CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Descended from Norsemen, the Munros of the Isle of Nichuish were a fierce God-fearing tribe of fighting men. It was said that they’d never sat down to a meal without thanking the Lord and opening the gates to the hungry, but they’d done so with their swords close to hand. Old Andrew’s purse and sword never left his side from the day he first strapped them on until he died on the far-off battlefield of Lützen commanding one of Gustavus Adolphus’ Scottish brigades. There, a silver damascened wheel-lock pistol pushed under his breastplate opened purse and belly and spread guts and gold across the battlefield. His brother Ian fled from Cromwell after Dunbar wearing the clothes of a crofter. Another Munro Americans buried—in four separate parts—under the cold soil of Lookout Mountain before the battle of Chattanooga had properly begun.

Andrew, a captain in the Scots Fusiliers, was in 1704 at Blenheim the first Munro to fight on the same side as the English. Since then there had always been one of the men of Nichuish in the British Army. The history of the Munros reads like battle honours on a dusty standard: Fontenoy, Waterloo, Inkerman, Aboukir, Koodoosberg.

In 1918 John’s uncle had fought the Turks from Basra to Kirkuk and his father had spent four long years in France and collected a DSO at Ypres. They had both come back to the estate at the war’s end. Uncle Ian had attended to the paperwork right up until the week he had died of some unidentified tropical disease. His father on the other hand had delighted in working on the land and with the livestock. So many times, arriving on vacation with his friends from school, they had mistaken his father for a cowherd. Now they were both gone, and with John and his young brother Ian both in the RAF the whole place was being run by Sarah. This is where the family’s military tradition might end, thought John Munro.

He would advise his son against going into military service of any kind. Last week two airmen had come before him for creating a disturbance in the Airmen’s Mess. One was reported to have said, ‘After this lot you wouldn’t get me to join a Christmas Club.’ It was alleged that the other replied, ‘You won’t get me to bloody well join hands even.’ Munro had given them three days’ jankers for ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order’ but the sentiments were his exactly. Perhaps some day after the war he would see them on the street and tell them how much he had agreed. Although deep in his heart Munro felt sure that there would be no ‘after the war’ for him. He’d never before had such a premonition of death. He told himself it was merely because this was his last trip, but he could not convince himself of that. Last night he had written cheques for his tailor, his dentist and the Mess, written a letter to his wife and the child and propped it on his pillow, and revised his will. Everything was done except this; he corrected the course with a touch of rudder.

Munro looked calmly down upon the dark landscape. Although for the newer crews the searchlights and explosions were a confusing maze of danger, for the old hands the flak concentrations provided a grim series of familiar navigational pinpoints.

‘Some silly blighter’s drifted off over Nijmegen,’ said Munro, watching the twinkling flak to port.

‘Arnhem’s pretty active too, sir,’ said the bomb aimer. ‘But not so many searchlights as there used to be.’

‘The Jerries are pulling back into the Ruhr. I suspect they’re letting their night fighters have a go over the target nowadays and using the lights to help them spot the stream.’

‘It makes the navigator’s job easier,’ said the engineer. Jock Hamilton the navigator was always fair game but this time he pretended that he had not heard them.

‘There’s a buzz going round that they are going to do away with them,’ said the bomb aimer. ‘We’ll be taking extra incendiaries instead.’

‘You’ll no’ bluidy get back then,’ Jock warned them.

The others grinned, but for Munro the threat reawakened his fears. He watched and noted the changing patterns of the air defences. It was amazing how far one could see from this height. On other, clearer nights he’d been this close to the Ruhr and still been able to see the English coastline. Tonight, thank God, he couldn’t, but the cloud was breaking up as they got farther inland. He didn’t like that. There was no sign of searchlights or gunfire ahead of him where the target should lie. He called the navigator. ‘Are you getting a picture on the H2S, Jock?’

‘It’s no’ so bad.’

‘Can you see the River Maas?’

‘Aye, sir. Just about. I make us level with Kleve.’ The landscape was dark and featureless except that Munro could see the river far below them. The Maas curved gently away.

