Oliver Owen discovered his father was a wartime RAF hero | Life and style | The Observer The light was beginning to fade and the mist thicken at RAF Bourn, a wasteland of mud and Nissen huts, as 21 Lancasters from 97 Squadron left their dispersals on the afternoon of 16 December 1943. It took a little under half an hour to get them all into the air, each plane needing a minute to goad its four Merlin engines up to full power before setting off down the bumpy runway. The sky above Cambridgeshire shook with the noise and vibration as the bombers lifted into the darkening sky and headed for Berlin, each one seen off with a wave and a silent prayer by those left on the ground. The airfield fell silent for the next seven hours, the smoke from each hut's coke fire hanging in the damp air. There was little to do until the bombers returned. That winter, 65 years ago, was particularly harsh and often raids had been called off at the last minute as the weather closed in, but the German capital had not been hit for two weeks, so there was some urgency to get Bomber Command back into battle. 'It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war,' said Air Marshal Arthur 'Bomber' Harris at the launch of the Battle of Berlin a month earlier. Harris believed that saturation bombing would alter the course of the conflict. But it was a grim time to be in Bomber Command: 7,000 allied airmen were killed over Germany during the five-month campaign against Berlin, and more than 1,000 bombers were lost. For the seven young men who made up the crew of Lancaster JB671 - known as V-Victor - the timing must have seemed particularly bad. Their arrival on operations in mid-November coincided with the start of Harris's assault on Berlin, when the chance of surviving a full tour of duty was one in five. This trip was V-Victor's fourth, but the 20-year-old pilot, Charles Owen, had flown a couple of earlier missions. He was my father. Google will find work for idle hands, and one day in June 2006, for no particular reason, I typed in my father's name. Among countless listings for a man with that name who 'made the world a safer place' by manufacturing riding hats was an entry that read: 'Owen, V-Victor, 16/17 December 1943, 97 Squadron'. I had stumbled across a website that was a continuation of Fire by Night, a book by Jennie Gray that told the story of a raid on Berlin in 1943. Also on the way to Berlin that bleak December night was Lancaster K-King, a plane my father's crew had used on their first trip together three weeks earlier. This crew, too, were on their first operation, and among them was 21-year-old wireless operator Joe Mack. Jennie Gray is Mack's daughter, and now her website had made me think very differently about my own father. It also reintroduced me to his wartime diary, a handwritten book that had sat on a shelf throughout my childhood. Up to that point, thoughts of my father had rarely entered my head because, I suppose, I never really knew what to think of him. He died in the summer of 1984, a few days after my 20th birthday. He was only 61, but looked very much older, due to a long battle with alcohol. In fact it was no battle at all, just one-way traffic with booze very much in the driving seat. The abiding memory I have is of him sitting on a sofa in our house in Wiltshire staring out over the Kennet valley, hoping to catch a glimpse of the American warplanes that used the area for low-level training. We all knew he was dying, but no one talked about it. We just waited. My memories of my father are divided in two. There was a time when he was still in the RAF, and there were the years afterwards. A round of defence cuts in 1975 called time on his career. We lived in Lewes in Sussex and his final job was at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. On his way back from the station each evening he stopped in at the Kings Head in Southover High Street. When he no longer went to work, there was no getting past the Kings Head. The RAF had been his entire life and he had no training to get by in the world beyond. I went to boarding school when I was seven years old and have only a scratchy recollection of time before that. My father was stationed in Cyprus and he would take my older brother, William, and me for walks at the weekend on the RAF base at Akrotiri. I liked that; we would walk past the planes and the lines of Bloodhound missiles, but most of all I remember, as I tried to equal my dad's long strides, that other men would salute him. One afternoon we went to a ceremony where he handed out 'wings' to newly qualified RAF pilots, and he made a small speech in which he gave some advice to the young airmen. 