The Arrow's Arc

by John Wilcox

  THE ARROW’S ARC

  JOHN WILCOX

  © John Wilcox 2018

  John Wilcox has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14.

  This book is dedicated to all the rear gunners – of whatever side – who flew

  in the Second World War.

  The soul of man is immortal and at one time

  comes to an end, which is called dying away,

  and at another is born again, but never perishes.

  — Plato

  Once we are able to rid ourselves of the cumbersome

  notion of linear time we can begin to move swiftly and

  freely to all possible realms of the psyche. We can each

  become, as Hamlet wished, ‘a king of infinite space’.

  — Dr Roger G.Woolgar, Other Lives, Other Selves

  CHAPTER 1

  The Lancasters lined up on the distant runway looked like black stick insects in the half moonlight, poised high on their stilt-like undercarriages, and Bill Gladwin shivered. There was nothing to be ashamed of in that, for it was February and as cold as it was going to be in this winter of 1944: a white dusting of frost was already glistening on the grass round the briefing hut and his breath misted in the night air. It wasn’t the cold, though, that sent that tremor through him. He was scared again.

  It was getting worse, this fear before each trip. Quite natural, of course. This was the last mission of his second tour and it was a very lucky rear gunner who survived more than twenty or so raids. He had completed forty-nine. The first tour was thirty ops, the second twenty. He had clocked up nineteen trips now on this second tour, so tonight would be the last incursion into the angry skies of continental Europe before he was stood down to enjoy a break from operational flying. He had survived again – well, almost. Lucky Taffy Gladwin! Lucky old Taff! For months now he had wondered whether the rest of the crew of BI LM220 – ‘B for Bertie ’ – felt it was good to be with him to share his luck or scared because his time must run out soon. He frowned up at the dark grey clouds rushing past the moon, indicating a strong headwind for the ascent. Nothing he could do about it, anyway. Life – and death – had to go on.

  He pushed open the door of the Nissen hut, fumbled through the blackout curtain and peered through the smoky, fuggy interior to pick out his five crewmates (the sixth, the navigator, was attending a separate briefing), sitting on a bench halfway down the crowded room and taking most of the space at one trestle table.

  “Hiya, Taff.” Nods came down the line as he pushed onto the end of the bench. The round, happy face of Chuck Baxter, the American mid-upper gunner, grinned at him.

  “It ain’t Berlin tonight, anyway, Bill,” he said. For some reason, Baxter was the only crewman not to call him Taffy. Perhaps he disapproved of the ethnic pigeonholing that went on (he, inevitably, was “Yank” to everyone but Gladwin) or, more likely, it was because of the sense of collegiate intimacy which had grown up between the two gunners.

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ve not loaded full tanks, according to Smithie.”

  “Ah, shit! Why the hell don’t they give us a bit of leeway to get home on if we get into trouble? We’re not going to win this war by saving petrol in teaspoons.”

  The American’s grin widened, revealing a row of white, wraparound teeth that could only come from the USA, the land of the free and of advanced dentistry.

  “Aw, stop gripin’, Bill. I’d take three quarter tanks any day as a swap for the Berlin run.”

  The chattering in the room subsided as a tall Wing Commander strode onto the platform at the end of the hut and switched on a light above a large map fixed on the far wall. An audible sigh of relief ran around the room as the map revealed the familiar coastline of the Pas-de-Calais and the less familiar interior of France, not Germany. Coloured tapes stretched out from their base in Mepal, Cambridgeshire, and then, turning, swept down past Paris, towards the very heart of France.

  The Wing Commander picked up a pointer with one hand and brushed back his wide moustache with the other. “No, Gentlemen,” he said. “Not Berlin, Leipzig or even the bloody Reich at all. Just a nice little jaunt towards the south of France, though you’ll have to stop before you dip your toes in the Med.”

