Obituary: Captain Donald MacIntosh DFC, former Bomber Command and commercial pilot, part of squadron that sank the Tirpiz

Donald MacIntosh, arms folded, wtih wartime comrades

Donald MacIntosh’s first real taste of the Second World War was as an 18-year-old police cadet caught up in the Clydebank Blitz in 1941.

Unexploded incendiaries landed outside the station door, the muster room became a morgue, gas mains blazed and back home his widowed mother cheerfully swept up broken glass from the windows blown in by a landmine.

He cursed the Germans and two months later, on his 19th birthday, requested release from his reserved occupation to take up aircrew duties, a move that would take him to the heart of the fight with the enemy and a mission to destroy one of their most iconic weapons – the feared battleship Tirpitz.

MacIntosh, an Inverness-shire policeman’s son who left school at 14 and became a police telephone operator, first took to the air in a Tiger Moth bi-plane. He trained in Florida in a Stearman, graduating to the Harvard and on returning to Britain completed further training before being posted to IX(B) Squadron at Bardney, Lincolnshire.

From there he led his crew, with great courage, on missions including raids on a destroyer in Poland’s Gydnia harbour, on dams, oil refineries, viaducts and bridges, flying bomb sites and cities.

But he admitted that his first experience on operations – a night raid in a 600-strong stream of bombers over Stuttgart – left him a changed man, as he witnessed the city ablaze, fighting to survive himself, evading the searchlights and repeatedly corkscrewing to dodge enemy fighters.

“As dawn lit the cockpit, I became aware that I was not the same person as the one who took off in the twilight the day before. All the reading, all the talk, all the training was one thing. Now I knew.”

That night over Stuttgart the chop rate was high – 65 aircraft failed to return. Though the young Lancaster pilot made it safely back to base he knew, logically, that the chances of surviving the experience another 30 times – the usual length of an operational tour – were pretty poor and that the odds were stacked against him. However he had faith that somehow he would survive the war unscathed.

That self belief, aided by generous doses of courage, skill and luck, was prophetic and “Mac”, as he was known to his crew, went on to complete more than 40 missions, including the successful raid that sank the Tirpitz, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Branded “The Beast” by Churchill, the Tirpitz had already been bombed by the RAF on various occasions and attacked by the Navy to no great effect until Barnes Wallis, creator of the Dambusters’ bouncing bomb, invented the 12,000lb Tallboy, a weapon capable of piercing the ship’s double armour plating.

The massive vessel was a constant threat to the Allies and Churchill was determined she should be destroyed or crippled. By the autumn of 1944, with Tallboys ready, a fresh assault was planned. MacIntosh and his crew from IX(B) Squadron, along with 37 other Lancasters from their own and 617 Squadron, set off on the 10-hour, 2,000-mile flight to an air base at Archangel. From there they launched their attack on Tirpitz but the mission was thwarted when she threw up a smokescreen just as they got the battleship in their sights.

As MacIntosh headed back to RAF Lossiemouth, on Scotland’s north-east coast, all four engines began to surge. After making the difficult decision to return to Archangel they discovered the Russians had filled the Lancaster up with 80 octane fuel – great for running a car but not recommended for a powerful Merlin aero engine.

Their second attempt on the Tirpitz was on a filthy October night. The target was missed again in the murky cloud.

The following month MacIntosh and crew left Lossiemouth on the third attempt. In his autobiographical book Bomber Pilot, he recalled the night of 12 November: “I turned in for our own bombing run, and a minute later, for the first time, I saw our quarry. There, squat, grey and massive, even at 12 miles out, sat the Tirpitz, just like the model we saw months ago… Not a cloud, not a ripple on the water, and no smoke. I watched fascinated and saw the long sheets of flame as she fired her main armament of 15in guns towards us. A gallant gesture but I didn’t even see them burst. Sporadic flak, both from the ship and the hills, burst ahead as the leading planes approached their aiming point.”

Then suddenly the Lancaster’s bomb sight stopped functioning and they had to turn away temporarily while calculations were done manually. By the time they circled back everyone else had gone. Through a sky thick with brown smoke from the flak they dropped the bomb and then heard the rear gunner exclaim: “She’s turning over! What a sight! It’s terrific!”

It was only back in the mess at Lossiemouth, when free drinks were being dished out, that he began to believe that “perhaps we had sunk her after all”.

“I didn’t feel any elation, only relief: it had been too serious for jubilation. We had kept pushing, till somebody’s luck gave out. It was a straight roll of the dice and by blind chance the Tirpitz’s luck gave out first. I was glad we wouldn’t have to go back, ever.”

His final target, on 25 April, 1945, was Berchtesgaden, home of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest retreat. “Springtime in the Alps, fellahs. Have a look,” said MacIntosh as they wheeled round after bombing the target. On the way back he noted the ruins of Munich and Stuttgart lay “peaceful and shattered beneath us, all their terrors gone”.

After the end of the war in Europe he wanted a career in civilian flying and headed to Group HQ at Coningsby. There he found the WAAF in charge of postings, asked to be put on the next Transport Command conversion training course at Dishforth, Yorkshire and gave her a pair of nylon stockings “to help her remember”. Two weeks later he left for Dishforth.

He then spent another 30 years as a civilian pilot, “some of which was almost as lethal as wartime”, he said.

Based in the Bahamas, he flew Yorks and Lancastrians for British South American Airways and married his first wife, flight attendant Brigid, in Nassau on Armistice Day 1948. They had four daughters, twins Shelagh and Moyra, Allyson, Elizabeth and Donald.

MacIntosh went on to fly the world’s first passenger jet, Comet 1, to Africa and the Far East. Divorced, he had a brief second marriage to a model and lived for a time in Australia, before finding renewed happiness with his third wife Joan. Together they two spent spells in Los Angeles working as personal assistants for Miles Copeland, manager of The Police and Sting, where Joan arranged dinners for Hollywood guests and he drove Copeland to the Oscars.

MacIntosh, who was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 2016 was predeceased by Joan. They had lived in Crieff for many years and he worked for some time in Scone instructing young pilots, his strong work ethic and love of flying forever with him.

Alison Shaw