Beating the Odds: Superstition and Human Agency in RAF Bomber Command,1942–1945

The role of superstitious thoughts and actions within Royal Air Force heavy bomber crews during the Second World War, despite a great deal of extant evidence, has largely been ignored by scholars. ¹ One or two cultural historians, to be sure, have bucked the trend. ² Yet among those few who have acknowledged the extent to which thousands of young men sought to improve their chances of survival through the carrying aboard aircraft of charms, mascots, and talismans, as well as by performing various rituals, there has been a tendency to judge this sort of behaviour as foolishly retrograde. David Stafford-Clark, for instance, a pioneer in studying psychological disorders among flying personnel, wrote shortly after the war that the ‘wide acceptance of a primitive system of magical ideas by men whose duties made them familiar with some of the most highly developed scientific apparatus at that time in use’ was the antithesis of ‘progress’. ³ Much more recently Mark Connelly, in an insightful study of Bomber Command and public opinion, has commented that in ‘this modern scientific war men still clung to animal-like rituals to appease the gods of battle’. ⁴ This is unfortunate since, as this article aims to demonstrate, not all aircrew behaviour of this kind was entirely irrational in nature, while belief in ‘lucky’ objects and actions gave many aircrew a vital sense of agency at a time when their fate in the skies over Germany could appear highly arbitrary.

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According to Freeman Dyson, then a junior civilian member of the Operational Research Section at Bomber Command, the ‘whole weight of Air Force tradition and authority was designed to discourage the individual airman from figuring the odds’ against survival. ‘Stringent precautions were taken’, he later wrote, ‘to ensure that any of our Command headquarters documents that discussed survival rates should not reach the squadrons’. ⁵ However, this did not prevent many aircrew from calculating their slim chances of completing what was, by the middle war years, the standard tour of 30 operations. BBC broadcasts giving the number of aircraft that had failed to return from operations the previous night gave a clear indication that cumulative losses were heavy, ⁶ while the missing crews on each squadron made it easy to estimate the high odds of being downed over the course of a tour. ⁷ Depending on the squadron and the period, these educated guesses as to chances of survival ranged from as high as 20 per cent to as low as 10 per cent. ⁸ ‘They were in fact – and they knew it – faced with the virtual certainty of death,’ their commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, observed with typical bluntness. ⁹

How individuals coped with this knowledge varied considerably. Some, to be sure, simply misunderstood the law of averages. There were those who convinced themselves that since the nightly losses of Bomber Command on operations were somewhere in the range of 5 per cent per raid, they stood a very strong chance of surviving their tour. ¹⁰ Others seem to have thought that as the number of crews from the squadron who failed to return mounted, so too did the odds of their own crew making it through 30 operations. ¹¹ It was also possible to believe, however incorrectly, that while many aircraft were lost, the majority of their crew members had safely bailed out. ¹²

Much more common was a youthful sense of indestructability, what former rear gunner John Wainwright described as ‘this vague, hard-to-explain feeling of immortality’, ¹³ the confident belief that, whatever was happening to other people, you and your crewmates would survive. ¹⁴ ‘It’s always the other guy who gets it,’ as Canadian pilot Sydney Smith recalled himself reflecting. ¹⁵

Conversely, there were also bomber aircrew who grew to feel that sooner or later they would be killed on operations. Many of these men thereafter simply got on with the job. ‘I had ceased counting the number of operations left,’ pilot Miles Tripp later wrote. ‘So far as I could see,’ he added, ‘we should go on flying until we were killed and there wasn’t any point in teasing oneself with the prospect of ultimate safety. Having accepted the worst, it was easy to live for the best and for the moment.’ ¹⁶ Others, since ‘premonition of coming disaster among the bomber crews was not unknown’, according to one station commander, ¹⁷ were sufficiently demoralized by the idea that they were marked for death to turn a gut feeling into a self-fulfilling prophecy. ¹⁸

