Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  The cookie didn’t whistle, Rollo thought. That won’t do. Bombs always whistle in the movies. Dub it in later.

  The bomb doors haven’t shut, Silk thought. Dog was still vibrating in the old familiar way. This was turning into a dodgy op. He turned the bomb-door handle again. And again. No joy.

  It knocked a good twenty miles an hour off the airspeed. And of course Dog wouldn’t climb an inch with those doors dragging against the slipstream.

  Silk cruised slowly over Hanover, while the flak never slackened. At times like this he took encouragement from the bluebottle in the rainstorm. Logically, it should get knocked to the ground. Yet it flew on. How? Because there was always more space between the raindrops. The trick was to find the space. A silly thought. But it took his mind off the storm of high explosive.

  He flew straight. If he weaved, it would only take longer to escape. Maybe the German gunners couldn’t believe that any RAF pilot would be so stupid as to fly so low, so slow, so straight; maybe it spoiled their aim. Or maybe the gods of war were tired of D-Dog. Maybe they’d gone off to pull the wings from some other butterfly. Because, amazingly, things got better. Silk left the flak and the searchlights behind him; and Campbell, with nothing to do since his radio went up in flames, found the fault in the intercom. The headphones came alive. Woodman went back to his nav table and worked on a zigzag route to the coast. “New course, skipper,” he said. “Two eight five. That puts us west of the Luftwaffe base at Sulingen.”

  “Two eight five. Is that based on the predicted winds?”

  “Yes. They were pretty accurate over the North Sea. Spot-on, in fact.”

  “The electrical storms are in the wrong place, Woody. Moving north, perhaps, but still over Germany. Predicted winds could be up the creek.”

  “They could.” Woodman tidied up the numbers in his latest calculation, lengthening the vertical line of a 4, improving the tail of a 3. “Any suggestions?”

  “A pinpoint would be nice. Chubby, Badge: find a nice pinpoint for the nav and he’ll buy you a drink.”

  Rollo sat on the bed, beside Kate. Now that the cookie had been dropped and the flak had failed to kill them, he felt a huge sense of anticlimax. The raid had been successful, or at least he supposed so, but what visible difference had it made? For the purposes of his film, none. Maybe the cookie hadn’t exploded. Plenty of dud bombs fell on London. And the job wasn’t finished, there was still the long grind home over the North Sea. He felt useless, physically drained yet mentally dissatisfied. How did these men do it? Hanover wasn’t even a very long trip. Imagine when Berlin was the target. Berlin was almost in Poland, for God’s sake. Thirty ops made a tour, so they said. Nobody should be made to do this thirty times. Yet they were all volunteers. Even so, thirty ops … Thirty chances to get the chop. Why didn’t it drive them mad? Maybe it did, some of them. Maybe anyone who went crackers got shunted off the base before he could infect the rest. Rollo shuddered, partly at the idea, partly from the aching cold, partly because the entire bloody Wimpy was shuddering.

  10

  Nothing much happened for half an hour. Kate dozed. Rollo couldn’t rest, he was too cold to feel his feet, his brain was swamped by engine roar, he had no sense of time and not enough energy to look at his watch, and anxiety nagged him. The shots of Hanover were good but they didn’t add up to a film, and he couldn’t see where the rest was coming from.

  Silk was not unhappy. He never allowed himself to be happy; that would have interfered with his cockpit routine. But Dog’s fuel tanks were lighter and she was moving faster. Not enough to escape a night fighter, and that was still a risk. He might have a chance to dodge into some clouds, but they were ugly monsters and if one turned out to be cu-nim, Dog with her bomb doors hanging down might not come out the other side.

  Then flak began to break out like a skin disease. No searchlights, just flak. Someone down there was good at his job. “Wireless op, fire off flares,” Silk ordered. “Red and yellow.” Campbell moved fast. Within seconds he had the pistol in the flare chute. Red and yellow signals arced into the night.

  The flak stopped. Silk counted to twenty. Still no flak. “And for my next trick,” he said.

  Rollo pressed his intercom switch. “What was all that about?”

  “Trick of the trade. Red and yellow flares used to be the Luftwaffe distress signal. Mind you, it doesn’t always work.”

