Maximum Effort

by Vincent Formosa

  Murphy went for a walk and was surprised when his feet took him to dispersal and their Manchester. The armourers were busy bombing up while the erks crawled over the bomber, getting her ready. Trolleys were parked under the bomb bay and a mix of incendiary containers and thousand pound bombs were being winched into place.

  The erks were giving him odd looks so he climbed inside and went up to his turret in the nose. He filched a wad of cotton waste from the instrument basher in the cockpit and kept himself busy industriously polishing the perspex in his turret. With the power off he tried the manual traversing mechanism, then he just sat there for a bit until he got bored, so he got down.

  Feeling foolish, he left the ground crew to it and went back to the Sergeants Mess. Todd was having a game of darts with White. He was two shillings down and determined to win his money back. He noticed Murphy’s pensive look.

  “Where did you get to?” he asked. “You weren’t going to duck out were you?”

  Murphy shrugged. He pinched some toast off Todd’s plate.

  “I was just making sure our ride was ready.”

  Todd nudged his partner in crime on the shoulder.

  “We’ll be fine mate. Don’t worry about it.”

  Dickinson led the way on this one. Lambert was eager to get back to the coal face and with Popsie repaired, he was ready to go. Seven other crews rounded out the field and it had been a fair sized crowd at briefing.

  The whole trip had been pretty straightforward. Flak had been scattered and the nightfighters had left them alone. The weather had been a mixed bag. They flew through banks of hail over the Channel and rain had lashed them as they crossed the Dutch coast. Carter had to peer through the canopy as visibility dropped almost to nothing. Eventually he managed to wring a bit more altitude out of their new Manchester and get above it.

  Scattered clouds obscured the ground but Woods got them to the target without too many problems. There was some debate when they reached Cologne as the Fires on the ground were scattered all over the shop. They argued back and forth while they tried to identify landmarks and the flak intensified as they followed the line of the river.

  Peering through his sight, Woods saw a big cluster of factory buildings arranged in a linear pattern. He lined up on it and asked for one final correction before hitting the release.

  “They’re away!” he shouted.

  Carter held her for the photograph and then dived, letting the speed build up and taking them further away from the city. Leveling off at four thousand, they headed north west for home and he handed over to White for a while, giving him a chance to fly the plane. Crossing the coast, Carter reminded everyone to stay alert. Just because they were almost home was no reason not to pay attention to their jobs. He was conscious it verged on nagging, but first time out, he wanted to make sure his rules were clear.

  Woods kept checking his maps but he was finding it difficult as they flew over the darkened English countryside. Occasionally a badly shaded light would show on the ground, but otherwise, the land below was in total darkness. Learning to navigate in Canada had been far easier than ops over England. In Canada it was wide open countryside as far as the eye could see, with big mountains, wide plains and large rivers. The winds were also fairly mild and the weather was quite predictable. Training had been a doddle compared to this.

  After checking his figures for the umpteenth time, Woods was sure the predicted winds had been wrong. He asked Vos for help and the Belgian duly obliged. The DF bearing proved him right when he found he was thirty miles or so off track to the south. He gave Carter the correction and the bomber changed course as directed.

  Arriving back at Amber Hill, the weather was starting to close in. An ugly bank of clouds were looming on the horizon. It would rain in the morning, Murphy thought.

  As they went around the circuit, he saw another Manchester was ahead of them. The wings glinted as the weak moonlight caught them. They followed them all the way round as the other bomber shaped up for a landing. The undercarriage came down, then the flaps. He saw the bods on the ground had lit the flare path but they hadn’t don’t it very well. Quite a few lights weren’t lit at all.

  In the cockpit, White and Carter thought there was something strange about the lights. They were pondering what was going on when another aircraft muscled into the circuit in front of them. It was so close, their Manchester shook from the slipstream.

  “Cheeky sod,” said Carter, unimpressed at having to break off to go round again. He was just about to pull back on the yoke when the newcomer opened fire on the bomber going in to land.

