The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill Page A

final five, the reserve aircraft, did not take off till two hours later. By the time they arrived in the target area Gibson, if still alive, would know where to send them.

CHAPTER VII ATTACK

    GIBSON slid over the Wash at a hundred feet. The cockpit was hot and he was flying in his shirtsleeves with Mae West over the top; after a while he yelled, “Hey, Hutch, turn the heat off.”
    “Thank God for that,” the wireless operator said, screwing the valve shut. The heat in a Lancaster runs down the fuselage but comes out round the wireless operators’ seat, so he is always too hot, while the rear gunner is always too cold.
    The sun astern on the quarter threw long shadows on fields peaceful and fresh with spring crops ; dead ahead the moon was swimming out of the ground haze like a bullseye. Gibson flew automatically, eyes flicking from the horizon to the a.s.i., to the repeater compass in its rubber suspension.
    The haze of Norfolk passed a few miles to port. In the nose, Spafford said, “There’s the sea,” and a minute later they were low over Southwold, the shingle was beneath them, and then they were over the water, flat and grey in the evening light. England faded behind. “G George” dropped down to 50 feet, and on each side Martin and Hopgood came down too, putting off the evil moment when German radar would pick them up. You couldn’t put it off indefinitely; about twenty miles from the Dutch coast the blips would be flicking on the radar screens and the orders would be going out to the flak batteries and fighter fields.
    Martin ranged up alongside and there was a light winking as he flashed his Aldis lamp at them.
    “What’s he saying, Hutch?” Gibson asked.
    “We’re going to get screechers tomorrow night.” Hutchinson picked up his own Aldis and winked back, “You’re darned right. Biggest binge of all time.” Hutchinson didn’t drink. Terry Taerum, Gibson’s navigator, spoke: “Our ground speed is exactly 2031/2 miles an hour. We will be there in exactly one hour, ten minutes and thirty seconds. We ought to cross the coast dead on track. Incidentally, you’re one degree off course.” The last part was the standing joke. The pilot who can fly without sometimes yawing a degree or so off course has yet to be born.
    In the ops. room of 5 Group H.Q. at Grantham, Cochrane was walking Barnes Wallis up and down, trying to comfort him. Wallis was fidgety and jittery, and Cochrane was talking of anything but the bomb, trying to get Wallis’s mind off it, but Wallis could think of nothing else.
    “Just think what a wonderful job you made of the Wellington,” Cochrane said encouragingly. “It’s a magnificent machine; been our mainstay for over three years.”
    “Oh dear, no,” lamented the disconcerting scientist. “Do you know, every time I pass one I wonder how I could ever have designed anything so crude.”
    A black Bentley rushed up the gravelled drive outside, pulled up by the door and the sentries snapped rigidly to attention as Harris himself jumped briskly out. He came into the ops. room. “How’s it going, Cocky?”
    “All right so far, sir,” Cochrane said. “Nothing to report yet.” They walked up and down the long room between the wall where the aircraft blackboards were and the long desks that ran down the other side, where men were sitting. Satterly was there, “The Gremlin,” the intelligence man and Dunn, chief signals officer, sitting by a telephone plugged in to the radio in the signals cabin outside. He would get all the Morse from the aircraft there; it was too far for low-flying planes to get through by ordinary speech.
    Harris and Cochrane talked quietly, and Wallis was walking miserably with them but not talking, breaking away every now and then to look at the big operations map on the end wall. The track lunes had been pencilled in and he was counting off the miles they should be travelling. It was 10.35 when Cochrane looked at his watch and said, “They ought