  It didn’t work ten minutes later. Woodman estimated they were near the German coast, and the sudden stabs of searchlights and ripples of flak and colored feelers of tracer suggested he was right. When the distress signal had no effect, Silk told the gunners to fire at the searchlights, and Rollo got some good shots of tracer streaking down from the front guns. Badger claimed to hit a searchlight. It certainly went out. He said, “Bull’s-eye!” Silk said something, but nobody heard him. A shell exploded underneath Dog and the blast hurled the Wellington up and over, until she was standing on a wingtip. Not for long. She was still flying but as she fell, her nose was too high. She stalled and, rather wearily, began to spin.

  Silk did what his instructors had told him, years ago: close the throttles, centralize the stick, apply full rudder opposite to the spin, pause, then push the stick forward. The kite will dive and the spin will stop. Total failure. Maybe the controls had been hit. Maybe Wimpys were different. Meanwhile Dog kept rotating, rather ponderously, as if looking for a place to lie down. And kept falling. Several searchlights found her. Now the inside of the fuselage was painted a fierce silver-white. The camera team, the nav, the op, all covered their eyes. Silk and Mallaby were dazzled. Badger and Chubb were still firing. German bullets were punching holes in the fabric. It was a toss-up whether Dog crashed before the flak got her. Silk remembered Langham and the stabilized yaw.

  He reached blindly for the throttles, shut the upper engine and opened the lower engine to maximum revs, combat limit, full boost, and commended his soul to Almighty God. The lower engine took command. The upper wing, its engine dragging instead of driving, dropped. The spin was killed. Dog lifted her tail and dived.

  That was what Silk believed happened. But what did Silk know? He couldn’t see, he was flying by memory, by instinct, by feel. Maybe another shellburst had kicked the Wimpy out of its spin. Who can tell? Who cares? He harmonized the engines and eased the control column back until long experience told him the aircraft should be more or less level.

  One advantage of being dazzled was that he couldn’t see how bad the flak was. By the time he’d got his sight back, the searchlights were losing him. Soon the flak was behind Dog, too.

  “New course, skip,” the nav said. “Steer three three zero.”

  Silk was surprised to hear from him. He had taken it for granted that half the crew were dead. He made an intercom check and everyone answered except Campbell, the wireless op. “He’s got a bit of steel in the backside,” Woodman reported. “Shell splinter, I expect. He’s on the bed.”

  Mallaby left the cockpit to check how badly Campbell was hurt, and found him face-down. Rollo was holding a flashlight. Kate had the first-aid kit and she was scissoring through Campbell’s clothing. Already her hands were slippery with blood. “You’ve done this before,” Mallaby said.

  “In the Blitz,” Rollo said. “We helped out, sometimes.”

  Campbell’s right buttock had a long, deep cut. Blood was pulsing out of it. She ripped open a dressing and plugged the wound. “Press the edges together,” she told Mallaby. She cut strips of adhesive tape, wiped most of the blood off the buttock, and taped the wound shut. She covered it with a bigger dressing and taped that too. “Does it hurt much?” she asked Campbell.

  He nodded once, slowly. His face had no color and his eyes were almost closed. She found the morphine and whacked it into his thigh. “Done,” she said. They covered him with blankets, put his oxygen mask in place, made sure he was breathing steadily.

  Mallaby went back to the cockpit. “He’ll live,” he said.

  “Any serious da
mage to the kite?”

  “None that I could see, but I couldn’t see much. This torch is on its last legs. It’s black as your hat down the fuselage.”

  “Tough old bird, the Wimpy.”

  The second crossing of the North Sea was far worse than the first. Flak damage let the slipstream penetrate the fuselage and it bumped its icy blast into every corner. Campbell shivered, even though he seemed asleep. Kate lay alongside him, a barrier against the wind. Rollo sat on the floor. All his joints ached, except his feet. He had no sensation below the ankles. This must be what hell’s waiting room is like, he thought. Nothing to do and total freezing blackness to do it in. His brain was so dull that he altogether forgot the flasks of coffee, until the flashlight roused him and Woodman gave him a steaming mug. The coffee trickled down his gullet and promised better times ahead. Five minutes later his stomach felt as cold as stone again. He remembered the Benzedrine. He swallowed one tablet. It did nothing for his stomach. His feet were still numb.

