“Not scarecrows, aircraft, I’m afraid,” he said and heard several gasps of horror on the intercom. Perhaps he should have let them continue with their delusions. Aircraft everywhere were going down on fire, or exploding, often with no sign that they even knew they had been attacked. The mid-upper continued to count them and the navigator to tick them in his log until Teddy intervened and said, “That’s enough,” because he could tell from their breathing that the crew were beginning to panic.
On their port beam an aircraft on fire from aft to stern flew by, straight and level but upside down. Teddy saw a Lancaster erupt in sheets of white flame and drop on to a Halifax below it. Both went cartwheeling down to earth together, gigantic pinwheels of fire. Teddy could see what must be a Pathfinder spooling down to earth, its red and green marker flares exploding prettily as it hit the ground. He had never been a witness to this much carnage. Aircraft went down in the distance usually, stars flaring and dying. Crews simply disappeared, they weren’t there next morning for their bacon and eggs, you didn’t give too much thought to how they disappeared. The horror and terror of those last moments were hidden. Now they were inescapable.
The Pathfinder puzzled Teddy, it should be at the head of the Main Force. Either it was in the wrong place or they were. He asked the navigator to check the winds again. It seemed to Teddy that they had drifted north of that red ribbon. He sensed the confusion in the navigator’s reply. He found himself wishing for Mac’s experience.
Down below he could see the blazing wreckage of aircraft on the ground stretching back for fifty or sixty miles.
Then, as further proof of the scarecrow myth, over on the starboard beam they saw a Lancaster, illuminated by the cruel moon—it may as well have been coned by a searchlight—being stalked stealthily by a German fighter from underneath, invisible to her oblivious rear-gunner. The fighter had an upward-pointing cannon, the first Teddy had ever seen. Of course—that was why so many aircraft were going down so suddenly. The cannon looked as though they were pointing straight into the vulnerable bellies of the bombers, but if they could hit the wings, where the fuel tanks were, then the bombers didn’t stand a chance.
He watched helplessly as the fighter opened fire before peeling quickly away from its victim. The Lancaster’s wings exploded into great gouts of white fire and F-Fox lurched violently.
Before they had a chance to recover they were raked by cannon fire, ripping and clattering along the flimsy aluminium fuselage, and without warning they pitched into a vertical dive. Teddy thought that Fraser must be trying to evade the fighter, but when he glanced at him he saw to his horror that he was slumped over the controls. There was no sign of any injury, he could have been asleep for all Teddy could tell. He shouted for help over the intercom—it was almost impossible to get at the controls with Fraser in this position and he had to try to hold his inert body back and at the same time haul back on the controls, while the G-force was like a ton of concrete on his head.
Both the spark and the engineer fought their way forward and started tussling with the motionless Fraser. The pilot’s seat was quite high up in the aircraft and it was a snug fit to cram yourself into it with all your kit on. To extricate someone from that position seemed like a near-impossible task, especially as Teddy was perched on the edge of the seat and at one point he thought he might have to crouch on poor Fraser’s lap. Somehow or other they wrestled the pilot out and Teddy took his seat. There was no blood anywhere, for which he was grateful.
They were screaming earthward at 300 mph now, F-Fox almost standing on her head. Teddy yelled for the flight engineer and they both wrapped themselves around the yoke and hung on to it for dear life. Teddy worried that the wings would simply be pulled off, but finally, after what seemed like an eternity but must have been a handful of seconds, their combined strength was just enough to actuate the elevators and bring the nose back up again and they levelled out and started a ponderous climb back up.
There were a lot of expletives on the intercom and Teddy did a crew check and told them rather tersely, “The pilot’s been hit, I’m afraid. I’m taking over. Navigator, plot a new course for the target, please.” The gods alone knew where they were now, and possibly not even them.
The spark and the flight engineer had dragged Fraser to the crew rest position. “Still breathing, skipper,” the spark reported. He was no longer “sir,” he noticed. He was the skipper. The captain.