by Ray Ollis
On they droned, south-east. The world was rugged, steep and still: a petrified ocean with gigantic waves of stone struck motionless, their white tops frozen into foam-flecked ice.
Navigation over such country would have been impossible had there not been well-mapped lakes here and there between the peaks.
Bombing presented one unique problem. Although altimeters showed four miles above sea-level, the Lancasters were struggling to gain sufficient bombing height above land-level. It was a new sensation when the world itself reached up to threaten them in the sky. They hoped they would not run into flak. Although they had climbed over 20,000 feet from base, the guns up here would be less than a mile below them.
The target-markers went down, pinpointing impregnable Berchtesgaden skulking deep in the mountainside; and immediately the flak came at them, heavy guns from the valleys and light guns from the peaks, all staining the clear Alpine air.
Vincent had passed the target wind to the bomb aimer and was about to go forward to watch the attack when he saw a row of neat round holes advancing in a jagged line along M-Mother’s fuselage.
‘Dive starb’d, go!’ he yelled.
It must have been light flak, Vincent thought as M-Mother tumbled from the line of fire. He had not heard them, not had they shaken the aircraft.
M-Mother levelled out. ‘Was that you, nav?’ asked Jackal, surprised to hear evasive directions from inside the aircraft.
‘Yes, skip.’
‘Then what the hell was that for?’
‘Light flak. There were bullet holes appearing along the fuselage.’
‘I felt nothing.’
‘You would’ve if we hadn’t dived. They were moving straight towards you!’
Instantly the two men remembered the jinx of the table tennis title, but there was no time to think of it.
‘Overshoot the greens one second,’ said the master bomber. The bomb aimer gave a correction. Jackal turned M-Mother onto their last target.
‘Bombs gone!’
Immediately three shells hit the nose, the third only a foot in front of Jackal’s head.
Before the fourth could strike they had dived beneath the line of fire.
Then they both seemed to know what they could not believe. This fantastic thing was happening. The jinx was hunting Jackal.
He set M-Mother climbing again. Two evasive dives over this high ground did not leave them much sky to manoeuvre in when the next shells came. Jackal seemed to know that they would come, but when they did, there was no warning. Suddenly a draught gushed through the cockpit and the perspex roof above him shattered.
Vincent screamed; ‘Dive starb’d!’, but even as he called he saw Jackal jerk in his seat. A gash had appeared in his shirt behind the right shoulder-blade, and another at the side of his throat where the twenty millimetre shell came out.
Magnetic leapt across and grabbed the control column. But only Jackal could reach the rudder bars and, in pain, he was pressing with his right foot so that M-Mother skidded in wide, untidy turns.
At least they were not losing much height, but Magnetic was no pilot and these pointless turns were getting them nowhere.
It was about twenty seconds before Jackal recovered from the shock and was able to take an interest in the flying again. Straightening his feet on the rudder bars he went to take the controls.
As he moved his arms, however, a grimace of pain contorted his face and he waited another few seconds before taking the stick with his left hand only.
He took it off again almost immediately to switch on his microphone. Then he looked at Vincent with a twisted grin.
‘What course, Champ?’, he said.
Vincent tried to grin back. He leant forward and set the course on Jackal’s compass.
Magnetic had to act as Jackal’s other hand; to work the throttles, turn the trim, to push or pull whatever knob was needed.
Meanwhile Vincent had ripped Jackal’s shirt from his shattered shoulder and was trying to patch the wounds with first-aid dressings. The shell had gouged an inch-wide gash above Jackal’s shoulder-blade, then entered the shoulder itself and tore its way up through bone and flesh.
Vincent recognised arterial blood but could not staunch the flow which welled up from Jackal’s throat. He pressed two pads into the wound and bound them tightly, but he had scarcely finished before ugly red patches appeared and grew again.
The colour left Jackal’s face and, with an undramatic little grunt, he slumped back.
Magnetic grabbed the controls again and M-Mother renewed her wavering, sliding course.