  He raised an eyebrow and elicited one or two weak titters. “No,” he went on. “Less than eight hundred miles, there and back; nearer seven, in fact.” He rapped the map with his pointer. “Here, at Limoges, in the Dordogne, the Gnome and Rhône aero engine factory. Damned important target. Put the roof in on this lot and there should be less fighter opposition to us throughout the year. Reasonable journey there and back if you stick to the flight plan which will avoid the hot spots on the way. Not exactly a piece of cake when you get there, though. The place is well defended and there will be plenty of flak as well as night fighters.”

  He looked round the hall, pushing out his chin so that his moustache stood out like a bushy bar under his nose. Chuck leaned towards Gladwin and muttered behind his hand. “Bad bit comin’ up now, pal.”

  “We have one problem, though, Gentlemen,” the Wing Commander went on.

  “Well whaddya know,” said Chuck.

  “This is an area where the Maquis, the French resistance fighters, are not as strong as we would like. The factory will be full of Frenchmen working the night shift and, of course, we do not wish to create anti-British feeling by causing French civilian casualties.”

  “Oh shucks, no,” murmured Chuck. “Mustn’t hurt anybody, for Gadsake.”

  “So, the force leader will run over the target to give warning that we are about to attack…”

  “How very British,” whispered Chuck.

  “…and then, when the French workers have had time to evacuate the factory…”

  “…and the fighters can get up…”

  “…he will drop red spot markers on the target which you will all then bomb. Now,” the Wing Commander detached the map from the wall to reveal another, in greater detail. “This shows the target and where the markers will be burning when you get in…”

  As he went on, Chuck put his hand over his eyes and half turned to Gladwin. “What a fuckin’ way to fight a war. Hey, is this how you did it in ‘14–18? Playin’ it like cricket?”

  “Oh shut up, Chuck,” whispered Gladwin. He wanted to defend the SC but could think of nothing to say.

  Flying Officer Peter Proctor, their Lancaster pilot and known behind his back – and not affectionately – to his crew as Percy the Prick, scowled at his two gunners down the table and pursed his lips in a ‘shush’. The Wing Commander droned on, before giving way to the Met Officer and then the Bomber Leader who described the composition of the bomb loads being put aboard the aircraft as he spoke, the types of fuses used and the method of target marking. He emphasised the danger of ‘creep back’ from the target and would not tolerate, he said, any ‘fringe merchants’ in the strike tonight.

  “Oh, bully for you, old chap,” growled Chuck.

  *

  Eventually the briefing was over and the few questions afterwards were dealt with. There was no specialist briefing for the gunners. Their task never varied with any mission. It didn’t matter whether the target was Milan or Mannheim, their job remained the same: to be vigilant
every second of the flight, scanning the sky about them, and then to kill the fighters when they attacked. You needed no briefing for that. Either you could do it or you couldn’t – and the question was soon answered on any tour of duty. The other members of the crew understudied each other to some extent, so that the flight engineer could fly the aircraft in a basic sort of way if he had to, the wireless operator could plot some sort of course, and the bomb-aimer could take a gun. Even Chuck, the mid-upper gunner, had back-up duties as fireman if flames took hold in the aircraft. Gladwin, however, was too remote at the end of the Lancaster fuselage – stuck out in his goldfish bowl right at the rear – to be expected to double up for anyone else should the need arise.

  The crew of B for Bertie shuffled out of the briefings hut and joined the line walking towards another long, low shed, where smiling members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force issued a parachute to each man. The same old jokes were exchanged: “Folded nicely?” – “Can’t be sure. Didn’t really bother to look.” “Did you darn those holes?” – “Sorry, ran out of wool.” “Now don’t get it dirty.” – “No, miss.”

  Outside at the dispersal site, the crew, looking like Michelin men in their bulky flying suits, Mae West ditching jackets and parachute harnesses, stood smoking last cigarettes in the icy air as they waited for the trucks to take them to the aircraft. They chatted in a desultory way, superficially, as though they had just been introduced at a cocktail party instead of having risked their lives continually together for some six months now. Each of them looked up from time to time, taking in the clouds hurrying by and the direction and strength of the wind that drove them.

