The good thing with being by the hangar is they could periodically nip inside for a warm. They could also go for a wee in a proper toilet without the risk of getting their boy frostbitten in the outside air. Miserable groups huddled behind the hangar walls to get out of the wind so they could have a smoke.
The snow stopped at lunchtime. By one o’clock the sun decided to peek out from behind the iron grey clouds. Cheeks welcomed the little bit of heat. After clearing the front of the hangar they were taken by Bedford out to the peri-track and were put to work clearing a section. Out in the open, the wind flailed them, the cold cutting them to the bone and numbing their senses.
Asher called time at four. No more snow was forecast and most of the important areas on the airfield had been cleared. Anything left over that needed finishing could be dealt with by the usual crop of defaulters over the next few days.
With no flying due to the weather, they were at liberty to go drinking. No one went very far. After a day in the cold, even the thought of slogging through the snow to the local pubs held little attraction. Most went to bed, a few stumbled to their respective Messes but it was a very subdued evening. Walsh had persuaded Carter to have a couple of drinks before turning in.
“If we go to bed too early we’ll only end up staring at the ceiling in the wee small hours,” he had said.
“No,” Carter corrected him. “I’ll be staring at the ceiling, you’ll be the one snoring, giving me a headache.”
Walsh paused as he drank from his pint and looked at him over the top of the glass.
“Do I?” he asked, quite serious.
“You do. Loudly.”
The following day was cold but the snow stayed away. The crews went out to the kites and ran them up. It was freezing sat in their metal tubes and they were very thankful to have heated flying suits. They plugged them in and were quite toasty while they checked their stations.
Nothing was forthcoming from Group. The word on the grapevine was that the snow of the last few days had moved east and covered Europe in a large fluffy blanket. While the mainland was socked in, the coasts were clear so the usual mining sorties went out but none of the Manchester’s were called upon to fill in.
Frustrated at the lack of activity, Carter cast around for a new way to keep his crew occupied and keep them sharp. They could have gone on another flight to the bombing ranges at Wainfleet, but familiarity bred boredom.
When the crew truck was taking them back to the equipment hut, he had the WAAF drop them off at the hangars. Inside hangar three was a Manchester looking very worse for wear. One of the new crews had wrecked the undercarriage on landing the previous week and no one had come for it yet to take it to the depot. Carter had them all go inside and told them to adopt crash positions. He went up to the cockpit as did White. Everyone else sat behind the main spar. Todd produced a pack of cards and he started laying out a game of patience. Vos tugged a pulp novel out from a leg pocket and opened it where he’d marked a page by folding over the corner.
Once they were settled, Carter went through the checklist with White. Flaps to fifteen degrees, jettison fuel, check their Sutton harness. Jettison bombs? Jettison bombs. Lower the flaps to twenty five degrees, close the fuel jettison cocks.
“I think we’re done,” said Carter. White nodded his agreement. Carter looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “prepare to ditch!”
In the dim of the fuselage, Murphy put his hands up either side of his head and started making plane noises. He swooped left and right, Todd pushed him away in good humour.
“Neeeeeooooowwwww, plonk!” said Murphy, slapping his left hand against his legs.
“And we’re down!” White shouted. Woods stood up and reached up to the escape hatch on top of the fuselage. They clambered out which was not so easy in bulky flying gear. They were laughing and joking about it but they all knew, doing this at night, in the dark with water pouring in, it would be no laughing matter.
Blinking as they emerged from the gloom, Carter stood on the canopy and watched as they gathered on top of the fuselage. Murphy and Todd straddled it, and pantomimed digging spurs into a horse. White had walked back and dropped down onto the starboard wing. Together with Woods they released the panel at the trailing edge of the wing and dumped it on the hangar floor. If they had actually ditched for real, the dinghy was designed to automatically inflate and deploy once the aircraft was in the water.
White and Woods pulled the rubber dinghy out and made a meal of it. They got vocal encouragement from the other three sat above them on the fuselage. Woods bit his tongue. It was not so easy pulling on the heavy rubberised dinghy, but he dug in and hauled it out and threw it over the side. A cord attached to the bay pulled on the dinghy and it inflated with a sudden hiss of air. It popped into shape on the concrete floor of the hangar.
They all slithered down onto the wing and then dropped into the dinghy. Carter had them check the contents, making sure they knew where the hand pump was and two of them broke out some crude oars and motioned rowing from the back of the dinghy. Woods went to the other end, put one foot on the top of the dinghy and aped tucking one hand into his flying suit, George Washington style.
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,” sang Todd, with the line taken up by Murphy. Carter quietened them down as their laughter echoed around the hangar. It was just some play, but it was better than nothing and who knew, perhaps one day they might have to do it for real.
9 - One of those months
November was a bad month for 363 with a succession of accidents and mechanical problems. Around tea time on a windy Wednesday, the entire squadrons complement of aircrew were summoned by tannoy. They filed in and took their seats, curious. There were no ops on that evening so it was either a rush job or an announcement of some kind.
