Byrd's School of English Fish
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The first bombs struck on the eastern edge of the city. The rumble of detonations was preceded by intense flashes. The pitch of the explosions rose as bombs struck closer. More spotlights turned on and leaned east. A searchlight caught a glimpse of an ME 109 and wheeled wildly to keep track of it. Thousands of rounds flew up. One of the shots burst the planes fuel line, another ignited it. The plane curved toward the ground and exploded well above the city. Searchlights tracked the largest piece of flaming wreckage.
Another plane crossed into the beams. Antiaircraft batteries quickly picked it up. Tracer rounds hosed the sky in front and behind. The plane disappeared in a streak of shredded aluminum lit by a half dozen beams. Shards of aluminum blown off of the fuselage sparkled. The mist of fuel in the debris did not ignite. Within the cloud of airplane bits, aviation fuel and bursting shrapnel the body of the pilot tumbled free.
He was alive. His parachute was undamaged. Shrapnel flew through his hands and forearms when he lifted them to protect himself from the flak. He mashed the pulp of bone and flesh left where his hands should have been against his chest to pull his ripcord. He couldn't feel the handle. He looked for, but could not find, his fingers. He was falling head first through the searchlight beams. Blood, driven by the wind from his descent, sprayed into his goggles through a gash in his wrist. He was conscious when he plummeted into the Thames, but he did not see it rushing toward him through the gore squirting onto his face out of his forearms.
Two bombers avoided damage and released their payloads while searchlights followed them. They flew away unscathed. The searchlight closest to Nelson picked up the bombs for a moment but did not track them all the way into their targets. There was hope that a plane full of bombs could be stopped. A descending payload, lit by searchlights contrasted against a black sky, destroyed hope well before it destroyed homes.
A straggling HE 111 got caught in two crossing beams. A third beam swung in. Within seconds four more lights latched on. The pilot, blinded by the intense glare shining through his cracked cockpit glass, ascended into his wing man. From the ground it looked like the climbing pilot was intentionally ramming the other bomber out of the lights. The planes separated. Pieces flew off of them. The blinded pilot's rudder jammed left forcing him to turn in a wide circle. Tracer rounds caught up with him and sparked across his cockpit. The lights kept on him. His turn ended low, behind Nelson's painted balloon. The balloon flashed purple and yellow on the smoke wafting beneath it. The beams paused for a moment then searched for more targets.
When the last few bombers flew out of London's airspace chased by RAF pilots using hints from radar nearby, the spotlights faded in pairs until the last two jerked across the sky and onto the striped balloon that made them pause during the thick of the bombardment. Enough light hit it for everyone within two miles to see clearly that it was decorated like a giant, smiling fish. The largest patch on formed an eye, the glue covering the gash up the side made the grin.
Word spread via radio from balloon crew to balloon crew. Two more spotlight crews saw the balloon and turned their beams back on to illuminate it from the other side. Nelson worried that sustained lighting would melt the glue they applied a few hours earlier to repair the bullet holes. He saw insects killed twenty yards away from the light of a searchlight. The glass covering the bowl reflector smoked constantly from the bugs cooking on its surface.
Before orders to turn the lights off were sent, more than a dozen beams intersected on the fish's grin and roamed around its brightly colored stomach.