大象传媒

I wish to lay claim to a unique experience - that of an air combat fought in the middle of a cloud, and at ranges varying from ten to twenty-five yards.

On 22nd June 1940, as the pilot of a Hudson aircraft of Coastal Command, I was escorting one of our naval cruisers off the coast of Norway when I intercepted a German flying boat which was shadowing the ship. I engaged it immediately, but it escaped into the cloud layer a few hundred feet above.

The Dornier was an unusual design of aircraft, its two engines being mounted in tandem, one pulling, the other pushing. And the two gunners'cockpits were open, so that the gunners wore helmets and black leather protective clothing against the cold.

I followed into the cloud in the hope that it would break cover on top, where I could have another go at it, and for the first few seconds was busy checking the blind-flying and engine instruments, to trim the aircraft before engaging the automatic pilot to maintain a steady rate of climb. Satisfied that all was in order, I was reaching out to engage the autopilot when something made me look ahead through the windscreen.

I had the shock of my life to see the Dornier about 30 yards ahead of me, and slightly off to one side. In a one in a billion chance, I'd followed directly in his track!

The white fog of the cloud softened everything, so the aircraft seemed twice its size, and incredibly sinister. And the midships gunner saw me at the same time as I saw him. Clad in his black leathers and goggles, he looked like an executioner as he went for his gun and swung the muzzle towards my head.

At thirty yards he wasn't going to miss, so this was no time for the niceties of gunsighting. I thumbed the gun button, wound over the wheel, and flew my aircraft straight at him. I saw my tracers bounce off his engines and swing down towards my foe. And I beat him to the draw. He slumped down in his cockpit and slid from sight. "Poor devil", flashed through my mind.

Most combatants in a 'civilised' war do not hate each other, they are all stuck in the same system of having to kill for a living.

And that gunner wasn't the first Hun I'd felt sorry for . A few months earlier I had found another Dornier which one of our squadron had shot down on to the water. Its four crew were huddled on the top deck and the aircraft was sinking.

'Good-oh' you might think. 'That's four fewer Huns left to fight this war.' But the North Sea in winter is a miserably cold place to perish in, so we used up a precious half-hour's fuel in finding a Norwegian ship to come along and rescue them. Only then did we swing back to our patrol line, looking for any German ship, U-boat or aircraft that we could destroy. At the de-briefing back home the Station Commander barked "You should have dropped a bomb on them and blown them all to bits."

But I was on safe ground here. "Hardly cricket, sir. Officer and gentleman, etc"

"In case you've forgotten, Edwards, it's not cricket we're playing. We're fighting a bloody war." We were, of course, but the Group Captain wouldn't have dreamed of doing such a thing in reality.

But back to our Dornier. When things happen fast - like skidding on black ice in heavy traffic you go into slow motion to think your way through. I imagine that the following sequence took all of five seconds from start to finish.

I'd dealt with the unfortunate midships gunner, but we were still overtaking, and couldn't stop. The range was now down to a horrifying five yards, and the Dornier's tail unit now filled my windscreen. Every rivet in its metal skin, every scratch in its paintwork, became matters of great interest. And my starboard propeller was about to slam into it and carve it to bits, which would knock him uncontrollably out of the sky.

But it might also bring my flight to a premature end, as the damaged propeller would be completely unbalanced. At 1,800 revs a minute - ninety strikes of the propeller blades every second - it could shake that engine out of its mounting. If it fell aaway it would weaken the wing structure, the fuel lines would sever, the petrol ignite, and God knows how much damage would be done to our hydraulic systems.

There was a small plus side. Lightened by a ton or so of engine we would hold height better on the remaining one, so we'd probably get home OK.

Just as in George Orwell's Animal Farm two legs were good, but four legs better, so in my estimation, two engines were better than one. I wound the wheel hard over, heaved the wing clear of his tail unit, and we slid off twenty yards to the side. But unable to stop, we were now coming into the view of his front gunner, who waited, like the black menace I'd just dealt with, for us to slide from behind the protection of his front propeller, which blanketed his field of fire to the rear. If he'd fired at us then he could have shot it off, which wouldn't have helped his pilot much. But he could afford to wait. He knew he was safe as my guns would no longer bear. And although my gunner was swinging his turret forward to join in the fray, it was obvious he wasn't going to make it in time.

As my unstoppable forward slide continued the gunner and I stared at each other through the transparency of the spinning propeller. Through that disc, and only a cricket pitch away, his gun was pointed at my head, and tracking steadily forwards as we overtook.

I lost my nerve, and ducked below window level to get away from that awful black devil and his gun, a pointless exercise as the bullets, when they came, would come through the side of the aircraft just as easily as they would through the window. But as, like a hypnotised rabbit, I raised my head again to stare at my executioner, I slid from the protection of his propeller. His gun muzzle blossomed into orange flame and twenty shots a second crashed into my aircraft. It seemed as though it was being destroyed about my ears. The shattering noise that started six inches above my head receded only slightly in volume as the line of bullets swept through the top of the cockpit, into the wireless set and on into the cabin.

But he shot a foot too high and stopped a yard too soon. That much lower and longer and he would have killed both pilots and our gunner, and probably the wireless operator as well. I could not retaliate, and had had a bellyful, so put the wheel hard over, and the big black Dornier and that flashing gun retreated into the mist.

I dived through the cloud as fast as I considered safe, hoping to catch him in clear air below the cloud base, but he didn't re-appear, and we never met again.

Air action is normally an impersonal affair, metal aircraft fighting each other at two hundred yards' range. But this bar-room brawl had been on an entirely different - and highly personal - plane. On the three-hour slog home in my damaged aircraft across that cold North Sea I thought again of those menacing black-clad gunners.

The front gunner had frightened the life out of me in a way that nobody had ever done before, or was to again. But it was the one in the midships cockpit that occupied my thoughts. Perhaps, back in Germany, there were parents, brothers and sisters, even a wife and children if he was a year or two older than me.

Thoughts of him were to occur to me occasionally in the five years of war that lay ahead, and still do sixty years later.

Over the years I've talked to a number of World War 2 fighter pilots, and read many of their books, but have never met, or heard of one who'd had a combat in the middle of a cloud. But I, a mere reconnaissance-bomber pilot, had. This would obviously make the Guiness Book of Records, I felt.

Alas, they need confirmation. And as my one-time crew have all passed through the pearly gates I haven't got it. You'll just have to take my word for the fact that it happened.

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