Jingo Brook. My story starts and finishes with him — and the special kind of leader he was. I still don’t quite understand Jingo and what made him tick. Hell, still don’t quite understand myself. We were hunters and, I think, also the hunted.
I told you bits and pieces of this when you were young, Matt, too young to take it in. Even then, I only told you bits and pieces because the rest was too painful. So I’m writing it down, and maybe then I can lay the demons to rest … maybe.
So I’ll go back to that first day — when the JU-88s paid us a visit. How Jingo rallied and fought back when everyone else was diving for the air-raid trenches. Even then, I knew he was different, as though made by war. And whatever war shapes, war also destroys. But when you’re young, you don’t think about those things.
In that first week, we settled in quickly. A mixed bunch, all odds and sods in the same bag. Good blokes and most of them had been fighting since 1940. Too long.
Gaston, a Frenchman, who hadn’t seen his family since 1940. Sven, a Dane, Lars the Norwegian, and a moody Dutchman called Jan. Emile, a Belgian, whose parents and sister were in a concentration camp for helping allied airmen who’d baled out over enemy lines.
Jingo’s sidekick, a Canadian, ‘Pussy’ Cato. Max, a South African whose Afrikaans parents had disowned him for enlisting. ‘Ten-Yards Reg’, a mad Aussie from Darwin, so-called because his prop was practically chewing the tail of a Jerry fighter before he opened up. And one I’ll always remember, Linus B. Longstreet.
Linus was a tall, black American from Alabama, who worked his way to Canada in 1940, took flying lessons and joined the Canadian Air Force. At that time, they took everyone and no worries abut the colour of your skin — so long as you could fly. He had nine kills, a top pilot, and would bleed sweet sad magic out of his harmonica. He was one of us but also a loner.
Myself, Nesbitt and Pinkney were the newcomers, and when Ten-Yards Reg learned we were from New Zealand he muttered they’d be enlisting sheep next. We’d replaced pilots who’d (to use a ground-crew phrase) ‘augured in’, meaning they’d crashed. And we gave our kites nicknames and gender, because these big wide-winged birds were life and death.
We were in that company, but not part of it. To be their comrades, we’d have to earn their respect. And we would earn that up in the cold grey skies of winter and spring; up where the last menace of a deadly and implacable enemy lurked.
Touch the face of God.
We sortied twice — sometimes three times — a day. Allied Air Command were determined to knock the last German fighters out of the sky. They emphasised that Jerry was down to his final few fighters — only about fifty aircraft — but somehow that same ‘fifty’ kept coming at us.
So every morning, it’s that crisped bacon and a sloppy mix of powdered eggs and burnt toast. The coffee is alright. Once the cook had milk — but it swam on the black surface in pale sour globules.
The mess (strange title for an eating-place) has a noticeboard with orders, new regulations, even a sketch of another new Jerry jet, this one powered — believe it — by coal. Lippisch-13A I learned later, but, like most of them, too late. Otherwise, we would have had real problems right then.
Also on the noticeboard are those ‘special’ letters from home. Some are stupid, some just plain silly.
There were poems pinned up on the mess noticeboard sometimes. One, clipped from a magazine, was not like the doggerel I wrote. At briefing, my chair was near it, so — while Jingo droned on about coal-burning fighters and the piston-engined Dornier-335 — I could see the poem and learn the lines.
The poem was pinned up (by Jingo I think) with a golf-tee and a ragged splinter of wood from the time a JU-88 raked the tent with 20mm cannon-fire, shredding our trestle-tables. Straight-shooting lines and written by another pilot, who’d been there — since shot down.
Enough for the moment.
So, briefing over, we go to our waiting fighters — like knights to their horses — except I wonder if knights felt the ice crack under their flying-boots and the cold mud splatter upwards. And did they feel a stomach-churning fear that needed ritual — each ritual private to the pilot — to say you will not die this day?
This morning, we are flying top-cover for a Marauder strike. The big twin-engined attack-bombers, taking out a Jerry H.Q. So if the Focke-Wulfs hit them, then we hit the Fockes. Peachey helps me into the cockpit, chewing gum — a habit he’s picked up from the Yanks. He grins, shifting the gum from one cheek to the other.
‘Give ’em hell, boss.’
Fitting on helmet, goggles and oxygen mask, I nod back and put up a leather-gloved finger. Peachey slides the canopy shut and I do a flight-check, settle my boots on the rudder — yes and a line of that poem stabs through me.
And touch the face of God.
