by Thomas Wood
It was why I had even accepted a temporary demotion, so soon after my promotion, I found myself going from a Captain in the British Army, to a Flight Sergeant in the Royal Air Force. I had been given all the standard issue uniform for flying bomber ops, the itching and uncomfortable royal blue uniform of the RAF, fleece lined boots which were doing a sterling job on my still scarred feet, life jacket for if we happened to ditch into the sea and most importantly, the chest harness, attached to which was the standard RAF parachute that would hopefully get me down to the ground safely.
None of the others wore their life jacket or parachute, opting instead for the comfort that stowing them elsewhere gave them, allowing them some more wiggle room instead of being wedged into their respective seats.
I didn’t know what their target was, or what kind of ordnance that they were dropping, but I knew that my target was going to be about thirty miles north of Paris and hopefully, I would land in one of the fields that seemed to litter the area. If I landed anywhere else, there was a very real possibility that I would be in the hands of the Germans before sunrise.
“Okay, mate,” called out Ray over the intercom, “forty-five seconds then out you go!”
“Thanks everyone,” I said as I began to move further down the fuselage, pulling out my headset as I did so.
“Good luck,” a few of them crackled, before I pulled the wire from the socket, and they were gone. I wiggled around on my backside, pulling myself along using the heels of my boots, until I made it to the door. I heaved the large lever upwards in a clockwise direction, before kicking the door outwards and pushing it so it was fully extended for my exit. I didn’t need to worry about closing it back up, the wireless operator was going to see to that, his hunched over frame already clambering over the spars down towards me.
I counted down the seconds until I imagined the alarm bells ringing in my mind; now was the time to go.
“Don’t forget, head first!” screamed the wireless op as he gave me a swift slap on the back. I didn’t know if this was one of their jokes on the ‘new boy’ but I didn’t want to risk failing in my first ever operational parachute jump because I hadn’t followed advice. I leant forward in the door, crouching down as much as I could until I felt the pull of gravity overwhelm me so much that I began to tumble through the night sky.
The drone of the engines was rapidly replaced by an intense whoosh as I fell through the sky. I waited a whole second before I pulled down hard on the D-Ring that would release my parachute. After another half a second of freefall, there was a swift yank on my harness and I thought for a moment that I had opened too soon, and was caught on something in the bomber, before I realised that I was, in fact, gracefully gliding to earth in a now complete silence.
The silence was overwhelming, enjoyable almost, but I soon realised that this was the starting point of my operation, everything that happened from now on would be in my hands, not the hands of the five crew members of the Whitley bomber.
As I rushed towards the earth, I began to marvel at my life and drink the overwhelming sense of relief that I had at being alive, which was rudely interrupted by the hard impact of the French ground.
My legs gave way and I crumpled in a heap on the floor, listening to the soft sigh as the silk parachute settled on the ground around me.
I listened as my heart pounded at the thought that I was back in enemy territory once again, there was no going back now. This was it.
From where I was, lying in the corner of a field, limbs outstretched exactly in the way that they had fallen, I could hear nothing. No shouts of surprise from German sentries, not even a bellowing cough from a local farmer out inspecting the effects of the bomber’s drone on his cattle.
There was nothing. Which meant it was time for me to get up and start working properly.
4
The silence that I had started to drink in was perfect, there seemed like there was nothing in existence that could shatter it. All I could hear was my own breathing and the sound of my heart pumping blood right to my extremities with a clinical effectiveness.
This had been what I was craving, this was my one true desire in life, to feel like this. Everything here was so calm, the silence as perfect as an early morning snowfall, with nothing to hinder it, every living creature seemed to be sheltering somewhere; sheltering from the bombers, the night, anything that gave them the excuse to rest. It felt as if there wasn’t another human being for miles, it was just me and the trees that littered the fields all around, gently swaying in the almost non-existent breeze that brokered the air around me.
It was this silence that I found so truly exhilarating, knowing that at any moment, the silence could be shattered by one simple shout, or a gunshot, and that the fields that lay so silent would suddenly begin to crawl towards me as the Germans slowly began to close their net around the field. I knew it was unlikely, the chances of them camping around a field for whole nights at a time, in the hope that an enemy plane might come down exactly where they were waiting, was slim, but it was something that I had to plan for nonetheless.
Within a matter of seconds, my sacred silence was shattered, by the distant boom of the pom-pom guns, as they opened up all around the bombers that were charging their way towards their target. I willed them all earnestly to return home and completely unscathed, which was unusual, as I was relying on one of them being shot down to make my plan work.
On the horizon, great pillars of light suddenly leapt up from the ground, assisting the guns in locating, and bringing down their targets. I at least hoped that Ray and his crew would survive, they had been pretty patient in allowing some unknown man to leap into the night from their aircraft.
