The parachute was huge and round and white above me. The leading edge fluttered in a silent wind; the shrouds stretched down and met at my shoulders. I turned slow circles, looking down past the toes of my socks to the fires of Berlin. I swung from side to side, and the searchlights washed over me and passed along. I saw the Lancaster hit the ground, or the main part of it at least; I was pretty sure it was ours. There was a flash of light as the bombs exploded. And in that instant they all just disappeared: poor stupid Buzz; little Ratty, who had got his last wish; Will the poet, Simon the gadna; and Lofty, with his secret still clutched in his hand.
All alone, I floated into the blackness. With no sense of falling, no sense of movement, I drifted through the void that belonged to Donny Lee and a thousand others. I was afraid to look around in case I saw him there, or a host of airmen sailing with me, all white-faced or burned to crisps. Between the heaven and the stars I swung below the chute, flying through the world of the dead.
EPILOGUE
I SPENT THE REST of the war, and the rest of my boyhood, in a prison camp. With its rows of wire fences, its wooden huts and sandy ground, it was like an enormous pigeon loft crowded with men and boys who had once been fliers.
We had lived in the sky, in that limitless world of moonlight and clouds, and to be suddenly caged in was too much for some. I thought at first it would be just fine, it would be jim-dandy to be locked in there, to be locked out of a world at war. But soon I was spending my days pressed against the wire, staring out at trees and hills. Through two winters and two springs I wore a trench through the sandy ground, from my hut to the wire.
Now and then the great Flying Fortresses thundered overhead. They didn’t even bother with camouflage paint anymore. Their aluminum skins shone like silver as they stretched their cloudy trails across the sky. It was heartbreaking to watch them, and the fighters that followed—like little sparks of sunlight. I came to understand the surly bonds of earth. They bound me down as the months crawled by.
But it wasn’t the sky that I longed for. I didn’t think that I would ever again climb into an airplane. I ached for the North Woods, for the cry of the wolf and the bursting of deer from the undergrowth.
In 1945 we were freed by American soldiers. We rode a train through ruined cities and flattened villages, past fields full of craters and rubble. A soldier beside me, watching through the window, said, “We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”
The war was over when I arrived in England again, and though I looked everywhere for Bert—from Land’s End to the Scottish Highlands—I found no trace of the old pigeoneer. In the hills of Yorkshire I found a deserted runway and the rubble of a pigeon loft. In London I sat by the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square. But the pigeons only saddened me, and the whirring of their wings brought sweat to my hands and a knock to my heart.
The things that I had seen and done never faded from my mind. The sight of a full moon, the smell of clover, the sound of a laugh like Ratty’s, would bring everything back in an instant. Every now and then I dreamed I was falling, and I woke in a sweat, kicking at the blankets.
There was nothing left for me in England, and I went home to Canada in the spring of 1947. It was the forest that called me, the great stretch of the Canadian Shield, with its red rock, its jack pines and leaping rivers. But I went at it slowly. I bought a train ticket only as far as Toronto.
Yesterday I climbed aboard and headed west. I huddled by a window as we clacked through little villages, through farmland and fields. The farther I went, the more the sky grew thick and stormy. When the sun went down, and there was only darkness around me—and the shaking of the train—I felt that I was flying. And last night, for the first time in many, many months, I dreamed the same old dream of spinning round and round, of the earth below me full of fire.
I woke screaming. I flung away my blanket, and it tangled in my arms. For a moment, amid the rumble of thunder and flash of lightning, I thought it was Percy beating his wings at my face. I woke the others in the railway car; I shocked them from their sleep. And their startled voices sent me back to a burning, spinning Lanc.
Even now, in the brightness of noon, they look toward me, wondering—I suppose—about my air force uniform and the deep lines in my face.
Lake Ontario sparkles on our left; the land on our right is green and flat. We’re getting close to the city now. I don’t know how long I’ll stay, or exactly what I’ll do. But someday I’ll carry on to the west, and home to Kakabeka.
The train rocks over a switch. The wheels click and clack. The engine sounds its whistle up ahead, and the sound sends me off again in my mind. I travel half the world, in the middle of a war, to a lonely airfield among the hills of Yorkshire.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Just about everyone who grew up in southern Alberta remembers the Nanton bomber. Seventy feet long, a hundred across the wings, it sat beside the highway near the little town of Nanton, as though its crew had landed there one day and walked away across the fields. It was a big Lancaster with four great engines, with a turret in its tail and a turret on its back, and a pair of rudders mounted on a rear wing that was wider than the road.
It was forty miles from our Calgary home, and it’s been almost that many years since I saw it last. But I remember the smell of the Nanton bomber, the yellowness of the glass, and a hollow feeling that seemed to pass from the thing into me. I remember climbing through it, sitting where the pilot had sat, crouching where the gunner had crouched.
In another direction, to the east of our home, there was a landing strip where people gathered every summer for an air show. We went there one year to see another Lancaster, one that actually flew. I can still hear the engines, still see the size of it as it growled across the prairie sky, across the sun, flying for the very last time. When it landed it was shipped away to be a statue somewhere.
