Dismayed muttering from the bomb-aimer alerted Teddy to something he had never seen before. Vapour trails. They were never usually seen below twenty-five thousand feet and now they were everywhere, pouring from the tails of the bombers. The contrails were bright banners, marking them as targets even more clearly than the moon, if that was possible.
The bomber stream had long ago begun to disintegrate. The more experienced pilots had realized that rather than being the safest place to be, it had become the most dangerous. Teddy began to elbow his way out to the edge of it at the same time as he pushed higher. Keep a tight bomber stream. Always. His last command to his squadron. He hoped they weren’t blindly following his instructions. Teddy was working the sky as much as he could. F-Fox couldn’t quite make the height of the Lancasters but in the thin air and with good engines he got pretty close. Nonetheless they were spotted.
“One coming in, skipper.”
“OK, navigator.”
“Nine hundred feet. Eight hundred,” the navigator counted off the distance of the approaching blip on his radar screen. “Seven hundred, six hundred.”
“See anything yet, gunners?”
“No, skipper,” from both.
“Five hundred, four hundred.”
“Got him, skipper,” from the mid-upper gunner. “Port upper quarter. Corkscrew port. Go, go, go.”
“Up the revs, engineer.”
“A hundred on, skip.”
“Hang on, everybody,” Teddy said as he rammed the controls forward, rolling the aircraft and dropping the wing down to port. The G-force pinned him to his seat. They spun down, the altimeter unwinding until at the bottom of the dive he rolled the aircraft to starboard, pulled the ailerons back and they lumbered upwards again. He was trying to find cloud to hide in but the mid-upper was shouting, “Starboard upper quarter, corkscrew starboard, go, go, go!”
Sometimes the amount of turbulence alone that was created was enough to put a fighter off, but not this one. As soon as they had climbed again, there was a shout from the rear-gunner, “Bandit at rear port, dive to port!”
The gunners’ Brownings were drumming away and the aircraft filled with the stink of cordite. The sky around F-Fox was crowded with bullet and cannon tracer. Teddy threw the heavy aircraft around in the sky, dropping into a starboard dive and then heeling into a port curve, clawing his way back up the sky, trying to shake the fighter off their shoulder. He felt exhausted from the sheer physical effort needed to control the aircraft. Needs must, he heard his mother say. The gunners were out of ammunition but then the mid-upper reported, “Port bandit broken away, skipper,” and then, “Starboard bandit moved on too, skipper.” On to another poor sod, Teddy thought and said, “Well done, gunners.”
Their luck finally ran out. They never reached the target. Teddy wasn’t sure they would ever have found it anyway. Many didn’t, he learned later.
It happened very quickly. One minute they were in the dark void of the sky, no sign of the bomber stream any more, and the next they were coned and were being hit by flak—huge, hollow bangs as if the fuselage was being battered by a sledgehammer. They must have found the Ruhr’s defences. Dazzled and blinded by the searchlights, all Teddy could do was fling the aircraft into another dive. He could feel poor F-Fox protesting, he had already tested her beyond her limits and he was expecting her to break up any second. He suspected that he, too, had been tested beyond his limits but suddenly they were out of the awful light and back into the welcome dark.
The port wing was on fire and they were rapidly losing height. Teddy knew instinctively that there was going to be no soft landing this time, no ditching, no WAAF guiding them into a friendly airfield. F-Fox was going to her death. He gave the order to abandon the aircraft.
The navigator kicked off the escape hatch and he and the spark strapped a parachute on to the injured pilot and pushed him out. The spark followed quickly, then the navigator. The mid-upper climbed down from his turret and followed. The rear-gunner reported that his turret was shot up and he couldn’t get it to revolve. The bomb-aimer crawled up from the nose, fighting gravity, and went to see if he could help the rear-gunner manually release the turret.
Flames had begun to lick the inside of the fuselage. They had come out of the dive but were still losing height. Teddy was expecting F-Fox to explode at any moment. There was no word from the bomb-aimer or the rear-gunner. Clifford and Charlie, their names suddenly came back to him.
He was fighting F-Fox now, trying to keep her flying straight and level. Clifford appeared by his side and said the fire had prevented him from getting to the rear-gunner and Teddy told him to jump. He disappeared through the hatch.