'As long as you remember that everyone else in the sky is a bloody idiot and they will do precisely what you least expect, then you will be fine,' was the gem he passed on. It went down well. Years later, when my mother was horrified at my plans to buy a motorbike, he made pretty much the same observations. While he was serving he was active and did the things that fathers do. He was strict in an old-fashioned 'children should be seen and not heard' way, an advocate of good table manners and courtesy, but he was fair and, most of all, fun. After the RAF he became very different. Looking back, the first sign of the trouble ahead was my 12th birthday. I had asked for a Scalextric set, and when I came home from prep school for a day I expected to be confronted by a large, paper-wrapped box. In the living room my present was already set up on the floor. It wasn't the end of the world, until I discovered lots of wrapping paper in the kitchen bin. Dad had been to the pub the night before and 'batted on a bit'. He came home in good spirits with a couple of friends. They opened my present and raced long into the night. At the end of 1977 we moved from Lewes to a small village in Wiltshire. The Red Lion became very much my father's second home. He would be there at lunch time and on the dot of six in the evening. He had a stool in the corner of the lounge bar and a stare that could burn a hole through tungsten should anyone dare to sit on it. At first, when he was late back in the evening, his arrival was accompanied by an excuse, usually along the lines of, 'Terribly sorry. Got trapped by some frightful ancient mariner.' But as time went by, and the more frequently this occurred, he gave up on the excuses. When I was home from school I dreaded the hour he was back from the pub and before he passed out in his chair. He was prone to irrational outbursts and could be very mean, particularly to my mother, Diana. To see her reduced to tears so often was heartbreaking, particularly when she was such a lovely person. She was deeply religious, but also one of the funniest people I ever knew, and certainly the best mimic. Her war hadn't been easy either; she had been interned by the Japanese in the British Embassy in Tokyo. When I finally left school my father had been banned from driving and had given up on trying to have any life beyond the local pub. I wanted to be at home as little as possible. I loved my father, but I didn't like or admire him at this time, when I should have been really getting to know him. How could you admire a man who couldn't start the day without a large sherry in his tomato juice? When he finally died the family's sadness was tempered with relief. I never really thought how, or why, my father ended up like he did. Not until Jennie Gray's website rekindled my interest. Charles Blundell Owen was born on 5 January 1923 in Barcelona. He was the second of five children and his parents ran a hotel in Algeciras, just across the bay from Gibraltar. I know little of his childhood except that he was sent to boarding school in England aged five and only returned home to Spain for the summer holidays. He never spoke particularly fondly of his parents - he used to call his father 'Sir' - or the two aunts he stayed with in Dorset for the majority of the year. I heard more stories of his bulldog, Admiral Sturdy, than I ever heard of Owen family life in Spain. He was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire and then, as Max Hastings records in Bomber Command, 'after leaving public school, [he] was working at the Supermarine aircraft factory as a boy of 17 in 1940, when he was badly injured in an air raid. He spent the winter in hospital, and came out at last old enough for the RAF. An exceptional pilot trainee, he was posted as an instructor, and served a year before transferring to operations with 97 Squadron, where he proved an outstanding operational captain.' The skills learned as a flying instructor were to save him and his crew that December night in 1943, on what became known as 'Black Thursday'. The journey to Berlin took around three hours, and the Pathfinders of 8 Group led the vast stream of bombers. These were elite squadrons, expert at marking targets and precision bombing. Made up from a mixture of British and Dominion air crew, 97 Squadron was such a unit. Almost to a man they were young, some so young they could fly a heavy bomber but not drive a car. Many were still teenagers and there was general suspicion of crew in their thirties, the feeling being that they had no right to still be alive, having used up all their luck. Crews could volunteer for the Pathfinders; with the post came a higher rank and the right to wear the insignia of