Post by Katie™ on Oct 15, 2007 20:37:18 GMT
A little something I wrote a looooong time ago. This is the first half. I'll post the second half after I've had a few comments =]
The siren screamed piercingly as a formation of Heinkel 111 bombers approached the airfield from the south. James Barker, a young man from Cumbria, sprinted alongside his squadron companions, heading towards the hangars where half a dozen Spitfire planes were being pulled onto the runway. He nervously placed a helmet onto his messy black hair as the six pilots skidded to a halt in the damp grass by the side of the long airstrip and waited until all their planes were ready for take off.
“Good luck,” James said to his closest friend in the squadron, Trevor Davis.
Trevor smiled at him and fastened his leather flight jacket, turning up the collar against the cool November breeze. He was nearly forty years old, the most experienced member of the group, and it showed. A scar curled under his eye where a shard of glass from his shattered cockpit had struck him, years ago on a raid near Devon. An inch higher and he would have lost an eye. “Thanks, but you’ll need it more.” He told James, “A scramble is no way for a chap to get into his first dogfight.”
“No, but I don’t have a choice do I?” James said, watching his plane get tugged out of the hangar by the ground crew.
There wasn’t time for any more conversation; the other squadron members were already running towards their planes. Trevor halted beside his own Spitfire and saluted James, “See you in the sky!” He yelled over the sound of the Merlin engines starting up.
The first Spitfire was already rolling up the runway when James reached his plane. It had a customized logo on the nose; a skull inside the RAF Roundel, grinning, with a Union Jack patterned bandana around its forehead. The words ‘Good Old Jack’ were painted in red underneath the logo in scrawling writing.
James grabbed onto the Spitfire’s wing and hauled himself onto the hard surface, swayed momentarily in the morning wind, and climbed into the cockpit. He clipped on the safety belt which crossed over the front of his leather, wool-lined flight jacket, and sighed, getting his mind ready for flying. He was only fresh out of FTS (flight training school) and had never shot at anyone before, but he had accompanied the rest of the squadron to get some experience from watching how they handled missions. Now he was about to battle with a formation of highly trained and highly dangerous German bombers! What a step! Just three days after gaining his Wings and he was dog fighting already! His father would be proud!
He did the routine checks that every pilot does before he takes off, making sure that all the instruments were in working order, then tested his elevators and rudders before opening up into full throttle. Trevor’s plane was already in the air, many feet ahead of James, and he had hardly even started moving. Thanks to the ground crew, the Spitfire was already pointing in the direction he wanted to go – west, so he could turn around to gain altitude before attacking the bomber formation head on – and all he had to do was throttle up and pull back gently on the stick.
The R/T hidden inside his helmet buzzed and a familiar voice crackled through the intercom, “Do hurry up, James!” It could only be Trevor. “We need to hit those Huns before they drop their payload!”
James smiled and gazed through the cockpitpit glass at the back end of Trevor’s Spitfire. He could picture the veteran’s face in his mind, wrinkled with concentration as he prepared to make the turn.
“Coming, old boy.” James said cheekily into his helmet.
Good Old Jack was now lifting off the ground, gathering tens of feet in just seconds. James leaned back, letting the vibrations of the plane ripple through him, until he was almost one hundred feet in the air. Now that he was off the ground, his body and the plane were one, a single living creature in the sky, in control of whatever fate they chose to follow. Trevor and the other four Spitfires were already out of sight, heading south. All he could see was the sky before him: pale, with a setting sun directly ahead of him. The clouds, low and full of snow, were shielding his eyes from the sun’s glow, and he was grateful for that small piece of help he was getting from the weather.
James pulled the stick back further and put the plane into a steeper climb. He glanced at the altimeter before making the right turn that would bring him up behind Trevor and the others, facing the Heinkels. It read 267 feet, flicking up a unit every second. He threw back the stick at an angle and studied the instrument panel as Good Old Jack turned smoothly on its wing. He waited until the compass read south before levelling out.
