Authors: Martin Bowman
Tags: #Bisac Code 1: HIS027140
In the main, 540 Squadron photographed German capital ships in Baltic waters and in North German ports and carried out bomb damage assessment (BDA) and target reconnaissance. Serviceability of aircraft in the winter of 1942-43 was only 50 per cent at times because of water seepage into badly fitted No.7 bulkheads. Late in 1942 the first of five PR.VIIIs
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began to reach 540 Squadron, this version being built to fill the gap until deliveries of the PR.IX and PR.XVI were made. The first PR.VIII sortie was flown on 19 February 1943 when Squadron Leader Gordon E. Hughes (later Wing Commander Hughes
DSO DFC
) and Sergeant H.W. Evans overflew La Rochelle and St. Nazaire. Unfortunately, they were unable to take any photos because the mud flap over the camera lens failed to open. The first successful PR.VIII sorties therefore took place on 27 February when Flight Lieutenant K. H. Bayley
DFC
flew to Frankfurt on a bomb damage assessment flight and another PRU Mosquito covered Emden and Bremen. On 8 March unit CO, Wing Commander M.J.B. Young, became the first Mosquito pilot to photograph Berlin.
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On 2 December 1942, 22-year old Canadian pilot Flight Lieutenant Bill White from Roland, Manitoba and his Mancunian navigator, 23-year-old Flight Lieutenant Ron Prescott flew their first operation (a short trip lasting 2 hours 30 minutes to Bergen) since joining 540 Squadron. Prior to this, they had had a close call during a training flight on 18 November when, at about 15,000ft, the starboard engine of their converted Mosquito F.II blew off a flame trap. When smoke began pouring from the rear of the engine White shut it down, feathered the prop and activated the fire extinguisher. This had little effect and by the time they were down to a few thousand feet over Mount Farm, flames were visibly issuing from the rear of the wing. Concerned that the fuel tanks might blow and by this time over the airfield, they decided to land rather than bale out. They crash landed at Mount Farm, where the right undercarriage leg fell off, but both men walked away virtually unscathed.
Two five-hour operations over Trondheim and the Norwegian coast followed in W4060 (which was the first long-range version of the PR.I). On 12 January 1943 they flew a 3 hour 55 minute flight in the same aircraft to an area of coast between Stattlandet to Lister in an attempt to locate the harbour where the
Scharnhorst
was at anchor but nothing was seen. On 24 January, again in W4060, they searched between Grimstadt Fjord-Bergen-Odda and Stavanger, where they were fired on by German flak, but again nothing was found. On the 26th in W4059, the original PR.I, they searched from Sogne Fjord down to Stavanger, flying at 3,000ft, again without result! Two more flights were made on 2nd and 5th February, and on these sorties the search area was extended north from Stattlandet to Trondheim. Each flight lasted for over five hours and on the 5th they flew in 10/10ths cloud almost all the way. On 16 February the weather was not predicted accurately and Ron Prescott commented “X” is a bloody awful Met man’. Their flight, again to Norway, proved to be extremely hazardous and required great skill, as Bill White remembers.
Since we preferred to stay just under the altitude at which we produced contrails, we did most of our flights between 20,000 and 30,000ft. In the belly of the aircraft we had two 36-inch cameras, which took line overlap pictures. These produced 3-D views of the areas being photographed, which were then examined by our intelligence people. Details as small as a golf ball were detectable. We also carried a smaller camera in the port side of the aircraft and with this we could take oblique pictures. Some of the trips involved low-level photography and this required flying at tree-top level.
More trips were made to Norway with occasional flights to other targets. On 9 February they flew over Copenhagen and Denmark during a 5 hour 5 minute reconnaissance flight and caused air raid sirens to be sounded from 13.14 to 14.10 hours. On 21 March they flew their longest flight so far, a six-hour round trip from Leuchars to Norway and back to Wick. On 22 April 1943, their 22nd sortie, Bill White and Ron Prescott completed one of the most memorable flights of their extensive operational careers. They were sent to photograph the railyards at Stettin, Germany’s biggest Baltic port and which had been bombed two days before on the night of the full moon (20/21 April) by 339 ‘heavies’, as well as the Politz oil refinery and Swinemunde on the Baltic coast. Twenty-four fires were still burning at Stettin when the PR aircraft flew over the target a day-and-a-half later; approximately 100 acres in the centre of the town having been devastated. On leaving Stettin they left their cameras running all down the north coast of Germany. After 5 hours and 20 minutes in the air they landed back and when the film was developed, it was found to contain pictures of Peenemünde. When they were developed, one of the prints showed an object 25ft long projecting from what was thought to be a service building, although it had mysteriously disappeared on the next frame! The interpreters of the CIU (Central Intelligence Unit) at Medmenham studied the photos brought back by the crew. From the type of buildings seen and the elliptical earthworks originally photographed in May 1942 by Flight Lieutenant D.W. Steventon in a PRU Spitfire, it was assumed that these were actual testing points. The interpreters concluded that Peenemünde must be an experimental centre, probably connected with explosives and propellants. A sortie flown on 14 May 1943 by Squadron Leader Gordon Hughes and Flight Sergeant John R. Chubb brought back more photos.
