Bomber (11 page)

Fighters did come – their own escort. Just as they reached the coast two squadrons of Lightnings arrived and flew above the combat box. The Germans rarely attacked when the bombers had their own fighters to protect them. Harry felt an overwhelming relief. They had done it. They had flown their first combat mission and survived. He felt a surge of pride in his crew.

The bomb group were back at Kirkstead by 3 p.m. No one crashed on landing, although a couple of the bombers fired their flares on approach, alerting the ambulance crews they had badly injured men aboard.

As they emerged from the main exit at the rear of the Fortress, Ernie was there to greet them, along with the rest of his crew. He waited for all ten of them to appear, and then his face broke into a wide grin.

Holberg came over and gave him a slap on the back. ‘Hey, Ernie. We would never have known the difference!’ He turned to the other ground crew, who had gathered around. ‘Thanks, boys. She flew like a dream. And to tell you the truth, the number four ran even better than on the old
Macey May.
’

In the canteen afterwards they discovered the B-17 that had exploded over Münster was one of theirs. It had been on its first mission too. Harry felt glad he didn’t know any of them. There was no news on
Carolina Peach
. Harry
hoped the guys had managed to parachute out before the plane was too low for a safe escape.

They also heard there had been a massive raid on Frankfurt. Maybe that was where all the Kraut fighters had gone.

Skaggs knew at once what had happened. ‘We were a decoy raid. The Krauts had their hands full with the Frankfurt bomber stream. Lucky it wasn’t the other way round.’

After a hot shower Harry went over to the canteen to eat his evening meal. Now they had recovered from the flight, the crews were all bluster and wisecracks, and talked about their mission over their steak dinner, careful not to mention the guys who had been lost. Harry began to relax.

He shared a table with John and Ralph and Jim and they all agreed it hadn’t been that bad and that Holberg had been superb. ‘We’ve got a great crew,’ said John. ‘Even Bortz and Stearley. They’re stuck-up jerks sometimes, but they do their job pretty good.’

Now the exhaustion and tension of the raid had worn off Harry was in high spirits. ‘Ernie Benik’s boys did a great job on the new plane,’ he said. ‘If anything’s going to get us through these twenty-five missions, I’m sure it’ll be the
Macey May
.’

Sitting in the corner of their table, a staff sergeant eyed them with indifference. He seemed quite despondent, but maybe he was just the quiet type. Harry thought he ought to bring him into the conversation. ‘Were you over Münster today?’ he asked him.

‘Yep, mission number nine. You boys were on your first, weren’t you? I can tell.’

They all nodded.

‘I wish you luck. We’re in the waiting room to hell here. Those other guys that never came back, they just caught an earlier train. We all catch that train sooner or later.’

‘What about those guys in
Kansas Kate
?’ John Hill said indignantly. ‘They did OK. They got through their twenty-five!’

The sergeant just looked at him, then got up to leave. ‘Like I say, I wish you luck.’

When he was out of earshot Corrales put an arm around Harry. ‘Hey, buddy. Rule number one. Don’t talk to strangers. Didn’t your momma ever tell you?’

‘Miserable loser,’ spat John. ‘We’re gonna be OK. I’ll bet any of you fifty bucks we’ll be still here after our twenty-five.’

They cheered and walked off, arms around one another’s shoulders. Holberg waylaid them as they reached the hut. ‘Good news, boys, we’ve got passes off the base tomorrow night. I’m taking you into the village. A few pints of that warm Limey beer in the Green Man. That’ll do us good.’

They all met up at the main gates of the base that next evening and walked down to the village in ten minutes. The Green Man was a solid brick inn with Dutch gables. Harry guessed it was at least two or three hundred years
old, built back when the settlers in the US were living in barely more than wooden cabins. The buildings were something which endlessly fascinated him here in England.

That night the pub was nicely crowded and a roaring log fire took the chill off the early autumn evening. They found two tables next to each other, officers on one, non-coms on the other. Holberg went to buy the beers and they all rubbed along well enough, although Bortz and LaFitte kept an obvious distance.