Up ahead he could see Trevor’s plane, at almost exactly the same height as his own, and the others before him. They had all made the turn perfectly. James breathed out slowly, relieved. The butterflies in his stomach felt more like angry wasps, battering against his innards. He was nervous about fighting against the Huns. He didn’t want to get shot down on his first real mission but he didn’t want to shoot down one of the bombers either. Maybe they were just as scared as he was. Maybe they were just as hesitant about what they were doing. But, as Trevor had told him, it didn’t matter.
James tried to recall the exact words Trevor had told him just days ago, when the nineteen-year-old hopeful pilot had arrived as the newest addition to the squadron - “Sonny boy, it’s no playground up there. The Germans want to rip you and your plane to shreds. They don’t want you to have a chance to live or escape.” Trevor had snapped, “In air combat, you find yourself forgetting everything you have ever known. All you know is that there are four things in the universe: you, your enemy, the sky and the ground. All four are deadly, but there are ways of making them your friends. Up there, you either shoot, or get shot. Kill, or get killed.”
Now that he knew Trevor James knew he wasn’t as serious as his deathly speech made him sound. The veteran liked nothing more than a good pint of beer before lift off, but it had been a scramble today and there had been no time, not even at Trevor’s drinking speed. Nevertheless Trevor was in a good mood. He was ready to shoot some Huns out of the sky.
James swallowed his growing fears and dipped the Spitfire’s nose down slightly so he could pick up speed. He noticed that his squadron had slowed down and split up into a line, wing to wing. The plan was that they would all stay in line, each taking on a separate He111, until they got too close to the enemy, when they would drop out of form and loop through the bombers, picking them off one at a time. It was a well-known fact that bombers aim to stay in formation no matter what. The most common tactic a fighter could use against a bomber squadron would be to dive into the middle of the formation to split them up. Once split up the bombers would have less chance of hitting their targets with their bombs.
“How’re you holding, James?” Trevor asked through the intercom.
“Okay,” James replied, hoping to hide the dread from his voice, “Are the bombers targeting our airbase, Trev?”
James heard somebody cough into his R/T, then Trevor’s voice, grim and hard now they were nearing the Heinkels, “I think. There aren’t many factories to bomb in that direction anyway.”
James nodded. He knew the others wouldn’t see him but he couldn’t speak, his whole being was focused on getting one of the Heinkels into his crosshairs, so his eight .303 inch Browning machine guns could smash them out of the sky. A gun doesn’t feel nervous, James reminded himself, whether you’re scared of killing or not, the gun doesn’t know that and it’ll do its job.
Now he could see his target clearly. A Heinkel flying on the right hand side of the V-formation, two planes behind the leader. Jeffrey, the squadron leader, had already started firing on his German counterpart, the Heinkel leader. Seconds later the two Spitfires flanking Jeffrey had started up their guns. James counted four seconds after they started before Trevor shouted ‘tally-ho!’ into the intercom and hammered hot lead injections into his target, next to and slightly ahead of James’ own target. He was now the only one who hadn’t started firing. He watched as the bomber leader’s left engine exploded and the plane fell out of the sky. Grittnig his teeth, he counted to four and hit the trigger.
The cockpitpit vibrated as all eight of Good Old Jack’s machine guns started rattling, firing at least five hundred rounds a minute. James almost heard the clatter of bullets on metal as they hit the Heinkel. The next two bombers in the V shape were burning and cartwheeling toward the ground. Trevor’s target was coughing out a thick trail of smoke that half screened James’ target, which had started burning. With the excitement of the dogfight, James forget about his nerves and grinned to himself as he watched his target explode in a violent fist of flame and drop out of formation, taking the plane behind it with it.
“Break up!” Jeffrey yelled at his fighters, “Break out of line and get into that formation, chaps!”
