Chapter Thirty-Eight
What’s It Going To Be?
“So. What’s it going to be, then?” I asked the assembled men. “What didst thou havest in mind?”
Black, Powell and Andrew and gazed up from their informal little conclave.
Mike Black did the talking.
“We all want to do it.” He reported.
There were associated nods and grins all around the tent. Having said it before, it needs to be said again. If we are going to ask a man to die for us, at the very least he is entitled to an opinion.
You never know how it’ll all work out, and you never can tell about some people.
Andrew was my best pilot, yet he didn’t exhibit huge leadership qualities.
Powell soldiered on as the leader of his squadron, and they were all workmanlike and well-prepared.
It was Black who emerged as the ‘political’ leader and spokesman.
Andrew must have had a high opinion of himself or he wouldn’t have fought so hard. He fought hard to prove he was the best, or to prove to himself that he was as good as anyone else. I never figured it out. Wildly overcompensating for the deep feelings of inadequacy. Or something.
Powell seemed content to be Powell, and nothing shook his equilibrium. I learned to live with it and gave the man an appropriate task.
“All righty, then.” I noted as if for the record. “We’ll play it your way, gentlemen.”
“So it’s on for tonight.” Black, seeking firm, final approval as the men began to stand up to leave.
“Yes.” I agreed. “We do it tonight.”
Now let Black organize these other guys. He can explain all about me, and apologize for me, and try to justify me to the other guys.
Let him take some of the heat.
It was their own fault for looking up to him in the first place, but they had to learn.
Poor old Richtofen was going to be kept awake tonight. This was a biggie, and it required a certain amount of advance planning. Half a dozen of us went to the command tent.
The plan was to bomb the enemy, ‘continuously and around the clock’ as best we could. We planned on using every aircraft at our disposal, and while we had some pilots who would have to sit this one out due to inexperience, it was meant as a massive insult to the Baron.
He knew we were here, we knew he was there, he knew that we knew that he knew, (et cetera), and we had been scrapping with them for a few days now. But these fleeting skirmishes were as nothing compared to what came next. Our friends to the north and south would keep the pressure on the Boche for the rest of the day.
“Now, the Camel Jocks don’t have a lot of experience bombing at night.” I noted.
“That’s why we should go.” Said Andrew. “None of us are chicken.”
“I know that,” I grouched.
Andrew was a very good-looking young fellow. Yet he could be obnoxious at times, and downright nasty at others. Apparently he wasn’t having much success with the ladies, either. The arrogance thing only works once in a blue moon. The whole problem was one of maturity, no matter how fascinating you may actually be deep down inside.
“We have to launch our planes, one or two at a time, depending on experience, and keep planes over that aerodrome.” Black said. “If that doesn’t get their attention, I don’t know what will.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a case of squid.” He added with a grin.
“Excellent.” Bernie nodded, a similar look on his face, too.
Apparently he approved very much, but I only recently found out that his older brother was killed by Lothar.
It was more than just a job, or an adventure to him. It took some time for his inner thoughts to be made known. Some people keep it all bottled up inside, as the reader may be aware.
It was one of the worst nights in my life. My back was so bad it would have been dumb to fly, and a recent bullet through the leg had sort of mucked things up.
Just a flesh wound, really. It missed the right knee, missed the arteries, the ligaments and tendons, and went clean through the muscle without much ado. It did hurt like hell, and the real doctor did offer enough medication to, ‘make it through the night,’ as he put it. I hate pills, but sometimes you have to look beyond that.
It was necessary to let the men plan this one themselves. To show confidence in them, to let them all gain the experience and the confidence. This may sound a little cynical, but it was a way of sharing the responsibility.
“You guys do realize, that in an operation of this type, it is almost a certainty that someone will not come home.”
I brought that up at the meeting.
Didn’t do a bit of good. In many ways they were raw and green and inexperienced, with only a month in the line. Some guys had been flying five weeks on the Front. That’s not enough time, actually, to get a picture. Not a true picture, for we were extraordinarily lucky so far. Malarkey was out of his coma. Biggsy kept the leg. Some other minor wounds. One man disappeared, probably deserted, or for all we knew got murdered on leave in Paris. There was no way to know until he was heard from, or seen again, or until his body turned up somewhere. One dead pilot. One gunner still in hospital.
A couple of other guys were in the hospital, for ailments too serious for the doctor to treat here.
Let’s face it, we were very lucky. No one knew that better than I.
