“So long Jorkins. Leave the girls alone tonight.”
Creamy Devonshire was stopping beside him. He gave Jorkins an affectionate punch in the ribs. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Like old times,” Pike said quietly.
“See you at twenty thou. Just don’t mistake us for a night fighter.”
“Not that what your air gunner could ‘it a ‘aystack at ten foot,” Devonshire added, leering at his maligned comrade in arms.
Pike’s gunner raised two fingers at his friend in derisory mute comment.
Roger led the way aboard. Pilot Officer Price squeezed past him to his place in the Blenheim’s long nose. Devonshire settled at his wireless set. Their fitter and rigger bobbed up through the hatch one after the other.
“All right, sir? Have a good trip. You’ll find that port throttle’s moving quite easily now; bit o’ clag got jammed in there.”
Roger saw Eastman’s wingtip lights swing away, his tail light recede; take to the air; vanish.
The noise of Pike’s engines filled the cockpit before Roger started his and the Blenheim began to throb and tremble from nose to tail. Pike departed between the blue lights that marked the taxi track. Roger had an urge to trundle after him at once. Five minutes’ spacing was a sensible precaution against collision, but so wide a margin was not necessary. Flying well separated, the Blenheims would be more easily picked off by flak and fighters; or so was the common belief. Two or three together, everyone thought, confused the predictors; particularly if they were at different heights. Two had a chance of catching a night fighter in their crossfire. They were applying their experience by day to what they expected to encounter at night. At root, there was a lingering mistrust of the Staff who persisted in tactics which cost many lives, with marmoreal obstinacy and presumed indifference.
Roger taxied to the end of the runway and turned across wind for his final checks. A green light blinked from the control tower. The Blenheim surged forward.
They climbed steadily, bumping through the clouds, the myriad draughts that swept through the Blenheim growing colder by the minute. At fifteen thousand feet Roger made sure that everyone had his oxygen switched on. Time was when crews thought it sissy to use oxygen at lower than twenty thousand. They all knew better by now, but nothing could be left to chance. Men behaved strangely once they got into the air. All sorts of aberrations manifested themselves in the sanest of them.
The Blenheim shuddered and creaked and whinnied and rattled as she made her way from one temperature layer to another, dropped suddenly in air pockets, soared as unpredictably on errant rising currents, lurched to the buffet of stray winds. And all the time cold seeped more deeply into the flesh and bones of the crew. The smell of rubber from the masks clamped across mouth and nose began to annoy. The masks chafed chilly skin. Frost formed on windscreen and windows. Ice built up along the leading edges of the wings. It broke off in lumps and rattled on the fuselage and perspex. Roger could not feel his feet. He wiggled his toes and thought they were responding. His fingers were stiff.
The engines pounded away, lighting the night with their exhaust flames. He wished he could warm his hands over them.
“E.T.A. Dutch coast, fifteen minutes.”
Roger noted the time and kept watching the clock. Ten minutes before the estimated time of arrival, large calibre shells began to explode below them.
“We’re early, it seems, Stan.”
“Yeah, must have a tail wind.”
“If we are crossing into Holland!”
“Hey, I’m not that bad.”
The flak was making red splashes in the sky around them now.
“What worries me, Stan, is that we can’t see any flak ahead. Where are Ginger and Terry Eastman?”
“Lost their way. Bum navigation. Aren’t you lucky to have me!”
“Only time will tell, chum.”
It was no joking matter, though, and Roger had a very unwelcome sensation in his bowels. His uneasy entrails felt as cold as the rest of him. A bunch of worms seemed to be wriggling in there somewhere.
Meanwhile clumps of flak rose buoyantly in every direction, surrounding them, bracketing them above and beneath, flailing the air into turbulence which made the Blenheim rock and pitch.
A glow penetrated the clouds as searchlights sought them.
“Sharp lookout for fighters, Creamy.”
