11

FIRE ON THE RUNWAY

I

Later that night I was running, running, running, along a wide flat highway under a sky that was broadening with pre-dawn light. I was going to miss something if I did not run fast enough to catch it up. What could it be? The noise was so deafening it blotted out all thought. It was coming up behind me. That was it – I was running on the runway, the planes were taking off, they were coming up behind me. They were going to obliterate me with that fearsome noise. I sat up in bed. The whole hut rang and trembled with the sound of the engines. They were really taking off into the lightening sky. It was the first operation after D-Day and I was not on it. I scrambled into clothes and flying boots – I had inherited them from someone who had not been wearing them when he went missing – and really ran up the hill to the airfield. It was too late. The sound of the engines faded southwards.

I sat down heavily on a loading tender. That was strange. I was surrounded by Mitchells in varying stages of repair. For D-Day each squadron was committed to put fifteen planes at readiness instead of the usual twelve. That accounted for the fact that there was hardly a Boston in sight. It was their taking off that had woken me. They had gone to lay smoke in front of the landing beaches. There was no room for any additional passengers in the Boston, so I had not missed being on our first Mitchell operation after invasion.

I interrogated some of the crews on their return. It must have been a heart-wrenching mission. The Bostons flew just above the water, leaving long streamers of smoke to blind the defenders. In these opening moments of the battle there was little sign of a German response. We lost only one Boston, shot down by mistake by our own battleship, Warspite. The British Navy was notoriously trigger-happy when approached by a plane from an unusual angle.

We expected that the Mitchells would be in the next wave of attack, bombing the German shore defences and gun emplacements, but the weather proved even worse than the forecast. For four days we were grounded. Four crucial days, while the greatest armada in history was struggling to gain a foothold on the steep tidal beaches, and the Germans were rushing up their reinforcements.

Compared with the terrible losses of the First World War, the casualties on D-Day were not enormous, but they were not insignificant either. I don’t remember them ever being published. On that first, longest, day, the assault on the beaches saw more than ten-and-a-half thousand casualties. It proved far harder to dislodge the defenders than we had expected. Why should the Germans prove so stubborn, when they were bound to lose anyway? We were expecting to take the local town of Caen on the morning of 7 June. A month later we had still not taken it.

The infantry would find itself pinned down between the hedges, ditches and narrow fields of Normandy. There was a fatalism often experienced by those battle-hardened troops. Many had been in the Western Desert battles against Rommel. They were not anxious to risk themselves unduly in these last struggles of the war. Later that summer our maid Dorothy told me that her only brother, brought back from Africa to contribute the tough capability of the hardened warrior, was convinced that he would not survive this last ordeal. He didn’t.

It was quite different for air crews taking part in these short bombing raids aimed at the German defenders. Our crews felt humiliated that they could not contribute more to the battle. In those first days after D-Day they were not able to prove their mettle, pinned down, rendered impotent and unable to operate by mere fog and rain, while the poor bloody infantry was expected to slog away without any assistance from its namby-pamby partner in the air. What was the good of relying on an ally who gave up once there was a change in the weather? It was easy to envisage how the British Tommy and American GI would see it.

Each day was no better than the last. We would go through all the rigours and tensions of a briefing which would then be cancelled. It gave me an insight into the moody temperament that afflicted most air crew. I felt so jumpy that I wondered whether I should abandon my plan to take an observer’s eye view of the final themes of the war. But on the fourth morning there were some breaks in the cloud.

The fallibility of the weather was an additional psychological strain for the airmen. Days passed and we had not even been allocated a specific target. Then, on 10 June two events hinted at change. The code breakers had discovered that a Panzer group headquarters had been set up to run the battle of Normandy from an orchard twelve miles south of the main battle area at Caen. At the same time, the weather showed signs of a change, but only in a meagre way. All day we waited for it to get just a little bit brighter.

‘We really need it this time,’ said Squadron Leader Walkerdene. I went through the briefing in a terrified dream. ‘Cheer up,’ twinkled the real navigator, Pilot Officer Martin, pinching my knee. ‘It’s well known that intelligence officers always keep out of trouble,’ grinned Sergeant Sims.

