The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill

15-stone Yank had found his own Lancaster, “Q for Queenie,” out of action with leaking hydraulics, rushed his crew over to the spare plane, “T for Tom,” and found the little card giving the compass deviations missing from it. No hope of accurate flying without it. If McCarthy had met one of the instrument people then he would probably have strangled him.
    Chiefy Powell had gone running into the instrument section and found the missing card. He dashed up to McCarthy shouting, “Here it is, sir,” and McCarthy grabbed it, well behind schedule now, and turning to run back to the truck, scooped up his parachute from the tarmac where he’d thrown it, but his hand missed the canvas loop handle and he yanked it up by the D-ring of the rip-cord. The pack flaps sprang back in a white blossom as the silk billowed out and trailed after him, and he let out a roar of unbearable fury.
    Powell was running for the crew room, but McCarthy snarled, “I’ll go without one.” He jumped into the truck but before the driver could move off Powell came running up with another parachute, and McCarthy grabbed it through the cabin and shot off across the field. There was a swelling roar from the south side; Munro’s Lancaster was rolling, picking up speed, and then it was low in the air, sliding over the north boundary, tucking its wheels up into the big inboard nacelles. Less than a minute later, as McCarthy got to his aircraft, Rice was rolling too, followed by Barlow and Byers.
    At precisely 9.25, Gibson in “G for George.” Martin in “P for Popsie,” and Hopgood, in “M for Mother,” punched the buttons of the booster coils and the wisps of blue smoke spurted as the engines whined and spun explosively, first the port inners, the starboard inners, the port outers and the starboard outers. They were going through their cockpit drill while the crews settled at take-off stations, running the engines up to zero boost and testing the magnetoes. A photographer’s flash-bulb went off by Gibson’s aircraft; Cochrane was there too, standing clear of the slipstream. Fay stood by “P Popsie,” waggling her fingers encouragingly at the crew.
    “G for George” waddled forward with the shapeless bulk under its belly, taxied to the south fence, swung its long snout to the north and waited, engines turning quietly. “P Popsie” turned slowly in on the left, and “M Mother” on the right. Gibson rattled out the monotonous orders of his final check.
    “Flaps thirty.”
    Pulford, the engineer, pumped down 30 degrees of flap and repeated, “Flaps thirty.”
    “Radiators open.”
    “Radiators open.”
    “Throttles locked.”
    Pulford checked the nut on the throttle unit.
    “Throttles locked.”
    “Prepare to take off,” Gibson said and checked through to all the crew on the intercom. “O.K., rear gunner?” “O.K.” And then all the others. He leaned forward with his thumb up, looking to left and then to right, and Martin and Hopgood raised their thumbs back. Pulford closed his hand over the four throttles and pushed till the engines deepened their note and the aircraft was throbbing… straining; then Gibson flicked his brakes off, there was the hiss of compressed air and they were rolling, all three of them, engineers sliding the throttles right forward.
    The blare of twelve engines slammed over the field and echoed in the hangar, the tails slowly came up as they picked up speed in a loose vie, ungainly with nearly 5 tons of bomb and over 5 tons of petrol each. Gibson held her down for a long time and the a.s.i. was flicking on no m.p.h. before he tightened back on the wheel and let her come unstuck after a long, slow bounce. At 200 feet they turned slowly on course with the sun low behind.
    McCarthy eased “T for Tom” off the runway twenty minutes late and set course on his own. At 9.47 Dinghy Young led Astell and Maltby off. Eight minutes after that Maudslay, Shannon and Knight were in the air. Anne waved them off. The