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hosing fire that suddenly lanced into the fuselage of Speirs’s aircraft. There was an explosion to the rear of the cockpit close to the wing root, almost certainly in a fuel tank. The Wellington fell away from the formation, flames pouring from the fuselage, to plunge headlong into the sea 10,000 feet below. There were no parachutes. Riddlesworth, the only survivor of Duguid’s vic after the other two aircraft turned back, now closed up to take Speirs’s place behind Kellett. The three Wellingtons began twenty minutes of desperate fighting against a procession of Messerschmitts. The 109s seemed to follow the 110s into attack. As they flew over Schillig Point, to their dismay the British could see a further squadron of fighters taking off to join the battle.
    ‘The enemy pressed home their attacks in a splendid manner,’ wrote Kellett in his report, striking a curiously gallant note in describing an ill-matched slaughter. But at last an Me109 gave the British their chance. Tiring of beam attacks and difficult deflection shots, the German swung in to attack Riddlesworth from dead astern. This was the situation for which the RAF had developed ‘mutual supporting fire’. All three Wellington rear gunners in the lead vic ripped into him. Spuming smoke, the fighter curled awayto the sea. The pilot escaped from his sinking cockpit only to drown under the weight of his flying gear. Kellett’s three aircraft, with the advantage of being in the van of the formation and aided by some disciplined and determined flying, pressed on towards England.
    But behind them, the bomber force was crumbling. In 9 Squadron’s section on the port side of the formation, the fierce little Canadian Bill Macrae cursed his gunner as he twisted and banked the Wellington under attack and heard no sound of answering fire from his own rear turret: ‘I’m trying, skip, but my fingers are too stiff to get the guns to bear!’ shouted the frozen, desperate gunner, who was wounded moments later. Fabric was flapping from great gashes torn in the wings and fuselage, and fuel leaking from the tanks. In Pett’s aircraft nearby, the first burst from a Me109 wounded the rear gunner. Heathcote, the second pilot, scrambled down the fuselage and dragged the gunner out. He emptied burst after burst into the attacking fighters until at last the guns clicked dead. The ammunition trays were empty. Heathcote crawled forward to the front gunner, wounded in the thigh, and took over his turret instead. Sergeant Pett threw the aircraft into a tortured dive to sea level to shake off the Messerschmitts. Miraculously he succeeded. With his bleeding gunners and his rudder controls partly jammed, he nursed the Wellington home to a forced landing at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire. Macrae made an emergency landing at the coastal airfield of North Coates.
    These were the only two aircraft from the port section to reach home. S/Ldr Guthrie, whom Baldwin was to charge with ‘lack of interest’ in his report, flew his blazing aircraft headlong into the North Sea. Douglas Allison, a quiet, serious Londoner, dropped away with his port engine on fire, and no trace of himself or his crew was ever found. The Wellington of Challes, beside him, broke up in mid-air after being hit amidships by fire from an Me110. Lines, the last of the section, vanished shortly afterwards, probably at the hands of an Me110 of the Luftwaffe’s 2 Squadron ZG 76.
    The starboard section of the big diamond – two vics of three,led respectively by S/Ldr Harris of 149 and F/Lt Peter Grant of 9 Squadron – held formation under attack better than their counterparts on the port side. Grant had just given the order to close bomb doors after leaving Wilhelmshaven when the first wave of fighters fell on them. It was the first time that they had seen an Me110, and as they droned steadily west they were shocked by the ruthless ease with which the Germans took station abreast of them, and hammered fire into the