the force, a gold eagle. The downside was a 'double tour' of 45 operations, as opposed to the 30 flown by Main Force. This did not mean that Pathfinders had any more experience; four of 97 Squadron's crews flying that night were on their first sortie of the war. Despite all the training, the novices could have little idea what the skies above the target had in store. They had to run the gauntlet of flak and searchlights, and keep an eye out for the nightfighters that preyed on the bombers. And it wasn't just the enemy that could kill you; often, crews would look up through the canopy in horror to see a 'friendly' aircraft looming above, its bomb doors yawning open. Collisions were frequent, as the Lancaster, suddenly relieved of the weight of bombs, would occasionally leap upwards, sometimes as far as 500ft, and into another plane. On this particular night only one of 97 Squadron's Lancasters failed to complete the bombing run. Q-Queenie, flown by Flight Lieutenant David Brill, exploded high above Berlin and all eight men on board (like three other crews, Brill was carrying a rookie second pilot) were killed. The crews of the other 20 Lancasters were pleased to be turning for home after surviving another bombing run to the dreaded 'Big City', but they weren't to know the most dangerous part of the night still lay ahead. Having been a pilot, with the ability to enjoy the freedom of the skies, the loss of his driving licence in 1982 must have come as a terrible blow to my father, although he was never going to admit it. He apparently never liked being flown, so it made perfect sense that he wouldn't enjoy being driven. My mother would become a nervous wreck whenever my father lurked in the passenger seat even before the alcohol really got hold of him. He drove 'flamboyantly', leaning back with arms straight. He helped out in the commentary box at Silverstone and I loved going motor racing with him. We would leave before dawn and he attacked the country roads with gusto. It wasn't clever, but it was thrilling, and it was on these occasions that he was very much my friend. He was relaxed, funny, never short of an anecdote and I loved his stories. He'd tell me about Admiral Sturdy, the bulldog, swimming in the sea but not being able to turn round. He used to chase him in a rowing boat as the dog paddled towards Gibraltar. Once pointed in the right direction Sturdy headed back to shore.
Part 2 And he talked about the war, about flying so low that he could whip up spray from the North Sea, and driving back from the pub in the dead of night with no headlights on, making it easier to sneak back into base. The three-year driving ban ended our motor-racing jaunts and left him stranded in our little Wiltshire village with nowhere to go but the pub. He couldn't even get into Marlborough, three miles away, to buy my mother a birthday or Christmas present. He would despatch me 'to get a couple of those lovely little scent bottles' whenever the occasion arose. I hated buying them as much as my mother loathed unwrapping them. They sat in a line on her dressing table, little reminders of all that had gone wrong. It was just before midnight when V-Victor arrived over Bourn, but the mist of the afternoon had turned into a blanket of thick fog that stretched up as far as Yorkshire. Visibility was dropping with every minute that passed - by midnight it would be down to 300 yards or less, and it took about 1,000 yards to stop a Lancaster. For all the returning aircraft that night, landing was going to be a precarious business, and all the while the aircraft fuel gauges were heading for zero. It was a minor miracle that my father's crew had even found Bourn as, on the long trip back, all his aircraft's navigation aids had stopped working. Jennie Gray's research for Fire by Night, which was originally published in 2000, had included reading my father's diary, which my mother had put on permanent loan at the Imperial War Museum in London shortly after his death. His entry for 16 December 1943, reads: 'Big City again, and first trip in my own aircraft. Trip generally was quieter than usual. 