The Dog Who Could Fly (27 page)

C for Cecilia was towed by a waiting tractor to a position adjacent to the hangars. Once there, Capka had no need to shut down the engines, for both had died due to lack of fuel. In no time the aircraft had been surrounded by a crowd of admiring onlookers.

“Nice work,” one of the officers remarked as Capka rolled aside the cockpit window. “You’re the first to land here today. How the devil did you manage it?”

“Well, sir, there was nothing to it, really,” Capka replied, with a sheepish grin. “You see, as soon as I spotted your lights I just eased the stick back a little, closed my eyes, and started to pray!”

“What’s with the dog?” the officer asked, nodding at the head of a German shepherd that the crew had painted in silhouette on C for Cecilia’s flank.

Capka laughed. “Oh, that . . . That’s our lucky charm. Every crew’s got to have one . . .”

“So does the dog really exist? He looks like a handsome brute . . . We’ve heard talk of this flying dog, but no one’s ever seen him.”

Capka figured there was little point in trying to hide Antis, for they’d have to disembark sooner or later and everyone here at Honington seemed to know. Very soon, Antis was being petted and feted by all at the airbase for having survived a mission that had so nearly ended in disaster.

The story of the flying dog of war and the Wellington’s miraculous fogbound landing quickly made the rounds. Somehow, it leaked out to a reporter with a national newspaper. The British press was hungry for positive stories about the war effort that would lift the nation’s morale, and this was without doubt a doozy. Before C for Cecilia could be refueled or return to her base, a press photographer and reporter materialized at RAF Honington, seeking out the RAF mascot that had flown into combat over Germany.

It was one thing for the squadron commander to turn a blind eye to Antis’s presence on such combat sorties. It was quite another to have such blatant rule breaking splashed all over the nation’s newspapers. The reporter wanted a photo of C for Cecilia’s crew—dog included—scrambling for a sortie and making a run for their aircraft, with Antis in the lead. But, inexplicably, an hour before the photographs were due to be taken, Antis mysteriously vanished. A good search didn’t uncover the dog, and the press photographer had to be content with a few pictures of the human aircrew and the warplane.

Throughout all the fuss being made around the Wellington, Antis had remained secreted in his usual place in the aircraft’s dark interior. In a rerun of the days he’d spent hidden in a cellar from a dog-hating adjutant and several bemused policemen, Antis remained perfectly still and quiet, as Robert had ordered him to. He was puzzled to have been ordered into Cecilia so long before takeoff, but as ever with his master, his was not to reason why.

The article that hit the press duly showed the crew of C for Cecilia posing by the warplane, the veteran of so many missions, in the gathering dusk, as they “prepared for another daring raid against the enemy.” Predictably, the elusive animal that reputedly flew with the Wellington’s crew was described as the ever-faithful and indestructible “dog of war.”

•  •  •

So far, incredible good luck and the friendly hand of fate had kept the crew of C for Cecilia largely out of harm’s way in the air. But it couldn’t last. On July 10, 1958-C was allocated a mission over Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city and one of the Allies’ key targets in the war. Set in the west of the German landmass, Cologne was a major Military Area Command Headquarters, being home to the 211th Infantry Regiment and the 26th Artillery Regiment.

It was mid-August when 311 Squadron took to the skies to bomb the city, some dozen Wellingtons forming up with their fighter escort. The flak over Cologne was so fierce that several times Robert felt and heard the harsh clatter of shrapnel tearing into the Wellington’s underside and flanks. Each time he braced himself for injury, or for the aircraft to suffer serious damage. But the Wellington’s unique geodesic airframe design, devised by the air engineer Barnes Wallis, meant the aircraft was able to take incredible punishment and remain flight-worthy.

The Wellington’s fuselage was formed of Irish linen stretched over
a latticework of aluminum crossbeams and interlaced with wooden struts. When the linen was treated with several layers of dope, this formed a taut outer skin. Whole sections of the framework could be blown off, punctured, or burned away, and yet the aircraft could still remain airborne and limp home to base.