The six Spitfires moved all at once. Jeffrey and Trevor dived and the other two, Jim and William, climbed. James and the fighter on the far left of the line, who was called Danny and had moved here from America, both rolled out to the sides, hoping to attack the formation of heavy bombers from astern.
James pushed the stick forward to lose a bit of height before levelling out again, about thirty or forty feet below the bombers. He counted about fifteen Huns: twenty including the ones that had been shot down already. In the excitement he had forgotten that he had just killed two crews of bomber pilots and technicians, about ten people. But he didn’t care. He wanted to carry on with the mission. Every German he killed meant two Brits were saved. He couldn’t remember who had told him that because he was now pulling up, coming up from below the bombers. Good Old Jack spat bullets at one of the bombers in the V shape on the outside of the formation, which he realised was more of a triangle than a V, a solid arrowhead of sluggish Heinkels. The bomber fell out of the sky with one of its wings missing. James watched as five parachutes dropped out of the burning wreck, carrying five terrified Germans to the English soil below. What the Brits down there did to the Germans did not matter to any of the Spitfire pilots as they tore open the enemy planes.
James aimed at another bomber, directly above him, and sprayed out bullets, but another stream of the Browning bullets shot passed him, narrowly avoiding his wing.
“Watch out!” James gasped as the offending Spitfire overtook him and took out the Heinkel they had both been aiming at.
“Sorry!” Danny apologised in his carefree American accent.
Moments later James forced his Spitfire into a sharp turn to avoid a collision with another burning Heinkel that Jeffrey had been clipping, then had to dive steeply to avoid a second collision with the bomber next to it.
Trevor could be heard chuckling into the intercom, “Mind the traffic, James!”
James laughed and flew further south, planning to turn around and gather height to hit the bombers from the tail. Just before he made the turn, he noticed two more planes heading toward them. He squinted at them as they approached.
“Two Huns coming in fast!” He told the others, “Fighters, probably. Keep an eye out for them. They’re approaching from the south!”
Jeffrey thanked him before heading out south to meet the fighters, “Cheers for the warning, lad!”
James had eliminated another two bombers before Jeffrey spoke again.
“Got ‘em, the blighters,” the squadron leader explained, breathless, “Messerschmitts I think, BF 109s by the poor handling on ‘em. I was busy with one when the other snuck up behind me and took off part of my wing.”
James twisted around in his seat to catch a glimpse of Jeffrey. He could just see the Spitfire, limping through the air, flames leaking from its left wing and its engine.
“Your engine’s ablaze!” James warned him.
“Damn it!” Swore Jeffrey, “Sorry lads, but I’m gonna have to crash land.”
“We’ll manage without you!” Trevor said, “Cheers for taking out those Bf 109’s though. Land safely.”
James watched as Jeffrey’s Spitfire dipped out of the sky, “Just keep bringing down those bombers!” The leader told the remaining five. “And keep an eye out for any more fighters from the south.”
The five Spitfires dodged between the bombers, shooting one out of the sky every minute. James opened fire on a slow bomber struggling along in the back line of the scattered formation, but this time the Heinkel fired back. Both planes were flying head on, firing upon one another. Good Old Jack’s bullets hit the Heinkel’s engine, fuel leaked into the air, an oily cloud, and the Hun’s bullets spattered into the Spit’s cockpitpit. James gritted his teeth as tiny little cracks appeared all over the glass in front of him, but he tried to ignore them and keep firing. He rolled out of the way before he collided with the enemy but still an enemy’s bullet had found its way through the armoured glass and was burying itself in James’ shoulder.
“Jolly good shot!” Trevor barked.
James levelled out once more and saw the Heinkel taking a nosedive toward an empty field far below the battle.
“I’ve been wounded!” James yelped, panicking, “My shoulder’s bleeding!”
Trevor forced his plane around so he was nearly wing-to-wing with James, who was frantically trying to stop the blood flow with a gloved hand while keeping control of his plane with the other. “James?” Trevor asked.
