The Windmill

By David Crookes

Occupied Holland 1943. The entire extended Jewish family of brave thirteen-year-old Anna Millstrom is killed by the Germans. Anna escapes the carnage and hides in an old windmill. An RAF Lancaster bomber comes down in Holland. Two members of the crew survive, Australian pilot Jack (Roo) Reilly and American Solomon (Sol) Abrahams. They too, hide in the windmill from the Germans. To save Anna and the badly wounded Roo, Sol creates a diversion and is captured by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Roo and Anna assisted by the Dutch Resistance escape to England.
Over the next few years before their reunion, Roo serves as a senior official in Australia’s Immigration Department, which is bent on maintaining the White Australia Policy, a defiant Anna is shuttled from church-run orphanages in England and Australia, and Sol uses his family’s wealth to assist the Simon Wiesenthal Centre hunt down Nazis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Crookes
• Release date: Oct 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780987395085

David Crookes

David Crookes self-published his first novel BLACKBIRD in 1996. It was quickly picked up by Hodder Headline, now HATCHETTE GROUP, and became a best seller in multiple editions, as did THE LIGHT HORSEMAN'S DAUGHTER and SOMEDAY SOON and other titles. Now most of his many novels are available as ebooks. David was born in Southampton, England. After living in Canada for twenty-three years he moved to Queensland, Australia with his wife and children. He has worked in many occupations, as a farm hand, factory worker, lumber-mill worker, costing surveyor, salesman, contractor, oilfield and construction industry executive and as a small business owner. He now writes fulltime. His travels have taken him to many parts of the world and his particular passion, apart from writing is single-handed ocean sailing.His novels include:BlackbirdThe Light Horseman's DaughterSomeday SoonChildren of the SunRedcoatBorderlineGreat Spirit ValleyThe Bookkeeper's Daughter

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

THE NETHERLANDS - SEPTEMBER 1943

Anna awoke terrified to the sound of loud knocking on the farmhouse door in the early hours of the morning. She pushed back the bed covers and went to the bedroom window. A black Mercedes gleaned in the moonlit farmyard below.

‘Have the Germans come for us?’ Anna whispered as her aunt silently entered the room.

‘Don’t be afraid, Anna.’ Clara Millstrom said calmly. ‘It’s only Oberlieutenant Werner. Go and hide in the attic while I go downstairs and see what he wants.’

Anna, a tall pretty fair-haired, blue-eyed girl was only thirteen years old, but she knew exactly what Werner wanted. The commander of the small German garrison in the small town of Tiel only came to the Millstrom farm for one thing—her aunt.

Outside on the landing, Anna’s grandparents stood in flickering candlelight. The elderly white-haired couple stood in their nightclothes with their arms clasped tightly around each other.

‘It’s all right,’ Clara whispered to them. ‘Go back inside your bedroom and lock the door.’

Johannes and Käthe Millstrom shuffled back into the bedroom. Old before their time, their tired eyes reflected their despair. Their only son, Anna’s father, who had chosen to leave the land to pursue a more traditional Jewish occupation, had been killed along with Anna’s mother when their jeweller’s shop in Rotterdam had taken a direct hit in a bombing raid during the lightening German invasion of Holland. Now, after two years of Nazi occupation, in return for their attractive, unmarried daughter’s sexual favours, Oberlieutenant Werner didn’t force them to wear the yellow Star of David, which allowed them to escape Nazi persecution of Jews.

Anna tip-toed to the end of the landing. The day she had arrived at the farm, distraught and hungry after walking over thirty miles from the bomb-ravaged port of Rotterdam, Aunt Clara had told her she must always hide in the attic when anyone visited the farm. Since that day, Anna’s presence at her grandparents home had remained a secret from everyone, even their closest neighbours.

Her grandfather had moved an old wardrobe to the end of the landing. The handsome French polished unit extended almost from wall to wall and from the floor to the ceiling, making it large enough to hide the narrow stairway which led up to the attic. In the back of the wardrobe, behind hanging clothes, Johannes had cut an opening which gave access to the attic to anyone small enough to squeeze through it.

Anna was about to get in the cupboard when she heard her aunt open the front door. Then the light in the hallway downstairs went on. Anna was scared, but instead of going up to the attic she stopped and listened.

‘Ah, mein Libechen.’

The pleasant greeting was uncharacteristic of the usually austere and sometime violent Oberlieutenant Werner. Anna knew at once that he was more than a little drunk.