10/10 cloud over target and rather less flak than usual. W/T and Y and G packed up on way home, so homed across North Sea on D/F Loop, which luckily was not jammed. Homed on to base on SBA beam, breaking cloud at 250ft to find fog, rain and visibility about 300yds and deteriorating. R/T then packed up, so after circling for 10 mins at 200ft landed without permission in appalling conditions. Six other aircraft landed at base, three landed away, three crews bailed out when they ran out fuel, four crashed when trying to land, and one was missing. Quite a night.' As Jennie points out, his figures aren't quite correct. Of the 20 Lancasters from 97 Squadron that made it back to England only eight landed at Bourn, five made it down safely after being diverted to other airfields, five crashed and two crews bailed out when they ran out of fuel. Twenty-eight men lost their lives on English soil and four more were so severely injured that they never flew again. The terrible weather made this the most disastrous night of the war for 97 Squadron, despite only losing one plane over enemy territory. Years later, V-Victor's navigator, Bill Shires, recalled how they got back when he was interviewed by the 97 Squadron historian Kevin Bending, who was researching his book, Achieve Your Aim 'We had a radio receiver, but no transmitter, so we couldn't ask for a course,' recalled Shires. 'I got Dougie Knowles, the wireless operator, to turn the aerial round so it was facing forward, and we homed in on one of the transmitters.' On her website, Gray has posted a transcription of an interview recorded in the early Eighties with the crew's bomb aimer, Tom Leak, about Black Thursday. 'Tension was beginning to build up and cloud base beginning to drop, and we began to wonder if we ever would land,' says Leak, who at 30 was the old man of the crew. 'Then eventually one aircraft got down, but the runway wasn't cleared. By this time our pilot was getting anxious and we were also wondering about the position of the petrol. So he said, "Well, look, lads, I'm going to land." The navigator got very concerned and said, "If you land without permission, this could be a court-martial." "Yes, and if we don't try to land it could be a coffin for us." So the navigator called out again, he said, "But the runway's not clear, there's an aircraft still on the runway." "Oh well," Charles Owen said, "we'll have to take that chance." The pilot realised that this was a desperate position and that if we didn't do something we never would get down. Meanwhile, all the other aircraft were circling around and he came down low and we could just see one or two of the perimeter lights at a time, but it was very difficult to see much. And he came in and the flight engineer helped him to try and pick out the flare path, and we landed with a terrific bump and shot up in the air, but it was the best landing we ever made.' Shires recalled that my father used skills he learned long before he ever flew Lancasters. 'Charles Owen had been a flying instructor and he was good at sideslipping [a method adopted to lose height very quickly]. So, we sideslipped in and still landed way up the runway, but fine.' Fifty-five minutes after V-Victor touched down, Ted Thackway, the pilot of K-King, was still circling blind over Bourn. His Lancaster was running on fumes. He had to get down, and looked for the first available space. K-King landed perfectly in a field to the east of the airfield, but as the Lancaster thundered across the rough ground the undercarriage collapsed. K-King broke apart and caught fire. There were only two survivors: the rear-gunner, Leslie Laver, and the wireless operator, Joe Mack. My brother William was born on my father's 40th birthday, and 16 months later, in May 1964, I came along. My father was still in the RAF, but his flying duties were in the past. Growing up, William was always keen on all things military, particularly aeroplanes, but I cared more for racing cars. My father made the war sound like the most fun a man could possibly have. Bill Shires described him as 'an enthusiast' to Kevin Bending, but my father never talked to me of the horror of it all, of seeing his friends die on an almost daily basis. Of the 151 men who took off on Black Thursday, fewer than 50 survived the war. People whom he ate and drank with one night were blown out of the sky over enemy territory the next, and they just disappeared. A lot of his comrades had short futures with 'No known grave' written on the end of them. None of this really occurred to me until I stumbled across Jennie Gray's website and I read her book. So badly injured was her father on Black Thursday that his war was over, but the effects were clear. That has been Jennie's story to tell, and why she is so determined to put a face to all 151 men who met in the briefing room at Bourn on the afternoon of 16 December 1943. I sent her a copy of a picture of my father taken shortly after he had flown the last of his 55 operations. It had lived in the transcript of his diary, which the Imperial War Museum sent to us after we had deposited the original. In the picture he is still only 21, and I never knew him like that. I had a posed picture of him in RAF uniform with my mother, but that was the shot I was supposed to keep