Bill White and Ron Prescott were unaware of these developments and on 15 May they had other things to think about, as Bill White recalls.
We were doing photo runs over Oslo when six Bf 109s jumped us. The 109 was faster than we were in a climb or a dive, but the Mosquito could out-turn them. With the excellent direction by Ron, we were able to do ever-decreasing turns and able to avoid their gunfire. We were also able to inch our way over to Sweden. The Swedes will never know how grateful we were to them as they opened up with every flak battery on their coast. The Ack-Ack was always behind us and I’ll never know how many 109s they got. The return to Leuchars was just a normal flight from Sweden, with no problems from fighters.
Meanwhile, further investigation of the photos from the 22 April sortie at Peenemünde revealed that road vehicles and railway wagons near one of the earthworks were carrying cylindrical objects measuring about 38ft long. On 17 May it was concluded that German rocket development had not only probably been underway for some time, but was also ‘far advanced’. A sixth sortie to Peenemünde on 2 June unearthed scant new information. Ten days later a sortie flown by Flight Lieutenant Reggie A. Lenton resulted in the first definite evidence that the previously unidentified objects were in fact V-2 rockets. One was photographed near to a building adjacent to one of the elliptical earthworks lying horizontally on a trailer. Also two objects were spotted, one described as being ‘35ft long and appears to have a blunt point. For 25ft of its length the diameter is about 8ft. The appearance…is not incompatible with it being a cylinder tapered at one end and provided with three radial fins at the other’; and the other as ‘a thick vertical column about 40ft high and 4ft thick’. But initially they were not recognised as rockets.
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On 23 June Flight Sergeant E.P.H. Peek brought back photos so clear that two rockets could be seen lying on road vehicles inside the elliptical earthwork known as Test Stand VII. The news was relayed immediately to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. PRU Mosquitoes photographed Peenemünde again on 27 June and 22 and 26 July. It was now almost certain that Hitler was preparing a rocket offensive against southern England and it had to be forestalled with all speed.
On 17/18 August 1943 596 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings set out to destroy the experimental rocket site. Although the German ground controllers were fooled into thinking the bombers were headed for Stettin and a further ‘spoof’ by Mosquitoes aiming for Berlin drew more fighters away from the Peenemünde force, forty Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings (6.7 per cent of the force) were shot down. Altogether, 560 aircraft dropped almost 1,800 tons of bombs on Peenemünde. A daylight reconnaissance was flown 12 hours after the Peenemünde attack by Flying Officer R.A. Hosking of 540 Squadron and he returned to the area the following day. Photographs revealed twenty-seven buildings in the northern manufacturing area destroyed and forty huts in the living and sleeping quarters completely flattened. The foreign labour camp to the south suffered worst of all and 500-600 foreign workers, mostly Polish, were killed. The whole target area was covered in craters. The Peenemünde raid is adjudged to have set back the V-2 experimental programme by at least two months and to have reduced the scale of the eventual rocket attacks on Britain.
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After the raid the Germans relocated development and production of V-2s to an underground facility at Traunsee near Saltzburg in Austria.