‘What is it, Kurt?’ Anna heard Clara ask. ‘What brings you here in the middle of the night?’

‘I have something important to tell you, Clara,’ the German officer said, ‘but first switch off that damn light. Conditions are ideal for the RAF. The swine will be bombing Berlin again tonight. Let’s not give them another light to guide them back to England, the Dutch underground give them enough as it is.’

There was a click and the hallway light went out.

‘What is it you have to tell me, Kurt?’ Clara asked.

There was a short silence, then Werner said, ‘Here, I have brought schnapps. Open it up and I will tell you....’

Werner’s voice trailed off as he and Carla moved from the hallway to the living room. Anna strained her ears, but unable to hear anything, she crawled back down the landing a little way. Still hearing nothing, she crawled all the way to the top of the stairs and peered down.

From where she lay, Anna could see the oberlieutenant standing in candlelight with his back to her just inside the living room. He had already taken off his boots and was swaying a little as he hurried to remove his tunic. When Carla came and stood beside him with the uncorked bottle of schnapps, he roughly pulled off her dressing gown and started groping beneath her nightdress.

Anna looked on in helpless dismay as she witnessed her pretty, dark-haired aunt’s humiliation. Carla had no choice but to stand compliantly, holding the schnapps in one hand and wine glasses in the other, while Werner, his mouth pressed hard against hers, fumbled to take off the rest of his uniform.

‘Please tell me now what it is that is so important, Kurt?’ Carla asked when at last he took his mouth from hers.

‘I am to be transferred away from Tiel.’

Carla gasped. ‘But what does that mean for us here?’

Werner nodded toward the staircase. ‘Come, we shall go upstairs to your bed. I shall tell you later.’

‘No, tell me now, Kurt.’ Carla said. She pushed her nightdress off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. ‘We can do what you want down here on the sofa.’

Werner’s earlier congeniality vanished.

‘You will neither tell me what I can do, nor where I can do it,’ he snapped.

Without warning, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of the living room and began pulling her up the stairs behind him.

Anna scarcely had time to get back to the end of the landing and get inside the wardrobe without being seen. She sat with her knees tucked up under her chin, her heart pounding furiously. As her heartbeat eased, she squeezed through the hole at the back of the cupboard. It was more difficult now because since she had arrived at the farm she had grown from a small child into a tall gangly adolescent, but once through the hole, she climbed slowly up to the attic where she lay down in the darkness and silently cried for Carla.

*

Carla didn’t risk triggering Kurt Werner’s explosive temper again. Instead, she allowed the German to have his way with her in her bed without uttering a word. The sooner he was satisfied, the sooner she would learn how his transfer from Tiel would affect the Millstrom family.

‘I leave for Berlin this afternoon, Carla,’ Werner said eventually. He took a long swallow of schnapps. ‘For two weeks now the English have been bombing the city in spite of heavy losses from anti-aircraft fire and Luftwaffe night fighters.’

Carla was surprised. It was not like the oberlieutenant to speak to her about how the war was going. She lay with her head against his chest as she knew he liked her to after they had sex.

‘I suppose with the heart of the Fatherland under attack, the Führer will need his finest officers around him,’ Werner said taking another swallow of schnapps.

‘Is that why you are going to Berlin, Kurt?’

He lit a cigarette from the candle on the bedside table and inhaled deeply.

‘No, I go there only to receive new orders.’

‘Is it possible you will come back here to Holland?’

‘No. I am to be posted to Poland.’

Poland. Just the sound of the word struck fear into Carla’s heart. It was to Poland that trainloads of Dutch Jews were taken every month from the detention centre at Westerbork in northern Holland. The Nazis had always said the Jews were taken to Germany to work in factories in the Ruhr Valley and elsewhere but the Dutch resistance had spread the word months ago that the trains really went to Polish death camps.

Carla could no longer contain her anxiety. ‘But what will happen to us here when you have gone, Kurt?’

‘I am told that Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann, the chief of the SS Jewish Bureau in Berlin, has instructed my replacement at Tiel to take a much harder line on Jews.’ Werner said. ‘The few who have escaped the net are to be rounded up and sent to Westerbork without delay. So there is nothing more I can do for you and your parents, Carla. That is what I came to tell you.’

Carla sat bolt upright in the bed. ‘But not before you had used and abused me yet again, you bastard.’ She clenched her fists and before Werner could stop her she landed a hail of blows to his head.