These guys thought they were good. For all I knew they were the best-trained pilots in the world right then, and we were still God-damned lucky.
‘Die kunst ist tot,’ or, ‘art is dead.’ Now we go by science. Sometimes it takes a long time to heal. It took me many years to heal. Not so much from my physical wounds as my spiritual ones. My mental ones for sure. The spiritual ones took a long time.
I know I will never be the same man. I can never go back. Maybe this is as good as it gets. What I’m trying to say is that maybe I am already, ‘better,’ now. And yet I find myself an atheist with five crucifixes nailed up on the wall.
My blood runs cold sometimes. I changed in those years.
***
Standing outside the tent in the darkness, and it was miraculous, unbelievable. The Aurora Borealis was out. I bolted back into the command centre.
“Wake up everyone in the camp.” I told the Adj. “This is pretty unusual, and I’d like the men to experience this.”
I had this weird feeling. It was like being a Scout-Master.
He went off, quietly arousing the camp into life. This was something many would have virtually no chance in their lifetimes to see. I was in a strange kind of a mood that night. The leg wound was down to the ‘soreness’ level of pain.
I was taught how it is to hate a man’s guts, and I wish I had never learned that.
It was the death of my innocence, and it grieved me.
Ultimately I learned how to forgive.
Now that, is a real accomplishment.
(Stolen.)
Small groups of men stood around looking at the sky. It was a curiously muted and subdued bunch of people.
“Nature is the symbol of the power of God.” I declaimed to someone next to me, as we all stared upwards.
It was Saul, looking up with mouth open and his ingenuous face totally blank, not unusually for him. Just this once he didn’t try to contradict.
‘Oohs,’ and ‘aahs,’ came from the surrounding groups of men, as a bloody great swirl waved its arms at us. What I found unusual about this particular display was the crystalline nature of it. Beams of light came up out of the horizon. These beams then converged into points in the great heights of the sky. They were blue, green and yellow, while the swirls in the top of the sky were red, orange, and deep purple.
With an otherwise crisp, clean sky, and no moon, we were lucky to see this.
Some people never look up. They keep their faces to the ground. As a farmer, and as a pilot, I was in the habit of looking up as soon as I came out the door first thing in the morning. Those cones and shafts of light were amazing.
Towering pyramids in the sky, deltas and triangles, like living crystals, growing in random patterns. It was like the cone of a searchlight, only in reverse. Wide end at the bottom, narrow end at the top, extending from ground into the sky, sometimes shifting and changing and moving along the horizon. Fantastically, the beams slithered and flickered around in the heavens above. A few stars, the Big Dipper, just icing on the cake. All we needed now was a meteor shower. Like an omen, a portent.
The shape of things to come.
“Humans are not that far removed from animals.” I told Chandragupta. “Women still have the nesting instinct, and men and children still have the pecking order.”
“I was wondering why you were being so quiet.” He answered with his quick, white-flashing grin. “You are being in a pensive mood. Do not worry, very fine they will be.”
“I am feeling hopelessly anal.” I quipped, and he laughed.
“You have to let them go upon their own once in a blue-cheese moon.” He reassured me.
“Assembling the new airframes went rather well.” He added. “I noticed that you built two or one of them yourself.”
He thought for a moment.
“And you gave them then to the most inexperienced pilots. Why was that?”
“I didn’t want them to have to deal with any sort of mechanical failure, considering their limited knowledge.” I said.
(Obvious, really. They didn’t get the best, or the newest, or most powerful motors.)
“A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, while a general knows less and less about more and more,” Chandra said.
“I’ll be careful,” I chuckled. “Jerk of all trades, and master of none.”
This was so much better than sitting around a smoky tent and reading week-old grubby newspapers. Or worse, those horrible, whining and complaining and sentimental and so-fucking-maudlin letters from home. We used to have someone play a violin, some real sad music when we read them.
“How would you describe this?” I asked Howard-Smythe, first making sure he was looking my way.
“Surreal. Sublime.” He muttered in acknowledgement.
“Real twilight of the Gods stuff?” I asked.
“Yes. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” He asked with raised eyebrows.
“I have a question, Howard-Smythe.” I asked.
“What is it?”
Let’s not get into that one again.
“What do they do in England, when they’re teaching kids the alphabet, and they get to the letter ‘r’?”
A couple of the guys were Canadians. They laughed and laughed and no one else had a fucking clue, of what the hell I was talking about.
