Read Bomber Command for Free Online Page A

Wellington sliding by beneath them, its tail shot to pieces. Its rear turret had simply disappeared, and with it Jones’s friend Len Stock, a little instrument-repairer from North London. There were no survivors from Thompson’s aircraft.
    Jones was still wrestling with his guns when the fighter camein again. There was a violent explosion in the turret and a savage pain in his ankle and back. ‘Skip, I’ve been hit!’ he called down the intercom. ‘Can you do anything back there? No? Then for God’s sake get out of the turret,’ answered Ruse. Jones dragged himself up the fuselage towards the rest bed, half-conscious, with his back scored by one bullet, his ankle shattered by a second. The Wellington I was equipped with a bizarre mid-under turret known to the crews as ‘the dustbin’. Because of its fierce drag on the aircraft’s speed in the firing position, it was lowered only in action. Now Tom Holly, the wireless operator, was struggling to bring it to bear as the Messerschmitts raked the Wellington yet again. Fred Taylor bent over Harry Jones, morphia in hand, trying to lift his leg on to the rest bed. A burst smashed through the port side of the fuselage, shattering Taylor’s head and back. Jones had persuaded the quiet northern boy to put aside his wartime scruples and get married only a few weeks before. Now Taylor collapsed on him, dying. The next burst caught Tom Holly as he struggled to pull himself out of the dustbin turret, jammed and useless. Hit in the face and side, Holly fell dead, draped half in, half out of the gun position.
    Herbie Ruse could smell the cordite from the explosions in the fuselage, and feel the Wellington being cut to pieces as he laboured to keep it in the air, still diving towards the sea with the revolutions counter gone mad and the engines in coarse pitch. Calmly, he wound back the actuating wheel controlling the aircraft’s trim, so that if he himself was hit and fell from the controls, the Wellington should automatically seek to recover from the dive. Then the elevator controls collapsed, and he knew that the aircraft was doomed. Beside him Tom May fought to help pull back the control column. Jones, lying behind them, was astounded to see a burst of fire tear up the floor between May’s legs as he stood straddled in the cockpit. May was hit only once, slightly wounded in the buttock. They saw the sand dunes of an island rushing up to meet them. It was Borkum, just a few miles east of neutral Dutch waters. With a grinding, wrenching, protracted shriek of metal and whirlwind of sparks from the frozen ground beneath, Rusebrought the Wellington to rest. There were a few seconds of merciful silence. May jettisoned the canopy and jumped down. Ruse was about to follow when he heard Jones’s painful cry: ‘I’m trapped!’ As flames began to seep up the fuselage, Ruse hoisted Jones off the floor. ‘My God, you’re heavy, Jonah,’ he complained. Then he half-dragged, half-carried the gunner out of the wrecked aircraft. The three men lay silent, in pain and exhaustion behind a dune in the sandy, frozen waste as their aircraft burned. At last a German patrol arrived to greet them with the time-honoured cliché: ‘For you the war is over!’ The rear section of the Wellington formation had ceased to exist.
    It is a measure of the fierceness of the struggle that continued for almost thirty minutes around Kellett’s Wellingtons that of those aircraft which survived, 9 Squadron claimed six certain ‘kills’ and six ‘probables’ among the German fighters, 149 Squadron the same, and Lemon of 37 Squadron a single. Their turrets were strewn with cartridge cases, their wings, tanks and fuselages holed repeatedly. Almost all had jettisoned their bombs in the sea. Three aircraft remained of the leading section under Kellett. The port and rear sections had vanished entirely. On the starboard side, Sergeant Ramshaw was still tucked in underneath, streaming fuel, while immediately