Bombs away: more accurately, more destructive than ever

Along the way Rowland White adds many exciting extras to his story of one of the most charismatic, successful and admired aeroplanes ever. As he says, in focusing on the finest aircraft Britain produced during the war, he was also gifted a far richer tale of spies, saboteurs, grand strategy and the role of air power in the desperate fight against Nazism.

And because that crucial mission targeted the Danish capital to prevent a German last stand that might prolong the war by many months, much of the book also centres on Denmark, how the country first meekly succumbed to invasion in April 1940 then slowly fought back to regain its pride, culminating in the precision attack on the Gestapo HQ in March 1945.

The Danish establishment allowed their country to become a German “model protectorate” that was offered a veneer of independence through self-governance, but this came at a cost to the country’s international standing. Denmark provided up to 15 percent of Germany’s food needs, for instance. The invaders liked its tasty meat and dairy products.

Denmark was controlled with a light touch, and the compliant government and King Christian X functioned fairly normally until August 1943, when Germany, facing rising violence and sabotage, switched to direct military occupation, until the Allied victory in May 1945.

Some of author and historian White’s side events are well-known, such as the 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, and many new, but first must come the main object, the ‘Mossie” that won the hearts of the British public. This begins with Geoffrey de Havilland, born in Buckinghamshire, UK, on July 27, 1882, and who as a child was infatuated by hot-air balloons and Jules Verne’s aerial adventuire “The Clipper of the Clouds”.

In 1908 the 26-year-old pushed aside ambitions to build cars and motorcycles in favour of an overwhelming desire to give his life to airplanes, even though he had never actually seen one fly. Two years later, with a £1000 legacy from his grandfather,  he took to the sky in his second design, becoming one of the last self-taught pilots in the UK. He joined the Army Balloon Factory at Farnborough in 1911 as their first fixed-wing specialist and test pilot, then made rapid progress through Britain’s burgeoning aviation industry.

Moving on to the Aircraft Manufacturing Company Limited (Airco) as their chief designer, de Havilland’s Dh.4 and DH.9 made a substantial and successful contribution to the First World War. With the demise of Airco, he set up the De Havilland Aircraft Company at Stag Lane near London in September 1920, beginning a long line of DH commercial and sport aircraft.

Fast forward to 1936, with another world war looming and the RAF in urgent need of rearmament he had a plan for a streamlined, lightweight wooden bomber with a crew of only two and unemcumbered by gun turrets, using high speed alone to keep out of trouble.

The head of Bomber Command offered stiff resistance to the idea but through spring and summer 1940 a protoype took shape in a small hanger behind Salisbury Hall, an elegant red-brick mansion supposedly haunted by the 17th-century actress Nell Gwyn, mistress of King Charles II, in the Hertfordshire village of London Colney.

White writes that the sleek plywood-framed Mosquito could be turned to anything and excelled at everything, offering multi-purpose potential to play a unique role of bomber, U-boat hunter, night fighter, strafer, pathfinder, interceptor or reconnaissance. Bullets and shrapnel didn’t tear its lightweight plywood structure in the way they would metal. Its robustness kept some crews alive as they struggled to reach home from Europe in battle-damaged aircraft.

The public’s love for the Mosquito grew mostly from a series of remarkable low-level pinpoint bombing missions. These included attacks on the Oslo Gestapo headquarters in 1942, the raid on the Burmeister & Wain diesel engine factory in Copenhagen in 1943, and the gleeful tarfgeting of the Haus des Rundfunks HQ of the German state broadcasting company in Berlin in 1943, to wreck a speech by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring on a day of celebrations to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to Fürher.

When nearly 600 British Lancasters, Stirlings and Halifaxes bombed the Peenemünde rocket research site on the German Baltic coast in 1943, where the Nazis were building the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, the V-2, Mosquitos made a diversionary raid on Berlin.

Another daring raid was on Amiens prison in occupied France in 1944. At Aarhus, Denmark, in 1944, 25 Mosquitoes blasted the Gestapo headquarters at the University of Aarhus.

Such deeds earned it the name “The Wooden Wonder”, and the versatility of the aerodynamic and fast aircraft, powered by two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines with three-bladed propellors, also proved its use for parachuting Allied agents into Denmark. Many of these agents and resistance fighters enter the story, such as the aristocratic and charismatic Monica Wichfeld, who was appalled by her country’s humiliation.

And fliers. Wing Commander Hughie Edwards was awarded the Victoria Cross for leading a formation of slow and vulnerable Blenheims on the heavily defended German port of Bremen in 1941, losing a third of his crews. In one of his first missions as a Mosquito squadron boss  he had been able to shake off an attack by a dozen German fighters and make it back across the Channel.

Wing Commander Basil Embry nursed a damaged Bristol Blenheim IV home 15 times, then after being shot down in May 1940 he spent two months on the run in France before making a triumphant return to England. His adventures became the stuff of legend and he was something of a celebrity, his close shaves enthralling the King and Queen for 45 minutes when he met them at Buckingham Palace, during which time they declined a request to retreat to their shelter during an air raid. Embry earned three Distinguished Service Orders.

An absorbing side story is the planned round-up of Denmark’s more than 7000 Jews. They  were hidden in the homes of fellow Danes, admitted to hospital with fictitious diseases and spirited around the country by ambulance. In a remarkable exodus organised by medical practitioners, students,  journalists, trawlermen and resistance fighters, operating out of a bookshop near the Copenhagen docks, more than 7000 men, women and children escaped across the narrow Øresund strait to neutral Sweden. Only 284 were found by the Germans.

And then there is “Its Most Extraordinary Mission”, Operation Carthage on March 21, 1945. Once over Copenhagen the actual bombing only occupied minutes, and White tells it in such full detail it is like real time. The Resistance had requested a raid on the Shellhus, used as Gestapo HQ in the city centre, to destroy Nazi records and severely disrupt their operations.

Readers may re-evaluate some thoughts after reading “Mosquito”. White doesn’t use the term “human shields” but the Gestapo had put Danish prisoners in the attic of the Shellhus. The bombing had to go ahead anyway. Nor do we read of “collateral damage”, or “friendly fire”. But Operation Carthage went very right and very wrong. Some bombers accidentally targeted a school and more than 120 people were killed in total, 86 of them Danish children.

When RAF crews were briefed on a target they might be told it had to be destroyed “at all costs”. That meant some of you won’t be coming home. Horror, all round.