Authors: John Drake
‘
L
-
for
-
Leather’
B1
Special
Lancaster
,
15
,
000
feet
over
the
North
S
ea
,
Monday
15 May
,
04
.
10
local
time
‘Abimilech Svart,’ said Charley Eaton, the flight engineer, ‘Why’s he so special, Skip?’
I made only a token attempt at looking back at the man sitting to my right rear, because I was concentrating on flying the aircraft. I was the pilot and it was my responsibility. And anyway, an operational Lanc was no place for conversation. It was unpressurized, deafeningly noisy, endlessly vibrating, and the crew were crammed into their separate stations, in their bulky, padded flying suits, such that communication was possible only by means of the microphones in the oxygen masks, and the earphones in the flying helmets. So the whole crew heard everything and everything crackled and buzzed.
‘How should I know,’ I said. ‘You heard what the CO said at the briefing. Svart’s a Jerry boffin, a back-room boy.’
‘Yeah,’ said Eaton, ‘But why’s he so important? Why are we going after him?’
I considered the question. Personally, knowing what the Nazis were doing to my relatives in the death camps, I would have bombed any man or any thing that hurt the Third Reich, but I knew the chaps didn’t agree. They didn’t like being sent out to kill a named man. It made them feel like Chicago gangsters.
‘It’s not the main raid objective,’ I said, trying to parry the question.
‘It’s one of them,’ said Eaton. ‘The CO said so.’ So the parry failed and I tried another way to keep them happy. I ignored the real question and sent their attention elsewhere. I did it by playing a trick on them, which I did because tricks come naturally to me, which is all right so long as you’re not trying to hurt people. At least I think so.
‘What’s that?’ I said, over the distorting intercom, as if straining to hear something. ‘Is that you Willy? Are you cold?’
‘What?’ said the tail gunner who hadn’t spoken: Flight Sergeant William ‘Willy’ McCulloch, RAAF. ‘Yeah. I’m bloody cold.’
‘Hear that, lads?’ I said. ‘Willy says he’s cold.’ And more voices growled over the intercom.
‘As cold as a frog in an ice-bound pool …’ said the navigator.
‘As cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s tool …’ said the wireless operator.
The rest joined in. They’d been waiting for someone to start it, and now they said it all together against the thunder of Rolls Royce Merlins, as they did on every raid. It was a ritual that I’d taught them, making magic out of a schoolboy dirty rhyme. It was one of the things they liked about me. They thought I made luck. Some bomber boys took mascots or charms or photographs: anything to prolong life, since the average age of a Lancaster crew was just twenty-one years and life was precious. So the chaps chanted my magic. It was like standing round piddling on the tail-wheel with nervous bladders before take-off. Lots of crews did that now, but it was my idea in the first place. My idea to make the chaps laugh, and do something silly together in a tense moment. As I say, I was good at tricks. Tricks of all kinds.
As cold as a frog in an ice-bound pool,
As cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s tool,
As cold as a mountain all solemn and glum,
As cold as the hole in a polar bear’s bum.
As cold as charity – and that’s pretty chilly!
But still not as cold as our tail-end Willy.
Not even a frozen Niagara Falls,
Could freeze as cold as his frozen balls.
‘Ha, Ha,’ said, the tail gunner, far away and lonely at the rear of the aircraft, peering ceaselessly out of the hole in the plastic bubble of his turret, where he’d had a panel removed for a better view. ‘You lot ought to be on the radio: ITMA with Tommy Handley,’ he said.
‘Aussies,’ said the bomb aimer, ‘No sense of humour.’
‘Now, children,’ I said, ‘playtime over. Gobs shut and eyes open, please.’
‘Maybe they’ll miss us this time,’ said someone.
‘Shut up!’ said McCulloch. ‘That’s bad luck. You’ll bring ’em on.’
‘Shut up all of you,’ I said. ‘And Willy, if you’re cold, drink your pea soup.’ McCulloch thought about that, but left the soup in its Thermos for later. It wouldn’t help much anyway, not with an outside temperature of minus Christ-knows-what, and sod-all help from L-for-Leather’s useless heating system. The electrically heated suit stopped actual frostbite, but beyond that he was doomed to suffer and he knew it.
