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Peenemunde The meaning ofthe word spectacular has been diminished by careless use, so I should find a more appropriate word to describe our twentyfirst mission-possibly beautiful- flown on the 25th of August. It was to Peenemiinde, the V2 rocket research and production facility located on the Baltic coast north of Berlin. Visually it provided the ultimate. Things that had been partially realized during some ofour previous missions converged and came into sharp focus, and I was able to see the full depth and sweep ofa magnificent aerial panorama. From coast-out at Lowestoft we took up a heading of about 50 degrees, which would carry us well clear of the Dutch and German Frisian Islands where flak could be regularly expected. Visibility was excellent to begin with, but at a point about midway across the North Sea an unusual wall of clouds appeared at a distance across our course. It was unusual in that it seemed, as we approached, to present a flat vertical surface that extended from sea level to a height far above our altitude, which was probably at the time 24,000 feet, and it ran from the northern to the southern horizons. There was no possibility of safely flying a formation of B-qs into such a dense cloud mass, so the group commander calmly ordered us to go up. Up, up. The B-q could do it. It was an indomitable war horse. At 28,000 feet the summits were still lofty and dazzling as the easterly 116 Peenemunde sunlight slanted down across them. At 29,000 feet we were getting close to the wall, but I could not say with certainty how near it was. At this proximity it still maintained its smooth vertical form. Was it ten miles? Hard to say, but it seemed that we would have to change course to have a longer run to get over it. The group commander was mum. Perhaps this was the kind of thing that we needed him for. By this time I was a pretty experienced navigator, but I knew nothing about the upper-level performance capabilities of this wonderful flying machine, especially at gross load and in formation. I had never been this high before, and neither had Russell. At 30,000 feet the other ships were beginning to drift here and there a bit. We had gone another ten miles and still the wall seemed well out in front of us. Up, up. The rate-of-climb needle wavered slightly at 100 feet per minute. At this point I began to notice how intensely cold it was getting. My gloves were inadequate, and my fingers were beginning to feel numb, but I still had control of them. I squeezed my oxygen tube to crunch the ice, and had had to detach it momentarily to shake out the pieces, but in the process I had averted my eyes for only a minute at the most, and when I returned my gaze to this awesome white phenomenon, I could see some irregular patches on its wall. They began to look more like clouds, and the summits seemed wispy in the fierce sunlight. At 31,500 feet we were there, and about to cross over. I glanced sideward to my left down along the gauzy west side of the wall from my perch in the nose bowl, down into the deep shadow, down to the nearly black surface of the sea, and I felt an instant of dread and yet exhilaration. Never had I been so high, and never before had I been able to see it in this perspective. Then we were skimming through the diaphanous material of the summits. Contrails had begun to form earlier, but because ofour privileged position our visibility was not hampered. My air plot was still intact, and I'd been able to get Gee fixes until we were quite close to the cloud wall. I had managed to divert my 117 Return from Berlin attention from my fascination with it long enough occasionally to calculate our changing true airspeed and ground speed- more precisely , our sea speed-so fortunately I knew where all of this was taking place. We must certainly have reached the jet stream at this altitude, and by conjecture I added another rwenty knots to the west wind that metro had granted us at 24,000 feet. The cloud mountain range was less than forry miles wide at the top, and in about seven...

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