CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘Levator labii superioris aloequae nasi’: for no reason at all Pilot Officer Fleming, at the controls of The Volkswagen, intoned the words like grace. He had in fact once said it as grace in the Officers’ Mess and had got by unchallenged, but he’d taken care not to do it when the Medical Officer was at table.

‘What’s that, sir?’ said Bertie the Flight Engineer, who thought it might be a technical matter he’d neglected.

Fleming closed his eyes and tilted his head. ‘It’s the longest name of any muscle in the human body.’

‘What’s the name of the shortest one?’ said the mid-upper gunner and was promptly answered insultingly, accusingly and unscientifically by the wireless operator.

‘OK, chaps,’ said Fleming. ‘Let’s have a bit of hush.’

Four of the Leiden searchlights had been on for some time but now another six were switched on. ‘Look at that,’ said Fleming.

‘Searchlights,’ said the Flight Engineer. In every group of lights there was one that remained vertical. That one was controlled by a Würzburg radar; it was called the master searchlight.

‘I’mgoing to steer a bit to the north, Mac,’ Fleming told his navigator. ‘No sense in heading straight towards that muck.’

‘Don’t let’s even head for the fringe of it,’ said the Flight Engineer.

Fleming laughed; perhaps the boy wasn’t such an idiot after all. It was a bad system, training an engineer apart from the crew. Fleming had known the rest of them for weeks, but he’d flown only a few hours with this child, his assistant pilot. Fleming wondered if the boy could handle the controls sufficiently well for him to go back to the lavatory. Next trip he would take that tin can he’d been offered and be grateful for it. Was it fear that did it? He’d noticed that the engineer and the bomb aimer had already been back there. It was easy for them, but he was strapped into the pilot’s seat and getting out of it was a struggle.

Fear should tighten the rectum and bladder, not loosen them, or so his medical training told him. In the Briefing Room he had watched his fellow men grow pale as fear diverted their newly thinned blood from the skin and the viscera to the brain. That’s why so many had been unable to eat their supper. He’d felt his own heart begin to beat faster as his blood—now red-corpuscle dominated, sugarrich and laden with adrenalin—rose in pressure. He handled the heavy controls with newly found strength and knew that fear had supplied blood to his muscles and his liver had released carbohydrate into his veins. His lungs benefited too, taking more oxygen in breaths that were both deeper and faster.

The first sight of the searchlights had provided him with further physiological evidence of his fear: loss of peristalsis and gastric juice had turned his supper into a hard knot and his saliva had gone, so that his tongue was rough against his mouth. Lastly, his scrotum had constricted tight against his belly. Resulting from these changes Fleming believed he could detect a rise in body temperature as a result of the increased basal metabolic rate. To confirm his theory a trickle of sweat rolled down his spine. His father—a truly dedicated physician—would be interested to hear of these observations.

‘Keep this course, Skip,’ said the navigator. ‘We’ll turn five miles inland instead of over Noordwijk. That should keep us well clear of Leiden.’

‘Okey-dokey,’ said Fleming and for the first time felt truly like a skipper.

Robin, fellow officer and bomb aimer, had been sitting at the navigator’s table filling in his log. He collected up his parachute, target map, log and Thermos flask, disconnected his oxygen supply and came forward. He pushed the Flight Engineer gently to one side and, waving a greeting to Fleming at the controls, bent double to put his foot downwards until it reached the step formed by the glycol tank. Carefully he ducked his head under the traversing ring of the front gun turret with its twin Browning guns. This was his world. It was quieter here. He spread the map out and lay full-length, with his belly on the exit hatch and his head in the clear-view bowl that formed the nose of the aeroplane. Outside the night was growing lighter; the moon was coming out. He looked round with interest but not surprise; he had always known it would be like this.

To the right, one of the searchlight beams was shorter than the others and instead of tapering its beam ended in a blunt hammerhead. ‘Look,’ said Robin, ‘they’ve got someone in the searchlights.’

‘Poor swine,’ said Fleming as he watched more searchlights affix their beams to the aeroplane.

