Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  “Was this a joke, sir?” Skull took three big photographs from his envelope and spread them on the table. “The Essen raid,” he said. They were night shots, taken by the flash of a flare from a bomber. Written across each of them in red Chinagraph was a single word: Unacceptable.

  “Pug Duff’s writing,” the adjutant said.

  “What does he mean?” Rafferty asked. “The print’s no good, or he doesn’t like what’s on it?”

  “The latter,” Skull said. “I asked him why, and he said they don’t provide a true picture of bombing by 409 and the photographs must not be sent to Group.”

  Rafferty put his glasses on and picked up a print. “Where’s the target?” he said. “I can’t see much detail. Is it blurred?”

  “The target isn’t there,” Skull said. “There’s no detail on that picture because it’s mostly farmland. Pasture. Some forest.”

  Rafferty studied the other two prints. “Plenty of built-up areas here. Flak, too. Are those bomb-bursts?”

  “Yes, sir. But not on Essen. This photograph was taken over Dorsten, a small town about twenty miles northeast of Essen. The other shows Solingen, another small town about twenty-five miles south of Essen.”

  “And you suspect the worst,” Rafferty said.

  “If those three Wellingtons hit Dorsten, Solingen and a field, they didn’t hit Essen, sir, no matter what the CO decides.”

  “Don’t rush your fences, old chap,” the adjutant said. He stretched his legs and waggled his feet. “One thing I’ve learned about war is never to assume that anything will work as planned, especially the equipment. How do we know that those cameras did their stuff properly?” He searched for his tobacco pouch. “Maybe the Wimpys bombed Essen but the cameras clicked five minutes too late. A Wimpy can be twenty miles away in five minutes.”

  “Or maybe they were five minutes too early,” Rafferty suggested.

  The adjutant pointed his pipe at Skull. “Never underestimate the power of the cock-up,” he said.

  “On that basis, sir, we might as well disregard all photographs.”

  Rafferty gave his most paternal smile. “I wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep if you did. I’ll tell you what would upset me, Skull, and what I won’t tolerate for an instant, and that’s any chivvying and harassing of a crew because a photograph is at odds with their report. Those boys have been through seventeen different types of hell, all night long, they may have seen their comrades killed, and they don’t deserve to face hostile questioning when what they really need is to have their morale reinforced.”

  “You should know that, Skull,” the adjutant said. “It’s, no picnic over Germany, is it?”

  “None of that is relevant to the question of accuracy,” Skull insisted. “We can’t award a crew a direct hit on the target because we feel they deserve it, can we? Oh, Christ …” He paused, and took a deep breath. “This is exactly what got me kicked out of Fighter Command.”

  “You’re rambling, old chap,” Rafferty said. “It’s that knock on the head you got over Essen.”

  “It was a nose-bleed.”

  “Have a nap,” the adjutant advised. He was setting up the drafts board. “You’ve been overdoing it again.”

  8

  D-Dog was the last Wellington to leave Coney Garth, so by the time she reached the German coast the others had stirred up the defenses. Badger, in Dog’s front turret, had no need to say, “Enemy coast ahead.” Searchlights told that story. But he said it anyway. Being the first to spot landfalls was one of the few rewards of sitting in the coldest place in the aircraft. Silk acknowledged. “Looks like Borkum, skip,” Badger said. His voice was as light as a plowboy’s.

  Rollo felt stiff in the limbs and thick in the head. Kate was leaning against him, half-asleep. He saw Woodman get up from the nav’s table and go forward. He shook Kate. They stumbled after Woodman, climbed over the main spar and re-plugged their intercoms. Now the cockpit area was very crowded. Woodman made space for them and pointed down. “See that island? Shaped like a V? That’s Borkum. Good pinpoint. Tells us we’re on track.”

  Rollo looked at the altimeter: over thirteen thousand feet. He looked again at Borkum. It was like a collar stud on a carpet. There were searchlights ahead, so the real coastline couldn’t be far away. That might be worth filming. He fetched the camera from his bag, checked that it was loaded, no hairs in the lens, all correct, and by the time he got back to the cockpit the airplane was vibrating brutally. It was like being inside a bass drum on a bandstand.

  He waited. Maybe this would pass. It got worse. He put the camera to his eye and everything was a fine blur. The thin sticks of searchlights were fat and fuzzy. He put the camera down and plugged in his intercom. “Why is everything shaking?” he asked.

