powerful German ships on 23 June 1919, fearful of the
consequences of not seizing them. A week earlier, German Admiral Ludwig Von
Reuter gave his forces the order to scuttle, and 52 German warships went to the
bottom. Some of them are still there.
It meant, of course, that if the Germans were ever to challenge Britain again,
they had to start from scratch and build a totally modern fleet. Planning started
almost immediately after Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. Called
Plan Z, it aimed to construct a German Navy surface fleet capable of taking on the
Royal Navy with a serious chance of winning by 1944, and a naval construction
programme was started. Germany wanted 13 fast battleships, 33 cruisers, 250
U-boats, and a large number of fast destroyers. Instead of going head-to-head in
a fleet action, the German Navy intended to send task forces out into the Atlantic
to roam the seas raiding commerce. Such forces were to be capable of taking on
scattered units of the Royal Navy, overcoming them with terrific force, and sinking
or capturing merchant ships carrying food and supplies to island Britain. Without
the Merchant Marine, Britain was not capable of continuing the war.
But Hitler miscalculated Britain’s reaction, and the less certain reaction of
France, to his invasion of Poland in September 1939. The war started too early for
the German Navy, which had to play catch-up for most of the ensuing six years.
Tirpitz was one of two super-battleships built as part of Plan Z. Germany had
started the war with two fast battleships already built, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau,
and three pocket battleships, Deutschland – renamed Lutzow – Admiral Scheer,
and Admiral Graf Spee, which were less than half the size of a proper battleship,
but with big battleship guns. There were two battleships, obsolete even before the
Great War – Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein, five cruisers including the heavy
cruiser Admiral Hipper, 17 destroyers and 56 U-boats, of which only 21 were
suitable for service in the Atlantic.
Bismark was the first of the super-battleships to launch, in Hamburg in
February 1939, and commissioned and ready for sea in August 1940.
Tirpitz, its sister ship, was laid down in Wilhelmshaven on 2 November 1936,
and launched with Hitler there to see it slide into the sea on 1 April 1939 – it’s
not thought the Germans saw any significance in April Fool’s Day. Tirpitz was
ready to fight on 25 February 1941. Both ships were monsters. Churchill later
referred to Tirpitz as ‘the Beast’. Close to 50,000 tons, with water-level armour
13 inches thick. Its main armament was eight 15-inch guns in four two-gun
turrets and the turret armour face was 14 inches thick, with turret sides clothed
in 9 inches of steel. Tirpitz also carried twelve 6-inch guns, sixteen 4-inch guns,
and 52 anti-aircraft guns. Eight above-water torpedoes were later fitted. Tirpitz
had a top speed close to 35 mph and a cruising range of 10,000 miles. It was the
biggest battleship ever built in Europe, and its presence alone dominated British
naval thinking for five bloody years of war. If it successfully got out to sea, it was
T i r pit z – T h e T h r e a t
11
capable of tearing into most of its victims with the ferocity and strength of the
fiercest Rottweiler taking on a terrier or a poodle.
It was difficult enough to protect Britain’s trade routes, but the stakes were
raised enormously when the United States entered the war in December 1941. The
only way to bring American troops into the face of war with Germany was by large
ships, either in the convoy system with protective escorts, or by fast unescorted
liners. Had Tirpitz met the SS Queen Elizabeth in 1943 or 1944, carrying 15,000
American fighting men to Britain, the liner could have gone to the bottom of the
Atlantic in half an hour. Because there was a large population of German origin
in the USA, Roosevelt’s political decision to take on Germany first, rather than
the Japanese who had attacked Pearl Harbor, such a sinking could easily have
changed the strategic aims of the Allies. There had been impassioned debate
within the United States, with a sizable minority – led by the famous airman
Charles Lindbergh, for example – who felt that America had been ‘tricked’ into
taking Britain’s side in the First World War. Hitler made it easier for the USA to
get into the Atlantic war by declaring war on the Americans; had he been really
clever and sent his condolences about the Japanese attack, in the short term he
would have ruined his relations with Japan, but he would also have caused real
turmoil in the United States. Britain needed the commitment of the Americans
in its own main theatre of war, so there was every incentive for Churchill to keep
banging the drum for forces to concentrate on sinking Tirpitz. The Royal Navy
got Bismark first in 1941, but Tirpitz was another matter.