  Silk reckoned they were about halfway across the sea, when the compass developed a nervous tic. “Look,” he said to Mallaby. “I think it’s trying to tell us something.”

  The tic became a wild flutter. “Looks like an earthquake, skip,” Mallaby said. “Either that or it’s desperate for a pee.”

  The navigator’s master compass was just as bad. “Forget it,” Silk said. “The cloud’s not bad. I can see the North Star now and then. We can’t miss England.” Vibration from the bomb doors put a tremor in his voice that made him sound frail and elderly. But he was right. Silk steered by the North Star and forty minutes later, Badger saw the coast ahead. “Looks like Harwich, skip,” he said. “Bloody great estuary. Yes, Harwich. And there’s Felixstowe.”

  “Defended area. Lots of balloons and bad-tempered sailors.” Silk swung the Wimpy to the right and flew parallel to the coast, losing height all the time.

  “Orfordness coming up, skip.” Badger’s voice still shook with the vibration, but now it had the confidence of homecoming. “Lighthouse two miles ahead.”

  “You should see this, Rollo,” Silk said. “Get it on film. 409 returns in glory. How we navigate to beat the band.”

  Rollo got his camera and went forward. His brain was working briskly. All his senses were alert and alive. Benzedrine was doing its stuff.

  “We turn left at the lighthouse,” Silk said. “Clever, eh?”

  “Too dark for me, I’m afraid.”

  “What a shame.” Silk wheeled Dog around the lighthouse and headed inland. “Now, then. In a moment you’ll see the big chimney of the cement factory.” Dog was down to six hundred feet and Rollo felt warmer. “There it is. Smell the smoke? I’d know it anywhere. Here we go … Over the chimney and dead ahead is the sugar beet factory in Bury St. Edmunds. One of my favorite landmarks. Or pinpoints, to be correct. Another delicious smell.” He chatted easily, pointing out church towers and windmills, scarcely visible in the dark, as Suffolk raced beneath. “At the sugar beet factory we find the railway, which forks left for Newmarket.” Silk flew alongside the line. “Nice shiny rails,” he said. “Who needs maps? Now, watch out for the lamps on the railway signals. At the third set of lamps we turn sharp left, and Coney Garth is just beyond a pub called the Lamb and Flag. You can’t miss it.”

  “Brilliant,” Rollo said. “Superb.”

  “Thanks. You’d better go to your landing position now.”

  Rollo sat with his back to the main spar. Kate and Woodman sat beside him. Campbell was strapped to the bed, mask off, face down. The note of the engines changed subtly as Silk entered the landing circuit. That was when Rollo realized that he was not going to die tonight. He had begun to suspect it when he drank the coffee. Benzedrine confirmed it. Now he could relax and enjoy survival.

  The nearer Dog got to landing, the less Rollo saw himself as a passenger, mere civilian baggage, and the more he became his true self: a cameraman, a guy who shot movies. This movie was approaching its happy ending. Campbell was wounded, nothing serious, enough to remind the audience that war had its price, just as Rollo had scripted it. Soon this Wimpy would taxi to a halt, the crew would climb down from the nose, weary but triumphant in the usual understated RAF way, and Campbell would be stretchered to a waiting ambulance. He might give a thumbs-up. At the very least he would smile bravely. It would be a hell of a scene. An absolutely crucial, rewarding, clinching moment. Rollo knew he had to have it. Otherwise, everything else was so much preparation without conclusion.

  He would have to work fast. No chance of rehearsal. Right first time, or never. But Rollo was good at this, he’d grabbed moments of drama just like it, all through the Blitz. The kind of thing that made other cameramen ask, “Jesus, Rollo, how the hell did you do that?” The kind of shot that got your name in books on the history of the cinema. The big problem was how to leave the airplane before the others did. That was the trick.

  There would be lights out there, the headlights of the crew truck, and an ambulance, maybe more. They would have to be aimed at the nose hatch. What about sound? He abandoned sound. Dub in any dialogue later. Maybe cover everything with music. He didn’t need Kate for this, he could move faster alone.