A small proportion of airmen chose to ground themselves rather than face, or go on facing, the likelihood of extinction. ¹⁹ Sometimes a sympathetic medical officer (MO) or squadron commander gave the flyers concerned enough time off operations to recover their nerve and change their minds. ²⁰ But MOs and senior officers were under great pressure not to provide aircrew with any excuse not to fly unless there was overwhelming evidence of serious and demonstrable illness. ²¹ Thus while symptoms of major ailments might be mimicked or induced, there was no guarantee – even for those with genuine afflictions – that an MO would pass a man unfit to fly. ²² Those not downgraded medically or allowed to rest, and those who deserted or stated plainly that they would not fly under any circumstances, faced either a court-martial or being reclassified as ‘Lacking in Moral Fibre’ (LMF). This mostly resulted in the loss of aircrew brevet and rank, sometimes in very public ceremonies designed to humiliate and deter, often followed – in the case of non-commissioned officers – by more demeaning treatment at a disposal unit. ²³ Not surprisingly, fear of the LMF stigma kept some men flying who otherwise might have stopped, and there were those who pushed themselves to the point of nervous breakdown in the wake of particularly traumatic events. ²⁴

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For those aircrew who felt neither fireproof nor damned, and were unwilling to refuse to fly, there were a number of widely accepted ways to improve the odds of successfully completing a tour. While operational experience counted for a lot – it was common knowledge that the first half-dozen or so trips to Germany were among the most dangerous because crews were new to operations ²⁵ – so too, it could be observed, did discipline and training. Chatting or arguing over the intercom while over enemy territory, rather than concentrating on the job at hand and only speaking when necessary to issue an order, report, or warning, placed a crew in extra peril. Navigators who did not keep their skills sharp, or crews in which each member had not gained rudimentary knowledge of the job of another member in case of incapacitation, also decreased the odds in favour of survival. ‘That our own actions could contribute greatly to our chances was an accepted fact,’ Jack Thompson, a Canadian pilot, wrote of his crew, ‘and thus we operated with the maximum amount of efficiency at all times.’ ²⁶

Operating in this manner was also good for morale, since it provided a sense among bomber boys of being able to exert at least some control over their fate. The difficulty with this approach was that over time it became apparent that capable veteran crews as well as newly arrived sprog crews were going missing over Germany. ‘We used to think experience counted for a lot because most of the guys would be lost on number two or three,’ Jim Moffatt, a Canadian tail gunner, related. ‘And then a bunch of guys would be lost between twenty-five and thirty; and you wouldn’t know what to think.’ ²⁷ This tended to erode the belief that only the new or poor crews were likely to be shot down. ²⁸

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For those who did not feel that their fate was sealed one way or another, that left only luck to consider. Those who possessed it tended to survive; those who did not tended to perish. ‘There is no doubt that whatever the skill or experience of a bomber crew,’ bomb-aimer Tom Wingham later reflected, ‘at the end of the day Lady Luck had the last say.’ ²⁹ Philip Gray, a Lancaster pilot, when thinking about how he and his crew had got through their tour late in the war, put it like this:

It could be reasoned that we owed our survival to skill, thorough training, experience, or perhaps knowing when to duck. That would be a load of waffle. We knew very well that the credit lay with a friend who had hung in there with us right down the line. She was a beautiful lady called Luck! True, we never actually set eyes on this most constant of our companions, but every time we left the deck she must have been riding in our pockets. How else could we have got away with it all? ³⁰

Doug Jennings, a bomb-aimer, estimated that getting through a tour was ‘90 per cent just plain luck and 10 per cent the talent of the crew’. ³¹ Even one of the official historians of Bomber Command, himself a former Lancaster navigator, commented that luck played a significant role. ³²

A sense that you were part of a lucky crew, having escaped from close shaves unscathed, could be a tremendous boost to morale. ³³ But there was also anxiety that luck might depart. ³⁴ How, then, to make sure luck was working for you rather than against you? This was where superstitious thought and action came in.

