The English flew without limits - to death or victory.
Captain Palmer takes off first. He always takes off first, this young captain with a long hours flying, because he leads bombers on the target. It's hard for us to understand. We have in our cars navigators, which always prompt a pleasant voice, where the turn to the right and where to the left. And our tablets for a split second will helpfully show us the maps of Moscow, at least of Paris, even of Cologne. But Captain Palmer, smoothly taking the helm of his heavy aircraft on himself, does not mean anything.
Palmer leads his "Lancaster" to the sound of an oboe, which he hears in his headphones. It works the guidance system, which is called "Oboe". Continuous, clear, filled with restrained sadness, the sound of a wooden pipe that fascinated Haydn and worried Beethoven, accompanies Captain Palmer on his entire heavenly path. If the sound is interrupted, it means that the car has left the course, and then it corrects it with a light movement of hands in woolen gloves lying on the black two-handed steering wheel of the bomber.
It is a cold day on December 23, 1944. Usually in the afternoon Germany is bombed by the Eighth Air Army of the United States, and the British do it at night. But in the morning the meteorological service reported that over the cloudiness of Germany, under the cover of which it is possible to reach the target, and therefore the British bombers were ordered to fly in the afternoon and attack Gremlin, the railway sorting station of Cologne. Rising from the airfield in eastern England, they pass over the strait, then they see under the wings of the Dutch Hague. They have not yet entered the sky of the Reich, and German fighters are already approaching them.
We do not know much about that air war, because from childhood we read in books about the defeats and victories of the Red Army, about the catastrophes of 1941, about the forested forests under Demyan and destroyed by shelling and bombing of Stalingrad. And this is understandable. Our war is different. Our heroes in the sky Kozhedub, Rechkalov, the brothers Glinka, Pokryshkin. But there, in the sky of Germany, hundreds of kilometers from the Eastern Front, there was also a brutal war. Every day the Eighth American Air Force raised 1000 bombers and 2,000 fighters. Every day, the English crews of the Lancaster, Stirling and Wellington in the pilot's coats, buttoned-up blue jackets, with ties in the cut of jackets, gathered at long tables and listened to the commanders, pointing at their targets in large-format aerial photography German cities. And every day they changed their caps to helmets, put on parachutes and warm soft boots with zippers in front and walked to their planes.
The bombing seems to be a simple matter not dedicated to its complexity man: flew, dropped bombs, returned. But when the air war began, the British did not know how to bring airplanes to a synthetic fuel plant or a factory for the production of submarine parts, bombers roamed in the sky and could not find whole cities. They did not know in which order to fly, how to fight off fighters and how best to enter the target, alone or all at once. By simple, overland human logic, planes are better dispersed in the sky, saving fire from antiaircraft guns, but this is a mistake. English mathematicians have calculated the optimal model: in order to reduce losses, it is necessary to reach the target with the maximum number of aircraft. Therefore, Marshal Harris, nicknamed Bomber, collected everything that is possible for air operations, including cadets who have not yet completed training. On Cologne on the night of May 30, 1942, he sent 1046 bombers. One of them was led by Palmer.
About Captain Robert Palmer we know a little. He grew up in the town of Gillingham, Kent. Perhaps a teenager he went to a local stadium and was a fan of the football club "Gillingham", which in the last prewar season of 1938/39 entered the final of the Grand Cup of Kent. Palmer joined the Air Force as a volunteer. The war of Germany with the USSR has not yet begun, and Palmer has already fought. He bombed Germany since January 1941. The place of his birth is known, there is a photo on which we see a calm, balanced guy with an open smile. He looks more respectable and older than his 24 years. In the rest there were only lapidary lines of characteristics written by the commander when submitting documents for rewarding. The first award he received "in recognition of courage and devotion to duty in performing air operations". In the presentation to the second award it is said that he "continues to work with unremitting zeal and enthusiasm, successfully performing a large number of departures. He invariably insists on departure, regardless of the resistance of the enemy, showing courage and devotion to duty ". In the last, posthumous order, he was called an "outstanding pilot".
By December 1944, Palmer had 110 sorties - 110 flights of fire and smoke, where German fighters were racing at a terrible speed and his friends were exploding in the sky. Such shooting is. Hits can not be seen. Suddenly, the fuselage breaks in two and a black blob of blast appears at the fault site. For a moment the nose of the plane with the glassed-in cabin is visible, as if unaware that death has already come. And in the plane there are seven still alive people, seven crewmen.
American pilots flying B-17 were sent home after they performed 25 or 30 or 50 flights. The English flew without restrictions, to death or victory.
Captain Palmer after an hour of flight led 27 "Lancaster" and 3 "Mosquito" to Cologne. But the cloudiness that the weather service promised, Cologne was not. Thirty aircraft with red and blue circles on the wings and fuselages were clearly visible in the sky. The bombers marched in a formation called the "stream," and Palmer's Lancaster flew ahead. The pilots of the remaining aircraft watched tensely his car, decorated with a red arrow - the distinguishing sign of the leader from the 582nd squadron of air rangers. He was now to find a railway station on the ground, mark it with a marking bomb that exploded to give a strip of green and red fire 300 meters long, and then attack the station, showing the group's planes the correct maneuver and once again marking the target with the ruptures of their bombs.
German anti-aircraft artillery focused fire on his plane. Other crews saw how Palmer first started burning one engine, then the second. At the same time, the whole group received an order allowing each pilot in the absence of clouds to act at their discretion. But Palmer did not know this. Perhaps his plane no longer had radio communication. He walked to the target with two burning motors.
In the cockpit, smoke, in the fuselage of the fumes, the flame was selected to the bomb compartment. But he did not try to save himself, quickly dropping the bombs so that they did not explode in the plane, and he did not protivozenitny maneuver, and unswervingly carried out the already canceled order, showing the course and speed for the whole group. On a burning plane, he made an ideal approach and accurately dropped bombs. Other pilots saw Palmer's "Lancaster" fire spiraling down and disappearing into the smoke.