‘Big bugger that one to port, sir.’

‘Yes, that’s what I call a searchlight. Makes the others look like a Toc H lamp.’

It wasn’t far now.

Keeping a proper all-round watch in a top turret was a tiring procedure. It meant rotating the head in a manner for which human anatomy was not designed.

Lofty, Munro’s gunner, did his series of horizon searches and ended each with two visual sweeps overhead. That’s when he saw the shape. One piece of darkness with a horrifying slowness detached itself from the night sky and reached out to grab them in its black grasp. A man can’t scream into an oxygen mask but, not knowing this, the gunner did scream. He almost choked, gasping for air with a force that gave him chest pains. He switched his microphone on to tell Munro what had happened but had difficulty in speaking. In a shaky voice he reported, ‘A Lancaster just about parted my hair, sir.’

‘Direction?’ asked Munro.

‘Same bearing as us, sir, but only a few feet overhead. How we missed him I don’t know.’

‘So long as the stream are keeping on course,’ said Munro. Jock grinned to himself. It was typical of Munro that so close to a mid-air collision he should be concerned whether the other plane was on the correct course. ‘Sure it was a fourmotor job, Lofty?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good, but keep your eyes peeled.’

No one aboard Lancaster Q for Queen had seen Munro’s Lanc come so close to them. The only crew member who might have seen it—Jammy Giles the bomb aimer—wasn’t full-length in the nose looking down; he was sitting in the pilot’s seat grappling with the controls. He’d never taken over the controls on an operational flight before. He was reluctant to do it this time until the pilot—a Canadian flying officer named Peterson, known to his friends as Roddy—made it an order. In spite of Jammy’s superior rank the pilot, a taxi-driver from Montreal, was the captain. Jammy said, ‘OK, you drunken Canadian bum, but I should be couchant by now.’

‘Bum’ and ‘couchant’ were two of Jammy’s very favourite words, and just as the former was applied to his crew and his sex-life so was the latter applied to his job and his sex-life. It wasn’t as easy to change pilots as they both thought. A stray boot hit the control column and for a time there were no feet on the rudder bar, both of which put the bomber into some unusual flying attitudes.

At first it had been a bit of a joke. Jammy had been sympathetic about Roddy’s diarrhoea because it was undoubtedly the result of a drinking party that Jammy had insisted he joined. Closer to the target, however, Jammy was getting more and more anxious. ‘Roddy, do you know what’s got an IQ of one hundred?’

‘No, what?’

‘Ten Canadians. All right. Now get your flaming arse off that thunderbox, Roddy, and come back here and start driving.’

‘I’m ill.’

‘Canadian twit.’

‘Limey berk.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I’m serious too.’

‘I’m the Bombing Leader, Roddy.’

‘And I’m goddamn ill, feller.’

‘All right. How long are you going to be on your bum?’

‘You take her over target, Jammy.’

‘And who will be couchant, you transatlantic twit?’

‘Let Al bomb, he was always better than you.’ The incapacitated pilot scored a shrewd blow with that suggestion, for Alun Davies the navigator had remustered from observer and knew almost as much as Jammy about bombsights, drift, markers and selector switches.

It was Jammy’s strict instruction that the target should be identified both on radar and visually before bombing. ‘Can someone hold Queenie straight and level while I do the couchant bit?’ asked Jammy desperately.

Whoever was at the controls would suffer Jammy’s wrath as they tried to comply with his steering directions over target. They all knew this and no one volunteered.

Jammy sighed, ‘All right. Alun, forget the H2S, have a go at the bombsight, will you?’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Alun, ex-public-school, ex-cinemamanager from Ffestiniog. He gathered together the maps under his lamp and took a closer look at them.

