On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  “Keep this course, Skip,” said the navigator. “We’ll turn five miles inland instead of over Noordwijk. That should keep us well clear of Leiden.”

  “Okey dokey,” said Fleming and for the first time felt truly like a skipper.

  Robin, fellow officer and bomb aimer, had been sitting at the navigator’s table filling in his log. He collected up his parachute, target map, log and Thermos flask, disconnected his oxygen supply and came forward. He pushed the flight engineer gently to one side and, waving a greeting to Fleming at the controls, bent double to put his foot downward until it reached the step formed by the glycol tank. Carefully he ducked his head under the traversing ring of the front gun turret with its twin Browning guns. This was his world. It was quieter here. He spread the map out and lay full length, with his belly on the exit hatch and his head in the clear-view bowl that formed the nose of the airplane. Outside, the night was growing lighter; the moon was coming out. He looked round with interest but not surprise; he had always known it would be like this.

  To the right, one of the searchlight beams was shorter than the others and instead of tapering, its beam ended in a blunt hammerhead. “Look,” said Robin, “they’ve got someone in the searchlights.”

  “Poor swine,” said Fleming as he watched more searchlights affix their beams to the airplane.

  The trapped plane was tilting and twisting like a tormented animal, but although it broke clear of some of the beams, always at least one of them hung on to it. The flak had started now; some of the bursts were so close to it that the smoke obscured their view for a second or two but still the plane flew on.

  “We have him on our set now,” said Löwenherz.

  “Where do you want him?”

  “Just starboard and level.”

  “Let me put him a trifle high, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  “Very well.”

  “We’re closing too fast again.”

  In the searchlights everything was white. Two more had him now and they were fixing him to the sky like gleaming hatpins holding a fluttering white moth in a black velvet box. There was a brief flicker under the plane and it shivered slightly.

  “He’s hit.”

  “It’s B Beer, the Navigation Leader.”

  “The immortal Lud.”

  The navigator couldn’t see. “Are they getting out?”

  “No, he’s jettisoning his bombs.”

  As they watched it the bomber seemed to swell up very gently with a soft whoomp that was audible far across the sky. It became a ball of burning petrol, oil and pyrotechnic compounds. The yellow datum marker, which should have marked the approach to Krefeld, burned brightly as it fell away, leaving thin trails of sparks. The fireball changed from red to light pink as its rising temperature enabled it to devour new substances from hydraulic fluid and human fat to engine components of manganese, vanadium, and copper. Finally even the airframe burned. Ten tons of magnesium alloy flared with a strange greenish blue light. It lit up the countryside beneath it like a slow flash of lightning and was gone. For a moment a cloud of dust illuminated by the searchlights floated in the sky and then even that disappeared.

  “Jee—sus!” exclaimed Pilot Officer Cornelius Fleming in horror.

  “No parachutes,” pronounced Robin from the nose. The searchlights began moving again.

  “Flak did it,” said the mid-upper gunner, who had the best view of all.

  Far away near Utrecht, Fleming saw another master searchlight tilt from the vertical position at which it rested. The top of its beam seemed to explode as it moved across cloud patches. Between the patches it reached seven miles into the sky. Unfalteringly it found a victim.

  “The stream isn’t routed over Leiden,” said Fleming to his crew. “All of those aircraft are off course.” It sounded not only prim but callous, but before he could modify the sentiment the mid-upper gunner said, “I don’t give a bugger who they are; it takes the heat off us and for that I am truly grateful. Amen.”

  “Kettledrums, kettledrums,” said Löwenherz.

  “Lancaster,” said the observer, putting away his field glasses.

