The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt Read online

  The first three years of the war had been difficult and sometimes disastrous for the RAF. Initially, its bomber force wasn’t large enough to pose a significant threat to the Germans (even as late as mid-1941, the RAF had only seven hundred serviceable planes available on any given day).12 In addition, the bombers they did have lacked the speed, range, power, or altitude capabilities needed to drop large numbers of bombs on targets within Germany. At the same time, the RAF didn’t have the long-range fighters needed to escort and protect bombers from German fighters during daytime raids. As a result, Britain could conduct only nighttime raids—a perfectly reasonable strategy if the RAF had developed the navigational technology to guide its bombers to their targets effectively at night. But they had not. Operating in the early years essentially by dead reckoning—quite literally “in the dark” about their own location—the bombers more often than not were unable to find their targets, and they often failed even to hit the cities in which their targets lay. And the RAF’s losses were brutal. During 1941 its aircrew losses were actually higher than the civilian losses at its German targets.13

  The British command concluded that the only way to wage a successful air war was to build a massive number of heavy bombers, work furiously to improve navigation technologies, and then mount a sustained campaign of area-wide bombing raids to destroy not just German military matériel, but also the homes, morale, and lives of German civilians as well. On February 23, 1942, the Air Staff named Arthur Harris—soon to be nicknamed “Bomber Harris”—air chief marshal to carry out the policy. He was “a commander of coarse single-mindedness [who] had neither intellectual doubt nor moral scruple about the rightness of the area bombing policy and was to seek by every means—increasing bomber numbers, refining technical bombing aids, elaborating deception measures—to maximize its effectiveness.”14 As new planes began to enter service, Harris was able to put as many as a thousand bombers in the sky on a single night, creating firestorms in some German cities that reached in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit; even the asphalt pavements caught fire. It was Harris who is famously quoted as saying of the Germans, “They have sown the wind, and now they shall reap the whirlwind.”

  Although the RAF’s technicians steadily developed better navigational technologies (only to have their advantage quickly countered by Germany’s own technicians), bombing accuracy was still unacceptably poor. Internal RAF studies found that despite the tonnages of bombs dropped, targeting was still “wide or wild,” and the bombs were having little effect on Germany’s ability to wage war.

  In the end it was human innovation that began to improve the effectiveness of the RAF’s bombing campaign. That innovation was the birth of the Pathfinder Force. The Pathfinders, created within Air Vice Marshal Bennett’s 8 Group on August 24, 1942, were a group of elite pilots and crews who were assigned to fly ahead of a bomber formation and mark the targets with flares. Flying Lancaster heavy bombers and, on occasion, light, high-speed Mosquito fighter-bombers, the Pathfinders traced the route across Europe, then dropped brilliant markers to guide the bomber streams that followed. Bomber Command chief Harris initially had opposed the creation of the Pathfinders, fearing it would siphon off his best crews and strip the RAF of its leaders, but their success was undeniable and eventually he relented. Each target marker contained sixty pyrotechnic flares equipped with barometric fuses designed to set off at predetermined altitudes. As the air war progressed, the flares were color-coded daily to prevent German decoy flares from drawing the incoming bombers off target. Though much improved, accuracy was still inadequate and, as a weapon of war, “Bomber Command remained more of a cudgel than a rapier.”15

  The plain fact was that area bombing was not slowing appreciably the flow of matériel to German troops. Consequently, in June 1943, the Allied Command, meeting in Casablanca, changed the bombing rules on Harris and ordered that the area bombing campaign be replaced with a more narrowly focused one aimed at destroying smaller and much more strategic targets: refineries, rail yards, submarine bases, airplane engine factories, and transportation hubs, among others. Harris vehemently opposed this new offensive, code-named Pointblank, and for the most part simply refused to alter his long-standing commitment to massive area bombing.

  This was more than just stubbornness on his part. For one thing, the Germans had repeatedly demonstrated an astonishing ability to hide, relocate, or simply rebuild military manufacturing factories destroyed by Allied bombers. Harris argued that “strategic” bombing would have little practical effect. Only massive and sustained bombing of entire cities would break the will of the German people, cripple the country’s industrial capacity, and starve its troops of the means of waging war at the fronts. But Harris and his subordinate Bennett knew something else as well, something they were perhaps somewhat less willing to admit: that even with the Pathfinders marking targets, their nocturnal bombers could not achieve the kind of pinpoint accuracy required by Pointblank. Bennett in particular was convinced that the Pathfinders could never fly low enough to mark such targets precisely without being destroyed by ground defense forces.