by my bed for 10 years at boarding school. So, far too late, I read the diary that Jennie Gray described on her site as 'a goldmine for historians of the period'. It was a launch pad into the life of a man I never really saw the best of. Charles Owen was clearly a brave and brilliant pilot, his diary littered with heroic deeds, but told in a very laconic style, typical of air crew at the time. But nowhere does he mention the horrors of the war: the funerals in Cambridge after Black Thursday must have been traumatic, if not as ghastly as removing the headless corpse of Flight Sergeant Laurie from the rear turret of another aircraft, as he had to do on 28 January 1944, the poor man decapitated by flak over Kiel. Or the death of his friend, Guy Gibson VC, the man who led the Dambusters raid, on 19 September 1944. His log book, signed by Gibson when they were both operating in the highly dangerous role of Master Bombers with the elite 54 Base, records that he took part in 'local flying' the following day. But Susan Ottaway's biography, DamBuster: The Life of Guy Gibson VC, reveals my father's part in the final mission of a man Bomber Harris said was 'as great a warrior as this island ever produced'. 'Charles Owen of 97 Squadron briefed Guy on the raid,' wrote Ottaway, 'and was dismayed when Guy told him that he intended to ignore the planned homeward route, which was to fly south-west over France and instead to take the most direct route and fly at very low level. Wing Commander Owen strongly recommended that Guy stick to the planned route, but could see that his words had fallen on deaf ears.' War shapes those who take part in it, often without the participants realising what has happened. My father flew long after hostilities ceased in 1945. He spent time with the American Air Force, flying Super Fortresses, and later he commanded the first Victor squadron, one of the aircraft that were designed to deploy nuclear weapons deep into the heart of the Soviet Union. But one day in 1976 his time with the RAF ended. He had not enjoyed the final few years when he 'flew a desk', but at least it gave him something to do. It is not really that surprising that he didn't deal well with retirement, but it was a huge disappointment for those of us who loved him. In Fire by Night, Gray begins the final chapter: 'When I think about my father and his crew now I chiefly see them as they are about to take off for their first and last operation. They are in their Lanc and hardly able to suppress their nerves and excitement as they run through the long series of pre-flight checks.' She has done me an enormous favour. For years I never thought of my father. Now, the odd day must go by when I don't think about him, but I can't remember when it last happened. Most importantly I no longer think of him as old and broken, but as a young man, fresh-faced and at the controls of a Lancaster. He is a hero and he is going to bring his boys home. This is his final diary entry of the war. It tells the whole story: 'Last trip of the war and a pleasant daylight stooge across the North Sea. I was doing deputy to Johnnie Simpson, so I could sit back and enjoy myself. Good trip out in sunny weather, and very quiet except for flak from Heligoland. Target was covered by 10/10 cloud, but a good deal of flak. I went up to 25,000ft and watched Johnnie being shot at down at 12,000ft. Saw plenty of our Mustang escort but no Huns. Good thing. Came home at 26,000ft in bright sunlight and not a cloud in the sky. Very peaceful except for a V2 shooting up from Holland, leaving a long jagged white trail. First time I'd seen one. Came in very fast, and beat up the aerodrome before landing. Live! Johnnie came in in the Mossie, 10 minutes later. It was his last rip too, so we adjourned to the bar before lunch and celebrated suitably. Recollection of subsequent session somewhat hazy. Good show.' His war was over but it obviously never really left him. This was never more apparent than at the end of the Falklands War, two years before he died. Watching the troops come back was incredibly moving for my father. He sobbed continuously as the soldiers disembarked from the Canberra, and I thought he was just 'pissed and emotional', but it was clearly rather more than that. The landlord's son from the village pub served in the South Atlantic, and in the late summer of 1982 there was a party to welcome him home. This was a potentially combustible set of ingredients, but the evening was a wonderfully happy occasion. I sat with my father and his 'ancient mariners' up at the bar the entire night, and when we set off back to the house long after the pub had officially shut we weaved home down the lane