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According to a wartime Mass-Observation survey, the civil population contained a large number of superstitious people. Women tended to be more superstitious than men, but half the adult males responding to the survey admitted to observing one or more superstitions. Significantly, behaviour such as touching wood or not walking under ladders was ‘almost invariably associated with states of anxiety’. ³⁵ Given the known odds against survival and the limits to other means of influencing the outcome, it should not come as a surprise to find that a large number of aircrew, much as their predecessors had done over the Western Front, ³⁶ adopted charms, talismans, mascots, and rituals.

Charms and talismans – ‘anything worn about a person to avert evil or ensure prosperity’, or in close proximity ‘any object held to be endowed with magic virtues’ ³⁷ – came in many forms, but were particularly valued if provided by girlfriends, wives, or other family members. Small medallions bearing the likeness of the patron saint of travellers, St Christopher, might be worn. ³⁸ Other more pagan but equally traditional items could be carried or worn, including preserved four-leaf clovers, miniature horseshoes, and the ever-popular rabbit’s foot or tail. ³⁹ Soft-toy rabbits, bears, dogs, and stuffed figures, as well as small dolls of various kinds, were quite common, as were coins and other metal trinkets. ⁴⁰ Everything from personal footwear to headgear, but perhaps especially scarves and jumpers, was also widely considered to ensure survival as long as the item concerned was not left behind. ⁴¹ Commonwealth flyers in some cases carried items specific to their dominion: an ice-hockey jersey, say, or a kangaroo’s foot or boomerang. ⁴² The majority of these objects were meant to impart luck to an individual, but there were also mascots, usually of the stuffed toy variety, that were supposed to bring luck to the entire crew and the aircraft in which they operated. ‘We had this [knitted koala] bear fully decorated with medals, and he had his own parachute,’ recalled Lancaster air gunner Wallace McIntosh: ‘I hung him up just inside the back door.’ ⁴³

Ritualistic patterns of behaviour were also widespread. The more devout offered up prayers, saying a Hail Mary or perhaps reciting the 23rd Psalm. ⁴⁴ More common, though, were a ‘series of actions compulsively performed’ ⁴⁵ that had nothing to do with either the Almighty or technical proficiency but which were believed nonetheless to improve the chances of survival by helping avert disaster. These rituals, usually performed before the crew climbed aboard the aircraft, could involve either individuals or entire crews. Like charms, talismans, and mascots, they took a variety of forms.

In a couple of squadrons it became the practice in the officers’ or sergeants’ mess to play a particular gramophone tune before departure, the belief being that failure to do so would mean the men concerned would meet disaster, ⁴⁶ while in another squadron it was the deliberate avoidance of a particular melody that was required. ⁴⁷ Sometimes charms were only considered potent if touched in a certain fashion. ⁴⁸

There were also cases where, consciously or otherwise, crews walked or stood around their aircraft in a set pattern. An MO mentions in his memoirs one instance of this sort of thing:

A padre relates how, watching from a short distance away the crew of an aircraft about to take off on an operational flight, he noticed what he thought was the crew forming a ‘Magic Circle’ round the aircraft. He was not sure that what he saw was in fact this, but on following nights he saw, without letting them know, the same crew again and again before each trip, certainly without being conscious of what they were doing, arranging themselves in a circle almost equally and evenly spaced around the aircraft. ⁴⁹

Another crew at a different station were observed to go twice round their bomber in single file. ⁵⁰

Spitting on the rudder fin for luck also occurred, ⁵¹ along with various tactile ceremonies. Crew members might pat, slap, or chalk a particular message on the biggest bomb in the bomb bay for luck, or press a hand against the aircraft’s exterior in a particular spot before or after an operation. ⁵² Probably the most common ritual surrounding the aircraft itself, though, involved crew members urinating on the tailwheel tyre or one of the main landing-gear tyres. ⁵³