The trapped plane was tilting and twisting like a tormented animal, but, although it broke clear of some of the beams, always at least one of them hung on to it. The flak had started now; some of the bursts were so close to it that the smoke obscured their view for a second or two but still the plane flew on.

‘We have him on our set now,’ said Löwenherz.

‘Where do you want him?’

‘Just starboard and level.’

‘Let me put him a trifle high, Herr Oberleutnant.’

‘Very well.’

‘We’re closing too fast again.’

In the searchlights everything was white. Two more had him now and they were fixing him to the sky like gleaming hatpins holding a fluttering white moth in a black velvet box. There was a brief flicker under the plane and it shivered slightly.

‘He’s hit.’

‘It’s B Beer, the Navigation Leader.’

‘The immortal Lud.’

The navigator couldn’t see. ‘Are they getting out?’

‘No, he’s jettisoning his bombs.’

As they watched it the bomber seemed to swell up very gently with a soft ‘whoomp’ that was audible far across the sky. It became a ball of burning petrol, oil and pyrotechnic compounds. The yellow datum marker, that should have marked the approach to Krefeld, burned brightly as it fell away, leaving thin trails of sparks. The fireball changed from red to light pink as its rising temperature enabled it to devour new substances from hydraulic fluid and human fat to engine components of manganese, vanadium, and copper. Finally even the airframe burned. Ten tons of magnesium alloy flared with a strange greenish-blue light. It lit up the countryside beneath it like a slow flash of lightning and was gone. For a moment a cloud of dust illuminated by the searchlights floated in the sky and then even that disappeared.

‘Jee-sus!’ exclaimed Pilot Officer Cornelius Fleming in horror.

‘No parachutes,’ pronounced Robin from the nose. The searchlights began moving again.

‘Flak did it,’ said the mid-upper gunner, who had the best view of all.

Far away near Utrecht, Fleming saw another master searchlight tilt from the vertical position at which it rested. The top of its beam seemed to explode as it moved across cloud patches. Between the patches it reached seven miles into the sky. Unfalteringly it found a victim.

‘The stream isn’t routed over Leiden,’ said Fleming to his crew. ‘All of those aircraft are off course.’ It sounded not only prim but callous, but before he could modify the sentiment the mid-upper gunner said, ‘I don’t give a bugger who they are; it takes the heat off us and for that I am truly grateful. Amen.’

‘Kettle drums, kettle drums,’ said Löwenherz.

‘Lancaster,’ said the observer, putting away his fieldglasses.

Löwenherz hardly increased speed at all; he inched underneath the huge aeroplane very very slowly. He looked up through the top of his cabin and he could see every detail of it. He let its red-hot exhaust pipes pass back overhead until he was exactly underneath the bomber. The two planes roared through the sky in close formation until, in the classic manoeuvre of the night fighter, Löwenherz pulled the control column back with all his strength. His nose went up closer and closer to the great bomber. The fighter shuddered as it neared stalling-point, hanging on its propellers, thrashing like a drowning man but suspended and stationary for a moment. Over him came the bomber. ‘Horrido,’ said Löwenherz to tell Bach what he was about to do, and he pressed his gun-buttons and raked its belly from nose to tail. The gunfire lit both aircraft with a gentle greenish light. Löwenherz squinted to preserve his night vision as much as possible. These Richards were nothing but high-powered gun platforms and the demented hammering of the big cannons deafened the flyers even through their closely fitting helmets—just as the smell of cordite got into their nostrils in spite of their oxygen masks. Working exactly by the instruction book Löwenherz kept his guns going even after the nose of the Junkers began to fall back towards earth. Suddenly the gunfire ended. The drums were empty.

Three 20-mm MG FF cannons were fitted in the nose of Löwenherz’s Junkers 88R. In sequence of threes there was a thin-cased shell containing 19.5 grammes of Hexogen Al high-explosive filling, an explosive armour-piercing shell with a reinforced point and an incendiary that burned at a temperature between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees centigrade for nearly one second. Each cannon was firing at the rate of 520 rounds per minute and was fed by a drum containing 60 rounds. So in seven seconds all of the cannon drums were empty and 180 shells had been fired at The Volkswagen. The target measured 300 square feet, and 38 struck the aeroplane. Theoretically 20 shells would have constituted an average lethal blow.