Over the months the aircrew of C for Cecilia had grown used to the odd, popping sound that hot shrapnel made as it tore through the taut linen, and unless any crucial human or mechanical item was hit, they paid it little heed. During tonight’s raid the bombs were released over target and the Wellington turned for home with a good few holes in her fuselage, but nothing that Adamek and his ground crew couldn’t easily fix. It was only after the aircraft had rolled to a halt, and Antis bounded down to start his war dance for joy, that Robert noticed that his dog seemed to be lame.

“Come here, boy,” he called. “What’s the matter with your leg? Have you hurt it?”

Antis lifted his left forepaw so Robert could inspect it. He noticed a nasty cut in the foot, one that had the clean but ragged signature of a shrapnel wound. It had stopped bleeding by now, but Antis would need it cleaned and bandaged in the sick bay if it were to heal properly—the pads on a dog’s feet being one of the most sensitive parts of its body. Robert bent to check his dog more thoroughly, and as he ran his hands over Antis’s handsome head he felt him flinch. There was a similar-size hole torn in Antis’s left ear, and a shallow but bloody furrow scored across his muzzle.

How many chunks of shrapnel had hit his dog Robert wasn’t certain. It looked like two at least, one to the foot and one to the head. But either way the brave and stoical dog had let out not the slightest whimper or complaint for the whole of the flight, and Robert would scarcely have known he was injured had it not been for the slight limp.

“You’ve got your first war wound, my boy,” he told him as he gazed into the dog’s eyes. “I guess it was only a matter of time, eh?”

In answer, Antis flicked out his tongue and gave his master an almighty slurp. Robert thought back over all the lives that Antis had saved: their own, certainly, during the escape from France; several more, very likely, when acting as an air-raid early-warning system; and those that he’d dug out from the bombed terrace in Liverpool. Now, on top of being a lifesaver, Antis had proven himself to be an incredibly hardy and tough warrior of the air.

“It’s the sick bay for you, my lad, at least until they’ve given you a good once-over. We’ve got to get you fit and well for Cecilia’s next sortie against the Hun . . . We can’t be going up without you, can we?”

As they set off for the sick bay, Robert noticed something was lodged in his flying boot. He stopped, bent down, and pulled out a razor-edged lump of shrapnel.

He held it out to Antis. “Is this what did it, boy? Is this what cut you? We’ll keep it as a souvenir of your first wound in action, shall we?”

Robert Bozdech’s dog was at the peak of physical condition and he recovered swiftly. But in years to come his injured left ear would start to droop, hanging down that side of his head much lower than the other ear. And now, news of such injuries suffered in the course of flying combat sorties against the enemy brought more media attention for the RAF’s flying war dog.

On August 21, the BBC paid a visit to the base to do some radio interviews, followed shortly by British Movietone News shooting film for newsreel. And then, in a rare treat for those at RAF East Wretham—whose lives seemed to have been reduced to an endless round of deadly missions flown into the teeth of enemy fire—there was a very special film screening in the NAAFI (Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes). It wasn’t any old movie that was being shown: it was the film in which the 311 Squadron aircrew played star parts.

Target for Tonight
was a gritty and realistic portrayal of Squadron Leader Pickard’s aircraft—F for Freddie—flying night bombing missions
over Germany. It had proven hugely popular with the British public, showing as it did the RAF taking the fight to the enemy. The film proved how Britain—aided by brave aircrews from countries like Czechoslovakia—was striking at the heart of the German war machine.

But that gritty spirit of resistance, coupled with the relentless pace of operations, was about to cost one aircrew and their dog dearly.

Nineteen

Hit repeatedly by German fire, C for Cecilia, their rugged Wellington bomber, refused to go down, as Robert and Antis manned the rear gun turret.