When Alun had last bombed, the target maps had been gaily coloured, fully detailed ones of the sort that a hiker would take on a cross-country stroll. Now the target maps were sombre things: inflammable forest and built-up areas defined as grey blocks and shaded angular shapes. The only white marks were the thin rivers and blobs of lake. The roads were purple veins so that the whole thing was like a badly bruised torso. On the old ones the rivers were bright blue and the trees green and hospitals were marked with a neat red cross. But now the urban conglomerations were just shapes like the ill-defined blurs that passed across the H2S radar tube. That, of course, was the whole idea. The old maps were as ancient as the idea of looking over the side of the cockpit to see the enemy you bombed. The new grey faceless maps were just one aspect of a new kind of war.

Alun Davies switched off the H2S radar set. That was Jammy’s toy; Alun had never liked it. He gathered his maps and notes together and moved forward. It was dark. He saw Jammy’s helmeted head rigid and silhouetted against the Perspex and groped for handholds as the plane lurched to Jammy’s inexpert touch. As he passed the pilot’s seat Jammy spared a hand long enough to pat his arm in encouragement. ‘Don’t forget the fuse switch, Al, and look for the red Oboe TIs first, then the greens. All right?’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘How are you back there, Roddy?’

‘Goddamn miserable, Jammy.’ It had taken the pilot several agonizing minutes to undo his flying clothes in order to use the Elsan chemical closet. Whoever decided that the flying meal should include beans had never suffered from wind at high altitude. The distension of the stomach and bowel that at ground level is merely painful becomes agony at 16,000 feet. Roddy Peterson had the added pain of an inflamed intestine. Originally he’d wanted to vomit and then a wave of shivering had hit him, followed by an urgent looseness of the bowels. Here at the back he’d plugged in his intercom and oxygen, but at 16,000 feet, with his trousers round his ankles, he was very cold indeed. In spite of being chilled to the bone he was sweating and could feel the perspiration trickling down his neck and back. He still felt sick and inside him there was an empty feeling of misery. Back here in the tail every trace of Jammy’s inexpert piloting was magnified into rolling motion and sickening drops through space.

He’d never realized before how dark and lonely it was for the rest of the crew. Looking forward from the Elsan all he could see was the feet of the mid-upper gunner as the turret traversed with sudden purrs. When they flew near cloud there was enough reflection for him to see the gunner’s arms too. Beyond that the tunnel of aluminium formers and ammunition runways seemed to extend for miles. Sometimes, like day at the end of a railway tunnel, he saw a pinpoint of yellow from the navigator’s desk lamp. It was noisy here too. The roar of the engines was much louder from behind and the wind buffeting the tail bumped and groaned and curious little clinks came from the girders around him. Now and again there was the explosion of a flak shell nearby and once there was the pitter-patter of spent shrapnel knocking upon the metal skin. All the time he felt a desperate frustration at not knowing what was going on.

‘You left your parachute on the seat here, Roddy,’ said Jammy Giles over the intercom. ‘One of the boys will bring my harness down to you. The chute is in the rear stowage. All right?’ Roddy nodded.

‘Hear me, Roddy?’ Roddy was racked by another awful pain and a bowel movement that drained the life out of him. He groaned and scarcely summoned the energy to switch his microphone. ‘I don’t want a chute. I just want to die.’

At the controls Jammy saw an extra big searchlight moving across the sky towards them. It looked very blue, as he’d been told the master searchlights were, and he pushed the rudder bar urgently. Without any bank the plane simply yawed sideways, skidding through the sky and lurching as the propellers tried to renew their grip upon the air.

‘Yes. All right, hold on to your Elsan,’ said Jammy. ‘This might be your big chance.’ Jammy gave a characteristic mirthless guffaw modified by the oxygen mask he was wearing.

Himmel saw the same big searchlights. As they swept across a patch of cloud they lit it like frosted glass. Conspicuous upon that white patch, like a cockroach on a counterpane, was the black silhouette of an aeroplane, and then came a second bomber slightly smaller.

