On Thursday evening we were walking from the crew wagon – next stop Duisburg. Grease lit a fag, took one lungful of smoke, and then ground it out under his boot. That was his ritual. He wouldn’t smoke again until we were back. Or he wouldn’t smoke again; it was as simple as that.
Conroy said, ‘An arch of spears through which a defeated enemy of Rome had to walk as a gesture of submission. That’ll do for me: very appropriate.’
Marty stretched – one arm after the other – that was his ritual before he counted his bombs, and asked, ‘What the hell are you blathering about, Conners?’
‘Our call sign: Yoke. It’s a very old word. All to do with defeating your enemies.’
‘That’ll do for me as well,’ I said, and followed Grease, and Fergal, Conroy and Marty through the small door and up into Tuesday’s Child. Bloody Duisburg.
We had a milk run. Grease was just beginning to show some canny signs. We had to fly circles over Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, to reach our operating height and form up with the others. I think that Grease’s circles were larger than anyone else’s, and as a consequence we didn’t bump into anybody, and saw few other Lancasters until we set course for the fleshpots of Greater Germany. Grease actually called Conroy and me forward to see a remarkable sight. I usually tried to keep close to my work table, and pretend I didn’t know that there was a war going on outside . . . unless Grease ordered my head up in the astrodome looking for fighters. The astrodome was a bubble of perspex, big enough for your head, behind the office – that’s what we called the cockpit. There was a good moon: not full, but getting on that way, and at 18,000 feet we were about 600 above a shallow, dense, cold cloud layer that stretched all the way to Germany – allegedly it would thin about thirty miles from target. In light almost as clear as day we could see aircraft all around us – maybe 250 of them in front, and 600 following. On the Home Service they spoke of ‘aerial armadas’ going to Germany night after night.
For the first time I wondered about the poor old Kraut underneath. The black bombers seemed to swim forward slowly, gently moving up and down in the airstream as if they were puppet aeroplanes on invisible strings; it was awesome. Before Grease ordered me back down, I saw one brief bright yellow and crimson flash maybe a mile or so ahead, followed by green lights slowly tumbling from the sky. They were target indicator flares – TIs: that was a Pathfinder dying.
Grease clicked the RT and said, ‘Night fighters, chaps: that’s one of the Pathfinder’s gone. Nav, please note that.’
‘Roger, Skipper.’
From Marty up front there was, ‘He had six green TIs. They burned on the way down.’
Conroy said, ‘OK. I logged it.’
Grease again: ‘OK, everyone. Pete, watch for them coming up out of that cloud.’
‘Roger, Skipper.’
‘Charlie, listen out for the fighter controllers. And yell out if you get the bad feeling.’
‘Roger, Skipper.’
Situation normal. You didn’t like to say that you were scared shitless, just in case anyone agreed with you. The ‘bad feeling’ was something funny that happened to W/Ops from time to time: you could hear the German night fighter controllers on the ground vectoring a fighter on to some poor sod, and even if it was in German, and in codes which changed weekly, you sometimes knew that the poor sod in question was you. It’s not something I can explain. It happened. They even warned you about it in training. It had happened twice in seven trips so far. Conroy noted seven other Lancs going down that night, and Marty remarked later that there had been something peculiarly awful about seeing it in such a plain light.
As I said, it was a milk run for us. The target area was clearly marked and glowing red with a hundred fires by the time we drove serenely over it. Marty did a neat, sharp job – minimum time over target – and got the photographs to prove it. Grease put the nose down and dived for the suburbs along the same vector, took the course home from Conroy, and lifted us into and through that deadly cloud layer again. We saw a lot less aircraft on the way back. It was always the same: you got into a fight, or some bastard above you dropped his bombs on you – you know the sort of thing. So the stream was always spread out and at different heights on the way home.
About five minutes from the Dutch border Peter the Pole yelled out, ‘Corkscrew port, fighter,’ followed immediately by, ‘No, it’s a Lanc.’
I suppose we lost, then gained, about a hundred feet in a great lurch.
Grease asked, ‘OK, Pete?’
The Pole replied, ‘Yeah. OK. It’s a Lanc. It came up out of the cloud in the fighter position.’ Then he added, ‘It’s taken a hell of a bloddy thump, though!’
Although I was standing with my head in the astrodome I still couldn’t see the newcomer because it was below and behind us. I felt Grease weave us gently to starboard, to get out of its way, but even so it took its time. It was struggling to reach our height, barely skimming the cloud cover before pulling another few feet. Grease let down alongside it; maybe forty feet out. It had our squadron codes and a big red ‘P’ on its side.