C HA P T E R T w o
Birth of a Fighter Pilot
My father, James Iveson, was born in 1892 and had left school at the age of 12 in
1904 to work as a bobbin boy in a Yorkshire cotton-spinning mill, where he earned
one shilling and tuppence (nearly 6 new pence) for a 78-hour working week. In
1914 he volunteered as an infantryman for the Great War, where he suffered three
wounds on the Western Front. All three were ‘Blighty’ wounds, each so serious
he had to be sent home to recuperate in ‘Blighty’ – soldier’s slang for England.
At the First Battle of Loos in October 1915 when the British Army lost nearly
49,000 men, he was wounded in the leg. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle
of the Somme, my father went over the top in the early morning and was shot in
the chest after just ten paces. He lay in agony for eight hours in No Man’s Land,
seriously wounded. He was carried off the battlefield that evening because the
Germans were so horrified at the bloody slaughter in front of them they stopped
firing for half an hour. The following September, 1917, he was thrown into the
fighting once more in Passchendaele, a battle described by the historian John
Keegan as so pointless it ‘defies explanation’. My father was wounded a third time,
but survived to come home to the city of York, where he married immediately,
fathered four sons, and joined the police force. I was his eldest son.
It is not difficult to imagine his feelings in early April 1939, when he watched
an American ‘March of Time’ newsreel in our local cinema in York. By then he
was a police inspector, with two sons eligible to be called up. The huge German
battleship Tirpitz was shown being launched with Hitler there to watch it, and
crowds of thousands singing Deutschland über Alles.
My father’s generation were deeply hurt to think that their children would have
to go and fight what they had thought they had finished in 1918 in the ‘war to end
wars’.
I was as close as could be expected to my father, given that he was a busy
police inspector and I had three younger brothers. He was a fair man, naturally
disciplined, having been a soldier. He never complained about his wounds, and
I only saw his scars when he was swimming. There was a huge scar about eight
inches long where the flesh had been opened up, but it had been sewn together. It
was an incredible sight. As far as I am aware, he never suffered any after-effects of
the First World War, even though he had seen some dreadful things.
I had read lots of the illustrated magazines produced in the inter-war years,
with drawings showing men and women in heroic poses. Like everyone else in the
country, I was deeply touched on Remembrance Day. Every 11 November, lessons
B i r t h of a F i g h te r P i l ot
13
stopped, and we shared a sense of the sacrifice that affected millions of families
across the land. I regret deeply not asking more questions of my father.
His outlook, when we did talk about such things, was that the only good
German was a dead German. I do not think he was ferocious about this. It was
the sentiment of the times for those soldiers who had been out there in the Great
War and seen what they had seen. This was particularly true for my father, who
had lost his best friend Billy on their first night in the trenches. Instead of having
a mate to face the war with, he had been on his own and he took it personally.
As a boy I was enthralled by flight. I remember Bert Hinkler, ‘Hustling Hinkler’,
who flew from England to Australia in 16 days in 1928, and whose flying helmet
became the model for that most fashionable of women’s hats, the cloche. I was at
Sunday school when somebody burst in and told the teacher we had just won the
Schneider Cup Trophy, flying at 405 miles an hour…in 1931! That was just 28 years
since man had first flown. I followed Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Circus, and cycled 15
miles to Church Fenton, where I had my first trip in the back of an Avro 504K. It
cost me five shillings, 25 pence in today’s currency, but of course worth much more
then. I had saved for the flight, and up and around and down we went.
The pilot said, ‘Righto! Next lot!’
‘Is that all?’ I said.
‘Oh, stay there, then’, he said, ‘I’ll give you another go.’
I was 13 years old that summer.
Then there was the great air race to Sydney in 1934, when my friends and I had
a map on the cupboard door and plotted daily where all the pilots were. I had
always wanted to be a pilot.
I started flying at the age of 18 in early 1938. You could take a short-service
commission in the RAF at 17¼ years of age. The authorities had worked out that
by the time you qualified to fly and fight you would be 18 years old, and therefore,
under League of Nations rules, you could be officially shot at by an enemy. My
father would not counter-sign my application for such a commission. He said, you
will spend four years of your life in the Air Force, learning to fly, and after that,
what have you got? You have missed the most important four years of your life.
Then I heard about the RAFVR – the RAF Volunteer Reserve – when they were
talking about introducing conscription into what was called the militia. I argued
with my father and said I was prepared to do my bit but I did not want to do it in
the Army. I wanted to do it in the RAF.
I applied for the RAFVR, and for weeks watched the post every morning for
the buff envelope. Then it came, and I filled in the application, got my father
to counter-sign, got a reference, sent it off, waited for weeks and weeks for it
to come back. When it came back I went for a medical, sent it back, waited
for more weeks, and eventually I was actually on holiday in Blackpool and my
mother rang me. I rushed home.