Also quite prevalent was a tendency to elevate routine action to the level of absolute necessity. Thus an aircrew member might always be careful to wear the same footwear or clothing, dress himself in exactly the same order each time he was due to fly, and whistle or sing the same tune while doing so. ⁵⁴ Saying and listening for the same phrases, and performing the same gestures in the same sequence before, during, or after a sortie, became habitual. ⁵⁵

Bomber crews in general were very keen on flying in the same ‘lucky’ aircraft, and were not at all happy when mechanical problems meant that another plane from their station was substituted for their own. ⁵⁶ Flying in mixed company – that is, going out on an operation in a plane in which one or more members were new to the rest of the crew – was also considered a jinx. ⁵⁷

This by no means completes the list of what was thought to aid or inhibit good fortune in the air. ⁵⁸ Interaction with particular WAAFs, members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force living on station, might be considered a good thing if the individual concerned was thought to be talismanic. ⁵⁹ Conversely, there were the ‘chop girls’: those unfortunates who were believed to bring terminal misfortunate to all airmen with whom they consorted. ⁶⁰ Perhaps not surprisingly the thirteenth operational sortie was considered particularly dangerous by superstitious types, ⁶¹ as was for some the taking of a crew photograph. ⁶² At various times in different places certain aircraft identification letters were thought to be lucky or unlucky. ⁶³

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It is important to bear in mind that not all aircrew believed luck could be influenced through such mystical means. ‘We thumbed our noses at superstition’, wireless operator Rex Kimlin recalled of his crew, ‘and got through OK.’ ⁶⁴ Among those who did believe, moreover, there were varying degrees of commitment to both individual and group totems and rituals, ⁶⁵ and after the war at least some ex-aircrew became a bit sheepish about it all. ⁶⁶ Indeed it is easy enough to agree with those who at the time or later came to regard such thought and behaviour as foolishly ‘primitive’ ⁶⁷ – superstition, after all, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as an ‘unfounded belief’, an ‘unreasonable or groundless notion’ based on fear and ignorance that is not rational (what else to make, for instance, of the wireless operator who always danced on the wing of his Lancaster brandishing a multicoloured umbrella aloft before boarding it with the umbrella furled?). ⁶⁸

To do so, however, would be to overlook the degree to which some thoughts and actions, at least initially, contained an element of rational – albeit often poorly developed – calculation. Dismissing superstitions among aircrew as mere mumbo jumbo, furthermore, ignores the extent to which even the irrational elements contributed to the ability of airmen to carry on against very bad odds.

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Aircrew superstition was often based on the premise that if something good or bad happened once in association with particular actions, then the chances of it happening again would be improved by doing the exact same thing in the exact same order: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. This flawed logic was the origin of many rituals. If a crew survived their first sortie or two despite their lack of experience, then in the minds of those involved it stood to reason they must have done something right; so it made sense to try to repeat the process as exactly as possible, perhaps right down to what was put on and in what order before heading out to the aircraft. ‘It really amounted to remembering something we had done on our first operation,’ Russell Margerison, a Lancaster mid-upper gunner, later reflected, ‘and making sure it was repeated on each subsequent raid.’ ⁶⁹

Even charms, talismans, and mascots were not entirely a matter of superstition. In a great number of cases they had been given to the individual concerned by a loved one, and thereby provided a link with the world beyond the war and thus a degree of emotional sustenance. Scarves and stockings, whatever the source, also served the not inconsequential purpose of keeping out the cold in high-flying aircraft with rather limited internal heating arrangements. John Wainwright recalled how many airmen possessed ‘a pair of their girl friend’s, or wife’s, stockings, which served the dual purpose of bringing them luck and keeping their legs a bit warmer’. ⁷⁰

