to England. He’d probably be the first pilot into the bomber stream. Tonight was starting well.
The bombers were swimming upwards. Ignoring their assigned heights, most pilots that night kept their noses trimmed skywards and let the technical limitations of their machines decide the altitude at which they turned the trim wheels back to normal. Some of the older Stirlings could not get above 11,000 feet. Even the best ones at 18,000 were not above the extreme range of the 8.8-cm flak. The two-motor Wellingtons, however, of even older design, could all do better than this and the best of them, at nearly 24,000 feet, were flying higher than any other planes in the stream.
Lambert had pushed Door to nearly 21,000 feet. Now he trimmed the controls so that the plane was flying ‘hands off’ and turned on the automatic pilot. He felt the elevators kick as it engaged. He had corrected course for the changing wind, so they had crossed the British coast at the prescribed assembly point. In his curtained cabin Kosher watched the shape of the pulses on the scope of the Gee and calculated their position from its map. He pencilled a dot upon his plotting-chart and calculated how much longer it would take until they were over the target. ‘Fifty minutes to TOT,’ he announced. They had entered Luftwaffe fighter grid-square Heinz Emil Four although they had no way of knowing that. Now they were at the front of the bomber stream. That was no great navigational achievement; the stream was an unwieldy slab of bombers flying as much as fifteen miles to either side of the pencilled route. It was timed to be nearly two hundred miles long. So while Creaking Door was over the North Sea the rearmost aircraft was only just taking to the air.
Tonight visibility was poor and only the sound of 2,800 high-performance engines marked their track. Each of those engines required the manufacturing capacity of forty simple car engines. The man-hours spent constructing each four-motor aeroplane would have built almost a mile of Autobahn. The radar and radio equipment alone equalled a million radio sets. The total of hard aluminium amounted to 5,000 tons, or about eleven million saucepans. In cash, at 1943 prices with profits pared to a minimum, each Lancaster cost £42,000. Crew-training averaged out at £10,000 each, at that time more than enough to send the entire crew to Oxford or Cambridge for three years. Add another £13,000 for bombs, fuel, servicing and ground-crew training at bargain prices and each bomber was a public investment of £120,000.
Without including the Oboe Mosquitoes, the nuisance raid on Berlin, the OTU planes dropping leaflets upon Ostend, training flights, transport jobs or any of Coastal Command’s activities, this bombing fleet cost eighty-five million pounds.
Six bombers had already landed – the ‘boomerangs’. Most aircrew hated to abort, for unless they bombed the target the trip didn’t count towards their tour. One Lancaster had got as far as the coast when a radiator leak caused the port inner to disappear in a cloud of steam. A Stirling had a faulty radio and the pilot of a Wellington was suffering from stomach pains. The latter turned back just before the Dutch coast. One Lancaster taking off from an airfield near Lincoln bounced badly enough to smash the undercarriage – one wheel went through a barn roof – and was unable to retract its landing gear when in the air. Its fuel-jettison device failed too. It was still circling its base under orders from Flying Control. When enough of its fuel had been used up to achieve Safe Landing Weight it would try a landing. At Warley Fen, John Munro managed a perfect take-off in spite of a tyre blow-out. He’d corrected the resultant swing effortlessly and two of the crew didn’t notice anything unusual. His problem would arise on his return.
Creaking Door, S Sweet, The Volkswagen and Joe for King were all within half a mile of each other, with Lambert 2,000 feet above the others, although on this dark night the only person to know that was the radar operator at Ermine who watched the blips slide across his screen. Lambert was as high as the plane would go and the control column was mushy and insensitive in his hands.
High above him, almost touching the stratosphere, he could see long wispy cirrus clouds. At the moment they weren’t lying along the wind direction, but the wind would continue to back until they were. They heralded rain, but Lambert’s interest in the clouds was a more immediate one and warned of a more immediate danger. The clouds glowed white and luminous, spotlit by a bright moon that had not yet appeared over the horizon. Soon it would appear and the sky would lighten and the mantle of night would start to go at the elbows.
The Freya radar warned the smaller, more accurate, Würzburg of the stream’s route. Its three-man crew complained of the cold, as they always did, and tilted the mirror until suddenly four blips – Door, Sweet, The Volkswagen and Joe for King – slid across the hooded radar scope. The number one operator missed three spots of light but held the fourth one and tuned to it. Inside the warm dark plotting-room August held his breath like an angler when the float twitches.
‘Red Würzburg has a contact, sir,’ said Willi Reinecke, ‘in Heinz Emil Four.’ It was as August had predicted. He compared the blue spot of light that marked Löwenherz’s night fighter. It was about ten miles away from the red one. ‘Question: your altitude and bearing, Katze One,’ said August as a double check.
It was Sachs, the radar man in the back seat, who replied. Löwenherz, hearing the call, turned his instrument-panel illumination to minimum and leaned close to the black windscreen. He could hear the wind buffeting the hinges and fixtures.
‘Order: Caruso ten left, Katze One,’ said August. Löwenherz touched the rudder bar. He knew that he must comply with every instruction immediately it was given, for the heavy Junkers with its clumsy aerial array was not much faster than a Lancaster. For the same reason its stalling-speed was higher.
‘It’s a parallel head-on intercept,’ said August. ‘I’ll bring him in slightly to the north of the Tommi.’
‘Announcing: boring cinema,’ said Löwenherz. It was code for poor visibility.
Willi Reinecke gave a little splutter of indignation. ‘They are always complaining.’ He followed the moving points of light across the frosted-glass table, marking their progress with a wax pencil so that the converging courses could be seen. In spite of the dimmed lights August could see that the plotting-room had begun to fill up with off-duty personnel who wanted to see the excitement.
‘Prepare: 180-degree turn,’ said August.
‘That’s clear,’ crackled Löwenherz’s acknowledgement.
‘A starboard turn,’ August explained to Willi. ‘If he turns to port he’ll pass close enough across his front for the Tommi to spot him.’
By now Löwenherz had become a part of the machinery; it was August who was flying the plane.
August looked round the plotting-room at the expectant faces. Some of the men were in overcoats thrown over pyjamas, their hair awry and faces stubbly. They watched him with the godlike and superior impartiality with which spectators judge card games. An orderly elbowed his way through them and came up the steps of the rostrum with a tray of coffee cups. The coffee soon disappeared and he went back to the kitchen for more. August drank his without tasting it. He watched the two coloured lights rushing towards each other. They represented a combined speed of six hundred miles per hour. He knew that a mistake in the timing of Katze One’s turn could cause them to miss the contact. That wasn’t an enjoyable thing for the commanding officer to do for an audience of subordinates.
‘Skip, give me a bit of straight and level for a star shot.’ Kosher Cohen stood under the Perspex astrodome fixing the stars through a sextant. Kosher was one of the few RAF navigators who was skilled in its use. At the navigation school he’d handled it better than his instructor.