  “What the-” exclaimed Murphy in surprise as the German intruder broke off.

  The Manchester ahead of them stood no chance. Low and slow, with the flaps and wheels down, it was a sitting duck. The rear gunner was caught napping as golf ball size cannon shells went whipping past him and chewed into the wings and fuselage. The bomber lurched, dropped its left wing and piled in from one hundred feet.

  The Manchester ploughed into the ground, short of the runway. The nose crumpled and the rest of the aircraft folded around it. The night sky was lit up by orange flame as the tanks touched off. Gobs of burning petrol skittered across the grass, chased by lumps of engine and pieces of fuselage. The crash crews went charging across the field. The pealing wail of the bell on the fire engine split the night. The ambulance brought up the rear.

  Carter circled well wide of Amber Hill. Somewhere out there was something with black crosses on the wing, prowling around in the dark and looking for game. He felt himself straining against his harness, wishing he could wring a few hundred extra miles an hour out of the engines. Everyone was alert, their senses twitching like crazy. If Todd even saw a dark smudge coming towards them he was giving it the lot before shouting out a warning.

  Finally the tower came on the line, the remaining aircraft were to divert to Waddington. Before Woods figured out the new course Carter already had them on the way. He knew this area like the back of his hand and could fly there blindfolded. It wasn’t even ten minutes and they were lining up on the east west runway. They got an all clear and went straight in.

  “For gods sake keep your eyes skinned,” he warned everyone. He would laugh if a German intruder caught them out now.

  He deliberately kept his approach fast and White had his hand behind the throttles, ready to ram them forwards if necessary. Carter skimmed over the perimeter fence with the flaps and wheels down. Now was the dangerous time. If anybody was to attack there wouldn’t be much he could do about it. He thumped his bomber down with no finesse and let her roll, running half the length of the runway before slowing down and turning off onto the grass. When he finally shut the engines down he was exhausted.

  A truck came to pick them up and take them to interrogation. They kept it short and sweet and went for their bacon and eggs. White ate like a starving man. Such a close reminder of his own mortality had made him exceedingly hungry. When they were shown to a hut with some beds he asked someone to wake him when the sun came up, “I want to see it,” he said, glad to be alive.

  They flew back to Amber Hill at nine in the morning. Half of them were still punchy from the op, but a quick sniff of oxygen helped clear their heads. Coming in to land, they flew over the still smoldering remains. A dark scar had been carved in the grass and the blackened bits of airframe had a lonely figure standing guard over them.

  They shut down at dispersal and were whisked back to their billets. After getting changed, Carter headed to the Mess to find energetic discussion of the previous nights events. Carter quickly looked around, searching for the missing face but had to admit defeat. He sought out Dickinson, finding him in an armchair nursing a cup of tea.

  “Carter, good to see you back. Shaky do last night,” he murmured. He gestured to the armchair next to him and Carter sank into it.

  “I saw it all, I was right behind them,” Carter replied, his voice neutral. “They came right up behind them and just blew them awa
y,” he shuddered, as if someone had walked over his grave.

  “Bad show,” said Dickinson, “sneaky bloody Huns.” His eyes were red rimmed. He’d not been to bed yet and he was dog tired. “His first op back as well. Such a bloody waste,” he muttered. Carter’s head turned very slowly to look at Dickinson as the words clicked into place.

  “Do you mean it’s Lambert who’s spread across the field?”

  It took a moment for Carter’s question to register in Dickinson’s brain.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot, how could you have known? Yes, it was Lambert. Bad luck, just bad luck.”

  Dickinson stared off into the distance as he remembered the crash scene. He had started running towards the crash, his flying boots slipping as he clumped across the grass. Almost out of breath, he’d flagged down the fire engine as it went past. Clinging to the running board, he shouted at the driver to go faster as they bumped across the ground and then slithered to a halt.

