Ask and ye shall recieve....
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO - Part Two
Through adversities we'll conquer.
Blaze into the stars,
A trail of glory
We'll live on land and sea
'Til victory is won.
Men in blue the skies are winging
In each heart one thought is ringing.
Fight for the right,
God is our might,
We shall be free
RAF March
RAF Kimbolton
Huntingdon
Cambridgeshire, England
June 14, 1940
1751 hrs, Greenwich Mean Time
Flight Lieutenant Jackson Dysart strode into the ready room for No. 686 Squadron, his squadron, following the conclusion of the briefing at Wing Headquarters for this night’s combined Command raid upon Berlin. Despite the shakes he had experienced in the Command briefing earlier that morning, he was feeling ready, almost eager to get into the air and conduct his mission of death and destruction upon the German capital’s industrial areas. Walking to the counter to receive his parachute and his Mae Wests from the Flight Corporal in charge, Dysart glanced about and saw the three command pilots that made the rest of his flight, the red-headed English boy with the two-weeks'-old mustache named Carson, and the two Australians Irwin and Dundee, standing by an open window that over looked the flight line. Carson, flying only his second combat mission was casting envious glances at the calm banter exchanged between the Australians, each of whom had flown more than ten combat missions over Germany. Grabbing his gear from the Flight Corporal and signing the D-17 Form, Dysart sauntered over and broke the scene with a snicker,
“Don’t let them fool you, Timmy, they’re all bluster. It wasn’t two weeks ago that Mick there was fouling his cockpit after a Me-110 buzzed by, and the week before that Sandy and his co-pilot Michealson nearly came to blows arguing who was hit and bleeding after a flak shell blew up Sandy’s thermos bottle of tomato soup.”
“Ah, Jack,” Dundee retorted in his Australian drawl,
"you are mixing it up, it was Steve’s thermos of tomato soup, not mine.”
Rolling his eye while casting a sly wink to a visibly less tense Carson, Dysart raised his hands and bowed slightly in mock supplication,
“Pray forgive me, oh great airman from Down Under.”
Amidst the chuckles at the scene being carried out, Dysart struggled into his flight gear in time for a WAAF to step into the door way and announce,
“Your lift to the flight line is waiting, sirs.”
The mood in the ready room quickly chilled at the announcement, however, not because of the words, but for the voice that delivered the news. Since the war began, every RAF station had its ‘Chop Girl’, a WAAF who had been friendly with a succession of airmen who had subsequently gone missing or ‘got the chop’. These women became quite miserable and could do nothing about their unwanted reputations. No aircrew members would even talk to them, let alone date them. To do so would be to sign their own death warrants. In this case, the WAAF who delivered the news was Kimbolton’s Chop Girl, a young lady by the name of Jenny McIntire.
While not normally a man to fall prey to superstitions, Dysart had seen to much war to not be a convert to goddess Luck, who very early in every war begins to gather her converts. This war was no different, and it was not surprising that men who fly should be amongst the most superstitious, or those most ready to believe in a lucky talisman of one kind or another. They were defying death, darkness, the enemy, the elements, and gravity, which put together created a truly a formidable combination. While Dysart was normally a gallant ladies man, with six aircrews lost after having being showered with affection by McIntire, even he had begun looking for ways to avoid running into the path of the young WAAF. Still, his parents raised him to be at least polite, so he alone was able to reply.
“Thanks, luv,” he replied somewhat stiffly.
With a slight tremor showing in her check, the WAAF nodded and simply turned on her heel and walked away. Several seconds later the ready room collectively let out a sigh and then began filing out the door toward the awaiting bus. The last one out the door, Dysart paused and cast a look in McIntire’s direction and shook his head sadly at her retreating form.
“Such a shame,” he muttered.
“The lass is a beauty. What a damn waste.”
A fruity Australian oath intruded into his musings.
“Better you go without, Jack,” Irwin said from a few feet away, his Australian accent coming across aggressively.
“I’d rather be celibate than take a roll with that one and end up flying a coffin named Halifax into the ground!”
“Aye, there is that to consider, Mick,” Dysart said with a grim chuckle. Tossing his thoughts aside with nothing more than a mental shrug, he boarded the bus and grabbed a hand hold as the driver put the vehicle into gear and lurched toward the flight line and the waiting bombers.
