Bomber, p.43
Bomber, page 43
‘Tell Hentschel,’ said the Standartenführer.
The NCO knew no one of that name. He exchanged a quick glance with the orderly, who nodded and moved his head to indicate that they should leave. ‘Heil Hitler,’ said the wounded boy.
‘Heil Hitler,’ said the Standartenführer without looking up from his desk. It was ten minutes later when the orderly came to tell him about the horse and he hurried downstairs and out into the chilly winter’s night to see if it could possibly be true.
‘Rosenknospe,’ he said. There were sugar cubes in his pocket. He’d never ceased to carry one or two since he was a child. ‘Rose.’ If only young Hentschel could have also been sewn up and put together again like the horse. Who in the regiment remembered him and had recognized the horse? Someone assigned to a veterinary farm, perhaps. ‘Rosenknospe. You’re not as young as you used to be, old girl.’ The horse whinnied, the smell and the voice had helped her recognize him. How long since he’d ridden? Such a fine horse. She’d be well cared for now.
Dieter Witting, the Standartenführer’s orderly, dozed for a few minutes after the last bombs. He was awakened by the bell and looked at the clock. It was a closely guarded secret that the CO could not go to the toilet without the assistance of his orderly. Witting put his overcoat over his pyjamas and took the case containing the syringe and tablets just in case they were needed. He went in without knocking, as was his usual practice when answering a summons. Wörth was sitting upright in his chair staring straight at the door. Witting wasn’t frightened. Wörth tried to speak and his orderly bent close to his mouth.
‘Rosenknospe,’ whispered Wörth.
‘Rosebud’; Witting had seen many men die and often their last words were incomprehensible.
‘It’s going to be all right now, sir,’ said Witting. ‘Yes,’ said Standartenführer Wörth, and died of frostbite and wounds suffered eighteen months before.
The Burgomaster did not return to his Control Room. The planes had passed over and anyway all of his phones were out of order. From now on the air-raid services must work on their own initiative. He took one of the portable stirrup pumps from the entrance and walked towards the red glow of the old town.
He walked through his town in horrified disbelief. By the lights of the big fires near the gasworks he could see a whole row of slum housing that was simply a one-wall façade like a film set; the houses themselves had disappeared. Alongside the railway station a locomotive had jumped its tracks and was now several feet away from the railway lines. As he turned north on to Nehringstrasse the whole street was a blizzard of flying sparks. The first time he saw a body – just beyond Tornow the printer’s – he stopped to look at it. It was Tornow’s son, dressed in his naval officer’s uniform. Quite dead. He recognized the body of a girl clerk too. After he’d passed fifty bodies he no longer glanced at them.
Only three minutes after he’d left his Control Room an NSKK motorcycle messenger arrived. The FLUKO at Duisburg had tried to get through by means of every official phone in Altgarten but when none of them could connect to the Burgomaster’s Control Room they ordered that a messenger should go from Party HQ. The message simply said that the second wave of RAF aircraft numbering approximately four hundred planes was approaching Altgarten. All fires must be extinguished and non-essential personnel ordered to take shelter.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lambert had seen six bombers since leaving Warley but he’d only had a glimpse of them. So far the trip had been uneventful. Sometimes he’d returned from trips to find other crews describing all manner of pyrotechnics and mayhem while he had seen little or nothing the whole trip. Other sorties had proved to be the very reverse.
‘Changing tanks,’ said Battersby.
‘OK,’ said Lambert.
The Flight Engineer let the tank drain to the final empty cough before changing over. That was the most efficient way to log the fuel consumption and avoid airlocks.
‘Look to port,’ said Binty. ‘The searchlights have coned some poor bastard and the flak is coming up like confetti.’
Instinctively Lambert touched the rudder to steer away from the flak.
Digby was still in the nose. The target was full of coloured lights flickering and winking as the heat rose. There was smoke too. The flares and fires under it made it glow and the heat and blast made it ripple and bubble like milk boiling out of a saucepan. There was black smoke too from where the TENOs’ diesel tank had been hit. Once Digby saw a shockwave expand across the brightest fire and wobble it like a redcurrant jelly. ‘I’d like to bomb those flak bastards. What say, Skip, that I save a couple of thousand-pounders for the flak? We could …’
‘Fighter, fighter, port beam,’ said Flash Gordon. His four machine guns were joined an instant later by the upper turret’s two guns.