  Enter Air Vice Marshal Cochrane, commander of 5 Group. While Bennett’s 8 Group had the Pathfinders Force, Cochrane’s 5 Group had the No. 617 Squadron—the so-called Dambusters—whose daring low-level bombing in 1943 had destroyed the hydroelectric dams in the Ruhr Valley, crippling German industrial capacity there and capturing the imagination of the British people. Cochrane was convinced the problem with the Pathfinders Force was that they released their flares at too high an altitude; he argued that low-altitude target marking could dramatically improve bombing accuracy without increasing casualties. At a meeting on January 18, 1944, he presented his case formally to Harris. Bennett, who attended, was opposed, and assumed the matter was closed. But Cochrane lobbied relentlessly for a chance to demonstrate his theory. What’s more, he had an ace in the hole: Leonard Cheshire, now wing commander of No. 617 Squadron, had in early 1944 successfully marked the Gnome and Rhone engine plants at Limoges, France, from an altitude of only two hundred feet. The rest of Cheshire’s squadron, following close on his tail, had demolished the factories.16

  Throughout the early months of 1944, Cheshire and his squadron worked continually to fine-tune their low-level bombing tactics until, by early March, they could promise that upwards of 60 percent of their bombs would fall within a hundred yards of the target, an unheard-of level of accuracy. On April 14, Harris not only gave Cochrane the go-ahead but went so far as to transfer Bennett’s No. 627 Mosquito fighter-bomber squadron as well as his No. 83 and 97 Lancaster bomber squadrons to Cochrane’s command. Bennett was so furious he had to be restrained from resigning his command.17

  Cochrane had more on his mind, however, than simply showing off his best fliers or advancing his career. Planning for Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, was well advanced. D Day was only weeks away. If low-level target marking was feasible under extreme combat conditions, if it could significantly improve the accuracy of bombing raids, then nighttime bombing of heavily fortified German installations in France might be accomplished without causing massive losses among French civilians. The strategic importance of this demonstration mission was very high indeed.

  Having made his Faustian bargain, Cochrane now learned what it was to cost him: Harris wanted Munich.

  In the spring of 1944, Munich was the second most heavily defended city in Germany, after Berlin. If that was not sobering enough, it was also located so deep within the country that it lay at the very limit of a Mosquito’s round-trip fuel range. Assuming they met with no fuel-consuming headwinds, dropped their markers on their first try, and were not required to undertake many evasive maneuvers, Wing Commander Cheshire’s target markers would have just fifteen minutes of fuel to spare when—and if—they returned to England.

  Bomber Command chose Munich for reasons as much symbolic as strategic. Certainly destroying the rail center, the raid’s principal objective, had strategic value. But Munic
h was also the birthplace and ceremonial home of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the “premier city of the Nazi Movement.”18 Berlin may have been the administrative heart of the Third Reich, but Munich was its soul. Destroy it and you would destroy Nazism’s birthplace and drive a symbolic stake into Hitler’s heart. The RAF had attempted to do just that in the early months of the war, with catastrophic effect—not to Germany, but to England. It was this early unsuccessful raid on Munich that resulted in the retaliatory raid by Germany which destroyed Coventry, England. Perhaps Harris had been waiting all this time to get even.

  And so, sometime around midday on April 24, 1944, 617 Squadron Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, the marker leader for the mission, taxied his Mosquito to the end of the runway at Woodhall Spa aerodrome, raced down the end of the airstrip, and lifted into the air. Three other Mosquitoes followed suit, piloted respectively by Squadron Leader David J. Shannon as deputy leader and Flight Lieutenants G. E. Fawke and R.S.D. Kearns as assistant deputies. Though Cheshire had spent most of his years as a pilot at the controls of Lancasters, the deHavilland-designed Mosquito was uniquely suited to this mission. Lightweight—manufactured, in fact, largely of plywood—and fitted with a pair of powerful and reliable Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, the Mosquito could fly faster and higher and maneuver better than any other plane in the war at that time.

