Meanwhile the target was being revealed to the pilots and navigators in a preliminary briefing. There were specialist briefings for the wireless operators and bomb-aimers. Teddy more than half expected the op to be scrubbed—they were into the moon period and the skies were clear, but soon, with the shorter nights of spring, it would be impossible to fly the long raids deep into Germany. He supposed that this was Harris’s last hurrah in the Battle of Berlin. The long gruelling series of winter raids with their high toll was nearly over. Seventy-eight bombers lost to Leipzig last month, seventy-three to Berlin last week. Nearly a thousand crew lost since November. Every one a young man. “Flowers of the Forest,” the lament played at the funeral of a Canadian navigator that Teddy and Mac both knew on their first tour. Walter. Walt. His nickname was Disney. Teddy didn’t think that he’d ever known his real name, although he must surely have had one. It seemed so long ago now, and yet it wasn’t.
The CO had asked them to accompany Disney’s body to Stonefall and act as pallbearers. A Scots piper had been found in Leeds and played at the graveside. Disney had been killed by flak on a raid over Bremen. The flight-engineer navigator had used astro-navigation to get them home, unable to consult Disney’s maps and charts because they were so sodden with his blood that they were useless.
They were burning burnt-out towns, bombing bombed-out cities. It had been a good idea. Defeat them in the air and save the world from the horror of land warfare, from Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele. But it wasn’t working. When they were knocked down they got up again, the stuff of nightmares, an endless harvest of dragon’s teeth sprouting on the plain of Ares. And so they continued throwing the birds against the wall. And still the wall stood.
An air vice-marshal had dropped in on the squadron. He had lots of medals and braid—“scrambled egg”—on display. “Like to show my face to the men,” he said. Teddy didn’t remember ever seeing his face before.
His mind was on Nancy. He had received a letter that morning—many words, as usual, yet saying nothing, also as usual, but at the end a reference to their engagement and how she would “understand if your feelings have changed.” (“You write to me so rarely, darling.”) Was she really saying that her feelings had changed? His CO said, “Ted? Ready?” disrupting his wool-gathering, and they made their way to the briefing hut, the vice-marshal striding authoritatively ahead. He was accompanied by his rather glamorous WAAF driver, who surprised Teddy by winking at him.
The crews were already assembled, ticked off on a roll at the door by the RAF police. Once everyone was in the doors would be locked and the windows shuttered. The air vice-marshal’s driver was left to kick her heels outside. Security was tight before a raid. No one could leave the station or make phone calls. Keeping the target secret was vital, although it was often jokingly said that if you wanted to know the next target you only need go to Bettys Bar. The reality was that one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the moment they took off. They listened on their radio frequencies, jammed the Gee, tracked the HS2 and caught them in the net of their own radar that stretched along the coast of Europe. Toe to toe, blow for blow.
When they entered the briefing hut there was a great clattering of chairs as the crews, some hundred and twenty of them, stood to attention. The room—a Nissan hut—was the usual smoky, sweaty fug. More scraping and bumping of chairs as everyone sat down again. The map on the wall was hidden by a blackout curtain and the CO always drew it back with a theatrical flourish as if it was part of a conjuring trick, before pronouncing the by now time-honoured words, “Gentlemen, your target for tonight is…”
Nuremberg? There was a rumble of discontent from the more experienced crews, a few “Jesus”s and “Christ”s, an Australian “Strewth,” despite the presence of the scrambled egg. It was a long flight, deep into the enemy’s heartland, nearly three times further than going to the Ruhr. The red ribbon stretched almost straight to the target with hardly any of the usual zigzagging.
The senior intelligence officer, a stern-faced WAAF who took her duties very seriously, stood up and told them all about the importance of the target. It was seven long months since it had been attacked and was largely intact, despite being home to a huge SS barracks as well as “the famous” MAN armament works, and now that the Siemens factory in Berlin had been bombed they had stepped up production of searchlights, electric motors “and so on” at their Nuremberg works.
The city was symbolic, where Hitler held his mass rallies, and was close to the enemy’s heart, the intelligence officer continued. It would hit their morale hard. The aiming point was the railway yards but the creep-back would find the medieval city, “the Altstadt,” she said, making a poor stab at German pronunciation. They were carrying high loads of incendiaries and the old wooden buildings would burn well.