The exhilaration of the mass take-off lifted the spirits. What did I write in my observer’s log book at the time? ‘Immense activity both in air and in Channel. Two large fires on Cherbourg peninsula. Meagre, inaccurate heavy flak from Caen area. Weather: clear patches over France. 9/10 strato-cn. en route.’

The area round the Mulberry mobile harbours was so densely active that, as Sergeant Sims said, we didn’t need a plane, we could have walked across the Channel on the piled-up shipping. By contrast, the Norman countryside on a midsummer evening seemed far from the turmoil of war. I watched as we put an end to that. On the bombing run the bombs rolled out horizontally like a series of extra-large French loaves. I followed them down through my field-glasses as they straightened into the vertical just before the moment of impact. Dense smoke shot back towards us and was quickly followed by the contributions of the other squadrons. At 12,000 feet we were too distant to see human detail, but that pile of mounting explosive looked conclusive. Indeed, two months later, when the Allies finally fought the seven miles down from Caen, they found the mass graves that replaced their last supper for many of the Panzer group that evening. The general himself and nineteen staff officers were among the German losses.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but I was more interested in discovering what detail the waning sun revealed to us from 12,000 feet. Most elegant of all were the long avenues of poplar trees near a church in the Caen area. These might have been carved by an industrious craftsman in memory of the nineteen staff officers.

The flight back to base was like the return from some particularly splendid theatre performance which we had all been witnessing. Flight discipline was rigorously maintained – it had to be when all six planes in an individual box were flying wingtip to wingtip, not more than a few feet apart – but this didn’t stop the humming of a familiar song or recounting a well-known tale. Adrenaline carried us along in a glow of self-regard.

The same mood elevated the debriefing back at the squadron dispersal. We all felt sure we had been on target and had in some way atoned for the wasted days that had perforce preceded them. There was a section in Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War memories that caught this same lyrical self-regard: ‘What I felt was a sort of personal manifesto of being intensely alive – a sense of physical adventure and improvident jubilation . . .’.

Across the splatter of the champagne corks in the debriefing room Squadron Leader Walkerdene beckoned.

‘How was it then?’

‘Some marvellous views, especially coming back.’

‘I’m glad I was able to get you that trip,’ said the self-regarding squadron leader. He had done nothing to encourage my efforts. Now he was waving a piece of paper at me.

‘I’m sorry Gill, they want you at Air Ministry. As from tomorrow. They’re on the track of those concrete platforms. There’s a lot of additional ciphering to be done.’

Seeing my disappointment he added, ‘You can make a personal appeal. It’s in your rights. I was sure you would want to do that. I’ve fixed you an appointment with Personnel for tomorrow morning.’

So perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all.

He was certainly right that the rumours of a new weapon had put the planners at Air Ministry in a jitter. But the thought of spending months, perhaps years, pouring over dreary blocks of codified numbers was beyond bearing. They surely didn’t need me or my friend Frank Watson from the Intelligence course – the brainy boys had already acquired what appeared to be half of All Souls College, Oxford.

Frank was in the waiting room. I was very pleased to see him. Five or six years older than me, he was infinitely more sophisticated. At my request we went into the interview together. The Personnel Officer was very friendly. He explained that the Air Ministry believed these pilotless planes to be Hitler’s last desperate gamble. They would put as many in the battle as they could. Hence the RAF would want every officer who could fly to counter them . . . Ah, but we were not pilots. That was a point on our side. The Personnel Officer could not envisage what we wanted to do if we didn’t fly. At this point I joined in and explained that I wanted to make a record of the experiences of war.

‘How come?’ asked the bewildered Personnel Officer. I wasn’t very good at explaining but, as it happened, I had been on that important raid the evening before, and the leading plane in a box of six Mitchells had to carry an additional navigator . . .

At this point the Personnel Officer picked up one of his many phones. ‘You better come in Charlie,’ he said in the tone of one who had seen everything. We got our permission to fly in a Mitchell on a bombing raid when it did not interfere with normal duties . . . and when the squadron commander endorsed it.

II

My meeting at the Air Ministry occurred on the morning of Monday 12 June 1944. The intelligence offices were crowded with energetic young men, feverishly passing each other short memos on unlikely defence tactics to use against pilotless bombs. That night the first four buzz bombs landed in southern England. In the next three months literally thousands fell on London and the small towns and villages of the south. There was an unlikely rumour that we might be forced to do a deal with the Nazis. Hitler would surely never have abandoned this singularly nasty weapon. Moreover, it glossed over the Nazis’ weakest point – the shortage of manpower. Nor were we likely to start negotiating at this late hour.