Vincent studied the wound again, painlessly now, and by binding the torn artery tightly against a bone he reduced the bleeding considerably. He put another dressing on the wound, then forced some hot coffee through Jackal’s lips.
Jackal opened his eyes.
‘Steady, skipper,’ said Vincent. ‘You’re losing blood. You’ll have to land as soon as we see somewhere to get her down.’
‘Can’t land on this mountaintop,’ said Jackal thickly.
‘Try to hold out till we find somewhere.’
Jackal relapsed into unconsciousness, but his feet remained more or less steady on the rudder bars whilst Magnetic held the controls as steady as he could. To try to change places with only a few thousand feet between them and the Alps was unthinkable.
Another sip of coffee brought Jackal round again. He blinked through half-closed eyes. Then painfully he reached forward and took the controls.
Vincent put the new course out of the Alps on Jackal’s compass and sluggishly they turned north. Vincent noticed that they were in a shallow dive. He pointed to the artificial horizon on Jackal’s panel.
Jackal nodded painfully but still he did not lift M-Mother level. Vincent watched more with compassion than with fear while Jackal struggled against his weakness to hold M-Mother in the air.
It was obvious that Jackal’s failing strength would soon be gone completely. They had already been forced off course to miss a mountaintop, and now they flew along a valley with great cliffs towering around.
Twice Jackal actually dropped the control column, so Magnetic took his hand and held it on the stick. Jackal looked up at him and nodded slowly; he tried to speak but no sound came.
Then he beckoned Vincent close. ‘Find—place to land,’ he whispered. ‘Must—land—now.’
Vincent looked round them. This country was impossible.
‘There’s nothing yet, skip. Try to hold on.’
‘Must—land now,’ slurred Jackal.
‘Hold on, skip, hold on.’
‘Must—land …’
‘Hold on.’
‘… now.’
Magnetic touched Vincent’s shoulder and pointed forward. The valley they were following turned sharp right. At first Vincent thought Magnetic pointed it out as a warning, in fear that Jackal would not see it or could not negotiate it. But then Vincent saw the smoke.
Smoke! A wispy ribbon of blue smoke, almost too slight to see as they rushed towards it, was curling up from around the corner. Smoke meant a fire, perhaps a house. That might mean a field or a road. Somewhere to make a forced landing.
‘Skipper, look! Some smoke! Turn starboard, slowly now. Then ready to turn pretty hard and put her down if there’s space.’
Vincent turned to Magnetic. ‘Throttle-back and flaps,’ he said.
But Jackal was bringing them around too slowly. The far cliff was rushing at them.
‘Starboard!’ said Vincent, softly but intensely. ‘Follow that smoke.’
‘Smoke?’, gurgled Jackal, faintly. ‘Can’t—see …’
Then he slumped over the controls. M-Mother nosed sharply down. Magnetic and Vincent both snatched at the stick to pull M-Mother back up and towards a tiny clearing with a shack and blue smoke now suddenly visible, but before they had steadied her, or before Jackal could recover for just a few more seconds, M-Mother jolted and shuddered, and there came a dreadful rending and tearing of meta
l.
‘Here’s a hopeful beginning to the peace,’ said Flight Lieutenant Lane, looking up from the newspaper and glancing at the faces around his met office.
‘Monty and Ike and the German Chief of Staff all agree that the war was won in the air. The German says so without reserve, Eisenhower says it was bombs that beat Germany and even admits that more than half of those victory-bringing bombs were dropped by the RAF.’
Montgomery is not so sweeping. He says; ‘The mighty weapon of Air Power enabled us to win a great victory quickly, and to win that victory with fewer casualties. The figures show 60,000 aircrew lost since D-Day, but he estimates that they saved a million troops.’9
‘Sixty thousand since D-Day? Or altogether?’ asked Paps.
Wendy answered her. ‘Yes, sixty thousand since D-Day. The bomber losses for the whole war were forty-two thousand planes and fifty-nine thousand aircrew.’
