the IJsselmeer that made his plane falter as it passed over the dijk road. Löwenherz pulled the control column back and the variometer showed a steady climb while holding the air-speed. Now he extinguished the navigation lights on his wingtips. There was no light anywhere except from his instrument panel. The artificial horizon with its tiny green luminous aeroplane tilted as he came round on a course for Gorilla, almost due south of him – the long rectangle of runway lights passed under him getting smaller as it went.
Kokke was the next to go. Redenbacher was next behind him and perhaps that’s why his take-off was a copybook example of flying skill. The forward window was hinged down the centre. Kokke pulled it closed but did not lock it. He left it slightly ajar, for like many flyers he liked to hear the note of the engines as clearly as possible. He enjoyed the sound of the airstream as it whistled through the gap. Gently the tail came up and they were airborne. Leutnant Klimke, the radar man, felt the wind round the back of his neck. He shivered, adjusted his hand-knitted scarf and watched the airport buildings tilt and drift under the port wing.
‘It’s freezing back here,’ he said, ‘close the …’
Until radar was discovered and manned by dedicated men, few people guessed how many flocks of birds moved after dark. This night nearly one hundred gulls, driven inland by the bad weather, were flying towards the fishing villages on the IJsselmeer where nets laden with juicy titbits had been hung out to dry. Only eight birds of the flock hit Katze Five. Two were bisected by the propeller blades and three struck the engine nacelles, were mangled and sucked into the air intakes. Two hit the leading edge of the wings and were cracked open like eggs.
It was the one that burst through the slightly opened front window that did the worst damage. By the time it entered the cockpit it had no wings or head. It was little more than half a pound of bloody offal that hit Kokke in the face, plus of course a thousand feathers. But it came in at two hundred miles per hour, putting out both eyes, fracturing his skull (with multiple fractures of his right cheekbone and nose) and dislocating his jaw. It was impossible to distinguish where the bird’s remains ended and Kokke’s face began. He lost consciousness almost instantly, but somewhere a reflex had ordered his hands to pull on the control column and they pulled. Neither the observer nor Klimke realized what had happened even when the cockpit was white with shredded feathers. Kokke was dying, medically perhaps already dead, but his muscular arms strained at the control column with a live man’s strength. It was no use. Kokke’s radio line was not fastened to his back. The radio plug from his helmet had fallen into the gap in the floor through which the control column passed. To have got the control column back far enough to gain height he would have had to crush a solid metal plug to wafer-thinness.
The Ju88 hit the IJsselmeer at a shallow angle. Finishing his sentence as though everything depended upon it, Klimke gasped ‘… Window’, and was dead. The waves were about a yard high and with a soft crunch the plane was swallowed like a gourmet’s oyster. All the crew were dead by then, for the impact snapped their vertebrae. The black aeroplane slid into the dark water, banking and turning as it had in the sky, until with a gentle thud it struck the seabed. The tail broke off and the aircraft was enveloped in a cloud of muddy water.
With a thump the yellow life-raft, activated by a water-immersion switch, erupted from the compartment in front of the tail. There was a hiss of compressed air and a flurry of bubbles. It inflated, writhing like a demented monster, as the air entered each rubber compartment in turn. Finally it was a perfect yellow circle and it floated up until it was held by the six feet of restraining cord. It stayed like that just under the surface of the sea: a sculpture-like yellow ring seemingly balanced upon the taut cord. The current sent it spinning gently like a hoop upon a conjurer’s finger. For many months it remained there, turning in the sunlight and in the darkness and attracting foolhardy fish until, rotting compartment by compartment, it finally sank to the ocean bed and disappeared. By that time eels had eaten the three flyers.
‘I’ve lost radio contact with Leutnant Kokke in Katze Five,’ said the ground operator.
‘Damn these bloody radios,’ said the officer. ‘He’s only been on the air for two minutes. You’d better reassign Löwenherz to Ermine; they’re getting fidgety out there. And tell Kokke to return to base. It’s probably only his transmitter gone, in which case he’ll still be receiving you.’
The operator nodded and tuned to Kokke’s wavelength to tell him that his transmitter was not functioning. ‘Announcing: I am deaf,’ he said. ‘Announcing: I am deaf.’
Löwenherz laughed when he heard the news. He could imagine Kokke cursing. So they had ordered him to return to Kroonsdijk. Not a chance of Kokke doing that; he would try and get into the stream and find a Tommi without radar aid. Löwenherz’s radar operator tuned their radio to the controller at Ermine.
‘Order: proceed to Heinz Emil Four,’ said the new voice calling him from Himmelbett Ermine. Let’s see, Heinz Emil Four was halfway 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