I had discovered that when my day off came round, I could take the local train into London and meet my father for a meal and a movie or a musical show. We would still have time to catch our respective last trains to Canterbury and Hartford Bridge. It was a pleasure for both of us. My father had taken my mother back to Yorkshire. Quite rightly he thought it was putting too much stress on her fragile nerves for her to stay in Bomb Alley. Life in bomb-battered Canterbury cannot have been any fun for him either.

So, at 11 a.m. on Tuesday 13 June, we met in Piccadilly Circus. Our intention was to stroll past Trafalgar Square, down to the Mall, to Buckingham Palace and so past Hyde Park Corner under the protection of another great war leader, the Duke of Wellington, on to the Hyde Park Hotel for lunch. But things didn’t work out that way.

We had only just ceased admiring the window-dressing of Fortnum and Mason and its clock chiming the hours, when a sudden absence of sound caused us to lose our breath. It was the chug-a-way chug-alug of Hitler’s new weapon. It caught our attention because it wasn’t like any other sudden silence. This one was literally a messenger of death. When it stopped it meant the engine had cut off and this crude mechanical device was falling – falling for ten seconds on average and then exploding with the fire power of a 500lb bomb. The dive-bombers at Canterbury had screeched to terrorise; the buzz-bomber left it to your imagination.

What we had not worked out was that at any moment when the chuga-lug was in the air we needed to know what we were going to do if it stopped. Because it did not fly very high – mostly about 2,000 feet – it was unlikely that we should get a siting on it during its rapid fall. In this first experience we followed instinct and fell flat in the gutter. At the explosion, little whorls of dust rose with the debris of the pavement. The bomb had gone off somewhere north of us, in Soho.

Perversely, we walked down to Jermyn Street, parallel to Piccadilly, but a good deal narrower. We thought we would be safer surrounded by solid early Victorian terraces. We had not got far before the tell-tale chuntering was heard coming up from the river. Now we saw it, our view unobstructed across Green Park, a little spurt of flame coming out of its backside, veering and lurching, presumably to put off the anti-aircraft fire. It looked like a child’s mechanical toy. Just before it got overhead, the engine cut out and it dived out of sight.

This time we had thought out our response. This part of London had not only imposing flights of entrance steps, but other narrower steps down which the tradesmen would deliver their crates of wine and assorted goodies. Open to the sky, readily accessible, an ideal buffer for everything, but the direct hit.

Twice more that morning we needed to prepare a defence at short notice. We survived, but the pleasure of the morning constitutional was quite lost. We didn’t try it again.

III

Hartford Bridge fell only just within the range of the buzz bomb. I don’t remember any blasts disrupting the endless toil of the fitters and riggers. One of the first things I had to master was the geography of the airfield – no small order as I was told it was the fifth largest in Britain. I needed to be able to get in touch immediately with any section of it, and also to understand the relative responsibilities of armourers and radar observers, and where the emergency field dressing was kept.

In some ways it was like being the latest arrival at a traditional public school. The air crews steadily played down their responsibilities, but they expected the newcomer to play the game without being taught. Breakfast for officers was in a big tent from 7 to 8 a.m. There was little difference in food and general amenities between the Officers’ Mess and airmen’s canteen. After breakfast everyone who could went up to the airfield. Some toiled up the steep little lanes on ramshackle old bicycles or hitched a trip on a lorry-load of incendiary bombs, or managed to get onto the neat little Jeeps (each squadron had recently been allocated one of these quintessentially Yankee inventions). Rough-riding, versatile, amenable and hard to beat, they must have been one of the most popular personifications of Western ingenuity and the value of Lend Lease.

However, they were of no use to Pilot Officer A.M. Gill. As the most junior officer on the field, he was the bottom of the list in getting a ride. Even then he would have to have a driver. Pilot Officer Gill might have aspirations to see the end of the war from close-up, but he would not be driving to the scene: he couldn’t drive.