Releasing my chest harness, I slowly and deliberately pulled the outstretched parachute in towards me, until it was all bundled up in one big armful that I clung to my chest. Moving even more slowly than before, I purposefully began making my way over to the bushes and hedges that marked the boundary of the small field that I had landed in, ensuring that I stopped every few paces or so to listen out for anyone shadowing my movements or laying in wait for me.
Upon making it to the bushes, I found that they were no more than an intertwining line of brambles and weeds, which would have to suffice as a place to dispatch of my parachute. I wanted the resistance to think that I was genuine but, at the same time, I didn’t much fancy advertising my whereabouts to the local German soldiers, if they were to come across my parachute on an early morning patrol.
My heart skipped a beat as I made my way into the brambles, as I suddenly found that I had lost my footing and I was in freefall for the second time in the space of fifteen minutes. I made solid contact with the bottom of the ditch, much to my relief, but not before I had managed to make an almighty racket in splashing around in the pool of water that had settled at the bottom of it.
I waited for a moment, allowing the ripples of the water to reverberate into nothingness, expecting at the very least to disturb a host of nestled birds that would release plenty of their excrement all over my head in the process, which I very much deserved. But nothing came.
Instead, all I could hear was the continuing boom of the pom-pom guns and the faint humming of bomber engines as I assumed they made their way back to Britain.
Resting my head against the bank of the stream that I had found myself paddling in, I let out great sighs of relief and took in almighty gulps of air, to try and calm myself down and let my head get back to normal. If I tried to do anything while I was behaving like this, I would make mistakes, mistakes which would easily end up with me dead.
The water was fortunately not so deep and, deciding that this was as good a place as any to camp out for a while, I pulled my parachute around until it was a nice, soft carpet for my feet to rest on while I stood there.
Over the next few hours the silk would slowly soak up a lot of the moisture, but it meant that my socks would dry out somewhat, so that the next phase of my journey would be slightly more
bearable.
I found that, in the daylight of the early morning, it was quite difficult for me to see out of my little hiding place and so assumed that, if it was tricky enough for me to see out of, it would be even more testing for the Germans to be able to see in, if they just so happened to be passing through this field and so that was where I decided to stay, until the next night.
My plan would only work if the resistance fighters on the ground saw a bomber going down with their own eyes and fortunately, no plane had seemed to have gone down on the raid that had dropped me in. Jimmy had negotiated with his Bomber Command counterparts that the raids would continue, every night, until just one plane went down over France, whereupon I would try and make myself known to the local resistance as one of the crew who had managed to bail out.
It was risky and I wondered if the crews flying the ops knew that this was the case, but either way, it would be the only reasonable explanation for a British serviceman suddenly turning up on the doorstep of the resistance and hopefully, it wouldn’t spook them too much.
I decided that now would be the best time for me to try and catch some sleep, as I was unsure about what the next few days would bring and how much sleep I would reasonably be able to achieve, based on my previous experience of trying to get out of the country.
If, and when, I was able to make contact with the local resistance network, I would try to maintain my cover as best as I could, and would become another escapee on an attempt out, in the hope that I would be able to spot the major players and provide some sort of intelligence back to London.
We were in the business of the long game. There was absolutely no point in me charging in there simply to interrogate everyone who had some involvement in the planning of an escape. That would arouse far too much suspicion and would only bring the Germans down on us quicker, if they got wind of the fact that there was a serious amount of in-fighting taking place in the local resistance.
I would just have to keep my head down I thought, as I pulled out a chocolate bar from my breast pocket. It was my only source of sustenance until I was able to make contact with the local resistance. I couldn’t jump with a week’s supply of food and spend the day munching through it, I was meant to be a downed navigator, stumbling through the darkness of the night, trying to find a friendly face.
I could only carry what was reasonable for the average navigator to be carrying. Which is why I had nothing about my person that could be seen as some kind of weapon. I had no revolver to speak of, not even a small dagger to utilise in the event of coming face to face with a lone German. My only option in that scenario would be to surrender, or run.
I prayed that I was never put in the position where I would have to make that decision, because if I came out of either scenario alive, then my whole op would be blown before it had really got started.
Taking a final bite of the chocolate, before wrapping it up and waiting for tea time, I tried to distract myself as I swilled the sticky mixture around my mouth for a moment, finally swallowing it down and deciding that it was time for some sleep.
I felt reasonably safe where I was, so much so that I felt comfortable enough to not have to have my eyes peeled in a constant state of alertness here. Resting them in preparation for later on that night was of paramount importance to me.
The rest of the day was spent drifting in and out of consciousness, each time taking note of the colours of the sky, before finally deciding that it was time to try and stay awake for the night now. The sun dipped below the trees on the far side of the field, giving me a full-on blast of fading sunshine straight into my face, which warmed and comforted me right to the very depths of my soul.
