The Last Trip of V-Vic

This story has been written by Matt O'Leary, Bomb Aimer in the crew of P/O S.Johns DFC

The Air Crews at Waddington awakened on the 28th July 1944 to a typical English Summer morning. Naturally their thoughts turned to the prime question of the day - Would it be 'Peace' or 'War'? The all too obvious code denoting whether ops would be 'ON' or ops would be 'OFF' for the night.

Thoughts were mixed as to preference - 'Peace' would mean a night off and some much needed relaxation, perhaps a few beers, and perhaps some fun. On the other hand 'War' would mean another trip and one more to add to the tally of ops. needed to complete a tour.

The crew of V-Vic of 467 Squadron was certainly one of those crews with mixed feelings as they had already completed 26 trips together, since their first trip on 26th April 1944.They had just completed 4 trips in 6 days including trips on the 25th to St. Cyr and the 26th to Givors, a 9 hour sortie - so a break would be a welcome rest and much appreciated.

So, when the code showed 'War', the next question to occupy our thoughts was whether or not the crew of V-Vic would be 'ON' or 'OFF'. The crew waited for news from their skipper and it was no surprise to them that they were 'ON' again. The obvious question being the target. The only indication at this time was the amount of fuel to be loaded into the Lancaster. This amount at the very least indicated a long or short trip. In no time at all the news was spreading around. 'Full tanks' and a long trip for the night.

The target was to be Stuttgart, in the heartland of The Reich. This had proved to be a difficult target to find because of it's position amongst the hills, but now with the improved navigational aids and the Path Finder technique of accurate marking, accurate bombing should now be achievable.

The briefing was pretty much the same as usual except for one fact. Usually we climbed to bombing height as soon as possible and normally reached 20000 ft. before the French coast. However the met. boys reported 10/10ths cloud from 10 to 14 thousand feet over most of Europe so the top brass decided to use the cloud as cover for the raid and remain within it's folds until 100 miles from the target and then climb to bombing height.

To this point the sortie had been quiet and peaceful without any obvious signs of trouble but the picture changed as soon as we started climbing out and above the clouds. Night fighters were very active as evidenced by the air battles going on all around and the streams of tracer rounds that were clearly visible. The thick cloud cover negated the use of ground based search lights so there were not any flak bursts to contend with. Clearly the fighters were using 'Visual Sighting' by silhouetting the bombers against the cloud cover below.

The results were obvious - Many aircraft going down and experience would tell us that the majority, if not all, would be the bombers. The official figures show that for this target, 469 aircraft were dispatched and 39 failed to return. 5 of these from Waddington. This result shows that 273 crew members would be missing and statistically 142 would be KIA.

The crew of V-Vic reached the target without incident, bombed and had an equally quiet trip homeward until the peace and silence was shattered by the navigator who reported "We are dead on track, Skipper. We will be over the French coast in half a minute".

The next second V-Vic was hit by flak. The port outer on fire, the engine was feathered but to no avail - the fire continued and the wing started breaking up - the aircraft was out of control - the skipper wrestling with the plane ordered 'Ditching'. This had all happened so fast, enough time was not available to for the crew to reach the ditching positions before we hit the water. Miraculously six of the seven crew survived.          SKILL OR LUCK 

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