A
few days after seeing their exploits immortalized on film, the crew of C for Cecilia was back in action. The target was Mannheim, a city in the southwest of Germany that lies at the confluence of the Rhine and Neckar rivers. Though a small city compared to Hanover or Cologne, Mannheim was a crucial industrial center for Nazi Germany, and its size belied both its importance to the war effort and the lengths the Germans had gone to in order to arm the city against attack from the air—as C for Cecilia was about to learn to her cost.

The battle-scarred Wellington had unleashed her bombs—4,500 pounds of high-explosive ordnance—but they fell to the south of Mannheim’s industrial complex, so missing their intended target. It was hardly surprising that on this night their navigator and bomb aimer had given the call to release wide of the mark: the aircraft had been flying through a storm of flak, the Wellington being tossed about violently as the blasts pummeled her from every side.

Then, as the aircraft lurched ahead with bombs gone and began her ponderous turn for home, disaster struck. As she banked around, a shell exploded right underneath her belly, the force of the blast almost flipping the aircraft over and causing her to “turn turtle” (go upside down) in midair. At the same instant a whirlwind of blasted steel fragments raked the aircraft’s underside, tearing through the thin linen fuselage and slicing into the Wellington’s interior.

The veteran lady of the air shuddered and heaved as Capka fought to right her and keep control. For a long and terrible moment the stricken warplane seemed to stagger and stumble, as if she were about to fall from the skies. Capka struggled desperately with the damaged controls, with the rest of the crew horribly aware that one wrong move by their pilot would spell disaster. As Cecilia seemed to hang motionless and mortally wounded above the city, more flak exploded all around her. One more hit like the last and they were done for.

Gently, but with a firm and sensitive touch, Capka eased the wounded bomber back onto a level flight path. He held her there, nursing her around until he could set a course for home. But he was painfully aware, as were all the crew, that no evasive action would now be possible. Cecilia was badly injured and barely airworthy. Only the reassuring roar of the twin engines gave the pilot and crew any hope that they might make it. The controls remained stiff and unresponsive, and there could be no attempt to fly around or avoid enemy fire.

In the rear turret Robert fixed his eyes on the skies behind them. It was all up to the gunners now.

“Keep your eyes peeled for Jerry,” he muttered at his dog, who lay curled up at his feet. “Keep ’em peeled.”

Antis seemed remarkably calm and sanguine after what they had just been through, and not for the first time Robert marveled at the courage and fortitude of his dog.

“Everyone okay?” Capka’s voice came through on the intercom.

There were a series of affirmatives.

The whirlwind of shrapnel that had raked the Wellington seemed to have left the crew unscathed. Or had it? Robert could feel Antis gazing up at him, but he didn’t have a second to tear his eyes away from the threatening skies. Had he been able to return that look, he would have noticed an expression on his dog’s face that he had never seen before. In Antis’s eyes, in the tautness of his features, and in his shivering, he would have read real shock and pain.

But Robert’s attention was focused on the darkness to their rear as the firestorm over Mannheim faded into the moonlit distance like a nightmare. Damn the moon, Robert told himself. It would make it so much easier for marauding German fighters to find them. He reached down and patted his dog’s powerful head, without taking his gaze away from the heavens.

“Good boy,” he comforted Antis. “Keep your eyes out for the Hun. Good boy.”

No doubt about it, having Antis there for company made this kind of mission far more bearable. The rear gunner’s position was the loneliest, for he was separated from the main body of the crew by some sixty feet of fuselage. It was also the point from which the enemy was most likely to try a surprise attack. Robert crouched over his twin Browning .303 machine guns and waited.

Moments later he found himself dazzled and blinded. A powerful glare had flicked across the aircraft as a German searchlight swept the sky. It flicked back onto them again as the searchlight’s operators brought it onto the target. The Germans were operating
radar-controlled searchlights—ones that could be vectored onto an aircraft’s flight path by radar signature alone. As the blue-white light pinned them in its burning glare, Robert cursed. They were lit up like a beacon now, presenting a perfect target for any German fighters.