Presentation Date: May 21, 2001
Robert F. Bob Reynolds
Flight Lieutenant, Aircraft Commander 101 Squadron, RAF WW II Flew Lancaster Bombers, Night Ops. Flight Lieutenant, "skipper" of British Lancaster, Aircraft Commander 101 Squadron, RAF WW II, Night Ops.
Bob Reynolds feels he was lucky he wasn't brought into the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Serving instead in the Home Guard, he watched from the ground as an air cadet during the summer of 1940. Bob says there were vapor trails high in the sky, he could see Hurricanes chasing Luftwaffe aircraft, and could hear the faint rattle of machines guns. Then we'd run like crazy for the air raid shelters when the German bombers came into view.
Growing up in Wembley, a suburb of northwest London, Bob had childhood dreams of flying an airplane, one with lots and lots of engines.
Like Walter Mitty, I suppose, I had feelings of wanting to control things and being surrounded by buttons and levers and dials and instruments and all kinds of stuff like that.
Four years later, before he learned to drive an automobile, Bob would be flying the RAF "s high performance heavy bomber, the Avro Lancaster.
On September 3rd, 1939 war was declared between Britain and Germany. That very Sunday Bob decided to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. The next day he went down to the RAF office to remind them he was available. Bob recalls, All we wanted to do was to beat the hell out of Hitler.
While Bob served as an air cadet, his brother was in the Army, assigned to a searchlight battalion near Norwich. Finally, Bob got his opportunity to start flight training and shortly thereafter he soloing in a Tiger Moth, he got a three day pass. He met his brother on the train and the two arrived home just in time for an air raid. The Blitz - nighttime bombing of Britain - had begun.
My parents were delighted to see us, surprised to see us. My mother was putting on her raincoat. She had her steel helmet, her tin hat as she called it. And she had an arm band. She was helping with First Aid. My father was also putting on his raincoat, wearing his steel helmet. He was carrying an American Springfield rifle. His job was to shoot down as many invading German paratroopers as he could with his ration of two clips of five rounds. My parents, civilians, were going out to defend England. It was an image Bob said he'd never forget.
Reynolds also remembers the bombers' unsynchronized engines, apparently an intentional plan to fool the British listening systems. I looked up at the moon and I saw two Heinkel 111s cross the face of the moon... I'll never forget the indignation and the anger I felt, as I saw these aircraft flying over our house.
Winston Churchill had seen four-engined bombers as the only real way to take the war to Germany. The Luftwaffe had attacked Britain with twin engined bombers, each carrying 2000 pounds of bombs. Design of a new British strategic bomber had to come quickly, and it did. By broadening the wingspan and increasing the two engines to four, the Avro Manchester bomber became the Lancaster. The British then had a four-engined bomber capable of hauling a 22-thousand pound payload to Germany. Now, training was needed for thousands of crewmen.
Reynolds was sent by troop ship to Canada to finish his pilot training, and then he became a flying instructor. He returned to England in 1944, assigned to a Bomber Command Operational Training Unit with Vickers Wellington bombers. Reynolds first task was to pick his crew of five. Starting with his choice of a bomb aimer, he had the team progressively select the navigator, wireless operator, and rear gunner. The soon-to-come Lancaster crews were augmented with an engineer and a mid-upper turret gunner.
As part of their training, pilots were blind-folded and told to handle the bomber's controls. The crew also shared responsibility and training for flying the airplane, in the event of an emergency that might render Reynolds unable to fly. Reynolds had them all take turns at the controls and at using the radio for barometric pressure readings necessary for an instruments-only landing at English bases.
The first day of training in the smaller Wellington lasted about three hours, followed by lunch and word to be back at dispersal for an afternoon of flying. Bob says the instructor showed up in a jeep, without any flying gear and said, "Gentleman, Flying Officer Reynolds is now going to take you for a little ride. He's going to take you on four takeoffs and four landings.' Then he turned to me and said, "Congratulations, skipper. Go do four circuits and bumps.' From that moment on, all of my crew called me skipper, Bob relates.
That night, the crew went down to the local pub to celebrate. Reynolds got a phone call from the pub owner who said You better get down here and get your crew.
Bob rode his motorbike and found them more than a bit tipsy. He took them out to his motorbike and had the bomb aimer hold onto the pinion, with the navigator, wireless operator and rear gunner holding the waist of the man in front of each of them. In that way, Reynolds towed them back to base behind his motorbike, a ritual that was repeated many times later.
Practice included cross-country flying, night landings and takeoffs, night cross-counties and the use of oxygen. Bob says the need for oxygen above 10,000 feet was dramatically demonstrated to the crew in a pressure chamber.
I was handed a deck of cards and was told to count them ... 1,2,3,4... while I was dealing. The man in charge of the pressurized room was turning my oxygen off, and I didn't know it. I lost coordination between my hands and my brain. And so, I was still handing out cards, but instead of going...16, 17... I missed several cards.
The crew also practiced abandoning the bomber and crash landings. Reynolds says the former drill was exceptionally important because if the bomber' inboard fuel tanks were hit, you had eleven seconds to get out of the aircraft. Bob says they practiced until they could click into their parachutes and get out of the aircraft within 7-1/2 seconds.
The first operation for Reynold's crew was a flight over the Friesian Islands off Holland, to drop aluminum strips called chaff or window. These drops reflected radar waves, to create the appearance on German radar screens of many airplanes.
It was a moonlit night and the Lancasters were flying at about 17,000 feet over 8/10 cloud cover at 15,000 feet. Reynolds says To German aircraft above us we would be like insects crawling over a white carpets. We'd been told "if you see any enemy aircraft, if you see any enemy action, return to base at once."
