The Dog Who Could Fly (25 page)

“You miserable little sod,” he remarked. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere I could bloody think.” He glanced at Robert. “So how did he do up there?”

Robert shrugged. “Fine for a dog. But he half suffocated at altitude and I was forced to share my oxygen, which meant I half suffocated
too . . .” Robert broke off. He could see Wing Commander Ocelka’s car driving along the airfield toward them. “Don’t look now,” Robert muttered, “but I reckon I’m for the bloody high jump good and proper. What with the RAF and all their rules . . .”

As everyone knew, it was strictly against Britain’s Air Ministry regulations to take an animal into the air, and especially when flying on a combat sortie over enemy territory. The car drew to a halt and Ocelka got out. Antis bounded over and flung himself at the wing commander, who he seemed to know by now was one of his greatest fans on the airbase. Ocelka glanced at the dog, rolled his eyes in amazement at his miraculous reappearance, then cast a look at Robert.

“Antis’s back on form, I see,” he called over. “No guessing where he’s spent the night, then.”

Robert figured he detected an ominous tone to the wing commander’s voice. He might have proven to be Antis’s foremost protector at East Wretham, but there were surely limits that even Ocelka wouldn’t cross. He was a fantastic leader, and he would often make a personal call to returning aircrew, just to hear how the sortie had gone and to boost their morale. But Robert suspected he was here for a different reason now—namely to investigate how Antis had gone missing overnight, only to become their
flying
dog of war.

Ocelka turned to the pilot, Capka. “So, how did it go?”

“All good, sir,” Capka replied. “We had a
Zerstörer
on our tail for a while, but he veered off after Robert gave him a few nasty bursts.”

Ocelka eyed Robert. “Did you hit him?”

“Not a hope, sir,” Robert replied honestly.

Ocelka arched one eyebrow. “Too worried about that dog at your feet, no doubt.” He patted Antis on the head, before turning to Josef, the other gunner. “What about you, eh? I don’t suppose you were so easily sidetracked? Maybe you got to hit the 110 for me?”

Before Josef could answer, Robert intervened. “Sir, please, let me explain. None of us knew that Antis—”

The wing commander threw up a hand to silence him. “There’s a very good English expression. It goes like this:
What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over
. I believe it’s more often used in connection to matters amorous, but it does just fine for last night’s little escapade.”

“Sir, rest assured it won’t happen again—”

Ocelka threw up his hand for silence again. Bending down so he was eye to eye with Antis, he gripped the dog’s head in both his hands and wrestled it playfully from side to side. Antis made a play-growl in return, nipping at the wing commander’s wrists.

“You know something, Antis, sometimes you have a fool for a master,” Ocelka mused. “He talks too much when he should stay silent. I’ve got enough on my hands with two-legged troubles to be bothered about four-legged ones. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over, eh, boy?”

Antis gave a short bark of agreement. Ocelka laughed. “That’s my boy!” He raised his eyes to Capka. “Walk me back to the car and tell me again about that new belt of mobile flak you encountered over the Dutch coast.”

The two men wandered off with Antis keeping them company.

“You’re dead lucky we’ve got such an easygoing wing commander,” Lancik, the navigator, remarked, when Ocelka was out of earshot. “We’re all of us damned lucky to have got off so lightly.”

Robert nodded. “We are. But there’s more to what he said than just that.
What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.
I reckon he was giving us the nod that he’s happy for Antis to fly with us. What do you reckon?”

“So Antis gets to be a permanent member of the crew?” Lancik shrugged. “Let’s see what the skipper has to say.”

It was more than just sentimentality or their attachment to their dog that lay behind all of this. Like all aircrew, that of C for Cecilia was always on the lookout for some special talisman. Some aircrew
flew with a silk stocking wound around their necks like a scarf, courtesy of a sweetheart back home. Others flew with photographs or crucifixes or lucky shamrocks, and they would each swear blind that it was their own particular talisman that kept them safe in the air.