Two RAF junior officers came to sit in their corner of the pub and they fell into easy conversation. They introduced themselves as Gordon and Ray and said they had cycled over from the British base at Woodton. Harry liked these guys and they made him roar with laughter, especially after he had had a couple of pints of that English beer.

The Limeys were talking about their commander-in-chief, a brusque rather stern-looking man known as ‘Bomber Harris’ in the newspapers, although Harry had heard the British flyers called him ‘Butcher Harris’.

‘He has a suite at Claridge’s,’ Ray told them, referring to a posh London hotel. ‘That’s where he spends his life, being pampered by WAAF girls. They fuss around him peeling grapes and stuffing foie gras into his mouth. And when he tires of that, he picks up a gold-plated telephone and commands us to go on a mission.’

‘Yes, he does, it’s true,’ said Gordon, ‘and when we get back a list of our exploits is read out to him as he soaks in a warm bath of champagne. If he’s particularly impressed,
he has one of his servants pick up a gold pen and writes a letter on vellum to our CO …’

‘… in purple ink,’ butted in Ray.

‘… recommending us for a medal.’

Gordon and Ray made them all laugh, even the officers. For a few hours that night, Harry completely forgot he was a ball turret gunner on active service.

Harry’s night out was complete when the pub filled up with a group of noisy girls, just off the evening shift at a nearby factory, by the look of their overalls and headscarves. When he went to buy the guys a drink, he found himself standing next to a familiar face at the bar. He recognised Tilly at once, and even in her factory clothes he still thought she looked beautiful. He asked if he could buy her a drink.

‘You came for tea with Grandma,’ she said. ‘Harry, isn’t it? Did you send your trinkets back home?’

Harry admitted he hadn’t. He wanted to tell her about the extraordinary things that had happened to him since he had last seen her, but he wasn’t sure if it was all supposed to be a secret so instead he asked her what she had been doing. Tilly worked in the sugar beet factory five days a week – ‘You come home just coated in this musty sweet stink. You must have noticed the smell from the factory at the airbase when the wind’s blowing that way.’

When he asked about her family, she told him she had a brother who flew Lancaster bombers out of Waddington in Lincolnshire.

‘Whoops, shouldn’t have told you that,’ she said, clasping a hand to her mouth. ‘All this “Careless talk costs lives” is so annoying. We’re supposed to treat everyone like a spy. You don’t look like a spy to me.’

Harry told her the story about Bomber Harris and the gold-plated telephone. She roared with laughter and said she couldn’t wait to tell Colin. ‘That’s his name, but I suppose that’s a secret too.’

John came up to the bar. ‘Hey, Harry, where are the drinks?’ he said and smiled broadly at them both, then ordered another round for the non-coms. Harry was pleased he didn’t try to join them and just as pleased to see Tilly had practically ignored him.

As the evening ended she asked him if he had been to Norwich yet. Harry said how much he’d like to explore the city, having seen it from the air.

‘I know just the person to show you around.’

Harry sensed she was playing with him and wondered if she was going to suggest her grandma.

‘Next time you’re on leave at the weekend, drop off a note with my grandmother, and I’ll take you.’

Harry floated back to base on a cloud. Maybe it was the beer, but he felt euphoric. He couldn’t believe his luck. That night he fell asleep with a smile on his lips.

Feldwebel Richter could see the tail of the Fortress just poking over the breaking waves in the outgoing tide – a splash of red and silver in a grey sea and grey sky. He shivered and pulled his Wehrmacht greatcoat tight around his collar. A fierce wind whipped in from the north, sweeping over the deck of the salvage vessel. It was dreary out here, still and silent save for the splash of waves and the mournful cry of gulls. It was a place of the dead. Richter could see the apprehension on the faces of his salvage squad, but he had been told this was valuable work and it had to be done.

The Fortress had crash-landed in the shallow waters of the Westerschelde, north-west of Antwerp, on the way back from that raid on the marshalling yards at Münster.

It took at least an hour for the diver and the lifting crew to attach heavy canvas straps to the wings and raise the plane out of the murky shallows. But once they had got it to the surface they had only to steam a few yards further to deposit it on the exposed mudflats of the tidal zone.