“Copper wire was invented by two Dutchmen fighting over a penny.” Said Howard-Smythe, who had just been reading ‘Punch.’
“Who owns that gramophone?” I asked the Adj.
“We do, actually. It’s a perk.”
I figured it was stolen. Can’t take my eyes off these boys for a minute.
“Find something suitable to play, and fire it up about half an hour before takeoff…i.e. right about now.” I suggested.
“Gotterdamerung, baby.” He joshed.
We didn’t have Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries.’
Too bad, really. I would have liked to have been the first. We had lots of records, though. Tons of the things. The man on the machine played marches, he played popular songs. He played Christmas music, he played opera, he played every recording we had by the time the night was over.
Waltzes, foxtrots and Highland reels.
Bagpipe music.
That almost made sense.
Just this once we didn’t overly concern ourselves with the enemy hearing us.
Every so often a plane would land, and taxi back in, and then figures assisted the man out. Hands would fill the tank, clean it up, push it forward again. More hands would clean the guns. More hands would load the guns. Hands would drag bombs forward on carts.
Shoulders, hips and back, legs and feet, would lift those bombs from a doggie position. A man with a bomb on his back. It is an interesting feeling as CO to stand and watch something like that. Hands would push and pull it into position and lock it there securely, and a grateful doggie would crawl back out from under the wing.
***
We had a nice pond at this field. It was just through the woods, a hundred yards away, over a light rise in the ground. The beaten-down path was easy to follow. To step off the trail was to crunch on dead leaves. Long grass and dead twigs tugged at the bottom of my pant legs.
There was a millpond, a broken water wheel, with a thin trickle of water from the head, falling through long trails of algae. From time to time the wild scene was lit by lurid flashes from the horizon. Pulling out my new pipe, a birthday present from the boys, I could watch and listen from there for a while. It was going to be a long night.
Crunch, crunch, crunch…something this way comes.
Two engines fired up, and we could see shadows and beams of glaring light in the treetops. I recognized the figure by its overall shape.
Black stood by my side.
“What do you think?” He asked.
“There’s no way we could have foreseen this.” I admitted.
“It’s like an omen.” He said.
He was feeling it too. A ‘fey’ kind of mood in camp this evening.
“Then we’d better launch before they do.” I re-affirmed.
He belched, and was silent for a moment.
“The lights of heaven are dim, but the fires of hell burn brightly indeed.” Said Black.
I couldn’t argue with that.
Like the first hint of a distant thunderstorm, the air was vibrant and expectant with distant concussions, so faint that we could only feel them. It was warm, humid, and very dark without those flashes. His eyes gleamed, but the rest of him was just a shadow.
“After the first shot, the first explosion, those lights will go out. The sky is pretty faint. I saw that as soon as the first lantern was lit.” He murmured in a kind of reverence.
It was a strange mood.
I cast my mind out into space, like some ancient Celt, a priest in the woods with the oaks and the holly. Was the Baron looking up at the sky, at exactly that moment in time?
We stood listening to a pair of aircraft slowly roar down the runway. The aircraft successfully took off and droned away into the night. Still sounding a bit tentative. Two separate and distinct entities roaring off into the darkness…tentatively.
For some reason I was all shaky and upset. Not that I let the other men see it, and it wasn’t the back pain either, nor the dull aches and pains of my injuries.
The Germans, the, ‘Allemagnes,’ would have dinner. They would write letters. They would play football, and socialize with friends. They would play cards. They would listen to the gramophone.
They would have all gone to bed by ten or eleven, for the most part. Except for the ‘inevitable ten percent.’ The party animals would dribble in by two a.m.
Now is when the fun begins. When the last one hits the hay.
No sleep for them guys for the next two or three nights and days. That was the plan.
Day and night, around the clock.
We would go through them like shit through a goose, after a couple days of this. But then, we simply out-numbered them. How original is that?
When you put yourself in extreme situations, all your faults are shown. Like if you were unprepared. But it also shows where the problem areas lie. What did we fail to anticipate? What could we not know? What random factors might come along to fuck it all up? This evening Howard-Smythe, Bernie, Dawley, Jaeckl, they all seemed a little strung-out.
For them maybe it wasn’t so bad. Coping with the stress seemed easier to the rank and file. They at least, were thoroughly trained in their jobs, whereas I wasn’t. It was a lonely place, that’s for sure.
Black stood there in silence. A long and unspoken moment.
