Bomber

‘Come on, Skipper,’ said Digby looking back to him. ‘Give us the gen.’

‘It’s Hamburg,’ volunteered Jimmy Grimm the wireless operator. ‘The Orderly Room WAAF told me. The blonde job’.

‘Big deal,’ said Binty scornfully from the upper turret. ‘Who told her, the Groupie last night in bed?’

‘Skip,’ coaxed Digby. ‘I’ve got the calculations to do. I should be told.’

‘It’s a five-tank job: 2,154 gallons,’ said Lambert.

Squinting into the hot sun coming through the nose panel Digby nodded. Lambert continued, ‘The whole Squadron is bombing the shit out of Adelaide.’

They all heard Binty’s catcall of joy even without his intercom. ‘That’s the one, Skipper,’ said Flash Gordon from the rear gun turret.

‘You pom bastards,’ said Digby cheerfully.

‘Sticky beak,’ said Lambert. It was one of Digby’s favourite insults.

Jimmy Grimm hunched lower at his table under the racks of radio equipment and grinned. He was sending the favourite operator’s test signal: ‘Best bent wire best bent wire best bent wire’. Who knows who first invented this strange phrase with its jazz-like rhythms, known to RAF operators and Luftwaffe monitoring services alike?

Lambert began a gentle turn. Under the banked wing the green countryside tipped slowly forward like a child’s soup plate waiting for a spoon. The Great North Road was black with traffic: long military convoys and civilian lorries lumbered slowly down England’s ancient spine.

Lambert looked at the dazzling blurs made by the air-screws and superimposed them as he juggled the throttles. Watching the stroboscopic effect enabled him to synchronize the engines. Lambert noticed that Battersby was looking at him. He grinned. Then he ruined the harmony and pointed to the throttles for Battersby to try.

Binty heard the motors go out of synch suddenly and said, ‘What’s the matter with the motors?’

‘Nothing,’ said Lambert. ‘Battersby is handling the controls.’

‘Then let me off,’ said Binty.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Lambert. ‘It’s better that he should know as much as possible.’ There was a fearful silence.

North-west of Huntingdon the countryside changed suddenly. No more weatherboard houses and thatched cottages, now yellow-brick dwellings and rusty sheds. Windswept allotments full of caterpillar-nibbled cabbages, shallots, wire fences and old cars propped on wooden blocks until petrol supplies returned. Here the fields were brightly coloured: light yellow, gold, green potato fields and bright blue ones full of cabbages.

Round came the flat angular fens and the Ouse through which had waded Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Danish Vikings too had plundered this land and left their names upon the map. The circle of Bourn airfield came into sight and around it the hovering flies that would be with them tonight.

Godmanchester: unmistakable, two Roman roads like spokes in its central hub.

‘Another Lanc ahead,’ said Digby. It crabbed along, the wind pushing it askew. It was not of their squadron. Nor was it a training flight from Upwood OTU or Woolfox Lodge. Lambert looked at the strange Lancaster. He tried to see it anew as though he had never seen a Lancaster bomber before. It was a brooding machine; thirty tons of it. Even counting motors and turrets as one and excluding nuts, bolts and rivets there were fifty-five thousand separate parts. Over three miles of electrical wiring, generators enough to light a hotel, hydraulics enough to lift a bridge, radio powerful enough to talk to a town on the far side of Europe, fuel capacity enough to take it to such a town, and bomb-load enough to destroy it.

Lambert held his speed. It was just enough to close distance inch by inch. Is this the view a fighter pilot will have just before pressing the button that will blow them all into eternity? Tonight? The prim red, white and blue roundels on the plane ahead were symbols of Britain. Its brown-and-green upper surface was a formalized version of the land, ploughed and verdant, over which it flew. Like primitive voodoo objects the brightly painted aircraft defied the enemy, and upon them were painted the little formalized yellow bombs, or symbols of aeroplanes destroyed, that showed how powerful was the magic they could work.

Lambert had seen enough of the other Lanc. He had got too close for comfort. Lambert moved the control column and adjusted the throttles and pitch control. Creaking Door lifted like a showjumper, leaving the other plane far below. That was better. Even a sneeze from a nervous gunner was enough to send a bomber into violent evasive aerobatics and like most pilots he feared mid-air collision more than flak and night fighters put together.

