Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  I took in my new surroundings. Two beds with grey blankets folded into hospital corners, two standard issue wardrobes and a sink; apart from a threadbare rug by each bed, that was it. I noticed that one of the wardrobe had a piece of string across its door, held in place by two red wax seals. I knew what this meant, but felt compelled to take a closer look. Threaded onto the string was a luggage label bearing the words, “P/O Chapman, missing 18/12/43. Effects officer F/L Carter.” ‘Poor sod got the chop on his first op,’ said Harrison in a tone that suggested oriental levels of fatalism. ‘Don’t think he’d even unpacked properly. Still, means you’ll have the room to yourself for a bit.’

  We were too late for dinner but I accepted Harrison’s suggestion of a drink. In the ante room I flopped into a scruffy but comfortable leather armchair while Harrison rang the bell for the mess steward. Moments later she appeared. There was something familiar about her but before I even had time to think, she screamed, dropped her tray and ran back out, sobbing and howling. I looked to Harrison for an explanation but he just gave one of his diffident shrugs. ‘To be expected, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  He was starting to annoy me. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  Before he had chance to explain, the Mess Manager appeared with the tear-stained steward in tow. ‘It’s Tommy. I told you he wasn’t dead,’ she cried, running towards me and flinging her arms around my neck.

  The mess manager’s jaw fell open and he too went white. ‘My God, I see what you mean,’ he said, gawping at me as though I was a two-headed monster from a freak show. Harrison gently removed the young woman who by now had drenched me with tears and kisses.

  The mess manager composed himself at last. ‘I’m sorry about that, sir,’ he said. ‘LACW Morris is a little overwrought, but you do bear an uncanny resemblance to Sergeant Handley. He went missing last night. LACW Morris and Sergeant Handley were, um, close friends.’

  I now remembered where I had seen her before. It was the same young woman whose photo I had found in ‘Tommy’ Handley’s wallet during my escapade in the Saracen’s Head bar.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘I’m sorry if I gave you a fright. And I’m sorry to hear that Sergeant Handley and his crew are missing.’

  Chapter Twelve

  It was still dark when I awoke. For a moment I thought I was back at home in Lincoln, but then I remembered. I turned on the bedside light and swung myself into a sitting position. As I did so it was obvious something had changed. Limbs that usually took several minutes to get going and a right knee that didn’t want to bend suddenly felt light and supple. I felt ridiculously fit and well. I’d forgotten what it was like – I was twenty-four again and it felt wonderful.

  After a breakfast of fatty bacon and congealed dried egg, the morning was taken up with the administrative trivia of getting my ‘arrival chit’ signed by just about every section at RAF Leckonby. Once more it turned out to be a procedure that had been handed down intact to my time in the RAF.

  Having got the requisite numbers of stamps and signatures on the blue cardboard chit, I was then sent for an interview with the squadron commander, the squeaky-voiced Press-on Preston. I knew that Bomber Command normally sent entire crews to its squadrons so I was curious to know how I came to be “a spare bod” and to find out what had happened to the rest of my crew.

  Preston called me into his office. I stopped, stood to attention and saluted. His eyes came out on stalks and his mouth opened and closed like a goldfish. This was getting tedious. For a moment, Preston seemed to be struck dumb. When at last he did find his voice, he could barely speak for coughing and spluttering. ‘Christ, you gave me a fright,’ he said, dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief.

  I feigned surprise. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m not with you.’

  ‘Thought I’d seen a ghost. You look just like young Brownlow’s rear gunner, Sergeant Handley. Poor buggers got the chop the night before last. Direct hit from an 88mm flak shell over the Dutch coast. Still, at least they can’t have known much about it.’

  After he’d got over his shock, Preston invited me to sit down and started chatting about my training on the Lancaster, alluding to a ‘regrettable and entirely avoidable accident,’ so I could only assume that my entire crew had been killed while flying with someone else, presumably during our last few days on our Lancaster training course at the Heavy Conversion Unit. After a tedious and rambling homily about God, duty and The Empire, he handed me back to Harrison who led me down to the B-Flight office. On the way he filled in the details about the fate of my former crew.