‘My legs,’ screamed Fleming. ‘God! Help me, Mother Mother Mother!’

The first shell that penetrated the aircraft came through the forward hatch. Missing the bomb aimer by only an inch, it exploded on contact with the front turrent mounting-ring. It dislocated the turret, severed the throttle and rudder controls, burst the compressed-air tank and broke open the window-spray glycol container. In the airstream the coolant atomized into a cloud of white mist. One twenty-sixth of a second later the second shell came through the bomb compartment and exploded under the floor of the navigator’s position. In the mysterious manner of explosions, it sucked the navigator downwards, while blowing the astrodome, and the wireless operator standing under it, out into the night unharmed. Although without his parachute.

Three shells—one HE, one AP and one incendiary—exploded in glancing contact with the starboard fuselage exterior immediately to the rear of the mid-upper turret. Apart from mortally harming the gunner the explosion of the HE shell fractured the metal formers at a place where, after manufacture, the rear part of the fuselage is bolted on. The incendiary shell completed the severance. A structural bisection of The Volkswagen occurred one and a half minutes later and two thousand feet lower. Long before this, another HE shell passed through the elevator hinge-bracket on the tail and blew part of the servo trim tab assembly into the rear turret with such force that it decapitated the rear gunner. Those six hits were the most telling ones, but there were thirty-two others. Some ricocheted off the engines and wings and penetrated the fuselage almost horizontally.

He couldn’t hold her, he couldn’t. Oh dear God, his arms and legs! Dropping through the night like the paper aeroplane. ‘I’m sorry, chaps,’ he shouted, for he felt a terrible sense of guilt. Involuntarily his bowels and bladder relaxed and he felt himself befouled. ‘I’m sorry.’

It was no use for Fleming to scream apologies; there was no one aboard to hear him. He outlived any of his crew, for from 16,000 feet the wireless operator falling at 120 mph (the terminal velocity for his weight) reached the ground ninety seconds later. He made an indentation twelve inches deep. This represented a deceleration equivalent to 450 times the force of gravity. He split open like a slaughtered animal and died instantly. Fleming, still strapped into the pilot’s seat and aghast at his incontinence, hit the earth (along with the front of the fuselage, two Rolls-Royce engines and most of the main spar) some four minutes after that. To him it seemed like four hours.

The air-conditioning in Ermine’s plotting-room wasn’t intended to cope with so many off-duty personnel standing round as spectators. In addition, the tension seemed to raise a man’s body temperature as does a meal. August mopped his brow and heard Löwenherz give the traditional victory cry, ‘Sieg Heil!’

‘Sieg Heil!’ said August. Willi came to attention and gave August a formal salute of congratulation in a situation where most men would have shaken him by the hand. There were shuffles and coughs from the onlookers and murmurs of congratulation. The loudspeaker crackled.

‘He’s breaking up,’ said Löwenherz. ‘The main spar has snapped and the fuselage is doubling back like a hairpin.’

Willi wiped the wax marks off the table.

‘Order: go to Heinz Gustav One,’ said August.

‘Please: via Noordwijk?’

‘Announcement: yes, Katze One.’ To Willi, August said, ‘He might get a visual contact if they are still putting flares down but I can’t call the flak to a stop just because he is overflying them.’

‘He won’t hang around,’ said Willi, ‘he’s a bright fellow.’

‘We’re all smart fellows,’ said August. Willi smiled at August, his ruddy battered face twisted like a freshly squeezed orange.

Löwenherz let the Junkers fall from its vertical position and after gaining speed he eased the antlers back and began climbing to fly back through the stream. Mrosek took off his seat straps, lit his torch and crawled down into the nose to change the sixty-round cannon magazines on the Oerlikons. Löwenherz held the same shallow climb, but a patch of turbulent air caused Mrosek to blister his hand upon the breech. Changing the drums was an awkward job even on the ground in daytime, but Mrosek never complained. They flew on past Noordwijk without spotting any bombers, although there was lots of flak including even some brightly coloured 3.7-cm stuff from Valkenburg aerodrome. The Junkers continued right out to the western extreme end of Ermine’s range. Those two interceptions had been quick and easy, but next time he might need to traverse the whole sector under August’s guidance before he made a contact.

