Christopher Priest - The Separation

Ted Burrage suddenly came on the intercom. He was on the front guns.

‘Enemy aircraft below us, JL! Three o’clock. Approaching fast!’

‘How far below?’

‘A long way.’

‘Can you get a line on them?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Hold your fire for a moment . . . they might not have seen us!’

Then I saw the aircraft myself. They were at least two or three thousand feet beneath us, crossing our track, south to north. All were clearly visible against the grey plain of clouds below, lit by the last glow of evening light. The leading aircraft was twin-engined. It looked to me like a Messerschmitt Me-110, a guess that was almost instantly confirmed by others in the crew as they also spotted it. Behind it were four single-engined fighters, Me-109s, flying much faster, rapidly overhauling it. I could see Ted swinging his turret round in the nose of the Wellington, bringing his guns to bear, but within seconds it was obvious that none of the Luftwaffe planes was interested in us.

The fighters were diving on the Me-110. I saw tracer or cannon fire flickering across the short space between them. They hit the plane on their first run. One of the Me-110’s tanks exploded with a spectacular burst of flame, throwing the aircraft on to its back. Immediately, the Me-109s swung away, turning sharply to each side of the stricken plane. There was a second explosion and this time part of the wing fell away. The plane had lost flying speed and was diving, upside-down, towards the sea. It plummeted into the cloudbase. All I could see of it for another second was an orange diffusion of flame, but then that too disappeared.

The Me-109s continued their sweeping turns, diving down towards the cover of the clouds, heading back to the south, the way they had come. They took no notice of us.

‘Bloody hell!" Ted said. Then he said again, ‘Bloody hell! ’

‘What was all that about?’

For a moment the intercom was full of voices. Sam Levy and Kris Galasckja had not been able to see what was going on. Lofty, Colin and Ted were describing what we’d seen. I was trying to yell at them to stay on watch. When we were over the North Sea we were never far from enemy aircraft.

As if to underline the point I saw more German aircraft coming towards us. This time they were travelling east to west and were about a mile away from us on the left.

I shouted to the gunners to be ready. ‘More bandits! About nine o’clock!’

‘Got them, JL!’ Ted shouted. ‘They’re the same ones!’

‘Couldn’t be. The 109s buggered off as soon as they’d hit the 110.’

‘No, I think Ted’s right!’ It was Lofty, who had come into the cockpit beside me, standing up, peering through the canopy over my shoulder.

I took another look. Once again, the aircraft were silhouetted against the grey cloudbase; once again an Me-110 was flying fast and low against the surface of the clouds, with a small section of single-engined fighters behind him, in hot pursuit.

‘What the devil are the Jerries up to?’

‘Don’t fire,’ I ordered the gunners. ‘They’re not interested in us. Don’t change things.’

I saw the 109s turning in for an attack, in two groups of two, one following the other. They peeled off in a sharp turn, flew broadside at the 110, their tracer glittering like jewels, curling around the Me-110. The pilot dived sharply, banked away, reversed the bank, swooped down. The 109s recovered from their attacking pass and swept around for another try. Now the 110 was in a steep dive towards the clouds. Tracer curled towards it.

I could hardly see because our flight was taking us beyond the battle. Lofty moved down the fuselage, went to one of the side windows.

‘I still can’t see anything, JL!’ he reported.

‘Kris?’ I shouted. ‘Are you watching back there?’

‘You bet. Rear gunner has the best seat. Germans attacking Germans. Good stuff!’

‘Did they shoot him down?’

‘Nah . . . they miss. Then they turn away. The 110 was in the cloud and I think it went on.’

Lofty returned to the cockpit and was standing behind me again, crouching forward.

‘Do you get it, skip?’ he said. ‘What were they doing?’

‘Haven’t the faintest. We were sitting ducks, but they went after one of their own. Or two of their own.’

Sam Lew came on. ‘Do you want a position fix, JL?’

‘Yeah, where are we?’

"A couple of hundred miles from the German coast and about two hundred and sixty from Denmark.’

‘Why Denmark?"

‘That was the direction the second lot came from.’

‘They could have come from Germany, though.’

‘Either way, they would have been at the limit of their range. That’s why they didn’t hang around out here. The 109s would be watching their fuel.’

‘OK, everyone,’ I said. ‘Keep your eyes open. We’ve got our own work to do.’

As the darkness finally deepened, the Wellington ploughed on slowly through the gentle air. An hour later we approached the German coast under a full moon, to the west of Cuxhaven. The nervous banter on the intercom died out as we crossed the coastline. Light flak surged up, a long way to the side of us. We watched the glow-worms of tracers, climbing, climbing. A solitary searchlight came on, the familiar bluish dazzle, breaking through the now intermittent clouds. It probed around for about a minute, then went off. We were flying at thirteen thousand feet, the highest altitude we could attain with the fuel- and bomb-load we were carrying.

We were now over Germany and anything could happen. I started jinking the plane, putting it into a long, steady rolling motion, side to side, tilting and swinging defensively, a corkscrew manoeuvre that would in theory prevent night fighters from getting an easy line on us. It had worked so far. The gunners reported tensely every minute or so: there was nothing going on that they could see, no planes around us, no searchlights, the cloud was light, visibility good. A bomber’s moon. The dark ground spread out below, marked in places by tightly etched lines of moonlight reflected back from canals, ponds, stretches of river. Lofty Skinner, flight engineer, took the seat beside me, keeping a watch on the engines, the coolant pressures, the hydraulics. He rarely spoke.

We were flying on dead reckoning: a series of timed course changes, calculated before departure and constantly updated by Sam Levy, navigator. He led us to a position north of the German town of Celle (fierce flak briefly came up around us), before we turned through more than a hundred degrees and took a heading on Lüneburg. I went on the intercom, warning everyone that we were a few minutes away from the target. Now we were flying almost due north, with Hamburg less than fifty miles ahead of us. We were looking for a distinctive curve in the River Elbe near Lüneburg.

Ted Burrage, our bomb aimer, had left the front turret and crawled into the belly of the Wellington, lying on his stomach, watching the ground through the perspex pane behind the nose. He yelled up to me when he saw the river. It edged into sight from my blind-spot, directly in front of and below the cockpit: a silvery worm of reflected moonlight, visible for miles. We moved in on Hamburg.

Soon the flak began in earnest and the searchlights came on. Tracer bullets snaked up from below, no longer drifting harmlessly away, miles to the side of us, but targeted on us. Searchlight beams crossed and re-crossed ahead, groping for bombers. As they swept around we caught glimpses of other aircraft in the stream. Every now and again one of the aircraft would be briefly lit from below, but managed to slip away without being coned.

‘I have the target in view,’ came from Ted, lying in the nose of the aircraft, his hands on the bomb release.