  ‘It was the CO of the HCU,’ he explained. ‘You were off sick with Delhi belly and he pinched your crew for a fighter affiliation trip against a squadron of Hurricanes. Thought he’d show those fighter boys how a Lanc could be flown. Silly sod overdid it and ended up colliding with one of the Hurricanes. No survivors and two perfectly serviceable aircraft destroyed.’

  ‘So I’m the bastard stepchild,’ I replied.

  ‘You could put it that way.’

  ‘But what happened to the skipper of the crew I’m joining here?’

  ‘LMF,’ replied Harrison with the same air of indifference I’d heard him use the previous evening. ‘Lack of Moral Fibre. Did two trips, and on the second they had a dicey time with searchlights and flak near Cologne. Ordered his bomb aimer to drop way short of the target. Then, he nearly wrote the aircraft off on landing and went straight to see old Press-On to tell him he didn’t want to be a Lanc captain after all. He was off the station within the hour.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  ‘RAF Norton in Sheffield I believe,’ said Harrison, studying his fingernails. ‘It’s where they send the LMF types to sew mail bags before packing them off to join the infantry as privates. Bloody good riddance if you ask me. Oh, and by the way, don’t be surprised if everyone else thinks you’re ‘Tommy’ Handley come back to life.’ Then he paused. ‘Which in a way, I suppose you are,’ he said.

  At the B Flight Office, Harrison introduced me to my Flight Commander, Squadron Leader Mc Evoy, a dark and brooding Ulsterman, well over six feet tall. The DFC ribbon on his chest and the nervous tic in his right eye told me he was on his second tour of ops. He too did a double-take and told me I was the spitting image of ‘Tommy’ Handley. Once he’d recovered from the shock, his words of welcome were perfunctory and gave me the strong message that he did not expect our acquaintance to be a long one.

  Next came the moment I was dreading – an introduction to the six other members of my crew. What I knew and they didn’t was that all of them would die on the night of the 29th of March. They had just over three months left to live.

  Five of them were NCOs, the only officer was the navigator, a small, prematurely balding Pilot Officer called Hudson. He spoke quietly but with a strong West Midlands accent. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying…’

  I finished the sentence for him. ‘Yes, I know. I’m the ghost of Sergeant Handley come back to haunt you.’ If only you poor sods knew the half of it, I thought.

  ‘Well anyway, I hope you’re going to look after us,’ he said, offering me a limp, sweaty hand to shake.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I replied. It was a response as feeble as his handshake, but all I could manage faced with six condemned and frightened men.

  Next came Sergeant Boyle, the flight engineer, who looked barely out of his teens and sported a pencil moustache which made him look like a caricature spiv. He proudly told me that he’d been a motor mechanic in Southend – “Sarf’end” he pronounced it – before the war and followed this unasked-for information with what I’m sure he thought was a gem of advice. ‘Don’t take no notice of them miserable bastards, skipper. We’ll be all right with you, I can feel it in my bones. An’ when I gets one of my feelings, I’m never wrong.’ Hudson glowered at him. Clearly no love lost between those two.

  ‘Well that’s good to know,’ I replied. ‘Any feelings about who’s going to win the 1:30 at
Sandown?’ This at least got a laugh from the others. I caught a look of annoyance in Boyle’s eye – clearly one of the many who enjoy dishing out the mickey-taking but can’t take it themselves. A big mouth and a thin skin. Not a combination I’d have chosen for one of my crew.

  Tall and gangling, with a mop of unruly blond hair, Sergeant Peters, the bomb aimer, was next in line. He had the thousand-yard stare of a man whose reserves of courage were already spent, but with another twenty-eight operations to go before the end of his tour. A man of few words, it took me several minutes of cajoling even to get him to tell me that he came from Huddersfield and had been an accounts clerk before signing up.

  My next introduction was to Sgt Wells, the wireless operator. He had the taut features and darting eyes of a man who saw danger lurking in every shadow. His white face was heavily freckled and topped with a badly-cut shock of ginger hair. Home for Wells was Plymouth and he spoke with a soft west-country burr. He too seemed ill at ease in my company, and appeared to share the others’ unspoken anxiety that I would probably get them all killed.