“Don’t worry, Skipper, I’m not dozing. All right to clear me guns again?” He had done this in the normal way when they crossed out over the sea.
“Go ahead.”
There was neither the sound of gunfire nor the reek of cordite.
“Bastards have frozen, Skipper.”
“I’m going down. We’ll get under the clag.”
The searchlights and flak were left quickly astern. Roger took the Blenheim down to fifteen thousand feet... fourteen... at twelve thousand they came out of cloud and could see the tops of another layer beneath.
“Know where we are, Stan?”
“I got a good star shot before we started to descend, Roger. The winds must have gone crazy. We’re twenty miles north of where we ought to be. Go onto one-three-zero, will you.”
“One-three-zero. I’m going down to see if we can get a visual pinpoint.” They had flown over all this part of Holland and Germany many times by day. He and Devonshire between them should be able to recognise some landmark, even if Price could not.
Wherever they were, Roger consoled himself, they were over low country. He could descend with impunity. Also, the patrolling night fighters would be up at the altitudes he had left, not down here.
At between five and six thousand feet they broke cloud and the blackness beneath was impenetrable.
“Where d’you think we are, Stan?”
“Fifteen miles west of Breda. Turn onto zero-seven-zero and we should hit the Maas.”
“Right, let’s give it a try. Good thing we’ve got a full fuel load.”
“Sorry, Roger. I guess the Met was duff.”
“I’d still like to know where Terry Eastman and Ginger got to.”
“Me too, fella.”
Devonshire asked if he could try his guns again. “Yes, you’d better.”
With relief, Roger heard the rattle from the dorsal turret.
“Good show, Creamy. At least we can defend ourselves now.”
“Don’t look now, Skip, but it looks like we’re going to have to. I can see exhaust flames and...”
A searchlight beam sprang from the ground and caught them. Another came on and swept across the sky in a great arc to intersect it.
Roger pulled back the stick and pushed the throttles forward. The swift coloured blur of tracer shells rippled past as the Me 110 behind them opened up with its two twenty-millimetre cannon. It had four 7.9 mm machine-guns in its nose as well; and another at the rear of the cockpit for its air gunner to cover the stern and shoot at the Blenheim if his pilot overshot.
Devonshire fired two bursts before cloud hid the Blenheim. Roger levelled off at six thousand feet and held his course. He let two minutes pass before nosing out of cloud. A mile ahead the broad flow of the Maas showed pale grey against the blackness.
Three searchlights came on together, flicked in the Blenheim’s direction and settled on it. Thirty-millimetre flak came flitting towards them. It stopped abruptly. Immediately, Devonshire started to shoot once more and again tracer raced by from astern.
“Seen enough, Stan?”
“Yep, thanks. I’ve got it.”
Thirty seconds later Price gave a heading for Dortmund. By then, they were hidden in the clouds again.
A hundred and thirty-five miles to go: about forty minutes at their cruising speed and with the present wind; which might shift again once or twice and change its speed, upsetting Price’s calculations once more.
Much though he loathed and had grown to fear daylight raids, Roger at least respected their purpose. One could usually find one’s way to the target w
ith certainty, confirming the route by reference to landmarks. Even so, particularly in making a landfall after crossing the North Sea, navigators often made errors of twenty, sometimes as much as fifty, miles. Mostly, it depended on the weather. But if the weather were bad and reduced the accuracy of navigation, it did enable one to conceal oneself in cloud. At night, clouds offered concealment but all the other factors were adverse. He doubted whether, on average, more than one-third of bombers found their targets in bad weather with current means of navigation. And getting there was not the end of it. You then had to bomb accurately: and that was another skill which was fraught with technical difficulties. Roger believed that not more than twenty percent of bombs landed within a thousand yards of where they should, at night. Most bombing was done from about ten thousand feet. Tonight they would bomb from less than five thousand. But visibility would be bad and they would be vulnerable to heavy flak, light flak and fire from heavy machine-guns.
