‘Weasels two-five,’ came Jingo’s voice over the intercom.
Jingo shrugged off most German secret weapons as too little, too late; but he had a special dislike for ‘weasels’, his nick name for the pilotless V-1 flying bomb ‘doodlebugs’. Its warhead punch would wipe out all life in a twenty-metre radius.
Jingo, with his eyesight like a hawk, had spotted the long lean bomb, engine over the tail, and flaring along at some eight hundred ks. We were on course to intercept.
‘Watch and learn, laddies,’ came his intercom voice.
And he set his Tempest downward, the angle accelerating their point of interception. Handling his Tempest like the born pilot he was, he went up to the doodlebug, skimming close to the stubby wingfins.
I had seen some photos — heard the tales — but nothing showed the simple ice-cold nerve of Jingo sliding his Tempest closer, a wingtip under those stubby wingfins. Then — tip — his wingtip smacking upward. The V-1 tilted, the stabiliser upset, and the doodlebug slipped in a steep uncontrollable dive to the snow-covered land below.
Our section wheeled and banked, we watched fascinated. Once the stabiliser was gone, the V-1 was doomed. Below came an eyeblink of yellow flame on the white snow, just as quickly becoming a black smudge.
‘First-class, skipper,’ came Pinky’s voice — always the first with compliments.
‘Don’t any of you silly buggers try that,’ Jingo retorted.
I was thinking, though, as we flew back. As I twisted my neck, sideways, backways, looking for the flying black spots coming in ambush out of the sun, thoughts crept through. Jingo could have swatted that V-1 with a blast of cannon-fire, but he went up close and did it the hard way. What did Shakespeare say? Seeking death in the cannon’s mouth.
Was Jingo seeking death?
Jingo never talked much about his early life and I found out a little only by chance. It was after a mission, a bad one; we lost two pilots and nearly lost Ten-Yards Reg. Three ME-262 jets bounced us and streaked through on a single firing pass. Four nose-mounted 30mm cannon packed a lethal punch. One Tempest disintegrated in the blast; a second spun out, with a wing torn away.
I knew that pilot well. Neil Armstrong, lowland Scot who used to sing border ballads about cattle-running. A baby son he’d never seen and never would now, because his aircraft crashed with that awful splattering explosion that I felt in the pit of my stomach. And Ten-Yards Reg — he swears the cannon-shells parted his hair — pulled out with about ten yards to spare and gave that kookaburra scream of his.
The jets shot away upward — the only time we ever tangled with them — doing more at the climb than we could do at the dive, and we lost sight of them. Just as well Jerry didn’t have time to build too many of them — or the fuel to fly them. So we headed back, leaving behind two smoke-dark patches on the snow, to mark the Jerry jets’ victory.
Jingo hated losing pilots. For someone who was reckless with his own life, he took each loss personally. It was an unspoken rule that nobody went near him for about an hour after a bad mission. I was getting toughened by then. Losing Armstrong was bad, too bad for the wife and kid, but I would forget — at least shut it away. Some guys, like Pinky, couldn’t and got stuck into the booze, but that was no answer.
I needed a wash, even in the lukewarm water that was about all our old pipes could cough up. So, grabbed my small-kit and towel and headed for the ablutions tent. I stopped at the door: Jingo was in there, washing his face. He looked over, blinking through the soap suds and grunted.
‘Come on then.’
I began washing. Neither of us spoke, and Jingo lathered his face to begin shaving. He used one of those wicked old cut-throat razors. He was stripped to the waist and I noticed little black marks on his forearm. He glanced over and caught my eye; surprisingly he grinned.
‘Chop-scars. Tattoos of the trade.’
The marks were caused by a pickaxe. Jingo had started work in the coal-mines at fourteen, three years of toiling away in the dark, and black coal-dust getting into the cuts. Then at seventeen, he joined up and his first flight changed his life forever.
‘No words to express it, Gus,’ he said. ‘Up there in the empty blue, I was a king. Well a prince, a king when I went solo. Natural shot, too, they said — took to combat like a duck to water.’
He soon went from sergeant-pilot to commissioned rank. He fought the Battle of Britain at Biggin Hill and he never went back to that little coal-mining village. I never even knew if he had family — and knew better than to ask. Maybe he was talking to release the stress of that day’s loss. He finished shaving, suddenly pulled a tattered book from his tunic pocket and tossed it to me.
‘Used to read a bit, waiting for Jerry to come over. Got that out of the station library, probably owe a hundred quid in fines now. Ever read it, Gus?’
