his mind and stood stupidly, shielding his face with his hand against the heat. A few more seconds and the whole front end of the crate was going up.
People came running from all directions; it seemed like everybody on the whole airfield. In the distance, the warning sound of ambulance and fire engine. But some way off the fire engine stalled; they said afterwards the plugs oiled up . . .
Everyone stood and gaped. Especially when the voice started. The German voice, right here in the middle of an English airfield. Leutnant Dieter Gehlen, having his last fine careless rapture. And he might have claimed his last victims then, because several erks made crazy attempts at rescue. But the Wimpey was too far gone, aflame from nose to tail. And the voice grew so loud, it echoed round the mist-filled airfield; more than human, essentially the voice from a radio, distorted and full of static crackle.
‘Bullfinch Three to Bullfinch . . . port wing on fire. Get the hatch open, Meissner . . .’
They backed away as the crate turned into a torch in which nothing human could have lived. Yet the voice still grew louder and louder.
‘Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!’
Then the screaming; terrible, familiar.
‘What is it?’ shouted the WO, to no one in particular. ‘My God, what is it?’
An aircraft’s fabric doesn’t take long to burn through. Within another minute, S-Sugar was a blackened skeleton, filled with black blobs. There was no big bang. The front guns fired two rounds as the heat reached them; then the four guns in the tail – fortunately aimed only at the earth bank of the dispersal-pan – got off a long burst all on their own. There were individual flame-ups of flares and glycol; then, for a short time, the near-empty petrol tanks kept us lively.
And still the German voice bellowed on, out of the blackened skeleton. The ghost of Dieter Gehlen, born in flame, was consumed in flame. If the life of a happy man flickers like a candle for seventy years and gutters out, the short life of Dieter Gehlen burned out like a rocket. All that assembled crowd, the aircrew especially, knew then what had done for Blackham and Reaper and Edwards. But I don’t think that ground-crew WO knows to this day.
At last, silence. He was gone. All that guts, all that energy, all that faith in an evil, unworthy cause. All that hatred of the Britische Terrorflieger. I like to think he baled out before the bitter end, and landed at the Pearly Gates, and got a halo for mistaken effort. But I doubt it.
‘They shouldn’t have laughed at him,’ said Dadda softly, to himself. ‘They shouldn’t have laughed at him.’
At this point old Groupie turned up in his jeep. He asked a few questions, didn’t bother waiting for the answers and had our whole crew placed under close arrest. There was a sort of low rumble from the assembled aircrews that suggested, even to Groupie, that he hadn’t particularly improved the shining hour.
We were questioned closely. Dadda admitted to lighting a fresh fag from a dog-end inside the crate, and maybe being a bit careless when he disposed of the dog-end. But there was too much flak flying round the station for Groupie not to know that something was up. Over the next twelve hours we were frantically marched here and there, which was a bit rough, though nothing like as bad as doing an op. Especially as every time we went out, we got more cheers than the last time. And we heard that Groupie was having the same experience, only with boos and catcalls.
Then Groupie brought in all kinds of guys to ask us questions; the coldest-smiling top brass RAF police I’d ever seen. If they’re that terrifying, why aren’t they out in North Africa, scaring the Germans? There were also technical experts, pretty in well-pressed blues, and a couple of civvies who I think were trick-cyclists. We stuck to our story: nothing. Dadda stuck to his fag-end. We spent a lot of time reading old comics and polishing kit that hadn’t been polished since we got there. Meanwhile, the cheering and jeering got worse, and the adjutant ill-advisedly uttered the word ‘mutiny’.
Groupie had us in one last time, late that night, and began going on about LMF. Dadda looked at him in a way even Groupie found hard to take. They went on staring and staring at each other till the WAAF stenographer