Being commissioned meant Fred used the more comfortable officers' mess, which was off-limits to his crew, who also ate and slept in different quarters. But differences in rank meant little among men who had to work together as a matter of life and death. Fred wasn't called sir, he was skip or skipper, and the crew had their nicknames - navigator Sullivan was Sully, bomb-aimer McLeod became Mac, wireless op Gleeson was Ginger and 5' 5" rear-gunner Meddick was Shorty. Hardwick and Mark were known by their first names Bill and Hughie. But Fred made the rules clear from the start, telling his men: "We are all in this. I expect you all to pull your weight. I intend to come out of this all right."
A tour of duty meant 30 ops before a return to other duties, such as instruction. Their arrival at Wickenby coincided with a new strategy in which Harris was forced to suspend city bombing and stick to objectives in support of Operation Overlord. This meant more 'daylights' to France, considered easier than night ops to the heavily-defended Third Reich, to the extent that such sorties at first counted as only a third-of-an-op. But that was soon stopped when more and more planes failed to return from this 'easy' target. Only the night before the crew arrived four Lancasters were lost from 31 sent from Wickenby to attack railway yards at Vierzon in France, with the deaths of 25 men.
Lorne McLeod
Unseasonably gloomy weather plagued the whole summer, and meant many ops were cancelled. Fred and Bill left the others behind to ride second dickey together on an attack on marshalling yards at Dijon, after which the crew was ready for its first op - an uneventful sortie to a V1 site at Foret du Croc, northern France, in PH-M, LM509.They were airborne the next day, in PH-J, ND749, on the war's most notorious op over northern France, to Caen. Montgomery compensated for the nearness of Allied troops by identifying a target further away than usual - smack in the medieval city. The Germans sent up a terrific barrage of flak, likened to thousands of blotches of paint on a huge canvas. On the first turn after the target PH-J was hit on the port side of the rear gun turret. Fred said: "I could feel it - a big 'wang', and out of the corner of my eye I saw a long piece of metal from the rear turret flash away from the aircraft. I was worried the rear gunner might have been hurt. I asked him to come and let me see him. It was in daylight and I had another gunner up there and there wasn't any likelihood of a fighter attack - there was so much flak shot up that I suspected there were no German fighters in the vicinity." George said: "We weren't very high. There was a hell of an explosion and I thought I had been hit, but I had just been banged up against the turret and hit my shoulder. Lucky isn't the word. I came up to the rest bed in the aircraft and Bill looked after me." Fred said: "He got shaken up all right. When we landed I inspected the aircraft and fabric covering the frame was missing."
In debriefing after the 3hr 50m sortie the crew reported it had been an extremely well-concentrated attack with bombs dropped in the centre of the smoke as instructed by the masterbomber, and Wickenby's operational report dubbed the raid an outstanding success. When the dust settled, however, a very different picture emerged. Caen had been left in smouldering ruins, obliterated under a cloud of black smoke that spouted thousands of feet into the sky. The raid killed more than 5,000 French civilians and very few Germans. Fred said: "We probably killed more Frenchmen than Germans. You didn't think about anything like that when you were actually flying. All my thoughts were about flying the aircraft. The time people might think about that is after they have done their flying or after they have done their trips and the photos taken by aircraft are usually put up on the wall in the photo section."
(Imperial War Museum) The carnage of Caen. The crew followed the masterbomber's instructions.
The crew's third sortie was Fred's first as nightpilot and the first in the Lancaster to become 'his own', a newly-delivered Mark I, PD201, call-sign PH-E Easy, a misnomer if ever there was one. It was among 16 Lancasters from 12 Squadron which took off after 9pm on July 12 to bomb marshalling yards at Tours. Returning over the Channel Islands in a moonlit sky George spotted a Junkers 88 about to attack another Lancaster on the port beam. He snapped an instruction down the intercom to Fred: "Corkscrew port!" and both gunners opened fire on the fighter 400 yards away, shooting off 260 rounds. It broke away to starboard over their plane, without firing, and appeared to have been hit. Few Luftwaffe loss records for 1944 have survived but they show no JU88 downed in the area that night.
After Tours came the frustration of more cancelled ops. Their next mission, on the 23rd, was their first to Germany - Kiel, an important U-boat and naval base. Crews ran a gauntlet of enemy fighters and heavy and light flak, but the massive raid paralysed the city for days on end and was judged a great success. The reflection of fires on clouds could be seen for 100 miles by homebound crews.
