Once More the Hawks

by Max Hennessy

  The navigator had his own compass and it was useful to check that it matched the pilot’s, particularly on a long trek over the empty sea.

  ‘Pilot to Gunners. Watch out for other aircraft.’

  ‘Navigator to Pilot. Alter course to one-two-three.’

  Dicken saw Scrivens’ hand move to his microphone to reply, probably to question the course, but as he did so the rear gunner’s voice came, harsh and urgent. ‘Rear Gunner to Pilot. There was a kite immediately behind us just now. He was bloody close.’

  ‘Roger. Keep watching. There are lots of aircraft around.’

  ‘Bomb Aimer to Navigator. Enemy coast ahead.’

  Suddenly the aircraft’s wing dropped and it slumped to port as if it had lost its footing in the air.

  ‘Christ–’ the rear gunner’s voice came in a nervous shout – that silly bastard nearly hit us!’

  ‘I know that, Rear Gunner.’ Scrivens sounded annoyed through the formality of his reply, and his voice was tart.

  ‘I didn’t see him coming.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have done. Keep a better lookout.’

  ‘Skip, I am keeping a good lookout.’

  ‘Dry up,’ Scrivens snapped. ‘Where is he now–’ That’s more important.’

  ‘I think he’s gone underneath us.’

  ‘Right. Let’s all keep our eyes open then, shall we?’ Scrivens glanced quickly at Dicken but Dicken said nothing. If he could control his nervous crew on his own so much the better. So far he was managing very well.

  They seemed to have lost the other machine. Indeed, they seemed to have lost all the other machines and Dicken suspected they had wandered out of the bomber stream and he quietly opened on his knee the map he had brought with him. He had marked off a course himself as a check but the wind was still edging them north and, with the cloud blanketing the ground and blotting out landmarks, he wondered if Norman was allowing enough drift in his calculations.

  In the distance as the occupied Dutch coast grew nearer he could see flickering pinpricks of flak, like small sparklers in the sky where the defences opened up against the leading aircraft, then a searchlight flung its beam upwards and another nearby plane came into action. The beams crossed then, for no apparent reason, the first light went out. The flak came nearer, like fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night, then abruptly there was a thud and for a moment the bitter smell of explosive in the nostrils. The aeroplane jolted as if struck by a giant fist, rattled, and rode smoothly on.

  ‘Rear Gunner to Pilot. We have a hole aft. Not a big one but a hole.’

  The bomb aimer’s voice came in a nervous attempt at humour. ‘Indian country.’

  Little damage seemed to have been done and every member of the crew reported that everything in his department was functioning correctly. But the chattering had died down now, because they were all aware that Cologne knew all about protecting itself and what they had just experienced was nothing compared with what they would have to face over the target. Cologne was used to aerial bombardment and having, like all cities, grown tougher under the experience, could be expected to hit back hard.

  For a long time, beneath the thunder of the engines, there was silence, then Scrivens spoke. ‘We should be approaching Germany by now, Navigator, shouldn’t we?’

  There was hesitation in the reply. ‘Yes, Skip.’

  ‘Well, are we or aren’t we?’

  ‘I – yes, we are.’

  ‘Aren’t you sure?’

  ‘Well, look, I–’

  ‘This has happened before,’ Scrivens snapped. ‘Are we or aren’t we?’

  There was a long silence and Scrivens began to stare through the window.

  ‘Pilot to Passenger. Do you see any other aircraft about, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Dicken said quietly. ‘We seem to have lost them.’

  ‘Pilot to Navigator. Where are we, please?’

  There was another thud nearby and the machine shook.

  ‘That was a German gun,’ the rear gunner said. ‘It sounded more spiteful than the ones in Holland. We’re over Germany all right.’

  They were still waiting for Norman’s reply when they found themselves surrounded by shell bursts. Then there was a tremendous crash that sent the Lancaster skating sideways out of control. The sound was shocking in its suddenness and intensity and immediately Dicken became aware of a cold draught on him that told him they’d been hit again, this time harder than before. But the machine recovered again and seemed to be flying safely.