In Joe for King, Roland Pembroke the young Scots navigator had overcompensated for the wind error. His Gee was unusable owing to German jamming. Now his mistake had brought Joe for King to the Dutch coast five miles south of the turning-point. Ahead of him, flying through flak and searchlights, there were others who had made the same error of reckoning.

‘We’ll go south of it,’ said Tommy Carter.

‘South of Leiden?’ said Roland, who had worked out his plot carefully and rather objected to abandoning the Flight Plan.

‘South of that muck,’ said Tommy, waving towards the flak and lights ahead of them.

‘OK, boss,’ said Roland.

The brand-new aeroplane had a strong smell of fresh paint and varnish. The controls were hard and stiff under Tommy Carter’s hands and as he turned the wheel it made brittle cracking sounds. On the other hand, everything worked properly. On his previous aeroplane two or three of the instruments were suspect and would stick and lag behind the others. In some ways he liked having this nice new aeroplane. He wondered whether they’d be allowed to keep it.

Tommy knew it was a bad idea as soon as he changed on to the new heading. It wasn’t only Leiden that was alive with flak, it was this whole coast; The Hague under the starboard wing was damn nearly as bad as Leiden. There were Grossbatterien of dozens of guns and searchlights working under radar control. The whole land was asparkle with gunfire. Tommy fixed his eyes upon a black region of countryside beyond the gunfire and pushed the throttles forward.

‘Close your eyes and swallow,’ said Tommy; ‘it will soon be gone.’ The motors screamed loudly.

There was an explosion rather nearer than the previous ones. It rocked the wings and made an acrid smell.

‘There’s light stuff too,’ said Tapper Collins, the bomb aimer. He was in the nose watching ropes of red and yellow tracer curve towards them and fall away at what he knew to be thousands of feet below but which looked close enough to touch. ‘Lots of light stuff now, from directly below us.’

‘That must be the aerodrome at Valkenburg,’ said Roland Pembroke.

‘Jesus,’ said Tommy. ‘Leiden to the left of us, Hague to the right of us and now we are doing a straight and level over a bloody Hun aerodrome. What do you think you’re on, charge of the flipping Light Brigade?’

‘Sorry, Tommy,’ said Roland politely. He didn’t point out that the change of route was Tommy’s idea.

Tommy Carter didn’t answer, for at that moment all of his attention was taken with a searchlight that, having remained vertical and immobile for some time, had tilted and now moved towards them.

‘It’s coming at us,’ said Collins from his position at the bombsight.

‘You berk, Tommy!’ said Ben Gallacher, and Tommy Carter was outraged that he should be blamed for something so obviously beyond his control and not of his liking.

‘Sideslip down the beam,’ said Collins. He was a veteran and Tommy respected his experience. This new aeroplane required extra strength to move its controls. He heaved at them and banked until the light was blinding bright. It had them. The cockpit was so brightly lit that it made his eyes ache and he could only see by almost closing them.

The theory was that by sideslipping down the beam the searchlight would (by continuing to move along) lose you. This searchlight crew seemed to have seen the trick before, although in fact Tommy Carter’s sideslip was not nearly violent enough to test the theory.

‘Fire into the light,’ Tommy called.

‘Turn more, I can’t reach, I’m full traverse and I can’t reach,’ replied the gunner.

Suddenly the light went out. Tommy and Ben tugged at the controls and the bomber eased out of its steep bank. The flak and searchlight had gone and the night was agreeably dark and silent. He began to climb again. It was more than a minute before anyone spoke and then everyone spoke, chattering hysterically and trying to make jokes.

‘Everyone shut up,’ said Tommy Carter in the tone he used when he didn’t want an argument—what his crew called his copper’s voice.

‘Navigator,’ said Tommy with unusual formality of address, ‘give me a course so that we’ll join the stream beyond Leiden.’

‘085,’ said Roland in his prim public-school accent.