‘Anybody ahead of us, Skip?’ he said, to take his mind off the cold.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘four. Nearly time for the gaggle.’
‘Hmm,’ said McCulloch, and nodded. I knew he could see the blunt noses of several more Lancasters astern. All together there were twenty-one aircraft from 696 Squadron, in three flights, each one carrying something so special that even a mighty Lancaster could lift it only by losing its nose turret, its mid-upper, its H2S radar, its bomb doors, and two members of its crew.
McCulloch shaded his eyes with heavily-gloved hands. The specially-adapted B1 Lancasters looked odd in flight. It was a such a struggle between the bomb load pulling down and the Merlins pulling up that the wings curved upwards as if they were going to flap. I saw McCulloch peer back at the rest of the squadron and look up to see the comforting formations of angels overhead.
I looked too. It was a big op. A lot of machines were in the air. Behind 696 there was a second wing carrying conventional bomb loads: eighteen Lancs from 9 Squadron, and another twenty from 9P, a brand new unit of Polish aircrew on their first operational flight. That made fifty-nine bombers in total. Added to that, flying cover at a thousand feet above, there were one hundred and twenty-five Mustang fighters of II Group, formed from nine different squadrons, including yet another Polish squadron. In addition to that there were two pathfinder Mosquitoes equipped with target-finding Oboe, ready to drop indicator flares if needed. Finally, there was a third Mosquito from 627 Squadron to film the attack as it went in. Daylight precision raids were now smooth, polished operations.
‘Here we go,’ I said. ‘Gaggle! Gaggle! Gaggle!’ It’d had been a joke once: the bombers flying like geese in a staggered line. But not now. The formation was entirely practical. So I touched the controls gently and L-for-Leather roared and swung to port, and dropped slightly. Ahead and astern 696 formed up with each aircraft fifty feet below and fifty feet to the right of the one in front, with the leader – Wing Commander Bob Raleigh’s B-for-Baker – highest of all.
The tight formation ensured that the squadron dropped its bombs as nearly as possible in one instant, so the bombs from the leaders didn’t burst and obscure the target for the followers. To be doubly sure of that, delayed action fuses were used so that no bombs burst before the whole squadron had taken precise aim, and had passed over the target. Also the staggered heights of the machines made it hard for the enemy’s flak to get the altitude right, and the single remaining gun turret at each aircraft’s tail covered the others’ blind spots. Or were supposed to. Ten minutes later I was aware of a black shadow flashing over McCulloch’s head in a chatter of automatic fire.
‘Christ!’ he said.
‘Bandits!’ I cried.
‘Where?’ said McCulloch, who was supposed to spot them first. He flinched at the roar of a Mustang in a steep dive: gone in an eye blink followed by its wingman, firing hard. Elsewhere other Mustangs flicked past, chasing other quarry. McCulloch swung his four guns: Left! Right! Up! Down! But he saw nothing. Nothing at all. Which didn’t mean there was nothing there …
‘It’s OK! It’s OK!’ said McCulloch, then, ‘Oh shit! Someone’s copped it.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Can’t see.’ A Lancaster behind L-for-Leather was dropping out of the gaggle. Its big, rectangular cockpit split wide open. Chunks of Plexiglas and other debris tumbled out and whisked away in the slipstream. I knew McCulloch could see the still figures inside: pilot and flight engineer, flopping limbs, lolling heads. ‘Oh shit!’ said McCulloch. ‘He got the crew.’ The stricken Lanc reared up, stalled, and went down under full power.
‘Who is it?’ said the flight engineer.
‘A-for-Apple,’ said McCulloch, ‘Can’t see any parachutes. Can’t see …’
‘Shut up, Willy!’ I said, ‘Gobs shut, eyes open – everybody! They’ll be back any minute.’ I was right. They came in swarms. The Luftwaffe was short of everything: fuel, aircraft, spares, and men, but it sent up fighters in dozens to defend this particular target, and five more Lancasters went down, smashed and shattered. When a cannon-armed fighter caught a Lancaster, the Lanc’s rifle-calibre guns were near useless. So the losses would have been catastrophic except for the fighter escort.
And then the attacks stopped.
‘They’ve gone! They’ve gone!’ yelled McCulloch.