  Löwenherz hardly increased speed at all; he inched underneath the huge airplane very very slowly. He looked up through the tip of his cabin and he could see every detail of it. He let its red-hot exhaust pipes pass back overhead until he was exactly underneath the bomber. The two planes roared through the sky in close formation until, in the classic maneuver of the night fighter, Löwenherz pulled the control column back with all his strength. His nose went up closer and closer to the great bomber. The fighter shuddered as it neared stalling point, hanging on its propellers, thrashing like a drowning man but suspended and stationary for a moment. Over him came the bomber. “Horrido,” said Löwenherz to tell Bach what he was about to do, and he pressed his gun buttons and raked its belly from nose to tail. The gunfire lit both aircraft with a gentle greenish light. Löwenherz squinted to preserve his night vision as much as possible. These Richards were nothing but highpowered gun platforms and the demented hammering of the big cannons deafened the fliers even through their closely fitting helmets—just as the smell of cordite got into their nostrils in spite of their oxygen masks. Working exactly by the instruction book, Löwenherz kept his guns going even after the nose of the Junkers began to fall back toward earth. Suddenly the gunfire ended. The drums were empty.

  Three 20-mm. M.G. F.F. cannons were fitted in the nose of Löwenherz’s Junkers 88R. In sequence of threes there was a thin-cased shell containing 19.5 grams of Hexogen Al. high explosive filling, an explosive armor-piercing shell with a reinforced point and an incendiary that burned at a temperature between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees centigrade for nearly one second. Each cannon was firing at the rate of 520 rounds per minute and was fed by a drum containing 60 rounds. So in seven seconds all of the cannon drums were empty and 180 shells had been fired at The Volkswagen. The target measured 300 square feet, and 38 struck the airplane. Theoretically 20 shells would have constituted an average lethal blow.

  “My legs,” screamed Fleming. “God! Help me, Mother Mother Mother!”

  The first shell that penetrated the aircraft came through the forward hatch. Missing the bomb aimer by only an inch, it exploded on contact with the front turret mounting ring. It dislocated the turret, severed the throttle and rudder controls, burst the compressed air tank and broke open the window-spray glycol container. In the airstream the coolant atomized into a cloud of white mist. One-twenty-sixth of a second later the second shell came through the bomb compartment and exploded under the floor of the navigator’s position. In the mysterious manner of explosions, it sucked the navigator downward, while blowing the astrodome, and the wireless operator standing under it, out into the night unharmed. Although without his parachute.

  Three shells—one H.E., one A.P. and one incendiary—exploded in glancing contact with the starboard fuselage exterior immediately to the rear of the mid-upper turret. Apart from mortally harming the gunner, the explosion of the H.E. shell fractured the metal formers at a place where, after manufacture, the rear part of the fuselage is bolted on. The incendiary shell completed the severance. A structural bisection of The Volkswagen occurred one and a half minutes later and two thousand feet lower. Long before this, another H.E. shell passed through the elevator hinge bracket on the tail and blew part of the servo trim tab assembly into the rear turret with such force that it decapitated the rear gunner. Those six hits were the most telling ones, but there were thirty-two others. Some ricocheted off the engines and wings and penetrated the fuselage almost horizontally.

  He couldn’t hold her, he couldn’t. Oh dear God, his arms and legs! Dropping through the night like the paper airplane. “I’m sorry, chaps,” he shouted, for he felt a terrible sense of guilt. Involuntarily his bowels and bladder relaxed and he felt himself befouled. “I’m sorry.”

  It was no use for Fleming to scream apologies; there was no one aboard to hear him. He outlived any of his crew, for from 1
6,000 feet the wireless operator falling at 120 m.p.h. (the terminal velocity for his weight) reached the ground ninety seconds later. He made an indentation 12 inches deep. This represented a deceleration equivalent to 450 times the force of gravity. He split open like a slaughtered animal and died instantly. Fleming, still strapped into the pilot’s seat and aghast at his incontinence, hit the earth (along with the front of the fuselage, two Rolls-Royce engines and most of the main spar) some four minutes after that. To him it seemed like four hours.

  The air-conditioning in Ermine’s plotting room wasn’t intended to cope with so many off-duty personnel standing round as spectators. In addition, the tension seemed to raise a man’s body temperature, as does a meal. August mopped his brow and heard Löwenherz give the traditional victory cry: “Sieg Heil!”