They flew on in a silence broken only by the drone of the motors. ‘Sorry, boys,’ said Tommy finally, intimidated by the silence of his crew. ‘Bloody stupid of me to go south of Leiden.’

‘That was a master searchlight,’ said Collins the expert. ‘The blue ones are always radar-controlled.’ Because arc lamps seem more blue when angled towards the viewer, RAF crews believed that the ones pointing at them (the bluish ones) were the most accurate, ie, radar-controlled. Luftwaffe crews over Britain believed the same thing, but there were no blue searchlights.

‘Then why did the flaming thing go off?’ said Ben Gallacher.

‘We were a bit small,’ said Tommy. ‘They decided to throw us back and wait for a Stirling.’

‘I’d like to know why,’ said Ben.

‘It’s a secret new weapon that some of our planes carry,’ theorized Collins.

‘We’ll never know for certain,’ said Tommy, ‘so belt up and be grateful.’

At that moment on the ground near Valkenburg a young Indian Feldwebel was shouting abuse in Hindustani, which is well suited for that purpose. He watched three phlegmatic signals-regiment mechanics remove the front of his searchlight. In the British Army, before capture, they had been separated by caste. The Wehrmacht, however, had mixed their new volunteers together, with only these brightly coloured turbans—lilac, ochre, green, and even pink and white with blue spots—to show the difference between himself and the lowest of the pariahs. Again he swore an ancient oath at the mechanics. One of the fools proclaimed it to be an ill-omen. It was difficult to contradict him, for today they had been told that the local Dutch civilians had protested at the presence of kaffers and they were to be moved to France with all their new flak equipment.

This was one of the first of the new high-performance 200-cm lights to be delivered. A beauty—2.7 million candlepower. Damn! He kicked the cable angrily. It was just his luck that, after a first-class contact on the Würzburg and a Tommi in the beam, just then the carbons should go. Sometimes he wished he was back home in Delhi.

In the potato fields a few miles to the west of Ahaus the young Leutnant who had spoken to August and Max during their delay on the road surveyed his Grossbatterie. The two Hitler Jugend guns were manned and ready; those boys were always the keenest. Some of the other guns were not completely jacked up and some were not even uncoupled from their prime movers. It had been a long hard day, with many delays on the road and his Oberst complaining every step of the journey.

The Leutnant sniffed the air and detected a faint smell of soot and smoke. Whenever the wind was from the south it brought the aroma of the Ruhr with it. During last month’s raids the air had also carried the smell of fouled earth, brick dust, cordite and burning buildings.

The sound of aircraft engines came suddenly. He phoned to his Control Room and when the phone was in his hands he looked up and saw the glint of moonlight upon a wing. He saw it for only a moment and it was too high to be more than a speck of light but it was leaving a condensation trail that glowed in the moonlight. Even had his 8.8-cm guns been ready to fire they couldn’t reach that height.

The information was passed to Deelen but already it was superfluous. Other reports showed that the aircraft were two Mosquitoes at 32,000 feet.

‘They are turning at Ahaus,’ said the Plot Officer.

The Operations Officer moved his hand to make an arc southwards from Ahaus, pivoting upon the Oboe transmitter at Dover. His thumb swivelled across the open country until it encountered the shaded pattern of a large town in the Ruhr. He looked then at the bomber stream’s reported position. The heading of the bombers would bring them over the same place.

‘Krefeld,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet a week’s pay on it.’

The other officer nodded. He didn’t take up the wager.

The plan was now clear. On their present heading the bomber stream would pass over Krefeld at half past midnight. Moving a hundred miles an hour faster and turning to approach from the north, the Mosquitoes—with their secret Oboe device—would pass over Krefeld three minutes earlier. That would be exactly enough time for the coloured indicator bombs to mark the target for the heavy bombers.

The routes were converging like the rays of light through a burning-glass and tonight attention was focusing on one town. The leaflet raids over Northern France, the lone Mosquito that was causing the alarms to sound all the way to Berlin, and the dog-leg course that had taken the stream to Noordwijk before turning, were all clearly seen for the ruses they were; the target for tonight was Krefeld. Deelen Control and Duisberg FLUKO began to arrange the defences of the Reich accordingly.

