The Perils and the Prize

by Jim Crossley

  P-Peter’s crew soon saw the menacing fingers of searchlights probing the night sky in front of them and then the bursts of shell fire exploding ahead. Twice they saw a glowing meteor of fire plunging to earth to mark the last resting place of an unfortunate colleague. Oddly William felt strangely detached from this part of the action. The aircraft droned steadily on, weaving gently from side to side in an attempt to confuse enemy radar. The ruse seemed to work and the machine crossed what appeared to be a barrier of searchlights and ack-ack without attracting the attention of the defenders. William was concentrating hard on his navigation and managed to get another star sight to confirm his course. Somehow he had shut out of his mind the terrible danger he was facing, or indeed the suffering the raid was likely to inflict on innocent German civilians. At the briefing it had been made clear that the aim of the operation was to destroy not just industrial sites but also the homes and lives of the people working in them. He managed to shut the horror of all this out of his mind and concentrate on his own technical responsibility for making the mission a success. Somehow the steady engine note, and the sight of Whiskers sitting there confident and calm at the controls lulled him into a state of well-being which was far detached from reality. He knew very well how his own morale would collapse if he let his mind dwell on anything but the technical aspects of his mission. He need hardly have bothered with the second star sight – by now Jimmy, in the nose, could see the glow of the industrial heart of Germany dead ahead and already there seemed to be fires breaking out on the ground to the west of what seemed to be the target area.

  “Ignore those,” ordered Whiskers. “Jerry often lights them in the open country hoping that we will go for them instead of the target. Bomb aimer, look out for the canal; it leads to the heart of the city. Navigator, time to target, please.”

  His voice was calm, reassuring, familiar.

  “Twelve minutes, skipper.”

  “Thank you, we are going to make this a perfect approach. Everyone OK?”

  Everyone was not OK. William heard a strange sobbing sound over the intercom. Jimmy and Isaacs seemed fine, so it must have come from the rear turret.

  “Navigator, go aft and see what’s happened to him.”

  Whiskers as cool as ever.

  William crawled back down the fuselage. It shook alarmingly and blasts of cold air spurted at him through hundreds of leaks and joints. The tail gunner, Philips, was leaning forward over his guns, oxygen mask removed, slumped in his seat. William took him by the shoulders, looking to see if he had been hurt. He could see no sign of a wound but the man was rigid and did not react to William’s attempt to unbuckle his harness and drag him from his seat. It was bitter cold in the turret – cold enough to make anyone turn stiff, but there was something about Philips which could not be explained by mere cold. William kicked him off his seat and half carried, half dragged him forward. He had almost reached the navigator’s compartment when the screaming started. It was high-pitched, like a woman’s wailing, but louder and more insistent. “I have to get out, I have to get out,” he screamed. William was not normally a violent man but the sight of this pathetic fellow revolted him. He smashed a fist into the pale face. The man shut up, whimpering quietly to himself. William fumbled for the medicine bag under his desk and found morphine. A double dose was soon pulsing through Philips and he became quiet and limp. William reported to Whiskers.

  “OK, leave him, Navigator, Bomb Aimer, can you identify target?”

  “Yes, dead ahead, skipper.”

  The clouds and industrial smog seemed to be thinning in the strong wind, revealing the centre of the city circled by an impenetrable ring of searchlights. Suddenly the aircraft was bathed in a powerful bluish light which seemed to grip it like a menacing presence from another world. Whiskers swore under his breath but held a steady course. William found that he was crouching down behind his navigation desk as if that might give him some protection from the shells which would surely come. P-Peter was suddenly shaken by an explosion right beneath her. Splinters of metal came whizzing through the cabin and there was a foul stink of burning. The burst seemed to have lifted the machine vertically upwards, straining every part of the structure, but miraculously she remained on an even keel and the blessed drone of the engines kept on uninterrupted. That Wellington was a tough old bird.

  Jimmy’s voice came over the intercom. “Blimey, skipper, this is bloody dangerous. Target still dead ahead.”

  William chipped in. “One minute to target.”