After last night’s death-defying sortie, the crew of C for Cecilia was beginning to feel the same about their dog.

Seventeen

When Robert suffered injury on a sortie and was hospitalized, Antis waited for days in the cold and rain beside the runway for his master’s return.

A
fter a long talk with the wing commander, Capka rejoined Robert and the rest. They put the question that was on all of their minds: did Ocelka mean they were clear to fly with Antis whenever they wanted?

“Lady Luck was certainly with us tonight,” Capka told them, “and very likely in the form of one very handsome and brave dog. And yes, Ocelka will turn a blind eye. He figures Antis has been
bloodied now and can take it. But, Robert, you’re to get him to the workshop and get him an oxygen mask made up. Ocelka can’t have one of his turret gunners fainting for want of oxygen, and all because he’s sharing his mask with a dog that shouldn’t even be there!”

•  •  •

Two nights later C for Cecilia was given her next combat mission, for the murderous pace of operations had yet to falter. The threat of an invasion by Germany might have receded, but the power of the Nazis was still in the ascendancy, and the Wellingtons could ill afford to remain on the ground for long. By now Antis had been fitted with his own oxygen mask, one made up for him by the East Wretham fitters. It consisted of a standard pilot’s mask, cut and modified to suit a German shepherd’s long and slender snout, as opposed to the flatter, boxier face of a human.

The mask attached to his head with a special set of straps that ran around the back of his thick and powerful neck, with extra fastenings latching on to his collar. Antis didn’t particularly like the thing, but he proved happy enough to wear it so long as Robert was wearing his. This was crucial. If Robert and Antis were to be able to fly further sorties together, Antis would have to behave himself impeccably when in the air and under attack—conditions that could melt the composure of many a man, if not break him. Antis needed to prove that his innate fear would be trumped by his attachment to his master, even in the most extreme circumstances.

Their target for tonight was Hanover, one of the most dangerous of them all. At first Antis couldn’t quite believe it when his master called for him to jump up the ladder and take up his position in the aircraft. But once he realized this was for real, he offered his paw to shake to Adamek and the other ground crew, climbed the ladder
leading into the aircraft’s nose, and took up his place in the gun turret at his master’s feet. As C for Cecilia took to the air there wasn’t a happier dog in all of England.

The sortie over Hanover proved largely uneventful, although it did serve to prove how suited Antis was to combat flying. He wore his oxygen mask whenever Robert did, snoozed at his master’s feet for most of the long flight, and only seemed to become disturbed when a bursting shell from the savage flak tossed the aircraft around more violently than usual. But one look at Robert and he took his cue from his master’s apparently confident and unconcerned manner:
If he can do it, so can I.

If he can do it, so can I.
The feeling was in many ways mutual. Not only Robert but all the crew got an added sense of peace from having their dog flying into the heart of death with them. It was almost as if they were more worried for Antis’s welfare than their own, and that took much of their anxiety away. That night’s sortie was C for Cecilia’s thirty-second, which signified that sometime soon their first tour of duty would be drawing to a close. But in the coming days and weeks they would need their lucky-charm dog more than any of them had ever imagined.

•  •  •

The very next sortie flown by Robert was a vital one. Once again 311 Squadron had been tasked to hit the German battle cruiser
Prinz Eugen
—the warship that had so narrowly escaped their previous attempt to sink her. Sadly for Antis, he was forced to sit this one out, for C for Cecilia had developed engine trouble. Robert joined the crew of Wellington No. 3221-O instead, and it wasn’t every pilot who was happy to bend the rules and have a large shaggy dog as a member of his crew.

The flight of eight Wellingtons reached Brest on the westernmost tip of France after a quiet passage over a dark but peaceful sea. The
port lay perfectly quiet and largely without illumination as they came over target. Only as the lead aircraft began its bombing run did the searchlights come to life, probing the night sky, and the antiaircraft batteries started throwing up their vicious fire.