The big four-bladed propellers turn and suck air into that powerful Bristol-Centaurus engine; it rumbles, the exhausts spurt and the propeller spins faster. The air-frame shudders like a big horse straining at the reins. I am waiting for Jingo’s Tempest to move, then I will move, let the shuddering growling engine drag me skyward to war and death.
Touch the face of God.
Touch my gut-fear, touch that delicate pain of not knowing if I will be alive tonight, that can wrench so hard as to knot me in fear. So I am held by the snarling and dragging engine, pulling me up into untimely death.
Slipping the surly bonds of Earth — and my own ratshit doggerel —
Jingo’s Tempest roaring upward, so my head must turn on nearly a 360-degree axis. Neck-wrenching though it is, it keeps me alive, as Jingo takes up into the pale high blue, high as his engine-roar can take us.
Leaving behind the brown shot-torn ground, our sand bagged entrenchments like raised ringworm circles; becomingly increasingly more distant as I glance left and right and then upwards; keeping an eye on oil pressure, think about knights thundering over the green patchwork below.
Airborne — slipping the surly bonds —
Climbing upward and the big-snouted airflow sucking in the frantic greed of those cylinders — checking oil-pressure, the hundred other checks as I crane around under the leather cap fitting my face, the prickly mad sweat starting under my leather flying-suit. And extending into my leather-gloved and madly prickling fingers.
Higher and higher the snarling engine takes me. I wear full leather because that will stop flames for maybe the moment it takes me to register that I am burning, because getting burned is horrible. I think about this as I wrench my head around and upwards to the high grey blue. Even in this penetrating cold, colder as I climb higher, I think about getting burned and sweat like a pig.
Better than roasting like one.
Climbing, propeller and engine dragging us up; aerodynamics doing their lifting miracle. My Tempest has a ceiling of just over ten thousand metres and it takes seven long minutes to reach it; long, long nerve-wracking minutes, squinting always, into those grey clouds and pale dazzling sunlight. Those Biggles books I used to love — beware the Hun in the sun.
The landscape below is a pattern of light and dark, green into a darker swatch of forest and the ugly brown pockmarks of bomb craters spotting like a disease. And we are at ceiling, sucking in the oxygen that burns raw in our throats. Ahead, Jingo fires a short burst to check his cannon are working. I fire mine and, behind me, Pussy does the same.
‘Come on Jingo, you promised us a brace of Huns each.’
‘Shut up.’
That pale patchwork of lines and light-dark patches below, the incredible clean light-blue of the heavens above. So, here, we will wheel and swoop like hawks, ‘stooge about’ Jingo puts it, wait for prey below. Sucking the burning oxygen, your breathing loud, your goggles misting.
So wheel and swoop and keep alert — keep alert — but also dream with part of your mind. Dream to calm your pounding heart and raw throat, the oxygen mask chafing your face, the close leather helmet scraping ears painfully tight to head. I’ve got big ears, ‘elephant-flaps’ my schoolmate, Brian Sutton, used to call them. Brian, killed before Monte Cassino, Italy.
So we stooge about and wait and I push Brian Sutton from my mind. Van-boy for a department store before he was called up, yes and his girl Maureen — push the thought away: concentrate.
So wheel and swoop and wait — wait — look upwards as well as down because Jerry has jets that fly higher than us. So I dream — and keep alert, because death, by cannon-shell or fire, or shattering crash — is sudden, untidy and permanent.
Swoop again, dream, those words have a steel accent and speak loudly, as though my brain is a theatre — this theatre with a scared audience, waiting with pounding head and raw throat, to go into action. And watching the magic of my leather-gloved hands touching with unconscious guidance on the controls.
Dreaming?
You have not dreamed …
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung …
my eager craft through footless halls of air.
‘Bandits, sixteen below.’
Jingo’s voice crackles. In addition to being an incredible shot, the man has eyesight like a hawk. We were all looking, but he saw first the tiny cross-winged outlines below, almost lost in the hazy landscape. Already diving as he speaks, myself kicking the rudder to follow. Pussy and Linus behind us, all still craning our heads around because the moment you relax is the moment they strike.
Now the air is screaming past, you have that curious flattening feeling as your ears hum and pop; a pair of giant thumbs are squashing against your eyeballs. And the sick desperation in your guts, because you are diving into a fight and might soon be dead. And the dark cross-winged shapes are clearer; now comes a sudden bright flash of yellow and streaming smoke.
An aircraft is on fire and smoking away down there.
Close enough now to see them — Focke-Wulf 190s, our long-nosed mates. And now they have seen us and are turning up. My thumb twitches, I flick the trigger-switch.
‘Teach ’em manners,’ comes Jingo’s voice.