  The flash of the explosion below seemed to have put off the searchlight which had been holding them, but all around, the horrid, deadly fingers kept on probing into the night.

  Jimmy kept calling out directions. “Steady, steady, left, steady, left again…” then at last, “Bombs gone.” Shedding her deadly load, P-Peter surged upwards, and William quickly gave the pilot a course for home. Whiskers started to organise his crew for the return. Jimmy was sent crawling to the rear turret to keep a lookout for fighters. Isaacs was ordered to monitor the engines carefully, paying special attention to the fuel situation in case a tank had been punctured. William was to keep an eye on Philips, prostrate on the floor, and give him another shot if he showed signs of life. The calm voice of the skipper making practical, sensible arrangements steadied everyone’s nerves as they set off on the dangerous path for home.

  Behind them the “heavies” were now over the target and great spurts of flame erupted as the bombs hit home. From his rear turret, Jimmy kept up a running commentary as he saw the bursts, the rising flak and the occasional terrible sight of a bomber plunging to earth. P-Peter seemed none the worse for her ordeal by fire, and her depleted crew settled down to their tasks. William had detected on the way out that the wind was stronger and had more north in it than the met officer had predicted. He therefore gave Whiskers a course of three three zero degrees and aimed to cross the English coast somewhere near Cromer. He was in the astrodome trying to get a further star sight when he heard Jimmy yell into the intercom.

  “Break left, break left, fighter on our tail!”

  In a moment all was chaos on board. The procedure for avoiding a fighter was the corkscrew turn. This meant throwing the machine violently into a steep dive, at the same time turning sharply in one direction then pulling up into a climb, turning the opposite way. An aircraft flying as erratically as this was almost impossible for a night fighter to aim at accurately. The corkscrew was not an easy trick to perform in a battered old Wellington, but Whiskers did it perfectly. Maps, instruments, mugs, torches and all kinds of clutter flew about the cabin as he savagely dived, banked and climbed, every man hanging on and praying that the wings would not be torn off. Jimmy tried to see what happened to the attacker but it was lost somewhere in the darkness, unable to take a shot. Eventually Whiskers levelled out and resumed his course. Everyone scrambled to recover their possessions, strewn about the aircraft.

  Calmly from Whiskers:

  “Everyone OK? Any sign of him, tail gunner?”

  Just as he was about to answer, Jimmy saw a darker patch in the sky astern. Could it be the fighter again?

  “Skipper, he’s still with us, closing from behind.”

  .

  Whiskers was himself a highly experienced night fighter pilot. He knew very well that his opponent must be an expert to have kept on his tail through the corkscrew procedure but he also knew from his own experience that the easiest mistake for a night fighter to make was to close up on the victim too quickly and overshoot before being able to open fire. He slammed both throttles shut and at the same time pulled up the nose and lowered the flaps. The Wellington groaned and staggered under the strain of the flaps being lowered at speed and floated upwards as she slowed down. Jimmy, surprised by the manoeuvre, was forced back in his seat. He saw the fighter flash past beneath him and tried to give it a burst from his guns but saw his tracer pass well behind. Once again, Whiskers put the machine into a tight turn, raised the flaps and dived toward
s what seemed to be a cloud bank.

  There was no more sign of the fighter, but all this action had taken the plane a long way off course and the strengthening north wind, which William had observed on the outward journey, was a further complication. They remained circling in the safety of the cloud bank for a further ten minutes, then emerged into clear air, finding themselves over an angry-looking sea. Where the hell were they? Isaacs tried to raise a directional radio station without success. The radio didn’t seem to have survived the violent treatment suffered at the hands of Whiskers. The sky above them was covered by broken high cloud which gave only occasional glimpses of the moon and stars so there was no hope of an astro fix. William looked down at the sea and wished that his old navigator, Branston, had been on board. He could accurately estimate wind speed and direction by looking at wave tops and calculating drift – a vital skill for naval flyers in World War One, now almost lost.

  Pilot to navigator:

  “Where are we?”

  Navigator to pilot:

  “Working on it, skipper.”

