Wartime bomber pilot who, despite appalling conditions, distinguished himself during the siege of Malta
When Peter Rothwell left Malta on June 22, 1942, after six months, he was suffering from boils and was also coming down with a bout of sandfly fever. His Wellington bomber needed a thorough overhaul, which was why he was taking it to Cairo. After two years under siege, RAF groundcrew on the island were in no position to carry out the repair work themselves.
On board were a number of fighter pilots and other passengers, who were, like Rothwell, tour expired. All of them were only too glad to leave the island that had become the most bombed place on earth. Taking off from Luqa, Rothwell headed south-east across the Mediterranean, but after an hour and a half, his starboard engine caught fire.
Although he immediately activated the fire extinguisher, this was only briefly successful and the engine soon reignited. They were now 200 miles out at sea. Rothwell ordered the passengers to jettison all baggage and then turned back towards Malta. It would have been exhausting work for a man in health, but was doubly so for a man weak from malnutrition and fever. The torque from the working engine was pulling the aircraft to one side, and only by applying constant hard rudder on the other could Rothwell keep it flying. Throughout that long return flight, with the Wellington constantly losing height, it seemed unlikely that they would make it. Yet, some two and a half hours later, with the starboard engine still on fire, Rothwell managed to safely touch down once more at Luqa, dodging the bomb craters and unexploded bombs. It was an extraordinary demonstration of skill and resilience.
Peter Rothwell was born in Bristol in 1920, the eldest of seven children. The son of a country vicar who had served at Gallipoli, he was educated at St John’s, Leatherhead. After his father’s early death he had to leave school and took a job with Imperial Tobacco.
In 1938 he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve. After training he joined 221 Squadron in Coastal Command, flying patrols over the North Atlantic from Limavady, Northern Ireland. On one occasion he found himself low on fuel in thick fog off the North Coast of Scotland. Desperately searching for somewhere to land, he at last spotted the Caithness coastline and touched down in the grounds of a large castle. With his undercarriage collapsing, he skidded to a halt under the castle walls, with all the crew unhurt. Unknown to him, however, he just landed at the home of the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair. “The day we called in for tea at the Air Minister’s castle!” Rothwell noted in his diary for May 28, 1941.
After several months flying from Iceland, Rothwell volunteered to join the Special Duties Flight of Wellingtons on Malta, believing the Mediterranean would make a welcome change. He was sorely mistaken. Touching down at Luqa in the middle of a raid after a seven-hour flight from Gibraltar, he was greeted by his CO, Tony Spooner, who was covered in boils and suffering from a virulent form of dysentery known as Malta Dog. Their billet was a former leper asylum with no glass left in the windows, and far from being warm and balmy, the island was suffering one of the coldest winters on record. The pilots drank gin and hot water to keep themselves warm.
Rothwell arrived early in 1942 as the Axis was intensifying it assault on the island. Within a fortnight, their billets had been bombed out and they moved to the seaplane base at Kalafrana, four miles from Luqa. Initially, they had a small car to take them there and back but by March 1942, with fuel so short, they had to abandon it and walk there and back instead, often in the dark after night-time operations.
On only his second sortie from the island, Rothwell led Fleet Air Arm squadrons to an Axis convoy of one merchantman and one tanker, both of which were both sunk. A month later Spooner was sent home ill and Rothwell took over command. The Special Duties Flight had by this time become Malta’s only strike force as all other bomber squadrons had been forced from the island. On March 27, 29 and 31 they conducted a series of attacks against Axis airfields, including a successful raid on Catania.
Conditions on the island were worsening, however. On April 7 the sea-plane base was bombed, although the pilots continued to use the mess, albeit with one end open to the elements. Their billets were now caves where they were safe from the bombs but easy prey for sand bugs. Their Wellingtons were increasingly battered, the airfield was a wreck, and pilots were expected to help refuel their aircraft by hand. Even air tests were dangerous exercise because of the large number of marauding enemy fighters.
Rothwell was finally evacuated back to the UK. After a spell instructing, he was posted to a meteorological squadron flying Halifaxes. With the war over, he left the RAF as a squadron leader with 158 operational sorties to his credit.