Her onslaught was so ferocious that the oberlieutenant’s only defence was to leap out of bed. ‘Strike me would you, you Jewish bitch?’ he bellowed at the top of his voice. Werner stood swaying on his feet beside the bed, naked and beside himself with rage. ‘You should be down on your knees thanking me. If it were not for me you and your parents would have been in the camps long ago. And the girl.’

‘The girl?’ Carla’s mouth trembled. ‘What do you mean? What girl?’

‘The one hiding in the wardrobe on the landing.’ Werner sneered.

Carla cowered as Werner lumbered around the bed then stood above her threateningly.

‘Do you think I’m stupid, woman,’ he roared. ‘I saw her crawl into the wardrobe when we came upstairs. ‘How long has she been hiding here?’

When Carla didn’t answer the German raised a huge fist.

Carla knew it was pointless to remain silent.

‘She has been here since her parents were killed in the Rotterdam blitz. She is my niece.’

Werner’s eyes widened in surprise. Then they narrowed as his anger seemed to subside and his interest was aroused. ‘And how old is she, Carla?’

‘Only thirteen.’

‘Then she’s old enough to pay her dues for my protection, just as you have always done.’ Werner nodded toward the bedroom door. ‘Bring her to me.’

‘No, Kurt.’ Carla pleaded. ‘I cannot. Please, Anna is just a child.’

He shrugged and reached for the candle ‘Suit yourself. I’ll just get her myself.’

Werner staggered from the bedroom and Carla leapt up from the bed and followed him down the landing. ‘No Kurt,’ she screamed. ‘Leave Anna alone.’

But Werner wasn’t listening. Already he was savouring the prize.

In a last attempt to save Anna, Carla threw herself at him, her fists flailing wildly. Werner responded by slamming his elbow backwards into Anna’s stomach and she dropped to the floor, winded and gasping for air.

Werner pulled open the wardrobe door. Apart from a few clothes there seemed to be nothing else inside. He pushed them aside quickly and saw the hole in the back and the stairs behind it.

Werner grasped the frame of the wardrobe and pulled hard. When the heavy piece of furniture fell, it narrowly missed Carla who still lay doubled up on the floor.

‘Come down, Anna,’ Werner called out. He looked at Carla and grinned, then called out again. ‘Come on, Anna. I have something for you.’

There was no response from the attic and he was about to call out again when a voice behind him said, ‘And I have something for you Oberlieutenant Werner.’

It was a man’s voice. Startled, Werner spun around and there was Johannes Millstrom standing just a few feet from him. The old man was holding a twelve bore shotgun to his shoulder and pointing it at his head. His wife stood nervously behind him.

As a trained soldier Werner didn’t hesitate. He made a quick grab for the gun. But he wasn’t quick enough. There was a deafening explosion and suddenly the German officer’s brains were splattered all over the landing.

For a few moments everyone was too stunned to say or do anything. Johannes and Käthe just stood in open-mouthed horror. Upstairs in the darkness of the attic, Anna sat petrified, afraid to move, huddled between the roof rafters. Then slowly Carla began to struggle up off the floor.

She had only made it to her knees when there was a loud crash downstairs. The light went on in the hallway, then the light on the stairs. Someone else was in the house. Carla and her parents stood still as statues, too afraid to breath. They heard footsteps then a German soldier appeared at the top of the stairs

He was a private, no more than eighteen or nineteen years old and he carried a sub-machine gun defensively in front of him. He was Oberlieutenant Werner’s driver and had been waiting patiently in the Mercedes outside when he heard the shotgun blast. When he saw Werner’s naked body lying dead in a pool of blood and the old Dutch farmer clutching a shotgun, he opened fire.

Even before the long burst of machine gun fire ended, Johannes, Käthe and Carla Millstrom were dead.

CHAPTER TWO

There was no sign of the conflict raging around the world in the picturesque Cambridgeshire village of Ramsey St. Mary’s as the evensong church congregation knelt and prayed for the deliverance of their loved ones fighting the Germans and Japanese in distant lands. But just a few miles away at RAF Upwood, the deadly business of war was in full swing as the seven man crew of a Lancaster bomber, commanded by Flight Lieutenant, Jack Reilly, was being briefed before a night bombing raid on Berlin.

Reilly, an Australian from Canberra, had dubbed the Lancaster, Digger, after flying its very first sortie over Hamburg after she was delivered from the Avro factory and assigned to one of the RAF’s four Pathfinder Force squadrons.