  “Well, work quickly, Wellingtons don’t fly on fresh air, you know, we have only fuel for another forty-five minutes.”

  William was at a loss. The temptation was to head due west and expect to cross the English coast somewhere over Kent, well south of his original course. But suppose they were being blown even farther south? They could be over the Dover Strait already. If they flew west they might blunder down the Channel, seeing no land until fuel ran out. So should they try a course of northwest? That was dangerous too, if the wind had backed- westerly, as the Met. had forecast, and they had passed over northern Holland, a course of northwest in a westerly wind would carry them on forever over the North Sea. He must think. He must not be interrupted, even by Whiskers. He pulled out the intercom plug and stared down at the sea now dimly illuminated by a pale moon. The white caps were certainly daunting, indicating a strong wind. Somehow, he thought, a little to the north of them, the sea seemed to look different. Maybe that meant something.

  Navigator to pilot:

  “Skipper, can you come down low, turn on the landing lights and look at the sea there to starboard?”

  “OK, but it better be good. We’ve no fuel to waste blundering about looking at the sea.”

  Sure enough, the landing lights showed a yellowish patch where there should be sea; it seemed to be a sandbank running north and south. Waves were breaking heavily around it.

  “Skipper, that can only be the Goodwins. I’ve sailed past them often enough to be sure of that. We seem to be somewhere over the south tip of the bank. I’ll give you a course for Manston. We must have at least thirty knots of north wind.”

  “Roger, navigator, hope you’re right. And let’s hope some bright spark at Manston with an AA gun doesn’t think we’re a Junkers. Radio Operator, have the colours of the day ready.”

  William was right. P-Peter landed safely on the windswept airfield with five minutes of fuel left on board. As the aircraft slowed down, William thought again of Philips, still prostrate on the cabin floor. He took him by the shoulders and tried to sit him up. There was something warm and sticky in the middle of the man’s back and the body was limp. A strange burning smell filled the cabin, and as the body slumped forward, it revealed a large hole in the floor of the aircraft. It was immediately obvious what had happened. A hot splinter from the bursting shell beneath them had come through to floor and buried itself in poor Philips’s body, killing him instantly and scorching his flesh. Isaacs pointed out that had the splinter continued on its way it would have smashed through the crew compartment, killing him and probably disabling the aeroplane. Idle, cowardly and incompetent, in the end Philips had saved them all.

  That night forty of the attacking bombers were lost; about twenty of these fell to German guns or fighters. The rest either had mechanical trouble or got lost and crashed into the sea. One such crew was rescued having blundered on down Channel and luckily ditched near a British destroyer which had been on a mine-laying expedition off Le Havre. The Dortmund raid was one of Bomber Command’s disasters: forty aircraft lost out of a force of six hundred, and, worst of all, a high-flying Spitfire reconnoitring the target the next day noted locomotives shunting trucks on the railways and barges moving on the canal. All industrial buildings seemed to be intact and the blast furnaces were working as usual. There was some damage to residential areas but most of the bombs seemed to have fallen on open countryside some way from the city. A poor return for the loss of life and of aircraft.

  P-Peter struggled back to Norfolk for debriefing by the intelligence staff.

  Yes, they had certainly bombed the target. They had seen the canal clearly and the huge inland port. Jimmy was certain he had identified the massive Dortmund Union Building, a skyscraper by European standards. No, they had not bombed the diversionary fires. No, they had not been carried south of their course by the wind; they had correctly observed it and recalculated their course.

  “Well done, boys,” said a tired-looking Group Captain, and that was that. They flew back to Ford to resume their work.

  Whiskers took William, Jimmy and Isaacs into his office the next morning.

  “Look,” he said, sounding more Welsh than ever. “We made a damned good crew over Dortmund. I’m sure lots of those others will have said they hit the target but they were miles away. We four know that we did a good job and that’s what matters. Tell it to your grandchildren one day if you have any. Thank you, boys.”

