It was the kind of winter’s day that Adam regarded as typically English: grey and non-committal. Heavy and dull without rain, cold and damp without snow. Just a relentless chill that seeped into your body and made your bones ache. But inside the officers’ mess, the atmosphere was lively. Everyone knew that the war was almost over, and the right side had won. Only the details remained to be ironed out.
Although after his conversations with Feliks, Adam was less sanguine about the outcome for Poland than his colleagues, he was relieved at the prospect of ending his flying career. Life for bomb crews resembled a deadly form of Russian roulette in which five out of six chambers were loaded.
Each time he climbed into the Lanc, he knew he might not return, and, each time he returned, his joy at having survived was marred by reading the names of those who hadn’t, whose kits and belongings would stealthily be removed from their lockers as though they’d never existed. Only a few more missions to go and it would all be over and normal life would resume. What that life would consist of, he wasn’t certain. Until recently, only one thought was uppermost in his mind: Poland. But for the past few months he’d found his thoughts increasingly returning to Judith, and he wondered whether she would agree to go to his homeland with him.
The other airmen were sprawled out in the deep leather armchairs or standing around the small bar, telling jokes and discussing what they’d do when the war ended. Tomasz couldn’t wait to return to Lwów, whose beauty he extolled at every opportunity.
‘You can keep your Guild Hall in Kraków and your Royal Palace in Warsaw. You haven’t seen anything if you haven’t seen the buildings and parks in Lwów. Our opera house is the most beautiful in Europe,’ he said, then added hastily because they were shouting him down, ‘next to Paris.’
Stewart was coming towards Adam with two tankards of dark liquid. ‘You can’t leave England without trying this stuff,’ he said.
Adam took a sip, shuddered and pushed it away. ‘It’s like mead that’s gone bad.’
Stewart laughed. ‘They call it Guinness. Not my brew either, but I thought I’d give it a go.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m going to London this afternoon to see Nancy. I’m trying to talk her into coming back with me to Australia. Best bloody country in the world, mate.’
Adam couldn’t understand these Australians who regarded England as home but compared it unfavourably with their own country, a distant backwater that didn’t count in the conference rooms where major world decisions were made. Whenever he asked Judith what it was she loved so much about Australia, she would look at him helplessly and launch into a list that included skylarking on the beach, greeting strangers in the street, giving people a fair go, and not being snobbish. According to her, the garbage man in Australia thought he was as good a bloke as the prime minister. ‘You just feel good there,’ she would conclude with a shrug, frustrated by his bemused expression.
In the background, the voice of the BBC announcer, who always sounded to Adam as though he were juggling marbles in his throat, was droning on. Suddenly, the word ‘Poland’ leapt out of the bulky wooden wireless and they stopped talking and turned up the volume.
At a conference in Yalta, a place none of them had ever heard of, the fate of their nation had been decided by the leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. The eastern part of Poland, including Lwów, had been ceded to Russia, while the rest of the country was to be governed by a provisional government installed by the Soviet Union until elections could be held.
The silence was broken by a harsh sob. It was Tomasz. ‘Looks like I won’t be going home after all,’ he said in an unsteady voice.
Adam clenched his fists so tightly that it looked as though his knuckles would burst through the skin. Unable to sit still, he paced around the mess. From what Feliks had said, he had known that the Allies would cave in to Stalin to some extent, but he hadn’t expected such a devastating betrayal. The fifth partition of Poland had just been completed but this time the country had been dismembered not by her enemies but by her allies.
He gave a bitter laugh. No satirist could have invented such a scenario. To appease Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had made him an offering of the nation on behalf of which they had declared war in 1939. They had conquered one dictator only to strengthen another.
‘Those Judases have sold us out,’ Romek fumed, throwing his head back to toss down a whiskey. ‘Instead of three pieces of silver, they got a pat on the back from Comrade Stalin. Fucking hypocrites.’
‘What fools we were,’ Olek said. ‘We joined the RAF thinking that if we helped Britain win the war, we’d be helping Poland get its independence. Now our country’s fucked and so are we.’
Some of the other men were shouting while others sat in glum silence, trying to absorb the news and the likely effect it would have on their lives.
Stewart was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘To think of the three of them — sitting there like bloody emperors, deciding the fate of Poland!’
Adam looked grim. ‘Not just Poland. They’ve sealed the fate of Europe for decades to come.’
In the midst of the furore, the intercom crackled and they listed to the announcement. All leave had been cancelled and they were summoned to an operational briefing.
‘Damned if I’m going to fly any more missions and risk my neck for the bastards who betrayed us,’ Romek shouted.
‘Me neither,’ Tomasz said. ‘They can go to hell, where they belong. Churchill and Eden were telling us how they’d never abandon us, but in the end they sucked up to Stalin and sold us out.’
Adam rose heavily to his feet. There was a tortured look on his face but his voice was expressionless. ‘No matter how we feel, we have to see this through to the end. If we don’t behave with honour, they’ll say Poles are cowards and deserters.’
In a mutinous mood, cursing under their breath, they filed slowly into the operations room for the briefing. The operations officer tapped on the map of Germany with his pointer.
