The Nazi leaders disappeared briefly from our view as they reached the viewing platform, but Hitler moved forward, flanked by two of the others. He stood by the rail, his back stiff and his head erect, looking from side to side in a calm but imperious manner. He raised his arms with a theatrical motion, folded them in front of him so that his hands clasped his upper arms. He looked around in all directions, silently acknowledging the tumult of acclaim and applause. The noise from the crowd was deafening, yet Hitler seemed detached from it, totally in command of the situation.
After about a minute of this, Hitler swiftly unfolded his arms, raised his right hand briefly in his palm-up salute, then turned and stepped back. As he did so, the crowd noise at last began to fade away.
I looked at my wristwatch.
‘Come on, Joe!’ I shouted. ‘We’re going to be late!’
Several minutes had gone by while Hitler and his entourage were entering the arena, attracting the attention of everyone, but we competitors were subject to a strict timetable. We were already nearly ten minutes past the start of our time allocated for warm-up exercises and we knew that the officials would make few allowances for late arrivals.
We dashed up the slope to the warm-up area, thrusting our passes at the German official on duty. Waiting beyond him was one of the British team officials, who was clearly not pleased by our tardiness, nor impressed by our excuse. A brisk, humiliating lecture on national expectations followed. We humbly accepted responsibility, apologized, then finally managed to move away from the man. We settled down quickly to our routine of exercises, trying to close our minds to everything that had just occurred, concentrating on the crucial race that was only a fewminutes away.
9
Five years later I was in a convalescent hospital in the Vale of Evesham, working backwards to my memories of the crash and before.
The date they had given me for when we were shot down helped me remember: May 10, 1941. Details began to accumulate around it. On that night we were at thirteen thousand feet, approaching the city of Hamburg on a north-westerly track. I was in a state of terror, my hands and feet pressed rigidly against the controls of the Wellington. I was obsessed by the knowledge that the next two or three minutes could hurt, maim or kill us all. During those moments, with the bombs armed and ready to be dropped, the bomb aimer in position and effectively in command of the aircraft, the rest of the crew tensed against attack, I felt unable to think or speak for myself. All I was capable of doing was to react to the events going on around me, trusting that my instinctive reactions would be the right ones, that my terror would not let me make mistakes. I could keep the plane straight and level, I could respond to the warnings and requests of the crew, but memories of the past and thoughts of the future were impossible. I lived for the moment, expecting death at any instant.
So. Thirteen thousand feet. Clear skies under a bomber’s moon. Twenty minutes past midnight, British time. Aircraft A-Able loaded with bombs and flares. City below: Hamburg. We had flown past the city a few minutes earlier at a distance of some twenty miles, trying to mislead the ground defenders into thinking we were passing Hamburg on the way to another target, Hanover or Magdeburg or maybe even Berlin. The RAF had hit Hamburg two nights before and we were warned at our afternoon target briefing that the Germans were bringing in more anti-aircraft guns to defend the city. Return raids were notoriously dangerous for us. We never treated German flak as a minor threat, so we all paid attention to the decoy plan. We used a distinctive curve in the River Elbe near Luneburg as the assembly point, then turned steeply and headed in on our bombing run.
Ted Burrage, our bomb aimer and front gunner, had crawled into the belly of the Wellington, lying on his stomach, watching the ground through the perspex pane behind the nose. It was a night of clear visibility: great for targeting the ground, but the anti-aircraft gunners could see us just as easily and if night fighters were about we would be visible for miles.
As we approached the centre of Hamburg, distinctive on cloudless nights because of the way the river curved through, the intensity of the flak suddenly increased. Ten or more searchlight beams flicked on, criss-crossing ahead, while tracer bullets snaked up towards us. I tried to ignore the tracer: it always moved with hypnotic slowness while a long way below us, but suddenly speeded up and whooshed past us. I could never get it out of my mind that the tracer was only part of the flak - for every bright firefly of light swarming up towards us there were ten or fifteen others that were invisible. Ahead, bursting in the sky, was a huge barrage of exploding shells, brilliant white and yellow, flashing on and off" like a deadly fireworks display. How could we ever pass through that without being hit a hundred times?
‘Bomb aimer to pilot. Are we starting the bombing run?’ It was Ted, in the nose.
‘Yeah, we’re already on it. No need to change track as far as I’m concerned.’
‘The sight is settled. Everything calibrated and checked.’
‘You can get on with it, Ted.’
‘What’s our present course?’
‘Two eighty-seven. Airspeed one thirty-two.’
‘Hold her steady, JL. Right a bit. Thanks, that’s fine.’
I could hear the others breathing on the intercom.
‘Bomb doors open, skip.’
‘Bomb doors open.’
There was a pause, then the plane lurched a little as the air-drag increased.
‘New airspeed, sir?’
‘One twenty-eight.’
‘OK, hold her steady . . . steady . . . hell, we’re hitting them hard down there tonight. . . smoke everywhere . . . that’s it... steady . . . hold her steady . . . bombs gone!’
The plane lifted as the weight of the bomb load fell away. My stomach lurched with it.
‘Less get outa here, JL!’ The deeply accented voice of Kris Galasckja, the Polish rear gunner, came through raspingly on the intercom.
‘You say that every trip.’
‘I mean it every trip.’
‘OK. Hold on.’
I pushed the nose down to pick up a little speed, then turned the plane through forty-five degrees to port, away from the inferno below. I closed the bomb doors, feeling the plane seem to fly itself as the aerodynamic characteristics improved once more.
‘What now, JL? Home?’ It was Kris again.
‘Not yet. We’ve got to go round one more time.’
‘You joking, skip?’
‘Yeah. Relax. But we’ve got to get out of this place.’
Anyone see what we hit?’ said Sam Levy, who had no outside visibility from the curtained-off cubicle where his navigation table was placed.
Just then there was a loud explosion directly beneath the nose of the aircraft. I was thrown back from the controls and fell sideways to the floor of the cockpit, my left leg twisted painfully in the straps. The plane rolled to the left, tipped over, started to dive. I heard the note of the engine change, as if an invisible pilot had taken my place and was making us accelerate towards the ground. For a moment I was so shaken by the suddenness with which everything collapsed around me that I lay immobile. I was thinking, It’s happened! This is it! We’ve been shot down!
My leather flying helmet was still on, although it was wrenched back uncomfortably in some perplexing way across the crown of my head. Somebody was yelling on the intercom - I could hear the sound of the voice through the headphones, but because the helmet had moved I couldn’t make out the words. The connection clicked to an even more shocking silence. My left arm was immovable because of the pain - there was some kind of wetness running down my forehead from under the flap of the helmet. I thought, I’ve been hit in the head! I’m bleeding to death! I managed to shift position, got my right arm free and brushed the top of my head with my hand. It was sore but seemed intact. The blood continued to flow. I pulled at my helmet to straighten it, yanking it forward over whatever the wound was. There was a jab of intense pain from the damage up there, but after that I couldn’t feel anything.