  Whiskers did not remain much longer at Ford. He was posted to Norfolk to take command of a newly formed Lancaster squadron, leaving William to carry on the experimental work. It was a slow, frustrating process. The idea was to fit a new centimetric radar in an aircraft. This would perform much better than the longer wavelength radars previously used and enable the aircraft to pick out the echo from a U-boat up to twenty miles away, even in rough seas. No radar however could work if it was very close to the target as the return time of the radar echo was too short to measure. Thus the final stages of the attack had to be made visually. A bit of enterprising private development by Wing Commander Leigh, a serving RAF officer, produced an immensely powerful searchlight which could be mounted under a Wellington fitted with either a battery bank or a separate engine and generator. This would allow the pilot to illuminate the target in the final stages of his attack and sink it with bombs or depth charges. It all seemed quite simple, but getting everything to work correctly and developing an effective technique for attack all took time, and was not made easier by the continued sniping at the project by interested parties with rival systems. Endless dummy attacks had to be made on target floats or British submarines, and the aircraft themselves had to be modified, removing the forward gun position to make way for the radar and mounting the searchlight on a retractable “dustbin” underneath the belly. By early summer the first Leigh Light Wellingtons were operational and immediately changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic.

  William never got to fly one of the new machines operationally. In June, once again, Bomber Command called on Ford for two Wellingtons to make up numbers on a further raid deep into Germany. William was to pilot one machine and he chose Jimmy as his navigator. Isaacs was pressed into service again as radio operator and two leading aircraftsmen, Henry and Oliver, were to act as gunner and bomb aimer. Neither had been on operations before, but, unlike poor Philips, they both seemed keen and the crew appeared to work well together. They were allocated Z-Zebra, the newest and best of the Wellingtons on the base. Zebra was one of the new Mark III Wellingtons fitted with the more powerful Bristol Hercules engines, and she was hurriedly stripped of most of her anti-submarine gear and made ready for action as a bomber. Tuoy took a particular interest in her preparation. He was certain that he had worked out a way to get more range out of the Wellington than was standard by subtly juggling with the fuel/air mixture.

  “Well, sir,” he said to William, “provided you keep her on lean mix on th
e way out, you’ll have ten minutes or more of juice on the way home. Just in case, sir. You remember what happened last time.”

  William didn’t need reminding.

  His crew received a more welcoming reception on this occasion. They were attached to a squadron based at Blackbushe in Hampshire. The crews had been well fed and cared for when they trooped into the station briefing room. Twenty Wellingtons had been rounded up from various operational training units and experimental stations to join the big four engine machines which were to make up the bulk of the force flying out of Blackbushe. The Wellington crews sat together and waited apprehensively for the Commanding Officer to uncover the map which would reveal their destination. He appeared, dapper and brisk, looking like a city gent about to announce a steep rise in profits. No one would have guessed that he himself was to pilot the leading aircraft in the bomber force and that very night would be fighting for his life, deep over Germany.

  “Well,” he started confidently. “Here’s tonight’s target.” A dreadful hush fell over the room. His pointer indicated Ulm, a city on the Danube in the very south of Germany.

  “Now this is a vital target,” he continued, “It’s the home of one of the biggest engine plants in Germany, and we believe it’s quite lightly defended. We’ll take off just before dusk and so we’ll be in darkness for the whole of the run there and back – it’s about seven hundred miles each way. The target will be marked by Mosquitos so that will be a good help for accurate bombing. The Wimpeys will take off first and the ‘heavies’ will overtake them before we reach Ulm. We should meet some friendly fighters on the way back so don’t go shooting them down. Now…” The briefing continued in this half-jokey mode but the pilots could only think of one thing. Ulm. Seven hours flying over enemy territory, on a summer night with dawn breaking as they approached home. It would be murder. And as for the fighters meeting them… Poppycock. They had heard that one before and no one had once seen a friendly aircraft on the homeward leg. The CO droned on, then the met man – at least there was no moon and cloud cover most of the way – but William couldn’t take his mind off the horror which awaited him. For a moment he felt his knees trembling, knocking together. With an effort he controlled them but he could not stop the blood draining from his face or the awful, sickening tightness in his stomach. Whatever happened, he kept telling himself, he must not let the others in Z-Zebra see how scared he was.