In 1943, when he was well into his second tour, Silk knew that a few of the men on their first tour had mixed feelings about him. They were amazed that he and his crew had survived so long, but they suspected that this might be at the cost of crews who had failed to return. There was only so much good luck to go around. Silk was getting an unfair share. What was his trick?
He had no trick. He was a good pilot and he kept learning from experience. This was something you couldn’t teach the newcomers. After an op, if there was an empty table in the mess, chances were the missing crew was inexperienced. Silk didn’t let it worry him. Nobody said the chop was fair. Equally, nobody said dodging the chop was fair. You made the most of life while it lasted. Silk’s new life was flying.
He liked the Lancaster. It was his workplace, his office. Every time he opened all four throttles and turned the Merlins’ roar into a thundering bellow and felt the controls become alive and the undercarriage hammer the tarmac until finally the bomber came unstuck and the engines stopped shouting and began singing: every time that happened, he felt privileged.
He knew the price of that privilege. From the outside the Lancaster looked formidable. From the inside it was a long alloy tube stuffed with explosives and aviation fuel. Silk had seen too many Lancasters falling out of the night sky over Germany, burning like beacons. All aircrew believed that some other poor bastard would get the chop, not them. All aircrew except Silk; until one night they flew to Stuttgart, and even Silk began to wonder.
He’d been there before. About five hundred miles from base to target. The flight plan would include plenty of twists and turns, all with the aim of keeping the German fighter controllers off-balance, hoping to con them into scrambling their night fighters over the wrong city. These detours would add a hundred miles to the op. A fully loaded Lancaster could cruise at 180 or 190 miles an hour, depending on wind strength and direction. So Silk’s crew expected to spend four hours or so over Europe, mostly over Germany.
It was a biggish raid: 343 Lancasters. The bomber stream began to cross the North Sea at 10 p.m. Silk was at fifteen thousand feet, still climbing, eating a corned-beef sandwich. Things began to go wrong. The port outer engine was losing revs. With unequal power, the Lanc was edging to the left.
Silk dropped his sandwich and applied a little rudder to straighten the bomber. He throttled back the starboard outer to equalise the action, and he looked at Cooper, the flight engineer. “Your rotten engine is mucking me about, Coop,” he said.
“Temperature’s okay, oil pressure’s normal. Electrics are working. Could be we lost a cylinder but I don’t think so.”
The port outer got no worse but five minutes later the starboard outer lost some power and from then on, at one time or another, each of the four engines gave trouble, and the Lancaster couldn’t keep its place in the stream.
Silk concentrated on flying the aeroplane. He trusted Cooper to nurse the Merlins and keep the airscrews churning. The Lanc was a frighteningly complex machine. Sometimes – not often – Silk had watched his ground crew at work, exposing the criss-cross networks of tubes and cables and rods: hydraulic, pneumatic, electric, oxygen supply, flying controls, fuel system, ammunition ducts, de-icing system, fire extinguisher system, intercom, engine controls, bomb fusing system, cockpit heating, and a whole lot more. It didn’t pay to think of the things that might go wrong. He left the ground crew to it.
The Lanc was over Holland when Cooper said: “Dirty fuel, skip.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty certain. Explains why the engines go sick and get well and go sick again, well again.”
“How can petrol be dirty? They filter it when they fuel the kite, don’t they?”
“Maybe the tanks got dirty.”
“Come off it, Coop.”
“They clean the tanks every time a Lanc has a major overhaul, skip. Why clean them if they’re not dirty?”
The port inner coughed and backfired and made a stream of sparks, and went back to business.
“I hate to get this far and quit,” Silk said.
“Nav to pilot,” Freddy said. “New course in one minute.”
“Thank you, Freddy. Deeply appreciated.”
“You could have had it ten minutes ago, skip, but you’re so damn slow.”
Silk didn’t quit. If he turned back now he would be cutting across the bomber stream and then flying against it. Not a pleasant thought. His present situation was bad enough, drifting back through the passing stream. The rear gunner was searching the blackness for any oncoming bomber. Silk’s machine was trailing a long slipstream of broken air. A following pilot should feel the warning tremble at 600 yards’ range and be rocked by turbulence at 400 yards. But what if the other Lanc was not behind but alongside? Changing direction, changing height. Cruising at 180 mph, a Lanc covered 88 yards a second. Even a gentle nudge would be enough to weld two aircraft into a blazing memorial to dirty fuel. Once already, Silk had been forced to bank steeply to escape the shape of a wandering Lanc that had lurched out of black nowhere and vanished into the same nowhere just as quickly.
All the same, he decided it was safer to stay in the stream. There was the added protection against enemy fighters. The risk of collision was acceptable because a stream was not a close formation. Bomber Command did not attempt that kind of insanity at night. From head to tail, the stream of 343 Lancasters made a column about sixty miles long and three miles wide. Each navigator knew the route and the turning points. He’d been told to be on time so that the whole force would bomb the target as a mass, saturating its defences, in and out in twenty minutes. If any crew straggled or strayed, that was their funeral.
Silk’s dirty fuel kept him drifting back. He could never rest. His eyes felt strained and weary from the labour of always searching the night, with nothing to focus on. Finally, Freddy told him they were thirty minutes late, which meant they must be clear of the stream. Later, Silk saw the target ahead. When he reached it, his was the only Lanc over Stuttgart. The city was burning hard. He bombed it and stayed on a straight and level course for the camera, although he knew his bomb-bursts would be lost in all that flame and fury.
Freddy stood beside him and looked down at Stuttgart. Normally he never left his navigator’s position behind the cockpit; this was a brief reward. “Crikey,” he said. “Someone’s been playing with matches.”
The rear gunner shouted: “Corkscrew port!”
Freddy reaching out to grab something, anything, but his fist closed on air, the floor slanted, his boots skidded sideways and his head whacked metal. Sparks chased across his eyes. The Lanc was banking steeply and plunging so hard that he feared it must be damaged, out of control, crashing. Through a haze of dust he saw Silk’s boots on the rudder pedals, his hands on the control column. Hands and feet moved, violently. The Lanc got slung from a hard left-hand bank to a hard right-hand bank, from a steep dive to a steep climb. Freddy felt as if he’d left his guts behind. The sparks drained away. He saw tracer pulsing in the night. Then the Lanc corkscrewed left and plunged again. The wings must fall off. Freddy counted his last seconds, got to five and Silk threw the Lanc from left bank to right bank and it went up like a lift. It’s not a bloody Spitfire, Freddy thought. Still, the engines must be okay. The Lanc plunged. No bloody night fighter can catch us like this, Freddy thought. Silk corkscrewed again.