  Together, the four planes turned south and made for Kent, in southeastern England. There, at RAF Manston aerodrome, they would top up their fuel tanks and await the order to take off again, this time for Munich.

  Even before darkness had fallen, from airfields scattered across the countryside around the cathedral city of Lincoln, bomb-laden Munich-bound Lancasters lumbered into the air. By this stage of the war the formation pattern was well established: The bombers rose and circled over eastern England, massing and eventually forming a dense bomber stream before turning east toward the European coast and their target. In all, the raid on Munich would involve 244 Lancaster heavy bombers and 16 Mosquitoes.19 By 1944 the Lancaster, with its four Merlin engines and its immense bomb-carrying capacity (up to twenty-two thousand pounds of bombs by the end of the war), had become the RAF’s “Shining Sword.” Lancasters had the range, speed, altitude, and sheer flyability that earlier bombers had lacked. In addition, with hydraulic gunner turrets fore, aft, and amidships, Lancasters were formidably able to defend themselves.20 They were tough, resilient flying machines; it was not uncommon for ground crews to hear, long after the main force had returned home, a Lancaster straining through the early-morning sky and see one of their crippled charges skim the hedgerows at the end of the airfield to touch down safely, if awkwardly, with only two engines functioning.

  The main bomber force took off in daylight because Bomber Command had devised an elaborate ruse to throw off the German defense forces. Instead of turning east toward Germany, the Lancaster force flew south, crossing the English Channel near Southampton, passing over the Normandy coast at Deauville, continuing on this southerly course to Romorantin, just east of the grand châteaus of the Loire Valley. There the bombers turned to the southeast and flew high above the vineyards of Burgundy toward Geneva. To German trackers, their route was unmistakable: heading straight for Milan, Italy. And indeed a small force of sixteen Lancasters did exactly that, scattering flares and a cloud of tinfoil strips (called “window” by the RAF) over the city to trick radar installations there into believing a huge force of bombers had arrived. In fact, the main force had turned due east just beyond Geneva and then north, heading directly for Munich.

  After German command recognized the false alarm in Milan, they had new trouble on their hands: Another force of 637 RAF bombers had mounted a simultaneous raid on the industrial city of Karlsruhe in southern Germany, near the French border,21 and German defensive fighter planes raced back to defend that city. By the time the German command realized another force was headed for Munich it was too late; the fighters were effectively out of fuel.22

  As these various feints and evasions got under way, Cheshire’s four Mosquito target markers streaked through the sky on a ramrod-straight route from Kent, over Belgium and across southern Germany to Munich. The weather was terrible. The Mosquitoes lifted off from RAF Manston several hours after the main bomber force and immediately ran into dense cloud cover. They managed to stay on course and broke out of the cloud cover near Augsberg, just northwest of Munich, where they were immediately picked up by ground defenses, plastered with searchlight cones, and subjected to withering flak attacks. Miraculously, they reached Munich shortly after midnight, on time and unscathed. Here some three hundred searchlight beams groped for their planes in the night and bursts of lethal radar-guided flak were heavy, in part because an advance group of Pathfinder Lancasters from the main force had just released a stream of flares high above the city to enable Cheshire and his fliers to find their marks.

  Cheshire was the first of the target markers to arrive. Looking down at the brilliantly illuminated city from an altitude of five thousand feet, he saw his aiming point directly beneath him—a Gestapo building just east of the raid’s strategic target, Munich’s central railway station and its switchyards. A proper approach would have meant crossing the city and returning, which, given his fuel limitations, he could not afford. Immediately and instinctively, he dropped one wingtip and put the Mosquito into a vertical dive he knew would exceed the safe speed limits of the plane. Only a few hundred feet from the ground he began to pull up, releasing his markers and placing them virtually on the rooftop of his target. Struggling to retain consciousness in the enormous G-force created as he reversed the dive, he put the plane into a steep climb through the flak clouds. He called in the other three Mosquitoes to mark their targets. Circling the city at just a thousand feet, Cheshire, acting as the operation’s master bomber, summoned the main bomber force to the markers. They came in two waves, separated by a few minutes.