  “Sieg Heil!” said August. Willi came to attention and gave August a formal salute of congratulation in a situation where most men would have shaken him by the hand. There were shuffles and coughs from the onlookers and murmurs of congratulation. The loudspeaker crackled.

  “He’s breaking up,” said Löwenherz. “The main spar has snapped and the fuselage is doubling back like a hairpin.”

  Willi wiped the wax marks off the table.

  “Order: Go to Heinz Gustav One,” said August.

  “Please: Via Noordwijk?”

  “Announcement: Yes, Katze One.” To Willi August said, “He might get a visual contact if they are still putting flares down but I can’t call the flak to a stop just because he is overflying them.”

  “He won’t hang around,” said Willi. “He’s a bright fellow.”

  “We’re all smart fellows,” said August. Willi smiled at August, his ruddy battered face twisted like a freshly squeezed orange.

  Löwenherz let the Junkers fall from its vertical position and after gaining speed he eased the antlers back and began climbing to fly back through the stream. Mrosek took off his seat straps, lit his torch and crawled down into the nose to change the 60-round cannon magazines on the Oerlikons. Löwenherz held the same shallow climb, but a patch of turbulent air caused Mrosek to blister his hand upon the breech. Changing the drums was an awkward job even on the ground in daytime, but Mrosek never complained. They flew on past Noordwijk without spotting any bombers, although there was lots of flak, including even some brightly colored 3.7-cm. stuff from Valkenburg aerodrome. The Junkers continued right out to the extreme western end of Ermine’s range. Those two interceptions had been quick and easy, but next time he might need to traverse the whole sector under August’s guidance before he made a contact.

  In Joe for King, Roland Pembroke, the young Scots navigator, had overcompensated for the wind error. His Gee was unusable owing to German jamming. Now his mistake had brought Joe for King to the Dutch coast five miles south of the turning point. Ahead of him, flying through flak and searchlights, there were others who had made the same error of reckoning.

  “We’ll go south of it,” said Tommy Carter.

  “South of Leiden?” said Roland, who had worked out his plot carefully and rather objected to abandoning the flight plan.

  “South of that muck,” said Tommy, waving toward the flak and lights ahead of them.

  “O.K., boss,” said Roland.

  The brand-new airplane had a strong smell of fresh paint and varnish. The controls were hard and stiff under Tommy Carter’s hands and as he turned the wheel it made brittle cracking sounds. On the other hand, everything worked properly. On his previous airplane two or three of the instruments were suspect and would stick and lag behind the others. In some ways he liked having this nice new airplane. He wondered whether they’d be allowed to keep it.

  Tommy knew it as a bad idea as soon as he changed onto the new heading. It wasn’t only Leiden that was alive with flak, it was this whole coast; The Hague under the starboard wing was damn nearly as bad as Leiden. There were Grossbatterien of dozens of guns and searchlights working under radar control. The whole land was asparkle with gunfire. Tommy fixed his eyes upon a black region of countryside beyond the gunfire and pushed the throttles forward.

  “Close your eyes and swallow,” said Tommy. “It will soon be gone.” The motors screamed loudly.

  There was an explosion rather nearer than the previous ones. It rocked the wings and made an acrid smell.

  “There’s light stuff too,” said Tapper Collins, the bomb aimer. He was in the nose watching ropes of red and yellow tracer curve toward them and fall away at what he knew to be thousands of feet below but which looked close enough to touch. “Lots of light stuff now, from directly below us.”

  “That must be the aerodrome at Valkenburg,” said Roland Pembroke.

  “Jesus,” said Tommy. “Leiden to the left of us, Hague to the right of us and now we are doing a straight and level over a bloody Hun aerodrome. What do you think you’re on, charge of the flipping Light Brigade?”

  “Sorry, Tommy,” said Roland politely. He didn’t point out that the change of route was Tommy’s idea.

  Tommy Carter didn’t answer, for at that moment all of his attention was taken with a searchlight that, having remained vertical and immobile for some time, had tilted and now moved toward them.

