As rear gunner on a Lancaster, Ron had the loneliest and deadliest job of the war...
One night, 20,000 feet over Munich, disaster struck – sparking a survival story to take your breath away...
THE leaden skies spread from horizon to horizon. Ground crews have been working the snow ploughs all day to keep the runways clear. Now at last, the moment has come. Dusk is falling on Sunday, January 7, 1945, as seven young airmen drive to their huge and majestic Lancaster bomber, awaiting them on the runway.
Aged 19, Ron Needle is a down-to-earth apprentice butcher from Birmingham, and the ‘baby’ of the tight-knit crew. He holds the loneliest position, far from the others in the rear gun turret at the back end of the aircraft.
This is to be the crew’s 11th life-or-death sortie. Each one, for them, is like ‘going over the top’ for the troops in the trenches of the First World War.
They survived their tenth – a skirmish with anti-aircraft fire over Bordeaux 48 hours previously. But they do not take life for granted. Never far from their minds whenever they take off is the thought that death is the eighth passenger.
Their destination now is Munich – a long run: four hours from their Lincolnshire base, and another four back. This will be the last major aerial assault of the war on a city already pulverised by more than 70 raids.
‘It was a totally normal day,’ Ron tells me when we meet to talk about those momentous events. ‘We’d had breakfast. We had such good food as aircrew: bacon, real eggs – not the powdered variety – tea, toast and jam.
‘We really were well looked after. Then we’d just wait to see what the day would hold. It was just another day in Bomber Command.’
During the afternoon, as they awaited the start of their night-time mission, the friends would just hang around and chat, says Ron. ‘But you never really talked about what we were going to do,’ he adds. ‘Even if you felt it, you could never admit to being afraid.’
ONCE aboard the Lancaster, Ron turns left – all the others turn right – and clambers through the narrowing fuselage. Squeezing himself into the Perspex turret protruding from the tail, he will face outwards. It is the loneliest spot on earth. Perched on a padded leather seat, knees bunched, in an area about the size of an oil drum, Ron is exposed on all sides in his glassy bubble.
Gloved fingers never far from the triggers of his four 0.303-inch Browning machine guns, his job is to scan the night sky ceaselessly for signs of enemy activity.
The Lancaster isn’t built for comfort. Temperatures at 20,000ft can be as low as -40C. Ron’s heated flying suit keeps the worst of the chill at bay – if it works.
As the four Merlin engines burst into life, Ron can see around 20 well-wishers who have gathered to wave them off. ‘I always drew comfort from seeing them,’ he recalls. ‘They knew what we were facing. They’d seen so many eager young crews set out on an op and fail to return.’
The Lancaster lifts into the night sky, soaring with a lightness that belies its vast size. RAF Metheringham in Lincolnshire grows tiny beneath them as they set course to join the rest of the 50-mile-long bomber stream bound for the Bavarian capital.
Time passes both too slowly and too fast; suddenly it is only 45 minutes to target. Ron keeps his eyes even more strictly peeled for Messerschmitt 110s and Junkers 88s, whose cannon are more powerful and have a longer range than his machine guns.
To his relief, none come. If they had, the Lancaster’s wonderful and legendary manoeuvrability might just have kept them out of trouble. But Ron is relieved it doesn’t have to be put to the test.
The black skies are crowded and dangerous as 645 Lancaster bombers converge. Wireless operator Harry Stunell, then just 21, would later recall that ‘tension was at concert pitch. Young lads who had not long ago feared our strict headmasters were now flying into the Third Reich, which was presided over by one of the biggest bullies of all time’.
Munich is now ablaze.
Their Lancaster is approaching the target. Bomb aimer Bob Dunlop’s voice, striving to be calm, talking to pilot Jim Scott, crackles in Ron’s intercom. ‘Steady ... steady ... right a bit ... steady ... correct left a tad ... steady . . .’
A moment’s silence, then: ‘Bombs gone!’
The Lancaster’s load, a massive 4,000lb bomb escorted by 954 fourpound incendiaries, hurtles towards the beleaguered city.
And then disaster strikes. Out of the corner of his eye, Jim Scott catches sight of something: a huge dark shape heading straight for them through the flame-reddened sky. Another Lancaster.
Jim wrenches on the controls to take avoiding action, as does the pilot of other plane. But it is too late. The wings have clipped.
Engines screaming, Ron’s Lancaster plummets towards the burning city they have just bombed. ‘Prepare to abandon aircraft!’ shouts Jim.
Fighting down panic, Ron manages to get hold of his parachute – there is no room to wear it inside his turret, so he has to recover it from outside the sliding doors that enclose him – and clip it on to his chest as the Lancaster plunges out of the sky.
The speed of its near-vertical descent has created a gravitational force that prevents Ron from turning his gun turret 90 degrees to the fuselage and baling out backwards, reversing into the relative safety of the night sky.
But suddenly Jim regains some control. He rescinds the bale-out order. For the moment the Lancaster seems to be bearing up.
Navigator Ken Darke plots a revised course home, heading north and east for Juvincourt in France, about 20 miles north of Reims. Liberated by the Americans four
months earlier, it has emergency landing facilities.
And now, miraculously, they are in France – Allied territory.