“Yes, I’m losing blood!” James gasped, trying to tear his eyes away from the blood seeping out from between his fingertips. “What should I do, Trevor?”
James saw Trevor’s calm face in the cockpitpit of his own plane, peering over at the younger pilot, “Try to keep flying.” Trevor advised. ”Cover the wound and keep flying. It can’t be too serious. We need to bring down all of these Heinkels before we can land.”
That was the end of the conversation, both planes banked apart at the same moment as a German fighter zoomed right at them. James took off his scarf and quickly tied it around his shoulder before grabbing the controls and searching for the fighter that had just tried to collide with him and Trevor. Hitler didn’t employ suicide fighters, did he?
Good Old Jack rolled aside and back toward where the remaining three bombers were shuffling through the air toward the British airbase. James watched as a Spitfire shot down the bomber at the head of them and pushed the throttle up to full, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder and upper arm so he could concentrate on taking out the last two bombers.
“Fighters coming in from the south!” Trevor shouted down the intercom, “James, there’s only two bombers left, can you take ‘em down while we dispose of these fighters?”
James glanced through the cockpitpit glass at five more planes heading toward them. Straight ahead was the last two Heinkels. James was approaching them from the wing. “Good as done, Trev!” He assured the Spitfire, and opened fire on the closest bomber. It fell apart in the sky but it had already let its bombs go. He watched helplessly as a couple of black lumps flew toward the British airbase. The only thing left to do was make sure the last bomber didn’t get a chance to drop its own deadly load.
Bullets sprayed across James’ right wing, making the whole plane shudder violently. James twisted in his seat to see his wingtip ablaze, leaping flames tickling the heavy air around him. The firing stopped momentarily and James took the opportunity to hit the bomber, whose bomb bay doors were opening slowly, jerkily. James could imagine the bomb aimer’s words, spoken in heavy German, “Bomben tuer geoefnett, bomben abgellassen!”
Bomb bay doors open, bombs away!
The siren screamed piercingly as a formation of Heinkel 111 bombers approached the airfield from the south. James Barker, a young man from Cumbria, sprinted alongside his squadron companions, heading towards the hangars where half a dozen Spitfire planes were being pulled onto the runway. He nervously placed a helmet onto his messy black hair as the six pilots skidded to a halt in the damp grass by the side of the long airstrip and waited until all their planes were ready for take off.
“Good luck,” James said to his closest friend in the squadron, Trevor Davis.
Trevor smiled at him and fastened his leather flight jacket, turning up the collar against the cool November breeze. He was nearly forty years old, the most experienced member of the group, and it showed. A scar curled under his eye where a shard of glass from his shattered cockpit had struck him, years ago on a raid near Devon. An inch higher and he would have lost an eye. “Thanks, but you’ll need it more.” He told James, “A scramble is no way for a chap to get into his first dogfight.”
“No, but I don’t have a choice do I?” James said, watching his plane get tugged out of the hangar by the ground crew.
There wasn’t time for any more conversation; the other squadron members were already running towards their planes. Trevor halted beside his own Spitfire and saluted James, “See you in the sky!” He yelled over the sound of the Merlin engines starting up.
The first Spitfire was already rolling up the runway when James reached his plane. It had a customized logo on the nose; a skull inside the RAF Roundel, grinning, with a Union Jack patterned bandana around its forehead. The words ‘Good Old Jack’ were painted in red underneath the logo in scrawling writing.
James grabbed onto the Spitfire’s wing and hauled himself onto the hard surface, swayed momentarily in the morning wind, and climbed into the cockpit. He clipped on the safety belt which crossed over the front of his leather, wool-lined flight jacket, and sighed, getting his mind ready for flying. He was only fresh out of FTS (flight training school) and had never shot at anyone before, but he had accompanied the rest of the squadron to get some experience from watching how they handled missions. Now he was about to battle with a formation of highly trained and highly dangerous German bombers! What a step! Just three days after gaining his Wings and he was dog fighting already! His father would be proud!