They found Asher pacing the stage in agitated circles when they came into the briefing hut. The gossip doing the rounds was that in the morning, Asher, the Adj and Church had disappeared in a rush so most people were leaning towards an announcement of some kind. Group Captain Etheridge stood at the back, grim faced with his arms folded. Saunderson was intently examining his nails, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Asher waited until the doors were closed and then he strode forward to the edge of the stage. He planted his feet, bunched his hands on his hips and fixed the crowd with a hard stare.
“Certain events today make it necessary for me to bring you all together and make something painfully clear. In the next few days there will be the funerals of Flight Sergeant Edwards and Pilot Officer Altring and their crews.”
A rustle of disquiet filled the room. Funerals on operational squadrons were rare. Funerals for whole crews were almost unheard of. It was an accepted fact of life that crews got the chop, but it was normally over foreign skies, blown into little pieces. Occasionally, a plane would make it back with wounded or casualties and medical orderlies would carry the dead away on stretchers.
Only the week before, Archer had lost yet another tail gunner. A JU88 had mauled the Manchester’s rear before Archer dived for the ground. It was Archer who had scraped the bits of his gunner out of the turret; no one else had the nerve to do it. When they hosed down the turret afterwards; red spilled out of the holes as if the aircraft itself was bleeding.
Asher continued speaking.
“We know that every time we go up we run a risk, it’s the chance we all take. Edwards was lost on a training flight, those things happen. The other loss was avoidable and an absolute bloody waste.”
Asher paused for a moment as fatigue washed over him. It had been a busy day. The first phone call had been from the Lancashire Constabulary. A policeman had been cycling round his beat when a Manchester had dived out of low lying cloud and caused a big hole on the moor. No chutes were seen and it had gone in almost vertical. The squadrons codes were still visible amongst the burning wreckage and a few checks soon had the phone call routed to Amber Hill.
It was soon est
ablished it was Edwards aircraft. A new crew with only two ops under their belt, they had been sent out to get some much needed practice on a navigation exercise.
The second phone call he received was an entirely different story. A Manchester had crashed next to the village of Fellholme after performing a series of low passes. On one of these low passes, witnesses reported that it had flown parallel to a row of terraced houses while it waggled its wings. The Manchester had clipped the trees as it climbed away. The wingtip and a few feet of wing parted company and took the aileron with it.
The bomber nosed in from thirty feet, cartwheeling across the fields and turning a perfectly serviceable aircraft to scrap and killing everyone on board. Further enquiries had revealed that a certain lady friend of Pilot Officer Altring lived in the end terrace.
By the time, Asher had got to the village, the fire brigade had put out the flames and all that was left were jagged bits of metal scattered over a field. Asher had spent some time staring at the six blanket shrouded mounds that were waiting to be taken away in ambulances. Saunderson had waited by the car with Church, talking to the Police officer who had been first on the scene.
“I don’t much care about a mans personal life. What you get up to outside this station is a matter of supreme indifference to me; but,” he paused, letting the word hang in the silence, looming over all of them. “When good men die, because one fool uses his aircraft to impress a bit of skirt then I have no choice but to become involved.” He looked around the room, going from one face to another. His eyes were blazing in anger. “If you want to kill yourselves, you have my permission to go down to the armoury; hand over a shilling to pay for a bullet, draw a revolver from stores and go off beyond the butts. It’s nice and quiet down there, you can blow your brains out with a bit of peace and quiet.”
He was warming to his theme now and his voice was hard and flat, cracking like a whip on each syllable as he barely held his simmering temper in check. He had the rooms attention, each man absorbing every word like a sponge.
“If he’d not done such a good job of killing himself, then I would’ve had no hesitation in breaking, Mr Altring. There is no place for stunts and low flying on this squadron. Get yourself transferred to a Spitfire squadron or something, then you’re only killing yourself. Instead; Altring was a selfish bastard.” Asher placed great inflection on bastard and everyone in the room flinched. “Yes, a selfish bastard. He took five other people with him and wasted a perfectly good airplane.”
Asher had seen his fair share of accidents during his service life. Flying was a dangerous enterprise, but despite every admonition from instructors, when a pilot was given a powerful aircraft they got drunk on power. Roaring around the skies, they were tempted to make that turn just that little bit tighter, to dive that bit steeper. When there was a woman involved, that just drove them to take an even bigger chance.
Truth be told, Carter was no virgin himself. He’d thrown his Hampden around the sky as much as anyone else. He wanted to know the limits of the aircraft and there was really only one way to do that, but he’d never done it to show off for a girl. Corkscrewing at eight thousand feet was fine. Chucking it around at nought feet you might as well pencil yourself in for an appointment with Saint Peter and a pair of wings.
“NO. MORE. STUNTS!” Asher shouted. “NO. MORE. LOW. FLYING! If you get caught out, don’t bother coming back because god help you when you land, because I won’t.” Asher looked over to the Group Captain. “Anything you’d like to add, sir?”
Etheridge just shook his head and did his best to look disappointed.
“No, I think you’ve covered just about everything I was going to say.”
At that, Asher stalked from the stage, down the central aisle for the doors. The others trailed behind him. Chairs scraped as everyone came to attention.