  Wreckage was scattered all over the place. What was left of the fuselage lay on its port side, the stump of the starboard wing pointing to the sky. Bits of twisted metal lay amongst the bushes and trees that grew at the edge of the field. Fires were scattered all around, blazing puddles of petrol that had spilled from the split tanks.

  Skirting round an undercarriage leg and large mainwheel which lay smoking, Dickinson had stopped in his tracks as he saw a figure hobbling away from the flames.

  “Good god,” he breathed, as the grim apparition of Smith appeared, struggling as he walked backwards, dragging a body across the grass. His face was covered in blood, his eyes wild. His jacket was ripped open on one arm, his Mae West blackened and scorched.

  Smith’s turret had broken free from the fuselage on impact and thrown him clear of the crash. Head ringing, some primal instinct had kicked in and he had forced his way out of the smashed turret and crawled back towards the wreckage. Eyes stinging from the smoke, in a daze; he had fumbled around, almost blind until his flailing hand had latched onto clothing. Clamping his hands tight he had pulled, doggedly putting one foot in front of the other, sheer will alone keeping him going.

  “It’s all right mate, I’ll get you home,” he kept repeating like a mantra as he dragged Jones from the flames. It was wasted effort. He was so dazed by the crash he’d not seen that Jones had a hole in his chest so big you could shove a fist through it. Jones had been dead before the crash, shot up by the intruder in their first burst.

  Smiths strength finally gave out as Dickinson got up to him and he collapsed onto the grass. Friendly hands hustled him away and he was carted off to hospital with a suspected fractured skull and burns. The rest of the crew were dead. Forrester, Fitzgerald, Tinsley, Jones and Lambert, all dead, just like that. That was the way it was on ops. The way it had always been.

  “Sneaky bloody Huns,” Dickinson repeated to himself as he stared off into the distance.

  8 - Deep And Crisp And Even

  After a recent run of bad weather and poor bombing results, nearly four hundred aircraft that night. Half went to Berlin. The remainder had gone to Cologne, Mannheim and Essen. Officially, Bomber Command had delivered a blow to the Big City. Half the aircraft dispatched had made the target and bombed all over the city, setting a large number of fires. Lord Haw Haw said otherwise, claiming that the sky had rained bombers brought down by accurate flak but no one paid much attention to him. The raid on Cologne barely merited a mention, Asher’s prediction about everyones attention being diverted north seemed to have been accurate.

  A dark pall hung over Carter for the rest of the day. Lambert’s Manchester had been the squadrons only casualty and the fact that it had happened on their own doorstep upset him greatly. The thought played in his head that it was his fault. He’d flown two ops with them, he’d had plenty of time to pour his knowledge and experience into them. Throughout his first tour he had never lost a crew member. Two had been wounded, he himself had been wounded; but he’d never lost one.

  He sulked in his room for a while. Coming back from Waddington had cost him three or four hours sleep. After the news about Lambert’s crew, he was more awake than ever and sleep eluded him as he replayed events in his head, seeing Lambert’s Manchester go in and tearing itself apart.

  By late morning, bitterly cold winds howled across the land and heavy clouds rolled in, dumping snow on the airfield. The scars in the earth disappeared under a layer of white and the twisted wreckage of the Manchester softened under its death shroud. Visibility dropped to a few hundred yards as big fat flakes of snow continued to fall for the rest of the day. The winter of 1940 had been one of the worst on record, it looked like the winter of 1941 was going to give it a good run for its money.

  There would be no ops that day but that’s not to say there was no work. Just because the aircrew weren’t flying didn’t mean everything came to a crashing halt. Ground crew continued to work on the aircraft in the cold. Exposed to the elements on work platforms to get to the engines, fingers soon went numb. The holes on the wing of Carter’s Manchester were patched, then the wind strength increased and the erks retired to their little makeshift hut. They hunkered down and got a good blaze going and drank some tea as they watched the snow coming down.