He tipped his head back from time to time, easing tired neck muscles.
“Reality. What a concept.” He stated firmly, then moseyed back to camp.
There came an engine in the distance. One of our boys returning.
There was a moment of tension as it moved to the wrong side, but he will figure it out. We had catechisms when we were younger. I wished at times that I had a prayer written down. It was disturbing to forget them all just when you needed them.
There’s nothing worse than waiting.
‘All things wait for He who comes.’ Which is a paraphrase but I can’t remember it.
I finished my smoke by the pond. Better get back to supervising.
The gloom was somehow less gloomy right about here, and the open field beckoned. It was like a relay, a marathon. Someone popped a flare. The engine perked up and the pilot went around to try another one.
He circled to the left. First he goes half a mile, straight off the end of the field, then a one-hundred-eighty to the left, then about a mile downwind, and then he tries again. He makes his second one-eighty, and tries another approach, and this time he snagged a good one. Tiny leprechaun lights led him off the ‘drome. Tuk-a-tuk-a-tuk-a-tuk the engine goes as he taxies, barely ticking over. That’s a Biff. The sounds are so completely distinctive with aero engines. Every man has his place, and for some reason I never felt so useless.
‘A Goddamned Figurehead.’
My back. It just plain hurt, and my leg was going numb. This may not be unusual while sitting up straight in a chair, with one’s legs crossed. To be walking along and have your foot go numb right up to the hip is a tad unusual. The pain when sitting was even worse. Lying down hurt. Sitting on a cold and frozen latrine was a kind of unspeakable hell. Standing to piss hurt. Sitting at the dining table hurt.
A sign of problems with the old spinal column. That’s what holds you up.
Doesn’t bear thinking about, for a pilot. Someone commiserated with me, upon rejoining a group of men currently not involved in the operations at the fuel points, the re-arming points, the briefing rooms.
“I know you’d love to be up there, sir.” He said. “A fan-fucking-tastic night for flying.”
One of our mechanics. Pete. Sometimes when one is distracted, it’s hard to find a name to go with that mug.
“Yeah, but it’s the dumbest thing I could do right now, Pete.” I allowed. “It will clear up in a day or two.”
“And yet we all knew it was just a matter of time.” A voice unseen from behind, as others talked and chatted.
Propinquity, like when you cut the deck and there it is.
The card everyone wants.
“There’s a lot of crazy rumors going around.” Pete revealed.
“The one about ‘Crazy Jane,’ that was a good one.” I reminded him. “Sounds like her poor hubby didn’t know his fuckin’ head was cut off until he tried to sneeze.”
He barked out a huge single laugh-part.
“You hit the nail on the head with that.” He said. “The craziest rumors turn out to be true, sometimes.”
He stood there looking sideways, but I wasn’t going to enlighten him.
Two men came striding past.
“What’s up?” I asked them.
“Really looks like it’s bleeding there, man.” One replied.
I nodded in commanding officer mode.
“Get a move on then, and thanks for looking after your buddy,” I added.
“I liked working on them light boxes made of wood.” Pete said a little wistfully.
Yeah, Pete was my special mechanic. I wasn’t going to embarrass him by making a big thing about it, but you could look it up in the secret files at Whitehall if you wanted.
If you’re willing to fill out all the right forms properly and wait long enough. There is a small nuisance fee. At some point we ran out of ideas, and we had to let him loose at a plane once in a while.
“Well, those were used in an earlier phase, on anti-Zeppelin patrols.” I told Pete. “I suddenly remembered, and I thought we should give it a try. It floods a nice gentle light onto the field and it doesn’t project too much into fog or onto low clouds.”
Two-foot wide strips of plywood, a few brackets, a few stakes, nails, and ‘voila.’
The back of our smudge pots were covered, the tops were covered, yet air came in, and the insides of the wooden angles were painted with thick coats of whitewash.
Dim, but effective.
Dumb, but effective.
“It’s fucking brilliant.” He told me in no uncertain terms. ‘Real spy-versus-spy stuff.”
He was referring to an earlier incident. Bernie and some French Intelligence types, ‘Les Flics,’ absolutely glommed onto some minor little idea put forth in a bull-session and, ‘Voila.’
They caught themselves some pathetic little perpetrator.
Now those guys, ‘les flics’, thought we were a God-send, but I don’t know.