‘He’s attacking someone else,’ said Binty. Just a couple of hundred yards to port the thin line of incendiary shells turned like the sweep second hand of a clock as the night fighter closed upon his victim changing his angle of attack and then climbed away into the dark.
‘Bomb-doors open.’
It had begun. They were fixed on the tramline course that would take them across the centre of the target’s fires and into its flak. It looked like a child’s birthday cake, half a dozen yellow candles flickering in a darkened room. A kid’s birthday cake. Left, left. Steady.
The plane ahead was on fire. Its propeller blades slowed as they feathered, but the flames were getting brighter by the second. Steady. Right, hold that, nicely, nicely, hold that steady. The night fighter would come in again as sure as God made little apples and when he did Creaking Door would be brightly illuminated by those damned flames. Brighter still. Its cowling is breaking apart. Steady, left, left. Please God make him go down! He doesn’t have to crash, if he’ll just go down. Please God, just a thousand feet! Right. Steady. Five hundred, then.
A crash of flak made the wing lift. There was a patter of shrapnel. ‘Come in,’ said Jimmy.
You’re veering, Skip. Left, left quite a bit. Even if it’s Micky Murphy. Make him go down! That night fighter must be behind us at this very moment. Steady. Even if it’s my mother. The light from the burning Lancaster was worse. They’ll never save it now. Jesus Christ, that’s another pass! That’s the night fighter’s cannon shells punching those pieces out of him. Get out. Jump, Jump, Jump. You bloody fools. The rear turret is hanging in shreds like a bundle of bent wire. So where are the parachutes? She’s leaping about like a punch-drunk boxer. The propeller blades must have broken on the other side. Left, left. Smoke everywhere, Skipper, I can’t bloody see. OK, hold her like that.
The pilot in the burning plane was throttling back. The distance between them narrowed and the tips of the flames seemed to be trying to get into their own airstream. Closer. So don’t look. Look at the instruments and look at your engineer. Battersby was staring at him in horror. Lambert nodded encouragingly and Battersby turned back to his panel. He thinks I can save him. They all do. Why the hell should they pick on me? Steady, left just a fraction. Steady. That’s good. ‘She’s well alight,’ said Digby calmly. He was only speaking of the target. Target; I’d forgotten the target. They’re having trouble to hold that blazing coffin and in a moment it’s going to stall and we’ll fly into it. Steady. God, it’s coming closer still!
‘Drop the bastard bombs,’ someone shouted. It was a high-pitched anxious voice, not recognizable as any one of the crew until the cry was repeated and Digby identified it.
‘Here she comes, Skip. Keep your hair on,’ Digby told him calmly.
Is he so glued to that bombsight that he can’t see that the whole sky is ablaze with this bloody great dying Lancaster almost touching our wingtip? Make it go down. Shoot it down. Anything but just darkness, please. Just darkness. Nothing should hold on like that, it’s obscene. Perhaps they’re all dead in there and it’s on auto pilot and it will fly in the stream on auto pilot all the way to England with us. Who says you’ll get that far, Lambert? Perhaps this is it, goodnight, Nurse. Blow out the candles.
‘Bombs gone,’ said Digby. His voice was completely relaxed, until he too saw the bomber losing height alongside them. ‘My flaming oath.’
The other Lancaster’s fuel was atomizing as it left the trailing edge of the wing and burning like a gas flame. A flare caught fire as it fell out of its flare chute. So white it seemed almost blue in a world coloured yellow and pink and red.
‘Hold her steady, Skip, for the photo,’ said Digby.
Lambert saw green-and-red pistol flares make a string of brightly coloured beads as they were jettisoned, already alight. He looked at Battersby who was occupied at his panel. The cockpit was golden with the light of the flames while thirty of the longest seconds in the history of the world ticked past.
‘You cow. Flare chute’s bent, Skip. The bloody flash is jammed in it.’ Jimmy’s voice.
