The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said, leaning forward.

  Mikhail took an A4 black-and-white photograph from the file and slid it over the table. ‘You recognize that?’ Jack stared, then nodded. The picture showed a large-bellied four-engine aircraft in wartime British Royal Air Force camouflage, white underneath and on the fuselage sides, and khaki and olive green above, with a large RAF roundel on the centre of the fuselage and the red identification letters MA below the cockpit. In front of the letters was the image of a scantily clad woman and a roaring red dragon, and the words ‘Dragon Lady’.

  ‘It’s a B-24 Liberator,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in the tropics, judging by the palm trees beyond the tarmac. That’s the RAF Coastal Command camouflage scheme, isn’t it? Was this a submarine hunter?’

  ‘It’s a Liberator of 111 Operational Training Unit, based at Nassau in the Bahamas and used to train new aircrew on four-engine bombers. A lot of the aircrew were Canadians of the RCAF, as well as British and Commonwealth RAF men who had done their initial training in Canada. The Liberator had a longer range than the other main four-engine bombers used in the European war, and many of the crews were destined for the Far East to take part in operations against the Japanese.’

  ‘You mean about the time when the Americans were gearing up to drop the first atomic bomb.’

  Mikhail nodded. ‘That’s what I was researching when I came across the records box with that picture. The box was peculiar because it contained papers and logbooks relating to 111 OTU in May and June 1945, material that would normally be found in England with the squadron operations records in the UK National Archives, or under restricted access along with other Second World War material still held by the Ministry of Defence. Its location in the US archives in Washington only made sense when I began reading the files and realized that they related to a secret training scheme co-ordinated by the US and were intimately tied up with the events of early August 1945, with the atomic bomb programme.’

  Jack peered at the photograph. ‘My father was an RAF Lancaster pilot in the final months of the war. He told me I owed my existence to a silver butterfly that had kept him and his crew alive. It was a pendant left in the aircraft by the previous pilot, who’d brought his crew through two tours. My father kept the butterfly and had it in his hand when he died as an old man. That’s virtually all I know about his wartime experiences, as he never spoke of them. He said he was one of the lucky ones who was able to live for the future. I think that pendant had something to do with it. But he did talk a lot about his beloved Lancaster, so I grew up knowing a bit about planes. I was right, wasn’t I? This Liberator may have flown with a training unit, but she’s armed and equipped for operational flying.’

  Mikhail nodded. ‘This is B-24D, serial number FK-856. You were right about Coastal Command. She’d been a Royal Canadian Air Force U-boat hunter based in Newfoundland, but with the Battle of the Atlantic winding down by early 1945, she was one of a number sent to operational training units. You can see she still has the chin fairing that houses the air-to-surface-vessel radar, and the airfoil winglets below the cockpit that carried eight five-inch rockets. Both of those features were removed when she went to 111 OTU, but the bomb-bay adaptation to carry depth charges was retained.’

  ‘What about the crew?’

  ‘That was what really piqued my interest. When I looked at the crew lists, I saw something odd. The usual operational conversion crews were men straight out of flight school. But the final crew to fly this Liberator was very different.’ Mikhail picked up the scanned sheets and flipped through them. ‘An inordinate amount of attention was paid to their selection, with secret reports from their squadron and station commanders as well as detailed intelligence assessments on each man. They were all highly experienced aircrew from the same elite RAF pathfinder group, the bombers that had flown ahead in the raids on Nazi Europe and marked the targets. Every member of the crew of FK-856 had flown at least a full tour of thirty missions over Europe, several of them a lot more; all four of the NCO gunners had Distinguished Flying Medals, the officers had Distinguished Flying Crosses and the pilot had the Distinguished Service Order as well. With the war in Europe over, many Lancaster crews were being remustered as part of “Tiger Force”, the plan to send RAF and Commonwealth squadrons to bomb Japan, and I could only think that this crew had been selected for special duties to get them to the Far East as soon as possible and were being converted to fly anti-submarine operations in the Pacific. But then I found the top-secret memo that explained it all. They were being given flight time on the Liberator before being sent to a secret destination in the Pacific to be upgraded to the Liberator’s successor, the B-32 “super-bomber”. They were being groomed to be the first generation of bomber crews to drop tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, something Allied commanders envisaged had the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs failed to persuade the Japanese to surrender.’

  ‘But then the war against Japan did end, and the programme was scrapped,’ Jeremy said.

  Mikhael nodded, then pursed his lips. ‘Too late for these men, though. They may well count as the last combat casualties of the war against the Nazis.’

  ‘Explain,’ Jack said.

  Mikhail picked out one sheet with a yellow marker stuck to it. ‘It was the morning of the third of June 1945. The crew had only been in Nassau for two weeks, having previously been involved in the airdrop of relief supplies to the emergency hospital units dealing with survivors of the Belsen concentration camp. One of their last bombing missions had been over Berlin, an attempt to use the “Tallboy” twelve-thousand-pound bomb to break the flak-tower defences. It was their expertise with those bombs that caught the eye of the US intelligence officers scouting for pathfinder crews suitable for conversion to nuclear bombing. The bomber crews were very tightly knit, and the pathfinders were the best of the best. The psychological reports show that these were not the kind of men who desperately counted down the last missions to the end of their tour, traumatized by what they had seen and done and by the constant fear. We often forget that some men relished it. The men in this crew seem to have been pleased to be selected to go out to the Far East ahead of Tiger Force, eager to get back into action again. These were precisely the kind of men the intelligence officers would have been looking for.’