All this sounds a serious disability in getting around a network of Nissen huts, partially disembowelled aeroplanes, stacks of bombs and radio operators trying out their wavelengths. The first thing I noticed was how helpful individuals were. And the second – and perhaps it linked with the first – was how superstitious the air crews were. I suppose this comes out of their inability to control their own destiny. There was also the increasing tension, which went with each further successful completion of a mission. I witnessed this at close quarters when I became friendly with a New Zealand crew. They were only a few months older than me and had that quiet reserve of manner that often seemed to distinguish the people of the far dominion from their brasher neighbours in Australia.

When I knew the Kiwis, they were already halfway through the fatal forties. At this stage of the war a tour (the allocated number of missions that had to be flown before a crew could be withdrawn for a spell in training) that had begun as thirty-five bombing missions had risen to fifty missions. Superstition made a particular hazard of the last half-dozen missions. In fact, the New Zealanders’ engines had been playing up, something that was most exasperating to pilot and crew. As with all of us, the New Zealanders had been waiting impatiently for the weather to improve. In a few weeks it became patchier, but it was too late for the Kiwis. They did not return from their forty-eighth mission.

The Mitchells flew wingtip to wingtip and on this particular trip were only briefly under fire on the bombing run itself. The box leader’s navigator tried to keep the planes on course while continually altering height and veering from side to side. He needed to hold the bomber on the straight and narrow when the air was in tumult with the bursting of hostile flak all around. For a few minutes, the other pilots agreed, everything was pretty hot – bursting anti-aircraft shells, planes going in all directions, following the box leader’s evasive rising and falling. Then suddenly they were out of it, out of Jerry’s flak range, bombs dropped and setting course for England.

They could sit back and count their blessings. But, hold on, one was missing. How could that be? It was the Kiwis. Somewhere in the minutes of maximum confusion they had slipped away. Must have gone down low, probably hedge-hopping back to base. But they didn’t come back to Hartford Bridge or any other RAF base. After a couple of days they were left on the operations blackboard: ‘missing’.

In the mid-years of the war, the centre of aerial conflict was with the daylight bombers and their main targets were support for the Army in its tank battles in the Western Desert. There was another use for these day-time marauders: propaganda. Low-level missions produced some spectacular footage in which tanks, artillery, armoured patrols and refuelling tankers seemed from the air like animated toy soldiers.

The two film photographers Ted Moore and Chuck Evans had joined 137 Wing at a time late in 1943 when the Germans were making attacks on shipping; these destroyed such large numbers of vital oil and food reserves that some economists believed the Germans could win the war by starving us out. Ted Moore had told me he had decided to ask for a transfer to another front – probably in the Far East. The unique role of the cameraman-cum-pilot gave Moore and Evans more authority than their actual rank as flight lieutenants suggested.

Ted Moore was a small compact person from South Africa. Before the war he had been a news cameraman on Pathé Pictorial. Chuck Evans had been his assistant. Tall, with dark wavy hair and an open cheerful expression, he usually accepted Ted’s opinion, but now his wife was expecting their first child. Not surprisingly, she hoped to persuade Chuck to stay on the European front. Our CO was likely to view Chuck’s attitude with favour. As you will remember, his wife was expecting their first child.

Ted had told me all this over a late evening drink in the Officers’ Mess tent at Hartford Bridge. He felt his view of the war had reached the limits that could be shown from the somewhat cumbersome spare seat of the Mitchell.

Now, for some reason, he called me over. As I often did, I was walking from breakfast in the cluster of bell tents in the valley to the 226 admin office on the far ledge of the airfield itself. I had only just become aware that the figure pacing up and down the puddle of dirty oil on the middle of the now empty dispersal area was the man I had talked with a couple of nights before.

He looked at me absently and asked what I was doing on the edge of the runway.

I explained this was a short cut from breakfast to a view of the squadrons coming back.

‘That’s it, you don’t want to get in their way. Someone might be injured.’ He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a filthy rag. He looked at it with surprising intensity, then said, ‘He left this behind.’

