In fact it was no battle at all, just one-way traffic with booze very much in the driving seat. He was only 61, but looked very much older, due to a long battle with alcohol. He died in the summer of 1984, a few days after my 20th birthday. Up to that point, thoughts of my father had rarely entered my head because, I suppose, I never really knew what to think of him. It also reintroduced me to his wartime diary, a handwritten book that had sat on a shelf throughout my childhood. Jennie Gray is Mack's daughter, and now her website had made me think very differently about my own father. This crew, too, were on their first operation, and among them was 21-year-old wireless operator Joe Mack. Also on the way to Berlin that bleak December night was Lancaster K-King, a plane my father's crew had used on their first trip together three weeks earlier. I had stumbled across a website that was a continuation of Fire by Night, a book by Jennie Gray that told the story of a raid on Berlin in 1943. Among countless listings for a man with that name who 'made the world a safer place' by manufacturing riding hats was an entry that read: 'Owen, V-Victor, 16/17 December 1943, 97 Squadron'. Google will find work for idle hands, and one day in June 2006, for no particular reason, I typed in my father's name. This trip was V-Victor's fourth, but the 20-year-old pilot, Charles Owen, had flown a couple of earlier missions. Their arrival on operations in mid-November coincided with the start of Harris's assault on Berlin, when the chance of surviving a full tour of duty was one in five. For the seven young men who made up the crew of Lancaster JB671 - known as V-Victor - the timing must have seemed particularly bad. But it was a grim time to be in Bomber Command: 7,000 allied airmen were killed over Germany during the five-month campaign against Berlin, and more than 1,000 bombers were lost. Harris believed that saturation bombing would alter the course of the conflict. It will cost Germany the war,' said Air Marshal Arthur 'Bomber' Harris at the launch of the Battle of Berlin a month earlier. 'It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. That winter, 65 years ago, was particularly harsh and often raids had been called off at the last minute as the weather closed in, but the German capital had not been hit for two weeks, so there was some urgency to get Bomber Command back into battle. There was little to do until the bombers returned. The airfield fell silent for the next seven hours, the smoke from each hut's coke fire hanging in the damp air. The sky above Cambridgeshire shook with the noise and vibration as the bombers lifted into the darkening sky and headed for Berlin, each one seen off with a wave and a silent prayer by those left on the ground. It took a little under half an hour to get them all into the air, each plane needing a minute to goad its four Merlin engines up to full power before setting off down the bumpy runway. T he light was beginning to fade and the mist thicken at RAF Bourn, a wasteland of mud and Nissen huts, as 21 Lancasters from 97 Squadron left their dispersals on the afternoon of 16 December 1943.
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