Christopher Priest - The Separation

So. Thirteen thousand feet. Clear skies under a bomber’s moon. Twenty minutes past midnight, British time. Aircraft A-Able loaded with bombs and flares. City below: Hamburg. We had flown past the city a few minutes earlier at a distance of some twenty miles, trying to mislead the ground defenders into thinking we were passing Hamburg on the way to another target, Hanover or Magdeburg or maybe even Berlin. The RAF had hit Hamburg two nights before and we were warned at our afternoon target briefing that the Germans were bringing in more anti-aircraft guns to defend the city. Return raids were notoriously dangerous for us. We never treated German flak as a minor threat, so we all paid attention to the decoy plan. We used a distinctive curve in the River Elbe near Luneburg as the assembly point, then turned steeply and headed in on our bombing run.

Ted Burrage, our bomb aimer and front gunner, had crawled into the belly of the Wellington, lying on his stomach, watching the ground through the perspex pane behind the nose. It was a night of clear visibility: great for targeting the ground, but the anti-aircraft gunners could see us just as easily and if night fighters were about we would be visible for miles.

As we approached the centre of Hamburg, distinctive on cloudless nights because of the way the river curved through, the intensity of the flak suddenly increased. Ten or more searchlight beams flicked on, criss-crossing ahead, while tracer bullets snaked up towards us. I tried to ignore the tracer: it always moved with hypnotic slowness while a long way below us, but suddenly speeded up and whooshed past us. I could never get it out of my mind that the tracer was only part of the flak - for every bright firefly of light swarming up towards us there were ten or fifteen others that were invisible. Ahead, bursting in the sky, was a huge barrage of exploding shells, brilliant white and yellow, flashing on and off" like a deadly fireworks display. How could we ever pass through that without being hit a hundred times?

‘Bomb aimer to pilot. Are we starting the bombing run?’ It was Ted, in the nose.

‘Yeah, we’re already on it. No need to change track as far as I’m concerned.’

‘The sight is settled. Everything calibrated and checked.’

‘You can get on with it, Ted.’

‘What’s our present course?’

‘Two eighty-seven. Airspeed one thirty-two.’

‘Hold her steady, JL. Right a bit. Thanks, that’s fine.’

I could hear the others breathing on the intercom.

‘Bomb doors open, skip.’

‘Bomb doors open.’

There was a pause, then the plane lurched a little as the air-drag increased.

‘New airspeed, sir?’

‘One twenty-eight.’

‘OK, hold her steady . . . steady . . . hell, we’re hitting them hard down there tonight. . . smoke everywhere . . . that’s it... steady . . . hold her steady . . . bombs gone!’

The plane lifted as the weight of the bomb load fell away. My stomach lurched with it.

‘Less get outa here, JL!’ The deeply accented voice of Kris Galasckja, the Polish rear gunner, came through raspingly on the intercom.

‘You say that every trip.’

‘I mean it every trip.’

‘OK. Hold on.’

I pushed the nose down to pick up a little speed, then turned the plane through forty-five degrees to port, away from the inferno below. I closed the bomb doors, feeling the plane seem to fly itself as the aerodynamic characteristics improved once more.

‘What now, JL? Home?’ It was Kris again.

‘Not yet. We’ve got to go round one more time.’

‘You joking, skip?’

‘Yeah. Relax. But we’ve got to get out of this place.’

Anyone see what we hit?’ said Sam Levy, who had no outside visibility from the curtained-off cubicle where his navigation table was placed.

Just then there was a loud explosion directly beneath the nose of the aircraft. I was thrown back from the controls and fell sideways to the floor of the cockpit, my left leg twisted painfully in the straps. The plane rolled to the left, tipped over, started to dive. I heard the note of the engine change, as if an invisible pilot had taken my place and was making us accelerate towards the ground. For a moment I was so shaken by the suddenness with which everything collapsed around me that I lay immobile. I was thinking, It’s happened! This is it! We’ve been shot down!

My leather flying helmet was still on, although it was wrenched back uncomfortably in some perplexing way across the crown of my head. Somebody was yelling on the intercom - I could hear the sound of the voice through the headphones, but because the helmet had moved I couldn’t make out the words. The connection clicked to an even more shocking silence. My left arm was immovable because of the pain - there was some kind of wetness running down my forehead from under the flap of the helmet. I thought, I’ve been hit in the head! I’m bleeding to death! I managed to shift position, got my right arm free and brushed the top of my head with my hand. It was sore but seemed intact. The blood continued to flow. I pulled at my helmet to straighten it, yanking it forward over whatever the wound was. There was a jab of intense pain from the damage up there, but after that I couldn’t feel anything.

The plane rocked again, tipping the other way, left wing up, momentarily recovering stability. It was nothing I was doing: the controls were out of my reach and I was in too much pain to move. However, the change in the aircraft’s attitude suddenly cancelled the centrifugal force from the spin. Before it started again I levered myself up. I put my weight on my right elbow, rolled to the side, then managed to get my good leg under me. With a further agonizing struggle I was able to clamber back into my seat at the controls. It was easier like that: I could favour the left side of my body, where most of the damage had been done. I could hardly see out of the windscreen ahead: something had burst through it, starring it and opaquing it. A jet of icy air came straight in at me.

I put on full opposite flaps and to my immense relief the plane began to pull out of the turning dive. The stick felt as if it weighed a ton, but by bracing my right leg on the rudder I managed to hold it back as I corrected the spin, fighting the G-force of the recovery from the dive.

I could see something flapping on the upper fuselage in front of the cockpit, but couldn’t make out what it was. As the plane first levelled out then swung upwards in its trajectory, recovering some of the lost height, I began a frantic cockpit check. Engines both still running, though the oil pressure in the port engine was below normal. No fires anywhere that the instruments could detect. Controls stiff but working; the plane was yawing to the left, which I could correct with the rudder. Coolant low. Electrics OK.

Crew? At the same time as I was going through the emergency checklist I shouted to the others to report back.

Nothing from Ted Burrage, who was in the damaged nose. Nothing from Lofty Skinner, who had been behind me; nothing from Sam Levy, behind where Lofty had been. Col Anderson said he was OK. Lofty responded on my second try. He said he was helping Kris with Sam, who appeared to have been hit badly.

We flew on, crossing the German coast, over the dark North Sea, looking for home. The plane was losing height as the port engine was not generating full power. I had to keep throttling it back to prevent it overheating. Soon it was inevitable that we were going to have to ditch. Sam Levy and I were still in the plane when it crashed, but we somehow made it out of the aircraft and into a dinghy. I think the others bailed out before we hit. Sam and I floated around on the choppy sea for many hours before we were rescued.