As the driver dropped first Carson then Dundee and finally Irwin at each pilot’s waiting Halifax and their flight crews, Dysart thought once more to some of the things that aircrews did for good luck. Before upgrading to the new four-engine heavies they were flying now, several members of Dysart’s squadron flew with the engines of their old Whitleys de-synchronized, believing that the de-synchronization rendered German searchlights ineffective. Despite there being no grounds for this belief and simply making the entire airframe vibrate appallingly, crews continued the practice. Pulling up in front of his Halifax, Dysart stepped of lightly and smiled at his crew as they waited for him to join them in the traditional pre-flight custom of ‘Watering the Wheel’, urinating together against their bomber’s tail wheel for luck.
“All ready, Jock,” Dysart asked his Scots tail gunner, who at the age of twenty-nine was the eldest member of his crew.
“Aye, skipper,” Jock Mason cheerfully replied as he began to unbutton his flight coveralls. Joining the crew, Dysart unbuttoned his own flight suit and seconds later the tradition was completed, with David Nelson, the navigator, winning a free round of drinks from the rest of the crew for finishing last.
“Alright lads, you all know you jobs so I shan’t bore you with a lecture.”
“Oh, skipper, don’t feel obligated to refrain yourself, we your humble crew love the lectures you provide us,” a New Zealand accented voice chuckled. Grinning at his rangy, satirical-faced co-pilot, Dysart replied sweetly,
“For a comment like that Harvey, you can pay for my round to Dave.”
“Well worth the cost, skipper,” Harvey Cooper replied while winking at the rest of the flight crew and fulfilling a tradition created by Dysart’s crew after their fifth successful mission together. Looking up at the big matte black painted four engined Halifax, “D for Danny”, Dysart felt a surge of pride at the sight before signaling his crew to disperse and begin their last pre-flight check. As they finished a small NAAFI (Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes) lorry pulled from in front of the bomber to their left, Mick Irwin’s “L for Lass”, arrived to provide a thermos bottle of coffee and soup, chewing gum, an orange, an apple, and a chocolate bar for each man. As the NAAFI girls winked at the crew and got back in their lorry to move on to the next plane, Dysart gestured and each man quickly scrambled aboard with the assistance of the bomber’s ground crew.
All across the aerodrome the scene was one of robust activity as aircraft were beginning to have their engines cranked to life by the attending ground crews. Senior enlisted men, the backbone of any armed force, were yelling orders and growling at young airmen they thought were moving lackadaisical, men were rushing about to give life to the awaiting bombers, and one by one, with their unmistakable growling coughs, the huge Bristol Hercules XVI radial engines fired off and roared into life at one dispersal point after the other.
Receiving word from the control tower that it was time, the bombers began pulling from their dispersal points and forming a long queue around the perimeter track to the end of the runway. After several minutes it was the turn of D-Danny, and following the flash of a green light from atop the control tower, Dysart and Cooper eased the throttle controls forward and the big bomber began rolling down the runway. Struggling against the Halifax’s full combat weight of fifty-four thousand four hundred pounds the two pilots held the bomber on the ground as it raced further and further down the runway, and then, as if eager to be free of the constraints of the land, the Halifax smoothly eased itself into the air.
Working the controls to raise the wheels up, as Dysart put their aircraft into the long climb through the scattered clouds into the place where men must breath pure oxygen to live, Cooper called over the intercom,
“That’s wheels up, lads. Ten seconds ahead of schedule. Reggie, who had that time in the pool?”
“Ah, that would, Rob,” D-Danny’s bombardier, Reginald Gilmour replied as he checked the betting pool held among the flight crews for take off time.
“That’s the fifth in a row, skipper, are you sure Rob’s not fixing things somehow?”
“Yer jus’ jealous of me affinity fer me engines,” the Scots flight engineer/wireless operator Robert Stewart called from behind Dysart and Cooper. After the answering chuckles died off Dysart became business like.
“Alright lads, lets get into the mood, shall we? Let’s start equipment tests, and Dave get us ready for insertion to the stream.”
Looking out his cockpit window, Dysart watched as more and more bombers rose up from the airfields around southeastern England, and as they did so, the sun began it’s long descent toward the far horizon. Its red glow made lakes and mighty rivers of fire atop the cloud base and cast red tint upon the clouds that were piling up to form castles, battlements and whole cities thousands of feet above the ground. Casting one last glance down and below at the safety of the English countryside, Dysart cast a silent prayer heavenward that he and his crew would survive their latest venture against the enemies of the British Empire.
**
Up next: The mission continues...
But that time is past, unfortunately.
