For a while another straggling Halifax formatted with them, but they were flying so low and slow that their companion gave up on them and climbed away with a farewell waggle of her wings. They were alone.
At fifteen hundred feet Teddy told his crew to prepare for ditching. Ten miles to the English coast, he reported calmly. “Get us a bit closer, skipper,” someone said. The idea of ditching was bad enough but to go down in the drink and be picked up by Germans was unthinkable. “Keep going,” Norman pleaded. “We made it back from Turin, remember.”
At one thousand feet they could see the white horses on the crests of the waves. Fifteen, perhaps twenty foot high. Tempest-tossed, Teddy thought.
By now they had jettisoned everything they could—the navigator’s table, cushions, flasks, oxygen bottles. Keith attacked the seats with the axe to break them up and Vic dismantled the mid-upper guns and threw them out of the aircraft, followed by the turret itself. Anything to keep them going that little bit longer. “Four miles to the English coast,” Mac reported, his voice as calm as ever. His papers and maps had flown all over the place when they had gone into the dive to evade the fighter and now he was gathering them all together as if he was shutting down an office for the weekend. It was one thing not to panic, Teddy thought, but another to have no sense of urgency. He recalled how, when they were trying to extricate Kenny from the rear-turret, Mac had stood back commenting while the others worked themselves into a frenzy.
“Keep going, skipper,” another voice said. At five hundred feet George Carr clamped the Morse key down, set the IFF on the international distress frequency and collected the dinghy wireless.
At four hundred feet the fuel gauges read zero. They opened the escape hatches and Teddy told everyone to assume ditching positions. Mac lay down in the starboard rest position, Norman on the port side, their feet braced against the front spar. The gunners had their backs to the rear spar and George and Keith sat between their legs. They all placed their hands behind their necks or rested them on their parachute packs to absorb the shock. Teddy had drilled them well.
They hit the water at 110 mph. The bomb-aimer’s compartment broke on impact and a huge wave of water and petrol swept inside S-Sugar, immersing them up to their necks almost before they had time to inflate their Mae Wests. George had been knocked out on impact and they manhandled him awkwardly through the escape hatch. It turned out that Kenny couldn’t swim, and furthermore was terrified of water, and Mac had to secure him with one hand by the scruff and drag him through the water that had filled the fuselage while he thrashed about, squawking with fear. Teddy brought up the rear. A captain was always the last off the ship.
The dinghy that was stowed in the wing had been inflated and was now blocking the overhead escape hatch. S-Sugar was almost completely full of water and beginning to roll to port, and for a moment Teddy thought, This is it then, but then he kicked down into the water and swam through the gaping hole in the fuselage.
They all made it out and somehow or other they scrambled on to the dinghy. Norman cut the painter and they floated away from S-Sugar. She was still afloat, bobbing lopsidedly in the unforgiving grey, but within minutes she was sucked down and lost to the world for ever.
Somewhere out in the dark they could hear an engine. Mac grabbed for the Verey pistol and tried to fire off a cartridge but his fingers were so swollen and numb with cold that he couldn’t do it. How many hours had they been in the water? They had all lost track of time. This was their second night, they were all sure of that. It had quickly become apparent to them that the ditching was only the beginning of their problems. There had been a huge swell on the sea and no sooner had they successfully made it into the dinghy than they were all pitched back into the sea again by an enormous wave. At least the dinghy had stayed the right way up (small mercies), but it had taken a tremendous, almost superhuman effort for them all to clamber back in again, not to mention having to haul the insensate George back as well.
Vic had lost his boots somewhere along the way and was in agony with the cold. They all took it in turns to rub his feet but their own hands had grown increasingly benumbed. Their clothes were completely waterlogged and they were sodden through to the skin, intensifying their cold and misery a hundredfold.
Poor concussed George Carr was propped up awkwardly but kept slipping down into the water on the floor of the dinghy. He was semi-conscious but moaning a lot. It was hard to say whether or not he was in pain, but Mac gave him a shot of morphine anyway and he grew quiet.