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voice over the intercom, shepherding, guiding, sometimes admonishing, always striving for perfection. And that was how it ought to be; it was the recipe for survival.
    The morning was brilliant, the sky cloudless, the sun burning the eyeballs even through smoked glasses, its rays dancing on cockpit canopies and the shimmering arcs of the propellers.
    Somehow, it made the outlines of the Mosquitos, with their drab war-paint — dark grey and green upper surfaces, grey bellies — appear less aggressive.
    Yet aggressive the Mosquito Mk VI certainly was, and powerful too, but nonetheless clean and graceful; an inspiration both to look at and to fly. Yeoman, who at first had viewed his conversion to twin-engined aircraft with considerable misgivings, had fallen completely in love with it. Its revolutionary concept appealed to him, for a start. Conceived as an unarmed day bomber back in 1938 by the de Havilland Aircraft Company, without any government approval or funding whatsoever, it was built from balsa wood, ply and birch laths, glued under pressure, a process that endowed it with a remarkable lightness as well as great strength, and its twin Rolls-Royce Merlin engines gave it a speed that compared favourably with most single-engined fighters of the day. It was fully aerobatic, too, and could be rolled on one engine.
    The Mosquito FB Mk VI was the latest variant, and the newly-formed No. 380 Squadron had been one of the first to equip with the type, receiving its first examples in May 1943. Formidably armed with a battery of four 20-mm cannon and four .303 machine-guns in the nose, the Mk VI could also carry two 250- or 500-lb bombs in the rear of the bomb-bay, with two additional bombs or 50-gallon fuel tanks under the wings.
    Mosquitos had been taking the war to the enemy ever since the end of March 1942, when No. 105 Squadron, flying the unarmed bomber version, had attacked Cologne the day after the RAF’s first big thousand-bomber raid. More spectacular missions had followed, including a daring low-level raid on the Gestapo HQ in Oslo on 25 September and an attack on Berlin by Nos. 105 and 139 Squadrons, the first time RAF aircraft had flown over the enemy capital in daylight. That raid had been brilliantly timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Nazi Party; all over Germany, people had been sitting by their radios, waiting to hear a speech by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. Instead, they had heard the sound of the Mosquitos’ bombs, exploding near the radio station in Berlin.
    Looking over to his left, Yeoman saw an airfield, with the dark shapes of Stirlings visible on their dispersal points even through the early morning haze. That was RAF Mepal, the home of No. 75 (New Zealand) Squadron. The Mosquitos were nearly home; the town of Ely lay dead ahead, with Burningham not far beyond it.
    Yeoman called up Burningham Tower and obtained immediate clearance to land, leading the formation down in a descent to two thousand feet. The Mosquitos drummed over the airfield and then broke into line astern, joining the downwind leg of the circuit. Yeoman carried out his landing checks: brake pressure and superchargers okay, radiator flaps open, under-carriage down. He heard the landing gear lock into position with a thump, saw the reassuring green lights on his indicator. Reaching down with his left hand to the throttle quadrant, he pushed the propeller speed control fully forward, then switched the fuel cock to the fullest tanks.
    A check with the yellow windsock showed him that there wasn’t much wind, so he lowered full flap just before he turned on to final approach, trimming the aircraft nose-down to compensate and reducing the speed to 125 mph as he lined up with the runway. A few seconds later the Mosquito’s wheels kissed the tarmac with a barely perceptible tremor.
    ‘One of your better ones, skipper,’ Hardy complimented him.
    ‘They always are, on the morning after a binge,’ the pilot