It was no wonder that I grew up with a fascination for the wartime aircraft and their pilots. There was so much drama in the air war, so many tales of heroism. There was Guy Gibson flying his great Lancaster along the top of the Möhne dam, drawing fire from the gun towers as the next pilot went in with his fabulous bouncing bomb. There was Charles Mynarski, who battled to free his rear gunner from a burning Lancaster as the flames leapt up and scorched away his clothes and his parachute. There was Douglas Bader, who stomped around his fighter base on two tin legs after a flying accident cost him his real ones.
Years and years later, hoping to find that boyish excitement again, I started planning a story about the air war, about the night fliers of Bomber Command. I read the same books all over again, and whatever new ones I could find. One of the first was Boys, Bombs and Brussels Sprouts, by J. Douglas Harvey, a Canadian pilot. I followed him through his days in Halifax bombers, to his first flight in a Lancaster. And the next sentence came as quite a surprise:
“Perhaps the strangest change was the absence of our pigeon, which we had always carried in the Halifax.”
It seemed bizarre to me. In its day, the Halifax stood at the peak of aeronautical design. The seven members of its crew could find their way on the blackest night to bomb any city within nearly a thousand miles of England. They could defend themselves along the route; they could talk to England by wireless. Everything they might need, they took along, like the old explorers on the seas. That they depended, in the end, on something as quaint as a homing pigeon seemed silly somehow, and pathetic. It was as though you could strip apart the space shuttles of today, and find at the heart of them little windup rubber motors.
I went back to the books in a different way, looking only for mentions of pigeons. There wasn’t very much. It was as though the airmen had forgotten about the birds, or hadn’t thought of them as important enough to write about.
But the pigeons saved lives. They carried messages from bombers forced down in the English Channel and the North Sea, from others that landed on fields and lonely moors. The most heroic pigeons were awarded medals for bravery.
One of those was White Vision, who flew in an RAF flying boat.
In October 1943 the flying boat ditched in the North Sea, sixty miles from its base. It came down at 8:20 in the morning, but the weather was so poor that no other aircraft could be sent out to look for it. At five o’clock that afternoon, White Vision homed to his loft. He had flown into headwinds of twenty-five miles an hour, through mist and rain so thick that he couldn’t see farther than a hundred yards. But he brought his message with the location of the downed aircraft, and the entire crew was rescued.
White Vision was awarded the Dickin Medal, a presentation given only to animals. Bearing the words “For Gallantry” and “We Also Serve,” it was known as the animals’ Victoria Cross. Of the fifty-three recipients, thirty-one were pigeons.
In 1943, when this story takes place, the squadrons of Bomber Command and Coastal Command had their own pigeon lofts, and specially trained crews to run them. The pigeoneers were usually fanciers who had kept their own birds in peacetime, and were taught their new duties by the Army Pigeon Service. Their birds flew in every type of bomber until the Lancaster was introduced. B for Buster would actually have carried two pigeons, with the navigator probably looking after one of them.
The aircrews often joked about the birds, and the chances of snacking on pigeon if flying rations dwindled. J. Douglas Harvey says, “We never thought of the pigeon except for those times when we were waiting to climb aboard for a flight; and once we got under way we seldom remembered it until the next raid.”
That take-them-for-granted attitude, though understandable for men going off to high and lonely battlefields, might explain why the pigeoneers had to wait fifty-five years beyond the war to receive any recognition for their work. It wasn’t until 2000 that a representative of the Army Pigeon Service placed a wreath at the Cenotaph in London.
That first wreath was placed by Mr. Jack Porter, an Army Pigeon Service pigeoneer during the war. Over eighty now, he still helps out at pigeon races, though he had to give up his own loft because of lung problems that came to bother many pigeoneers. Mr. Porter kindly helped me with the research for this book, answering questions about lofts and pigeons and pigeoneers. From him, more than any other source, I learned the importance of the job he’d had, and the seriousness of his work. For the sake of this story, Bert—my pigeoneer—is an outcast and a bit of a failure at everything else, a dirty and slovenly man. That is perhaps the most fictional part of this book. In truth, the pigeoneer was a dedicated professional, volunteering for his role out of an interest in and a love for pigeons. Though nearly overwhelmed with paperwork, he kept his birds with great care and fondness.
Throughout the war, pigeons carried messages for the army, the navy, and the air force. They parachuted into France with British spies, and brought back messages that couldn’t be safely sent by radio. They even carried messages for journalists. Articles in the wartime papers were sometimes headed “VIA PIGEON.”
In Bomber Command, there were several pigeons that flew fifty ops, some that flew more than a hundred. One of those, a Dickin Medal winner called Cologne, made its way home several times by itself, from aircraft that had been forced to land in England. On June 29, 1943, its last aircraft was lost over Germany. But Cologne still returned, seventeen days later, with a broken breastbone and other injuries.
Some pigeons do have the eye-sign. Fanciers have written whole books describing the colors and glints in the eyes of great racers and homers. Others say the marks mean nothing, but they don’t argue that the halos and the stars are there.