While PR never did reveal how the V-2s were launched (ground intelligence showed that they were to be launched vertically), during October 1944-March 1945 544 Squadron Mosquitoes and other PR aircraft, identified several launching sites in Holland. PR was much more successful in identifying the existence and launching sites of Germany’s other secret weapons, however. It all began by chance on 28 November 1943 when a Mosquito from Leuchars, flown by Squadron Leader John Merrifield
DSO DFC
and Flying Officer W.N. Whalley, set out to photograph bomb damage in Berlin. They reached the German capital, but were unable to take any photographs because of the low cloud cover. Merrifield then turned north, back towards the Baltic coast, to cover secondary targets that he had been given at briefing. There were shipping targets at Stettin and Swinemünde, airfields and a suspected radar installation at Zinnovitz (Zempin) on an island, which is separated from the mainland by the River Peene. Merrifield covered each location in turn and realising that he still had film left, overflew Peenemünde airfield, before returning home. When the film was developed, the shots of Zinnovitz showed buildings that were similar in size and shape to those which had been photographed at Bois Carré, 10 miles north-east of Abbeville, on 28 October 1942 by Pilot Officer R.A. Hosking. This was the first V-1 flying bomb launching site in France to be analysed on photographs and the buildings shown were meant for storage of flying-bomb components. Frames of Peenemünde airfield revealed a ski-type ramp pointing out to sea, which were identical to examples photographed by PR Spitfires at sites in northern France. Merrifield’s photographs of the ramp went one better, for they showed a ‘tiny cruciform shape set exactly on the lower end of the inclined rails a midget aircraft actually in position for launching’.
The ‘midget aircraft’ was now revealed as a flying bomb and the curious ski-shaped ramps in France were to be the launch sites for a new reign of terror against London and southern England. The
Vergelrungswaffe
I (Revenge Weapon No 1) was a small, pilotless aircraft with a 1,870lb HE warhead that detonated on impact. On 5 December 1943 the bombing of the V-1, or
Noball
sites, became part of the Operation Crossbow offensive. PRU aircraft regularly photographed each V1 site before and after an attack and by the end of the month, the Allies had overflown forty-two
Noball
sites, of which thirty-six were revealed as having been damaged; twenty-one of them seriously. By 12 June 1944, sixty weapons sites had been identified. Hitler’s ‘rocker blitz’ began on 13 June when ten V-1s, or ‘Doodlebugs’ as they became known, were launched against London from sites in north-eastern France.
When the enemy began building new underground storage centres in caves and quarries, vertical photography was rendered almost useless, so PR Mosquitoes of 544 Squadron were fitted with forward-facing oblique cameras in the nose of their aircraft. Crews had to fly straight at the target at 200ft and they often had to brave heavy flak to obtain their photos. By the end of September 1944, when the Allied advance overran most of the sites, PRU aircraft had identified 133 V-1 installations. Only eight ever remained undiscovered by aerial reconnaissance.
Following a series of complaints from Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, on 26 June 1943 1 PRU became 106(PR) Wing (and from 15 May 1944, 106 (PR) Group) at Benson. Also included in the new set up, which was commanded by Air Commodore John N. Bootham
AFC
of Schneider Trophy fame, was 309 Ferry Training and Despatch Unit and 8(PR) OTU at Dyce. On 29 May 1943 540 Squadron received the first two PR.IX Mosquitoes off the production lines.
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The first sortie with the type was flown on 20 June, when Flying Officer T.M. Clutterbuck set out to cover Zeitz and Jena but he was forced to turn back after crossing the Dutch coast when smoke poured into the cockpit. Flying Officer R.A. Hosking, who had taken off soon after, had better luck and returned with photos of the airfields at Augsburg and Oberpfaffenhofen. On 3 August Flight Lieutenant Peter Hollick and Flight Lieutenant A.R. ‘Ronnie’ Knight, who had joined 540 Squadron a month earlier, photographed the whole of the Brenner Pass starting at Innsbruck and finishing at Verona. Ronnie Knight recalls.
This was one the most interesting sorties I flew. As there was more than the usual amount of photography involved and the trip was going to the extent of the normal range of the Mossie we flew on and landed at La Merse. We returned via Gibraltar next day and the weather had closed in over the UK with cloud down to the deck so we had to make an emergency landing at Predannack in Cornwall. While searching for this airfield we were flying below the cliffs. When we landed we were told that the bad weather was due to a front moving west, which at that time was between Predannack and Benson. We were given the option of staying the night at Predannack or taking off immediately and get to Benson before the weather closed in there. We decided to get back to base over the top of the weather using the Gee to navigate. We had to go up to 30,000ft, which was very bumpy due to the Cu Nim in the cloud. We did a VHF descent through the cloud and landed at Benson, as it was getting dark. We had a similar experience on 30 October when we went to Leipzig. It went off OK but in the meantime the whole of the UK had become fog-bound. It was impossible to land at Benson and so we were diverted to Tangmere where we had to stay the night but the Fighter Boys made us very welcome in the bar of the Mess.