He did the routine checks that every pilot does before he takes off, making sure that all the instruments were in working order, then tested his elevators and rudders before opening up into full throttle. Trevor’s plane was already in the air, many feet ahead of James, and he had hardly even started moving. Thanks to the ground crew, the Spitfire was already pointing in the direction he wanted to go – west, so he could turn around to gain altitude before attacking the bomber formation head on – and all he had to do was throttle up and pull back gently on the stick.
The R/T hidden inside his helmet buzzed and a familiar voice crackled through the intercom, “Do hurry up, James!” It could only be Trevor. “We need to hit those Huns before they drop their payload!”
James smiled and gazed through the cockpitpit glass at the back end of Trevor’s Spitfire. He could picture the veteran’s face in his mind, wrinkled with concentration as he prepared to make the turn.
“Coming, old boy.” James said cheekily into his helmet.
Good Old Jack was now lifting off the ground, gathering tens of feet in just seconds. James leaned back, letting the vibrations of the plane ripple through him, until he was almost one hundred feet in the air. Now that he was off the ground, his body and the plane were one, a single living creature in the sky, in control of whatever fate they chose to follow. Trevor and the other four Spitfires were already out of sight, heading south. All he could see was the sky before him: pale, with a setting sun directly ahead of him. The clouds, low and full of snow, were shielding his eyes from the sun’s glow, and he was grateful for that small piece of help he was getting from the weather.
James pulled the stick back further and put the plane into a steeper climb. He glanced at the altimeter before making the right turn that would bring him up behind Trevor and the others, facing the Heinkels. It read 267 feet, flicking up a unit every second. He threw back the stick at an angle and studied the instrument panel as Good Old Jack turned smoothly on its wing. He waited until the compass read south before levelling out.
Up ahead he could see Trevor’s plane, at almost exactly the same height as his own, and the others before him. They had all made the turn perfectly. James breathed out slowly, relieved. The butterflies in his stomach felt more like angry wasps, battering against his innards. He was nervous about fighting against the Huns. He didn’t want to get shot down on his first real mission but he didn’t want to shoot down one of the bombers either. Maybe they were just as scared as he was. Maybe they were just as hesitant about what they were doing. But, as Trevor had told him, it didn’t matter.
James tried to recall the exact words Trevor had told him just days ago, when the nineteen-year-old hopeful pilot had arrived as the newest addition to the squadron - “Sonny boy, it’s no playground up there. The Germans want to rip you and your plane to shreds. They don’t want you to have a chance to live or escape.” Trevor had snapped, “In air combat, you find yourself forgetting everything you have ever known. All you know is that there are four things in the universe: you, your enemy, the sky and the ground. All four are deadly, but there are ways of making them your friends. Up there, you either shoot, or get shot. Kill, or get killed.”
Now that he knew Trevor James knew he wasn’t as serious as his deathly speech made him sound. The veteran liked nothing more than a good pint of beer before lift off, but it had been a scramble today and there had been no time, not even at Trevor’s drinking speed. Nevertheless Trevor was in a good mood. He was ready to shoot some Huns out of the sky.
James swallowed his growing fears and dipped the Spitfire’s nose down slightly so he could pick up speed. He noticed that his squadron had slowed down and split up into a line, wing to wing. The plan was that they would all stay in line, each taking on a separate He111, until they got too close to the enemy, when they would drop out of form and loop through the bombers, picking them off one at a time. It was a well-known fact that bombers aim to stay in formation no matter what. The most common tactic a fighter could use against a bomber squadron would be to dive into the middle of the formation to split them up. Once split up the bombers would have less chance of hitting their targets with their bombs.
“How’re you holding, James?” Trevor asked through the intercom.