Pathfinder squadrons were made up of a mixture of aircraft, mainly Lancaster, Mosquito, and Halifax bombers, which were fitted with the latest on-board radar and wireless equipment, which allowed them to find enemy targets by flying along preset radio beams. By following route markers and target indicators dropped by the Pathfinders, usually brightly coloured flares and incendiary bombs, huge formations of RAF bombers were able to locate enemy targets faster and drop their bomb loads with much greater accuracy.

The nose of Digger was adorned with a crude painting of a grinning kangaroo with its huge flat feet standing on the throat of a terrified Adolf Hitler. Beside the marsupial, almost a hundred downward-pointing bombs had been painstakingly painted on the aircraft’s fuselage by her ground crew. Each bomb represented a successful sortie flown against the enemy.

Of the total sorties flown, fifty nine had been commanded by Jack or ‘Roo’ Reilly as he had been affectionately tagged by his crew. Tonight was their sixtieth mission and if they came home safely, yet again, they would have completed their tour of operations unscathed. As the seven young men walked across the tarmac to their waiting aircraft, bundled up in heavy flying suits, fur-lined boots and parachute harnesses, Reilly hoped and prayed they would.

For some reason, best known to the commander of the elite RAF Pathfinder squadrons, Air Commodore Don Bennett, another Australian, the aircrews of the four squadrons were comprised almost entirely of mixed crews from nations of the British Commonwealth, with the odd American serving with either the RAF or the Royal Canadian Air Force thrown in.

Roo Reilly guessed Bennett’s reason was that the dangerous task of the Pathfinder crews required the ultimate in guts and dependability. With national pride and patriotism on the line, no member of a Pathfinder crew wanted to be the one who let the others down in the face of the enemy. And each crew as a whole was determined not to let down the airmen manning the bomber squadrons following behind them—men who depended on the Pathfinders to guide them to the enemy as quickly as possible so they could drop their deadly cargo, then turn and run for home.

Since the Pathfinder squadrons had been formed a year earlier, the Germans knew their presence in the night sky was a prelude to imminent large scale death and destruction. Accordingly, the destruction of Pathfinders had been given the highest priority by the Luftwaffe and the German ground defenses.

Reilly was the first to climb aboard Digger. He was a slim, brown-haired, blue eyed man and at twenty-five, was the ‘old man’ of the crew. With this raid being over heavily fortified Berlin and the crew’s last before retiring from operations, everyone knew that the chances of returning home safely, shortened with every sortie flown and that they had already stretched the odds to the limit.

Roo and each man in the crew were also acutely aware that Digger, like all Lancasters, was a death trap. Weighing over 30 tons, including 7 tons of bombs, thousands of .303 rounds for her 8 Browning machine guns and 2000 gallons of fuel, she was just a huge flying bomb herself. One stray tracer and she could blow like an ammunition dump, killing everyone aboard.

First to board the aircraft after Reilly were the upper-mid and rear-gunners, two French Canadians. They were followed by the flight engineer, a South African, and the bomb-aimer, a Rhodesian. Then came Digger’s wireless operator, a New Zealander, and finally her navigator, an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force and who, at twenty-four, was the second oldest crew member.

‘You be sure to bring us all back alive, you Aussie bastard,’ the American said, giving Roo a playful punch on the arm.

‘Just you worry about your navigation being spot on, Sol,’ Roo said as the American took his seat, ‘and the rest of us will take care of everything else.’

Flying Officer Solomon (Sol) Abrahams was the most unusual member of the crew. Unlike the others, he wasn’t a loyal subject of one of Britain’s far off dominions who had promptly joined his country’s air force to fight alongside the mother country in her hour of need. He was the son of a New York Jewish businessman, a tall, mild-mannered man, with a degree in business administration from Harvard University. Angry at the plight of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and embittered and disappointed at the US government’s inaction over the outrage, Sol had joined the RCAF just prior to America’s involvement in the war.

Both Sol and Roo, who had been a civil servant in Canberra before the war, had trained together as aircrew at one of the British Commonwealth Air Training Stations in western Canada. They had won their wings in the wide open spaces of Alberta’s ‘big sky’ country at a place called High River near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Soon after Roo took his seat at the controls, Digger’s four huge Rolls Royce Merlin engines spluttered and roared into life. Then her ground crew removed her wheel-chocks and Roo taxied her out to the end of the runway. Minutes later Digger was climbing up into the night sky to blaze the trail to Berlin for almost five hundred heavy bombers already taking off from airfields all over south-eastern England.