‘Kick it out,’ said Lambert. ‘I’m not holding this for ever.’
‘It won’t budge.’
‘Make it bloody budge,’ said Lambert. All that and they hadn’t even got a picture for the Photo Ladder. He sighed as he banked the bomber over and slid into the darkness, away from the fiery aeroplane that Murphy and Sweet were trying to coax back to earth.
‘That aged me ten years,’ said Jimmy Grimm, who had been watching the burning bomber.
‘Any luck with the flash, Jimmy?’
‘Still trying, Skip.’
Grimm had echoed his thoughts but captains just don’t say that kind of thing. That would be the second time this month he’d come back without a photo. On the Intelligence Officer’s board the three rows of target photos arranged in chronological order would include one print that was merely a shiny blank card. Nor would there be caption detail either. It would be as if Creaking Door and its crew and its bomb-load did not exist.
‘Watch for night fighters, everyone,’ warned Lambert.
‘’Kay, Skip,’ the gunners acknowledged dutifully, although they had not ceased searching the sky for one instant.
Lambert tasted the stink of rubber in his oxygen mask and knew that he had broken into a flush-sweat of fear. He unclipped his mask and wiped his face. His jaw was stiff and his chin was stubbly.
‘Only one HE. All the rest were incendiaries and phosphorus tonight,’ said Digby.
‘Glad I didn’t know that on the run in,’ said Battersby.
‘Concentrate, chaps,’ said Lambert. Here was the moment of maximum peril. The tension of the target was suddenly replaced with a relaxed relief and a surprise at being still alive on the far side of the flak. Now came a terrible tiredness and with it a lack of fear, an inability to concentrate and an almost overwhelming desire for sleep. Men had returned to tell stories of crewmen – even pilots – who fell completely asleep on the return journey. Other crews did not return to tell the same story.
‘Concentrate,’ repeated Lambert. ‘There are fifty million dedicated Germans trying to kill us. Concentrate.’
Lambert always said that or something similar. Jimmy Grimm nodded over his radio set and to help him stay awake he poured a cup of coffee from his Thermos flask and sipped it. It was scalding hot. From his rear turret Flash watched the target burning: a scattering of pink blobs. Suddenly one blob swelled and went white for a moment. It was the roof of the Liebefrau collapsing.
Lambert’s head ached. He slipped an aspirin into his mouth. Binty took his Benzedrine. Battersby entered up the fuel change in his log book. In his navigator’s log Kosher wrote ‘Unidentified four-motor aircraft on fire over target’.
By now the moon was high. It wasn’t the golden orb that dust particles colour for men on the ground. From here they saw it as it really was: a cold blue cipher in the sky. The landscape was blue and black and it was possible to distinguish dark patches that were towns and the edges of fields and trees. He saw the River Maas glint in the moonlight and then on the river a dark patch that was Venlo winked as its flak opened fire. The ground was often obscured by greyish-blue patches of cloud that drifted past only 500 feet below.
‘Steer 271,’ said Kosher. ‘That will take us a shade south of the stream, with Eindhoven to port and Tilburg and Breda to starboard. That OK?’
‘If Eindhoven turns nasty, you must steer me farther north of it.’
‘Wilco, Skip. I’ll come up and watch if I may.’
‘Bring a friend.’
Eindhoven – a notorious flak concentration – was quiet as they flew across the outskirts. It wasn’t until they neared Tilburg that they saw intense flak again.
‘The coloured-light stuff is Gilze-Rijn airfield. Breda beyond it. Fifty miles to the Dutch coast … with this wind, say sixteen minutes.’
‘I’m going to start losing height,’ said Lambert. ‘We’ll put on a bit of speed if we put our nose down.’
North of Breda the flak was concentrating upon one section of sky while the searchlights moved busily through the flashes. Suddenly there was a reddish flash. Larger than the others, it stayed bright longer too. ‘Scarecrow shell,’ said Digby. Everyone in Bomber Command knew about scarecrow shells; they were designed by a German flak expert to look like an aircraft exploding in mid-air. Still today survivors swear they could tell the difference between them and the real thing. But there were no scarecrow shells, only exploding planes.