It was an extremely tattered miniature woollen teddy bear. Apparently Evans never went on a mission without it. This morning, over-sleeping, in the bustle to get off, he had mislaid the bear. Ted had found it and was waiting to give it back to its owner just as soon as he physically could. It wasn’t long before we heard the preliminary tremble in the air that spelt the approach of thirty-six bombers in close formation. Wait, in the second box of six there was a gap, there was one plane missing. If we had been waiting in the flying control tower we could have been in communication with the squadron commander and we would have known what had happened and which plane was missing. But now we had to wait for the planes to lose height, to land and come taxiing over to their individual dispersal bay. By that time we had identified by its absence which plane was missing. It was indeed the Mitchell that Chuck Evans had been flying in. No one had seen it go down.

Years later Ted Moore achieved fame with the top cinematography award of the year for A Man for All Seasons.

Long before that had happened a whole lot of medals and citations were presented to us on the airfield itself by the King and Queen. I had heard that the King could be frightfully shirty if things didn’t work out the way he had expected. Something certainly went wrong that afternoon.

Virtually the entire personnel of 137 Wing were formed up into a hollow square. Junior officers formed a guard of honour. I was both the youngest and one of the tallest so was in a position to hear the row. Something had delayed the royal party. Standing to attention for over an hour might be all right for a Guards regiment, but it made the mixed company of RAF, French and Dutch crews very restive.

All the decorations were carefully laid out. The adjutant, responding to a crib taped to his wrist, picked up the appropriate medal and placed it on a brocaded pillow. This was handed to one of the top RAF brass, I think it was Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. He held the cushion out for the King, who had to pick up the medal and stick it onto the recipient’s chest. No doubt this wasn’t as easy as it should have looked. But the King made it impossibly difficult. He wanted all the trestle tables rearranged, but there were no airmen to do the rearranging. They had been standing to attention for over an hour and were in no mood to be helpful; and the top brass had been wining and dining too indulgently: that was why they were late for their own parade. Trestle tables are all right if you have at least four handlers per table. Unfortunately there weren’t that many air vice-marshals to go round. I wrote to my mother: ‘If the pictures get on the newsreel, you will probably see me – looking an excellent imitation of a lamp-post! The King disappointed me by being in a bad temper and displaying very poor manners, but I thought the Queen was very charming and much prettier than I had expected.’

She had looked me in the eye and said how youthful many of the air crews looked.

IV

A few days later we had some more distinguished guests, this time from across the Atlantic. Squadron Leader Walkerdene looked more than usually excited. He asked me to stay on duty in case the Yanks wanted to have anything explained to them. There were at least a dozen of them and not one less than a full colonel.

It was the suggestion that they might need something explained that grabbed my attention. Hartford Bridge did indeed harbour an exciting modern invention that none of us had seen in action. Squadron Leader Walkie-Talkerdene ushered us all into the crowded control tower. He explained that one of the hazards of flying from Britain was the way the weather could change in a minute or two. He reminded the American Army men how they had had to make the invasions of Europe without the support of the Mitchells, Bostons and Mosquitoes of 2 Group. ‘Much help they would have been,’ muttered one of the American generals. ‘All that has changed now,’ Walkie-Talkerdene went on impetuously. ‘What we’re about to see has never been seen before. Observe, gentlemen, we are on a hilltop and there is quite a thick mist gathering in the hollows – enough to stop us flying, but no longer, thanks to the wonders of Fido. Switch on Fido.’ He gave me a meaningful nudge.

For a few awkward seconds nothing happened. Then there was a dazzling flash that lit up every corner of the control tower, a shrill hissing like the threat of a dozen monster snakes, a powerful smell of petrol. It was all coming from the main runway. As we watched, flames raced forwards leaping like an athlete of fire down the concrete runway. The height of the flames seemed to vary, but to be around eighty feet.

It was a barbaric sight and demanded that the viewer did not take too strong a breath of the tormented air in case the heat overwhelmed us and drew us into the magnet of fire, as was said to happen in the bombed German cities when the RAF inflicted a firestorm on them. Perhaps it was the memory of the dreadful torments that both the RAF and the Luftwaffe had launched on its enemy that made one of the senior American generals turn somewhat impatiently to Squadron Leader Walkerdene, who was just getting into his stride.

‘How much does this cost a minute?’ It was the sort of question that our squadron leader should have been able to answer, but, of course, he didn’t have a clue (nor did anyone else). We could only respond rather lamely that we would forward the figures to him, General Eisenhower, in his London headquarters. ‘In the meantime, it’s costing too much for a demonstration. Switch it off.’ In photographs for which he was prepared, Ike always looked jovial, but there was a tough side to his character.