Of course I hadn’t, and he told me about it. One of those epic poems that go on for pages, translated from the French. It was set in the eighth century and an army of French knights had razed Spain. So the Spanish, who were Muslims then, took after them and caught up with the rearguard. Two great knights, Roland and Oliver, commanded and their pride did not let them summon help from the main body. All the rearguard died: Roland and Oliver were the last to fall.
Of course there was a lot more to it than that. Splendid and colourful descriptions of men, armour and horses. Deceit, tragedy and heroism. But it was the theme that Jingo loved — a band of heroes dying gloriously in a last fight. He flicked one dog-eared page and quoted softly.
Let lords who love a battle, follow me.
He actually declaimed it as Ten-Yards Reg walked in and stopped, gaping. Jingo explained and Reg took one look, unrolling his kit.
‘Pommy crap.’
‘Translated from the French, you bloody Philistine,’ grinned Jingo.
‘Frog crap, even worse.’
He started to whistle ‘Advance Australia Fair’ as he began washing. Reg always did that for some reason, even though he had the most tuneless whistle in Europe. We left. I was expecting Jingo to continue the conversation, but he just walked off to his quarters.
Jingo was no scholar, nor was he into simple heroics. So that poem Chanson du Roland was, as I figured our later, more than that. It was fighting, linked to the clean blue aerial combat he loved — far from the sooty darkness of that coal-mine. And this feeling — this spirit — was stronger than life.
Something else I didn’t work out. Until too late.
‘Jeeze, look at that.’
Night-flying is a bind. Jingo’s expression, everything that ‘annoys or gripes’ is a bind. A bloody great bind when you’ve been up all day. But when the Powers-that-be want a new night gun-sight tested, then we have to go up. Jingo, myself and Nessie.
So we do the tests, the night still and dark around us. A dark full of menace because fearsome German night-fighters still prowled these skies. The ME-410, the Junkers-88 and the Heinkel ‘Uhu’ — the owl. They are waiting to get among our bomber streams like sharks among tuna.
So, ahead we see the light.
‘Hey, that can’t be dawn,’ comes Nessie’s voice.
But it does glimmer like dawn on the horizon; dawnlight flaring in an angry mix of colours. So we go closer and the ‘dawnlight’ is below us. It stretches endlessly ahead on the black ground, into squares, lines and untidy blotches. Everywhere the same angry multi-coloured light.
These lines quaver and the splotches spread like a horrible virus. They are blue, red and yellow, even green — all the colours tinged with a burning cobweb yellow that eats hungrily into the darkness.
‘Somewhere’s clobbered it,’ comes Jingo’s flat intercom voice.
‘Somewhere’, I learned later, was a German town, nestling in a valley. Going back some two thousand years, full of medieval halls and churches. But Bomber Command had run out of big targets — and all German cities were part of the war effort. So somebody put a finger on the map and off went the bomber fleet. A thousand of the four-engined Lancasters, spearheaded by the twin-engined Mosquito ‘pathfinders’.
The Mosquitoes would drop flares to highlight the target. Then the bombers came with a belly-load of high-explosive tonnage, aiming at the neat flares. Some would only drop hundreds of the tiny fire-bomb incendiaries and the town burned brighter. And each wave of bombers would aim at those yellow flares and make them more hungry.
So the tonnage would fall and the fires burn brighter. And the people below would die of suffocation as the air was burned away. They would be destroyed in the crashing buildings. Or even sucked into the buffeting firestorm, or entombed in the bomb-shelters.
When those thousand bombers came over, there was nowhere to hide.
‘Let them burn,’ said Emile, whose own Belgian town was destroyed.
Jingo tersely tells Emile to maintain radio silence and we turn away. I look back once at the smouldering red edge of destruction in the darkness.
Anyway, the day after the night-flying thing, we were in the mess. I mentioned the burning town and Pinky laughed: ‘Few less Jerries to worry about. They’ve flattened enough of our towns.’
Jingo did not like false heroics and rolled a bleak eye at Pinky. ‘Really? I never knew the German Air Force had got as far as New Zealand.’
Ten-Yards Reg laughed. ‘Probably the Yanks, Pinky. They’ll bomb anything.’
A laugh and the moment passed. Pinky busied himself with the dart-board but I think Jingo had him sussed even then.
Anyway, Jingo went out and a minute later I did too, for a pee. Hell of a cold night. I went round the back of the mess and was halfway through when Jingo appeared. He eyed the steaming urine a moment.
‘Dirty bugger, can’t you hold it for the latrines?’
‘Seen you do it, sir, you’ve always told us to watch and learn.’
You could only go so far with Jingo; a moment, then he grunted and thumped my arm. ‘Pinky’s an idiot. Bombing Jerry towns won’t make them pack up. Didn’t make us pack up.’