‘Yes, scarecrow shell,’ said Lambert.
Satisfied with his identification of Breda, Kosher went back to his navigator’s table behind the curtain. Battersby watched Lambert’s hands as he kept the compass steady. Battersby had been trained to hold a Lancaster upon an even course, although landing one had actually been one of his recurring nightmares while he was training. The controls were tremendously heavy to move and yet Lambert seemed to use only his fingertips. Now he watched him ease the controls forward.
‘Beginning descent, Skip?’ asked Battersby.
‘I want the cloud on my belly,’ said Lambert.
Battersby nodded blankly. Lambert said, ‘Nothing can get under our backside then.’
‘What about radar?’ asked Battersby.
‘No, they need a final visual,’ said Lambert. ‘All OK, gunners?’
‘Sure thing, boss,’ said Binty.
‘This clear-vision panel is fantastic, Skip,’ said Flash.
‘Good boys,’ said Lambert. They were all good boys; Lambert was lucky. He let the Lancaster settle gently until it hit the greyish-blue bank of cumulus. Shreds of it poured across the wings and tufts made the windscreen opaque. He let the aeroplane wallow in the cloud, churning it up and sliding under it like a child hiding in bedclothes. Make the most of it, thought Lambert, ahead there was the Dutch coast. There this ragged cloud, like the land below it, ended. A vast plain of inert black treacle stretched below them glinting in the moonlight. That was the North Sea.
Chapter Thirty
When the second and much larger wave of bombers began to attack Altgarten it wasn’t fear that dominated the minds of its citizens. Nor, although this was in many minds, was it simple anger or a feeling of being victimized by fate. It was a neurosis of a kind that comes from being asked to do something beyond one’s mental and physical capability. Life had got out of control. For the professionals, their jobs had got out of control. The fire-service officers had spent their lives handling one fire at a time with a plentiful supply of water and the telephones in working order. Tonight they faced over a hundred fires, many of them large and out of control. They were hampered by broken water mains, disconnected phones and exploding bombs. Now, just as they had the emergency power and phone lines almost complete and the water was pumping from the Mönchenstrasse sewer, it was going to start all over again.
There were many symptoms of this neurosis, and for some survivors it was the beginning of a mental breakdown from which they would never recover. One senior fireman was singing an old music-hall ditty over and over again as he worked at the pump. Several of the firemen at the hoses were speaking to the fire, swearing at it in a confused obscene mumble. At the Volkschule a Blockwart, after warning a group of people of the dangers of throwing water on to a burning incendiary bomb, had picked it up as though it was the demonstration dummy and inflicted upon himself very severe burns.
When the second wave of bombers began their attack, both Gerd Böll and his friend Bodo Reuter knew that it was going to be even bigger than the first wave. This was the way the Tommis worked and the fast-revving British engines were as loud as a swarm of hornets. Salvoes of bombs were centring on the fires. The noise hammered their eardrums and the blast plucked at their bodies. They both knew that a sensible man would take cover, but they moved up Mönchenstrasse towards the hospital fire in leaps and runs punctuated by long waits flat on their faces. There were several damaged lorries in the street; one – an Army lorry – was on fire. They passed it cautiously and then kept close to the walls until the last block before Dorfstrasse, where conscientious civil-defence men were throwing burning bedclothes and furniture into the street from a fire on the top floor.
Even before they turned the corner into Dorfstrasse they could see the fire at the hospital reflected in the wet roadway. The main street seemed to be running in blood as the brightly lit water rippled along the gutter. The air was full of sparks and the ground so littered with burning wreckage and incendiary bombs left to burn themselves out that Reuter trod into a patch of phosphorus. The goo burst into flame as he tried to scrape it from his boot. It was an evil, frightening substance that clung like glue. Reuter put his boot into the water-filled gutter, which extinguished the flame, but immediately afterwards it ignited again in the air. Finally Gerd used a piece of broken brick to scrape it away. Then they resumed their journey. Now they were stepping more carefully around the burning timber and white-hot magnesium fragments from the incendiaries.