As for Fido, it was in practical use within a week and was, on the larger airfields such as Hartford Bridge, a valuable method of clearing the foggy air.

It was just about this time that I began to realise how much I was enjoying myself. Within my first five weeks on an active service station I had met at close quarters the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower; the top fighting general, Montgomery; and the King and Queen at an unguarded moment. This was exactly the way I had daydreamed my war might be. Only one extra touch was needed: it was time to go on another mission.

Once it seemed that it was time to put on my crash hat, there was no point in dawdling. The previous day, 16 July, the Mitchells had attempted to bomb a fuel dump south of Caen. Enemy defensive fire was so strong that we had failed to hit the target and we were briefed to return to it. There was no time to find the best available crew. I scrambled in with a non-commissioned outfit. They didn’t mind taking me, and that was it.

The weather was still tricky. After spending twenty minutes circling the airfield looking for a gap in the clouds we were recalled. These sudden changes in plan and enforced idleness were undoubtedly the hardest things to bear. Unexpectedly, in the early afternoon the Met Officer spotted a wider break and the chance that it was going to spread eastwards carried us hopefully into the air again. I was more scared than I had been the first time. But once over the beaches there was so much to see that the immediate action carried me along. The beach was much changed in the five weeks since I had last been there. It seemed the whole of the Normandy coast had been chewed over by some monster and then spat out.

The attractive little town of Lisieux was a mass of sandy-coloured rubble. We were returning the invasion that we had had to endure so many hundred years ago from the Normans. Enemy anti-aircraft fire grew in intensity once we were above the valley of the Seine. The air was dense with ugly black smudges. Death might be in any of them. The crew sang ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer’.

Suddenly, the hostile flak intensified before it was expected. We were on the bombing run. The plane shot sideways and upwards. ‘Bombs gone,’ shouted the navigator (a bit late in the day). Everything this crew did was a bit slow in happening. ‘Where’s the bloody box?’ shouted the pilot. ‘Go on, find it for us. Anybody got any suggestions?’ A box, you will remember, was a flight formation of six aircraft. Flying so close together was supposed to give us safety in numbers. It was quite terrifying. One moment we were in a mill of thirty-six aircraft, narrowly missing collisions; now there wasn’t a plane in the sky. What was worse, there wasn’t a cloud either. ‘Don’t know about you fellows, but I’m going home,’ said the pilot. ‘You better hurry up,’ said Mac the navigator, ‘there’s a gun battery loading up down there. Start taking evasive action now.'

Four puffs, well away to the left, seemed less dangerous than the flying bomb in Piccadilly. Fifty seconds later the next round of four shells had cut the difference between us by half. The pilot cursed and waited for the navigator to give him a warning. ‘Off to the right now.’ There seemed nothing in the world except the toiling gunners below and the sweating quintet in the plane above. Now I understood what was meant by ‘ageing in a moment’. Everything seemed to rest on the mysterious symbiosis that linked the warriors on the ground to the lurching, zigzagging men in the air. Would it never stop? Just off to the left the shell bursts were getting closer and made the air tremble. That was the last chance for the German gunners. We were out of their range from then on.

When we got back to Hartford Bridge (we were the last crew in) I got as fierce a drubbing from old Walky T. as if I had been caught climbing back into school. I listened carefully to what was said. A bombing raid was not a joy ride. If we had been hit by that aggressive gun battery, it was unlikely that I, as the unknown factor, would have had the opportunity to try to get out: that would have fallen to the pilot and navigator. They would probably not have made it either. In my year or so of active service I never knew anybody who escaped by parachute from a falling plane. It was better to suppose that you wouldn’t, or not to think about it at all.

The fact that one lone British bomber had lost its way flying over Normandy and was able to get back to base without the appearance of a single Messerschmitt was another symptom of Germany’s loss of grip on the war. Once this begins to happen it is hard to stop.

