Briefly, it happened something like this: the ship was cruising in such
a nonchalant manner that the navigator and I started an argument
(which had better not be quoted in this book) as to whether the ship did
not belong to our Northern Fleet. Having settled that it did not, we drew
away from it—my navigator's favourite way of doing the job—then
banked steeply to port and made straight for the target.
It's a pity I can't give a drawing of the rather intricate stunt I had to
perform in order to drop my torpedo as accurately as possible. I had to
make a second run-up, as my first attack was unsuccessful. Then we
started to creep away. Creep is the word, because, as it soon became
clear, the Germans had not lost time either.
During my first target run the gunner had shouted: 'Cabin full o'
smoke!'
We felt three jarring shocks during my second run, but there was no
time to think of that, as I was already on top of the raider, my teeth
clenched. Now, however, I had enough time to realise that our aircraft
was crippled. Petrol and oil were siphoning away through holes and but
for the navigator, who set going a new gadget in the nick of time, we
would have been in flames long ago. The starboard propeller had
changed over, while we were still on the target, from a little pitch to a
big pitch, then to a very big one—a gigantic one, you might say.
We had our emergency boats, of course, and I could have ordered the
crew to bale out. But we had tested these boats near Archangel on a
quiet little inland lake, and had had to clamber out of the water,
shivering like dogs. And here we had below us an inhospitable, cold sea
covered with sludge ice.
I shall not list the brief reports concerning the state of the machine
which my crew made to me. There were many of them, too many to my
liking. After one of them, a pretty gloomy one, the navigator asked:
'Sticking it out, Sanya?'
'You bet!'
We had entered a cloud, and in the double ring of a rainbow I saw
below the clear-etched shadow of our plane. Unfortunately it was losing
height. Without my having a hand in it, the plane suddenly turned
sharply over on its wing, and if it were possible to see Death, we should
undoubtedly have seen it on that wingtip pointed perpendicular to the
sea.
I don't know how I did it, but I managed to right the machine. To
lighten it I ordered the gunner to jettison the machine-gun drums. Ten
minutes later the guns themselves followed them, toppling, into the sea.
'Sticking it out, Sanya?'
'Sure!'
I asked the navigator how far it was to the shore, and he answered
that it wasn't far, about twenty-six minutes. He lied, of course, to cheer
me up—it would take us all of thirty minutes to reach the shore.
329
This was not the first time in my life that I was called upon to count
the minutes. There had been occasions when I had counted them with
despair and rage. There had been occasions when they had lain upon my
heart like round heavy stones, and I had waited in an agony of suspense
for one more crushing minute-stone to roll off and away into the past.
Now I was not waiting. With a furious abandon that sent an exultant
thrill through my heart I hurried and goaded them on.
'Will we make it, Sanya?'
'You bet we will!'
And we did. Some half a kilometre from the shore, which we did not
even have time to look at, we pancaked into the water, and, strange to
say, we did not go to the bottom. We had hit a sandbank. On top of all
our troubles we now had icy waves drenching us from head to foot. But
what did these waves matter or the fact that our aircraft had been
staggering about in the sky for over an hour till we reached the shore, or
the thousand and one new labours and troubles that awaited us,
compared with that laconic phrase in the current communiquй of
Sovinformbureau: 'One of our aircraft failed to return.'
What made me think that this was Middendorf Bay, and that
consequently we had landed far from any habitation? I don't know. The
navigator had had no time to work it out while we were passing over the
sea—the only course that interested him was the shoreward one. And
now he was too busy, as I had ordered the machine to be made secure,
and we worked at this until we dropped from sheer exhaustion on dry
patches of the beach among the sun-warmed rocks. We lay there quietly,
gazing up at the sky—a clear, wide sky without a cloudlet in it-each
occupied with his own thoughts. But each one's thoughts were tinctured
by the same common feeling—victory.
We were so exhausted that we did not even have the strength to brush
the clinging sand from our faces, and it dried in the sun and fell away in
pieces. Victory. The navigator's dead pipe lay on his chest. He suddenly
gave a loud snore and it rolled off. Victory. We wanted nothing but to
gaze at the radiant blue majesty of the sky and feel the warm pebbles
under our hands. Victory.
Everything was victory, even the fact that we were ravenously hungry
and I couldn't force myself to get up and fetch the sandwiches from the
plane which Anna Stepanovna had given me for the journey.
There is no need to describe how carefully we looked over the plane.
Evidently the cause of the smoke which the gunner had reported was a
shell, which had exploded in the cabin. Apart from a couple of hundred
shot holes, the aircraft seemed in fairly decent shape, at least compared
with the heaps of scrap iron I had often had occasion to land. The only
thing wrong with it was that it could no longer be flown, and we did not
have the means to put the engine right.
Over our dinner-we had an excellent meal: the first course, a soup
made of dried milk, chocolate and butter, and second course, the same
soup in dry form—it was decided:
(a) that the aircraft be made fast where it lay, embedded deep in the
sand—in any case we could not raise it on to the shelving beach;
(b) that the gunner be left to guard the machine;
(c) that we go in search of people and assistance.