Tragedy followed when he lost his eldest son, and his first wife, Eileen, died in 1959. But despite being left with five children to raise, he ran a successful boat-building business in Hampshire. In later life he was also an active member of the George Cross Island Association and was instrumental in maintaining the annual April pilgrimage of Malta veterans to the island.
His second wife, Margaret, died in 2002. He is survived by his three sons and two daughters.
Squadron Leader Peter Rothwell, wartime bomber pilot, was born on October 20, 1920. He died on December 20, 2010, aged 90
Bomber pilot who flew 48 sorties in Wellingtons and was mentioned in dispatches for his services while a prisoner of war
Joining the RAF from school in 1935, Wilfred Harrison was posted to Bomber Command the following year and was already a seasoned pilot when war broke out in September 1939. As the captain of a Wellington bomber in 149 Squadron with the rank of sergeant he was ready to “go to war” on day one of the conflict, and on September 5 he and his crew attacked German warships at Brunsbüttel, on the North Sea entrance to the Kiel Canal.
Like most of the early RAF raids of this “Phoney War” period, carried out in bad weather against formidable flak and fighter defences with inadequate navigational aids, such sorties were costly to the attackers and largely ineffective. The Air Staff had at this stage of the war a quite unrealistic assessment of the British bomber’s ability to defend itself against fighter attacks. Harrison and his crew were lucky to survive this sortie and most of those that followed it.
Until the German Blitzkrieg the following May which turned the war in to a thing of urgent reality for Britain, the RAF was also constrained by a Chamberlain Government edict that forbade attacks on Germany itself; ships in harbours might be attacked, but not even then if collateral damage to dockside installations might cause loss of life.
In these circumstances the RAF operated with one hand tied behind its back. Not until Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 was the RAF given the task of dropping a bomb on Germany.
Harrison was in hospital in December 1939 and so did not take part in the disastrous attack of the 18th of that month in which 24 Wellingtons of 149, 9 and 3 Squadrons lost more than half their number in an “armed reconnaissance” over German shipping in the Schillig Roads in which, however, they were not allowed to drop their bombs since all enemy vessels were in harbour, where the fall of bombs might have caused civilian casualties.
By the time he returned to operations in May 1940 the tempo had changed, and he and his crew were repeatedly airborne with No 149 on sortie after sortie against Germany troops and supply lines, as part of the RAF’s attempt to stem the onrush of the Wehrmacht as it overran Holland, Belgium and France, driving the British Expeditionary Force and the French armies before it. Harrison’s log for the desperate weeks of May and June 1940 graphically records day after day of sorties against German-held airfields, bridges and convoys, all in the face of heavy flak and constant attacks by fighters.
With the capitulation of France in mid-June the squadron’s efforts turned to attacks on docks at Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Emden and Kiel, as well as factories in the Ruhr and shipping off the Dutch coast, gradually extending to deeper penetration of the Third Reich — Mannheim, Frankfurt and Berlin itself.
After a period with an operational training unit from September 1940, Harrison was back on operations in April 1941. On June 12 that year he was flying his 48th sortie, a low-level attack on Düsseldorf, when his starboard engine caught fire on the return trip and he was compelled to execute a belly landing in a field in the Netherlands. Thanks to his skill, all his crew survived to become prisoners of war.
Harrison ended up in Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia where over the next few years he took a prominent part in the planning and organisation of breakout attempts, including the Great Escape of March 1944 with its tragic consequences: fifty of the escapers were shot on Hitler’s orders after being recaptured.
In the bitter winter months of early 1945 as the Stalag Luft III PoWs were marched westwards to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Russian armies, Harrison and a number of colleagues managed to escape into the undergrowth and hid until the approach of Allied forces. After demobilisation as a warrant officer he was in 1947 awarded a Mention in Dispatches in recognition of his valuable services while a prisoner of war.
After the war Harrison became a civil airline pilot flying most of the world’s commercial routes and retraining as airliners progressed from piston engines through turboprops to turbojets. He retired from the BOAC as a senior captain in 1967 having flown more than 15,000 hours in civil aviation.
He is survived by his second wife, Betty, and by the son of his first wife, Peggy.
Captain Wilfred Harrison, wartime bomber pilot and postwar airline captain, was born on June 20, 1917. He died on October 30, 2010, aged 93
