The Crew

by Margaret Mayhew

  Christ, what a way to crew-up! They stuck you in a hangar with a hundred or more other blokes you didn’t know from Adam – pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, wireless operators, gunners – all milling about, and told you to sort yourselves out, chaps! You were expected to pick your partners like you were at a bloody dance. Only you weren’t choosing partners for an evening’s hoofing; you were trying to pick the men you were going to have to trust with your own sweet life.

  He’d wandered about the hangar, not knowing what the hell to do for the best, and when he’d stopped for a fag his lighter had gone u/s on him. A bloke standing nearby with pilot’s wings and a Canada shoulder flash had given him a light and it had seemed a good idea to join up with another colonial, not being too sure about the Poms, so they’d shaken hands on it. Later, of course, he’d discovered that Van was really a Yank in disguise. Pretty soon Harry had come by with the kid Charlie in tow, like a minnow on a line. They’d still needed a navigator, until Piers had come up, stammering and blushing like a sheila, and asked if they’d mind awfully if he butted in. If they’d known then that he couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag, they’d’ve minded quite a lot. Bert had teamed up with them as mid-upper gunner when they’d gone on from Wellingtons to Lanes, and their flight engineer had been assigned whether he liked it or not. Poor old Jock, he’d had lousy luck to get stuck with them. Well, they were all stuck with each other and all you could do was bloody pray.

  It was a frightful scrum in the Officers’ Mess. Piers waited his turn patiently to order a sherry and stand his skipper a beer – the least he could do after the mess he’d made of navigating. ‘I’m terribly sorry about making such a hash of things again today, Van.’

  ‘Forget it. I’m just as sorry about that landing.’

  ‘Gosh, that’s all right. It can happen to anyone, I expect.’

  ‘Not to most guys. Maybe we’ll both improve, in time. Cigarette?’

  ‘Thanks awfully. I rather like your American ones.’

  He took one of Van’s Chesterfields. The smoke felt good going into his lungs; so did the sherry going down his throat. They both made him feel better. After all, he wasn’t the only one who’d messed up; that landing had been bloody awful. He’d really thought they were going to cartwheel, in which case that would probably have been that. He’d seen a Halifax do it: stand on one wingtip and flip right over like an acrobat before it had gone up in a mighty whoomph. No-one had got out. And he couldn’t see them getting out of a Lanc quickly, either. If anything happened in the air, they were all supposed to bail out by the nose escape hatch so they didn’t go and smash into the tail. On the ground, in flames, God knows if they’d be able to get to any exit in time. They’d probably be caught like rats in a trap. He tried not to think about that. Not much point. In fact, absolutely no point at all.

  Just the same, he’d no regrets about volunteering. The parents would have preferred him to go into the Army, following family tradition, but he’d always liked the idea of flying. If he hadn’t failed the course, he’d have been a pilot, but navigator wasn’t a bad alternative. And it wasn’t as though he didn’t know his stuff – you couldn’t get through the training unless you did – but when it had come to the real thing, he kept getting into a complete panic and losing his head; forgetting everything he’d learned.

  The thought of letting the rest of them down – maybe getting them all killed, not just lost on a training exercise like today – filled him with a sickening horror. To get oneself killed was one thing, to be responsible for six other deaths along with your own, quite another. Of course, it was the same for each of them. Their lives depended on the other chaps doing their jobs properly. They were bound to each other like links in a chain – and a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. He hoped to God that link wasn’t himself.

  In a couple of weeks they’d be posted to an operational station somewhere and doing their first sortie. The first of the thirty. The chances of getting through the tour weren’t terribly good, he knew, but he tried not to think about that either. After all, they could be one of the lucky ones. Survive your first five, he’d heard somebody chant, and double your chances of staying alive.

  He wondered why Van had volunteered to fight in a war that hadn’t been his country’s problem. The skipper never talked about it – hardly talked about himself at all – but he must have joined up long before the Japanese had attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. From the little he knew of America, mostly from films, they seemed to live pretty comfortably over there. Certainly a lot better than wartime England. Plenty of food and everything, and no bombs. Mad to come here.

  ‘Think anyone’d mind if I played that piano?’ Van said, nodding towards the beer-stained upright in the corner of the Mess.

  ‘Golly, I shouldn’t think so.’ He watched his skipper make his way across the room, park his beer and cigarette and sit down at the keys. He played a few bars of a song that Piers recognized vaguely but couldn’t put a title to. After a while he realized that Van was rather good. A lot of the chaps had stopped talking and were listening, and some of them gathered round the piano. Piers drank his sherry and smoked his American cigarette and listened. He felt a lot better now. With any luck they’d be posted somewhere decent – one of the pre-war aerodromes with proper buildings, not tin huts. And before that, there’d be some leave so he could get home for a few days. He was looking forward to that.

  Two

  IN THE FADING light, the bombers were emerging from their dispersal pans and lumbering after each other round the perimeter track, like elephants in a circus ring.

