“You both make him feel inferior,” said Colin. “All that heady talk in the officers’ lounge comparing hydraulics to blood pressure. He can’t keep up.”

“Hydraulics and blood pressure are endlessly fascinating,” said Silver. He spread his chart on his knees, holding his electric torch ready in his gauntleted hand. He declared with satisfaction, “From tonight I shall always think of him as the Old Roundhead.”

My B-Flight aircrews knew what we were doing that night—three planes in my own Pimms Section and three in Madeira Section, with three men in each plane. In a few minutes I’d be in the sky in the dark in charge of eighteen men, counting myself, and in a few hours half of them would be dead.

I didn’t know then what the full toll of that night would be, and I tried to lighten the tone as we set out. I called over the radio to Pimms and Madeira as we took off. “Setting course for target and climbing to twenty thousand feet, as per orders from the Old Roundhead.”

Over the intercom I heard Colin behind me laughing again.

“The Old Roundhead might be keeping a listening watch,” Silver warned me.

“I don’t mind. I’ll get another damned reprimand. He already knows what I think of him.”

We flew obediently high, heading for a flotilla of German warships that was supposed to be cruising fifty miles off the Norwegian coast. After about an hour and a half, maybe we were over the ships we were supposed to hit and maybe we weren’t. The sky was clear and blue-black, but the half-moon lit the thin cloud below us like a sheet of milky Chinese silk. I could see the other B-Flight planes standing out in black silhouette like decals against that cloud.

So, too, could the German Messerschmitt 110 night fighters on patrol.

We didn’t have lights and neither did they, and we didn’t see them coming. They can fly a hundred miles an hour faster than we can. But Silver and I both saw the streaks of green flame as the tracers flew from the first rounds of their thundering guns. And we saw the explosion of golden fire as the bullets struck an engine on another Blenheim in our formation.

Silver opened the observer’s panel in the window next to his head and twisted around to stick his nose out so he could see behind us. “There’s one on our tail!” he cried. “Dive, dive—”

“Down, everybody get down!” I called to my lads over the radio. “Use the cloud! Get into it or below it where they can’t see you! Drop your bombs if you have to, lose the weight—”