Her voice came flat and lifeless. ‘The first ones died over Wilhelmshaven the day the war started, and they were still dying over Berchtesgaden up to the day it ended.’10
Wendy went on staring at the paper. Then, suddenly and convulsively, she gripped it between her hands and buried her face in the crumpled sheets. Paps put a reassuring arm around Wendy’s shoulder.
‘They might show up yet,’ she said.
‘From country like that?’ Wendy spoke into the paper and her question ended with a tiny sob she could not stifle.
‘Stranger things have happened. You never know.’
‘Barbara knew. She drove into a tree and ended it quickly. The fifth wife to kill herself on this squadron. They all knew. None of their men came back.’
She was crying now. For the first time in the days since Vincent had gone missing she had really broken down. Paps did not try to say any more, just tried to comfort her silently.
There was a quick knock on the door and Squadron Leader Gaffer hurried in. He was talking before he looked around. ‘How is visibility at Cottesmore?’ he asked.
Then he noticed Wendy with Paps kneeling beside her. Gaffer was embarrassed, and wanted not to intrude, but his question was important.
‘I’ve just slipped down from control,’ he explained. ‘An American Dakota has just landed to drop survivors and they want to return to Cottesmore. But there’s fog around. Will they be able to get in?’
Wendy had heard only one word, but it was Paps who spoke it.
‘Survivors?’
‘Yes, seven bods they picked up on the Continent.’
‘Seven? One missing! Do you know whose crew it is?’
‘Why only seven?’ asked Wendy, hardly daring to come out of her daze. ‘Who is missing?’
‘I don’t know who they are or who is missing. But I do know there’s a Dakota waiting on my runway for a visibility report,’ he almost shouted. ‘Is there fog at Cottesmore?’
Paps rushed to the map. ‘No!’, she said. ‘It’s fine. It’s ten-tenths sunshine. It will be just wonderful.’
She turned to Wendy as Gaffer went grumbling away. ‘I wonder … can it be them?’
‘I wonder …’
‘It must be. Is there anybody else it could be? It must be them.’
‘And I look a wreck!’
There was a knock and a voice outside the door said; ‘May we come in?’, and at the sound of it their hearts stopped beating.
The door opened and Vincent stood there.
‘Vincent!’ cried Paps, and went to rush towards him.
‘One moment, dear,’ said Wendy, holding Paps back. ‘My turn.’
And she turned towards the door and said, ‘Oh, Vincent,’ very softly.
It was many minutes before they could tell their story. Even the high emotions at their return and the fact that it had happened days before could not hide the amazement they still felt at their escape.
‘It was quite impossible country,’ they explained. ‘And then we saw this smoke. Jackal was almost done but we made the corner and there was this unbelievable clearing with a tiny hut in it. We actually clipped a crag and ripped our bomb bays out, but Jackal revived at the noise and set her down, rough but safe. Our position had seemed impossible, and yet we landed, almost—miraculously.
Then, walking towards us from the hut came a man, a young man with a beard, and when we looked we all swore it was Johnnie Muller.’
‘Johnnie! Alive?’
‘But it wasn’t Johnnie. Rather, I don’t think it was Johnnie. We rushed up to him but he didn’t know us. He spoke very little English. When we said we knew him and that he had flown with us, he said he had been in the Alps for as long as he cared to remember.’
‘But was it Johnnie?’
‘I would swear it was. But it couldn’t be. However, we hadn’t time to discuss it because Jackal was hurt so badly. We made a stretcher, and this hermit chap gave him some sort of medicine and that seemed to help. Then he led us to a village and sent us on alone. He would not come with us. He said that nobody knew he was there and that he was happier alone. I couldn’t help feeling—hoping—it was Johnnie.’
‘Poor little Johnnie,’ Wendy said. Then, seeing questioning eyes upon her, she added, ‘And how about the Jackal?’
‘We don’t know. The village was German. We were taken prisoner and he was sent to hospital. Johnnie, er, that is, the hermit, had said his only hope was to get to hospital quickly. So we just don’t know.’
Vincent shook his head. ‘He was a strange chap; mysterious and yet—simple.’
‘But was it Johnnie?’
‘I could have sworn … And yet, had Johnnie time to grow a beard?’