  Gladwin, as always, stood a little apart from the rest. Dark, stocky and of medium height, his regular, high-cheekboned features habitually wore a withdrawn, wary look which usually served to warn off those looking for easy familiarity. His hair was close cropped and his teeth white and regular, almost as good as Chuck’s, but they were seen rarely, for he smiled infrequently. It was a face not only of a man who had flown more hours than anyone else in the crew but of one who preferred to keep his own counsel; perhaps one who preferred not to share with others the secret of how to survive forty-nine missions while hanging first in line as target practice to a succession of Me 109s, Focke Wulfs and Junkers. Only Chuck had broken his reserve – it was impossible to resist the sheer consistency of the American’s good humour. Before their second flight together Gladwin, suspecting that the upper gunner’s non-stop chat concealed a lack of concentration that could be lethal for them all, had taken him to one side and impressed on him the gunners’ mantra: never fire at a fighter unless you know he’s seen you; never stare at fires or other bright lights; always ensure that the armourer has changed the tracer ammo from day to night ratio when you switch to night flying, otherwise you could be blinded by your first burst; and always, always concentrate on looking around the sky. Chuck had stopped smiling for a moment and nodded. That op he sent a Focke Wulf down in flames.

  Gladwin was suddenly aware that the six of them were all looking at him and that Proctor had spoken to him.

  “Sorry, skip. What did you say?”

  Proctor, just a little sharply, repeated his question: “I said, Taff, just one more trip and I presume it will be back home to Brecon for you for a while and then a training posting. Have you heard where?”

  Gladwin shook his head. He knew that a posting would come through either just after his return from this op or while he was on leave. It was considered unlucky in this squadron – counting chickens – to tell a man his next job until he had finished his tour. One thing was for sure, however, the powers that be would try to get him away from operational flying for a while. He would be one of the very few rear gunners in Bomber Command to have completed two tours, and Command always wished to nurture experience like that and ensure that it was passed on for the benefit of new men coming through. But he wouldn’t go. Damned if he would! He had had enough of teaching in civilian life, back in the grammar school on the Welsh borders, to last him forever. Somehow, he would wangle a way of staying on ops, if not with this crew then with another.

  He looked round at the others. This was a New Zealand squadron and Chuck and he were the interlopers, sent as replacements into dead men’s shoes after a bad night over Hamburg. The gunners were always the first to go. These Antipodeans had a freshness about them, a level-gazing confidence which somehow set them apart from the Brits. Or was it just that they were all only a few trips into their first tour and didn’t know how bad it could be? He smiled back at the grinning faces. There was David George from Wellington, too tall a man to have to curl himself over the navigator’s table; Smithie from a mountain somewhere in South Island, formerly a farm mechanic, now the flight engineer; Mac McKenzie, a pharmacist from Auckland with small pig-like eyes that somehow seemed to suit a bomb-aimer; Harry Hampton, the hugely-moustached wireless operator who swore he would never return to herding sheep near Wanganui; and Chuck, of course, the young soda jerk from Chicago, who had volunteered for the RAF before Pearl Harbour and had managed to qualify for air crew after an eternity working on aircraft maintenance. They were a good mob. Only the Prick struck a discordant note in this happy band.

  Proctor was abrasive and ridiculously pompous for a New Zealander – “jeez, you’d think he was a Brit,” Chuck had once confided. In most bomber squadrons rank was forgotten once the aircraft was airborn. But Flying Officer Proctor liked to be called ‘sir’ and only just accepted ‘skipper’. It clearly perturbed him that in a crew of sergeants he had a Flight Lieutenant as rear gunner, a man who out-ranked him and who wore the silver and purple ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Cross to boot. Gladwin posed no real threat to his authority because the pilot, ‘the driver’, was always in charge of the aircraft, whatever his rank. But Gladwin knew that he was resented by the skipper and it amused him, although it was also another reminder how, at twenty-nine, he was so much older than the rest of the team. It was this experience, of course – plus the fact that he was damned good at what he did – that had bequeathed him a Flight Lieutenant’s bars. Usually, it was only Gunner Leaders who carried that rank. Gladwin had twice been offered that post in squadrons and twice he had declined it. He wished to stay out at the end of his fuselage, alone with his thoughts and his concentration and with his responsibilities confined only to his own crew. Nevertheless, Gladwin knew that he would have to take on the leadership role if he wished to stay operational for a third tour. Well… he would face that problem when he had to.