Every five minutes or so Price would ask him to go below cloud so that he could identify some feature of the landscape. Almost as often, when sound locators picked them up, flak would fire blindly into the clouds and searchlights would jab at them, trying to penetrate the clouds. Some of the light flak came within thirty feet and some of the heavy shells burst no more than fifty yards away, but they were not hit even by fragments; although, when three or four shells went off more or less together, the blast tossed them about.
Where, James wondered, were the other Blenheims? Were they so confident of their navigation that they had stayed at a greater height all the way? Even if they had crossed the enemy coast at the right place and time, it was easy to stray off course between there and Dortmund.
“Target in five minutes.”
“All right, Stan; I believe you!”
They were to the north of Essen and the steel city’s defences had declared themselves as soon as the beat of the Blenheim’s engines reached the listeners at the flak posts. A score of searchlight beams probed for the Blenheim. Dozens of light flak guns pumped tracer shells into the sky which surrounded it with a web of coloured lines. Eighty-eight millimetre shells burst thickly around it, making Roger blink his eyes against the dazzle.
The shooting died down but erupted again when the gun and searchlight batteries around Dortmund heard the Blenheim.
“Going down. We should be able to see the blast furnaces. They’ll give us a fix for the oil plant.”
“O.K. The blast furnaces should be dead ahead.” Roger eased the Blenheim down. Thick cloud gave way to patches of impenetrable vapour interspersed with clear, but equally impenetrable, sky; then to thin wraiths of the stuff, until finally the Blenheim was below the overcast and cruising over the almost invisible city in a sky lit by searchlights reflected from the underside of the lowest cloud layer and by the incessant explosion of flak shells.
A fire burned a mile ahead on the port bow and Roger could see another a little further away on his other hand. The first one was the bigger.
“Looks as though the first two got here,” Price said.
“Looks to me as though three or four have been here while we were losing ourselves. And I don’t think either of those is the oil plant.”
Coming nearer, bucking and weaving through the searchlights and flak, Roger could see that the closer fire was near the blast furnaces: the shape of the buildings and the glow from the furnaces made them easy to identify. The other, he thought, was probably in the railway yards.
He circled the city. Four searchlight beams held him, but he switchbacked violently so that the shells which exploded every few seconds more or less in his path missed the Blenheim. Shards of steel pattered against the fuselage. Wind screamed through rents in the metal skin.
“There it is, Stan.”
“Yep, I see it.”
“Try to make it in one run.”
“You bet!”
“Here goes, then.”
Straight and level, Roger flew towards the huge spread of the oil plant which showed up as a darker patch on the dark ground.
“Left, left... right... a bit more... too much... left, left... right a bit... hold it.”
Roger was holding his breath as well as the direction.
“Bombs gone.”
Roger put the Blenheim into a steep climb, turning to port.
Devonshire, looking down from the turret, said “We hit one corner of it, Skipper... look.”
Roger tightened his turn and saw tall flames consuming a small section of the factory buildings. Billows of smoke rolled across the roof.
His attention was wrenched away by a deafening roar and a searing flash of light which lit the cockpit. The control column jerked strongly forward, then back and from side to side. The rudder pedals swung without any aid from him. His feet resisted the movement, his hands automatically centred the stick and brought it back to keep the aircraft in its climb. He was trembling all over, the loud noise and bright light had partly numbed his mind. He felt a rush of air through the Blenheim from its nose and heard a moaning organ note that rose as he pushed the throttles further open.
“Are you all right, Stan?”
There was no answer.
“Creamy... O.K.?”
Devonshire’s voice shook. “I’m... O.K., Skipper.”
“Go and see what’s happened up for ‘ard.”
It was dark again, and clammy as it had not been before. The cockpit was opaque with damp vapour. They were in cloud and still climbing. Roger’s vision was gradually returning. He could see the instruments. He moved the stick to raise a drooping wing and held his climb.