Fergal said, ‘P-Peter. It’s a bit of a mess. Isn’t that Gerry Brookman?’
I offered, ‘He never took your advice, Skip.’
Grease snapped, ‘Shut up. Not amused.’
Fergal eased our throttles back to match our speed with Brookman’s kite. That was when we got a proper look at it. Grease sounded characteristically in touch with events – as he invariably was when he had his hands and feet on an aircraft. He said, ‘Rear gunner, keep sweeping for fighters. You too, Toff. And Marty.’ They all rogered in sequence. Then he told me, ‘Sparks – see if you can speak to them. They may not know all of the damage.’
I ran one long ranging glance along Peter before I dropped out of the astrodome to my radios. There were great chunks out of the tail turret, and the barrels of its four .303 machine guns slopped drunkenly downwards, bouncing slightly with the aircraft. The holes in the starboard side of the fuselage seemed like exit holes to me. No port rudder. Their astrodome had been shot away, and there were bits of the canopy flapping – it must have been desperately cold in there. The starboard outer engine, nearest to us, was shut down and the propeller was windmilling, but quite slowly – I couldn’t make out if it had been fully feathered – and there were burn stains around it which suggested that a fierce fire had been successfully extinguished. Brookman looked across at me and waved a hand slowly, as if it had suddenly become too heavy; he might even have been trying a tired, tight smile. Where was his engineer?
‘P-Peter, P-Peter . . . this is Yoke.’
Their W/Op’s flat south country vowels came calmly back at me. Sometimes you can be quite proud of your fellow in trade.
‘Hello, Charlie. We got roasted back there.’
‘Hello, Paul. The pilot wants to know if you want us to spot your damage for you.’
‘Wait one, Yoke. I’ll ask my skipper. He’s got his hands full at present.’ There was no air of urgency. But his signal was weak. When he came back, it was with a very snappy, ‘Y-Yoke, Y-Yoke, P-Peter.’
‘Yes, Paul?’
‘The skipper says, yes please. Don’t worry about the holes and the cockpit, we can see them ourselves, and we know there’s no left rudder: but we haven’t heard from the tail since the attack, and can’t get it moved or opened; and also – what does the starboard outer look like on your side? There’s also a personal message for your skipper.’
‘Send.’
‘Gerry says, don’t waste your bullets – he says your boss will understand.’
I closed down, went forward again, and shouted the gen close to Grease’s right ear. He nodded, then pointed to me. He had that determined glint in his eyes that always worried me. On the intercom he said, ‘Gunners. We’re dropping behind P-Peter to examine her damage. Keep watching for those fighters.’
Conroy’s voice cut in: ‘Just crossed Dutch border, Skip. Change of course fifteen minutes.’
‘Thanks, Nav. Hold on everyone.’
I don’t know what he did, but Tuesday’s Child seemed to stop in mid-air, and at the same time drop about fifty feet, whilst the ponderous P-Peter drew ahead, taking my stomach with him. Then Grease pulled us slowly up to within about twenty feet of his tail. The port side of the rear turret – the side which had been away from us – was badly shattered. There was an infrequent blue spark from an electrical short inside it. The gunner was slumped against the perspex with his face towards us.
As we got in close Marty said, ‘I can see him: I can see his face, he’s . . .’ Then there was a long pause before he finished flatly, ‘Tell them he’s exceptionally dead. I can see his eyes.’
Fergal wrote on his pad, so that I could see it, a capital ‘P’, which he circled, followed by No fire. Slow oil leak. No visible damage to wing. No aileron damage. Fuselage damage? Hydraulics? I held my thumb up to show I understood, and turned to leave him. Grease grabbed my arm, touched his mask mike and said, ‘Tell Gerry to try to gain another couple of hundred feet. We’ll fly astern and below him, in his blind spot, and watch out for him. Radio him our course changes as they come up.’
I did the thumbs up thing again. As I squeezed back past Conroy to my radios he handed me a scrap of paper with the imminent course change and time on it. I passed P-Peter’s radio op the information we had. His response, apart from a terse ‘Thanks,’ was, ‘The heading’s particularly useful; we’ve only one nav between the two of us.’
There are some things you don’t want to think about. Among them are what the inside of an aircraft looks like after Stripping the Willow with a Jerry night fighter. After we made the turn, and were doing a slow waltz, to extend the metaphor, across Holland towards home, Conroy came on and said, ‘Excuse me for mentioning it, Skip, but is this a good idea? We’re making twice the radar target than we would on our own, and flying at their pace, not ours. If the nasty Hun comes out of the cloud, we will be between it and Brookman: he’ll see us first.’
