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altitude and ninety minutes short of target when Hardy in the rear turret yelled, “Fighter port—go!,” and they pitched into violent corkscrew evasive action. When they resumed their course, the gunner said he had seen a Ju-88, but it was gone. A nervous, jocular voice on the intercom said: “How many engines did it have?” Sok said briefly: “Cut the chatter.” They saw other aircraft around them catching fire and falling through the sky. Then oncoming tracer streaked up to meet F-Freddie and lashed into the wing. Stables, in the nose, closed his eyes and prayed. The engineer yelled: “Port engine on fire, skip, let’s get the hell out.” Sok said coolly: “Feathering port inner, hit the graviner switches, Dick, prepare to abandon aircraft everyone. Bomb doors open. Drop your bombs, bomb aimer.” The graviner switches released CO2 on to the engines, but this failed to extinguish the fire. The crew left their stations and went to the hatches. Sok threw the aircraft into a steep dive, to put out the fire. This was a terrifyingly risky manoeuvre. Sometimes it succeeded. Often, however, it created a blowtorch effect which melted the wing off the aircraft. The seven men in F-Freddie were lucky. Levelling off at 4,000 feet, they found that the fire was out.

The crew returned to their positions—except Hardy, the rear gunner. His turret was traversed sideways, and empty. He had bailed out—a wise move, for it was notoriously difficult for rear gunners to escape from a stricken aircraft. They set a course for home, hampered by the loss of all their maps and logs, which had been sucked out into the slipstream by the great blast of air that swept through the fuselage when the hatches were ditched. The main fuse panel had been destroyed by German fire. The fuel gauges and radar were gone. They suffered another moment of terror when the mid-upper gunner reported seeing two fighters, provoking Sokoloff to corkscrew again.

By late 1944, bomber crews possessed one huge asset for survival: if they were badly hit, they no longer had to struggle home across the North Sea, where so many met their ends earlier in the war. F-Freddie crash-landed on the flarepath at Brussels without flaps or brakes, bouncing so violently that the undercarriage collapsed. The aircraft skidded rasping on its belly past the end of the runway and over a ditch, earth exploding upwards into the fuselage through the shattered nose. It lurched to a stop seventy yards short of a cluster of houses. There was a mad scramble to get out before the aircraft caught fire, though mercifully there was no blaze. They counted a hundred holes in the aircraft. Later, Sok’s mother asked anxiously if the pilot would have to pay for the damage.

The exhausted and traumatized crew were taken by truck to the Imperial Hotel in Brussels. In addition to their own aircraft, twenty-nine others were lost by Bomber Command that night. A thousand people died in Bochum, where the steelworks was badly hit. After three weeks’ survivors’ leave, David Sokoloff’s crew returned to operations from Linton and flew a further twenty-three trips. Among every hundred RAF Bomber Command aircrew in the course of the war, fifty-one died on operations, nine were lost in crashes in En-gland, three seriously injured, twelve were taken prisoner, one was shot down and escaped capture, and just twenty-four completed a tour of operations. One night just before Sok’s crew were due to take off again, they found their new rear gunner drinking beer. If he ever did such a thing again, they said, they would kill him. Survival depended on luck, but also upon relentless vigilance through each minute of every hour that men braved the airspace over Germany.

From the autumn of 1944 onwards, Bomber Command conducted a growing number of daylight operations, alongside its night attacks. As the Luftwaffe’s powers declined, and with France and Belgium now in Allied hands, daylight “ops” offered a chance of more accurate bombing and reduced casualties. Daylight raids were initially conducted against easy targets. Most groups committed their