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Flt Lt Stephen Nolan DFC was my Grandfather. He was a career soldier in the Coldstream Guards. When war was declared he travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force. Following the evacuation from Dunkirk he felt he wanted to ‘have a crack’ back at the enemy so he transferred into the RAF Volunteer Reserve and learned to fly in the USA under the Empire Air Training Plan.

After qualifying he served as a flying instructor on the Bristol Blenheim aircraft, later converting to the DeHavilland Mosquito and going on ‘ops’ with 142 Squadron, the ‘Light Night Striking Force’ based at Grandsden Lodge, near Cambridge, part of the elite 8 Group Pathfinder Force. By May 1945 he had completed 39 operational sorties including bombing Berlin twice in 24 hours! The following account was written by him in the late nineteen eighties.

John Nolan, November 2003

My experience was in Mosquitos which carried only a pilot and navigator/bomb aimer. ‘Heavies’ had a crew of eight but generally the manner of briefing them was basically the same.

The procedure for putting on a raid was somewhat as follows:

Notification would come from Bomber Command to the groups of such matters as the target, the time of the raid, the number of aircraft taking part, the bomb load and type of bombs to be used and the route/s to the target. This information would be passed by each group to its Squadrons accordingly.

Although crews would know they were ‘on ops’ they would not know the target until briefing which would take place in the afternoon. At the briefing, attended by all the crews, they would be given the target, the bomb load, which would vary according to the distance they had to go and the route they had to take. Other matters covered would be the weather they could expect, the sort of opposition they might meet from fighters and anti aircraft fire and details of any other operations that may be going on that night.

The pilots would then leave and the navigators would go into more detail over the route to the target. The Met Officer would give approximate wind speeds and directions and details of likely clouds to be encountered. The navigators would then make out their flight plans. In the ‘Heavy’ squadrons the specialists such as the radio operators and the gunners would have their briefings.

After briefing, no-one who had knowledge of the target could leave the station or make a telephone call to the outside.

While this was going on the ground crews would have been loading up the aircraft with the required bomb load. Each aircraft would have had an air test by the pilot flying it that night.

At the takeoff time the crews, after removing from their pockets anything that could inform the enemy of their squadron or station would don their parachutes, enter their aircraft and start up and test the engines. On a signal from the control tower they would take off.

For a fast, unarmed bomber like the Mosquito, the trip to the target could be rather boring. There was nothing to see, of course, and although a lookout had to be kept there was little to fear from night fighters. The situation for the ‘Heavies’ was very different. They were comparatively slow, were easily tracked by enemy radar, both ground based and in the fighter and had blind spots in which they could not see where an attack was coming from.

The marker aircraft would reach the target slightly before the main force and would drop their flares. The main force would then bomb as though they were trying to hit the flares and theoretically the bombs would go on to hit the required target.

There would be some opposition over the target from anti aircraft guns, but it is surprising how many shells must be fired off to get even one near a moving ‘plane. Anti aircraft guns did not worry us much. In actual fact we were much more frightened of hitting another ‘plane than we were of being shot down.

Most crews would hang around for a while over the target before making for base, particularly if the ‘Heavies’ were also raiding in the vicinity.

On landing back at base the crews would be given a cup of tea in which would be a tot of rum and would then go before an intelligence officer for debriefing. The crew would confirm that they reached the target, duly dropped their bombs and would report anything unusual seen on the journey out, over the target and on the way home. That done they would make their way to the mess room for their ‘ops’ meal of egg and chips with sometimes a piece of steak thrown in and then to bed.

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