Bomber (10 page)

As the minutes slipped away Harry shifted uncomfortably and wished he had not had to jam that folded-up copy of the
East Anglia Courier
in his back pocket. Next time he’d leave it with his parachute in the main fuselage. He wriggled his left leg, to relieve the cramp that was building, and accidently touched the foot pedal. The turret lurched a full 180 degrees and there he was staring straight at the French coast. From this distance it looked like any old coastline but as they grew nearer, and other aircraft ahead of them in the combat box came within range, enemy flak positions along the seashore began to open up. Harry saw flashes on the ground and then puffs of black smoke exploding in the air ahead. They looked like little balls of dirty cotton wool. His stomach gave a lurch and everything inside him tightened.

‘Look at that,’ he wanted to shout. ‘Those bastards down there are trying to kill us.’ All at once he felt terribly lonely. Him and Jim Corrales back at the end of the plane, they had the worst jobs. Not the most difficult – Harry knew the pilots and the navigator were pretty much occupied all the time – but at least the rest of the crew had each other for company. They had someone else to look at for comfort, someone else to help them if their oxygen mask failed, or, God forbid, they got hit by flak or bullets from a Nazi
fighter. Harry and Jim could sit there and bleed to death and no one would know.

There was a sudden jolt, the kind you got when you hit an air pocket, and Harry was buffeted around in his little steel world. His courage was deserting him fast. For the first time ever, he felt really trapped in there. Now he was faced with the reality of actual enemy action, he was painfully aware of the danger he was in.

Holberg had told Harry there would be times when no fighters would come swooping in, not least when they were going through heavy flak, and he would tell him when he could come back into the plane. Harry wondered if he’d remembered.

On cue, the interphone crackled. It was Holberg. ‘Friedman, you can come out of your turret. But get back in as soon as I tell you.’

‘Thank you, Captain.’ Harry was out of there in a frenzied minute of unbuckling, unplugging, caught straps, awkward wriggling … he almost forgot to lock the turret in the 90-degree down position and only remembered as he reached for the catch that opened the hatch out into the fuselage. John and Ralph Dalinsky immediately appeared to haul him out.

It was utterly illogical, but Harry felt safer now he was with the two waist gunners. He stood behind Dalinsky, peering out at the coast through the right window. There were occasional bursts of flak around them now, not just ahead.

The smell of high explosives caught in his throat. It was strangely reminiscent of nail varnish.

The
Macey May
bucked in the air, and Harry was thrown to the floor, his head narrowly missing the sharp corner of an ammunition box. ‘You have to hold on tight here, Harry,’ John shouted in his ear as he pulled him to his feet.

Harry began to feel light-headed and a little nauseous. He wondered for a moment if he’d been hit, but dismissed the idea. He’d have felt it surely? Then he suddenly realised that he had forgotten to pick up one of the little oxygen bottles and masks placed at intervals around the ship for crew members who had to move away from their usual station. He looked around to locate the nearest one, but there was a sudden loud explosion and the plane shook violently. Then another. And another. The
Macey May
was bucking around like a car speeding through a ploughed field. They were in the thick of it now. He could see it all around them through both waist windows.

The Perspex left side window shattered into thousands of fragments and he almost jumped out of his skin. Then it disintegrated before their eyes, blown in by the force of the slipstream. The temperature dropped in an instant and the great roaring sound of the engines became overwhelming.

There were sharp little pinging noises, loud enough to hear even over those engines, and Harry could see little holes in the thin skin of the fuselage behind them where pencil-thin beams of sunlight poured in. He looked at John
and Ralph in their flak aprons – heavy steel plates almost like medieval armour – and felt totally vulnerable there in the waist with no protection at all. Those holes had been made by razor-sharp fragments of flak passing through the
Macey May
. They would have passed straight through him too, if he’d been standing there.

He remembered Ernie telling them how fragile the skin of the Fortress was. Its strength lay in those concentric rings and the struts that formed the frame of the aircraft. The thin aluminium plates kept the wind out – but you could punch through those with a little screwdriver.

