S-Sugar bounced up in the air, relieved of her burden of bombs. No escape yet for them though as they had to carry on flying over the target, straight and level for another thirty seconds or so while the photo-flash flare dropped and the camera in the bomb-bay shuttered and took the photograph. It was their proof that they had been on the bombing-run—without it, it might not count as an op—but God knows what anyone would see when they scrutinized the results, Teddy thought. There was complete cloud cover over the target and add to that the sooty industrial miasma that permanently cloaked the Ruhr and it could have been the surface of the moon down there for all they knew. They had bombed on sky markers laid down by the newly formed Pathfinder force and hoped for the best.
Later, much later, after the war, when all the history books and memoirs and biographies started to come out and people stopped wanting to forget the war and started wanting to remember it, Teddy had looked into this raid and discovered that a large part of the force had bombed a place ten miles west of the target, and, on balance, probably more damage had been suffered by the bombers than by anyone on the ground. The more he read, the more he discovered how inaccurate their bombing had been in those earlier years. He had talked about this with Mac at the reunion dinner. “What a waste,” Teddy said. “A waste of bombs,” Mac said. Teddy supposed that as a navigator Mac felt personally slighted. “Well, that wasn’t really what I meant,” Teddy demurred. “So many men and aircraft lost for so little result. We thought we were crippling their economy but a lot of the time we were killing women and children.”
“Can’t believe you’ve joined the hand-wringers, Ted.”
“I haven’t,” he protested.
“They started it, Ted,” Mac said.
And we finished it, Teddy thought. He was glad that he had sat out the last eighteen months of the war in a POW camp, hadn’t witnessed Bomber Command trying to remove Germany from the map of Europe.
It was the backstop of every argument. They started it. They sowed the wind. They asked for it. The clichés thrown up by war. “An eye for an eye,” Mac said. “And you can say what you like, Ted, but a good German is still a dead German.” (All of them, Teddy wondered? Even now?)
“I know. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bombed them,” Teddy said, “but with hindsight—”
“The question is, Ted, with all your so-called ‘hindsight’ would you do it again, if asked?”
He would. Of course he would (Auschwitz, Treblinka), but he didn’t give Mac the satisfaction of an answer.
The camera shuttered and Teddy banked S-Sugar away and Mac set the course for the homeward leg. “That wasn’t so bad,” the second dickey said. (Guy, wasn’t it? Teddy wasn’t sure. He seemed like a Guy. Or was it Giles?) Two or three voices groaned on the intercom. It was considered particularly bad luck to say a thing like that. “Long way to go yet,” Teddy said. And indeed the flak was as bad, if not worse, on the way out as it had been on the way in. They could feel the blast from the ack-ack shells bursting all around them and the jar and thud as splinters of flak hit the fuselage.
There was a sudden blinding flash on the port side as a Lancaster was hit in the wing. The wing was blown off and sheared through the air under its own volition until it hurtled into another Lancaster, slicing off its mid-upper turret. Both Lancasters then spiralled down to earth, almost balletic in their fiery fall.
“Fuck,” a horrified voice said over the intercom. Vic or George, Teddy wasn’t sure. Fuck, indeed, he thought silently. He sent Norman back to assess the flak damage. “Bloody big hole,” he said. They hardly needed telling this, there was an Arctic gale blowing through S-Sugar. Guy seemed to have changed his mind about how bad it was and he indicated to Teddy that he was going to the back of the aircraft to acquaint himself with the unsavoury Elsan. Guy. Went to Eton. Must remember, Teddy berated himself. The lost odd bod from Somerset had left him feeling guilty, derelict in his duty. Everyone on the aircraft was his responsibility, after all. The least he could do was to remember their names, for heaven’s sake. Guy never came back because at that moment both gunners started yelling down the intercom at once, “Fighter port quarter, corkscrew port, go!” and Teddy rammed the control column forward, but not before they were hit by cannon fire from a fighter, a great rattling like some sky god throwing stones at the fuselage. The stink of cordite fumes filled the aircraft.
Teddy had thrown J-Jig into a steep dive but by the time he had banked to starboard and started to climb back up the fighter had gone without Teddy ever having seen it. It didn’t come back, disappearing as mysteriously as it had appeared. Mac set a direct course for home, avoiding the heavily defended areas around Rotterdam and Amsterdam, but by the time they reached the Dutch coast they were down to two thousand feet. The fighter had done its work. The port and starboard inners were out, the starboard aileron gone, and five wing tanks were perforated. There was also a big gash in the fuselage. Teddy feathered the useless engines and they persevered, too late to turn back as they had been flying through cloud and when they finally came out of it they were well over the North Sea.