*

After Oberlieutenant Werner’s driver had dragged the German officer’s dead body down to his car and driven off, Anna crept down to the landing. At first, when she saw what had happened to her aunt and grandparents, she screamed then slumped down on the landing, sobbing.

What had happened was the same kind of nightmare she had experienced in Rotterdam when she was sent home from school at the start of the blitz to find her parents dead in the bombed out shop below the family’s living quarters. But this time it was worse. This time there was no one she could turn to.

Apart from some distant relatives living somewhere in Belgium, Anna had no-one left in the world. And since none of the people on nearby farms even knew she existed, she knew they would be unlikely to help her after they learned about what had happened at the Millstrom place. Fearing retribution, they might even turn her in to the Nazis to save themselves. Unable to think straight and not knowing what to do, Anna had just stayed on the landing, crying her heart out, until the first grey light of dawn appeared.

It was the onset of daylight that spurred her into action. Realising the Germans might come to inspect the scene where Oberlieutenant Werner had been murdered, she had decided there was only one thing she could do. She would pack some food, a few clothes, and a blanket into a haversack and head back to Rotterdam. After all, there were hundreds of orphaned and homeless children living on the streets there. She would be just one more.

Anna spent the entire day running and hiding. At dusk, she saw an old abandoned windmill in a cow paddock beside the road and decided it was a good place to spend the night.

The old building was cold and damp inside. Unused for many years, perhaps decades, its high dome shaped roof had collapsed, letting in the weather which had rotted much of its timber superstructure and rusted out its complicated pumping apparatus. Looking for a place to hide, Anna climbed up a ladder to a wooden platform about ten feet above the ground and spread out her blanket on the damp boards.

As darkness fell, she sat eating some bread and cheese she had packed in the haversack and staring up through the hole in the windmill roof at stars emerging into the night sky. Later, as the night wore on, like so often during her long periods of hiding in the attic at the farm, she tried to block out reality by escaping into a make-believe world.

Over the years she had developed a private world of her own, a world of constant sunshine and happiness where there was no pain and suffering. But there was to be no escape from the awful reality of the night before, as cold and trembling, she kept reliving the nightmare over and over again.

Suddenly she heard a familiar dull drone in the night sky. It was a sound that the people of the Netherlands had come to know well. It was the sound of heavy bombers. Gradually the drone grew louder and louder. Anna put her hands over her ears as the noise intensified into a deep throaty roar. Plainly there were an awful lot of planes overhead, but she wasn’t afraid. They were flying eastward and they would be over Germany when they started raining down death and destruction.

*

As the Meteorological Office report at the sortie briefing had predicted, it was a clear moonlit night with just a few cloud patches. Roo knew the route markers dropped by the Pathfinders would be seen easily by the massive aerial armada following them to Berlin, or ‘Big City’ as the RAF had nicknamed the German capital.

Digger dropped her first guiding flares as she approached the Dutch coast at around 12000 feet. They immediately attracted fire from German ground batteries. But the flak was slight and ineffective. Fortunately, less than half an hour later, when Digger flew into a belt of searchlights over the industrial area of the heavily fortified Ruhr Valley, there was more cloud which offered some protection from the ack-ack guns.

Still, for what seemed an eternity, bright streams of red flak poured up through and between the clouds lighting up the sky around Digger. When at last she flew out of the glow of the searchlights and into the darkness beyond, no one was more relieved than the two French Canadian gunners who huddled in their cold cramped gun-turrets, whose job it was to defend the Lancaster against any night fighters.

Digger dropped an increasing number of flares as she drew closer to Big City and tension mounted amongst the crew.

‘How are we doing?’ Roo asked Sol.

‘Running about four minutes late, Skipper ’

‘Increase speed.’

The roar of the engines increased slightly as the South African flight engineer followed Roo’s order. There was no more communication between the crew until they were almost over Berlin. Partially obscured by cloud and with few lights showing, the German capital looked deceivingly small.

‘Hang on to your hats, boys,’ Roo said over the intercom, then told the flight engineer to open the throttles wide.

As Digger surged forward she began dropping more flares. Almost simultaneously the markers and those of the other Pathfinders began to hit the ground, giving off brilliant green light around specific targets. As always, the Pathfinders had maintained strict radio silence during the flight but from the number of flares it was plain they all had successfully reached Big City and that their timing was perfect.