As they descend, Ron hears the anxious voice of Jim asking if anyone can see the ground through the blizzard now pelting the aircraft’s shell. ‘I can, Skipper!’ shouts 19-year-old gunner Jack
Elson. ‘It’s right below. I can see some trees.’ ‘Can’t be!’ comes the taut reply. ‘Altimeter’s at 4,000 feet, safety height.’ Everyone’s stomach tightens.
Seconds later, they hit the treetops. The Lancaster bucks and jolts, ripping itself apart as it plummets through the forest.
Fuel bursts from its shattered tanks and the engines leap into flames as they career onwards and downwards, 30 tons of mortally wounded dragon cutting its way through the forest until the irresistible force of the trees brings it to a gradual halt.
Alone at the back of the aircraft, Ron Needle hears ‘no noise, feels no sensation of a crash’. He is thrown violently forward and passes out.
When he comes to, he is hanging upright from his parachute harness, hooked on to the fuselage. Without that piece of jutting metal, he would have been hurled into the inferno.
The flames ahead of him look as if they are losing their force. But they could draw fresh energy at any moment from a hitherto untouched puddle of fuel, the smell of which is everywhere, coupled with the acrid smell of burning Perspex and now, he realises, of burning flesh.
Ron presses his harness release button, drops to the floor and winces as he feels a stabbing pain in his lower leg. His chest burns when he breathes. But he has to get out.
It doesn’t look as if anyone else has. Ron can see Jack Elson’s legs, shattered and burned, hanging from his hammock seat, still suspended in his upper gun turret.
‘He was a terrible mess and I knew immediately he was dead,’ Ron tells me. ‘To see my dear friend hanging lifelessly like that was horrendous, but survival now became paramount.’
All he wants to do is lie down and sleep. Instead, he forces himself on, dragging his way to the main door on the starboard side.
With a superhuman effort he manipulates the lever that opens it – not the easiest of tasks at the best of times, as every Lancaster flyer knows. At last it swings open.
‘I simply fell out of the door and pain shot through my body,’ remembers Ron. ‘I was surrounded by towering trees. I crawled towards them through the freezing snow and found myself in the blackness of the forest.’
There is no other sign of life. As far as Ron knows, the crash has claimed all his other crewmates. Only much later will he discover that his mate Harry survived, too.
From where he lies, Ron can see the silhouette of the ruined Lancaster. ‘It was no longer a beautiful The Lancaster lay dying before my eyes… I thanked her for my survival machine; it was dying before my eyes, blackened and charred; it was a wreck in the forest,’ he says.
‘I felt a personal loss as I gazed at her, but I thanked her for my survival. If it hadn’t been for the strength and determination of this Lanc, I had no doubt I would not be alive. She saved my life.’
I spoke to Ron more than 73 years later as he relaxes in his sheltered accommodation in Birmingham.
He tells me he is the luckiest man alive, grateful for every day of his long life.
Ron is surrounded by memorabilia from his time in the RAF. Books about Bomber Command and his beloved Lancaster crowd the shelves. Many memories, though by now decades old, are still raw and distressing.
Later, Ron and I visit the RAF Museum in Hendon, North London, to see one of the few surviving Lancaster bombers.
I show him the Tornado I spent much of my RAF career flying; he gasps when I tell him it was capable of around 600mph.
Finally, there she is, in a cavernous hangar. S-Sugar towers above us, by far the biggest beast in Hendon’s jungle.
She is the world’s oldest surviving Lancaster bomber, having flown her first operation into the heart of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1942. Her final mission, in May 1945, was collecting liberated prisoners of war from Germany.
Bomber Command took the fight to the enemy when no one else could, and the statistics are as impressive as the aircraft herself.
Designed in the early 1940s by engineer Roy Chadwick to replace the less successful twinengined Avro Manchester, she is a British legend.
The four mighty Merlin engines mounted along the 102ft wingspan gave her a top speed of around 280mph and a range of 2,500 miles. With a 69ft-long fuselage, the aircraft was essentially built around a 33ft bomb bay designed to carry a 14,500lb payload.
At the height of the Second World War, over a million men and women were employed producing the aircraft and its 55,000 separate parts at hundreds of factories. More service personnel were involved in flying and maintaining the Lancaster than any other British aircraft in history.
Sir Arthur Harris, the no-nonsense and controversial chief of Bomber Command, called it his ‘shining sword’ and ‘the greatest single factor in winning the war against Germany’.
The average age of the seven-man crew was a mere 22. Of 7,377 Lancasters built during the war, over half were lost to enemy action and in training accidents. Ron Needle and S-Sugar are among the lucky survivors.
With 137 ops under her belt, S-Sugar is one of only 20 Lancasters to have completed more than 100 wartime missions.
A picture of falling bombs depicting her incredible tally is painted on the fuselage under the cockpit. Beneath the bombs is inscribed Germany’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering’s arrogant boast: ‘No enemy plane will fly over the Reich territory.’ He had been very wrong.
The statistics revealing the human cost of the Lancasters’ operations are breathtaking.
Of the 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command, just under half were killed flying missions.
In simple, brutal terms, if you flew in Bomber Command, you had less than a 50:50 chance of surviving the war.
The mental toll was largely unrecorded and unrecognised.
A group of visiting schoolchildren gathers beneath the Lancaster a few yards from where we are sitting. The five- and six-year-olds listen to one of the museum staff explaining what the aircraft did and who flew it. Ron listens quietly, too. When the guide points out