  Assistant Section Officer Catherine Herbert stood with the small group of station personnel beside the runway, watching the Lancasters and waiting to wave them off. Whatever the weather, every kite was seen off on every op, and every time she wondered which ones they were waving goodbye to for ever.

  Although it was May, there was a cold wind blowing hard from the Wolds and she had to hang on to her cap. The hedgerows and a huddle of bent trees along the eastern edge of the aerodrome were the only protection on the piece of flat Lincolnshire farm land that had been turned hurriedly into a wartime bomber station. The ancient farm buildings lay at the northern perimeter and a raw group of Nissen huts and wooden shacks had sprung up among the trees to the east. Drab brown and green camouflage, ugly corrugated iron and asbestos, concrete paths linked across oozing mud, gigantic steel hangars, barbed wire, the deafening roar of heavy bombers, a ceaseless wind. That was RAF Beningby.

  She had hated it at first, and then gradually got used to it. There was a war on, after all, which meant getting used to everything – including men dying.

  The big four-engined bombers had only been with the squadron a few weeks, and they were an impressive sight. And an impressive sound. Mingled with the steady roar of the engines, the WAAF could hear the short extra bursts of power and the sharp squeal of brakes as the pilots steered along the narrow, winding track between the blue and amber lights. Once or twice she’d seen a bomber run off the concrete edge and bog down in the mud, which meant a long delay for everyone behind while the aircraft was hauled out. It was usually a sprog crew and there was one on this op. She’d spotted them at the briefing, as easy to pick out as new boys in a school class: not knowing where to sit or what to do, taking industrious notes, making neat little diagrams of flak and searchlight batteries, and paying more attention than all the rest of the old hands put together. All too often she never saw sprog crews more than once or twice: the first five ops were known to be the trickiest for them. But if they got through those, they had a fair chance of surviving the remainder.

  The target for tonight was St Nazaire, and they were off to lay mines in enemy waters. Gardening, the crews called it, and the mines were vegetables. Nobody called anything unpleasant or dangerous by the proper word. You didn’t get killed, you ‘bought it’, and you didn’t bomb the enemy, you ‘clobbered’ him. The atmosphere in the briefing room h
ad been almost light-hearted. Not Hamburg, or Cologne or Stuttgart . . . just a milk-run. Piece of cake.

  The leading bomber had reached the end of the peri track. When the red light from the controller’s caravan winked to green, it rolled forward onto the start of the main runway and swung round into the wind to face the flarepath lights. The engines howled and faded and the Lancaster hovered for a moment before she leaped forward with a mighty roar. She passed the waving group, engines bellowing. The tail lifted and further on down the runway the elephant rose slowly and majestically into the air, to become an eagle.

  Catherine watched the first one climb away, red and green wingtip lights fading into the distance, and then turned back to the second, already in position at the end of the runway. One aircraft would take off every ninety seconds.

  The sprog crew’s rear gunner waved back as he went by. They were in S-Sugar, the ropey kite. She hoped they’d make it.

  Charlie had seen the people waving to him and he’d held up his gloved hand awkwardly in reply, wondering if that was the right thing to do. They were distant shapes now, grey blobs getting smaller by the second as the bomber raced on, carrying him down the runway. The tail was already off the ground and he could feel it swinging; he prayed the skipper would keep her straight. They’d got six fifteen-hundred pound sea mines on board, and that morning one of the ground crew had told him a horror story about another new crew who’d gone careering off the runway when they were trying to take off, all loaded-up for their first – and last – op. The Lanc always wanted to go left, apparently, and once you got a bad swing with a heavy load, you’d more or less had it.

  So far as he could tell, though, the lights flashing past looked at the proper angle to the tail. He kept his eyes fixed on them until, suddenly, they dropped away beneath and he knew they were airborne. The dark roof and chimneys of the farmhouse at the edge of the drome went by below, and he and his Brownings were pointing downwards to earth as they climbed. The flarepath became little pinpricks of light and RAF Beningby disappeared from view. He wriggled around on the seat pad to get more comfortable. It was a bit like being packed in a glass suitcase. The metal doors behind him formed a back rest, the control column, with hand grips and triggers, was between his legs. If he stooped his head a little, the gun sight lay immediately in front of his face. With the illumination switched on, he could see the red circle with a dot in the middle superimposed on the dark landscape below.

  He reached down with his right hand for the lever and unlocked the turret on its rotating ring so he could swing round, searching the skies above and each side and below him. He was the eyes in the back of the crew’s head. They’d been taught that over and over in training. He had to keep a constant look-out for anything and everything behind and report to the skipper instantly. And if it was an emergency, with a fighter suddenly attacking from the rear, he had to tell the skipper which way to turn fast to get away and not muddle starboard and port because he was facing backwards. You had to think fast and get it right. It was a big responsibility and he worried about it a lot. He must hold his ammo if the fighter was out of range, but if it came near he had to give it everything he’d got. Luckily, he was a good shot. It had come naturally to him in the training and, unlike Bert, his eyesight was perfect: like a cat in the dark. Bert could see all round from his turret, on top in the middle of the kite, but he hadn’t got such a good view of what was happening at the rear, and none of them could see the blind spot right underneath without the pilot rocking the wings.

