As navigator of a Lancaster bomber in 617 Squadron in 1944, Alex McKie took part in the squadron’s first two attacks on the battleship Tirpitz in Norway, in September and October of that year.

Since the battleship was at that time moored in the Kaa inlet off the Altafjord, high inside the Arctic Circle, the first of these attacks had to be launched from a Russian airfield, as the Lancaster could not deliver the Barnes Wallis-designed armour-piercing 12,000lb “Tallboy” bomb direct from any British airbase.

On the long flight from Lossiemouth in Scotland to Yagodnik in North Russia, McKie navigated the Lancaster of Flying Officer D. Carey, and, in almost zero visibility, played an important role in locating the remote airfield on an island in the Dvina river. In the event Carey’s Lancaster, which had been badly damaged by Russian flak over Finland, could not be repaired in time for the raid and he, McKie and other members of the crew had to fly as “guests” in other Lancasters for the Tirpitz attack.

This was adjudged a failure as the bombers had had to release their Tallboys virtually blind through the smokescreen which poured from the smoke pots sited along the shore of the fjord and rapidly enshrouded the battleship.

From our Archives: End of the Tirpitz

The German battleship Tirpitz is no more. On Sunday she received the coup de grace from Bomber Command Lancasters

• How the Tirpitz Was Sunk

• R.A.F. Lancasters Sink The Tirpitz

BACKGROUND

• Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Newson

• Group Captain Willie Tait

• Freddie Watts obituary

• Sir John Smith

Multimedia

• Video: RAF sinks the battleship Tirpitz

BACKGROUND

• Squadron Leader George Watson obituary

• Richard Kendall obituary

• Commander Stan Orr

• Vice-Admiral Sir Ian McIntosh

Related Links

• Squadron Leader Larry Curtis

As a result, a second raid was ordered for October 29, by which time the battleship had been moved south to Tromsøfjord, where it was in range of a direct strike from Lossiemouth. (It was only later that 617 learnt that its first attack had in fact damaged Tirpitz beyond repair, and that she had been towed to Tromsø merely to be moored as a floating fortress because her fighting days were over.)

On the second occasion Carey’s Lancaster was hit by flak on his run to the target and his starboard outer engine was put out of action. With all the bombs dropped, Group Captain Willie Tait (obituary, September 13, 2007), commanding the operation, ordered the bombers to head for home, but as Carey’s aircraft dived down to pick up speed, a second engine was hit and put out of action by flak.

Two fuel tanks were now leaking aviation spirit, and though the two good engines were keeping the Lancaster airborne, McKie and Carey realised that there was no chance of getting the aircraft home. McKie navigated the Lancaster to neutral Sweden where Carey crash-landed it in a bog.

Carey, McKie and the rest of the crew were interned for several weeks before being released, which meant that they missed the November 12 raid which administered Tirpitz’s coup de grâce. “You might have waited for us, sir,” grumbled an aggrieved crew to Tait on arriving back at 617’s Woodhall Spa base.

Alexander Millar McKie was born in Crewe, Cheshire, in 1922. In 1938 at 15 he joined the RAF as an aircraft apprentice at Halton, Buckinghamshire, and trained as a fitter. After a number of ground-crew postings he was accepted for pilot training in 1942.

He had plenty of aptitude and soon went solo. But on a further training course at a US air base in Florida, he was “washed out” as a pilot for “dangerous flying”. Determined to stay as aircrew, he retrained as a navigator in Canada and after returning to England was posted as a sergeant to an operational training unit, and then to 106 Squadron flying Lancasters.

He flew 30 operations with 106, including eight against Berlin, the costly raid on Nuremberg, the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt and many other heavily defended targets. Completing his tour of operations in April 1944, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. After a short rest he joined 617 Squadron in May. His first sortie was Operation Taxable, the D-Day deception plan, which was, with its demand for precision formation flying over a long period, very much a navigator’s operation.

Sixteen Lancasters led by 617’s commander, Leonard Cheshire (obituary, August 3, 1992), dropped showers of “window” — metal foil strips — at regular intervals in such a way as to give the impression to German radars that a large invasion convoy of ships was heading in towards the Pas de Calais. This was an important contribution to diverting the defenders of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall from the true destination of the Allied landings — Normandy. So complete was the deception that German coastal guns actually opened fire on this phantom “armada”.

McKie also took part in attacks on the U-boat pens at Brest and V1 and V2 sites in northern France. He was commissioned in September 1944. After returning from Sweden he flew two more operations with 617, the last being the destruction in March 1945 of the Bielefeld viaduct with the first of Barnes Wallis’s ten-ton “Grand Slam”, bombs, the RAF’s heaviest.

After the end of the war in Europe McKie was posted as squadron navigating officer to 9 Squadron flying missions to bring troops home from Germany and Italy for demobilisation. He was finally demobbed himself as a flight lieutenant in May 1946.

In civilian life he worked for many years as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company. He is survived by his second wife, Rene, and by the two sons of his first marriage, to Kathleen Jones, which was dissolved.

Flight Lieutenant Alex McKie, DFM, wartime RAF navigator, was born on July 17, 1922. He died on August 1, 2008, aged 86