Nobody answered.
Then Krink clapped his hands loudly and said, ‘He hadn’t time, really. So that’s solved. Now, snap out of it; we’ve got a party to fix.’
‘And don’t forget that we’re all expectant,’ added Magnetic.
‘Expectant?’ asked Paps, puzzled.
‘Sure!’, said Krink. ‘All ex-prisoners are on expectant mothers’ rations and that means bags of orange juice. So let’s get cracking. Who’s going to organise the gin?’11
Ray Ollis: A chequered career
Robert Brokenmouth
‘I think the ones who survived weren’t as lucky as the ones who were lost. The ones who survived had so much more to cope with.’—Margaret Ollis
‘… it should never be forgotten that in war everything is confused. At all levels it is hard to see clearly …’—John Grigg
Briefing
101 Nights is a play on Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights and ‘crusader knights’; and it tells the story of 101 Squadron, the first Radio Countermeasures (RCM) squadron, during WW2.
Ollis’s approach is very typical. Most Bomber Command servicemen felt they were embarked on a moral crusade; that they were ‘knights of the air’ was an obvious, if unspoken, subtext. Many who served in the Navy and Army felt much the same way.
we felt that the Germans were going to wreck this world of ours and that we would have to stop them … The war we were involved in was very clear cut. It really was a crusade.—Ross Munro (Canadian correspondent in World War II, Knightley)
The war waged by the Luftwaffe and Bomber Command was one of brutal, bludgeoning attrition, of constantly changing methodology, equipment and tactics. Initially determined not to target civilians, Britain’s bombing policy became primarily directed not by a carefully considered plan to win the war, but by a complex series of powerful, furious actions and reactions by the enemy. The uncertainty of target types further confused the circumstances and led to necessary, and unnecessary, evils. For it is evil we must discuss here. Not evil people, but ordinary people employed in an evil business.
‘Bob’ Braham, a night-fighter pilot in May 1940, explains:
the Luftwaffe … had got away with relatively light losses considering the terrible damage they had inflicted on the civilian population [of Britain]. It made me furiously angry to see our cities burning beneath me as I flew … through the
night sky, trying to stop what, at that time, seemed pointless murder of helpless people … I could never see why the Germans thought these murderous bomber raids would help them. The destruction merely hardened the hearts of the British people against them.
Britain may not have been a decent man’s paradise, but the British firmly believed themselves to be decent. Their colonies were considered profitable, semi-civilised places which, with tutelage, would in time govern themselves in a civilised way.
By contrast, the Germans led by Adolf Hitler, believed that they were better than the people in the countries around them; it was natural to conquer their neighbours and expand their country into other people’s territory.
The key difference between the British and the Germans in WW2 is intent. Initially the British attacked military targets, holding back from attacking German cities until their own cities were bombed with considerable damage and loss of civilian life. The Germans, however, were deliberately bombing civilians in 1937, before WW2 started.
But first, to 101 Nights (1957), a striking, vivid war novel published within ten years of the war. The publisher is prestigious; the House of Cassell included writers such as Winston Churchill, Quentin Reynolds, Sir William Slim and Sir John Slessor. Only a few night-bomber and German-pilot memoirs had so far appeared, with modest success; Cassell took a punt on 101 Nights.
Yet there is little to show for Ray Ollis’s life-long energy, drive and ambition, and we wonder why. Ray’s dustjacket photograph shows us a handsome, talented, confident man, whose ‘own experiences in the air with 101 Squadron are guarantee enough of its authenticity.’ We wonder how much of 101 Nights is true and how much fiction.
This is a delicate balancing act. Unnoticed, Ian Fleming slid his own experiences and opinions into his novels. Popular books described as non-fiction often tweak facts to ensure a better read. Paul Brickhill’s non-fiction thrillers could not be clogged with too much fiddly detail.
All writers try to present an essential truth to their readers, sometimes deciding that in setting down their experiences the factual gorge is too hazardous to negotiate without fiction’s bridge. In a ‘story’, truths may be told which would not have the same impact if told in an autobiographical account.