‘Your target tonight will be Dresden.’
There was a sharp intake of breath. This city was often described as the Florence of the north, but they were told that those baroque churches and palaces concealed state-of-the-art factories producing radar and listening devices, which had to be obliterated.
‘Dresden is a major centre of communications for Germany’s defence,’ the officer explained. ‘The German army is still capable of reinforcing its eastern front with up to forty-two divisions from other fronts. We have to destroy their communications to hinder the movement of half-a-million German troops from the west, so that we can help the advance of the Red Army.’
Ignoring the muttering, the officer continued. ‘It’s not generally known that Dresden is an industrial centre of military importance. There are over a hundred factories and industrial plants on its outskirts that build radar and electronic parts, fuses for anti-aircraft shells, gas masks, engines for their Junkers, and cockpit parts for the Messerschmitts. Our aim is to hit the Jerries where it hurts and, by Jove, we’ll show the Russians what Bomber Command is capable of!’
As his plane lifted off three hours after the first wave of Lancasters had flown away, Adam thought about the other major cities they had bombed. Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg had also had their cultural and ecclesiastical showpieces and civilian populations. As always, he felt calmer as soon as he was airborne. The comforting drone of the engines had stilled the jangling of his nerves, which on this occasion had been more insistent than usual.
During these bombing raids, he always kept his mind focused on the impersonal concept of ‘the target’, but this time his mind kept straying to the statistics.
They’d been told that, within two minutes, 529 Lancs would drop 1800 tonnes of incendiary bombs onto a city crowded with refugees fleeing from the east, a city with few anti-aircraft defences.
He knew what these incendiary bombs would do. The roaring rush of overheated air would create a tornado of flames that sucked people in and reduced them to cinders. In London, Judith spent her days healing maimed and burnt patients, while he was on a mission that would maim and burn others. The more he tried to stifle that thought, the more powerfully it gripped his mind. In their desperate struggle to win the war, were they losing the moral values for which they’d been fighting?
He knew that each member of the crew had his own demons and none of them were as nonchalant as they appeared. Negative feelings were best kept to oneself. But one question kept running through his mind.
‘Do you ever think about what we’re actually doing?’ he asked Stewart.
His navigator looked surprised. ‘Too right I do,’ he said. ‘We’re giving them a dose of their own medicine. We’re repaying them for starting all this, for the Blitz, for Coventry, for Warsaw, and for their death camps. If we let up now, they could still win this fucking war. Just think what sort of world we’d be living in then.’
Adam fell silent.
It was a textbook flight. The cloud that had obscured the city the day before had lifted, and there was less flak than on previous raids. The Pathfinders had flown ahead, marking the target with flares to guide the flotilla of bombers.
Suddenly Adam called out, ‘Look at that!’ Twenty thousand feet below, they could see Dresden lit up by the red glow of fires. The rear gunner whistled through his teeth. ‘What a target!’
The bomb-run began and they felt that familiar rush of adrenalin as the navigator called ‘Steady, steady, left, left’ while they ran the gauntlet of the flak and searchlights. The bomb doors opened and the Lanc lurched each time a bomb was released and hurtled through the waiting air.
No one spoke as the plane turned and headed for home above a solid sheet of fire that resembled Vulcan’s workshop. As the plane rose, it flew through banks of clouds whose unearthly colour startled them. Even a hundred miles from Dresden, the clouds were tinted red.
Adam glanced at his fingers that protruded from the ends of his cut-off gloves, as though he expected to see blood on them. They were all staring, struggling with conflicting thoughts and emotions. Tomasz’s voice was hoarse. ‘Those poor buggers down there.’
At the wireless controls, Romek pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘Don’t ask me to shed tears for Germans, for Christ’s sake. Do you think they’re crying for the millions of Poles they’ve murdered?’
Adam didn’t speak. No one emerged from war with clean hands.
All around them, the returning Lancs looked like black darts flying through the air. There were flak shells slicing through the sky now, and below them black smoke trailed from one of their planes. The starboard wing was on fire.
A moment later, Stewart said, ‘He’s gone.’ Adam looked down and was startled by the horrifying beauty of the plummeting plane, which resembled a huge flower bursting into flames.
Suddenly he heard a loud crumping sound. The plane was being buffeted about. Adam tried to keep it steady but his right shoulder hurt so much he couldn’t move his arm. When he touched his shoulder, there was blood on his left glove. He’d been hit. He gritted his teeth to avoid making a sound and alarming the others.
A moment later they started losing height. He smelled smoke. The plane was engulfed in flames and spinning out of control.
‘Hit the silk and bail out!’ he shouted.
With trembling fingers, they fastened their parachutes and, one by one, jumped out. But when Adam tried to pull on his parachute, he froze. It had disintegrated in the fire. There was no time to panic, no time to think. Either he stayed in the burning plane and became incinerated, or he jumped out without a parachute. He felt for the cigarette case in his breast pocket, closed his eyes and launched himself into space, hoping for a swift death as he hurtled towards earth like a broken missile.