Stop climbing. Straight and level while he saw where he was. Six or seven miles away to starboard the countryside lapped around Cambridge, a ramshackle rash of workers’ dwellings and speculators’ suburbia. In its centre, lush with green courts and beflowered backs, the great university, its spires grinning like dragons’ teeth daring the untutored to seek admittance. Beyond this citadel the countryside turned green again and there were more airfields. Below him passed RAF Oakington, Lancasters dotted along its perimeter. Gentle turn. Warley somewhere off to port lost to sight amongst the fenland. He saw the other Lanc turn that way. This was the flying Lambert liked, in the clear light of a fine summer’s day. This was how he’d fancied it would be on the day he’d volunteered.

Lambert was flying straight and level now. No compass needed, for below him, glinting in the sun like a twenty-mile-long steel needle, was the man-made Bedford River.

‘Lambert’s compass, I call it.’ The voice startled Lambert. Kosh Cohen was at his elbow, sitting on Battersby’s folding seat and staring out of the window like a day tripper.

Lambert smiled.

‘You always come over here, Skip,’ said Cohen. ‘Is this where you’re going to live after the war?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Lambert. ‘Your toys OK?’

Cohen nodded.

‘Let’s go and get some lunch,’ said Lambert and he let the nose dip. Cohen folded back the seat and returned to his dark curtained booth. Since Lambert was flying by visual landmarks there was little for Cohen to do. He had sorted his maps and given the Gee and H2S the routine test. Although it was notoriously prone to technical failures, he was proud of the top-secret radar set that showed him the ground through fog, mist, cloud or darkness like some god bringing wrath to a sinful Babylon. Only ‘selected crews’ had the new equipment.

Lambert’s voice came over the intercom asking each crewman if their equipment was in order. Cohen pushed the mask to his mouth to answer yes into the microphone. On his first two operations he had vomited before the aircraft had even crossed the English coast. Apart from the humiliation, it meant that Creaking Door had to lose precious height so that he could clean himself up before clamping the oxygen mask back to his face for the rest of the trip. Now he knew the smell of fear, for it lingered in his face mask and was a constant reminder of the dangers of being too imaginative. He sharpened pencils and prepared the elastic strap that held pencils, rulers and protractors from flying loose during violent evasive action. He looked at the topmost map and read to himself the names of Channel ports. He had passed through them on holiday before the war. He switched his microphone on. ‘Batters,’ said Cohen on impulse. There was no answer for a moment, then the engineer answered, ‘Engineer here, who is it?’

‘Kosh, Batters. What mob was your brother in at Dunkirk?’

There was no reply for some time. Cohen was debating whether to call again when Battersby answered.

‘I made that up, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My brother is in a reserved occupation, an electricity sub-station.’ There was a stunned silence over the crew intercom. Then Battersby said anxiously, ‘You weren’t thinking of telling Mr Sweet?’

‘No,’ said Cohen. ‘I wasn’t.’

Lambert could see Warley Fen straight ahead. The mile-long runways were distinct on the landscape like a black Chinagraph cross scrawled upon a coloured map. Lambert took a quick look round to be sure there were no other aircraft in the circuit. High above them he saw a thin streak of a condensation trail in the upper atmosphere. The aeroplane making it was just a speck.

‘Look at him go,’ said Cohen. Lambert guessed he was standing under the astrodome. He was like a kid on an outing whenever they were in the air.

‘It’s the Met flight, on his way to look at the weather over our target,’ said Digby.

They looked up at the dot. ‘With that sort of altitude,’ said Lambert, ‘a man could live for ever.’

At 32,000 feet the Spitfire had begun to spin a white feathery trail in the thin moist air. The pilot watched the trail in his mirror and put the stick forward. The highly polished Spitfire Mk XI responded with a shallow dive. The altimeter needle moved slowly backwards until, as suddenly as it began, the white trail ended. Immediately the pilot corrected his plane into straight and level flight. This was his optimum safety height for today. No enemy could bounce him from above without leaving a telltale trail. Now he need only watch the air below. He checked the notepad and pencils strapped to his knee for the tenth time. He settled back comfortably and ran a finger round his collar; the cockpit was very warm. Few men had seen the world from this height. Few men knew that it was only a layer cake: a rich-green England base with a layer of light-green ocean on it, then Holland, brownish and flecked with clouds along the coastline. Then the distant horizon, perhaps as far as two hundred miles away, disappearing into white mist like whipped cream. Upon it blue sky was heaped until it could hold no more. To the Ruhr and back would take the Spitfire only ninety-two minutes. He’d have time for a game of tennis before tea.