  “I de-synchronized the engines,” Silk said. “They’re not making the same revs. Not speaking the same language.”

  “It buggers up Jerry’s sound locators,” Mallaby said.

  “De-synch is good for your health,” Silk said.

  “It’s shaking the fillings out of my teeth,” Rollo said. “I can’t hold the camera still.”

  “Let it shake, then,” Mallaby said. “Shoot the truth.”

  Was that a joke? Rollo couldn’t tell. Both pilots were wearing their goggles, so he couldn’t even see their eyes. He gave Kate a thumbs-down. By now Dog was over the mainland and searchlights were swinging briskly, prodding corners of the sky, standing still as if they had lost interest, then suddenly hunting again. The flak was colorful, more like festival celebrations than high explosive. Lights pulsed from the ground, red and yellow, some green; they were in no hurry until their final rush. Dog was above much of this, but plenty of star-shaped explosions reached her level. One of them burst alongside, maybe a hundred yards away, and Dog caught the fringe of the blast and lurched. Silk lost height and swung onto a new course. Rollo got a glimpse of more shellbursts, high up where they would have been. Then Dog was through the coastal belt. Silk pushed up his goggles, and synchronized the engines. They ran as smoothly as sewing machines. Rollo stopped grinding his teeth. But now he could see nothing but night: nothing worth filming.

  Kate tapped him on the shoulder and led him back to the nav position. They plugged in and she pointed at Woodman’s map of northern Germany. “Worth a few feet of film?” she said. The map was marked with patches of red, and Woodman had plotted a twisting course to avoid them.

  “Defended areas,” Woodman said. “Emden, Oldenburg, Bremen, Osnabruck, and a few Luftwaffe fields here and there. Not a good idea to fly straight to Hanover.”

  “Can you say something about that to the pilot?”

  “He knows already.”

  “Well, tell him anyway.”

  Rollo filmed the navigator, full figure, hard at work; then head and shoulders, turning his intercom switch, saying: “Hello, skip. We’d better fly a zigzag course, to miss the places where we know Jerry’s got a lot of flak batteries and searchlights.”

  “What a bloody boring idea,” Silk said. “I think I’ll go down and strafe a few hospitals.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kate told Woodman. “We can edit that out.”

  “Now point at the map,” Rollo said. “Follow the zigzag with your finger. Slowly.” He filmed the navigator’s hand in close-up.

  Another little sequence in the can.

  Every few minutes, Woodman gave Silk a change of course. Rollo went to the cockpit a couple of times. He saw searchlights in the far distance and what might have been flak twinkling, but he knew it would be a waste of film. A lot of cloud was building up, white as cauliflower in the moonlight. The flak would look like stars and the searchlights would look like cracks in somebody’s blackout. He went back to the bed. His feet were cold and he was afraid to stamp them. The cookie was only inches beneath his boots.

  He could feel this opportunity slipping away from him. No chance to film the enemy coast, or the belt of lights and guns behind it. Unable to film the all-important faces of t
he crew. Not allowed in the gun turrets. What was left? Flak over Hanover: presumably that would be highly filmable, unless Silk desynchronized again. As for the climax, dropping the cookie, he suddenly realized he wouldn’t see it leave Dog, wouldn’t see it fall, might not see it explode if a wing obscured his view. Then what? A long trudge home, also in blackness. Rollo felt cramp in his left calf. His parachute harness was too tight in the crotch. The awful truth came to him: bomber ops were not necessarily exciting. They were endlessly threatening and frightening and difficult, but the drama was all in the danger and the danger was hidden by the night. You had to fly on ops to know the fear of sudden death, and he couldn’t film fear. With everyone wearing oxygen masks, he couldn’t even film the look of fear. He’d drawn a double blank. That was when Chubb, in the rear turret, said: “Fighter behind.”

  Silk said, “Which side?”

  “Port quarter, a thousand feet below. Five hundred yards away. He’s climbing, in and out of cloud, skip.”

  “Wireless op to the astrodome,” Silk said. “Search starboard, Mac”

  “On my way, skip.”