In peacetime a complicated electronic device like Oboe would have spent six months more on the test bench and four or five in prototype, and anything up to a year would have passed before they were sold, installed and in use. But this was war and Oboe was in production. It needed nursing all the way to the target and even then it was no surprise to Flying Officer MacIntosh when the set went dead twenty-five miles short of Krefeld.

‘Not a sausage. What a nuisance, the signals were clear as a bell—then it went dead.’

‘We’ll turn back, then.’

‘Might as well. We’re on the curve but we’ll never find the target with a dud set.’

‘Bloody thing. I cancelled a date tonight.’

‘You shouldn’t have joined.’

The Mosquito turned abruptly until it faced west to England. There was no sense in going a yard nearer to the Ruhr than was absolutely essential.

‘Let’s get out of here, Mac.’

There were two radio transmitting stations in England from which the signals went to activate Oboe. The stations could handle only two Mosquitoes every ten minutes. The two planes that should mark the target for the very first bombers to arrive were now reduced to one plane. That one was piloted by Pilot Officer Alan Hill; his observer was Peter Hutchinson.

They had done everything according to the book. They had flown at 32,000 feet, for only at this height were the signals able to reach over the radar horizon. At a point fifty miles north of Krefeld they had turned southwards. Keeping the steady beat of the signals in his ears the pilot had banked his wing to fly a gentle curve that would—at the moment the signal from the second transmitter reached him—bring him at the right distance from Krefeld to allow for the forward movement through the air of the 250-lb targetindicator bombs.

They did not know that the accompanying Mosquito had turned away with its Oboe device out of action. Nor did they know that they were accompanied by a German aeroplane up in this region of the sky that was almost the stratosphere. It was a specially equipped Ju88S in which the GM1 system injected nitrous oxide into the superchargers and thus provided oxygen that boosted its performance by nearly twenty per cent. Its endurance was measured in minutes and a few nights previously it had used up its Ha-ha device just as it caught sight of the Mosquito. Tonight there had been no miscalculation. Tonight the moonlight had made the upper reaches of the sky into a floodlit arena.

‘Bombs armed,’ reported the observer. At the speed they were going, Krefeld was only two minutes away. There was suddenly a thumping sound and the controls were wrenched from the pilot’s grasp. The panel was bent and torn and the glass from its instruments flew in all directions. Two Perspex panels had suddenly gone white and the sky was no longer to be seen through them. Even when the bangs stopped, the engines were screaming an octave above their normal tone. The Mosquito performed a flick roll, steadied itself for a moment and then put its nose up and stalled. As he dived the aircraft to regain control they saw the Ju88 far away on the port beam. Its wings shone in the moonlight as it turned to find them for a second attack.

‘Fire!’ said Peter Hutchinson.

‘What with?’ said Alan Hill angrily, until he noticed that the port engine was coughing blue flame and spitting orange sparks and his few remaining instrument needles were collapsing. He wrenched at the tiny jettison box by his side and tore a nail as he broke the safety wires. There was a lurch as two 250-lb target-indicator bombs—each almost as big as a man—fell out of the bomb-bay, and then he struggled with the box for what seemed like hours until the other two went. Relieved of the weight of its bomb-load the aeroplane responded more readily to its controls. He kept the nose down and headed desperately for the cloud bank but it was still two thousand feet below him as the Ju88 came in again. More pieces of wing disappeared as the cannon shells punched holes through the wood.

‘To hear you two young fellows talk you’d think the Germans had no fighter planes.’

‘They don’t as far as we’re concerned, Dad. We’re too high for them.’

‘Well, I didn’t say this in front of your mother, Alan, but mark my words, your Jerry is a damn good engineer and if he wants to get up to you one of these nights he’ll do it.’

‘Drink up, Dad, we’ve two more days of leave yet.’

‘And change the subject, I know. Your job’s too hush-hush to talk to your father about.’

‘Peter, Peter, jump! She’s coming to pieces.’ Peter didn’t move. That last attack must have done it. Please God, don’t let that Junkers come round again!

