Armageddon - Max Hastings [231]
The people who fight wars are customarily referred to as “men.” Yet in truth, irrespective of their ages, most of those engaged in combat behaved, thought and talked as boys—exuberant and emotional, careless and naive. “Dear Mom,” a pilot of the 95th Bomb Group, Harry Conley, wrote home.
No air battle manufactured in Hollywood can approach the thrills and sights of the real thing. They rarely last over half an hour, but the thrills of a lifetime are contained in that short space of time. It’s a funny reaction. I sit there flying my airplane and I can hear and feel all my boys’ guns going off. The only enemy planes I can see are those coming from the front or side, and I can see whatever flak appears in those regions. You sit there quite calmly and watch the flak explode around you in little puffs of black smoke . . . as if it were a movie. Then a couple of hours after you are back on the ground, it begins to dawn on you, and it is then that you get properly scared. The German boys are marvellous pilots and really have guts.
On 4 November 1944, the crews of 408 Squadron Royal Canadian Air Force prepared to fly from Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire, on one of Bomber Command’s great night raids against Germany’s cities. A force of 384 Halifaxes, 336 Lancasters and 29 Mosquitoes was to attack Bochum. The 408 Squadron was scheduled to take off at 1600, but to the bitter frustration of the crews bad weather caused repeated postponements. David Sokoloff’s crew were specially tense, because it was the thirteenth trip of their tour. “We had to hang around the Halifax, F-Freddie, checking and re-checking for something to do, smoking cig after cig in the clammy half-dark of the English winter evening,” wrote the nineteen-year-old bomb-aimer, Alan Stables from British Columbia. Dave Hardy, the rear gunner from Saskatoon, felt nervous and gloomy. Jon Sargent, the navigator, an accountant from British Columbia, said: “Why the hell don’t the bastards scrub it in this weather?” Their spirits were further depleted by a friendly visit from the base’s Catholic chaplain.
The planes finally took off at 1930, carrying fourteen tons of fuel and bombs, slipping into the familiar routine: “Lock throttles—adjust pitch on the starboard outer—wheels up and locked—synchronise engines—adjust trim tabs—throttle back to climbing boost.” “Sok,” the pilot, always worried about putting his chocolate too close to the heating outlet, where it would melt. He was a twenty-four-year-old Londoner who had been studying architecture at Yale in 1939. He went north to Montreal to join up, which is how he now found himself captaining a Canadian crew. He was dismayed to find the aircraft struggling to reach operational height, a familiar problem with Halifaxes, whose ceiling was 2,000 feet below that of the Lancs. Sok told Stables to ditch part of their bombload, a practice which infuriated Bomber Command’s senior officers, but was commonplace in some squadrons.
F-Freddie gained 1,000 feet, but the plane was still 5,000 feet below the bomber stream’s designated