  Silence for half a minute. Silk had dropped the left wing a bit to give the rear gunner a better view. “Lost him, skip,” Chubb said, and immediately shouted, “Fighter! Turn starboard!” but before Silk could swing the Wellington, Chubb was firing and the harsh chatter of his guns cut through the engine-roar. Then nothing. Rollo stood and cursed. Here was battle, behind closed doors. “He’s buggered off, skip,” Chubb said. “Dived away. I scared him.”

  “Where there’s one, there’s two,” Silk said. “Keep searching to starboard, Mac”

  Campbell was standing on a box, with his head in the astrodome, just like the dome on top of the flare-path caravan. All it needs is a tiny spotlight on his face, Rollo thought. Make a hell of a shot. Also a hell of a target. Another example of Blazer’s Law of Bomber Ops. If it’s worth filming, you can’t see it.

  “Some bastard’s out there, skip,” Campbell said. “Maybe one of ours, maybe not. He’s following us. Starboard quarter.”

  “Don’t like it,” Silk said. “We’ll run away and hide.”

  He turned toward a sprawling, top-heavy cloudbank. He put the nose down a touch, opened the throttles an inch, and drove into a bleak and gloomy fog. Now he was flying on instruments alone. He sent Campbell back to his radio.

  Woodman kept feeding course adjustments. “Twenty-five minutes to target,” he said. Silk thanked him. Kate, lying on the bed and dreaming of hot soup, was impressed by everybody’s calmness. They were as matter-of-fact as if they were delivering coal in Camberwell. Rollo stood and watched the nav draw neat lines and make tidy calculations. There was nothing else to watch. The floor suddenly slanted and he fell to his knees. Kate rolled off the bed. Woodman was grabbing his pencils and maps. In the cockpit, Silk and Mallaby were flung against their straps as the Wimpy plunged into a hole, hit bottom and was kicked sideways. Silk labored and won back some control but she still kept bouncing and plunging. They knew what was wrong. Cumulo-nimbus cloud was full of tortured air. The Met man had predicted a risk of electrical storms over the North Sea. He’d got the risk right but the place wrong: the storms were still over Germany. Lightning flashes were making the cloud bright. The electrical discharge swamped Dog from end to end and filled her with a pale glow. This was St. Elmo’s Fire, and the crew had experienced it before, but never so intensely. A blue flame danced from every external point. The propellers were brilliant with multicolored light; they spun like Catherine wheels. The gunners were looking at flames a yard long sparking between their sights. In the cockpit the instruments were drunk and incapable. That was when lightning struck Dog.

  Kate, flat on the floor, was convinced the bang and the flash had broken the Wimpy in half. But when she could see again, Dog was still in one piece, still being bucked and kicked by the cu-nim. Parts of the radio were red-hot and Campbell was beating out a small fire. Just when Rollo’s brain told him he should be filming this, the flow of St. Elmo’s Fire vanished. Silk had flown the bomber out of cloud and into clean air.

  He tried to do an intercom check and nobody answered. The intercom was dead. He sent Mallaby to make a tour of Dog. He came back and said everyone was intact. Bruised and scraped, but intact.

  Two problems.

  The compass was spinning, reversing, chasing its tail. It needed time to recover its wits. And the port engine was surging. Its revs climbed and fell, climbed and fell. The lopsided pull sent Dog wandering about the sky. Silk kept her out of cloud and nursed the engines back to health and harmony. Recovery took many minutes, and Dog lost much height. In the end she was down to six thousand feet, and Silk was lost.

  He got unstrapped and slid out of his seat and let Mallaby take the controls. Silk clambered over the spar and had a shouted conference with the navigator. They were off oxygen, so talk was easier. Woodman had tried to keep track of all the twists and turns, but without a compass it was an impossible task. What he needed was a good pinpoint. He went forward. Silk peered at the smoking radio and had a few words with Campbell. Then he spoke to Rollo and Kate.

  “Awfully dull, isn’t it?” he bawled. “You should have brought a book.”

  Rollo felt useless. He had to do something, so he touched the goggles on Silk’s forehead. “Why wear these?”

  “In case we get a brick through the window. Shocking draft.” He went back to his office.