  There was a long silence then the members of the crew began to report. The last one to speak was Norman, the navigator. The voice was faint and hesitant.

  ‘Navigator? You all right?’

  ‘There’s a big hole here. But, yes, I’m all right.’

  ‘Well, will you give me that position, please.’

  ‘I–’

  Scrivens’ voice became crisp and hard. ‘Do you know where we are?’

  There was a long silence. ‘I think–’

  ‘I don’t want any “thinks”, Navigator. I want to know for sure. Do you know?’

  ‘I think we’re over Eindhoven.’

  ‘I don’t think we are.’

  Dicken, who had been following the course with his map, stared down at the ground and spoke quietly. ‘I think we’re further north and east, between the Waal and the Maas at Nijmegen. We’re still over Holland.’

  He heard Scrivens give a sigh of relief. ‘Thank you, sir. Did you hear that, Navigator?’

  ‘Yes, Skip. I’ll work out a new course.’

  ‘If the Navigator will come forward,’ Dicken said, still keeping his voice quiet, ‘I can probably help.’

  When Norman appeared he seemed almost in tears and terrified of a monumental ticking off. But Dicken gently pointed out the rivers, which they could just see between the broken cloud in the moonlight.

  ‘The wind’s been setting us north all the time,’ he said.

  He pointed out the new course and handed back the map. ‘After that,’ he suggested, ‘I doubt if we’ll need a course, because we ought to be able to see the fires the pathfinders have started.

  Norman had just disappeared back to his position when there was a yell from the rear gunner.

  ‘There’s a fighter – !’

  A tremendous crash drowned the shout and Dickens heard Scrivens, who had just yanked the machine to port, cry out. As they lurched in the air, holes appeared in the side of the cockpit. Scrivens’ instinctive move had undoubtedly saved them but he was sitting twisted in his seat now, his head down.

  ‘You all right, Pilot?’

  Scrivens’ voice came faintly. ‘No. I – I’ve been hit.’

  ‘Right.’ Dicken reached for the controls. ‘I’ve got her.’ He looked about him. The machine was flying steadily and there was no interruption in the beat of the engines. ‘Where’s that fighter, Rear Gunner? Can you see him?’

  ‘No, sir. He went over to starboard. He’s disappeared.’

  ‘Keep a sharp lookout, everybody. Engineer and Bomb Aimer, come here and help me change seats.’

  Blood was pulsing from Scrivens’ left leg. The bomb aimer yanked him roughly from his position while the flight engineer held the machine steady for Dicken to change seats. He had just settled down when the rear gunner’s voice came once more in a high-pitched yell.

  ‘ I see him! He’s coming round again!’

  ‘Let me know when he comes in.’

  ‘He’s coming in – now!’

  ‘Flaps!’

  As the flaps opened, the Lancaster wallowed, her speed cut abruptly, and they saw the night fighter shoot ahead of them. As the bomber fell over to starboard in a dive and its speed built up, it began to rattle and shudder.

  Ho
pper, the flight engineer, was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat now. ‘You all right, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you need any help?’

  The controls seemed solid against the weight of the airstream but gradually they began to move as the flight engineer also applied pressure. The Lancaster’s nose came up, the whole machine shuddering and rattling as it did so. The damage turned out to be less than they had expected but, though the engines were still roaring satisfactorily and the flight engineer reported that he could find no malfunctioning anywhere, the aeroplane persisted in flying one wing low.

  As they began to regain height, Dicken saw a glow in the sky and other aeroplanes in silhouette against it. Cologne was drawing them towards it like moths towards a candle, but they were on a converging course as Y-Yoke came in from slightly to the north.

  ‘Keep your eyes open, everybody,’ Dicken said. ‘We don’t want a collision.’

  ‘There’s an aircraft to starboard, sir,’ the mid-upper gunner reported at once. ‘I can see him quite plainly. Converging.’

  ‘I see him, too, thank you.’

