LITMIR.BIZ

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that were about to mount the stage: mouthing their dialogue lest they forget it, noting their cues, worrying about lights and timings and fussed over by a dozen stage managers who will take the blame should the performance become a disaster. It was a complex theatrical drama that this audience were about to stage and one mistake would bring them, not a boo or a jeer or a poor review but a sudden, nasty, fiery death.

      The Group Captain tugged the cord and the curtains parted with a squeak of metal rollers.

      ‘The target for tonight,’ said the Group Captain, ‘is Krefeld in the Ruhr.’

      The captains and navigators had already been briefed, so it was no surprise to them. Many of the engineers had guessed from the fuel-loads and some of the remainder had heard by now, but there were still enough wireless operators and gunners to greet the news with a soft sincere groan. There had been rumours and bets that it would be a pushover target. Krefeld was no pushover. Happy Valley was Happy Valley: the best-defended target zone in Europe.

      Lambert, Cohen and Micky Murphy had arrived together from the previous briefings upstairs. Seated behind them were Flash and Binty, the two gunners, and Digby, who was smoking a small cigar. Cohen had his notebook open in front of him. The raid was detailed there in neat handwriting with times in large numbers down one side. Lambert had some notes on the back of an envelope but he knew he would never refer to it. The routes and details that seemed so baffling to the newcomers were second nature to him; he had seen the techniques grow from the days when they had little more briefing than the name of the target and time of take-off.

      On the stage the technical officers were seated in a line, with the Groupie standing like a vicar opening a church fête. Beside him, on a table covered with a grey blanket, there was a carafe of water and a glass. He moved it aside as he always did and turned to the map. Beribboned gaily with red-and-white tapes, the route to and from the target made a squat diamond shape centred upon the North Sea. The enemy coastline was defaced with ugly red blotches of flak around the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, while the right-hand tip of the diamond poked into the biggest red patch of all, the heavily defended heart of Germany’s heavy industry – the Ruhr.

      ‘Krefeld, heavy industry, textiles, light industry, communications,’ reeled off the Groupie. ‘It’s a big show tonight: over seven hundred Bomber Command aircraft operating, with leaflet-dropping by Operational Training Units. Zero 01.30 hours. Take-off 24.20.’ The Group Captain eyed the five journalists and Flight Lieutenant from Air Ministry Press Office who had seated themselves quietly at the rear of the room. He spoke to them rather than to the aircrews, who had heard it all before. He spoke slowly and deliberately and avoided jargon, as much as one can avoid it when dealing with a series of new techniques that have been named as they were invented.

      ‘Any target in the Ruhr is difficult to identify. Even though the Met man tells me there will be little or no cloud and a full moon, there will be industrial haze lying over the target area; there always is. Take no chances, chaps. No guesswork. Tonight we are flying as part of the pathfinder element and it’s important that we put up a good show. Don’t bomb or mark out of sequence. One plane can spoil the entire raid and that means they’ll send us back to do the job properly next week. So let’s get there and mark it accurately so that the Main Force can hit it once and hit it bloody hard.’ The Groupie sat down while a ripple of agreement ran round the room. No one wanted to go back next week.

      Flight Lieutenant Ludlow, the Navigation Leader, stood up. The shy ex-bank clerk from Guildford had become an actuarial curiosity. He was now on his third tour. Only two per cent of airmen survived three tours. Some called him ‘the immortal Lud’. He had briefed the navigators upstairs an hour before but now he outlined the route for the sake of the others. As usual he mumbled so quietly that the crews at the very back couldn’t hear properly, but the ones who chose to sit at the very back usually didn’t care. ‘Assemble over Southwold on the coast. You’ll need little or no change of course until the turning-point at Noordwijk on the Dutch coast. There will be yellow markers at the turning-point but don’t come back and complain that you didn’t see them. They are for the Main Force boys and as pathfinders you’re now expected to pinpoint places like that without the markers. Met says there will be no cloud, but if he’s wrong there will be sky markers above, the cloud.

      ‘From there it’s straight run down to the target. I’ll be placing a yellow fifteen miles from the target and you must go in to bomb over that yellow datum-line marker. If you don’t you’ll be crossing the bomber stream. By the time you reach the datum marker navigators must have their ground-speed calculated so that captains and bomb aimers have an exact time to the aiming-point. That’s all. Anyone with queries can see me afterwards.’

      Some of the new boys were scribbling away furiously. Cohen could see PO Fleming and his officer navigator checking and rechecking every word of the briefing. The rest of Fleming’s crew sat close and watched approvingly as he prepared the spell that would bring them safe through the night. Not all of the crews were together. Sweet always sat at the front with a group of officers. His engineer – Micky Murphy – sat next to Lambert just as he had always done. On the other side of Lambert sat Battersby, studying the oil and grease on his hands. He noted with pride that they were fast becoming real engineer’s hands like Murphy’s.

      Digby leaned forward to Murphy and Lambert. ‘Faith, Hope and Charity are writing their memoirs,’ he whispered.

      ‘Yes, I remember what it was like on my first trip,’ said Lambert. ‘I was more frightened of making a mistake on my log than of tangling with a night fighter.’

      All of the new crews had arrived in the Briefing Room at least five minutes early. For fear of taking some veteran’s allotted seat they had all stayed close together near the back of the room. Like new boys at school they were anxious not to attract attention, but when Jammy Giles stood up it was to this part of the Briefing Room audience that he addressed himself.

      Flight Lieutenant Giles was the Squadron’s Assistant Adjutant and also its Bombing Leader. Thirty-three years old, he had joined the RAF during the Munich Crisis. He had first flown as a gunner, when any erk standing around at take-off could become an air gunner without training or brevet or sergeant’s rank. At that time he had been an LAC, almost the lowest form of Air Force life. Later, when his job had been made official and he’d got three stripes, he had delighted in swapping jobs with other aircrew. He had flown as gunner, as wireless operator, and even as second pilot. He had proved particularly skilled at bomb-aiming; so much so that at the end of his first tour he had got the DFM and a job as instructor. The discipline at the training school had been so irksome that he had applied for a commission and to his surprise got one. Now that the importance of his job had been recognized by the creation of the air-bomber category, Jammy had become an important man at Warley.

      The eleven men in the room who had already completed a tour of operations were quieter and more introspective than the newer crews. Jammy was a notable exception. He was noisy, balding and inclined to plumpness; all due, he boasted, to the vast amounts of alcohol he consumed. Amid a less stringently selected group of men Jammy’s physique would have gone unremarked. Amongst these aircrews, however, his slight paunch was Falstaffian, his pate Pickwickian and his cheerful nose Cyrano-like.

      This was emphasized by the build of his pilot, Roddy Peterson, a tall thin doleful Canadian. He had a dry, savage brand of humour that Jammy had taken to immediately and now excelled in. Laurel and Hardy they were often called. Before joining up Jammy Giles had lived with his mother in a three-room basement in the London suburb of Morden and worked as a clerk for a building contractor. Now he was a bemedalled officer; a Flight Lieutenant. It was a transformation beyond his wildest dreams and he refused to think of what he would do when the war was over. In any case he didn’t expect to survive it.

      ‘All right. Belt up there and listen,’ said Jammy. ‘I don’t care how many times you’ve heard it before.’ Several times in the past Jammy had brought some inattentive crew member up on to the stage and asked him to repeat the briefing. Jammy knew how to make such a man feel like an infant; the crews became quiet and attentive.

      ‘First the PFF Mosquito aircraft will mark the target with red markers. Their gear is much more

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