Bomber Flight Berlin by Mike Rossiter

Author:Mike Rossiter [Rossiter, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781407082882
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2010-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

11

THE NEXT FIVE MISSIONS

AFTER GEOFF AND the crew’s successful fulfilment of their first mission on 23 September 1943, two operations were cancelled because of bad weather over the targets, but they were called off very late on both days. It was unsettling to go through the preparations and the rising expectation of an imminent take-off and then have to stand down. It made everybody tense.

Four days after the raid on Mannheim, 27 September, a raid on Hanover was announced at the morning briefing. There was always a stirring of fear as soon as the target was announced, and Geoff, the Skipper and everyone in their crew had more or less accepted that that would happen. The Skipper believed that it was a healthy reaction. Their missions were dangerous. Flying itself could be dangerous for the lazy, incompetent or complacent, and the Skipper had resolved that that would never affect him or his crew. Like everyone, he was determined to stay alive and he was going to drill into their heads that the best way to survive was to be vigilant and prepared for any emergency. The way to handle fear was to recognize it and understand that it existed for very good reasons, but not to become overwhelmed by it. Even after just one op, Geoff knew that they had only scraped the surface of what the future might hold for them. They had another thirty trips over enemy territory to carry out before their tour was over, and they all knew the statistics. They could look around the squadron and know, with an awful certainty, that some of these men would be dead, perhaps sooner rather than later. It might be them, but it was important not to dwell on it.

Years later, Geoff explained that there were a lot of other motives to take into consideration to understand why they did not succumb to fear. They had all volunteered and spent many months training and practising for this very job – flying a large, heavy bomber hundreds of miles over territory where enemy night fighters and anti-aircraft guns were determined to shoot them down. Their training had emphasized both the dangers they faced and the steps they could take to minimize them, whether it was breaking out of a cone of searchlights or going into a corkscrewing dive to evade a fighter. Combat was always a shock, because it was much more frightening and vivid than the training, but you came back from it knowing that it was possible to survive.

One thing they had discovered was that, being a new crew, they were assigned a different Lancaster for every op. The Skipper put a brave face on it, saying that he could fly anything, but it meant that there was little time to get to know the vagaries of the particular aircraft, or to establish a rapport with the mechanics and riggers. The spare aircraft that they were given also tended to be worn out, their engines in particular not quite as responsive and powerful as they could be.

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