  There was no need for navigation now, and Dicken merely pointed the Lancaster at the glow. The cloud, exactly as they had been told, had fallen away to leave them a clear view of the target and they could see the ground in amazing clarity under the moon. A lake picked up the glow momentarily then turned pitch black, darker than the rest of the countryside. They were approaching the city from the north-west, making their run at 15,000 feet. Hundreds of searchlight were quartering the sky and hundreds of guns were throwing up an incredibly heavy barrage. But the defences had been hard hit by the earlier arrivals and were already beginning to show signs of confusion and panic. Much of the firing seemed to be haphazard, a barrage merely because there had to be a barrage, while the searchlights seemed unable to pick out individual aircraft. When they did, however, the flak was co-operating well, hurling a tremendous fire into the apex of the cone of light.

  The shell bursts grew nearer then just ahead of them, there was a bright glow in the sky and a ball of incandescent light fell slowly and gently earthwards. Immediately, all the other machines in the vicinity, whose crews had seen the aircraft explode, began to weave and corkscrew, determined not to be caught, too. Under the circumstances, the safest thing seemed to be to fly straight and level.

  Still the mass of bombers forged on and now they could see that, as if caught by some internal explosion, the old city had caught fire.

  So far the losses had been minimal but the defences were by no means saturated yet and, with the fear of fighters, there was also the fear of collision. An enormous number of machines were converging over Cologne, and, with the varied angles of the searchlights, there was also an effect of a false horizon that made it all too easy to fall into an uncontrolled spiral.

  Rocking in the slipstream of other aircraft, everybody was straining their eyes not only for fighters but also for friendly aircraft weaving nearby. Then, no more than four hundred yards ahead and slightly to port, clear in the glow from the fires below, they saw two aircraft settling down into a dangerous position one above the other. Unless someone in the lower machine was looking directly upwards, neither crew would see the other. The top aircraft was a Stirling, the one below a Wellington, both of them easily recognised by their silhouettes against the glow. Then, as the Stirling sagged and levelled out, the Wellington lifted slightly, soaring just too far, and its propellers carved into the Stirling’s tail. The two aircraft drew apart at once, as if startled, then they both began to fall. As their noses dropped, the Wellington blew up in a flare of flame and they saw the Stirling hurtle through the blaze and disappear. A few seconds later there was an explosion on the ground where it had struck.

  ‘Jesus!’ The voice was the mid-upper gunner’s.

  For a few minutes the chatter died and Dicken could only hear the roar of the engines and the shout of the wind through the holes the flak had made in the machine. It was less a shocked silence than an awed silence, as though for the first time the crew, with all their idealistic beliefs about the war in the air, had suddenly realised what the reality was.

  Because they were approaching from the wrong angle, Dicken knew they would have to cross the target and go round again. Below them the fires were spreading like a plague and major conflagrations were going now like blast furnaces in three enormous columns of flame. Then, as they turned into the main stream, they were hit again. The explosion was just below and to starboard and there was a crash in the cockpit that left a gaping hole in the nose. The outer starboard engine began to run raggedly, the aeroplane developed a shake, and somewhere beneath them Dicken could hear a loud rattle, as if something had been torn loose and was flapping in the slipstream. But nobody was hurt and the flight engineer’s voice came quietly.

  ‘The compass’s smashed, sir.’ He sounded quite calm.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dicken said. ‘At the moment, I doubt if we need it. How are we, Flight Engineer?’

  ‘Losing pressure on the starboard outer, sir. It’s overheating. We look like having to shut it down.’

  ‘Well, that ought to enable us to turn south for the homeward run without much difficulty.’

  Beneath them now Dicken could see the outline of the city clearly, the Rhine running almost north and south. A vast S-bend just to the south gave them a steering point as they began their run towards the centre of the city. Ahead they could see the twin central bridges, the Hindenburgbrücke and the Hohenzollernbrücke, and the cathedral floodlit by the surrounding fires.

  The defences were growing ragged now and the entire target area was thrown into relief by the moonlight so that individual streets could be seen for their entire length, broken by buildings and by the railways that curved wide tracks round the city. Ortton, the bomb aimer, was already in position. There seemed to be dozens of aircraft around and they were all, Y-Yoke included, clearly visible to fighters against the glow.