  But how to get out before the others? The cockpit area would be blocked by crew members. Rollo stared at the blackness of the fuselage and saw the answer: the rear gunner’s turret. It had a quick exit. When it was swung to the right, it exposed a door on the left. That was how the gunner baled out. Rollo had seen it in daylight when the rear turret was being tested. He wasn’t sure of the details but he knew the idea was right. Tell Chubby to rotate his turret. When Dog stopped, Rollo would dive out through that hole.

  As soon as he felt the double bump of Dog’s wheels hitting the flare-path, he took the torch from Woodman’s hands and stood up. Kate shouted. He set off down the fuselage, onto the catwalk that led to the rear turret. The batteries were weak, the beam was dim, and the bulb had worked itself loose. He had to keep shaking the torch to revive it, but even with a healthy torch he was so eager that he probably wouldn’t have seen the hole that flak had blown in the floor. One leg plunged into it and dragged down the rest of his body. The last image his eyes saw was the blurred gleam of flare-path lamps, before his head struck the grass at seventy miles an hour. The impact broke his neck. The tail wheel smashed into his body. Silk felt the small jolt and thought he’d hit a badger, or maybe a big fox. They had been known to wander across the airfield at night.

  When he taxied to his place at dispersal, and he completed the after-landing routine, and he led the others down the short wooden ladder from the nose hatch, he asked Kate where Rollo was. She said she assumed he was in the rear turret, filming Chubb by the light of the torch; or something. Already, Dog’s groundcrew had found the hole in the fuselage floor. Soon, they saw strips of flying clothing wrapped around the tail-wheel unit, and that started the search.

  11

  The crew followed their familiar routine. Climbed into the truck, drove to interrogation. Clumped into the room and blinked at the light. Drank the coffee with the shot of rum in it. Nobody said anything about Rollo. They were very tired, very glad to be home and alive, and besides, what was there to say? It had been such a freak way to die, you couldn’t really blame the war, it was more like a road accident. Getting the chop in the air over Germany was something everyone was prepared for, even if they never talked about it. Poor old Mac Campbell’s wound wasn’t glorious, but at least his rear end did battle with a chunk of Jerry flak, and now he was in Sick Quarters getting stitched up. Tomorrow they’d all go and visit him and make a lot of bad jokes. But Rollo was in the station mortuary. Nobody would visit him. By all reports, he looked a mess.

  Bins asked the usual questions, and Silk let the rest of the crew answer them. Bins wrote fast: good pinpoint at Borkum, night fighter attack, evasion, cu-nim, electrical storm, compass trouble, intercom failed, pinpoint Hamelin, found Hanover. Dog wouldn’t climb, thick smoke over target, estimated the AP, bom
bed it, bomb doors failed to retract. Campbell mended the intercom, compass mended itself. Reached the coastal belt, got blown ass over teakettle by a near-miss, flew home somehow, God knew how.

  “The Wimpy knows how,” Mallaby said. “Tough old kite.”

  “And you definitely bombed the target,” Bins said.

  “Cookie and incendiaries,” Woodman said. “Definitely.”

  “We hit it right on the nose,” Chubb said. “Lovely grub.”

  “Well done. Off to your bacon and eggs, chaps.”

  “Damned good show,” the group captain said.

  They left. Silk remained. He felt grimy, and the rum had not killed the rubbery taste of his oxygen mask. There was a high buzzing in his ears that changed pitch without warning, and then went back to the old note. It was caused by hours of the howl of the propeller tips. None of this was new; it happened after every op. He stayed because the Wingco was there, straddling a chair, chewing on a cold pipe; and Silk felt that someone should say something about Rollo Blazer. He couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t stupidly obvious.

  “Hanover took a pasting,” Rafferty said. “Group are very pleased.”

  “I don’t suppose Crown Films will be,” Silk said.

  “Sod ‘em,” Duff said. “What did they expect?”

  “Not our fault,” Bins said. “Bound to be an inquiry, though.”

  “Let ’em piss in their hats,” Duff said. “They knew ops were dangerous. That’s why they came here. Inquiry be buggered.”

  “You sound as if you enjoyed your trip,” Silk said. “Sir.”