‘Announcement: kettle drums, kettle drums’—he thus dispensed with his radar station’s services. Himmel had already followed one contact right across the zone of the Würzburg without success and was about to fly back along the stream and begin again. He switched on the Revi sight and an engraved cross and circle lit up on the glass before him. He put the Junkers into a steep dive, turning on to the same course as his quarry. The bomber had been at least a thousand feet below him when he’d spotted it and he watched the next patch of cloud hoping that he’d see it again closer to. At 15,000 feet he levelled off but continued on the same bearing. He’d only seen the bomber for a second or two and he might have misjudged its heading. Then the observer saw it again. One hundred yards away, much larger and just above the starboard horizon. ‘There he is.’ Himmel stole a glance at it. Too fast.

The speed of the dive was still affecting their forward motion and even throttling back drastically didn’t help much. It was damned near. Himmel pulled the nose up. They slowed. It would put them above the horizon for a moment or two but it was better than showing them his exhausts.

‘Corkscrew port go,’ shouted Lofty Lee from his upper turret and began firing as Munro slammed the stick over and stood the bomber on its wingtip. Lofty’s machine guns tilted high above him as he tried to keep the night fighter in his sights while his own plane banked vertically and slid down. It was impossible. Munro grabbed the throttles and reduced the forward speed (and exhaust flame) to minimum and had the satisfaction of seeing the Junkers pass rapidly over him. Its exhausts glowed brighter and brighter as the angle narrowed and he was right ahead of them.

‘Don’t fire, anyone,’ said Munro. ‘He’s lost us.’ He’d seen his bomb aimer dodging under the ring of the front turret. It was tempting, of course, for now positions were reversed: Himmel’s Junkers was silhouetted against sky and moonlit high clouds. Munro kept in the blind spot behind the Junkers’ tail and vanished against the dark background of earth. Himmel banked for a better view around him. Munro watched the plane ahead as it searched for them and held his breath lest they heard him.

‘Everyone all right?’ asked Himmel.

‘One bullet starred the cockpit glass,’ said the observer.

‘Those piddling things don’t do much damage,’ said the radar man.

‘Not to you, buried under all that machinery,’ grumbled the observer.

‘Keep looking for him,’ said Himmel.

‘We’ll never see him in that muck,’ said the observer.

‘He knew what he was doing,’ said the radar operator. ‘My fault,’ admitted Himmel. ‘It’s so seldom the Tommis spot us that I’ve grown complacent. I climbed. I should have dived and circled behind him.’

‘They’re lucky, those Tommis. Not many get away as easily as that.’

‘Probably old-timers.’

‘Someone else will get them,’ said Himmel. ‘Keep looking.’ They kept looking, but finally Himmel had to tell his Controller that he had lost contact.

‘Good work, Lofty,’ Munro said to the tiny upper gunner who had warned them of Himmel’s approach.

‘I thought he was aWellington in the stream at first. Then he went a little higher and I got a good silhouette of the bastard.’

‘It was good work,’ said Munro. ‘Keep your eyes peeled, everyone. They’ll put up every night fighter they have on a night like this.’

Cautiously Munro put the nose up and began to climb to his assigned bombing height.

Some bomb aimers were seeing a town under attack for the first time. In Jammy’s plane, his navigator Alun Davies had done so many operations hidden behind his curtain that he’d almost forgotten what a target looked like. Battersby, in Creaking Door, stared down at the fires and flashes and for a moment forgot his duties. He’d expected the fires and markers to look much bigger, as they had in the training films he’d seen, but they had been photographed with telephoto lenses. From four miles high even a whole city block on fire was nothing more than a pimple of red in a vast bowl of darkness. A tiny red glow-worm was all that could be seen of fires that stretched from the gasworks to the brewery sidings. It was such a muddle, too. At the briefing the plan was so clear: red markers, then greens and yellows accompanied by the HE Illuminators scheduled to arrive before the Finders. Now, looking down, only the most experienced crews knew what was happening. Battersby couldn’t distinguish a fire from a descending marker, or the flicker of an exploding bomb from the slower photoflash.