Two days later the squadron filed down to the chapel, packed the pews and listened attentively while the Padre waxed lyrical about man having but a short time to live. It was grey outside which was appropriate to the mood of the day. They huddled against the cold in their best blue as they looked at the flag draped coffins while Asher read aloud the names of the twelve dead men. Carter flinched as the funeral party fired twelve shots into the leaden skies.
In the afternoon, Dickinson sent Carter up on a long navigational exercise, much as Edwards had done. North to the Tyne, turn left and then back down the west coast, a large box route. It was simple enough, but they would be lucky if they got home before it got dark. Carter skipped along to the cookhouse and asked for some sandwiches to take with them.
There was some good natured chat as they set off. Considering the mood of the last few days, Carter let them get it out of their system. Once they set a course north they settled down and focused on the task at hand. Murphy called out landmarks from the nose as they sailed along. Woods marked out their track on his map, correcting for the wind.
Murphy silently grumbled to himself. Up front in the nose turret the meagre sun was shining through the perspex and giving him a headache. He was also cold. Frigid air rushed into the turret through the elevation slits and tickled his neck. He fiddled around, prodding and poking a silk scarf around to close the gaps. Since their first few trips, the ‘who flew in what turret’ arrangement with Todd had been modified. Now they took turns. Every trip they alternated who was in the tail, and a trip counted for the test flights in between as well.
The routine they had fallen into was that on outward bound trips, the one in the nose would throw out bundles of propaganda leaflets down the flare chute. Shoving a wad of paper down the chute twenty or thirty times with a broom handle was fun and helped kill some time.
Murphy’s problem was that the flare chute was in the tail. To get there, he had to wiggle out of his turret, go up to the cockpit, squeeze past White and then clamber over the main spar. That was awkward enough on the ground. Throw in a pitch black fuselage, a vibrating airframe, bulky flying gear and numbed limbs and it left him sweaty, tired and grumpy. More often than not he banged his shins on something and once he was done chucking the bumf out, he had to retrace his route to get back to the turret. He couldn’t wait until they got a different Manchester with a mid upper turret. Then he could just wriggle out of the turret and go about five steps to the flare chute instead.
He’d looked at one of the leaflets once. Kent had translated the German for him. It was pretty basic stuff, Throw off your shackles, seize back your freedom. Do not suffer under the heel of National Socialism. Garbage. All they were doing was giving the Jerrys some free toilet paper. Today he was in the nose, which meant it would be his turn to bugger about going back and forth to chuck out the leaflets the next time they went on an op.
While Murphy ruminated on the point of traversing the fuselage, things were not going so well in the cockpit. Both Carter and White had noticed a rise in temperature in the starboard engine. The port was rock solid for once but the starboard was behaving like an energetic puppy. Carter could physically feel it surging, the vibrations running through the controls in his hands, his seat and up and down his spine.
It would go up and down with little consistency. There would be a wave of sudden power before it faded away before picking up again. They made constant corrections, juggling the throttles, trying to find a sweet spot where it was happy but the instrument needles were going up and down like a fairground ride.
“Could be a blockage in the fuel pipe, or a fuel pumps buggered,” suggested White. “That would explain why the throttle setting makes no apparent difference.”
Carter frowned. His eyes scrunched up behind his goggles while he thought about that. White shrugged and gave the throttles another nudge. Flying Manchester’s was certainly never boring. Engines could go bang at a moments notice, the hydraulics might break and that was just for starters.
At Blyth they turned left towards Dumfries. Carter went up to fifteen thousand feet but came back to ten after a strange vibration built up in the contr
ols. They headed south. The vibration continued and Carter and White decided to call it quits although home was a good hour or more away. Woods gave them a steer and they cut the corner at Whitehaven, following the coast and crossing over Morecambe Bay. Fiften minutes later, the engine temperatures shot up alarmingly and this time they kept on climbing.
“We’re not going to make home, Woody. I need something closer.” He shared a look with White. “Better make that a lot closer.”
Woods was already poring over his maps. He only had large scale maps for this side of England. He peered at the cramped symbols, figuring out their options.
“Make it one eight zero, skipper. Ringway, just south of Manchester.”
Carter throttled back to spare the engines and traded height for speed, threading his way around the towns of Lancashire. Barrage balloons dotted these northern towns and they floated over the cramped back to back terraces and factories. Chimneys spewed smoke into the sky, casting a grey pall over the houses. A southern wind pushed the smog before it.
Murphy wrinkled his nose in distaste as a sulphurous tang stung his nostrils and he glowered at the chimneys of Wigan off to his right. An industrial centre, mills and factories surrounded the town which was a primary route on the canal between Liverpool and Leeds.
The large sprawl of Manchester was on the horizon and Ringway was on the far side of the city. The engine temperature was still creeping higher and Carter kept glancing at the altimeter, it was going to be close.
“What do you think?” he asked. White hunched his shoulders.
“Might hold. Then again we might explode or burst into flames.”
“Oh, you’re full of cheery thoughts.”
The vibrations increased. The yoke juddered in his hands and even the instruments were starting to jump. Down in the tail, Todd was getting a headache from the shaking.
“Can we lay off the tap dance, boss? My fillings are starting to rattle.”
Maximum Effort Page 9