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taste the salt. After their half-hearted debriefing onlanding at 3.30 pm, they waited for the next Feltwell aircraft to return. Yet by evening, none had come.
    As the rear section of the Wellington force, 37 Squadron were the first and easiest targets for the German fighters. The experiment with the ‘stepped down’ formation in pairs must be considered a failure, by results. Lemon had been flying as wingman to S/Ldr Hue-Williams. In the chaotic nightmare of the battle, as each bomber struggled for its own survival, men could spare only momentary glances for the plight of others. Peter Grant glimpsed Hue-Williams’s aircraft diving for the sea, starboard wing on fire. Hue-Williams’s second pilot was the same Appleby who drove so gaily to Monte Carlo with Grant that spring. There were no survivors.
    Just north of Wangerooge a second pair – Wimberley and Lewis – broke away westwards in an attempt to make a low-level escape for home over the sandbanks. They were at once spotted by Lieutenant Helmut Lent in his Me110. Lent had scrambled from Jever with his armourer still lying on the wing loading cannon shells into the magazines – the man was scarcely able to roll to the ground before Lent accelerated to take off. After one abortive beam attack on the blindspot of Wimberley’s Wellington, the impatient Lent closed astern and abruptly silenced the rear gunner. His second burst set fire to the aircraft, which dived and crashed in the sea close to Borkum Island. ‘Pete’ Wimberley was picked up by a German patrol boat, the only survivor. Lent turned in pursuit of Lewis, now struggling ten feet above the sea to escape in the same style as Lemon. The fighter pilot, unlike his colleague in the Me109 which attacked Lemon, made no mistake. After a single burst, the Wellington caught fire and broke up as it hit the water. There were no survivors. Lent later became one of the most celebrated German aces of the war.
    Herbie Ruse, concentrating on keeping formation with F/O Thompson as the middle pair of the 37 Squadron section, was oneof the few British pilots to drop bombs that day. Thompson opened his bomb doors, apparently on his own initiative, as they approached a German vessel a few miles west of Schillig Point. Ruse followed suit, and Tom May, himself a former seaman who had joined up during the Slump, took position forward by the bomb release. ‘He’s going for that ship!’ called May. ‘He’s going to overshoot!’ ‘Are you sure it’s naval?’ asked Ruse, as he struggled to hold the aircraft steady amidst a new surge of flak. Then as Thompson’s bombs fell away, May released their own. The aircraft rose as the weight vanished. They saw the sticks splash harmlessly into the sea at the same moment that Herbie Ruse spotted a German fighter underneath them ‘climbing like a lift’. Thompson put his nose down and dived steeply northwestwards, Ruse close behind him. The pilot of the leading Wellington had obviously decided that they must make a run for it on their own. Although Ruse instinctively regretted breaking away from the formation, 37 Squadron’s section was a straggling litter of aircraft. This might be their only hope.
    The Wellington was racing downwards at an incredible 300 mph, shaking in every rivet. Harry Jones was irrelevantly startled to see red roofs on the coast to port of them: ‘The roofs can’t be red!’ he muttered. ‘Those are German houses. We have red roofs in England.’ Then he saw a German fighter streaking towards them at a closing speed of more than 100 mph. ‘My God, isn’t it small!’ he thought, as so many thousands of air gunners would think in their turn in the next five years as the slim silhouette of the fighter swung in, guns winking, to attack. At 600 yards Jones touched his triggers. The Brownings fired single rounds and stopped. They were frozen. He tried to traverse the turret. It was jammed by the cold. Fighting with the cocking handles, he glimpsed Thompson’s