  Carter finally stirred himself out of his funk in the early afternoon and willed himself to get up. In the intervening hours he’d discovered that Walsh could snore quite loudly. Thankfully, throwing something at him made him turn over and the noise would stop for a while. Carter was dog tired but it was no good continuing to lie there. What he needed was a brisk walk to blow away the cobwebs, some food and a good cup of tea.

  He shrugged on his greatcoat and crammed his battered cap on his head as he went out the door to the hut. His breath caught in his throat as the biting cold blasted him. His cheeks stung from the driving wind and he sank into his greatcoat, his nose poking out over the collar.

  He inevitably drifted over to the Mess. There was a good blaze going in the hearth and Carter thawed himself out as he pawed idly at the newspapers and training manuals that were lying around. He sat sideways on an armchair, his feet towards the fire as he thumbed through the reading material. He got half an hour without interruption when the station tannoy burst into life.

  “The Station Snow Plan is now in operation. Any personnel not on duty are to report to their sections for work detail.”

  There was a collective groan around the room. The message repeated over the tannoy and then bodies began to move. Feet dragged as they went out into the hall as they threw on their greatcoats and hats. Gloves were dug out of pockets and pulled on as they clumped outside. Seeing no way out of this, Carter got up and followed the herd.

  For the rest of the day they shovelled snow. Split up into groups, they joined hundreds of other station personnel to keep the taxiways and runway clear while the snow continued to come down. This annoyed Carter but there was no way round it. It wasn’t realistic to wait for the snow to stop before doing anything, but it stung to shovel snow, only to see the ground turn white again before they were finished.

  NAAFI vans did the rounds on a regular basis, delivering welcome hot mugs of tea and sandwiches. Cold hands cupped the mugs, trying to get feeling back into numb fingers.They were kept at it until five when the light began to go but they were under no illusions that they would probably be doing it again the following day.

  Carter’s feet were like blocks of ice when he shuffled back into his billet. He promised himself that he’d put on an extra pair of long johns and socks in the morning. After the previous nights operation and the days exertion he just flopped into bed fully dressed. Walsh turned up twenty minutes later. He looked like some sort of abominable snowman. Snow covered his shoulders and his greatcoat was stiff from the cold. He had been out at the bomb dump on the far end of the field for most of the day keeping the road clear.

  He stamped the snow off his boots and then sat on the end of his bed. He put one foot in front of the other and put the heel to the toe.
Slowly the boot on his left foot came off. He slumped over his knees and dragged his right boot off. He slung them both towards a corner and lay back on his bed like Carter, fully dressed. He groaned and rubbed his face, trying to get some feeling back into his cheeks.

  “Much more of this and we’ll all be coming down with pneumonia,” Carter said, his voice dull and listless.

  “Much more of this,” Walsh told him, his voice muffled behind his hands, “and I’ll be breaking into the hospital to get the pox. I could do with a few weeks off.”

  Suddenly that sounded like a viable plan. Get chickenpox, get quarantined in the hospital. It would be a diet of warm beds, good food and lots of rest.

  “Ah, but you might scar that pretty face of yours,” Carter warned him, wagging an admonishing finger. Walsh was unconcerned.

  “Better a few scars than be so cold that my little chap drops off.” Carter laughed, his voice a braying neigh, his jaw tight from the cold. “No point getting myself a woman then,” Walsh continued, “I won’t be able to do anything to her.”

  “It won’t be that bad,” Carter got out between gasps of laughter.

  “I hope not,” Walsh replied, his tone serious.

  Asher had them out shoveling snow the following day. Half dead, they trailed into the Mess at first light, loaded up with porridge laced with sugar and then shuffled outside. The more forward thinking individuals dug out their hip flasks and added a little extra kick in their porridge. Wrapped in as many layers as possible, Carter had lined up with the rest outside as they were divided up into work parties.

  They shouldered their tools and got ready to move off. Stood next to him, Walsh nearly brained him with a shovel when they did a smart right turn and marched off to hangar one. A good couple of inches had come down overnight and snow covered the tops of their boots. They got busy shifting the snow into heaps by the hangar doors.