Over the Apennine Mountains, then the Italian Riviera and the Mediterranean, the Lancaster force kept loose formation for protection as the sun came up. Italian fighters were a possible threat, and the Luftwaffe's Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 (2nd Night Fighter Wing) was based in Italy, but the bombers had descended to low altitude again and seemed to be undetected. Off the Italian coast, Johnnie Sauvage and his crew saw Rod Rodley's Lancaster, just ahead of them, engulfed in a sudden red fireball. Rodley's flight engineer, Flight Sergeant Duffy, checked an inspection port and said the fire was in the bomb bay. Rodley realised that the vermilion glow was that of a red TI. The bomber was carrying a TI that the bomb aimer had fused from his switching panel but had not dropped, and, as the Lancaster descended, the barometric fuse had blown the bomb's tail off and ejected the pyrotechnic candles into the bomb bay. Rodley opened the bomb doors and Sauvage's crew saw the fireball fall away into the sea. But the explosion had damaged the hydraulic lines: Rodley could not close the bomb doors properly and the flaps were drooping.