In the thirteenth century East Anglian wool merchants had brought back from the Low Countries wealth, brickmakers, architects and a taste for fine Dutch houses. There were many houses as well preserved as Warley Manor, with its distinctive curved gables and fine pantiles. Before the war it had been the home of a Conservative Member of Parliament. Art students had regularly come to sketch it. They had sat on the lawn shaded by the ancient elm trees, and had tea and cucumber sandwiches in the Terrace Room. Now it was the Officers’ Mess of RAF Station Warley Fen. The Terrace Room was furnished with long polished tables. Between the tables white-jacketed airmen moved carefully, setting the lunch plates with white linen napkins and gleaming glassware. Through the folding doors from the anteroom came the cheerful shouts of young commissioned aircrew, and a gramophone record of Al Bowlly was playing gently in the background. The sunlight made patterns on the carpet and the glass doors had been opened to let the tobacco-smoke escape.

There were sixteen Lancaster bombers at Warley Fen. Each one had a crew of seven. Of these one hundred and twelve operational crewmen, eighty-eight were sergeants. (The Sergeants’ Mess was a series of corrugated iron huts interjoined.)

The remaining twenty-four flyers were officers; they shared this mess with another forty-eight officers ranging from the Padre to the Dental Officer, plus some WAAF officers like Section Officer Maisie Holroyd. She was a plump thirty-eight-year-old woman who had spent eight years running a cheap ‘meat and two veg’ dining-rooms in Exeter. At Warley Fen she was the Catering Officer and even the people who found the present food unappetizing agreed that she did a better job than any of her male predecessors.

The non-operational officers were mostly middle-aged. They wore medals from the First World War and inter-war campaign ribbons from Arabia and India and a very high percentage had pilot’s wings on their tunics. Of the twenty-four operational flyers, thirteen were born in Britain. The others were three Canadians, four Australians, two Rhodesians, and two Americans who still had not transferred to the USAAF. Seven officers wore the striped ribbon of the DFC, including Flight Lieutenant Sweet of B Flight.

Had he been asked what his talents were, Flight Lieutenant Sweet would not have put flying a bomber anywhere near the top of his list. Nor, which would have surprised his fellow airmen even more, would he have claimed to be a popular leader of men. Sweet felt himself particularly well fitted to be a planner of air strategy. Some of his boyhood ambitions had come to nought, for instance his desire to be six foot tall and his ambition to be head boy. In addition, there was his dream of winning the hundred yards’ sprint and being Captain of the Southern Counties Public School Cricket Eleven, but these were lesser hopes.

His desire to be a strategist had not diminished with time as had the desire to be a professional cricketer, nor had it become unreal like his hopes of being six foot tall. The war would continue for at least ten more years, Sweet had decided. There was time enough for this ambition. When we had conquered the Germans the Japs would be next on the list, and look how long the Chinks had spent trying to hold them off: since 1931. After that we’d probably have to put the Russians in their place. It was going to be a long war and Sweet had decided to spend the greater part of it on the staff side: making decisions, formulating plans, forging strategy. These were the things of which wars were made. Naturally a young ambitious staff officer would have had a dangerous war behind him and a couple of gongs. These would be his credentials, his way of making the old-timers listen to reason. Two tours of bombers, DFC and bar and a job at High Wycombe: this was Sweet’s ambition.

He could handle a bit of schoolboy German and French. Next he’d learn some Russkie or Jap, or perhaps even Mandarin. He bought two whiskies and walked across to the solemn-faced Education Officer, an elderly schoolteacher who had joined the station only that week. Education officers were often called ‘schoolmasters’, and never more aptly, for this bespectacled pilot officer had, until ten weeks before, been teaching History and Languages at a secondary school in Harwich.

‘How are you finding things, sir?’ said Sweet deferentially.

‘Splendid,’ said the Education Officer, wondering why he should have been sought out by this gay young hero.

‘Wizard,’ nodded Sweet. ‘That’s wizard. My name’s Sweet, Flight commander B Flight. Look, sir, I would appreciate your advice. Considering the way the world is going – the war and everything, you know – I’d like to hear a broader view than we’ – quick look round – ‘get in the Mess.’