“Okay,” James replied, hoping to hide the dread from his voice, “Are the bombers targeting our airbase, Trev?”
James heard somebody cough into his R/T, then Trevor’s voice, grim and hard now they were nearing the Heinkels, “I think. There aren’t many factories to bomb in that direction anyway.”
James nodded. He knew the others wouldn’t see him but he couldn’t speak, his whole being was focused on getting one of the Heinkels into his crosshairs, so his eight .303 inch Browning machine guns could smash them out of the sky. A gun doesn’t feel nervous, James reminded himself, whether you’re scared of killing or not, the gun doesn’t know that and it’ll do its job.
Now he could see his target clearly. A Heinkel flying on the right hand side of the V-formation, two planes behind the leader. Jeffrey, the squadron leader, had already started firing on his German counterpart, the Heinkel leader. Seconds later the two Spitfires flanking Jeffrey had started up their guns. James counted four seconds after they started before Trevor shouted ‘tally-ho!’ into the intercom and hammered hot lead injections into his target, next to and slightly ahead of James’ own target. He was now the only one who hadn’t started firing. He watched as the bomber leader’s left engine exploded and the plane fell out of the sky. Grittnig his teeth, he counted to four and hit the trigger.
The cockpitpit vibrated as all eight of Good Old Jack’s machine guns started rattling, firing at least five hundred rounds a minute. James almost heard the clatter of bullets on metal as they hit the Heinkel. The next two bombers in the V shape were burning and cartwheeling toward the ground. Trevor’s target was coughing out a thick trail of smoke that half screened James’ target, which had started burning. With the excitement of the dogfight, James forget about his nerves and grinned to himself as he watched his target explode in a violent fist of flame and drop out of formation, taking the plane behind it with it.
“Break up!” Jeffrey yelled at his fighters, “Break out of line and get into that formation, chaps!”
The six Spitfires moved all at once. Jeffrey and Trevor dived and the other two, Jim and William, climbed. James and the fighter on the far left of the line, who was called Danny and had moved here from America, both rolled out to the sides, hoping to attack the formation of heavy bombers from astern.
James pushed the stick forward to lose a bit of height before levelling out again, about thirty or forty feet below the bombers. He counted about fifteen Huns: twenty including the ones that had been shot down already. In the excitement he had forgotten that he had just killed two crews of bomber pilots and technicians, about ten people. But he didn’t care. He wanted to carry on with the mission. Every German he killed meant two Brits were saved. He couldn’t remember who had told him that because he was now pulling up, coming up from below the bombers. Good Old Jack spat bullets at one of the bombers in the V shape on the outside of the formation, which he realised was more of a triangle than a V, a solid arrowhead of sluggish Heinkels. The bomber fell out of the sky with one of its wings missing. James watched as five parachutes dropped out of the burning wreck, carrying five terrified Germans to the English soil below. What the Brits down there did to the Germans did not matter to any of the Spitfire pilots as they tore open the enemy planes.
James aimed at another bomber, directly above him, and sprayed out bullets, but another stream of the Browning bullets shot passed him, narrowly avoiding his wing.
“Watch out!” James gasped as the offending Spitfire overtook him and took out the Heinkel they had both been aiming at.
“Sorry!” Danny apologised in his carefree American accent.
Moments later James forced his Spitfire into a sharp turn to avoid a collision with another burning Heinkel that Jeffrey had been clipping, then had to dive steeply to avoid a second collision with the bomber next to it.
Trevor could be heard chuckling into the intercom, “Mind the traffic, James!”
James laughed and flew further south, planning to turn around and gather height to hit the bombers from the tail. Just before he made the turn, he noticed two more planes heading toward them. He squinted at them as they approached.
“Two Huns coming in fast!” He told the others, “Fighters, probably. Keep an eye out for them. They’re approaching from the south!”
Jeffrey thanked him before heading out south to meet the fighters, “Cheers for the warning, lad!”
