Lost in the flames : a World War II RAF bomber command novel

224 Pages·2015·1.07 MB·English

by  Jory

This book is dedicated to

Flying Officer John Ross
186 Squadron, RAF Bomber Command
And 55,572 others who shared his fate

International Bomber Command Centre
The International Bomber Command Centre is being built to ensure that the
personal memories of those involved in or affected by Bomber Command are
recorded as a means of educating current and future generations about the
Command’s fascinating and, at times, difficult history. Contributions from
across the world are being collected to add to the archive and inform the
exhibition. To find out more please visit: www.internationalbcc.co.uk
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
HISTORICAL NOTE RAF BOMBER COMMAND 1939–45
FEBRUARY 1945
DECEMBER 1934
CHRISTMAS 1934
1935
SEPTEMBER 1939
1940
1941
1942
EARLY 1943
SUMMER 1943
AUTUMN AND WINTER 1943
1944
JANUARY 1945
MAY 1945
1950
MEMORIAL, 2012
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright
HISTORICAL NOTE
RAF BOMBER COMMAND 1939–45
Courage
RAF Bomber Command fought for our freedom from the opening day of the
Second World War until the eve of VE Day, the only one of the Services to
take the fight to the enemy from the very beginning to the very end. Night
after night they went, cramped and frozen in their flying coffins, to strike at
Germany’s cities and industries. Each time they flew among the searchlights,
the night-fighters and the flak, they did so in the knowledge that many of their
number would be dead before dawn.
Sacrifice
125,000 men served as Bomber Command aircrew. Their average age was 22.
Many were in their late teens. They were all volunteers, most of them civilians
before the war intervened. Of every 100 who flew, around half could expect to
be killed in the air. On some nights, more men were lost than in the whole of
the Battle of Britain. They died in many different ways – from flak wounds
and cannon shells, trapped and burning in a spinning plane, hurtling with no
parachute from the sky, crushed as their aircraft smashed into the ground, shot
or hanged if they reached the ground alive, coming to grief in the fog when
landing back at base. At the height of the campaign only one man in six could
expect to survive a first tour of thirty operations. One in forty might survive a
second. The loss rate was higher than any other Service and the life
expectancy of six weeks was on a par with that of infantry officers on the
Somme. When it was all over, more than 12,000 Bomber Command aircraft
had been destroyed and 55,573 aircrew were dead.
Betrayal
Yet for years the sacrifice and bravery of these young men went largely
unrecognised. 2012 finally saw the opening of an official memorial to Bomber
Command, but it was nearly 70 years in coming – a long time for the dead to
be spinning in their graves – and most of the aircrew who survived the war are
no longer alive to see it. Churchill backed the bombing strategy but abruptly
disowned it at war’s end for reasons of political expediency, snubbing the
bomber crews in his 1945 victory speech. The other branches of the Services
received their campaign medals but none has ever been awarded to Bomber
Command. In the decades after the war, there were increasing attempts, with
the benefit of hindsight and the comfortable knowledge of victory, to draw a
veil over their contribution, to paint the crews at best as brave but immoral
and at worst as war criminals, even drawing comparisons – in A. C.
Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities – with the 9/11 bombers. Whatever the
controversies that have swirled around the strategy of the bombing campaign,
surely they deserve a better epitaph than that, all those boys who were lost in
the flames?
To honour their courage and sacrifice and to regret the death and
destruction that the war brought with it need not be mutually exclusive
undertakings.
FEBRUARY 1945
The route out took them over the Dutch coast and then suddenly they were on
the run-in to the target, the master bomber overhead, guiding them in, Jacob in
the nose, fussing over the bomb-sight and the selector switches, the target
looming beneath him, edging itself inside him now, eating him away, the way
it always did. Then Charlie breathing out adjustments to the course, his voice
down the intercom like a ghost, Ralph responding in word and action,
adjusting B-Beauty’s path, setting his fear aside until the bombing run was
over, Roland hurling out bundles of foil strips to scramble the German radar,
searchlights lamping up the sky, light flak tracing slow-motion streams of red
and green, accelerating as it passed. Then a plane struck away off to starboard,
a little lick of flame along the fuselage becoming a stream then a deluge, the
flares inside the belly of the pathfinder igniting, dripping bright gobs of light,
the plane dipping away, bleeding red and green fluorescence from its guts,
spinning down like a Catherine wheel, and Jacob in the front of Beauty,
concentrating now, the target coming near, then the aiming point in his sights
and he is suddenly cold, and his flares are going down, Christmas trees of
cascading light, and the bombs drop away and the plane lifts then settles, freed
at last of its bombs. Ralph banks them away as a torrent of flares from other
pathfinders goes down, then the intense white light of fighter flares bursting
apart the night with their glare, and Beauty is fleeing headlong now, racing
towards the darkness, Ralph’s hands shaking violently upon the control wheel,
flak bursting beneath, then Jacob coming up from the nose and taking the
controls as Ralph goes back to the rest-bed, looking back as he goes, guilty
and wrong but forgiven all the same, and Jacob is guiding Beauty now, loving
her, taking her away from the target, that thing he never wants to see, slipping
away beneath him now, another bad glow in the memory and he is leaving it
behind.
But then a judder, a ripping sound, like gravel, gravel on a corrugated
metal roof, explosive shells raking along the underside, the rear gunner shot to
pieces, a leg ripped off at the knee, wind raging around his shattered guns, and
Jim silent too in the other turret, slumped in his harness, all but dead, his heart