Wrong wind predictions had thrown the weight of the stream northwards and would have made the timings wrong even if they hadn’t mistaken the target. Altgarten was nine miles closer than Krefeld and the immortal Lud’s yellow had marked neither. Main Force Stirlings were arriving even before Illuminators. Some Primary Markers had had doubts about the correctness of the markers and had circled several times looking at H2S, thus making themselves late. Altgarten now was a meaningless chaos of greens and yellows, fires, photoflashes and explosions.

‘The H2S is acting up, sir. I’m going to bomb the central fire,’ said Munro’s bomb aimer.

‘OK, bomb aimer,’ said Munro. ‘She’s all yours.’

‘Left, left, and a bit more. Now we’re nice. Steady. Left, left.’

The fires were like little furry animals, their edges softened by the smoke. And like animals they seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting as the flames inhaled the surrounding air-currents. Sometimes it was possible to see the tiny flicker of dozens of incendiaries as they landed and glowed pink. Much larger, the HE bombs flashed and were gone. From each aircraft came a photoflash bomb which exploded above the target with seven million candlepower of light that lasted longer than the bombs and threw enough light upwards to illuminate the bombers. One of these was going off every three or four seconds. Munro, listening carefully to his bomb aimer’s instructions, saw by the light of one photoflash eight aeroplanes close around him and was so frightened that he made himself stare at his instrument panel.

‘Left, left, steady.’ There was no mistaking the instructions since the word ‘left’ was always said twice. Adding ‘steady’ without pausing was his way of telling Munro to only touch the left rudder. ‘Steady, steady.’ Plenty of flak now; the row of tiny fires crept along the bombsight wire with agonizing slowness. The Volkschule fire, the gasworks fire, the Nehringstrasse fire, the Altmarkt fire pulsated like red embers on a sooty fireplace. The bomb aimer waited for the largest one—the hospital annex—left, left, steady. The wire crossed the edge of it. ‘Bombs gone.’ The selector was at salvo. The whole bomb-load dropped away so that the Lancaster leapt into the air. Munro let the nose come up. For thirty seconds more they flew on straight and level, waiting for the photoflash to explode and the F24 camera shutter to turn over to record the accuracy of their bombing.

‘OK.’ Munro turned gently. ‘Let’s go home.’

Only a hundred yards behind him Jammy Giles was doing his best to follow his bomb aimer’s instructions but he consistently overcorrected.

‘Left, left,’ said Alun. ‘Right. Too far, left, left. Steady. No, too late. Right. Steady. Yes, that’s good. Hold her like that. Steady. Left, left. Jammy, left, left, more.’ The plane yawed across the target. The yellow markers slid past, well to the left of his bombsight mark. Under him came the Liebefrau church. The control column kicked against Jammy’s sweaty grasp.

‘Bombs gone, Jammy. Jettison bars across. It wasn’t awfully good, I’m afraid.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Jammy. He tipped the wing down and with the engineer’s help increased the air-speed.

‘Wait for the photoflash,’ shouted Roddy as the plane tilted.

‘Bugger,’ said Jammy, ‘I forgot. Oh well, give me a course for home, Alun.’

Alun was looking back through the clear-view panel into the bomb-bay to make sure that the racks were empty. The 2,000-lb HE, the incendiaries and the 1,000-lb HEs had all gone. He tried to visualize the plot in his memory. ‘Steer 280 for exactly four minutes, Jammy. By that time I’ll have got a new course for home.’

‘Close your bomb-doors, clot.’

‘I forgot that.’

‘But that you really forgot,’ said Roddy archly.

‘Now listen, Roddy, you bum. I didn’t turn off like that to avoid getting a photo.’

‘Flannelling limey bastard.’

‘Deserter.’

‘Have you been drinking, Jammy?’ said Roddy.

There was a moment of hesitation. ‘Only a couple,’ said Jammy guiltily, and suddenly his crew had discovered an awful secret about Jammy’s lively indifference to danger. No one spoke for nearly five minutes; they were all silently vowing that no one else on the Squadron should know. It was now a family secret. In the pilot’s seat the first red flush of embarrassment had faded from Jammy’s cheeks. It was better that they knew.