COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER SEVEN
BALBOS AND BOOZE
With the end of the fighting in Europe summer had come. Marked by
a spell of magnificent weather which seemed set to go on and on. Like
the celebrations at Alhorn. The party to end all parties.
Each morning after the latest possible breakfast, or no breakfast at
all, we took ourselves off into the surrounding countryside seeking the
spoils of war. In the evenings, surrounded by a growing collection of
motor vehicles, the party rekindled itself with renewed vigour. We
moved indoors as darkness fell, pausing briefly for solid refreshment
and thundered on into the small hours.
On the third day I shook off my hangover and went back to work.
Group wanted photographs of the final shipping strikes and Charlie
Hall had volunteered to come along as my number two. There was a
ceasefire in force. But hostilities were not due to terminate officially
for another 24 hours and Tommy, briefing us beforehand, stressed that
we should take nothing for granted. Our aircraft were fitted with drop
tanks, in order to make the round trip from Alhorn, and the cannons
were fully armed.
We cruised low down across the rich farmland of Niedersachsen
and Schleswig Holstein, past the sprawling ruins of Hamburg and the
burnt out shell of Lubeck until Travemunde lay ahead. Skirting the
white beaches we dropped down towards the Deutschland and the Cap
Arcona, lying close together, on their beam ends in the shallow water.
The vast hulls loomed large against my gunsight and I switched the
camera on.
The whole of that forward oblique pass between Lubeck Bay and
Fehmarn Island was a graveyard of sunken, burnt out and capsized
ships. Charlie and I returned to base, well satisfied with what we had
seen, happy that the Typhoons had played a major part in frustrating
plans for that final Nazi stand in Norway. On subsequent reckoning
146 Wing alone had sunk more than 40,000 tons of enemy shipping.
Shortly afterwards we learned that some were prison ships, whose
wretched inmates had been moved from their concentration camps in
the last weeks and days of the war. Whether they were hostages for the
safe conduct of their unspeakable jailers, or about to be sunk in an
effort to destroy the evidence of atrocity, had yet to be ascertained.
Whatever the truth our attacks had unwittingly added to their
sufferings.
Back at Alhorn Felix Cryderman had grounded himself. He had
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