That summer I was flying Hawker biplanes, Harts and Hinds. They were real
aeroplanes, with 300-hp engines, and I flew them solo, being told to go off for an
hour to do aerobatics: ‘Go up the coast and give them a show at Scarborough or
14
c h a pte r t w o
Bridlington.’ It was a wonderful life. I was paid at my rank, a sergeant pilot on ten
shillings a day, with £25 as a bonus. The Air Force was generous in that sense. I
paid £12.10s. to buy a car, a Standard 10. It had four doors – one of which would
not open – and was made in 1934.
On 6 January 1939 I went solo, and piled up about 70 hours before the war
started.
To make a living, I worked in the City of York’s architecture department, as I
intended to become a qualified architect. I studied at a technical college as well as
working, and the architect job was my main source of income. I knew the war was
coming. My father, way back in the early thirties, had told me it was inevitable. I
had read all the books about the Great War – Sagittarius Rising, Winged Victory,
All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey’s End, Goodbye to All That, Memoirs of a
Fox-Hunting Man, and followed politics mainly through the newspapers, but also
through the cinema newsreels. Hearing my father and his brother and friends
talking among themselves, they asked, are we really going to have to fight this war
with Germany all over again? There seemed to be only one politician who had
the slightest idea of what was going on. Winston Churchill was then preaching
against disarmament. He was a voice crying in the wilderness, that was what my
father and his friends said, the only man who knew the score.
For hundreds of thousands of us facing total war, our view of what was right
and wrong underlined our determination to ‘do the right thing’ and ‘be fair’. It was
typically informed by institutions like Greyfriar’s School in The Magnet comic.
These stories are known now for its chief character, the fat, greedy, dishonest Billy
Bunter, but the values of the school were not Bunter’s. Bunter was a fence for the
real values, and we had been schoolboys reading those stories, imbibing them.
We modelled ourselves on boys other than Bunter, and admired chaps like Harry
Wharton, captain of school, strong-willed, stubborn and a natural leader; Frank
Nugent, loyal and self-effacing; Bob Cherry, cheerful, energetic and robust; Johnny
Bull, Yorkshire-bred, stubborn yet thoughtful.
We carried those models into the sergeants’ and officers’ messes of the RAF and
stuck by them. There were not that many of the Lord Mauleverer types in the Air
Force, they tended for historic reasons to cluster in the Army and Navy. None of
us, including the other fighting services, wanted to be the Harold Skinner type,
cowardly and unwholesome.
An almost perfect summary of the aspirations to courageous behaviour of my
generation, and of my father’s generation, is Rudyard Kipling’s great poem If. There
is not a line that would be repudiated in any mess hall in all the fighting services.
For us, morale was maintained by patriotism, love of country, a desire to do our
bit and even our love of flying. We were sustained by self-esteem, supported by
group cohesion, the strength of which depended to a great deal on the quality of
our equipment, the length of time we were kept in combat, the results we obtained
and the rate of attrition. A flying career was seen by me, and by many young men,
as the best way ‘to get back at the Hun’, if that had to be done.
Like most boys, I wanted to be a fighter pilot.
A Lancaster prototype, all turrets fitted, is a familiar sight but when it
first appeared Spitfires tried to shoot it down and Germans on the ground
cheered, thinking it was one of theirs.
A Lancaster production line in England, which could deliver up to 26 brand new
aircraft a week. There was also a Lancaster production line in Canada.
lancaster plate section 1.indd 2
6/8/14 08:38:20
Wireless Operator, behind the navigator and in front of the Lancaster main spar,
‘a very cramped position’.
Lancaster pilot, with instrument panel. Compared to twenty-first century aircraft
they were actually very simple. Note the armour plate behind the pilot’s head –
absolutely non-effective against 20mm cannon rounds.
lancaster plate section 1.indd 3
6/8/14 08:38:22
Lancasters of 44 Squadron, based at Waddington, Lincolnshire, pictured
in September 1942. They are flown by Sergeant Colin Watt, Royal
Australian Air Force; Pilot Officer T G Hackney, who was later killed
while serving with 83 Squadron; and Pilot Officer J D V S Stephens
DFM, who was killed with his crew two nights later during a raid on
Wismar.
Loading a ‘cookie’, a 4,000lb
‘blockbuster’ bomb, with no
stabilising fins and a thin skin,
designed to blow the roofs off
buildings so that incendiaries
dropped with them would cause
fires. Some later ‘cookies’ weighed
12,000lbs and could only be carried
by Lancasters.
Plate section 2 (pp9-16).indd 10
6/8/14 08:39:01
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