Harry crouched down, as if to make himself smaller, and clutched desperately at one of the rings that made up the inner structure of the fuselage. Every breath, every movement, was forced. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest and wondered if each beat would be his last.

The explosions were less frequent now and Harry started to come out of his own terror-filled bubble. He realised he was drenched in sweat and could feel his hands swimming around inside his thick gloves. As sweat cooled on his exposed face he noticed how cold it was in the waist. But the deep drone of those Wright Cyclone engines was steady enough, so at least they hadn’t been hit. Were the others OK, he began to wonder. He could see John and Ralph were both standing up. They must be all right.

‘Hey, Harry,’ he heard John call out to him. ‘Where’s your oxygen?’ John grabbed a bottle of oxygen and made his way towards him.

Harry placed the mask over his face and immediately began to feel better. A strange elation overcame him. ‘We made it. We frigging made it. We’re still here,’ he shouted.

He looked up, realised no one was paying him any attention, and felt grateful he was not plugged into the interphone.

‘Harry, Captain says back in your ball,’ shouted Ralph over the roar of inrushing air.

‘You OK?’ Harry asked, a big grin now plastered over his face.

Ralph gestured towards the shattered left window. ‘I’m glad of this heated suit,’ he shouted.

Harry paused to slap John on the back and then wriggled back into his turret. As soon as he plugged himself back into the interphone he heard Holberg’s voice. ‘That flak was pretty intense and no one went down. That’s got to be good news. Well done, boys.’

This had been his first test. His first time under fire. He had got through it.

But as he was strapping himself in to the harness in his turret he noticed a long clean cut in his flying jacket, just at the side and down to his waist – almost like someone had taken a swipe at it with those tailor’s scissors with the long blades. Something had flown past and missed him by a whisker. A fragment of flak that could have sprayed his guts all over the waist.

When he felt able to speak again, Harry told Holberg he was back in his turret. The patchwork countryside of
occupied France rolled by far beneath his feet. Down there were real, actual Nazis. The thought of what the Nazis were doing gave him courage. This was worth it. It was terrifying, and they might all be killed. But at least he was getting back at the Nazis.

Holberg, his voice calm and steady, came over the interphone. ‘You boys at the back, and underneath, you listening? Friedman? Corrales?’

‘Copy.’ They both grunted an acknowledgement.

‘Keep sweeping the sky, top to bottom. Skaggs and Lieutenant Bortz, you keep our front covered. Dalinsky, Hill, watch our flanks. If we keep a tight defensive formation – and this combat box is looking pretty good – we should be able to swat anything that tries to dive through us. And all of you, if those fighters do come, watch you don’t go hitting our own ships in all the excitement.’

If the fighters come
. Judging by the canteen talk, there was never a mission when the fighters didn’t come. Harry continued to roll his turret around the sky, up and down, all angles. Sometimes he’d see little black dots and wonder if it was just eye strain.

This waiting for the fighters was terrible. Harry almost began to wish they would show up so he could stop worrying about them coming.

Holberg came on to tell them they were an hour away from Münster and then things would get a lot rougher.

The hour passed so slowly Harry checked several times to make sure his wristwatch hadn’t stopped. There were
several alerts, when members of the crew thought they could see enemy fighters in the distance, but none of these turned out to be the real thing.

‘OK, here comes trouble,’ Holberg said over the interphone. ‘Hold tight, boys. Flak looks pretty heavy couple of miles ahead. Bortz, five minutes, then it’s over to you.’

In less than a minute the
Macey May
started to buck again. Harry kept waiting for the captain to tell him when he could come out, but Holberg had other things on his mind. So Harry did what he was supposed to do and swung the turret round a constant 360-degree rotation in case any Kraut fighter pilots were mad enough to engage them in the middle of their own flak field.

Ahead in the combat box, Harry saw the leading bombers open their bomb doors. Through the clouds he could see the grey shape of a conurbation below – houses, office buildings, hospitals … and the scar of a great railway marshalling yard. The sun caught on a large body of water to the centre west of the city. It didn’t seem real, what they were about to destroy.