  ‘So that day they were on a training mission?’ Jack asked.

  Mikhail nodded, then took out a photocopied map with ruled lines on it. ‘It was their last operation in an intensive week. They were due to take their Liberator across the United States to the island of Guam in the Pacific the next day. They were fully armed as if they were on an anti-submarine patrol, with three depth charges in the bomb bay and the machine guns in the turrets fully belted up. The depth charges were an experimental type designed to bounce on the surface of the sea, hit their target and roll under it to explode, like the famous dambuster bombs. Their mission was to fly three hundred and fifty nautical miles east of Nassau to a designated live-fire zone just north of the central Bahamas chain, find a decommissioned minesweeper that had been anchored as a target and expend all their ammunition on it before returning in a clockwise route to Nassau. Their last radio contact shows that they made it to the live-fire zone, a rectangular area of about fifty square miles extending north from the island of San Salvador. Intermittently, there’s severe electromagnetic disturbance at this location, on the edge of the abyssal plain where the Bahamas shelf extends over the Atlantic plate, an extension of the Puerto Rico Fault Line that’s still poorly understood. It’s the kind of thing that would get Bermuda Triangle fantasists all excited, but an oceanographer colleague of mine at Columbia University thinks it might be a localized upsurge of the magma that affects the geomagnetic field, an anomaly that might also disrupt compasses.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before,’ Jack murmured, thinking hard. ‘About the North Anatolian Fault off Turkey, at the site of Atlantis. It makes some meteoritic materials seem heavier.’

  ‘That refe
rence on the pillar at Lixus,’ Jeremy interjected. ‘“Where the palladion becomes heavier.”’

  Jack nodded, leaning over and staring at the map. ‘I take it there was no more contact.’

  ‘None whatsoever. Over the next few days hurricane conditions prevented search-and-rescue flights, and by the time the weather had cleared, the Nassau station commander deemed that there was little chance the crew had survived. They found the anchored minesweeper completely untouched, so assumed the Liberator must have gone down before reaching it, on a flight path that was meant to take them on a compass bearing of thirty degrees from the northern tip of San Salvador out to sea towards a coral ridge where the minesweeper was anchored. The aircraft was meant to attack at very low level, and the base commander’s log concludes that she may have clipped the waves in the rising wind and gone into the sea intact, accounting for the absence of floating debris. That was pretty unusual for the Liberator, which tended to break up on ditching, but the pilot, Squadron Leader White, was exceptionally skilled. The case was closed, but was briefly reopened nearly three weeks later, when a horrifying discovery was made almost three hundred nautical miles south-east of their target off the far end of the Bahamas chain.’

  He pulled out another photograph and passed it to Jack, who took it and stared. ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve seen harrowing pictures of survivors of wartime sinkings who’d endured weeks at sea in lifeboats, but this is one of the worst.’ He stared for a moment longer, and then passed it to Jeremy. It was a low-level aerial photo of a one-man inflatable boat Jack recognized from the survival equipment his father had once shown him in the RAF museum at Hendon. The pontoons were smudged and criss-crossed with markings. Inside was a man, apparently naked, beneath a scrappy awning that seemed to have been rigged using his battledress and life jacket. He was in a foetal position, but his face protruded under one side of the awning, blackened and horribly ulcerated.

  ‘Surely he can’t have been alive,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘He was, just,’ Mikhail replied. ‘He was so dehydrated that his eyeballs had shrunk into his head. After his emergency rations ran out, he’d survived by fishing, making his first catch using pieces of his own flesh as bait. He’d been trying to drink his own blood. That’s what those markings on the pontoons are, like finger painting, all kinds of numbers and slashes that must have been his way of marking the days. The Catalina aircraft that spotted him managed to land on the sea and pick him up, and he was taken back to Nassau. By then, 111 OTU unit had departed and everything was winding down. In the hospital he was debriefed by the last remaining US intelligence officer on the base, an inexperienced man who had been sent out to take the records of the secret programme back to Washington for classified storage. His report from that day is in the file. The rescued airman had no chance of recovery and died that night, but during brief periods of lucidity he told the story that caught my eye when I unearthed that box in the archives almost fifty years later.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said.