The guy was caught sending signals out of his bedroom window to an enemy observer on a distant hilltop. He tried to cover up his activities by using a small light, and setting up a box-like tube on the far, opposite side of the room from the window. He forgot about the glare on the ceiling, and he had no choice but to open the curtains to signal. He got caught. His lady friend was already caught, by the opposition. She was under house arrest, most likely. She would be kept available to answer questions, probably sitting there at gunpoint in case our friend asked about Uncle Pierre’s hemorrhoids, or something.
He should have painted the inside of the box black, or the ceiling, at the least. Some gendarme was walking down the street, on some cold, dark and lonely night, and a furtive orange gleam in a second-floor window on some back alley half a block away is going blink-blink-blink-blink.
Fucking idiot.
The poor man didn’t have a clue that he wasn’t talking to his girl. He was so innocent.
He was in deep shit. Many would condemn him, but wait until you hear the circumstances. It seems he fell in love with his cousin, a girl of seventeen. When she got to eighteen, they secretly married in a civil ceremony, bribing the clerk to keep it a secret, and he visited her once a week on Sunday afternoons.
It was just bad luck that the war intervened. The young lovers with nothing better to do, found themselves separated by the Western Front. They were waiting until she was twenty-one. Something like that. So they could tell their folks, and it would be all legal, and some such. I don’t have all the details. Quite frankly, all the reports were written in French, as we weren’t officially involved.
Anyway, Bernie was in a tough spot, but what can you do? It’s a crime, and a capital crime at that. We kept it nice and quiet, and no one wanted to embarrass anyone else, so we had a degree of cooperation politically.
Let’s just say the whole thing never got too far up the ladder. We did Bernie a favor. We strapped a chute on the man and dropped him out into the dark sky over Germany one night, and hopefully he was re-united with his girl. If the Fritzies caught him, they’d both be shot.
“Better if they shoot them, than us.” Is what I told Bernie.
His best bet was to lay low and try to rescue her from house arrest when he got the chance. Hide under the fucking porch, if possible. That’s what I would have done. Anyhow, we gave him some money, (a lot of money,) some hard rations, and dumped him out. Poor bastard. What a man won’t do for the love of a good woman. Mind you, it’s worth it. Right?
The really important thing was that particular source dried up just when the Fritzies needed it most. All’s well that ends well. But I must say, that poor, pathetic bastard caused us all a lot of heartaches.
He caused us a lot of trouble.
Old Bernie was awful down, but as he put it, “My hands are tied.”
The truth is, it’s better to throw the little ones back. I told Bernie to use that window.
“Use it and send false reports to the enemy. Why don’t we just drop this kook out over Germany.” I suggested and his face lit up in such sincere gratitude.
I guess you could say we became friends.
“You would do that for me?” He asked.
“Of course.” I smiled in glee. “You know me.”
What’s next? Free shipping?
“Snotty’s winger is Geoff Lang. They’ve been doing real well. I’ll send them, and if they come back, I want you to give them the Croix the Honneur, or something.” I advised Bernie. “Would you do that for them?”
“Of course.” He said, absolutely without hesitation.
“Whatever the heck you guys call it. I mean the big one.” I thought further. “I have a few Russian decorations that I can hand out, and I’ll put them in Dispatches. Mention them by name, talk about their contributions, et cetera. At least put them in for one.”
It couldn’t hurt to try. I’d think of something plausible.
“I can get you a German bomber-plane if you want.” He said happily. “Perhaps you could do an assessment on it, and write a report for my government? That way, we can maybe, as you say, ‘skin two cats with one stone?”
Come on, Bernie. You ain’t that fuckin’ dumb.
Tit-for-tat. It sounds like poor old Bernie has done a little horse-trading himself.
I’ve always wanted a German bomber.
***
It was a tough choice.
The real doctor gave me a number of options.
“Take the pills, and stay on the ground.” Was the first. “Get some rest and you’ll be okay in a day or two.”
“Don’t take the pills, fly, and make it worse.” Was the second. “And you could take a pill or two and fly, which I don’t recommend. You’ll only keep that up so long, and then you’ll find yourself in big trouble.”
“Or I could stay on the ground and not take the pills.” I grumped.
“If you want to be stubborn.” He agreed, with a tolerant grin. “Trust you to find the alternative no one else ever thought of.”
More planes revved up and prepared to take off into the night. The droning was constant, but once again we had help disguising our noises by tanks moving along nearby roads. In a sense we were covering them with noise too.
Keep the enemy guessing.