‘Course they have, you silly sod,’ said the bomb aimer, ‘we’re coming up to the flak engagement zone.’
‘Shut up!’ I yelled. ‘Just do your jobs and never mind the sodding flak!’ But they did mind. They knew what was waiting for them down below: the German eighty-eight millimetre heavy flak gun fired up to twenty high-explosive rounds per minute, each eight-gun battery locating its targets by radar, and aiming with target-predictor computers. The intelligence officer at the briefing back in Woodhall Spa had said the Germans were scraping the barrel and the flak crews were kids and old women, so they needn’t worry. But nobody believed that.
‘The wind finder’s going in,’ I said, ‘poor bastard.’
‘F-for-Freddie?’ said McCulloch.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Bomb aimer to station!’
‘I’m going,’ said the bomb aimer. He tried to swallow. He tried several times and couldn’t, retching sour vomit. Then he crawled into the transparent bubble under L-for-Leather’s nose and forced himself to lie down with nothing between him and the German gunners but clear plastic, thin aluminium, and lots of empty air. It insulted every natural fear for a man to do this, exposing his helpless belly to an enemy. What he would have
wanted
to do was roll into a ball, or hide behind battleship armour-plate. But he couldn’t. Not if he was to operate the Mark IIA SABS precision bombsight.
WHOOMPH! WHOOMPH! Flak shells burst far to the left and high above L-for-Leather, and everyone dared hope that the gunners really were just kids after all.
‘Christ!’ I said, ‘poor sods!’ as F-for-Freddie forged out alone, heading steadily towards the aiming point to measure wind speed and direction for the rest of the formation.
WHOOMPH! WHOOMPH! WHOOMPH! The flak burst all around F-for-Freddie as the excellent German target-predictors concentrated on the lone aircraft. In theory it was no worse than being shelled in formation, since the other aircraft offered no protection. But I knew it didn’t feel like that.
WHOOMPH! WHOOMPH! WHOOMPH!
‘Oh shit!’ I said, as F-for-Freddie visibly shuddered under repeated hits.
The Met Officer had promised us ‘clear skies with south-west winds moderate over the target at forty to fifty miles per hour’. But that was nowhere near good enough for precision bombing. It wasn’t even good enough for one of the Pathfinder Mosquitoes to measure the wind. Not for this op. What was needed was the wind effect on an actual Lancaster, flying over the actual target with a full bomb load, to give the best possible wind settings for the SABS bombsights. But that meant one crew exposing itself, alone, to enemy fire.
‘We’re getting the gen, Skip,’ said the navigator, ‘set bombsight for drift at …’
‘Jesus Christ!’ I said, ‘Oh no!’ and a third of F-for-Freddie’s port wing folded back on itself and tore free: spinning, smoking, trailing oil and petrol, down and down, leaving the mutilated aircraft to wallow and sink, with flames roaring from two engines. ‘Get out! Get out!’ I cried, sick with terror that it might be L-for-Leather next and myself honour bound to stay at the controls, to hold her steady until the lads had jumped, which meant I’d probably go down with the aeroplane.
‘They’re going,’ said the flight engineer, ‘One, two, three. Come on, come on!’ Three parachutes opened. Only three. No more. F-for-Freddie struck ground and exploded, with the rest still aboard. But the remaining Lancasters now had an accurate measure of ‘drift’: wind over the target. The SABS bombsights were already set for bomb load, airspeed, altitude, and the spin of the Earth – which would move the target ten yards eastward beneath the Lancs while their bombs fell – and now the bomb aimers could now add the final correction. The bombsight computers would do the rest, given one last assistance from the bomb aimers and pilots.
‘Left a bit … left a bit … steady … right a bit,’ chanted the bomb aimer, peering through the sight at the ground below, and I nudged the big aircraft left and right to his command. Apart from the bursting flak there was perfect visibility, with no cloud all the way down. He had photos beside him with the target marked. He concentrated hard. He was after pen six of the huge, concrete U-boat shelter on the banks of the River Jade, a pinpoint target, believed to be of utmost importance to the German war effort, according to radio transmissions received from some poor bloody slave workers inside it. More than that, the intelligence officer at the briefing had said that the second wing had to plaster the buildings alongside the pen, where the technical people lived: especially Abimilech Svart, who was in charge.