Finally, Antis refused to remain behind when his master flew into war and stowed away on his aircraft—facing bailing out, crash landings, and worse.
None of the crew of C for Cecilia had ever bailed out. It wasn’t Air Ministry policy to give the crews of Bomber Command more than a basic grounding in the theory of parachuting. Robert had gotten East Wretham’s tailor to make some further adaptions to his dog’s oxygen mask, so it fitted as snugly as a sock now, but he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t have asked the parachute section to make Antis a doggie parachute.
Whatever, it was too late to worry about it now, and there was no way that Robert was about to bail out without his dog. If he went they both went, and he could only imagine he’d have to jump with a terrified dog clutched in his arms—though how he’d be able to pull his chute and steer it while holding on to his dog he didn’t have a clue.
Robert had never felt so anxious in all his hours of flying. As for Antis, he dozed on, oblivious to the danger, his head resting on his forepaws on the cold metal floor.
“Starting to climb to ten thousand,” Capka reported to control. “I’m heading due east for the coast, fuel gauge on the absolute minimum reading possible.”
In reply, a new voice came up on the radio net. “Not to worry, Jo,” their squadron leader intoned. Bearing in mind the circumstances, Wing Commander Ocelka seemed as cool as a cat. It was heartening. “If your indicator’s at zero you’ve still got some twenty gallons in the tanks. Should be enough to get you near the coast and up to ten thousand. There’s no point trying a landing in the thick muck that’s down here, so you’re better off bailing.”
“I could try to put down,” Capka suggested.
“It’s your call,” Ocelka replied, “but I don’t advise it.”
The radio traffic went dead for a second as Capka eased the bomber into a shallow climb. In the blinding dawn light Robert spotted the glint of an aircraft away to their right. For a moment he tensed his shoulders and prepared to swing his guns around to face the threat, before recognizing the four-engine aircraft for what it was—a Stirling heavy bomber. As he watched, the first of a series of seven parachutes bloomed beneath the aircraft as the Stirling’s crew did what C for Cecilia’s aircrew were about to attempt. The Stirling, set on automatic control, continued on its steady course flying eastward out to sea.
Josef’s voice came up on the intercom. “There’s a Stirling to starboard and they’ve all jumped.”
“Must have got similar orders to us,” Capka remarked calmly. “I’ve set a course east and we’re climbing, but what d’you all want to do?”
Several voices—Robert’s first and foremost—responded with the same answer.
“Try for a crash landing, skipper.”
They knew their pilot well, and other than “old man” Ocelka himself he was the best in the squadron. If anyone could get them down in one piece, Capka could. They were also loath to abandon C for Cecilia, the trusty Wellington having brought them home from so many sorties when by rights she should have been a goner.
“Mr. Karel?” Capka queried. “D’you think we can make it?”
Capka, a sergeant, always called their navigator, Karel Lancik, “Mr.,” in deference to his officer status, three officers and three sergeants making up the Wellington’s crew.
“Try for a crash landing at Honington,” Karel replied calmly. “It’s only five miles away, so we should make it. Glide the last bit if you have to. You know Honington like the back of your hand, and maybe she’ll be a little more fog-free.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Capka remarked. “What’s the heading, Mr. Karel?”
As Karel worked out the bearing for RAF Honington, Robert reflected upon the elephant in the room, as it were, which was Antis. No one had said as much, but all six of the aircrew knew that if they bailed, Robert and his dog would have to jump together, and if Antis panicked both of them stood next to no chance of making it. Like the rest of them, Robert had never even done a practice jump, let alone rehearsed for doing one with the flying dog of war grasped in his arms.
“Warning light’s on for zero fuel,” Capka intoned. “You have that bearing?”
“Zero eight seven degrees,” came Karel’s reply.
“Zero eight seven,” Capka confirmed. “Everyone, brace for a rough landing, and Robert, get that dog in your lap and hold on tight. Once we’re down, all out as fast as we can, dog included—”
“I can’t raise Honington,” the copilot’s voice cut in. “Try reaching them via East Wretham.”
“I’m trying for a landing at Honington,” Capka radioed Ocelka. “Can you radio through a warning—”
“Got it,” Ocelka cut in. “I’ll deal with it. You concentrate on getting down in one piece, dog and all! Stand by.”
The seconds ticked by in a tense silence. Robert could feel the Wellington coming around onto its new bearing, and he sensed the aircraft losing height. He doubted whether they had enough fuel in the tanks to fill a cigarette lighter, but from this altitude they should be able to glide the five miles in, as Karel had suggested. The problem with doing a glide approach was that it left zero room for maneuver, which was bad enough in full visibility. It was close to suicidal when going in completely blind.
Robert reached for his dog, grabbed his thick metal collar, and gave his head a good shake. “Antis! Antis! Wake up!”
Antis opened one sleepy eye, heard the reassuring drone of the twin engines, and tried to settle back down to sleep again.
“Wake up!” Robert shook him some more. He leaned back from his guns and presented his lap. “Hup! Hup! Hup!”
For a second Antis eyed him in confusion. He knew the rules: flying was a deadly serious business and the last thing he or his master ever did was fool around—yet here he was being invited onto his master’s lap! Maybe Robert was about to teach him to use those long, noisy pointy things, the ones that his master used to scare off the enemy? Either way Antis was being ordered to get up, and get up he would. He took a leap, landed in Robert’s lap, and sat there half smothering him.
“Honington’s unusable.” Ocelka’s voice came back on the air. “Fog’s down like pea soup. But if you want to give it a try they’ll do what they can. Watch out for a red at the beginning of the only runway they think you might get down on. Good luck.”
“Roger,” Capka confirmed. “We’ll try for the landing.” He switched to the intercom. “As you heard, we’re going down. Brace yourselves, and hold tight to that dog!”
Moments later the air around the Wellington grew dark as she plummeted into the fog. Robert’s gun turret was surrounded by a soggy gray-whiteness, like a fishbowl packed around with cotton. He hugged his dog closer, bracing for the impact that would tear Antis from his arms and throw him forward into the guns or the turret if he wasn’t careful. That was another thing they needed for their flying dog, Robert reflected ruefully—a flying harness, so they could strap him in properly.
Robert felt Capka begin his last turn, which would line the Wellington up with the runway itself—the maneuver known as “the final.” Right now it was beyond final—for they had zero fuel left in their tanks. To his left one of the engines began to cough and splutter as it sipped on fumes. Robert saw a faint red glow within the fog to his left, lighting it up an eerie pink. Moments later the squat form of a hangar roof loomed out of the fog, and as Robert gripped his dog in a crushing hold the ground rushed up to meet them.
There was a thump and a screech of tires hitting solid ground, and moments later the Wellington was thundering along the runway of RAF Honington. Capka held tight to the controls as the aircraft rolled to a halt, still on the runway and still intact. Their pilot had made a perfect landing with zero fuel, only one working engine, and next to zero visibility—he had been flying on instruments only.
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.