There was, of course, potential for flawed logic to elide into the truly irrational if, say, experience suggested that certain actions could not possibly be relevant to life or death yet once adopted to the point of ritual proved hard to discard in the context of the obvious odds against survival. Correlation, after all, did not necessarily translate into causation. Harry Lomas, having worn the same pair of flying boots through months of operational flying as a Halifax navigator, found it difficult to get rid of them even though they were worn out. ‘I would be a fool to risk ending the good luck I had so far experienced,’ he recalled, adding: ‘The fact that I knew I was being completely irrational didn’t make the slightest difference.’ ⁷¹

A similar drift could occur with reference to urinating on the tyres of the bomber before boarding. There was initial logic at play here too. Sorties to and from Germany often lasted over five hours, and around the dispersal stands there were usually no toilets to hand. (There was an on-board chemical toilet at the rear of each heavy bomber, but heavily encumbered crews strongly disliked using it in the freezing dark of night operations. ⁷² ) It therefore made sense to relieve oneself either on the grass edge of the concrete pad ⁷³ or, for privacy, hidden from the eyes of WAAF drivers and the effects of wind, by the tail or the main undercarriage. ⁷⁴

Superstition arose when what had begun as a matter of simple practicality began to become compulsively ritualistic. ‘The first time we went [to Germany], the rear gunner thought he ought to go before he got on the plane,’ Ben Cecil, a wireless operator, remembered. ‘First time it was only him. But we went on the raid and came back and thought, “Oh, perhaps that [urinating on the tailwheel assembly] had something to do with it [i.e. returning safely].” After that we always did it.’ ⁷⁵ Good fortune was now at stake along with practicality. ‘To pee was vitally important,’ explained pilot Peter Russell; ‘to do so on the wheel was for luck.’ ⁷⁶ Wallace MacIntosh concurred: ‘It was symbolism wrapped up in sound common sense.’ ⁷⁷ A sign of how the two had become inextricably intertwined occurred when regulations banning the practice of urinating on the tailwheel, because of the long-term corrosive effects, were ignored. ⁷⁸ ‘Peeing on grass was not the same thing at all,’ a Canadian navigator complained. ⁷⁹

There was also sound logic behind the widespread fear of flying with different crew members and in strange aircraft. Ever since being brought together late in their training, the five or seven members of a bomber crew had been operating as a unit both in the air and on the ground. They had grown to recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses, quirks and habits, and thereby had developed a significant degree of mutual trust. Flying in so-called scratch crews, made up of comparative strangers, or even going out as a last-minute substitute with an established crew, was rightly considered risky. A scratch crew necessarily would lack the level of coordination and personal understanding present in most established crews. Hence Halifax navigator Henty Hughes’s desperate desire to avoid being left behind by his crew despite a foot injury because of his fear that as a result ‘I would end up as a spare and that was a sure way of getting the chop.’ ⁸⁰

A similar problem arose in relation to having to transfer to the squadron’s standby aircraft if a mechanical fault developed in one’s own bomber. The standby plane would be of the same type, but while a crew would know the idiosyncrasies of an aeroplane in which they had flown a lot and therefore could anticipate and compensate for potential problems in what was, after all, a complex flying machine full of electromechanical systems, the quirks of an unfamiliar aircraft would be unknown. In order for a substitute aircraft to get off the ground quickly and catch up with the rest of the bomber stream there would be very little time to check for faults. ‘Life was dangerous enough without taking off into darkness with a full bomb load and six tanks of aviation fuel,’ Lancaster flight engineer Brian Soper explained, ‘with an aircraft [potentially] not fully serviceable.’ ⁸¹