Grease had that icily reasonable edge to his voice that was always there when he was going to be stupid: ‘That’s the idea, Conners. Gives Pete the chance of his second kill.’ Then he added, ‘Their rear gunner’s dead, and if their hydraulics and electrics are shot, then they’ve no mid-upper or front guns to speak of, either. We stay: Brookman would do the same for us.’
Conroy said, ‘Brookman’s a cunt. He hates you.’
Grease said, quietly, but we all heard him, ‘Brookman’s wounded.’
‘How do you figure that, Skip?’ from the Toff, who had been uncharacteristically quiet on this trip.
‘Dunno. But he is. Now shut up everyone. Dutch coast ahead, Nav?’
‘Six minutes, Skip.’
We gave Manston plenty of warning this time, and Brookman made a very low, very straight approach. We watched his wheels lock down. Grease flew a parallel as we watched Peter’s touchdown. And then flew a slow, low circuit of the airfield to see him stopped. It was a grade-B landing, but everything held together. As Peter pulled away on to the peri-track Paul Nash called, ‘Thanks,’ and, ‘see you later.’
At Bawne we were the last one down, not counting Brookman, and the last crew interrogated by intelligence – a new, pretty WAAF officer. Bushes had got back first, but he was still there, alongside her. We had to tell him twice that Brookman’s kite had made it. Bushes was becoming detached, I thought. Not quite with us. He stumped moodily to the hut door, but when Grease asked him, ‘How many’d we lose tonight, sir?’ He swung back on us and glowered, because it was one of those questions an Englishman doesn’t ask.
Then he beamed, and barked, ‘None. None at all. Bloody hallelujah.’
Bushes paraded the crew the next morning. Another fucking bawling out was what was going through my mind as we squeezed into his overheated office. I was sure that he was going to tell us that Brookman was going to get Tuesday’s Child away from us. He looked tired; Bushes always looked tired these days. When had he stopped looking angry and started to look tired? I wondered how many trips he’d done this time round. What he said was, ‘Gerry Brookman won’t be flying for a while. There’s a bit of his leg missing.’
‘I figured that,’ said Grease. ‘He was flying very carefully. Very neat. Usually he’s a bit flash; almost sloppy.’
Bushes shook his head and glanced out of the window, cross-hatched with a cream-coloured tape which was peeling, then back at us, before responding.
‘There you go again, goon. I try to do it by the book, and tell you what a fine job you all did last night, and you spoil it before I start. Don’t insult your senior rank: not in front of me, anyway.’
‘OK, sir. You got me there.’
‘Doesn’t alter it, does it? You did a good thing last night. A good thing, a brave thing . . .’
‘Probably a stupid thing . . . sir,’ said Conroy and looked pointedly at Grease. We all saw that, but Bushes ignored him.
‘. . . and Brookman and his crew – they all made it except Tallow, the rear gunner, by the way – anyway they’re all asking for you to be put up for it. They want gongs all round for a shower like you lot!’
‘They’re just glad to be alive,’ said Grease. ‘They’ll soon get over it.’ Then he remembered and added, ‘Sir.’
‘I won’t, and I just wanted you to know that, even if you can whistle for your medals. I wanted to say thank you, that’s all. Old-fashioned sort of phrase, isn’t it?’
‘But rarely misplaced I think,’ said our Pole. He gave Bushes an oddly Germanic little bow which seemed to start chest high, and added, ‘And we thank you for it, sir.’
Conroy, who had a professional interest, asked him what had happened to the nav.
‘Cannon shell exploded in the cabin. Blinded him – temporarily the doc thinks – burned all his exposed flesh.’
‘His hands,’ murmured Conners, ‘and his face. I wondered why he couldn’t plot.’
‘Now you know, son. Keep your gloves on out there in the wild night sky.’
‘Yes, Boss,’ said Conroy. The exchange had put it back into a formal mode, which made us more comfortable.
‘Anyway,’ said Bushes, ‘it’s written into your service records. Bloody good show. Now, carry on.’ And when we hadn’t moved for surprise, ‘Yes; that’s it. Bugger off.’
Outside I asked Piotr if he had known Tallow, the gunner. The Pole spread the fingers of his left hand then moved it this way and that – not so well, I guessed.
I explained. ‘He was the only happy Yorkshireman I’ve ever met. Could sink a few when he had a mind to.’
Paluchowski said, ‘He was too big. For the turret – it meant that his head moved too slow.’
‘Not any more.’
‘I see the welfare committee. Maybe he had some good things. We can buy them.’
Sometimes the little sod took his cold-bloodedness too far.