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In reality, on this 18 December, at about the same time that Kellett sighted the north German coast fifty miles ahead, the Wellingtons were picked up by the Luftwaffe’s Freya radar station among the sand dunes of the offshore island of Wangerooge, and by the naval radar station on Heligoland. Yet it was an hour before the fighters made their first effective attack. 53 doomed men among the 114 in the British formation were granted that much extra life because of simple disbelief on the part of the Germans that the Royal Air Force could flaunt itself in the face of the Luftwaffe on a brilliant winter’s day that promised only a massacre.
    Despite the adequacy of their technology, the Germans had failed to match the British in marrying radar to an effective fighter direction system. The naval radar report was only hesitantly passedthrough their own HQ exchange to the Luftwaffe at Jever. When the young lieutenant commanding the air-force’s own radar station telephoned Jever direct, he was caustically dismissed: ‘Tommies approaching in weather like this? You’re plotting seagulls or there’s interference on your set!’ 2 The Luftwaffe officer then tried to telephone the CO of the neighbouring Me110 squadron direct, only to learn that he was absent at headquarters. Kellett’s men, now cruising majestically down the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, had gained a few more minutes. Only after a visual sighting report by German naval observers, whose message was duplicated in transmission and reached HQ as a warning of forty-four approaching enemy aircraft, did the Luftwaffe at last grasp the reality of attack. Belatedly the fighters began to scramble.
    Even as the Messerschmitts were climbing to engage the Wellingtons, the Germans suffered another moment of bewildered astonishment. The bombers came high over Wilhelmshaven, over a battleship and cruiser lying in Bau Haven, with bomb doors open. Yet not a bomb fell. As the flak still splashed and blackened the sky around them, the British aircraft turned slowly westwards towards the North Sea and home. The formation’s orders not to bomb if there was any danger of hitting the shore gave Kellett no discretion. He concluded that the warships were too close to land to risk attack. As an operation of war against the German navy, the Wellingtons’ mission was thus a total, indeed a grotesque failure. Yet as the bombers cruised away from Wilhelmshaven and emerged from the flak barrage, a few minutes before 1.30 pm, the destruction began.
    In the Luftwaffe’s previous encounters with Wellington formations, they had probed the bombers’ strengths and weaknesses with some circumspection. Two important conclusions emerged from the fighter pilots’ reports. First, although the Wellington’s rear turret could be very effective against attacks from astern, the guns were incapable of traversing to a full right-angle with the aircraft, and Wellingtons were thus unable to make any reply to an attack from the beam. Second, through a criminal omission onthe part of the Air Ministry, the aircraft lacked self-sealing tanks. If hit in a fuel tank, especially that in the port wing, a Wellington could be transformed within seconds into a flying bonfire. Even if the tanks did not ignite, rapid loss of fuel would almost certainly bring down a crippled aircraft on a long run home. The Luftwaffe fighter squadron commanders urged their pilots to knock out the Tommies’ rear turret at long range, where the Wellington’s .303s were useless, then close in for the kill.
    Many of the men flying the bombers had joined the RAF in the early and mid-1930s, before the era of the 350-mph cannon fighter. As they lumbered westwards at less than 200 mph over the north German island towards the open sea, a succession of stabbing, slashing assaults by the Me109s and 110s began. P/O Speirs of 149 Squadron was flying no. 3 in the leading section behind Kellett, when a twin-engined Me110 dived across the formation