Lost in the Flames by Chris Jory

Author:Chris Jory [Christopher Jory]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857160782
Publisher: McNidder and Grace Limited
Published: 2015-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

A hundred miles away in Suffolk, the Dog was bombed up and ready to go when Jacob took his place between Ralph and Charlie in the briefing room that afternoon. As the intelligence officer strode to the front to address the skulls, the blinds fell across the windows and the officer said in a loud decisive voice, ‘The target for tonight, gentlemen, is Hamburg. And tonight, believe me, is a big one.’

Something between a cheer and a groan rippled across the room and the projector hummed its beam upon the screen and the intelligence officer outlined the night’s work. Later that evening, Hairy Mary set the truck in gear and it pulled away across the airfield. Jacob sat in the back with Ralph and the others and another crew that had arrived the previous day and whose names he knew it would be a waste of time to learn just now, best wait and see if they were still there in the morning. Jacob watched the new men as they sat in the dark and he recalled the numb thoughts he had had in the moments before his first trip, thoughts he knew would be numbing them now. The weather had been hot and oppressive for days, the air growing heavy, building towards an almighty storm, and he sat sweating in his flying kit, knowing that when they reached cruising height the sweat would have chilled and his oxygen mask would be cool to the touch and still smelling of sick as he strapped it back on.

Approaching the German coast, Jacob crouched beside his flare chute, hemmed in by bales of aluminium strips, and he chucked them out in bundles at regular intervals, and as bombers across the stream did likewise the sky became a swirling mass of foil strips, throwing a protective sea of blips across the sky, shielding the bombers from the German radar operators and the night-fighters. A new navigational aid, H2S, showed the German coast in rough outline on a small screen in Charlie’s navigator’s compartment and Jacob sensed a confidence in Charlie’s tone as he rolled instructions down the intercom to Ralph and in the nose of the plane, lying on his belly, Jacob watched the outline of the coast slip by as Ralph turned the bomber down the mouth of the Elbe towards the port city of Hamburg. The target was already erupting when they arrived and Jacob let the bombs go and watched pricks of light, orange and white and red, bubble up as high-explosive bombs blew the walls apart and he knew the incendiaries were showering down too onto the roofless, windowless buildings, bursting magnesium and phosphorous and petroleum jelly and burning rubber around the vicinity of their impact, facilitating the dispersal of fire and flame, and Don reported later that he could still see the city burning a hundred miles behind them as they sped home through the short summer night.

The following day, Jacob and the others sat in exhausted silence

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