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Reason, though, whether solid or flawed, was often supplemented – and sometimes overwhelmed – by superstition. Thus an aircraft identification letter could come to be considered jinxed because a previous bomber or bombers with the same letter had crashed or been shot down. This was illogical given that the high loss rate in Bomber Command meant that plenty of aircraft were being lost bearing every letter of the alphabet, but this did not stop some airmen from deciding on the basis of recent events on their squadron that a particular letter was an omen of doom for anyone flying in the aircraft so designated. ‘Every squadron had a jinx aeroplane,’ claimed Wellington pilot Jack Goodman. ‘Anything awful that was going to happen would happen to that aeroplane, and it would go missing at a drop of a hat. I was in B Flight, which had R for Robert as the jinx aircraft.’ ⁸² The same label might be applied to a particular flight or even an entire squadron that, overall, was suffering no greater losses than average but which in a particular space of time had lost a higher than usual number of crews over Germany. ⁸³ Moreover, while there were solid reasons to be wary of operating with strangers, there was no logic behind the superstition that crews were more likely to go down when carrying a ‘second dickey’: that is, a new pilot going on his first operation purely as an observer with an experienced crew for familiarization purposes. ⁸⁴ Just as illogical was the associated fear that, having become spares through the loss of an original crew or pilot, individuals were somehow jinxed. ⁸⁵

Even more irrational was the prejudice against those unfortunate WAAFs whose sweethearts had ‘got the chop’ on operations. Some might lose more boyfriends than the statistical average and some fewer: but given the high probability of airmen getting killed in Bomber Command during their tours such tragedies were common, so there was no logical reason for airmen to avoid the former like the plague through fear that they caused men to die. And, of course, there was no logical reason to believe that, on average, the thirteenth operation would be any more dangerous than the twelfth or fourteenth, or that to take a photograph of the crew was to court disaster.

There can be no denying, therefore, that superstition existed. Moreover, despite later attempts to put some distance between themselves and their wartime behaviour on this score, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that actions and items thought to bring good luck were taken ‘very seriously’ at the time. ⁸⁶ If a mascot, charm, or talisman was lost or left behind, or a ritual forgotten or incorrectly carried out, aircrew became ‘terribly distressed’. ⁸⁷ A mid-upper air gunner later admitted that ‘I was known to completely undress and start the task all over again because I had not put on my left sock first! To simply change the socks would not have sufficed at all.’ ⁸⁸ A navigator recalled in his memoirs what happened when he realized just before dressing for an operational flight that he had left behind his personal charm:

I jumped on my bicycle and tore back to my billet, found Bo and put him in his usual spot [breast pocket], then rode as quickly as I could back to the airfield. I arrived just in time to get suited up and board the plane for our flight. ⁸⁹

When the pilot of one Lancaster, waiting for the green light to take off, discovered that the tail gunner had neglected to spit on the rudder, he insisted the gunner get out and perform this vital ritual. The pilot was forced to start the take-off roll before the gunner was back inside, in turn forcing the latter to run alongside and be bodily hauled in through the rear door by the mid-upper gunner. ⁹⁰

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Interestingly, senior officers seem to have made no attempt to interfere with superstitious behaviour beyond circulating the order concerning urinating on the tailwheel. ⁹¹ In all probability this was partly because wing commanders leading bomber squadrons and group captains commanding bomber stations had by the latter part of the war completed operational tours before being promoted, and themselves believed in the efficacy of charms and rituals. When the ‘groupie’ on one station tasked a crew to come with him for some local flying one day in late 1944, the airmen concerned (who normally urinated on the edge of the dispersal pan) were struck by the way in which he unbuttoned his trousers and relieved himself against the starboard wheel: ‘Hello, gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me but I always do this before take off. It brings good luck. Squadron Leader Robb’s boys I presume?’ ⁹²

Even if a group captain was not personally superstitious, he could see who among the crews were believers and act accordingly for the sake of operational efficiency. One day as bomb-aimer Andy Wiseman and his crew prepared to board, the station commander happened to be there to wish them luck, and the mention of that very word prompted Wiseman to realize he had forgotten the knitted doll made by his girlfriend: the look on his face was such that the group captain forced him to admit what was wrong and then, without a word, drove over to Wiseman’s billet and retrieved the doll for him before take-off. ⁹³

Operational efficiency was probably also the reason nobody at higher level intervened. Bomber Command, as the following well-documented case illustrates, was loath to interfere with anything that gave crews the strength to carry on, given the known odds against successful completion of an operational tour.