  “It’s coming at us,” shouted Collins from his position at the bombsight.

  “You berk, Tommy!” shouted Ben Gallacher, and Tommy Carter was outraged that he should be blamed for something so obviously beyond his control and not of his liking.

  “Sideslip down the beam,” said Collins. He was a veteran and Tommy respected his experience. This new airplane required extra strength to move its controls. He heaved at them and banked until the light was blinding bright. It had them. The cockpit was so brightly lit that it made his eyes ache and he could see only by almost closing them.

  The theory was that if you sideslipped down the beam the seachlight would (by continuing to move along) lose you. This searchlight crew seemed to have seen the trick before, although in fact Tommy Carter’s sideslip was not nearly violent enough to test the theory.

  “Fire into the light,” Tommy shouted.

  “Turn more, I can’t reach, I’m full traverse and I can’t reach,” called the gunner.

  Suddenly the light went out. Tommy and Ben tugged at the controls and the bomber eased out of its steep bank. The flak and searchlight had gone and the night was agreeably dark and silent. He began to climb again. It was more than a minute before anyone spoke and then everyone spoke, chattering hysterically and trying to make jokes.

  “Everyone shut up,” said Tommy Carter in the tone he used when he didn’t want an argument—what his crew called his copper’s voice.

  “Navigator,” said Tommy with unusual formality of address, “give me a course so that we’ll join the stream beyond Leiden.”

  “O-eight-five,” said Roland in his prime public school accent.

  They flew on in a silence broken only by the drone of the motors. “Sorry, boys,” said Tommy finally, intimidated by the silence of his crew. “Bloody stupid of me to go south of Leiden.”

  “That was a master searchlight,” said Collins, the expert. “The blue ones are always radar controlled.” Because arc lamps seem more blue when angled toward the viewer, R.A.F. crews believed that the ones pointing at them (the bluish ones) were the most accurate, i.e. radar contolled. Luftwaffe crews over Britain believed the same thing, but there were no blue searchlights.

  “Then why did the flaming thing go off?” said Ben Gallacher.

  “We were a bit small,” said Tommy. “They decided to throw us back and wait for a Stirling.”

  “I’d like to know why,” said Ben.

  “It’s a secret new weapon that some of our planes carry,” theorized Collins.

  “We’ll never know for certain,” said Tommy, “so belt up and be grateful.”

  At that moment on the ground near Valkenburg a young Indian Feldwebel was shouting abuse in Hindustani, which is well suited for that purpose. He watched three phlegmatic signa
ls regiment mechanics remove the front of his searchlight. In the British army, before capture, they had been separated by caste. The Wehrmacht, however, had mixed their new volunteers together, with only these brightly colored turbans—lilac, ocher, green, and even pink and white with blue spots—to show the difference between himself and the lowest of the pariahs. Again he swore an ancient oath at the mechanics. One of the fools proclaimed it to be an ill omen. It was difficult to contradict him, for today they had been told that the local Dutch civilians had protested at the presence of kaffers and they were to be moved to France with all their new flak equipment.

  This was one of the first of the new high-performance 200-cm. lights to be delivered. A beauty—2.7 million candlepower. Damn! He kicked the cable angrily. It was just his luck that, after a first-class contact on the Würzburg and a Tommi in the beam, just then the carbons should go. Sometimes he wished he were back home in Delhi.

  In the potato fields a few miles to the west of Ahaus the young Leutnant who had spoken to August and Max during their delay on the road surveyed his Grossbatterie. The two Hitler Jugend guns were manned and ready; those boys were always the keenest. Some of the other guns were not completely jacked up and some were not even uncoupled from their prime movers. It had been a long hard day, with many delays on the road and his Oberst complaining every step of the journey.

  The young Leutnant sniffed the air and detected a faint smell of soot and smoke. Whenever the wind was from the south it brought the aroma of the Ruhr with it. During last month’s raids the air had also carried the smell of fouled earth, brick dust, cordite and burning buildings.