  Last came the two air gunners. Rear gunner Sgt ‘Charlie’ Chester was a stocky Londoner with a crooked and well-worn face that spoke of his early career as a fairground boxer. He was the only one so far to treat me to a firm handshake and to look me in the eye when he spoke. Like Boyle he was already happy to address me as “Skipper” but without the flight engineer’s over-familiarity. Sgt Grey, the mid-upper gunner was a whippet-like Glaswegian, barely five feet tall and who looked as though he should have been still at school. Like Peters, the bomb aimer, he was a man for whom conversation with me seemed an ordeal. I remember clutching the naïve hope that he was harbouring his reserves of enthusiasm for when we got airborne.

  We stood looking at one another while an embarrassed silence fell. Nature abhors a conversational vacuum and I felt that awful compulsion to fill the void, even though I knew I was about to say something stupid. Rescue came in the unlikely form of Mc Evoy who put his head round the door. Clearly, he’d already forgotten my name because I saw him consult a printed sheet of paper before he spoke. ‘Price, grab your flying kit, the CO’s going to check you out. Airborne in forty-five minutes,’ he said. And then added, almost as a casual afterthought. ‘Your crew’s on ops tonight, briefing at six.’

  Boyle, the cocky flight engineer, forced a smile and said to no one in particular, ‘One more trip off the list. Then it’ll only be twenty-seven to go.’

  Nobody replied. With the exception of Sgt ‘Charlie’ Chester, the others’ features wore expressions of dread.

  My check ride with Press-On Preston went surprisingly well, my fears that I would have forgotten how to fly a Lancaster were dispelled from the moment we started the first engine – it was like I had never been away and the confidence of youth came flooding back. After just over an hour airborne he pronounced me fit to take a crew on ops and we landed back at Leckonby.

  Just before the main briefing I gathered my reluctant crew together to brief them on what I expected of them; no unnecessary chatter on the intercom, keep a sharp lookout for night fighters from takeoff to landing – no slacking and thinking we were home and dry once we’d left enemy airspace – full concentration from start-up to shut-down. They listened to me in silence, I suppose they had heard it all before and were just going through the motions of paying attention. ‘Any questions?’ I asked. Silence and avoidance of eye-contact was my only reply. I was certainly going to have to find another way of bonding with this sullen gaggle, the only question was how?

  The briefing followed an identical format to the one I had attended before. The nav leader and air-gunnery leaders were unfamiliar to me – it didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to work out what must have happened to their predecessors. I knew from my research prior to setting out for Leckonby that 362 Squadron had lost eight aircraft so far in December 1943, four of them on the night of 16th-17th during a raid on Berlin. Tragically, three of the crews who died did so on British soil when low cloud and fog had closed every airfield in Eastern England. Two aircraft crashed when trying to land at RAF Downham Market and another was destroyed when it ploughed into woodland just short of the runway at Graveley.

  In a blue fug of cigarette and pipe smoke, bantering and noisy we shuffled along to take our place behind the long rows of trestle tables in the briefing room.

  The shiny-faced intelligence officer was still there, as of course was Press-On Preston. The station commander strode up onto the rostrum and with a theatrical sweep of his arm, pulled aside the curtain. ‘Gentlemen, your target for tonight,’ he said, ‘is Dusseldorf.’

  A collective sigh of relief went round the briefing room. Although sandwiched between the hotspots of the Ruhr valley to the north and Cologne to the south, and well defended by flak and night-fighters, at least Dusseldorf would mean a short trip compared to the previous night’s long slog to Frankfurt. ‘Thank fuck it’s not Berlin,’ said a voice close at hand, speaking aloud the thoughts of every man on ops that night.

  As the briefing continued, an unfamiliar face caught my eye. The wireless and signals briefing was given by a WAAF Section Officer. Even the coarse fabric of her badly-cut wartime uniform could not disguise the grace with which she carried herself, nor did the severe perm inflicted on her light brown hair detract from the beauty of her face. An unwise Sergeant pilot sitting somewhere behind me gave a wolf-whistle as she walked up the steps to the lectern, but the ripple of laughter this caused was instantly stifled as a pair of china-blue eyes fixed the culprit with a glare that left him red-faced with shame. ‘She’s pretty,’ I said to Hudson, my new navigator who was sitting next to me.