  Cheshire’s own situation was now extremely perilous. His plane was illuminated by light from above and below and subjected to intense ground attack. Above him, waves of Lancasters passed high above the city. One by one, they opened their bomb bays. The sky filled with bombs and incendiaries. Moments later, explosions traced lines of fiery destruction across the center of Munich.

  With fuel already dangerously low and flak explosions thundering around them, Cheshire finally took the four Mosquitoes home. Searchlights and flak followed them, and Cheshire was forced to execute violent and fuel-costly evasive maneuvers. Twisting through the sky, they finally outran enemy fire. With luck, they would have just enough fuel to make it back to RAF Manston airfield. And luck was with them, at least until they crossed the English coast and began to descend. Ahead, the field was illuminated oddly, as if it was having electrical trouble. It was Cheshire who realized what was up: A lone German fighter plane was shooting up the airfield. After a few more evasive moves, luck returned: The fighter withdrew, and the four Mosquitoes landed safely. They had little more than fumes left in their fuel tanks.

  Munich in 1944 was a city of broad squares and grand public buildings built in the sort of neoclassical monumental architectural style so characteristic of the era. One such building, the Alte Akademie, occupied nearly an entire city block. Its main entrance was on Neuhauserstrasse, roughly a half mile from the bahnhof.

  The Alte Akademie was, in 1944, the home of the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Historical Geology, one of Germany’s and the world’s most respected centers of scientific research. Within its high-ceilinged halls was housed, among many other antiquities, an extraordinary collection—the 95-million-year-old bones of four huge dinosaurs entirely new to the world of science that had been found some years earlier in the barren wastes of the Western Desert of Egypt. The fossils had been found by a Munich-based German explorer and pioneering paleontologist near an ancient oasis known to desert dwellers for centuries as El Bahria, the Bahariya Oasis.

  The RAF bombing of Munich ended at one-fort
y A.M. on the morning of April 25. At dawn, the city’s residents would discover that the central railway station—the kind of strategic target 8 Group Vice Marshal Bennett had refused to believe could be safely marked at low altitude—was now a mass of twisted steel and burning rubble.

  Despite Cheshire’s exceptional marking, however, there was collateral damage beyond the station. With more than two hundred Lancasters dropping hundreds of bombs, it was inevitable. More than seven thousand buildings in the vicinity of the station were in flames. One of them was the Alte Akademie. As the wan daylight filtered through the smoke, it was clear all that was left of the Akademie was a hollow masonry shell. Sometime after midnight an RAF bomb had slammed through the roof and set the museum ablaze. The collection was destroyed.

  The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

  TWO

  THE BONE-HUNTING ARISTOCRAT

  Anyone taking a stroll on the upper deck of the Lloyd’s steamship Cleopatra on the morning of Wednesday, November 9, 1910, could not fail to note the gentleman standing at the railing, nor that he was thoroughly disgusted with the situation in which he found himself. A small bespectacled man, carefully groomed with a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard, he was dressed—as he had been throughout the voyage—with a certain studied precision. On this day he wore a white shirt, tie, dark trousers, handmade shoes, and a thigh-length wool coat buttoned, as was the fashion of the day, just once, at the breastbone. And because he was a gentleman, he of course wore a hat. He stood ramrod-straight, almost visibly vibrating with impatience, his delicate hands clasped tightly behind his back.

  Before him sprawled the teeming port of Alexandria, Egypt. Even now, in November, and with the day still young, the heat was rising. All along the ramshackle docks, hundreds of laborers dressed in what seemed to be little more than rags scurried about, backs bent under heavy bundles, loading and unloading steam and sailing vessels of every description and condition. As the morning warmed, the air was redolent of tarred wharf timbers, horse and donkey dung, fetid seawater and sweat. Beyond the docks lay a warren of narrow alleys, tawny mud-brick warehouses and primitive dwellings, the flat-roofed scene punctuated here and there with taller municipal buildings of a decidedly French colonial design and, taller still, the minarets of Muslim mosques. The entire scene was bathed in that peculiar quality of light the man had come to associate with Egypt, a pale golden haze—part sunlight, part wood and coal smoke, part the ever present fine-grained dust of the Sahara: carried on the wind for hundreds of miles, filling the air and giving it texture before finally settling in shallow drifts in the nooks and crannies of the ancient port city. On any other day, this prospect, of which he had become curiously fond over the years, would have filled him with pleasure.