Against All Odds by P.J. Naworynski

Author:P.J. Naworynski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2017-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

Elsie Forbes gives her son Roy his wings.

Gary Forbes

ON THE RUN

10

At 22:20 on June 12, 1944, Roy Forbes sidled up beside his pilot and friend “Root” Lacey as Root steered their Lancaster bomber down the runway at Middleton, St. George. Roy liked to sit up front while the engines roared and the massive bomber pulled away from the earth and took to the skies. Once they were well on their way, Roy made his way down to his bomb aimer’s bay and lay in position so he could spot for the navigator, watch for night fighters, and prep for his bomb drop. This was their twelfth mission together. Lacey and Forbes were both prairie boys and had become fast friends and drinking buddies from the day they met, when they shared a Quonset hut in flight school many months before. Like Roy, Root was a farm boy, but he was a lot bigger than Roy, and he whipped the Lanc around like it was nobody’s business. When it was time to pick their crewmates, Roy and Root found a couple of likeable farm boys from Dauphin, Manitoba, to be their gunners. Their flight engineer was a Brit. Everyone else was Canadian.

The entire crew of seven was like a family. Ranks were a forgotten thing. The boys in the Lanc that was humming through the night sky towards the south of France loved each other like brothers. They drank together, they bunked together, and they fought together. Tonight their mission was to bomb the snot out of the rail yards at Cambrai.

At around midnight their bomber stream was high above a thick cloud cover and about an hour away from their target. As Forbes lay in the bomb aimer’s bay with his eyes scanning for enemy night fighters, the curtain of cloud suddenly opened. He called out to his skipper over the intercom, “Jeez, Root, look at that. There’s something down there.” Ten thousand feet below, in the blackness of night, the sea was lit up by the twinkling lights of hundreds of Allied ships that were also heading towards France. It was a bizarre and surreal sight of different coloured lights, some with crosses. The bomber stream was flying over an advancing fleet of reinforcements sent to burst through the Atlantic wall as part of the invasion of Normandy. After a few minutes the clouds closed in again and swallowed up the flotilla. About half an hour later their Lancaster began to make its way down to bombing height.

Amid a wailing barrage of ground fire from anti-aircraft guns, Lacey took the Lancaster in low. Accuracy was a must. Bomber Command wanted the boys to break everything up at the rail yards. They made it to their target, and from about a thousand feet up, Forbes unleashed hell on the infrastructure below. As they pulled up and started climbing for home, the massive German ground guns blew a hole in the wing. Two motors ignited in a wall of fire. In an instant, the fuselage and the engines were engulfed in flames.

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