Ursula should congratulate him, not raise doubts. Operation Gomorrah was considered an enormous success by the crews. It was a turning point, it would push the war nearer to its conclusion, it would help those troops, the “brown bodies,” who at some future date were going to have to land again on European soil and battle their way to the end. “A good prang,” his flight engineer, Geoff Smythson, had written in his log book. A good show, the solicitor said yesterday, slavering in anticipation of the poor pig.
The crews had been pleased, Teddy thought, glancing at his sister, now utterly absorbed in the music. Surely everyone was?
Later, much later, long after the war was over, he learned that it had been a “firestorm.” He had not heard that word, not during the war. He learned that they had been sent deliberately to residential districts. That people were boiled in fountains and baked in cellars. They were burnt alive or suffocated, they were reduced to ash or melted fat. They were trapped like flies on flypaper as they tried to cross the molten tarmac of the streets where they lived. A good prang. (“An eye for an eye,” Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?) Gomorrah. Armageddon. An Old Testament God of spite and vengeance. Once they started there was no going back. Hamburg wasn’t a turning point, it was a staging post. In the end it led to Tokyo, it led to Hiroshima, and then later the whole argument about innocence became irrelevant when you could flick a switch on one continent and destroy thousands on another. At least Cain had to look at Abel’s face.
The RAF had gone back for a second innings on the Tuesday night and found the city still ablaze—one vast inferno, like a glowing, incandescent carpet spread across the landscape, smothering everything beneath it.
It was like flying over an immense volcano containing the fiery heart of hell from which violent explosions would occasionally erupt. The City of Destruction. Its ferocity, its terrible awful beauty, almost returned poetry to Teddy. A medieval apocalypse, he thought.
“Navigator, come and look at this,” he said, persuading Sandy Worthington out from behind his curtain. “You’ll never see anything like it again.”
Keith didn’t need to direct them in, they could see the conflagration from many miles away and as they flew over the boiling, bubbling cauldron of flames he said, “Let’s put another shovelful of coal on the fire, shall we, skipper?”
A filthy dense column of smoke rose as high as the aircraft, and they could feel the tremendous heat rising up from below. They could smell the smoke through their oxygen masks, and something else, even less welcome, and when they landed back at the squadron they discovered that Q-Queenie’s Perspex was covered in a thin film of soot.
The smoke and the soot of the fire had risen up to meet them thousands of feet in the air. And the something else, something that Teddy would never forget, something he could never talk about—the smell of burning flesh rising from the pyre.
He knew then in his secret heart that one day a reckoning would come due.
Sometimes a German fighter would infiltrate the bomber stream as it made its way back across the North Sea, a particularly mean trick. It might pick off an aircraft as it headed home or even as it came in to land, just as safety was at hand. A few weeks after the Battle of Hamburg, after dodging and weaving for months, Q-Queenie was finally caught on the way back from a raid on Berlin.
It had been a long hard struggle to get back from the Big City and they were all sleepy and cold. They had eaten their chocolate, drunk their coffee, taken their wakey-wakey pills, and it was a great relief when they finally saw the red light on top of the church spire in the village nearest to the airfield. Teddy presumed the light was there to prevent them crashing into the spire but they always regarded it as a beacon guiding them home. The flare path was lit up and they heard the cheery tones of a WAAF in the control tower clearing them to land, but no sooner had she spoken than the flare path was extinguished, the airfield plunged into darkness, and the call sign for intruders was broadcast.