The Valour and the Horror

By spring, 1944, after five months of brutal raids, Bomber Command had failed to destroy the city of Berlin. Harris counted Hamburg and the Ruhr as successes, but "Victory Through Air Power" still eluded him. He had lost 953 bombers in 34 raids. And he knew that, after April 14, Bomber Command would be diverted to Operation Overlord, the Allied code name for the invasion of Normandy.

On March 29, Moffat, Harvey and their squadrons were ordered on a final raid. The target was Nuremberg, one of Germany's oldest cities, the headquarters of the Nazi party and the hub of the world's toy industry.

"We came back from vacation," says Moffat, who had been on a week's furlough in Edinburgh with his navigator, Red Soeder, "and that night we were on ops. We looked at the target and, 'Oh my God!' Nuremberg-and in moonlight. Moonlight! We'd go to France and that's no problem; but to go into Germany in moonlight?"

Behind the scenes, one of Harris' advisors tried to talk him out of the mission, objecting that the clear, moonlit night would expose the bombers to terrible danger. A late weather report showed that the only cloud on the whole route hung over the target. Everyone expected the mission to be scrubbed. It wasn't.

Nearly 6,000 airmen prepared for the attack.

It was Moffat's 10th mission, his skipper's 13th.

At approximately 10 p.m., March 30, 781 Lancaster bombers took off from the Yorkshire airfields in quick succession. The plan was for all the planes to bomb the target within a 20&endash;minute period: a bomb-load dropped every one and-a-half seconds.

The return flight to Nuremberg took eight hours. The crews could see the white vapour trails of the other aircraft in the stream.

"I was sitting at my tail gun and suddenly I saw the first Lancaster explode in a big, red, fiery ball," recalls Moffat. "It's the gunner's job to point out where aircraft go down. We started reporting the planes going down in flames, 'Aircraft going down in flames with no parachutes off the port.' This went on for 20 minutes. Twenty&endash;one aircraft going down in 20 minutes. 'Aircraft going down in flames, no parachutes.' Finally the pilot said, 'That's enough, no more; don't give any more."'

Through his cockpit windscreen, Harvey saw German fighters coming at him across the moonlit sky. Harvey was used to this: he had a gold watch, one of 12 awarded for dropping the most bombs on Berlin. But for the first time flying, he prayed

He would have been even more terrified had he known that the Germans had two new secret weapons-a sophisticated tracking antenna that could guide a night&endash;fighter, undetected, to the underbelly of a bomber. And an upward&endash;firing gun called Shrage Musik. "A simple periscope gunsight was arranged so that the pilot could take careful aim as he flew quietly below the bomber's blind spot," says Dyson. "The main problem for the German fighter pilot was to avoid being hit by pieces of the exploding bomber."

Virtually the entire Herman night&endash;fighter force of planes was deployed against the stream of approaching British and Canadian bombers. With the new German technology, 59 planes were shot down en route to Nuremberg. The crews knew what hit them.

Miraculously, Moffat and his crew made it to the target. Moist bombers, following the meteorological officer's winded miscalculations, flew off course and dropped their bombs Northwest of Nuremberg, on the city of Schweinfurt. Moffat's plane dropped its bombs and headed home, but now their navigator was off course.

"So we turn 45 degrees to the port," says Moffat, "and thepilot said, 'Okay, gunners, everyone keep your eyes open, we don't want to crash into anyone.' And every now and again, he reminds us, 'Okay gunners, you've got your eyes open, keep watch.' I couldn't see too well because I'm in the tail."

Suddenly, Moffat heard the pilot say, 'What the hell...' and then his head hit the turret so hard he was almost knocked out. He saw a plane drifting off to the rear, another Lancaster, one of their own, the only other aircraft in 40 miles. He called to the cockpit. No answer. He tried to open the doors to the main body of the plane, but they had crumpled shut. He signalled in Morse Code to the wireless operator. Silence. The plane seemed to be level. He had been in tough spots before; he decided to sit tight and wait it out.

"What I didn't know was that the plane was in a tail dive and I was on the inside of the spin so there was no centrifugal force.

"Then I noticed a tail fin missing and I realized what was happening."

Painfully, he uncurled his long legs up out of the turret. He was already wearing his parachute. He flipped on his back and rolled out. Still caught in the illusory weightlessness of the tailspin, he floated to earth in tandem with his plane. In a few moments, he'd be sucked into the plane's crash. The turret guns pointed at him. He had forgotten the safety catch, but he had no choice. He kicked against the guns to free himself from the deadly vacuum of the Lanc.

"It was just like God grabbed me and yanked me up real sudden. I heard the chute open. The idea had just gone through my head-I'm going to land in that clear field- when I hit the ground."

Moffat landed in Germany with nothing more serious than a nosebleed. For the next year and a half, he lived with the Resistance, the only man from the two crews to escape the collision alive. For him, the air war was over. He had flown ten missions as a gunner, and had never once fired his guns.

In one night, the raid on Nuremberg destroyed 108 planes. More airmen died-545-than in the entire Battle of Britain. In Bomber Offensive, the detailed wartime memoir of Air Vice Marshall Harris, which goes on at great length about Hamburg and Berlin, there is not a single mention of Nuremberg or the airmen who died.