  Rollo tried to picture a pilot sitting in the hurricane blast that would rage through a smashed windscreen. His imagination was too good, and he turned it off. The nav hadn’t returned. Rollo could see he wasn’t in the cockpit. It didn’t take long to work out that Woodman must be in the bomb-aimer’s position. No flak, no searchlights, so Dog wasn’t over the target. Woodman was looking for it. The nav was peering through the window, trying to find Hanover. Silk was stooging around Germany, totally lost, and what’s more the gunners couldn’t call him if they saw a fighter, because the intercom was kaput. Rollo was about to tell all this to Kate when he saw that she was being sick into her paint tin. He decided that she didn’t need to know. He gave her his handkerchief, to wipe her face.

  9

  The compass settled down and behaved itself. Woodman found a pinpoint. He scrambled up the tunnel from the bomb-aimer’s position and handed Silk a piece of paper with one word on it: Hamelin. Silk shouted, “Pied Piper?” Woodman lip-read and nodded. Mallaby circled, losing height until they were under the lowest cloud. By then Woodman had scribbled:

  Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,

  By famous Hanover city;

  The river Weser, deep and wide,

  Washes its walls on the southern side.

  Robert Browning, poet.

  Silk read it and smiled. They were looking at a town that fitted the description perfectly. A pair of heavy machine guns started pumping tracer, nowhere near Dog, just red stitches on black cloth. Small garrison in Hamelin, probably. Nothing worth defending. All the rats had gone.

  After that it was simple. Hamelin was southwest of Hanover. Precise navigation wasn’t necessary. Soon the flicker of searchlight beams, gun flashes, bomb bursts and fires guided Dog to the target. Mallaby had coaxed her up to eight thousand. That was her limit. Silk took over the controls and tried to bounce her higher, diving a little and then climbing on full power. It usually worked. Not tonight. Not with this great pig of a cookie in her belly, and the port engine not pulling its weight. High above, Wimpys and Hampdens were unloading bombs. If one incendiary fell out of the night and hit a wing, it might burn a hole so big that even a Wimpy couldn’t survive. Best not to think about that. Other trouble was nearer to hand.

  Eight thousand was well within the range of light flak. The Hanover searchlights were slicing up the sky. Clouds reflected their beams and turned parts of the night to twilight. Everywhere, tracer crisscrossed in a silent stutter of red and yellow or blue and green. Many shellbursts seemed as harmless as cracker jacks, unless the bur
st came close enough to create a jagged flash that leaped out of nowhere like an ambush. If you could smell its peppery stink, it was very close. If you could hear the rattle of hot shrapnel on the bomber, it was too close.

  Silk’s first reaction when they reached Hanover was that he’d never seen flak so thick and nobody could get through it untouched. Rollo’s first reaction was sheer glee. He filmed everything. The light was excellent. Tracer left the ground so slowly that he had time to select it, focus on it, follow it all the way to its final rush of brilliance past the Wimpy. He filmed the lights on the ground: the blink of flak batteries, the splash of bombs exploding, the ragged shape of burning buildings. This was the pay-off. This made the whole trip worthwhile. It was only when he stopped to reload that he realized the sound was all wrong. There was no sound. All this mayhem was drowned out by the roar of the engines. Every bang was mute. That was no good. He told himself: Dub in bangs.

  Woodman was a good bomb-aimer, but without intercom he was helpless, he couldn’t tell his pilot to go left or right or hold steady. He had thrown the switches that gave control of the bombload to the pilot, and now he stood in the cockpit, leaning over Silk’s shoulder, and together they tried to find the railway station. There was some cloud, and a lot of smoke. Maybe the AP was under the smoke. Maybe it didn’t exist any more. He heard an old familiar sound, a bok-bok, something like two halves of a coconut knocking together: heavy flak, not far off. Silk weaved, changed direction, couldn’t go up so he went down, anything to baffle the gunners. But lower was not safer. Soon there were more bok-boks. A searchlight flicked their wingtip and kept going. A poor sodding Hampden was not so lucky. It was pinned in a cone, and kept twisting and writhing but the lights tracked every dive, every turn, while the heavy flak blew holes in the cone and, eventually, in the Hampden.

  In the end, Silk dumped the bloody bomb. Smoke was getting worse, some from fires, some perhaps from German smoke generators. He looked at Woodman, and Woodman shrugged. Silk opened the bomb doors. The slipstream hit them and Dog vibrated. Rollo stopped filming. Silk leaned forward and pressed the bomb-release button, and the bomber gave a little leap of relief. Forget the flash, forget the photograph. Shut the bomb doors, open the throttles and piss off out of this madhouse.