“At the very least, take something to help you sleep.” He offered, big, sad brown eyes boring sincerely into my own.
“I’ll think about it.” I murmured. “All right?”
“I’ll just leave these. They’re labeled with simple instructions.” He stood to go. “I’ll be in the medical tent. We’ve had a few minor injuries so far.”
“Thanks, Doc.” I said.
It’s all up to me to command, and to plan these things. But when we attempt to carry them out anything can happen. I can’t be all doped up. The Commanding Officer, on the ground, has no avenue of escape. And every so often God gives you a good smack on the head.
God answers all prayers. Sometimes the answer is no.
One aircraft crashed on landing. Thank God there was no fire. Just one dead pilot.
His gunner was seriously injured. Their faces looked so pale in the wreckage. It was predictable enough. One of the new guys. His gunner was beat up pretty bad but he might make it. At first, I couldn’t even remember, just who was assigned to that particular plane as rear-gunner.
Howard-Smythe was writing most of the notifications now, and I just signed them.
They came in on top of a thicket, heavily overgrown with close-set young trees. It helped to cushion the impact. The pilot, Cowings, was shot several times. He never regained consciousness after the crash.
He got a medal posthumously. He saved the gunner’s life. Knowledge dispels fear, but not this time. Edward Cowings flew by instruments, in the dark, unable to see or to examine his wounds. The terror must have been overwhelming, the pain unthinkable. But he did it. They hit just thirty yards short of the field.
The road a little less traveled, it sure does have a few stones. Perhaps I needed a pill and a sleep just to disrupt the obsession and maybe even get a fresh perspective. One could only imagine how much sleep old Manfred might be getting these days.
“Gentlemen abed in England will find themselves accursed.” Said Howard-Smythe as he came in. “That they were not here.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” I muttered.
“No more, no less.” He admitted. “I’ve been thinking we need some smaller cameras, to document and analyze certain aspects…”
He was trying to distract me with cheerfulness and irrelevant stuff.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, we could have taken pictures of the broken gun carrier.” He said. “Or even how we did that test. The reconnaissance cameras are useless for that type of shot.”
I supposed he was right.
Howard-Smythe was an attractive character because he learned, somewhere along the line, how to listen. Which is pretty good for a deaf guy. He knew when to speak up, and when to keep his mouth shut.
“That idea of putting colored paper on the windows of the train.” He marveled. “It’s awesome, simply awesome.”
We could use it as a beacon almost anytime.
“Once the boys figured out it could be done, and got some practice in night-flying and navigation, and bearing in mind it’s only twenty or thirty miles each way.” I ventured.
“I guess once you know what to look for, and more or less where to look.”
“It’s working out well.” He said. “And it’s not too bright. All we have to do is beware of the night with extremely low cloud.”
“A half-mile long Chinese lantern.” I said. “Anyhow, tomorrow we’ll have up to ten or twelve, squadron-strength fighter-bomber sweeps.”
The enemy had a limited number of options. They could come up and defend their airspace, many times during the day. They could sit on their butts and wait to be bombed and strafed. Or they could come and attack us.
If I was von Richtofen, what would I do? After being pounded all night? With a number of killed and wounded? Destroyed and damaged machines, hangars, quarters, supplies, etc?
They weren’t too likely to attack. Not the first night, nor the second, nor even the third. Although a heavy bomber attack at night couldn’t be ruled out. That’s why we were dispersed. He should call for some kind of reinforcements. But it was M.I.’s opinion that the Fritzies couldn’t build them fast enough. They were running out of pilots.
Sooner or later, one side or the other must run out of pilots.
A gaggle of Gothas couldn’t hit anything, except by chance.
Maybe they can hit a city like London, but not pick one field out in the middle of the night and hit it from ten thousand feet. That’s nonsense. Another thing, the bombs are armed by little propellers on the front end. They have to spin up in order to arm the warhead. A low-level heavy bomber attack didn’t seem too likely, although a large number of very small bombs was a frightening proposition. Especially if they landed in the right place.
Mr. Baron von Richtofen would defend. He would be lucky to have eighteen or twenty planes available tomorrow. They weren’t equipped for bombing per se. His men were trained and used as interceptors.
Which means that my boys still have to take it to him.
END
Images. Louis finds stuff on the internet.
Louis has books and stories available from Google Play. See his works on ArtPal.
See the #superdough blog.
Thank you for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment on the blog posts, art or editing.