Snow covered everything in pure white and the full moon dazzled. Everything was silent and beautiful, but deadly because night-flying Jerries loved a clear target.
So I did up my pants. We had buttons in those days, not those bloody zips that always catch something painful. ‘How long do you think the war’ll run?’
‘Not important, old son.’ Jingo answered directly, looking over at a distant searchlight and the stitch-lines of tracer climbing like fireflies in the black sky. ‘Peace frightens the hell out of me.’
He threw that remark at me with a wink, paused again. ‘Get some sleep. Jerry’ll probably blow you out of the sky tomorrow, but no sense in making it too easy.’
He stumped off through the snow, his boots throwing up icy little showers. ‘And do up your bloody flies before frostbite sets in.’
I had already rebuttoned, but that was Jingo’s way of telling me to be careful in the morning. I was beginning to think I knew him.
I did not.
We were flying patrol on the French–German border with the snow-covered Ardennes wilderness below us. A vast expanse of mud roads, villages and pine forests — all frozen solid by winter.
And below, unseen, under those frost-covered trees, were thousands of German and American troops scrambling and dying in a pointless fight because those frozen mountains had nothing to offer — except that neither side would give the order to pull out. They were like two dogs scrapping over a bare bone.
Then I saw a flicker of movement on the white landscape below.
‘Red Leader, bandit at ground level.’
‘Clobber him, old son,’ replied Jingo.
I kicked the rudder and half-rolled out, down into a steep dive. Red Section would cover in case this was an ambush. The aircraft below was expertly camouflaged in white and grey against the streaky landscape, but was betrayed by its own black shadow on the snow below. You cannot camouflage a shadow.
I was diving but still very alert. That aircraft might be leading me into a nest of Quad-20mm anti-aircraft guns, or even something new and horrible. Jerry was reported to be experimenting with a wind-cannon, reputed to knock an aircraft apart with a blast of air.
Now I had the plane ID — Fiesler-Storch, little reconnaissance job, no guns. Spotting our gun-emplacements for Jerry artillery, most likely. Anyway, fair game; so I streaked towards it like the angel of death. We were just about at zero ceiling, above the tree-tops.
When I was a kid, I would swipe at dragonflies with a stick; most times they’d just flick away. It was like this with the Fiesler. It would turn quickly, I’d overshoot, it would turn again, inside mine. Ducking and waving like a dragonfly, the sun dazzling on its wings.
‘Get the lead out,’ crackled Jingo’s voice from above. ‘That’s your five, you know.’
Five — that made me an Ace! A super-charge of emotion hit me and I turned again, so tightly I swear my wingtip scraped the snow. The Fiesler ahead, one blast of cannon-shells and it tore apart, those sun-glinting wings folding as it did. A dull red bloom and I flew through the dark smoke with a sudden strange sick feeling.
‘Nice work, Gus, now get some height unless you want a bum full of pine-needles.’
Jingo was right and I angled the Tempest in a blood-draining climb. Rejoined formation on Jingo’s wingtip and he put up five leather-gloved fingers for a moment. I was an Ace.
Back at base, I was hand-shaken and back-slapped and my ground crew cheered. My being an Ace gave them special status. All I could think about was swiping at dragonflies. The Storch pilot who tried so hard to live.
My first kill was that Focke-Wulf over Amiens. Then the ME-410 night-fighter, blundering like a blinded bat in dawnlight. The tri-motor Junkers transport and that FW 190 over the airfield — probably flown by a pilot greener than me. Now the little unarmed Storch. Over lunch in the mess — spam sandwiches again — I talked to Jingo.
He crammed a sandwich into his mouth and drank some coffee before replying. ‘Gus, my first was a Heinkel floatplane, then some poor sod of a Dornier, limping home on one engine. Next three were JU-87s on a convoy strike, bloody sitting ducks.
‘Five is just a number Gus, nothing special. I’m surprised you’re not dead already, those brick-shithouse landings you make.’
He grinned, swallowed the last of his coffee and walked out. We had a sortie in one hour and I went over to my Tempest. It was refuelled and the crew was winding the long belts of cannon-shells into the wing magazines. Young Peachey was painting a black bar alongside the other four under the cockpit.
I told them to check the oil-feed then went off. I turned and told Peachey to scrub the mark off. I joked about chucking back the little fish, but they just gaped. I told them to scrub it off, because in my mind came an image: a pilot like me, in his tiny vulnerable craft, struggling frantically to live and knowing he was doomed. And he was, because I had made that extra-special effort to kill him — to become an Ace.
A few days later over the same Ardennes forest, we bounced two ground-strafing Focke-Wulf 190s. So my cannon-shells hit one and he scored a deep black burning mark on the snow.
And that made the ‘five’ official.