The nineteen-thousand-ton battle cruiser lay to the east side of the jetty, on Dock 8. The Brest smoke screen had been activated by now, a defense designed to blanket the dock in thick smoke so as to obscure any targets. But the wind was in the wrong direction, and it blew the smoke inland, leaving the docks and the battle cruiser in stark relief. The
Prinz Eugen
was totally blacked out and all but invisible against the dark waters, yet the crews of the Wellingtons knew exactly where she was moored due to their pre-mission briefings.

The flight of Wellingtons approached along the waterfront, with terrifying volcanoes of flak erupting all around them. They held steady to their course, and Robert saw the first bombs fall from flight leader 1015-L. A string of 1,500-pounders straddled the position of the warship. The first bomb scored a direct hit on the jetty, and further bombs landed all around the battle cruiser where it lay at anchor, the oily flare of the explosions lighting up the inky darkness.

Robert’s aircraft followed suit, her string of bombs pummeling the location of the German warship, one of the finest in the enemy fleet. Robert felt the thrill he always did when hitting back at the enemy, and he only wished he could have had his war dog there at his feet to share it with him. All eight aircraft made it safely back to East Wretham, and subsequent reports from the French resistance suggested that the battle cruiser had indeed been hit during the raid.

The first days of July proved hugely demanding for 311 Squadron. Robert—and Antis—found themselves flying raids every second night. Essen, Münster, Cologne, Bremen, Hanover, Hamburg, Mannheim, and Brest—C for Cecilia was in action above them all,
and such an intensity of operations took a heavy toll. When Robert had first arrived at East Wretham he’d noticed how tired and gray the veteran aircrew looked. Now he understood why.

The need to be constantly alert during the long night missions, coupled with the fear and the overbearing tension, was hugely stressful and draining. Near misses and lucky escapes—hits from machine-gun fire and shrapnel that didn’t bring down an aircraft or wound or kill—these had become the “new normal” for the aircrews of 311 Squadron. They barely warranted a mention in the mess as crews chatted over a beer and decompressed after their missions.

In a sense the enemy fighters that pounced on the lumbering Wellingtons were the lesser of the evils they faced. What ensued was a duel to the death between each bomber and the enemy fighter’s guns, one that the best man would win. It was the searchlights and the flak that were the most terrifying, for there was little the pilot or crew could do to avoid those. Survival was largely down to luck and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. With luck playing such a pivotal role, C for Cecilia’s lucky talisman—their flying dog of war—was an invaluable morale boost, but Antis’s composure in the air and his bond with his master were about to be tested to the very limits.

C for Cecilia’s next raid was to be over Hanover again. As the aircrew notched up combat missions, so the tension mounted that sooner or later their good fortune was going to run out. But Antis seemed to remain sublimely unaware of both the risks and the dangers, and his joy at every takeoff put added steel in the souls of C for Cecilia’s crew.

Once again the battle-scarred Wellington climbed for altitude over the English Channel. Just prior to topping ten thousand feet—the altitude at which most aircrew found themselves struggling for breath—Robert took his eyes away from the skies momentarily, reached forward, and strapped the oxygen mask to his dog. It had
become a strict routine for him and Antis: the dog’s mask went on first and came off last, just in case Robert became unconscious before strapping his dog in, leaving Antis to die of asphyxiation.

C for Cecilia reached her cruise altitude of 15,500 feet and set a course for the German city that was such a vital strategic target for the Allies. With its road junction, railhead, and factories, Hanover was a pivotal link in the supply chain for men and matériel heading to the Eastern Front. Disrupting those facilities was the chief aim of tonight’s mission, as Churchill sought to show solidarity with Britain’s new allies in the east. Hitler’s lightning advance had bludgeoned aside any Russian resistance, and the rate at which the Russians were in retreat did not bode well. They were clearly in need of all the help they could get.