There were three Lancs, not two: thank you, Cliff. Two of them climbed into a circle at about another thou – say four thousand feet. The leader flew a wider loop, and came straight back onto a bomb run. It was odd for me: I’d spent my operational tour flying Lancs by night – mainly over Germany – but I’d never seen one actually dropping bombs in daylight; not observed it from the outside, that is. I was surprised how steady it looked: my experience had been that of having been bounced about a lot on the bomb run. There was no opposing fire from the castle; perhaps that was something to do with it. It dropped two bombs: big cylinders with flat ends – no tail fins. It was curious; they rocked gently, and weaved slightly as they tumbled – like children being rocked to sleep by a parent.
The Colonel asked, ‘What are they?’
I answered without taking my lenses from them: tersely, probably, ‘Cookies: four-thousand-pounders. Eight thousand pounds of high explosive.’
‘Poor sods,’ James murmured just before the bombs disappeared into the castle. Bang on, both of them; but then you don’t miss much from that height – like a chicken laying eggs. What appeared to happen was this. The bombs disappeared. After a pause of maybe a couple of seconds the castle walls seemed to expand briefly, and then fall back into their original shape and configuration. Now the castle looked more or less the same, but was fatally damaged. It was skewed. A pall of fine brown dust and thin smoke, hundreds of yards high, hung in the thin air above it in a squat column. Then the sound of the two almost simultaneous detonations reached us like a double thunderclap. The audience clapped too, and cheered. I had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t really thought much about what my bombs had been doing when they reached the ground during those long months over Germany. All of a sudden I didn’t want to.
The two circling Lancs gave a couple of turns to let the pall begin to clear, and then one of them pulled away for a run. It was like watching a cobra gear up for a strike. Again, it was a finely executed run in – the bombing standard on the squadron had improved since my day. I counted the bombs away. There were twelve of them. Shark-shaped, with fins to steady them into their dive. Before anyone asked me I said, ‘Thousand-pounders.’
James didn’t say anything this time, but I heard him grunt.
Three of the bombs fell outside the walls of the place: two in open fields, and one in the moat. The one in the moat threw up a great curtain of water hundreds of feet high, which hid from us what the nine that hit inside were doing. I saw their great flashes of red and orange and yellow behind the veil of mist, and could see the shimmering ripples of blast in the rainbow-laden air above it. The blast effect intrigued me. It was like invisible rings visible, and spreading outwards and upwards. As the shit cleared I could see that the castle was altered even more. It was still more or less the castle shape and size, but the whole of its profile had spread out.
The radio behind us burst into life. The communicant appeared to be shouting in a very highly pitched voice. The W/Op answered in rapid, fluent German, then he told the Colonel, ‘The enemy requests permission to surrender, sir.’
‘I like that,’ the Colonel told us. ‘Very Germanic. Asking permission to surrender: we would have just thrown our hands up, and got on with it.’
‘Sir?’ the W/Op prompted him.
‘Tell them By all means, and to stay put until I’ve worked out what to do with them.’
The third Lancaster had pulled out of the circle. The Colonel told his ADC, ‘Give them the gun, Harry.’ Then, ‘Pity they dragged their bombs here all for nothing.’
The ADC fired off a Very Pistol too close to my right ear for comfort, and dropped a huge blue light in the sky. The pilot of the Lanc was a comedian. He did the run as if he’d not been given the scrub signal, and at the last minute, instead of dropping his eggs, waggled his wings and went off low across country. Two Spits followed him, weaving from side to side. The Colonel turned and looked at me.
He said, ‘Very good, RAF. That medal: which one had you in mind?’
I was prevented from answering by the Negro pianist. He had a white batboy’s jacket on, and had come to stand behind us. He was counting aloud. He got to sixteen.
The Colonel asked, ‘Sixteen, George?’
‘Yes, Colonel. Sixteen souls climbing up to heaven through the smoke.’
‘If they had about a hundred or so Krauts in there,’ the Colonel told me, ‘that’s maybe fifteen or sixteen per cent of their establishment. We’ve gone rather easy on them really.’
I decided that I didn’t like the cold-blooded bastard, but it was all a bit late for regrets, wasn’t it? He who laughs last, and all that.
The Colonel sent his ADC down later in the morning to take the surrender. We had had to wait until the Press Corps arrived. A company of hard Hun Paratroopers opting out of the war was bound to make all the front pages. There were a hundred and fifty of the Allies’ finest down there to meet them. Probably twice as many Press people as military. And a load of guys rubbernecking. That included me: I’d just won my first land engagement,