James had eliminated another two bombers before Jeffrey spoke again.
“Got ‘em, the blighters,” the squadron leader explained, breathless, “Messerschmitts I think, BF 109s by the poor handling on ‘em. I was busy with one when the other snuck up behind me and took off part of my wing.”
James twisted around in his seat to catch a glimpse of Jeffrey. He could just see the Spitfire, limping through the air, flames leaking from its left wing and its engine.
“Your engine’s ablaze!” James warned him.
“Damn it!” Swore Jeffrey, “Sorry lads, but I’m gonna have to crash land.”
“We’ll manage without you!” Trevor said, “Cheers for taking out those Bf 109’s though. Land safely.”
James watched as Jeffrey’s Spitfire dipped out of the sky, “Just keep bringing down those bombers!” The leader told the remaining five. “And keep an eye out for any more fighters from the south.”
The five Spitfires dodged between the bombers, shooting one out of the sky every minute. James opened fire on a slow bomber struggling along in the back line of the scattered formation, but this time the Heinkel fired back. Both planes were flying head on, firing upon one another. Good Old Jack’s bullets hit the Heinkel’s engine, fuel leaked into the air, an oily cloud, and the Hun’s bullets spattered into the Spit’s cockpitpit. James gritted his teeth as tiny little cracks appeared all over the glass in front of him, but he tried to ignore them and keep firing. He rolled out of the way before he collided with the enemy but still an enemy’s bullet had found its way through the armoured glass and was burying itself in James’ shoulder.
“Jolly good shot!” Trevor barked.
James levelled out once more and saw the Heinkel taking a nosedive toward an empty field far below the battle.
“I’ve been wounded!” James yelped, panicking, “My shoulder’s bleeding!”
Trevor forced his plane around so he was nearly wing-to-wing with James, who was frantically trying to stop the blood flow with a gloved hand while keeping control of his plane with the other. “James?” Trevor asked.
“Yes, I’m losing blood!” James gasped, trying to tear his eyes away from the blood seeping out from between his fingertips. “What should I do, Trevor?”
James saw Trevor’s calm face in the cockpitpit of his own plane, peering over at the younger pilot, “Try to keep flying.” Trevor advised. ”Cover the wound and keep flying. It can’t be too serious. We need to bring down all of these Heinkels before we can land.”
That was the end of the conversation, both planes banked apart at the same moment as a German fighter zoomed right at them. James took off his scarf and quickly tied it around his shoulder before grabbing the controls and searching for the fighter that had just tried to collide with him and Trevor. Hitler didn’t employ suicide fighters, did he?
Good Old Jack rolled aside and back toward where the remaining three bombers were shuffling through the air toward the British airbase. James watched as a Spitfire shot down the bomber at the head of them and pushed the throttle up to full, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder and upper arm so he could concentrate on taking out the last two bombers.
“Fighters coming in from the south!” Trevor shouted down the intercom, “James, there’s only two bombers left, can you take ‘em down while we dispose of these fighters?”
James glanced through the cockpitpit glass at five more planes heading toward them. Straight ahead was the last two Heinkels. James was approaching them from the wing. “Good as done, Trev!” He assured the Spitfire, and opened fire on the closest bomber. It fell apart in the sky but it had already let its bombs go. He watched helplessly as a couple of black lumps flew toward the British airbase. The only thing left to do was make sure the last bomber didn’t get a chance to drop its own deadly load.
Bullets sprayed across James’ right wing, making the whole plane shudder violently. James twisted in his seat to see his wingtip ablaze, leaping flames tickling the heavy air around him. The firing stopped momentarily and James took the opportunity to hit the bomber, whose bomb bay doors were opening slowly, jerkily. James could imagine the bomb aimer’s words, spoken in heavy German, “Bomben tuer geoefnett, bomben abgellassen!”
Bomb bay doors open, bombs away!