The Separation (7 page)

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. The plane rocked again, tipping the other way, left wing up, momentarily recovering stability. It was nothing I was doing: the controls were out of my reach and I was in too much pain to move. However, the change in the aircraft’s attitude suddenly cancelled the centrifugal force from the spin. Before it started again I levered myself up. I put my weight on my right elbow, rolled to the side, then managed to get my good leg under me. With a further agonizing struggle I was able to clamber back into my seat at the controls. It was easier like that: I could favour the left side of my body, where most of the damage had been done. I could hardly see out of the windscreen ahead: something had burst through it, starring it and opaquing it. A jet of icy air came straight in at me.

I put on full opposite flaps and to my immense relief the plane began to pull out of the turning dive. The stick felt as if it weighed a ton, but by bracing my right leg on the rudder I managed to hold it back as I corrected the spin, fighting the G-force of the recovery from the dive. I could see something flapping on the upper fuselage in front of the cockpit, but couldn’t make out what it was. As the plane first levelled out then swung upwards in its trajectory, recovering some of the lost height, I began a frantic cockpit check. Engines both still running, though the oil pressure in the port engine was below normal. No fires anywhere that the instruments could detect. Controls stiff but working; the plane was yawing to the left, which I could correct with the rudder. Coolant low. Electrics OK.

Crew? At the same time as I was going through the emergency checklist I shouted to the others to report back.

Nothing from Ted Burrage, who was in the damaged nose. Nothing from Lofty Skinner, who had been behind me; nothing from Sam Levy, behind where Lofty had been. Col Anderson said he was OK. Lofty responded on my second try. He said he was helping Kris with Sam, who appeared to have been hit badly.

We flew on, crossing the German coast, over the dark North Sea, looking for home. The plane was losing height as the port engine was not generating full power. I had to keep throttling it back to prevent it overheating. Soon it was inevitable that we were going to have to ditch. Sam Levy and I were still in the plane when it crashed, but we somehow made it out of the aircraft and into a dinghy. I think the others bailed out before we hit. Sam and I floated around on the choppy sea for many hours before we were rescued.

I thought repeatedly about this incident as I recovered in the convalescent hospital. I was still in chronic discomfort, with spells of acute pain, but the doctors said I was healing. At night I dreamed of disturbing events. One nightmare involved me having to crawl head first into a long metal tube, barely wide enough for me to fit. The further I crawled along the tube the hotter it became. I reached a point where the tube curved suddenly downwards, looping back, until I had to crawl upside down. Then the tube began to fill with water, hissing in over the hot metal in front of me. I could not breathe or move my head, could not escape. I woke up. It was the last week in June. The news on the wireless told us that Hitler’s army was invading the Soviet Union.

A Royal Navy Lieutenant was brought into the hospital. One of his arms had been amputated at the elbow and both his legs were in plaster. One day they put him on a recliner next to mine, on the verandah overlooking the vegetable garden.

I was on the cruiser
Gloucester,’
he told me, his voice a mere whisper. He had damaged his throat and lungs when he inhaled hot gases. I told him it could wait until he found it easier to talk, but he was determined to describe what had happened. I encouraged him not to rush his story. We both faced long spells in hospital. Nothing needed to be hurried. ‘We were stationed off Crete,’ he whispered, ‘providing cover for the troops who were being evacuated. We came under attack from the air: dive-bombers and fighters. There were U-boats in the vicinity too. I was gunnery officer and we were giving them everything we had. But then something exploded under us and within a couple of minutes the ship heeled over. I think it was a torpedo that got us. The skipper gave the order to abandon ship. I was climbing aboard one of the lifeboats when the magazine went up. I don’t remember much after that.’

I told him what I could remember at that point of my own story, incomplete as it was. But at the same time I was thinking: we’ve lost Crete! That means we must have lost Greece too! I remembered Mr Churchill sending the British army to Greece from Egypt, in an attempt to reinforce the Greeks in their fight against the Italians and the Germans. How long ago was that? What was the cost to our side?

My new friend told me that he’d been hearing rumours from friends who were still serving at sea that one of the German battleships had been sunk. A great triumph, he said. ‘She must have been the
Tirpitz
or the
Bismarck.
She broke out into the Atlantic somehow, but the navy chased her and we sank her. We lost the
Hood,
but we got the damned Germans!’

We lost the
Hood
in this triumph? Later we learned that the German ship had been the
Bismarck.
I was confused and depressed by the news of these events. The world had taken a nasty turn: it was exploding with war. It had not seemed so terrible in the days before I was shot down. The war had gone badly for Britain at first, when Hitler marched across Europe. But under Mr Churchill’s leadership we were fighting back and the tide had started to turn. We won the Battle of Britain and there was no longer much of a threat of invasion, we were bombing the German military industries effectively, the Italians had shown themselves to be ineffectual allies of Germany, we were beating the U-boats, even the Blitz had been running down throughout April and May. Now everything was worse again. Meanwhile I had my own battles to endure. I had a broken leg and a damaged knee, and I had a serious chest wound and a fractured skull. Three ribs were cracked. My left arm and hand were badly burned. I had not died and the medical staff seemed to take my recovery for granted, but all in all I felt that it had been a close-run thing.

My main concern was to get my health back, return to my squadron and rejoin the battle with Germany. Every day I underwent physiotherapy and received medication, and the dressings for my wounds and burns were changed. Every day I sat or lay on the covered verandah, staring at the rows of vegetables, gleaning what news I could from the wireless. Every day more injured servicemen were brought to the hospital or were moved out of it to somewhere else.

‘When am I going to be able to return to my squadron?’ I asked the senior physiotherapist one day. I was face down on her bench.

She was behind me, leaning down as she worked on my thigh. ‘That’s not the sort of decision we have to make here, thank goodness.’

‘Does that mean you know something I don’t?’

‘Not at all. Would you really expect them to give us information about our patients that we weren’t allowed to pass on?’

‘I suppose not,’ I said. I asked her no more questions, but I was aching to return to duty. My idleness gave me too much time to think. One subject that seriously worried me was the fate of the rest of my crew. I found out about Sam Levy: he too was in hospital, but we had been separated. They told me he was going to recover, but that was all I knew about him. The other men were officially posted as missing: that terrible euphemism which inspired hope and dread in equal measure. The only thing I was certain of was that they had not escaped from the plane with me. Either they were killed in the crash, or they had jumped from the plane when I ordered them to do so. What worried me was the silence that followed my order. It could mean, of course, that they had jumped when I gave the order. On the other hand, the intercom might have failed or they had simply decided to disobey me, thinking they’d have a better chance if they stayed on the plane until it hit the water. Whatever the truth, Air Ministry letters had been sent to their families.