Meaning: meet them head on without giving way. So they are closer and those first yellow winking lights and black-starred lines; those are the machine-guns, shooting for range. Now come the orange golf-balls floating up in their drifting lazy way. Now — my thumb on the firing button. Now — the aircraft jars, acrid smoke in the cockpit and my own orange lines go drifting down.
Ahead, the Jerry fighters break and Jingo swings at the same time. His cannon-shells striking orange destruction along the pale grey underbelly. My own is still holding course, then vanishes below. I turn, another dark shape flashes past. A Jerry ahead, great no-deflection shot, taking the Tempest in a tight curve and fire.
‘Break Gus, you silly arse.’
Pulling the joystick back into the pit of my stomach and the Tempest buckets up; kick the rudder-bar sideways and it angles. Now Jerry chatter on the intercom, Pussy yelling something, Pinky squawking. Ahead, a Focke-Wulf also turning but too slow — new boy this — my cannon-shells crash into his green-spotted fuselage, his canopy explodes and flies back. Smoke and streaming glycol hide the cockpit as his aircraft tips into a steep sudden dive.
And then — always so sudden — the sky is clear and the Focke-Wulfs are gone. So I turn once more and an awful sight unfolds. Pussy’s Tempest — Snarling Panther — is level and straight-winged before me but streamers of red engine-fire are enveloping the canopy. And Pussy’s calm crackling voice — ‘Baling out’ — and tipping Snarling Panther over to drop out.
Something goes wrong. Maybe the fire reaches him too quickly, maybe the controls are affected — or he pulls the ripcord, releasing his parachute too soon. Whatever, the ’chute opens too soon, snags on the tailfin of his fighter and Snarling Panther goes into a dive with Pussy trailed behind and kicking violently to free himself.
I should not be watching this. I should be watching the sky because the Focke-Wulfs might bounce us again. But I do watch, transfixed, as Pussy is swept on down, still kicking but entangled, and nothing waiting but the five thousand metres it takes for Snarling Panther to dive down — two minutes, maybe more — and Pussy waits for his sudden slamming death. Maybe he’ll get lucky and black out — maybe.
‘Gus, what are you, some old bugger in a wheelchair?’
Jingo’s roar snaps me out: he’s seen it too, but this is not the moment. So, kicking the rudder-bar again and going into a wide circle, but the long-nosed jobs are gone. And I do not look down — at least not for a minute — so I am not in time for that little yellow splat. Pussy and Snarling Panther hitting the ground; that is the end of Vernon Cato, twenty-five years old, pilot-officer, former second-year veterinary surgeon.
We re-form. A new bloke — always the new blokes — named Mike Aiden, is gone and Jingo’s voice crackles flatly. ‘If you’re looking for Pinky, he’s walked.’
So Pinky baled out too. ‘Walked’ but there are different ways of saying this. And there are different reasons to ‘walk’, not all connected with battle damage. But I tell myself that Jingo does not like Pinky. Still — with a churning sick feeling — thinking about Pussy’s horrible death.
And it hits me again when my Tempest trundles to a stop: Pussy is dead. I sit there, my ground crew running up as they see the stitch-lines of bullet-holes, the dark streaks under the cannon’s muzzles. But I am unharmed. It hits me — I am still alive.
Still alive! So my detached gauntleted-hands can come up and push the goggles from my red-rimmed eyes and pull away my oxygen mask, let my staring eyes on the controls tell me that I am still alive. But I have to get up out of the cockpit and never mind if my boots scrabble on the wing as I jump down. My boots hit a brown icy puddle, splinter the thin ice, and I just recover from falling flat.
Jingo is out of his Tempest, buffing his arms and stamping. He nods at me. ‘Not bad, eh? We got three of theirs. Not worth Pussy, though.’
Not bad, we got three of them — so I stump off to the mess-tent. Jingo grunts and heads off to his office, to report today’s combat. At the mess, I crash into a chair, order something to drink. The others come clumping in and some speak to me; I even hear myself answering. But my mind is still up in the high blue, the exhilaration that I have survived another day; this will come later. Yes, and Pussy’s final struggles will come into my dreams.
Enough as I sit in the mess-tent and hold a hot coffee in my leather-gloved fingers; my gloved fingers clasping the hot cup, sipping the scalding liquid. It should be hot and comforting, but it just burns in the pit of my stomach.
I have been there — up into the high blue deadly sky — and back again, knowing each mission will leave an indelible mark; leaving me thinking that I cannot die — until I go back into that brawling giant emptiness and understand the last line of that poem.
Put out my hand and touch the face of God.