“I Didn’t Need That Kind of Exposure”

Bob Burns flew into the heaviest flak Germany could put up — Schweinfurt, Berlin, Nantes — and accepted it as the job. But he stopped taking leave in London, and the reason he gave is one of the purest examples of how a careful man counts risk.

Leave in London

Polebrook sat about seventy miles north of London, off the Great North Road near Peterborough. London was where the officers went for an overnight pass — the bars, the shows, a hot bath. Bob went, too, for a while. Then he stopped.

“I went to London occasionally until I quit going of my own volition.”

The Germans were still flying night raids on the city. One trip, that fact stopped being an abstraction.

Four or Five Flares

A raid came in while he was there. In the dark, he went to the window to see what was happening.

“One night I was down, and I looked out my window in the dark to see what was up, and I could see four or five flares having been dropped from their pathfinder boards. And I looked at [those] flares hanging there and decided that… they could hit my hotel room, any one of them.”

German pathfinders dropped flares to mark the aiming point for the bombers behind them — and the flares were hanging, slow and bright, more or less over his hotel.

Not That Kind of Exposure

His conclusion was immediate and final.

“I decided I didn’t need that kind of exposure.”

It is a revealing line, because it draws a sharp distinction most people never bother to make. Over Germany, the danger was enormous but it was his — he had a machine, a job, a measure of control, and a reason to be there. In a London hotel bed, the danger was smaller but it was random — a bomb finding him by accident, for nothing, while he was off duty trying to relax. He would spend his life accepting the first kind of risk and refusing the second. He went back to flying combat from Polebrook; he did not go back to London.