  Charlie found it a bit nervy, not to be able to see anything forward. All he could do was listen to what the rest of them were saying about what was happening up front and hope for the best. He could hear them talking to each other over the intercom now: short, crackling exchanges in his headphones. The skipper’s drawling Yank accent, Jock’s Scottish, Piers’s posh one, Stew’s Aussie, Harry’s Yorkshire, and Bert’s chirpy cockney. Easy to tell which was which without them saying, though they nearly always did. You had to be quite sure who was talking so there were no mistakes.

  He didn’t understand why people kept on telling him horror stories. Maybe because they thought he was the kind to frighten easily. He was windy at times, but he wasn’t going to show it if he could help it. Still, that take-off story had rattled him and when they were getting into the crew bus to go out to dispersal he’d gone and picked his parachute up by the release handle so it had come undone all over the place. They’d had to hang about while he went and got another, and he’d felt a right noddy. Then one of the other crew in the bus had leaned across, grinning, and asked if he could have his egg if he didn’t come back. It was a joke, of course, and he’d managed a laugh with everyone else, but inside he’d felt a bit queasy.

  It wasn’t really the idea of dying that worried him, so much as the way it might happen. None of the possibilities was very comforting, except being blown to little bits, because then you wouldn’t know a thing about it. The thought of having to bail out was almost more terrifying than anything else. He wasn’t too good with heights and the idea of throwing himself into space . . . well, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do it. Whatever happened, he’d be on his own unless he could make it all the way up to the nose escape hatch, which wasn’t very likely. Nobody envied him being in the coldest and loneliest place on the kite, but the cold wasn’t too bad with his electrically heated suit, and he could hear the others and they could hear him.

  In training they’d been told that rear gunners were one of the most important members of the crew, and he had nearly twice as much ammo as the other two turrets put together to prove it. So he was proud of being Tail-End Charlie. And if it came to dying, what really mattered, to his way of thinking, was whether the cause was worth it. He thought it was.

  We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

  That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold

  Which Milton held.

  That was out of his poetry book. By Wordsworth. He repeated the words to himself often. Some of them had to die to stop Hitler. We must be free or die. Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

  He wished Mum could understand, but the only thing she could really see was that she might lose him. He knew that would be hard because he was all she had, but it couldn’t be helped. She’d never said a cross word when he’d gone off to the recruiting office and lied to them about his age, but he’d heard her crying in her bedroom and he’d felt very bad about it.

  It was dark now – darkness and engine noise and vibration, all around him. The skipper’s voice spoke suddenly in his ears: ‘Pilot to rear gunner. OK back there, Charlie?’

  He pressed his mike switch down carefully, still not easy with speaking out over the intercom. ‘OK, skipper.’

  He went on searching the night skies.

  They dropped the mines in what Van hoped were the waters off St Nazaire, Stew letting them go at three-second intervals. For once Piers had sounded sure about their position, but that might not mean a damn thing. There was no flak and no enemy fighters; nobody seemed to be taking any notice of them at all. He had a feeling that it was never going to be this easy again.

  They flew back over the Channel and crossed the English coast at what should have been Portsmouth but was probably somewhere else, because later they turned out to be at least fifty miles off course. Piers was frightfully sorry about it, as usual, and eventually got them back to Beningby after a circular tour of Lincolnshire. Van managed a reasonable landing with only a couple of bounces, and they were ferried back from dispersal in the crew bus. He sat in front beside the WAAF driver, a jolly, red-cheeked girl who made bright conversation about the weather as though they were taking a pleasure drive out in the country. Apparently it was going to be a nice day, or what passed for one. The smell of dew-damp grass reached him pleasantly through the half-open window. He wondered just exactly where they had dropped the mines.

  Catherine saw the sprog crew come into the debriefing room. All th
e other crews had already gone off for their breakfast and for a while she’d been afraid that they’d bought it on their first op. She watched them gather round a table: two pilot officers and five sergeants. They’d yet to do a really dicey trip, so they hadn’t that dazed look she knew so well. That would come later. A fairly typical crew, except that someone had told her the pilot was an American. He’d be the tall fair one with the wings, chewing gum. The other officer, also fair-haired and wearing a navigator’s badge, looked very English and very anxious. The bomb aimer was a stocky, aggressive Australian in the royal blue of the RAAF, and the flight engineer with the reddish hair and dour expression was probably Scottish. The two gunners were the smallest and youngest-looking of the crew, one of them scarcely more than a boy. The wireless operator, a big man, was obviously considerably older than the rest.

  They were behaving like most crews at the start of their tour: like a group of virtual strangers with nothing much in common. Because it was their first op, they would try to answer all the de-briefing questions conscientiously in every detail. Later, they’d learn to rattle through it as quickly as possible and escape to their eggs and bacon and their sleep. If they lasted that long. Some said the first op was the diciest of all, and they’d survived it. Still, it had only been St Nazaire.