And You Will Find Love

Glad the fighting was over and her ship and the rest of the convoy was safe, at least temporarily, Barbara felt a dread, too. Being a pilot herself, and also eager to drop some bombs, she felt a comradeship for the Nazi pilots that she hadn't expected.

The feeling was repeated the next afternoon as again an alert was sounded. Two more "vultures" flew out of the bright sun, but circled far out of firing range. One bomber flew over the convoy and began to dive on the lead freighter. Streams of tracer bullets from the anti-aircraft gunners in the Armed Guard aboard the freighter poured into the plane, and it crashed into the ocean. The other bomber finally flew back to the Nazi aircraft carrier it had come from.

That night, to relieve the tension, a sing-along was held below decks. Barbara nearly blew it, coaxed into joining others of the crew in singing everyone's favorite song of the war, "The White Cliffs of Dover." As she sang, trying to blend in with the others, heads turned.

A merchantman in his fifties, whom Barbara only knew as Angus, threw the others off.

"Sure and Bob's the best boy soprano I've ever heard," he said in a heavy Scottish brogue.

Before anyone could think about it, the siren sounded again. By then Barbara had made up her mind that if she were to be killed, at least she wanted to see how it would happen. While most of the crew stayed below-deck, she climbed topside and watched as three Nazi planes came out of the moonlight and flew in formation over the convoy.

"Torpedo bombers," Angus, who had followed Barbara topside told her. She thought he was a kindly-seeming Scotsman old enough to be her father.

As they watched, the planes flew in low. Barbara estimated they were no more than fifty or seventy-five feet above the water.

"They've dropped their torpedoes," Angus said.

Moments later, they heard an ear-splitting reverberating explosion as the bombers' payload found targets against ship hulls. Almost instantly, not far away in the moon's glow, they saw one of the merchant ships plunge bow-first into the water. Seamen began spilling from the decks. While they swam to lifeboats that had been launched to rescue them from the icy ocean, their ship sank in less than thirty seconds with most of her crew still aboard.

By then, two of the attacking planes had been hit and crashed in flames. The remaining bomber, having dropped its load without sinking another ship, flew off over the horizon.