  ‘Many are called but few are chosen,’ he replied, enigmatically. ‘None so far, anyway.’

  After the briefing, the navigators went into a huddle to make their final calculations based on the latest forecast wind and the rest of us trooped off to our respective messes for the pre-flight meal. Then came the now familiar routine of changing into flying kit before collecting our parachutes and escape kits, followed by the long, nervous drive around the perimeter track to our waiting aircraft. As the over-laden Bedford wheezed and bumped its way ever nearer to our dispersal I felt rather than saw six pairs of eyes anxiously watching their new skipper for signs of nerves. What none of them knew, but I did, was that we were safe from ‘the chop’ until the 29th of March. I say ‘we’ but I had every intention of being safely back at home in 21st century Lincoln well before then.

  In the circumstances I suppose it was inevitable that I remembered Samuel Johnson’s famous quote, “Every man thinks meanly of himself who has not been a soldier.” And in recalling these words, sitting in the chilly darkness with six frightened men, came the realisation that I was possibly the only man in history with the opportunity to learn at first-hand what it was like to face a battle in which others would die, safe in the knowledge that I would not. For a brief and shameful moment, I thought not of my crew who had just over three months to live, nor of the German civilians we would kill that night, but of the elation at the prospect of adventure to come. If only I had known the awful truth of the Faustian pact I had signed.

  Just as on my previous mission, our aircraft joined the lumbering queue, like elephants trooping patiently to the water hole. Then our turn came to take off and for a moment, my cocksure certainty that no harm could befall me evaporated. What if Harrison couldn’t be trusted? What if we were killed that night rather than in March? All that would change from the viewpoint of the 21st century would be a few entries in long-forgotten files and the dates on seven headstones. A steady green light from the runway controller’s caravan broke my reverie and as I released the brakes I felt Boyle’s hands below mine, pushing the throttles open to maximum boost, leading with the port outer throttle slightly ahead of the others to check the Lanc’s natural tendency to swing left on takeoff. For all his swagger, Boyle seemed to know his stuff. Fully laden, O-Orange took what to me was an eternity
to reach our takeoff speed, which at an all-up-weight of 65,000 lbs was 100 knots. As the end of the runway flashed beneath us, I raised the undercarriage and settled into a shallow climb, waiting for the safety speed of 140 knots before starting to raise the flaps.

  We settled into the climb and once Boyle had reduced the RPM and boost, the noise levels in the cockpit became almost bearable. Hudson gave me a course change and we continued, one of countless fireflies, winking through the dark towards the south east. One by one, as they crossed the English coast, the lights went out and, had we not known otherwise, it would have been easy to believe we were the only crew airborne that night.

  As we neared the Dutch coast, twinkling bursts of light showed us that German flak gunners were engaging the head of the bomber stream. A few minutes later, it was our turn to run the gauntlet and I double checked that Peters, the bomb aimer, was sticking to his briefed task of throwing out bundles of radar-deceiving “window” at the correct intervals. A hesitant stammer from Peters confirming that he was doing his job was interrupted by the voice of Grey, the mid-upper gunner. ‘Flamer going down to starboard, skipper.’ I looked across and saw a stream of orange flame split itself into two as the stricken bomber broke up in mid-air, scattering a cascade of red and green target markers as it fell.

  ‘Captain to navigator, make a note of time and position of that one,’ I said.

  ‘Wilco, skipper,’ replied Hudson. If he felt fear, his voice didn’t betray it, not that I’d heard him express any emotion in the short time I’d known him.

  Our course took us between the known hotspots of Antwerp and Breda and now that we were clear of the coastal flak batteries, night fighters were our big threat. By the time we reached our next turning point, just north of Eindhoven, Grey in the mid-upper turret and tail-end ‘Charlie’ Chester had reported four more bombers going down in flames. Twenty-eight men who wouldn’t be coming back tonight.