Suddenly, Reynolds caught a glimpse overhead of the bulbous form of a Focke Wulf 190. He shoved the control column forward, plunging the nose of the Lancaster down into the relative safety of clouds, and that's where they flew to return to base.
After this mission, Bob and his crew converted to the Lancaster. In this famous bomber, only the pilot and engineer sat on the flight deck, under the canopy - - there was no co-pilot. The rear gunner aimed his four .303 guns through what was called a clear vision panel. This was really a misnomer, as there was no panel of plastic or glass, just cold, icy air.
The 101st Squadron, to which Reynolds and his crew were transferred, was a Special Services Squadron, and one requirement for every crewman to speak a second language.
SR*L was the code for Reynolds' Lancaster. Phonetically it was known as Sugar, Rover, Love. (SR was code for the 101st Squadron, L for the individual plane.)
Reynolds says the Lancaster was highly responsive, and with its four Merlins, had plenty of reserve power. Bob compares it to flying a four-engined Spitfire. The bomber had a castering tail wheel which didn't lock, the tail swinging in the wind making it a challenge to take offs.
As I opened the throttles, If we swung to the right, then I would open up the right hand engine, to bring the airplane back straight on the runway. If we swung to the left, I'd open up the left engine... you were sort of jiggling the controls until we had enough speed that the rudders could take over, and we could steer the aircraft with the rudders.
On operations, Bob says they took off at dusk to cross over the North Sea. It was important to take off while it was light enough to see the other bombers in the squadron. Immediately over the sea, gunners tested their machine guns, and didn't want to hit a friendly airplane. As darkness fell, the black underside of Lancaster against the dark sky made them nearly invisible to the naked eye.
We all had our own things that made us nervous. Collision was my number one. Number two was searchlights. Other pilots were nervous of fighters, other were nervious of anti-aircraft.
Collision was an extraordinary danger for streams of bombers, typically fifty miles long and five miles wide. The method Bomber Command used to coordinate as many as 1000 bombers in a stream over each target was Time over Target, or TOT, for short. Reynolds says the whole idea was to go over the target to overwhelm the anti-aircraft guns down below. A TOT would read as two minutes before midnight, two past midnight, six minutes past midnight.
Radar was used on board Lancaster's (H2S) to find the target. Radar would also show the bomber stream as a mostly static series of blips in column, since the bombers were moving in the same direction at the same speed. Enemy fighters would sometimes appear as blips crossing the bomber stream. But radar was essential to hitting targets, as heavy cloud cover was a regular condition over German cities.
Pathfinder aircraft flew ahead of the bomber stream, with the task of identifying the target. They would drop different colored incendiaries, each burning for about 20 minutes, to give the bomb aimers a reference point for their payloads.
As the bombing campaign developed, Bomber Command's tactics evolved. It was realized that German cities would be levelled through the phenomenon of the firestorm - - the sum of thousands of explosions and fires would be searing winds of destruction.
One of Reynolds' more memorable experiences occured as he and his crew were returning at daybreak from a mission. Reynolds recalls looking down from the Lancaster cockpit at the waves breaking on the English coast, and noticing a green Very cartridge being fired, the signal for aircraft to takeoff.
I saw movement in the barely faint earth below. It was a B-17 taking off, and it was followed by yet another. And a whole stream took off and began to circle and climb. We were down at about 7000 feet, and I'd given permission to my crew to take off their oxygen masks, and we were sort of relaxing. I put the aircraft into a rate one turn to the left so we could see this happening.
As the sky lightened, We saw an incredible sight, a B-17 in polished aluminum, no camouflage. It was firing colors - - red, green, red - - so his formation would know to formate on him. Then we saw a B-24 with zebra stripes, and he was firing colors - - yellow, red, yellow - - and his group was formating onto him. Yet another B-24 was painted in polka dots, doing the same thing... It was a majestic, wonderful sight. Slowly they climbed up and they climbed up above us, in formation andflying across the North Sea. The majesty, the sheer beauty of this thing as the sun came up, beginning to glint on the fuselages. It was a sight that's etched like a painting in the back of my mind.
Fifty-eight years later - - Bob has learned new truths about the strategic war against Germany. Studies of tactics and equipment which made the campaign possible are now public and, he says they are explicit about the contribution of the Lancaster.
It was the most effective bomber of World War, carrying up to 22-thousand pounds of bombs. It's Merlin engines were dependable, rarely malfunctioning (Reynolds says his Lancaster never lost an engine), and they were very fuel efficient for their power delivery.
(Sidebar)
A Laugh On the Way OverBob Reynolds recalled one moment of humor on a Lancaster night operation :
When we crossed the North Sea, I used to give my crew a chance to chat on the intercom. this is normally not permitted. But before we crossed to the enemy coast, I wanted to give them a chance to get things off their minds, and to tell stories. My two gunners were very good friends. The rear gunner was a Scotsman with a brogue Scottish accent and... a marvelous sense of humor. He was a jokester. My mid upper gunner was an Englishman, a Yorksman.
We called each other by our crew position names - - skipper to crew, navigator to bomb aimer, rear gunner to mid-upper gunner... so each of the crew knew who was talking to who.
I heard on the intercom, Rear gunner to mid-upper gunner. How do you make an Englishman laugh in church on a Sunday?
Mid-upper gunner... I don't know. How do you make an Englishman laugh in church on a Sunday? Rear gunner to mid-upper... Tell him a funny story on Thursday.