condemned and seven received prison sentences. Of the condemned, only Goering, whose defence had been – is this the right word? – so spirited, played a final trick on his audience by swallowing concealed poison. It is said that there was horse-trading amongst the Allied nations as to who should die. It is also said that the executioner deliberately bungled the hangings, so that some, at least, of those who died, died slowly and horribly. Was this a crime against humanity?
I don’t recall now where they had flown that night. Conceivably, it was Nuremberg. In any case I hadn’t flown with them (and I was glad of that). But I was taking shots of the planes as they returned at dawn. For one of the Lancs things had gone badly – or not so badly, depending on how you look at it, since the plane got back, as others didn’t, and all save two of the crew were unharmed. They were transferring the pilot from the cockpit to the ambulance, and I should have been stopped, perhaps, from coming so close. But (I would discover this later over and over again) people don’t stop you. They don’t, as a rule, make a grab for your camera, or for you. They are too busy, too caught up. You are just another mad part of the scene. It’s afterwards that they say: Did you see?! That bastard with the camera!
The pilot was supported in a cradle formed by the joined arms of two ambulance crew who were walking him from the plane. His arms were round their necks and he was held in a sort of jammed foetal position, as if his knees couldn’t be prized from his abdomen. His lips were curled back and histeeth clamped together, so he looked like some terrible parody of a man straining to void his bowels. He had flown back from Germany and landed his aircraft with a cannon shell up his arse, and his face was green with the pain.
I took three, four pictures, which the Air Ministry promptly impounded, these not being the sort of pictures they had in mind (even if they were, according to my brief, ‘authentic visual records of the air war’). But several years later they released them, and one of them is included in
Aftermaths
, in the first section called ‘Bombers 1945’ (it is captioned simply ‘Lancaster pilot’ with the name of the base and the date), and became regarded as one of my ‘famous’ early shots.
That pilot was awarded, posthumously, the D.F.C. for his act of heroism in bringing back his plane and crew. When you look at the photo you do not think, I think, of heroism. You think of pain and absurdity. But your mind focuses on that agonized young airman in an act of compassionate concentration that it would be sacrilegious to call sentimental. You think of personal things. You wonder who he was. You imagine his home somewhere, his parents, his girl. You think of him as an unsuspecting schoolboy. You do not think – it would seem almost blasphemous to do so – of the many hundreds of men, women and children who were killed or maimed as a result of the raid in which this young pilot took part. You do not think of the bombs stored in the bomb-bay of the now emptied and shot-up plane in the background. Nor would you think (assuming you were told the nature of the pilot’s fatal wound) of the cannon shell, that particular cannon shell, amongst so many cannon shells. How it must have been turned out, one of millions, in some mid-European works. How it must have passed through the hands of a munitions worker, a girl in a mob-cap, imagine. Whether she had relatives who had been killed in air raids. Whether she could have conceivably guessed the final resting place of that shell. Whether she ever thought of where thoseshells it was her business to send on their way might end up. Surely she did, but then there were so many shells: to think of them all, impossible; to think of one, pointless. But you stare fixedly at this suffering figure, picked out from the random carnage of war, destined not only for a posthumous medal but also – But
I don’t recall now where they had flown that night. Conceivably, it was Nuremberg. In any case I hadn’t flown with them (and I was glad of that). But I was taking shots of the planes as they returned at dawn. For one of the Lancs things had gone badly – or not so badly, depending on how you look at it, since the plane got back, as others didn’t, and all save two of the crew were unharmed. They were transferring the pilot from the cockpit to the ambulance, and I should have been stopped, perhaps, from coming so close. But (I would discover this later over and over again) people don’t stop you. They don’t, as a rule, make a grab for your camera, or for you. They are too busy, too caught up. You are just another mad part of the scene. It’s afterwards that they say: Did you see?! That bastard with the camera!
The pilot was supported in a cradle formed by the joined arms of two ambulance crew who were walking him from the plane. His arms were round their necks and he was held in a sort of jammed foetal position, as if his knees couldn’t be prized from his abdomen. His lips were curled back and histeeth clamped together, so he looked like some terrible parody of a man straining to void his bowels. He had flown back from Germany and landed his aircraft with a cannon shell up his arse, and his face was green with the pain.
I took three, four pictures, which the Air Ministry promptly impounded, these not being the sort of pictures they had in mind (even if they were, according to my brief, ‘authentic visual records of the air war’). But several years later they released them, and one of them is included in
Aftermaths
, in the first section called ‘Bombers 1945’ (it is captioned simply ‘Lancaster pilot’ with the name of the base and the date), and became regarded as one of my ‘famous’ early shots.
That pilot was awarded, posthumously, the D.F.C. for his act of heroism in bringing back his plane and crew. When you look at the photo you do not think, I think, of heroism. You think of pain and absurdity. But your mind focuses on that agonized young airman in an act of compassionate concentration that it would be sacrilegious to call sentimental. You think of personal things. You wonder who he was. You imagine his home somewhere, his parents, his girl. You think of him as an unsuspecting schoolboy. You do not think – it would seem almost blasphemous to do so – of the many hundreds of men, women and children who were killed or maimed as a result of the raid in which this young pilot took part. You do not think of the bombs stored in the bomb-bay of the now emptied and shot-up plane in the background. Nor would you think (assuming you were told the nature of the pilot’s fatal wound) of the cannon shell, that particular cannon shell, amongst so many cannon shells. How it must have been turned out, one of millions, in some mid-European works. How it must have passed through the hands of a munitions worker, a girl in a mob-cap, imagine. Whether she had relatives who had been killed in air raids. Whether she could have conceivably guessed the final resting place of that shell. Whether she ever thought of where thoseshells it was her business to send on their way might end up. Surely she did, but then there were so many shells: to think of them all, impossible; to think of one, pointless. But you stare fixedly at this suffering figure, picked out from the random carnage of war, destined not only for a posthumous medal but also – But
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