With a creaking and grinding of metal, the rear of the fuselage snapped as the Fortress settled into the muddy beach. Water flooded out in a torrent, and in smaller streams and rivulets from the many other holes that peppered the front part of the fuselage.

As soon as the craft broke surface Richter could see the pilot and co-pilot were still in the cockpit. He wondered if any of the others had got out. He noted the name too –
Carolina Peach
– and a garish painting of a semi-naked girl with wavy blonde hair.

A thin drizzle started to settle in and the
Feldwebel
reached for another cigarette to take his mind off the task ahead. The Dutch captain came over and told him in broken German that he and his men had about half an hour to recover the bodies before the tide came in to reclaim the downed bomber.

So Feldwebel Richter and his squad boarded the small sailboat that came attached to the barge and were swiftly ferried the short distance to the wrecked aircraft.

Richter was first in, entering through the broken rear section. The first thing he saw was the body of one of the crew, hand still clasped around the handle of the rear exit door. He was almost certainly a gunner, judging by the sergeant rank visible on his sodden uniform. A small man, Richter noticed, with matted blond hair. He looked like an Aryan, one of the master race.

The rest of the crew were there – all ten of them. No one had bailed out. Most were in a jumble of arms and legs in
the radio operator’s compartment. It was an unpleasant business, untangling this soaking human knot, but it could have been far worse. The Fortress had only been in the sea a day or two, and decomposition had barely begun.

One by one they brought the bodies out to lay them on the shore. The pilot and co-pilot were the most difficult to extract and they had dropped both of them as they struggled through the cramped, cluttered interior.

They looked peaceful enough, Richter supposed, and imagined all of them had been killed or knocked unconscious when their Fortress crashed into the sea. They said the sea was as hard as a brick wall if you came down too fast. The one at the rear door had nearly made it out, but it had jammed by the look of it. Richter almost felt a stab of pity for the man. But then he remembered the mess Allied bombers had made of his home town of Hamburg and thought no more about it.

When they had all the dead men out they ferried them over to the barge and chugged south-east with the incoming tide to Antwerp. On the journey back Richter’s men completed the melancholy task of removing all the clothes from the bodies, from flying helmets to socks and underwear.

The deathly white corpses were loaded into a van that took them straight to Antwerp’s crematorium. Their clothes were washed and ironed and sent to Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin.

At five o’ clock in the morning, Ernie Benik arrived with a thermos of fresh coffee. There was a briefing at six. Harry had a thick head. It had been the Jewish New Year the night before, and most of the Jewish guys on the base had met up to celebrate. Harry had enjoyed himself, but the evening left him aching for home.

Just as the
Macey May
’s non-coms were entering the briefing hut, Stearley dashed up to them.

‘We’ve got a passenger,’ he said.

They stared uneasily, awaiting the rest of the news.

‘That news guy, Eddie Burnet. You might have seen him hanging around the base these last couple of days. He’s coming with us.’

‘Says who?’ Corrales could barely contain his amazement.

‘Look, boys, this is straight from the top. Gotta go.’

The
Macey May
’s non-coms shuffled into the briefing room, muttering to themselves.

When the curtain over the map of Europe was drawn back to reveal the target, a concerned murmur rippled around the room. They were going to Stuttgart to bomb
the factories there. They’d all heard the stories. Barely a month ago, an Eighth Air Force raid on the city had cost them nearly fifty bombers. The city was deep in southern Germany. It was going to be a long flight.

Kittering finished his briefing and then called for the crew of the
Macey May
to remain behind when the rest of the men had been dismissed. He drew heavily on his cigarette and his words came out in a cascade of smoke.

‘You’ve all seen Eddie Burnet around the station. He’s telling the folks back home about what brave boys you all are and how you’re helping to win the war. Eddie was going up with
Sally D
, but ground crew are still working on her. I thought you
Macey May
fellas would do instead. He’s got orders not to get in your way, but if you smile sweetly he’ll take your pictures and tell all the readers of
Life
magazine what a bunch of heroes you are.’