together. There wasn't a cloud in the night sky, and before we got to the back gate we stopped, sat on the grass and looked up at the stars. He knew the names of all the constellations and how you got from A to B if that was all you could see. It was probably the best chat we ever had. There were never enough of those. • To read more about Black Thursday and 97 Squadron go to 97squadron.co.uk On a wing and a prayer: extracts from Charles Owen's wartime diary 18 November 1943 Target: Berlin We overshot the target on our initial run, and so turned back and bombed against the stream. I did not like it at all, and made up my mind never to do it again if I could help it. 26 November 1943 Target: Berlin Flew over Hanover by mistake on the return journey and was coned for seven minutes. Lost height from 20 to 13,000ft during evasive action from intense heavy flak. Several holes in starboard wing and roof of cockpit, and the bomb aimer was wounded slightly in the leg. 2 January 1944 Target: Berlin Got jumped badly by fighter on way home across France. Both gunners were wounded, the rear gunner seriously, and the starboard outer engine caught fire. Found it impossible either to extinguish fire or feather prop, and had to have rudder tied by engineer to maintain straight flight, as the rudder trimmers had been shot away. Limped into Tangmere and swung off runway on landing, due to starboard tyre being holed by cannon shell. End of V-Victor I. 21 January 1944 Target: Magdeburg No fighters, but nearly got bombed by another aircraft. Saw his cookie [4,000lb bomb] go down past the wing. Very shaking. 30 March 1944 Target: Nuremberg Moon far too bright for comfort, and the sky swarming with fighters. Saw combats all over the sky right from the coast to the target, and a very large number of aircraft shot down. 3 May 1944 Target: Mailly-le-Camp We were attacked again coming out of the target and he shot away our mid-upper turret and made a few holes elsewhere. The mid-upper gunner, miraculously, was only slightly wounded but had to leave what was left of his turret. The fighter came in again but the rear gunner drove him off and claimed him as damaged. I came home at 0ft, crossing two German aerodromes below the level of the hangar roofs. 6 June 1944 Target: St Pierre du Mont (coastal battery) We broke cloud over the French coast; the Channel was full of ships. The army had pulled its finger out at last and D-Day was on. We bombed at 05.00 just as it was getting light, and had a grandstand view of the Americans running in on the beach. First-class prang on the battery, but saw Jimmy Carter shot down by a Ju88 over the target. Marvellous sight coming back as the sun came up. We on the way back and the Americans on the way out. Landed back in time for breakfast, but very disappointed that there was nothing on the 8 o'clock news. 21 June 1944 Target: Gelsenkirchen Moon came up on the way home and jerry fighters enjoyed themselves, even following us halfway across the sea, which we thought rather against the rules. Not at all a nice trip, and a lot of chaps missing. 12 July 1944 Target: Culmont-Chalindrey. Railway Junction Arrived back at dawn in pouring rain, low cloud and shocking visibility. Managed to creep in more by luck than good judgement, feeling rather relieved. Rest of the squadron diverted, so we got two eggs each for breakfast. 18 August 1944 Target: L'Isle-Adam - V1 storage depot Another daylight stooge to France, but more amusing than last time. Had to mark the target myself in a hurry and went down to 100ft. Luckily no defences opened up and we got away with it. Quite a lot of flak from Rouen on return, and we followed a Lanc down and saw it belly-land in a field. Went down to have a look and saw the pilot climb out and wave. Came home across France at 0ft, and saw some very surprised Huns when we nipped over a big chateau near the coast. Quite an amusing trip.
What an evocative piece David !! It reminds me of when I talked to a 93 year old woman - who knew my Grandfather and the only thing she could say about him was ... " I remember him !! ... he drank like a fish !! " It wasn't until I started reading war diaries etc - and after flooding my keyboard more than once - I realised all he had been through and then when he came home was expected to just carry on as though nothing had happened ! Our men in all wars have had to go through the same things .... but I'm so glad that Oliver Owen is now able to see his Dad as a hero ... but what a shame he didn't see it before the summer of 1984 ! Thank you for sharing that ! Annie
I can take no credit. I was told about the article as it is about 97 Squadron crew member and that squadron is one of my interests.