Through much of the war, many bomber crews firmly believed that if caught in a radar-directed searchlight beam, they could escape by activating the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) set. This was the heart of a system designed to allow British radar stations to distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft through using specific signals to activate a recognized response from an on-board transponder. Some crews that had tried to ‘jam’ using the IFF set while manoeuvring to get out of the searchlight beam succeeded in escaping back into darkness, and by the summer of 1941 it was confidently assumed that this was a case of cause and effect. ⁹⁴ One of the leading scientists attached to the Air Ministry, Dr R.V. Jones, rightly thought that there was no scientific basis for this belief; indeed he was worried that the practice was potentially dangerous, as the Germans might work out how to challenge the switched-on transponders themselves and thereby more accurately plot a bomber’s location. However, at a meeting in late September he was completely unable to convince leading Bomber Command pilots: ‘my rational argument failed to prevail’. ⁹⁵ Subsequent trials initiated by the Operational Research Section at Bomber Command indicated that the IFF technique had no effect on a bomber’s ability to evade a searchlight, ⁹⁶ but in late 1942 Bomber Command HQ was arguing that it should be allowed to continue since the practice gave crews a sense – false though it was – that they had a means to help shape their destiny beyond manoeuvring their aircraft once caught in an enemy searchlight beam, and that they would be therefore more likely to press on. To Jones that attitude was ‘thoroughly immoral’, but a ban on the use of IFF while over enemy territory was only instituted in early 1944. ⁹⁷

To have tried to stop the festooning of aircraft with charms and the carrying out of rituals would have gone against the policy of Bomber Command of doing everything it could to keep men flying on operations. As early as December 1939, as it happened, the then Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, had ‘in the interests of those who may be superstitious’ intervened to make sure that the new air gunner brevet incorporated 12 feathers rather than 13. ⁹⁸ By the time Bomber Command got into its stride approximately three years later there were many superstitious men indeed. ‘Sooner or later,’ Canadian navigator Bill Grierson-Jackson recalled, ‘some sort of “clutching at straws” seemed to be universal.’ ⁹⁹

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Reasoning, albeit sometimes flawed and often liable to elide into superstition, underlay a number of apparently irrational patterns of thought and behaviour among airmen during the long aerial campaign waged by British and Commonwealth bomber aircrews in the last three years of the Second World War. Moreover, superstitious beliefs and practices are coping mechanisms, ‘attempts to exercise human agency’ in situations where individuals feel they have, at best, only limited control over their future. ¹⁰⁰ In the context of distinctly limited survival prospects, the appearance of charms, talismans, mascots, and rituals was by no means a sign of psychological regression to a primitive sapient state. Courage, modern research suggests, involves ‘the feeling of having some control over one’s environment or destiny’, a ‘key factor that permits the combatant to overcome his or her fear’. ¹⁰¹ Beliefs and actions such as those described above were about trying, as Martin Francis rightly surmised, ‘to reclaim some sense of agency, even when perched on the edge of oblivion’. ¹⁰²

Though those bomber boys who flew under the command of Arthur Harris were neither the first nor the last flyers to resort to such psychological tactics when facing dangerous operations, ¹⁰³ the sheer size of Bomber Command – approximately 125,000 crewmen ¹⁰⁴ – meant that superstitious individuals were created on a scale never seen before or since in the United Kingdom. Rather than engaging in mindless ‘personal propitiation to the gods’, ¹⁰⁵ these men were seeking, through a blend of rational and irrational calculation, ways to increase their chances of completing a tour of operations. Survival for many confirmed the existence of ‘lucky’ actions or items that were then treasured into old age. ¹⁰⁶ Thousands upon thousands of others, however, ultimately discovered in the course of their tours that the odds still favoured the grim reaper. ¹⁰⁷