It would be wrong to suggest that the three Mitchell squadrons covered the range of activities going on at this very large airfield. No doubt there were more totally unwarlike men in raincoats sitting in a corner of the bar than I noticed. They tended to keep themselves to themselves. As one of them said to me, it would be better to know as little as possible. If you were caught you would be bound to be tortured. Better to know the minimum so you couldn’t betray your friends. These men were the exact opposite of the brash Aussies or introspective New Zealanders of 137 Wing. They waited only till the sky was right. That meant a pile of cumulus to dim the light of the moon. Then the clumsy old Lysander aircraft would be wheeled out to the end of the runway. The plane took off in the middle of the night as silently as possible. The two or three crews on this regular dropping run did their job well. One of their passengers even appeared back in his old seat at the end of the bar – for a few days at any rate. The conventions of war made the spy’s lot, even at this gathering place, somehow outside the comradeship that had evolved over the centuries in barracks and parade grounds.

There was another advantage to this rolling heathland. It was quite near London and yet relatively desolate. That brought another distinguished guest to see us in the early autumn. He had with him no petulant team of generals, only a small lapdog, but the guest merited a considerable amount of attention. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands might have passed for a playboy with the amount of care he lavished on his small canine. He demanded that his dog be given the seat next to him at lunch and fed him special titbits. I’m not sure that the dog didn’t accompany the Prince on the mission that had brought him to Hartford Bridge, but he might have found the Spitfire Mark IX noisy and frightening. The Prince was a skilled pilot and had come to see how this new version of our favourite plane was operating. The Mark IX Spitfire could manoeuvre at 39,000 feet, they said, but how adeptly? It was unlikely that the lapdog would help the Prince make up his mind. Before he left, he was fulsome in the plane’s praises. He had that characteristic Dutch mixture of hardheaded realism and a streak of disarming erotic fantasy.

I should know. I was now sharing a cabin with a philosophical Norwegian. He had many of the same fey characteristics that went with the northern temperament. As I may not have explained adequately, the whole of 137 Wing was put under canvas in late April. This was to acclimatise us to work in difficult and alien conditions. It did indeed show that work in such conditions was difficult and alien. The powersthat-be quickly agreed that we needed the best possible conditions when fighting the Germans, so we were moved back into the Nissen huts that the Wing had occupied before its brief experiment into Boy Scoutery. Besides the orderly rows of huts, like lines of metal mushrooms, there were a few of a more substantial nature, usually shared between two or three admin officers. I was put in with Captain Torgelson, late of the Norwegian Flying Corps and now the senior flying control officer on the airfield.

I cannot believe that it was mere coincidence that the oldest and youngest officers were put together. It was the sort of tease that gave Squadron Leader Walkerdene his twinkle. It also gave me an insight into a lifetime of daring and adventure. Captain Torgelson had flown with Nansen in the far north. After the Norwegian resistance crumbled in spring 1940, before the Blitzkrieg, Captain Torgelson went back to his post as headmaster of a senior secondary school in Narvik. He noted that the Germans had left a number of twin-engined sea planes anchored in Narvik harbour. They had sufficient fuel, Captain Torgelson reckoned, to reach the Shetlands. There was no time for checking the engines or studying a map. He had to go or stay. He went, without even saying goodbye to his wife.

With no fuel to spare, he landed on Shetland sands. If I was shocked by his apparent indifference to the fate of his Nordic family, he maintained he was horrified by my lack of sexual experience. Arguments about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were soon bouncing around that sturdy little hut.

This serious Norseman even found me a book in English to read, Human Sexual Energy, by Van Der Velde. It occurs to me now, did he carry this weighty tome with him in his escape from the Germans? It hardly seems likely.

In the meantime, we had a new squadron commander. It was his first flight with us in late July. Bald-headed and sturdily built, he had a navigator who was the exact opposite in build and temperament: lanky, bony and hollow-eyed. He had the Distinguished Service Order and, at the age of twenty-six, had learnt how to handle a tough yet hard-working ground crew almost twice his age. How this team would respond to the wing’s new commanding officer remained to be seen.

Every morning those who could find an excuse to go up to the airfield did so. After all, the airfield was the reason why we were there. It was also the carriageway that brought news from the wider battlefront. This morning there was something extra, something dynamic in the air. I tried to prise information from the excited ground crew. All they could say was that something had happened to our new wing commander. We should soon know; we could hear the vibrant power of the returning squadrons. I put on an extra spurt, running up the last steep slope, and saw the whole plateau bisected by the wide sweep of the runway in front of me.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when our new toy, the squadron Jeep, drew up alongside.