Then the
Macey May
’s own bomb doors opened in front of him. Holberg came over. ‘Bortz, the ship is yours.’ That was standard procedure. On a bomb run the bombardier took control of the plane from his station at the nose and could make his own minor corrections to the flight path.

The flak grew to a crescendo and Harry realised he actually felt safer curled up in his little ball, especially when
he thought of John and Ralph, standing up in the waist above him.

The leading bombers began to drop their loads. There was something animalistic about it – as though they were emptying their bowels – shitting over enemy territory. He watched those little green bombs whistle down, wobbling as they did in deadly clusters of ten. This was something he had never seen before, and what shocked him the most was the sheer violence of their detonation. As each cluster landed, the ground would disappear at random moments microseconds apart. Even from twenty-five thousand feet up he could see the shock waves as they exploded and the plumes of smoke and dust that erupted around them.

Just ahead in the combat box to the left of them there was a sudden flash – bright enough to make Harry flinch. He saw a Fortress explode in an instant into great clouds of yellow and red flame and tendrils of black oily smoke.

‘Jesus Christ,’ came a voice over the interphone. Harry didn’t know who it belonged to, but they sounded utterly terrified.

The explosion hung in the air for a moment, as pieces of debris arced through the sky. Apart from the tail section, which was still intact, there wasn’t anything else recognisable as a Flying Fortress.

‘Bortz, drop those bombs, for Chrissakes.’ That was Dalinsky, crackling in Harry’s earpiece. He was utterly
wrong to speak and Holberg rapidly admonished him with a curt ‘Silence in the waist’.

But Harry could see why he was so concerned. A direct hit by flak on a plane full of bombs was a catastrophe none of them would survive. In training they had been told they always stood a chance if their Fortress went down. Not with a full payload they didn’t.

Another Fortress to the right of them began to trail smoke from both right engines. Then the whole wing caught – a dense yellow and black stream of flame and black smoke. The plane dropped out of formation and began its shallow dive to earth.

‘Come on, guys, come on, get out of there,’ Harry heard in his earpiece. He willed them to bail out too, totally distracted from the bomb run and the flak. Three black specks fell from the Fortress and white parachutes blossomed in the sky. Then there was a sudden bright flash as the wing fuel tanks ignited and the stricken Fortress began a dizzying spin, like a great metal leaf whirling to earth. Once that happened you were doomed – pinned to your stations by centrifugal force, like a fairground ride in hell.

‘Bombs away,’ said Bortz, as the
Macey May
lifted in the air, suddenly free of its 4,500-pound load. Harry spun his turret round to watch those ten green pods plummet from the bomb bay, rapidly lagging behind the aircraft as the
Macey May
powered on through the sky.

Another Fortress began trailing smoke from its left outer engine. That was quickly extinguished but then
the propeller stopped rotating. It was the
Carolina Peach
. Harry had shared meals with their non-coms on several occasions.

Holberg came over the interphone. ‘We’re on our way home. Watch out for fighters.’

Harry felt a familiar squirming in his stomach. They must come, surely. Didn’t they always? He managed to stay awake for the return flight and wished there was something to distract him from the plummeting bombers and the flak fragment that had nearly ripped his stomach open. It was exhausting staring into endless, empty sky. Some music would have been good, but Holberg turned down Corrales’ request for the BBC Home Service.

‘Sorry, Jim,’ he said. ‘I want you all to keep your eyes open. We’re all tired. We’re all a bit jittery. We’re over the worst, but I don’t want some Nazi fighter to creep up on us just when we think we’re safe.’

For the first half-hour of the journey home,
Carolina Peach
, the Fortress that had lost an engine over Münster, had managed to keep up with them, lagging only a little behind the tail end of the combat box. But as he scanned the sky for fighters, Harry also noticed it gradually losing height. The inner left engine began to flame too and trail black smoke, but the pilot was obviously still in control. No parachutes appeared.

‘Godspeed, boys,’ Harry heard Holberg say. ‘Maybe they’ll get back if they’re lucky with the fighters.’

As the minutes ticked away, the grey North Sea appeared on the horizon and Harry began to hope they would not be attacked after all.