In the Junkers the fuel warning lights were on. He’d had his forty-five minutes’ fun and now the nitrous oxide was used. He turned away from the Mosquito. It was done for, he could see that. He wondered if Luftwaffe High Command would let him claim it; they were so keen to keep the Ha-ha secret.

Alan Hill held the stick with one hand and shook Peter frantically with the other. There was no sign of life. He grabbed at the flying helmet and turned the head to look into his friend’s glassy eyes. As he shook him the oxygen mask fell aside and he had difficulty in refixing it. Peter’s face was covered with fresh blood.

Down where the bomber stream was flying it was cold—colder than the coldest of domestic freezers—but up here it was even colder. Sixty degrees below zero and the air was rarefied and its pressure fatally low for a human lung. Alan undid his safety belt and Peter’s too before he put the stick over. When the Mosquito was upside down he fell out of his seat. He tried to pull his observer with him but Peter’s leg was caught under the bent instrument panel. He tugged at Peter’s arm but that too became bloody even as he watched.

Alan took one last gulp of oxygen and then holding his breath he let himself fall. He dropped a long, long way before pulling the rip-cord but even so he had slight frostbite and lost the joint of an index finger that stuck to the metal handle. Perfectly, the canopy bloomed above him. He landed in a ploughed field two miles from the Dutch border. His only other injury was a bad cut on his right hand that must have happened during the first attack. He realized then that the blood on Peter’s face and arm was from this cut. He asked himself if he could have saved Peter’s life. Alan was interned together with other bomber crews and was thus not interrogated in the way he would have been had they guessed him to be an Oboe pilot. He spent the rest of the war in a prison camp and died aged forty-nine in a motor-car accident in Liverpool, and yet there was not a day when he did not ask himself that same question.

A layer of cold air lay close upon the great district of the Ruhr, untroubled by any wind. This cold still air trapped smoke from the furnaces and factories and held it like a grey woollen blanket. Water droplets had built up against this layer and formed a roof as dense and flat and smooth as a sheet of grey aspic: what today we call smog. One target indicator jettisoned by the Oboe Mosquito went into this layer near the Rhine at Duisburg. The second went into the Rhine. One and a half minutes and nine miles later the second two landed on the south-east edge of Altgarten.

Detonated by barometric pressure at one thousand feet, each marker bomb spewed benzol, rubber and phosphorus for a hundred yards in all directions, so that there were two pools of red-coloured fire easily seen by the bomber stream four miles above the earth. It was Altgarten’s fate to be on the track of the bombers as they flew from the coast towards Krefeld. Had the bombers passed a few more miles to one side or the other then the stream might not have seen the burning TIs waiting to be bombed. It was an extra misfortune for the town that the markers dropped on its far side, for the creepback would start to bring the bombing right across the town towards the approaching stream. Each crew would bomb as early as they could do so without shame. Then they would turn away before the concentration of guns and searchlights that guarded the Ruhr on Altgarten’s far side. Perhaps some of the more experienced crews would not have been deceived by the markers into bombing the little town, except that to the H2S radar the acres of glasshouses that were Altgarten’s special pride appeared on the radar screen like enormous factories.

The first Finder circled twice before putting flares down to the south-east of the markers, trying to get a visual confirmation. Then a Supporter—on his first trip—put a string of high explosive between the flares and the red TIs and a second Supporter did the same. The last of these bombs hit the Venlo road and set fire to a gas main.

Tommy Carter in Joe for King the Second was a Backerup. He arrived five minutes early and put his four green markers on to the reds. One thousand feet above Altgarten sixty pyrotechnic candles were ejected from each marker. Each was suspended under a tiny parachute. Falling in close proximity and according to wind and weight they assumed the shape of a bunch of fiery grapes or, if bottom-heavy, a Christmas tree.

Within ten minutes dozens of Supporters and Finders had dumped their flares and HE upon Altgarten and inevitably the release points were creeping back north-west across the town.

Meanwhile, at zero plus three minutes, an Oboe Mosquito arrived exactly on time over Krefeld and marked the real target with four perfectly placed reds. They burned unseen by the bombing force. By now attention had been centred upon Altgarten and the plan had begun to go terribly wrong.