  ‘Steady!’

  There could be no evasive action during the run up as the bomb aimer lined up his target, and everybody steeled themselves to ignore the shuddering and the rattle and the flak.

  ‘That’s it, sir. Hold it there. Drifting a bit to the right. Left a bit. Good. That’s fine. Hold it there.’

  The flak blasts kept nudging the aircraft.

  ‘Bit more left, sir. Hold her there. Steady. Steady.’

  God, Dicken thought, he was growing too old for this lark! He could still remember the terror he’d felt when they’d bombed the Lugagnano power station in Italy in 1918. Curiously, though, the fear now didn’t seem so intense. Perhaps as you grew older dying didn’t matter so much, while at twenty you felt you still had too much life to live. In addition, these days he had no woman to care whether he lived or not. At Lugagnano, he’d been thinking of Nicola Aubrey.

  Concentrating on keeping the aircraft steady, his thoughts drifted to her sister, Marie-Gabrielle, who had said at the age of nine that she wanted to marry him and had said it again when they’d met on the North-West Frontier of India when she was nineteen. She’d be all of thirty now and sometimes as he thought of her he longed for another chance.

  ‘Bombs gone!’

  The words jerked him back to the present and, relieved of her load, Y-Yoke lifted, adjusting herself to her new freedom. His mind on the job in hand again, Dicken’s hands moved as he retrimmed her. All they had to do now was get home.

  Limping badly by this time, with one engine dead, Y-Yoke dropped down to Harwick well behind the rest. The runway had been cleared for them and, with Scrivens faint by this time from loss of blood, an ambulance was waiting. As the tyres screeched on touchdown, Dicken saw it move out and start to follow them.

  Taxiing to their place on the perimeter, as he switched off engines, there were shouts from the ground crew as they stared up at the holes in the machine. Then as the ambulance arrived and Scrivens wa
s lifted out Dicken climbed with the others into the crew lorry. They didn’t speak much but kept giving him sidelong, almost shy glances, as if they knew that, in their inexperience, they probably wouldn’t have survived but for his presence in the aircraft.

  Hatto was waiting at the debriefing. ‘Nice to see you back, old lad,’ he said quietly. Holding out a cigarette case, he handed over a mug of tea. ‘Harris’s livid, of course. Next time, he says, there’ll be an order saying that no AOCs are to take part.’

  Dicken shrugged. ‘That crew wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t,’ he pointed out. ‘As it is, we have one more aircraft and one more crew for tomorrow than we would have had, and there are seven young men out there who are still alive. What’s the state?’

  ‘They’re still coming in. We’ve got off lightly, judging by the reports, we’ve lost around thirty-seven aircraft. Which is what was expected. We can cope with that.’

  The returning crews were excited and thankful to be alive, especially the crew of Y-Yoke. Even the return had not been without incident because Norman, once more on the point of tears, had been obliged to confess he was lost once more. With the compass destroyed, a freezing gale passing through the cockpit and the aircraft shedding pieces all the way across Europe, Dicken had flown them home with his map on his knee. He had recommended to Gregg that Norman be sent back for further training.

  As the crews began to disperse for breakfast and sleep, he headed for the Ops Room. Howarth was there with Hatto.

  ‘Still one or two to come,’ Howarth said.

  His hair flattened by his flying helmet, Dicken found a chair, lit a cigarette and sat in silence. Everybody was watching the board, waiting to see that last ominous space filled in with the time the aircraft landed.

  Section Officer Paget was sitting behind the table, answering the telephone, getting up every time they heard the roar of engines overhead and climbing the ladder to the board to fill in yet another space. X-X-Ray. S-Sugar. M-Mother. They were all there. One after the other the spaces were filled, until only one remained empty. Section Officer Paget sat silently at her desk. Someone brought her a cup of tea which she drank without speaking, while Dicken sat watching her, still smoking. Above her head the empty space remained, blank and frightening. As Dicken’s eye travelled along the line of information – the bomb load, the time of take-off, the crew – he stopped at the name of the pilot: Flight-Lieutenant Diplock.