  ‘His name was Flight Sergeant Brown. He was the rear gunner of Liberator FK-856. You won’t find his name or those of any of the other crew on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, as officially they were lost in a peacetime training accident. He was English but had emigrated to Canada to make a new life on the prairies. His parents had been killed in the Blitz and he had no other recorded family. He was twenty-six when he died. From the debriefing, it’s clear that the pilot was talking to the crew right up to the plane’s final moments, fighting to keep it level as it dropped towards the sea. The Boulton Paul rear turret on the RAF Liberators was a deathtrap at high altitude if a plane went down, but it often came away on impact in a forced landing, and that’s probably what saved him. He said there was a fire, but the pilot managed to ditch the plane nose-up, dousing the rear turret with seawater before the flames reached him and causing the turret to break away. The Liberator’s poor ditching characteristics were mainly a result of the lightly built bomb-bay doors, which tended to collapse on impact, causing the fuselage to fill up quickly and sink. He said that when he recovered consciousness the aircraft had disappeared and the pilot and other crew were nowhere to be seen. At that location the plane could well have gone down beyond the abyssal wall, where the ocean is more than a mile deep, and by the time the surviving crew had struggled out of their harnesses it may have been too deep for any hope of escape.’

  ‘So a fire caused the crash?’ Jeremy asked.

  ‘He claimed they were shot down.’

  ‘Shot down?’ Jeremy said in disbelief. ‘Nearly a month after the war had ended? No way.’

  ‘That’s what the intelligence officer thought. Flight Sergeant Brown was delirious, in and out of consciousness, and I think the officer recorded what I’m about to tell you only as a matter of getting something into the debriefing report before closing the file. Brown kept repeating that they had depth-charged a U-boat over a blue hole, but had been shot down. The officer noted in pencil on the side that he’d checked Brown’s personnel record and seen that before joining the pathfinders he had done a tour with Coastal Command and had a similar experience, flying rear gunner in a Liberator in 1943 that depth-charged a U-boat off Newfoundland but was hit by machine-gun fire and forced to ditch. The officer evidently thought that the 1943 ditching was a traumatic experience that came out in Brown’s delirium. Even the blue-hole story was dismissed out of hand. Blue holes are a striking feature of the Bahamas from the air, and the officer noted that from his position of boredom cramped in the rear turret for hours on end, Brown may have become fixated on them.’

  ‘You mean the sinkholes where so many cave divers die?’ Jeremy said.

  Jack nodded. ‘The Bahamas land mass is a limestone plateau, and during the last Ice Age the sea level was over a hundred metres lower than it is today. Rainwater percolated through the limestone and created huge cavern systems that became submerged as the sea rose after the end of the Ice Age. Where the roofs of the caverns have collapsed, they appear as deep blue holes in the reefs, or as depressions where the limestone fragments from the ceiling have collapsed and filled up the caverns.’

  Jeremy turned to Mikhail. ‘But when you read the file, you believed Brown’s story?’

  Mikhail paused. ‘I’ve been to war, and I know about post-traumatic flashbacks. The streets and hospitals of Russia are strewn with veterans of the Afghan war who’ve never been able to deal with it. The trauma, the flashback, is rarely generalized or conflated. It isn’t a mishmash of memories. It tends to be one specific event, remembered in exacting detail.’

  ‘You’re saying that Brown’s account wasn’t a product of delirium.’

  ‘I’m saying that if he was traumatized by his U-boat experience with Coastal Command in 1943, he wouldn’t have seen a blue hole in the flashback. He would have remembered everything from that event in 1943, but not added other memories. And anyway, the trauma idea doesn’t ring true. The intelligence officer was assuming what we might assume, that experiences such as that 1943 ditching must have been traumatic. But that’s just wrong. Flying night raids over Germany was about the most terrifying thing a man could do in that war, yet Brown and his fellow crew had done it over and over again, and volunteered for more. There was a reason they were selected for the nuclear programme. They were the toughest of the tough. Some people just don’t get traumatized.’

  Jack peered at the map. ‘If he really was describing one specific blue hole, the trouble is there are hundreds of them in the Bahamas over several thousand square miles. All we have to go on is the last reported position of the aircraft over that sector north of the island of San Salvador.’

  ‘I looked into this with my oceanographer friend,’ Mikhail said. ‘At the co-ordinates of the target minesweeper noted in the file, the Liberator would have been beyond the land-mass plateau of the Bahamas and probably over the abyssal plain, beyond the huge underwater cliffs that run up from the Puerto Rico Fault along the Atlantic side of th
e Bahamas towards the coast of Florida. The plain is at least a mile deep and you won’t find blue holes there. But there’s one crucial feature we noticed. Off San Salvador there’s an undersea ridge that extends about twenty-five nautical miles north-east, rising up from the abyssal plain. The detailed bathymetry was unknown in 1945, but I wondered whether there might be sections of reef shallow enough to have been upstanding land mass in the Ice Age, enough for rainwater erosion to have formed caverns that might have become blue holes as the sea level rose. We just don’t know enough about the sea and reef at that point. That whole sector was a weapons test range, designated in April 1945 and in the event seeing little use. After the war it became part of the Atlantic Test and Evaluation range for anti-submarine weapons, continuing to be an exclusion zone even after the decision had been made to use another sector of undersea trench closer to Nassau for most testing. The San Salvador ridge extends beyond the twelve-nautical-mile Bahamas territorial limit, but the weapons test zone remains in force beyond the end of the ridge and we couldn’t find any record of exploration or diving there. So it’s possible that there is a shallow reef and a blue hole that has never been properly charted.’