spraying his life away, wasting it all over the ribs of the fuselage, blood
hissing on the searing metal of the burning plane as a torrent of flame is
sucked down its steel tunnel to where the other gunner sits already burnt
black. And then another shrieking pass by the Ju-88, incendiary shells ripping
through the mid-section, the wireless set bursting into flames, George bursting
apart at the seams as the cannon shells tear through the fuselage, in and out of
him, up again into the night through the shattered metal above his head, his
blood soaking Charlie’s desk, turning the maps and charts blood-black in the
light of the flames, the angle-poise lamp throwing its bulb now towards the
roof, Charlie on the floor with his oxygen tube around his neck, struggling to
throw it off, and Ralph rising from the rest-bed and crawling through slime
towards the cockpit where Jacob and Roland struggle to hold Beauty level as
she tosses her head and throws her reins and demands to be allowed to let
herself fall, tired of the whip, tired of fighting through the fire and the night
just to go out again the next day, trailing her mane of fire behind her,
shuddering now, shaking again as more shells rip into her guts and another
fighter homes in on the blaze and pumps more death inside her, strips of
Window cascading up through the cabin in the rush of air that pours in
through her wounds as she fills up with smoke.
‘We’ve had it, lads!’ shouts Jacob over the intercom. ‘Bale out! Bale out!
And get out quick!’
Ralph is in the cockpit now, looking up at Jacob from his place on the
floor, then standing and staring at him as the foil strips swirl around and
glycol from the tank in the nose sprays about and Jacob shouts at him
repeatedly.
‘Get out!’ he shouts. ‘Fucking get out!’
Ralph tries to grab the control wheel, tries to haul it back, but Jacob hands
him off and Roland pushes him hard towards the hatch at the front and Ralph
goes down the step into the nose, kicks the hatch away, sits on the edge, looks
back, drops out into the freezing night. Jacob shoves Roland away too and
Roland jumps and Jacob is alone now with the dead men. He stares behind
him at the blazing interior of the fuselage. He hauls at the wheel, pulls Beauty
level, then stands up and steps back towards the navigator’s desk and slips on
something soft that glistens and seems to be moving still, and he bends down
and holds his face close up next to Charlie and hears him whimper, or perhaps
it is just the gurgle of the blood that bubbles up in his throat, specking Jacob’s
face red with spittle as Charlie coughs and tries to say something, then coughs
up again and speckles him more. Beauty is pitching forward again now and
Jacob lurches back to the wheel and pulls her level and holds her steady then
lets her go and returns to Charlie but he will not cough for him now, does not
whimper or gurgle, and the blood does not bubble up in his throat but lies flat
inside his mouth, flat black ink inside a well from which no more words can
come. Jacob looks now to where George is a dark bundle by the main spar and
he steps towards him, slipping in a hot slick of blood and slither that is
beginning to simmer and burn, and he takes George’s gloved wrist and tugs,
pulls him towards him, feels him light beneath his grip, realises he is pulling
only half a man, the hips separated from the waist by a cannon shell or a
ripping piece of fuselage, and Jacob lets go and slips, then stands and moves
again towards the main spar to get at the gunners, but he cannot get across it,
Beauty’s metal burns him, burns him through his flying suit, and the flames
really get a grip on him now, force him back, and Beauty is tipping again,
tipping away down, and he slithers across to the wheel and hauls it back and
Beauty shakes, a great wracking judder as an engine disintegrates and hot
shrapnel comes zinging in, and she lurches to one side and bows her head and
Jacob is aflame and he takes a last look at the dark shapes that were Charlie
and George and he stumbles down the step to the bomb-aimer’s dome and he
sits beside the hatch, burning he is, burning beside the selector switches and
the bomb-sight through which he has seen his war, nights of criss-cross streets
of orange, the city’s lattice-work kissed by the silent crump of bombs
thousands of feet below, and he pushes his flaming feet through the open
hatch and the wind wrenches his burning boots away and he thinks again of
Rose, his Rose, the reason he had to get through this war …
DECEMBER 1934
It was nearly Christmas. Jacob Arbuckle was standing on the corner of New
Street with his older sister Vera and her best friend Rose, snow sheeting down
from a cold December sky, falling for him, he thought, layering him in white.
His eyes fell on Norman Miller and he sensed Vera’s gaze alight upon him
too, observing in that quiet thoughtful way of hers the man who sat stiff and
serious on the seat of the trap as the pony tripped up the hill towards Chipping
Norton market square, edged by trees and dotted with Model-T Fords and
traders’ vans.
Norman brought his horse to a halt with a tug of the rein and a click of the
tongue, stepped down into the market square, and disappeared out of sight
behind the Town Hall as his dogs sidled after him.
‘Come on, Jacob,’ said Vera, her voice cool but her eyes aflame. ‘I’ve got
an errand to run.’
She stepped out into the whitening street as Rose grabbed Jacob’s hand
and dragged him along.
‘What sort of errand?’ Jacob called out, griping at the sudden change of
plan. They had been on their way to Pool Meadow to skim stones across the
pond, an important pursuit for an eleven-year-old boy.
‘Mind your own business, Jacob,’ said Vera over her shoulder to where
Jacob walked hand in hand now with Rose. ‘Important errands aren’t for little
boys like you.’
‘I’ll remember that next time you ask me to do something!’
‘Shush, you cheeky little bugger,’ laughed Rose. ‘Don’t talk to your big
sister like that.’
Rose grinned at him but he snatched his hand away and stomped after Vera
as Rose swayed along behind in a manner she believed to be indicative of
elevated aesthetic preferences.
Jacob caught up with Vera and prodded her.
‘I said what sort of errand?’
‘Jacob, will you ever stop asking questions?’