However, the response from the ground was immediate. Suddenly, the whole sky was lit up by roving searchlights and ack-ack fire and Big City could be seen extending for miles in every direction. With all her target markers dropped, all that remained for Digger was to release the only large bomb she was carrying, a 4000 pound ‘cookie’, on a designated industrial target. Just a few more minutes and she could turn and run for home.

As the Lancaster closed in on the cookie’s target, Roo saw a series of huge flashes of light on the ground below and knew the first of the main strike force were getting their 12000 pound deep penetration ‘tallboy’ bombs away. Soon the bright flashes were appearing all over the city. Berlin was on fire.

Soon the light from the explosions of the massive bombardment, combined with the glare of hundreds of searchlights and continual streams of anti-aircraft tracers was so bright, that the hordes of bombers droning over Big City like a swarm of angry hornets became plainly visible.

‘Cookie’s gone, Skipper.’

It seemed a lifetime before the Rhodesian bomb aimer’s jubilant voice came over the intercom. But the moment it did, the flight engineer eased the throttles and Roo put the Lancaster into a 360 degree turn, careful to make it wide enough to get out of the way of the bombers coming up behind. Even with her bomb load gone, the turn would still take Digger more than three minutes to execute. Three long minutes of hoping that none of the ground batteries or any German night fighters singled her out.

Just as she was completing the turn, Digger was coned in a searchlight and it locked on. Almost immediately the shrill voice of the rear gunner came over the intercom.

‘Corkscrew, skipper. Fighter to starboard.’

Roo started to put Digger into the first of a series a twisting 60 degree turns, standard corkscrew evasive action designed to shake off the attacker.

‘Second fighter, port side.’ This time it was the upper mid gunner’s voice on the intercom.

Roo put Digger into a steep dive. The two fighters, both Junkers 88’s, used their superior manoeuvrability to quickly take up the pursuit and with guns blazing, sent tracers ripping down the length of Digger’s fuselage. Both the rear and the mid upper gunners were quick to return the fire. But their machine guns fell silent almost immediately. From the agonised screams coming over the intercom from the gun turrets, Roo knew the fighter pilots had found their prime targets.

Digger was now defenseless. Only more evasive action combined with sheer luck could save her now. Roo pulled her sharply out of the dive, intending to corkscrew again before taking her into a power dive as a last resort. As he did, a burst of machine gun fire raked through the cockpit.

‘Full power,’ Roo yelled, deciding to dive immediately.

There was no response from the flight engineer. Roo glanced at him quickly. The young South African sat slumped over in his seat, stone dead, blood trickling from his mouth. The last burst of machine gun fire had killed him instantly, without even a whimper. As Roo leaned over to open the throttles himself, the German fighters were racing in for the kill from opposite sides of the Lancaster.

A split second later Digger momentarily slipped from the cone of the searchlight. But the respite from the glare was short lived. Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light and a huge ear-splitting explosion. Digger shuddered and lurched wildly. Simultaneously, small chunks of flaming metal slammed into the aircraft, some with such force they burst through one side of the fuselage and passed out again through the other side.

Roo felt a stab of excruciating pain in his right shoulder. Instantly the sleeve of his flying suit turned red with blood. Behind him he heard more screams from the crew. Certain one of the fuel tanks had been hit and the plane was exploding, he braced himself to die, but nothing happened. Shaking and shuddering, Digger just flew on and after a few minutes she slipped out of the deadly glow above Big City into the protective darkness beyond.

Roo felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Sol.

‘Hell, you’re bleeding bad, Roo. You okay?’

‘Yeah. Something’s smashed up my arm, that’s all. What the bloody hell happened?’

‘Those two Kraut fighters outsmarted themselves. When we flew out of the searchlight cone the bastards must have momentarily lost sight of each other and collided. That shrapnel that hit us was bits and pieces of Junkers. This kite has got more holes in her than a colander. We’re just lucky none of the really big chunks hit us.’

‘What was all the screaming? How bad is it back there, Sol?’

The American looked at the lifeless body of the flight engineer and shook his head. ‘The bomb-aimer and wireless operator bought it too, Roo. There’s only me and you left now. Do you think this baby can make it home?’

‘I don’t know.’ Roo grimaced. ‘She’s getting bloody hard to handle. Something’s wrong with the ailerons and the rudder isn’t responding properly. All we can do is give it a try.’