  It was not just Proctor’s pompous vanity, however, that made him less than popular with his crew. A pilot’s quirks of personality could be forgiven if he was competent. It had become apparent that Proctor was not. Oh, he could fly the giant Lancaster well enough in normal circumstances. The problems began when the target was reached and the ground below became a glowing mass of fire and the flak bursting around them lit up their faces and sent shudders through the aircraft. Then, his face glistening with sweat, Proctor would find difficulty in controlling the Lancaster on the bomb-run, causing Mac the bomb-aimer to forget himself and shout, “hold the fucking thing straight, skip, can’t you” on the intercom; or he would react too slowly to Gladwin and Chuck’s cries of “corkscrew right, go!” when the fighters attacked. It was even rumoured that it was this hesitancy that had led to the deaths of the two previous gunners, although the charge had never been formally made.

  Proctor was a small man, whose face wore the statutory RAF big-wing moustache and a constant frown that he hoped gave him sufficient gravitas to belie his twenty-four years. Now he was levelling a half-smile at Gladwin, revealing perhaps some ambivalence: happy at the removal of a half-perceived threat to his authority but sorry to lose the best air gunner in the group.

  “Aw, I don’t know what’s going to happen, Skip,” said Gladwin. “I don’t want to instruct. I did a bit of that after the last tour and I was bloody awful at it.”

  “But you are a school tea
cher, aren’t you?”

  “Was,” corrected Gladwin. “Don’t think I was any good at that, mind you. Better at shooting at Jerry.”

  “What did you teach?”

  “History. A lot of medieval stuff.”

  The conversation was cut short by the arrival of the trucks. Cigarettes were flicked away, cutting sparkling arcs of light in the darkness, and the crews threw their parachutes into the backs of the high-sided vehicles and awkwardly followed, clutching their thermos flasks and little packets of chewing gum and chocolate. Their escape kits – flat aluminium packs containing maps of France and Germany printed on both sides of silk cloth, plus a small piece of soap, a razor, Horlicks tablets and a handful of foreign currency notes – were already stowed into the long patch trouser pockets of their flying suits. The only item not in the box always amused Gladwin. It was a pencil with a slim pocket clip made of magnetised steel in which there was a tiny dent at the point of balance. Steady the clip on the tip of the pencil and the clip would point north. Fascinating! He coveted it.

  Gladwin clambered in last, sitting at the end of the bench, his head poking round the edge of the canvas top so that he could see the stars between the scudding clouds. He felt that inward tightening of the stomach and wished they were in flight. He would feel better then; he always did. There was no chatter now as the truck bounced along the grass and then, more smoothly, across the tarmac, pulling to a halt beside one giant wheel of their aircraft.

  As always, Gladwin was the first aboard – he had to veer left as the others, except Chuck, went right. Head down, he threaded his way down the tube of the fuselage, past the high-backed rest seat and the flare chute, ducking under Chuck’s sling seat, stepping over the ammunition chute and round the Elsan sanitary pan until he reached the walkway (more like a crawlway) over the tailplane and then the draughtproof doors which sealed off his own domain right at the rear. Beyond the doors a further set of doors into the turret were open. Here, he carefully laid down his parachute and provisions within reach of one hand, for there was no room for them in the turret. Then he grabbed the two handgrips on the roof of the airframe and swung his legs into the turret, remembering to duck his head to avoid the fire extinguisher. He was now sitting on a firm pad, about fifteen inches by nine, and he reached behind him and slid the metal doors together, so that they locked and formed a back rest. He always hated doing this, for it separated him from his parachute, but