I tried to start preparing myself for the night’s events, but there wasn’t really a lot I could do. I made sure my jacket was done up and that nothing would fall out of my pockets that wasn’t meant to. I had my RAF pay book, all back dated and filled in as if I had been in the air force since late 1938. I also carried a few token French notes, not enough to even really buy a loaf of bread, but enough to at least offer in exchange for a night in someone’s barn or outhouse.
As darkness fell, I tucked the parachute that I had been standing on all this time, under a slight ledge in the stream, pulling a few old brambles and such like over the top of it, to keep it concealed for as long as possible. If luck was on my side, the Germans wouldn’t find it until long after I was back in Britain, far away enough to not have to deal with the consequences.
The field now covered in an unforgiving blackness, I heaved myself out of the ditch, before lying on my belly, to inspect my little hidey hole with a small torch. From here, I could see nothing, not even the bright white of my parachute beamed back at me but, more importantly, no wrappers from my chocolate or footprints left in the muddy walls of the bank.
Everything was in a complete darkness as I made my way in the vague direction of Paris once again, hoping that if any bomber had to come down tonight, that it would at least be relatively close to my position when it did.
I thought about Paris for a moment or two, as I clung to the shadows of the trees that seemed even darker than darkness itself. I wondered if the security there had been tightened since I had last visited, the days of travelling soldiers more concerned with the sights of France than with capturing evading soldiers long gone, and now replaced with a tight grip on everyone and everything inside its perimeter. I wondered how much better I would fare with this group of assistors than I had done the first time round. Would I even be able to find them?
I guessed that I had been walking for nearly two hours, supposing that I must have completed about ten miles on my trek towards the capital, before I started to run out of fields. I decided that it would be best to sit tight at the edge of one such field for now and work out where I would need to go once the bombers came rolling in overhead.
Before too long, I could make out a very distant hum, more like it was in my own head at first, but it gradually grew louder and louder, until it was superseded by the constant wail of air raid sirens, as I imagined the residents of Paris rushing to shelter, if they had not done so already.
5
As the bombers thundered directly over my head, I wondered if the inhabitants of Paris were faring as well as their counterparts in London. Back home, everyone had seemed very calm when the siren had sounded and had resorted to singing gentle tunes, when the thunderclap of bombs pulverising the streets above had begun to resound its deathly clamour.
But somehow, I couldn’t imagine the residents of Paris being as calm and collected as the folk back in Britain. They were brave yes, I had experienced their courage first hand a few months before, but they struck me as somehow less stable than the Brits, like they couldn’t quite accept the fact that their homes had now become a warzone.
I prayed as wave after wave of bombers trundled over my head, desperately hoping that they didn’t accidentally drop their bombs twenty miles short of the capital, if that was even their target, and that I wouldn’t have to find the local resistance with a gushing head wound or without one of my own limbs.
The bombers seemed to be flying much lower than they had done last night and I wondered if they had been briefed to fly at a lower altitude because they didn’t have someone jumping out the back of one, or so that it was more likely that they took a hit. I wondered how the top brass had justified it to the crews, never mind to themselves.
I watched as they disappeared over the tops of the trees and I started to think about Ray and the rest of his crew. Again, I found myself hoping that they would make it back okay and that maybe they had been stood down on this op, as a reward for letting the crazy man hop out of the back.
I didn’t want to see any of them go down, not really, and I started to think that maybe I could come up with some other story to fool the resistance into believing why I was wandering around the countryside. Maybe I could say that I was a rear gunner and some sort of malfunction had meant that I had had to bail out early
, or even that the plane was hit and the pilot had ordered us all out while he tried to lighten the load, attempting to get the plane back to Britain. But I knew that all my stories were beyond the realms of fantasy and that, despite the brutal nature with which this operation was being covered, Jimmy and his RAF counterparts would have tried to have conjured up another way of giving me some sort of cover, especially if it meant saving one of their precious crews.
Before too long, I realised that one had taken a hit, the spluttering noise of the engine markedly different from that of all the other planes that I had heard. The engine continued to stop and start, while the second engine seemed to carry on as normal, working particularly hard to keep them all airborne.
Suddenly, roaring so close to the tops of the trees that I thought I would be able to touch it, a lone Whitley bomber came scudding overheard, an eruption of fire on the starboard side engine. I knew how to try and extinguish the fire on a Whitley; I had been taught how to shut down the engine, feather the prop and then activate the extinguishers, but the engine that had erupted into a fireball seemed too far gone for that.
I prayed that the crew were all still okay in there and that they were holding their nerve, especially as they continued racing to the ground like a brick in water.
The roar of the fire was louder than anything else I could hear right now, especially as the port side engine seemed to simply give up under the strain of everything that was happening.
It now simply looked like a flying bonfire gliding across the sky and I supposed that, from afar, there might be a child somewhere delighting in the fact that they had just seen their first ever shooting star.
