Flight Lieutenant Sydney Grimes
Gunner and wireless operator who flew on the raid that sank ‘the Beast’, the battleship Tirpitz
FLIGHT LIEUTENANT SYDNEY GRIMES, who has died aged 100, flew with 617 Squadron on the raid that finally sank the German battleship Tirpitz.
His squadron, together with IX Squadron, made three raids on “the Beast”, as Winston Churchill described the battleship. Grimes flew as a wireless operator on the last two raids.
With his New Zealand pilot, Flight Lieutenant Barney Gumbley DFM, Grimes joined 617 Squadron at the end of September 1944. Their first operation, on October 29, was to attack Tirpitz, which was moored in a fjord near Tromsø in northern Norway.
At the extreme range of the Lancaster – and carrying the Barnes Wallis 12,000lb “Tallboy” bomb – the bombers mounted the raid from airfields in the north of Scotland.
Thirty-seven Lancasters took off and arrived over the battleship as clouds rolled in to obscure it. Bombs were dropped on the estimated position, but no hits were registered. On November 12, Allied bombers mounted another raid. This time the weather was clear: two direct hits and several near-misses resulted in the Tirpitz
capsizing with great loss of life.
Over the next few weeks, Grimes attacked dams in south Germany and E-boat pens in the Netherlands using Tallboys. His crew bombed the synthetic oil plant at Pölitz (now Police in Poland), and on December 31 they attacked German cruisers in Oslofjord.
During an attack on U-boat pens near Rotterdam, his Lancaster was damaged by flak. After this he was involved in a series of attacks against key railway viaducts using Tallboy bombs. On March 14 a key viaduct at Bielefeld was finally destroyed.
On March 21 Grimes’s crew were allocated a Lancaster BI (Special) aircraft. This carried a crew of five and Grimes was stood down. His crew took off to attack a railway bridge near Bremen.
Waiting for his friends back at Woodhall Spa, Sydney Grimes watched the other Lancasters return from the raid, and his anxiety turned to dread as the minutes, lengthening into hours, dragged by with no sign of them. The agonising suspense finally ended when one of the returning crewmen broke the news to him. His crew had perished.
“These were my friends, who I’d fought alongside and been through so much with them,” Grimes said. “If I’d had my way, I’d have been on that aircraft too.”
The son of a Thames bargeman, Sydney Victor Grimes was born at Great Wakering near Southend-on-sea on May 6 1922.
On the outbreak of war he was working for EK Cole (EKCO Radio) and in 1940 he volunteered for the RAF. After training as a wireless operator/ air gunner and converting to the Lancaster, he joined 106 Squadron at Syerston, near Newark.
His arrival in April 1943 coincided with the Battle of the Ruhr. On the 4th he flew his first operation when he attacked the port of Kiel; a week later the target was Frankfurt.
On April 13 Grimes attacked the docks at La Spezia in Italy, a sortie lasting longer than 10 hours. Over the next few nights he went on three more long-range operations, to Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland), the Czech city Pilsen, and then back to La Spezia.
On the return from Stettin, his Lancaster was badly damaged by flak. The ground crew counted more than 100 holes in the aircraft when they got back, and it had to be written off.
Duisburg was the target on May 12, and over the next three months Grimes attacked targets in Germany, mostly in the Ruhr. By this stage the Pathfinder Force had become well established and the raids were increasingly accurate, but losses were heavy.
On July 24, Bomber Command turned its attention to Germany’s second city and biggest port, Hamburg. Grimes and his crew were among the 791 aircraft that attacked the city. Three nights later the city was the target again, a devastating raid that caused a firestorm. Grimes returned for the third time on July 29.
His final operation was on August 23, when Berlin was the target. This proved to be Bomber Command’s greatest loss of aircraft in one night so far in the war, but Grimes and his crew returned safely.
In a post-war interview he commented: “My crew was only the second one to finish a tour whilst I was there.” He was Mentioned in Despatches.
After the loss of his crew on 617 Squadron Grimes left the squadron, having completed 41 operations. He joined IX Squadron briefly before finishing his flying career in September 1945 after three months with 50 Squadron.
He served with the RAF in Germany before being released in the summer of 1946. He returned to work at EKCO and became an accountant, rising to finance director.
In later life he reflected on his wartime service: “I was religious before the war, but my faith diminished when I saw the effects of the bombing. After the war, in late 1945, I was an adjutant based near Hamburg and I was shocked by the sight of the city. Whole areas were a wasteland – no bricks, no buildings, nothing, just the entrances to cellars; the houses didn’t exist, but people still lived in their cellars.
“That really affected me. I understood what we had done in Bomber Command. I still thought it was necessary and the only way to defeat the Nazis, but I now saw war in its entirety and how those on the receiving end were affected. I had always understood the bomber, but now I was understanding the bombed. Those sights still live in my memory.”
To celebrate his 100th birthday, members of the current 617 Squadron visited him in his care home. “I felt honoured,” Grimes commented. “It definitely made it extra special.”
Sydney Grimes married his childhood sweetheart Iris in 1944; she died in 2019. They had a son and two daughters.