As Digger headed for home she was vibrating so badly she could only be flown at half throttle. And with Roo’s right arm virtually useless and so painful that at times he almost passed out, Sol had to help him fly the plane as well as navigate. But after a couple of harrowing hours they were over Holland and beginning to think they might make it safely home after all, when without warning one of the engines cut out. Then, even before Roo and Sol realised what had happened, the other three Merlins fell silent and deprived of her 5000 horse power of thrust, Digger began to lose altitude.

‘Hell. How can that happen?’ Sol yelled with real fear in his voice.

Roo checked the fuel gauges for the first time since leaving Berlin. All registered empty. ‘Must have ruptured one of the tanks over Big City and been leaking fuel ever since,’ he said grimly. He quickly pushed the stick forward to lower Digger’s nose and gain some airspeed. ‘We’d better get our chutes on, mate. And we’d better be quick about it.’

THREE

It took Sol less than thirty seconds to clip the harnesses onto Roo’s parachute and his own. But with Digger plummeting silently downward at over 300 feet per second, she had dropped from 12000 feet to less than 3000 before they jumped from the aircraft narrowly missing the Lancaster’s huge tailplane in the process.

Sol pulled his ripcord the instant he cleared the plane. The chute quickly filled with air and he winced when it tugged viciously at his harness straps as his rate of decent was drastically reduced. He looked below him anxiously. In the moonlight he saw Digger was now in a spiral death spin, then gasped in horror when he realised Roo was still hurtling downward with his chute unopened.

Roo had brushed his right arm against the fuselage as he had jumped from the plane and once again he had almost passed out from the pain. Fortunately after a while in freefall, the cold rush of night air on his face stimulated his senses prompting him to tug on the ripcord with his left hand. When the chute billowed open he lost consciousness immediately from the sheer force of the wrench of the harness straps on his body. He was still unconscious when he hit the ground and broke both ankles, not far from an old windmill in a cow paddock.

Digger slammed into the roadway about a mile from the cow-paddock. The sound of the impact reverberated for miles around and the Lancaster left a deep smouldering crater. Bits and pieces of twisted metal and debris were strewn for hundreds of yards in every direction. But with every drop of her fuel spent and with her bomb bay empty there was no fire or any secondary explosions.

*

Anna was woken with a start for the second time in as many nights by a deafening noise. She sat up quickly and was horrified when she realized the old windmill was shaking to its very foundations. As the shaking subsided she strained her ears but now there was complete silence.

After a few moments her eyes became accustomed to the dim light and she could see well enough to pick her way across the platform to a hole in the side of the windmill which had once housed a window. She looked out over the cow paddock. Here and there she could make out the ghostly forms of black and white Friesian milk cows as they milled around nervously. Then something else caught her eye.

A shadowy form was moving towards the mill. As it drew closer she gasped when she realised it was a man, a tall man, and he was carrying another man over his shoulder and dragging what looked like a huge white sheet behind him. Anna quickly stepped away from the window and stood trembling with her back to the wall wondering what on earth was going on outside.

A few moments passed before she plucked up the courage to peep outside again. Now the man was very close to the windmill and she could see him quite clearly in the moonlight. Both he and the man he had slung over his shoulder were dressed in some kind of uniform and wore leather helmets on their heads. Then a slight wind gust caused the white sheet the man was dragging to flare up and when he struggled to contain it she could see that it wasn’t a sheet it all. It was a parachute, perhaps two.

Anna realised that the deafening roar that had woken her must have been an aeroplane crashing and that the men below in the paddock were flyers. Now they were seeking refuge in the windmill. She hurried back to the blanket, and lay down out of sight. A moment later she heard muffled noises beneath her as the men entered the mill, then a grunt as the man carrying the other lowered his burden to the floor.

Anna silently squirmed to the edge of the platform and cautiously looked down. The tall man was shining a torch over the injured man who now lay motionless on the rough dirt floor. His eyes were closed and he was so still that when Anna saw the huge patch of blood on his flying suit she thought he must be dead. But when the tall man hastily gathered together several folds of parachute silk into a soft mound and gently lifted his companion onto it, she realised he must still be alive.

‘Roo, how bad is it?’ the tall man asked.

Like many Dutch people, Anna spoke and understood English because she had been taught it in school and everyone at the farm had listened to BBC radio broadcasts since the start of the German occupation. But