Dave Dawson with the Commandos

by Robert Sidney Bowen

But even before the German broke away from the fight, Dave and Freddy were completing the rest of their maneuver. Like streaks of greased lightning, each whirled off to his side and went thundering in for a broadside attack on the two other Messerschmitts about to close with the helpless ferry bomber formation. Maybe the pilots of those two Nazi planes figured that they had actually remained hidden in the rays of the dawn sun. Maybe they figured that Dave and Freddy had decided to make sure of at least one victim, and pray the other two would miss the bombers and over-shoot and have to come back. In fact, maybe those Nazi pilots figured a lot of things. The point is, though, they figured all wrong. For a couple of moments they had a chance at the bombers that was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. But in the next they had a couple of flying wild men on their necks.

The impulse to twist around and see how Freddy was making out with his man was strong in Dave as he went cutting in at his victim with all guns blazing. Naturally, though, he didn't dare take out even that small amount of time. Even if Freddy and he got their respective Messerschmitts there was still a third boiling around some place in the sky. And so he tore in savagely, and thrilled with wild joy as he saw his tracers cutting into the Messerschmitt from its two spinning props clear back to the double-finned tail. The Nazi gunner-observer returned his fire, and the pilot tried to whip around and into the clear. For all the good it did him he might just as well have climbed out and tried to walk the dawn sky back to Germany.

The Messerschmitt seemed suddenly to fly smack into an invisible brick wall in the sky. The plane fell off sharply to the right, and came way up by the nose. For a brief instant it hovered there in the air. Then red flame belched out from the two underslung Benz-Daimler engines, and in the next split second the whole business was just a mass of fire slithering down toward the rolling grey-green swells of the North Atlantic.

"Save a seat for Hitler, where you're going!" Dave yelled as he pulled his P-Thirty-Eight up and around. "He'll be joining you before very long. And—"

The rest died in his throat, and his heart seemed to zoom up and jam against his back teeth. It was at that moment that he saw Freddy Farmer's plane flip-flopping and half spinning down out of the sky as though either it were completely out of control—or its pilot were dead. And thundering down with blazing guns after Freddy were the two other Messerschmitts.

"No, no, it can't happen!" Dave sobbed wildly, and whirled off his climb and down into a dive. "Freddy boy! What happened? They didn't get you! They didn't get you!"

Those and other words of anguish spilled off his lips as he hammered his Lockheed down in a wing-screaming dive. So great was his excitement, and so great the terror that clutched at his heart, he failed to see that Nazi bullets weren't coming very close to Freddy's plane. As a matter of fact, the Germans were shooting half-heartedly. With the Lockheed headed straight for the North Atlantic, they figured that the finish of their victim was inevitable.

But they hadn't figured on Dave, nor the terrific diving speed of his plane. As a result the "fun" for one of them was short-lived. Though his heart shed tears of blood for Freddy Farmer, Dave's grip on the controls was rock steady, and his eye to the ring sight keen and sharp. A two second burst from his guns was all that was needed. A longer burst would have been sheer waste of ammunition. The Nazi's wing came off as though hacked clean by a knife. What was left spun like so much stiff paper tossed into a whirlpool, and then broke up in a shower of flying wreckage.

One Nazi less, but what of it? Freddy was but a couple of hundred feet from the water now, and still flip-flopping helplessly downward with the remaining German pecking away at him. Stark reality was like white hot knives twisting about in Dave's heart and in his brain. Tears flooded his eyes, and he unconsciously hammered his free fist against the already wide open throttles.

"Dear God, please no!" he sobbed. "Don't take Freddy. Don't take Freddy away. I need him! England needs him. The whole decent part of the world needs him. Please don't...!"