“Skipper...” Then silence.
“What is it, Creamy?”
“Stan...” Again Devonshire’s voice ceased abruptly.
“What the hell is it?” Roger’s voice was loud with annoyance.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked round. Devonshire was leaning over him. His oxygen mask hung unfastened and vomit dripped from it and all down the front of his Sidcot suit.
“He’s had it, Skip... must have been a bloody great lump of flak splinter... cut his bloody head right off... and one arm... there’s a sodding great hole on the starboard side... Stan’s head... his head’s gone... through the hole... blood all over the place...”
“All right, old boy, all right. Now listen. I know the course for base, but I don’t know what the wind’ll do to us. I’m setting course now... two-eight-eight... I checked that before we left. Go to the nay table and lay off that course from Dortmund to Baxton. Got it? We’ll fly at two-forty indicated, so mark off every twenty miles... that’ll be five minutes, O.K.? We’ll check course and ground speed from time to time by going down for a dekko. All right?”
“All right, Roger.” Devonshire did not often allow himself this familiarity on duty, but they had been sergeants together and he was badly shaken.
He came back a minute later. “The chart’s all sopping with blood, Skip, and the wind’s torn the bugger as well.”
“See if you can find a spare, or a map.”
Devonshire came back again after a few minutes. “All the nav instruments and maps have been blown through the hole, Roger.”
“Then we’re going to have to chew tough titty, aren’t we? We’ll just have to go down and check every five minutes and when I reckon we’re within ten minutes of the coast I’ll go down to two hundred feet. We’ll be too fast for the flak sites and too low for fighters. If we can fix our position when we cross out, I can adjust course for home.”
“Yeah. I’ve sent me signals. Wireless is O.K. I can get a bearing as soon as we’re close enough.”
“Nothing to worry about, then.”
“Yeah. I could do with a double scotch, Roger.” Devonshire’s teeth were chattering and Roger knew that it was not only the cold that was responsible.
“So could I. Get the coffee, then stay here to help me spot landmarks.”
*
When Roger landed the battered Blenheim at Baxton,
taxied to the squadron’s hard standings and switched off his engines, he saw that only Eastman’s aircraft was already parked there. The station commander’s car, an ambulance and a fire tender were waiting for him. Group Captain Brand, Wing Commander Dean and Squadron Leader Eastman were standing there. As soon as the Blenheim’s hatch was opened the squadron Medical officer scrambled aboard.
He looked enquiringly at Roger, who felt he would not be able to find the energy ever to move from his seat. His ears dinned with the noise of the engines and the scream of the wind through the huge hole in the Blenheim’s side, the fluting and moaning caused by all the smaller tears. His eyes smarted. The reek of high explosive from German shells clung to the flight deck, with the dank odour of cloud, sea mist and the chemicals in the air over the Ruhr. For the first time, he began to feel queasy.
He spoke loudly, raising his voice so that his own deafened ears could hear it. “It’s Stan Price, Doc... he’s in there.” He wearily raised a pointing hand.
He forced himself out of his seat and to the ground.
Devonshire followed closely. Roger could see Jorkins, a white smudge, his brindle patches indiscernible in the darkness, the whites of his eyes and teeth reflecting the glimmer of masked headlamps. He looked for Ginger Pike, but it was Pike’s ground crew, who looked after the bulldog while his master was flying, who stood there.
Group Captain Brand moved forward.
“Are you both all right?”
Roger ignored the question.
“Where’s Ginger?”
He could hardly recognise the voice. He had difficulty in speaking: his tongue felt too big.
“He baled out over Holland... the whole crew.”
For some seconds Roger could not speak at all: not because he could not get his tongue to work but because he felt drained of the necessary energy. His knees sagged and he had to shift his feet to keep his balance.
“Flak, sir? Fighter?”
“Flak.”
“Did he get to the target?”
“Yes, they got him on the way back.”
“Anyone else...?”
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 23