‘Hop in,’ shouted Bob Laurie, looking much less like a careful Scottish Writer to the Signet. ‘They’ve lost an engine.’

Right on cue an amazing spectacle reared up on the opposite side of the airfield. It could have been a crazy artistic vision of Frankenstein, the dying moments of a metal monster. Even as we watched, the whole righthand side of the monster peeled off and went cart-wheeling across the airfield to a scattering of bicycles, airmen, back-up planes and ambulances.

‘He hasn’t got control,’ shouted Bob. ‘Any moment he’s going to blow up!’ As if in answer, the monster ground a supply hut to powdered concrete. A wild figure leapt out of the top hatch to shouts of applause. It was the Wing Commander’s long-limbed navigator, waving his arms and dancing over the tangle of junk which had once been a bomber. He was shouting some long and complex message. What was it? ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen . . .’

The Wing Commander shimmied his considerable bulk through the ruins of the fuselage. We agreed that it was a more decorous way to arrive than coming through the ceiling like the navigator. But what had happened to all that high octane fuel?

‘We dumped it in the North Sea,’ said the navigator. ‘Think I would have danced on top of full tanks?’

After a bitterly contested summer the German discipline began to crack. For a few heady days it seemed the war might end that autumn. But it proved indeed a bridge too far, though all 137 Wing’s resources were marshalled to bomb together – forty-eight Mitchells and thirty Bostons. This was to break up German troop concentrations in the woods south of Caen. Appallingly bad weather held up the Air Force’s chief duties – to act as the spearhead for the Army. The airfield became a monument to lost friends.

Early in October we took over the German airfield of Vitry-en-Artois in northern France. It was better maintained than Hartford Bridge. What struck us all were the pads of matching grey leather above the urinals. Intensive research revealed that these were for the foreheads of the impressive young airmen who would regularly drink themselves insensible. Our French interpreter and guide was surprised that the pragmatic British had not worked out a similar device . . . Thinking it over forced us to admit that our drinking bouts tended to go on haphazardly until a quick dash for the outside door was necessary. Yet there also seemed something unwholesome in such excess as the Germans anticipated.

It all came down to customs that had been established long before the Wright Brothers took off in their skinny little concoctions of wire, string and sails. Only three weeks before, German fighter planes had taken off regularly from the concrete runways. Now it was our turn to savour the amenities.

Now that we were based on French soil, and here to liberate this ancient enemy, 342 Squadron sounded a fresh note of cheerful optimism and comradeship. Moreover, it was clear that the German pilots had done themselves well. An eighteenth-century chateaux was our new headquarters. It seemed the right place and the right time to celebrate the return of the native – a lorryload of champagne, more little tins of caviar than I had believed were still in existence and, of course, an adequate show of beautiful women. It was mid-October and getting a little late to celebrate the victory of the Battle for Normandy in secluded bowers in the frosty garden. Moreover, there was something unbalanced in the revellers. It was not only differences of ages and languages, there was something else. I realised that behind the music in the Glenn Miller style there was a continual droning. It was not in English or French. Could it be? It could. I remembered there was a Scots officer who, in times of stress (like now), resorted to the bagpipes.

I was curious to see who the bagpipes were summoning forth. It wasn’t difficult. Once I was inside the French windows, the corridors acted as resonators. I turned a corner, and it was the close-up of the crew of the disintegrating Mitchell back at Hartford Bridge. But there was a different plot. My arrival was the cue for a rearrangement of the scene. The piper slung his pipes under his arm and went off to deafen another part of the chateau. The navigator piled two chairs on top of each other. The wireless operator took up his position by a small barrel. Beside the bed there was a splendid black-haired temptress. There was something irresistibly comic about the scene: the plump and middleaged Wing Commander, comfortably wrapped in his somewhat tattered silk dressing-gown, dividing his attention between the oysters in their barrels (specially flown up from Whitstable the day before) and the glamorous serving maid. It might have been a scene recorded by Hogarth. The wireless operator dug out an oyster from his small barrel. The navigator cracked open the oyster and sprinkled it with fresh lemon juice. The dark lady took it between her teeth and transferred it to the Wing Commander’s mouth.