And pigeons really can fly as fast as Percy. The Army Pigeon Service trained its birds for speed, and clocked more than one at seventy miles an hour. A Halifax bomber, with its wheels and flaps down, would stall at about eighty-five miles an hour. There wasn’t a great deal of difference in speed between a very fast pigeon and a very slow bomber.
Over time, technology replaced the birds. As Bomber Command squadrons converted to Lancasters, with advanced radio systems, the birds became redundant. The birds were somehow removed, but their fate is unknown. Though I doubt very much that any commanding officer feasted on his feathery crew, it’s almost certain that others did. While many of the birds belonged to private fanciers, others were bred especially for the air force. Mr. Porter says those birds were destroyed when Lancasters arrived. J. Douglas Harvey says the birds were officially retired. “If you ordered chicken in a restaurant,” he says, “you knew it was pigeon that was served, and a question often flicked across my mind: was a fellow crew member now making the supreme sacrifice?”
It seems to me that it was a terrible fate the pigeons met.
To the Germans, the crews of Bomber Command were known as Terrorfliegen, the Terror Fliers. The destruction that was brought to European cities by the nighttime raids is difficult to grasp from the numbers in casualty lists. But it was immense, and horrific.
As Allied armies advanced through Europe in 1945, pictures of the flattened cities appeared, and a great dismay and horror rose at what had been done. Churches and monasteries, castles and museums, old bridges and harbors and homes, all lay in heaps of rubble, and it seemed a shameful way to have fought a war. Then in the first months of peace, German war leaders were tried as criminals. Some were sentenced to be hanged or imprisoned for ordering aerial assaults on English cities.
The airmen of Bomber Command, who had brought far greater destruction to German cities, were—in a way—tarred with the same brush. Campaign medals were issued to soldiers and sailors, but not to the bombers—once heroes and now villains. The same people who had cheered the airmen on their nightly way to Germany suddenly condemned them for what they had done. And over the years, the criticism of Bomber Command only grew stronger. Bomber Harris, today, is often cast as a cold-blooded man who delighted in slaughtering German civilians.
The truth isn’t so simple. At the beginning of the war, British bombers worked in the daylight, taking great care to avoid harming civilians. But aircraft losses were so high that night bombing became the only option. And bombing at night was not very accurate. Of the first ones to try it, fewer than one aircraft in ten came within five miles of its target.
Early in 1942 the British government put Harris in control of Bomber Command, with the instructions to target German cities, and especially civilians. By killing workers in their homes, the government hoped to destroy or delay the major German industries. It called this process de-housing.
Harris had the duty of announcing the shift in tactics. In his first public broadcasts he said Germany could now expect to receive what it handed out in the bombings of Rotterdam, London, and Warsaw, but on a scale far greater and more deadly. “They have sown the wind,” he said. “And now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Harris was popular among the aircrew of Bomber Command. He did what he could to make their lives safer and longer. For the fliers themselves, there was no question of right or wrong. They dodged flak and searchlights and fighters to hit back at an enemy that was doing its best to kill them. There wasn’t a British soldier on the ground in all of Europe, but night after night the fliers climbed into their bombers and took the war to Germany.
They suffered for it terribly. Their casualties were higher than in any other branch of the service. Of the 125,000 men who flew with Bomber Command, 55,500 were killed. Thousands more were wounded or captured, and an airman beginning his thirty-op tour had no logical hope that he would ever complete it.
They were all volunteers. For the most part they were teenagers, or men so newly out of their teens that they were still really boys. They fought in the darkness, in bitter cold, where the air was too thin to breathe. They came home to empty chairs and empty beds, where their friends had been just hours before. Of course they were terrified.
“The fear of flying operations was a constant with most aircrew,” says Harvey. “Faced with what they considered impossible odds, many aircrew simply quit. It was rare for an entire
crew to quit but nearly every crew had one member pack it in.” Harvey had two.
Lack of Moral Fiber. That was the fate awaiting airmen who quit, the label that Bomber Command put on those who refused to fly, whether it was before their first op or long after their twentieth. Punishment was swift, and so terrible in the eyes of the airmen that, for many, the fear of being branded LMF was greater than the terrors of ops. I imagine it often took a great deal of courage for a man to be called a coward.
GLOSSARY
Airscrew—the propeller unit on an aircraft, made up of a hub and separate propeller blades.
Bind—a favorite word of Bomber Command aircrew. Binders are the ground brakes on the aircraft wheels. In airmen’s slang, something depressing or troubling is a bind. But bind can also mean bored: if something bores you utterly, it binds you rigid.
Bomber Command—the structure set up to control and manage the aircraft and crews of the Royal Air Force, and the “colonial” crews of the Empire. Airmen from the United States fly under their own, separate organization, unless—like Ratty—they have volunteered for Bomber Command.
Bomber Harris—Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command.
Bowser—a fuel tanker that is towed from bomber to bomber. The sergeant in charge of it is known as the bowser king.
CO—commanding officer.
Clag—cloud, tending to be thick. In its oldest sense, the word refers to the clotted bits cut or combed from a sheep’s fleece.
Darkies—“Darky” is the code word for a system of emergency navigation. A lost aircraft can call “Darky,” and searchlights on the ground will be aimed by their controllers to guide the bomber to a nearby airfield.
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