Digby sat on the edge of the hospital bed, dry-eyed now, watching his brother’s face, seeing the thousand-yard-stare as Bart remembered.
“I told the crew to jettison the rear hatch then get into ditching position, braced against the bulkhead.” The Whitley had a crew of five, Digby recalled. “When we reached zero altitude I heaved back on the stick and opened the throttles, but the aircraft refused to level out, and we hit the water with a terrific smash. I was knocked out.”
They were step brothers, eight years apart. Digby’s mother had died when he was thirteen, and his father had married a widow with a boy of her own. From the start, Digby had looked after his little brother, protecting him from bullies and helping him with his schoolwork. They had both been mad about airplanes, and dreamed of being pilots. Digby lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident, studied engineering, and went into aircraft design; but Bart lived the dream.
“When I came to, I could smell smoke. The aircraft was floating and the starboard wing was on fire. The night was dark as the grave, but I could see by the light of the flames. I crawled along the fuselage and found the dinghy pack. I bunged it through the hatch and jumped. Jesus, that water was cold.”
His voice was low and calm, but he took hard pulls on his cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs and blowing it out between tight-pursed lips in a long jet. “I was wearing a life jacket and I came to the surface like a cork. There was quite a swell, and I was going up and down like a tart’s knickers. Luckily, the dinghy pack was in front of my nose. I pulled the string and it inflated itself, but I couldn’t get in. I didn’t have the strength to heave myself out of the water. I couldn’t understand it—didn’t realize I had a dislocated shoulder and a broken wrist and three cracked ribs and all that. So I just stayed there, holding on, freezing to death.”
There had been a time, Digby recalled, when he thought Bart had been the lucky one.
“Eventually Jones and Croft appeared. They’d held on to the tail until it went down. Neither could swim, but their Mae Wests saved them, and they managed to scramble into the dinghy and pull me in.” He lit a fresh cigarette. “I never saw Pickering. I don’t know what happened to him, but I assume he’s at the bottom of the sea.”
He fell silent. There was one crew member unaccounted for, Digby realized. After a pause, he said, “What about the fifth man?”
“John Rowley, the bomb-aimer, was alive. We heard him call out. I was in a bit of a daze, but Jones and Croft tried to row toward the voice.” He shook his head in a gesture of hopelessness. “You can’t imagine how difficult it was. The swell must have been three or four feet, the flames were dying down so we couldn’t see much, and the wind was howling like a bloody banshee. Jones yelled, and he’s got a strong voice. Rowley would shout back, then the dinghy would go up one side of a wave and down the other and spin around at the same time, and when he called out again his voice seemed to come from a completely different direction. I don’t know how long it went on. Rowley kept shouting, but his voice became weaker as the cold got to him.” Bart’s face stiffened. “He started to sound a bit pathetic, calling to God and his mother and that sort of rot. Eventually he went quiet.”
