They flew down to Warmwell, Middle Wallop’s forward air base, the next day. Warmwell lay south and west of Middle Wallop: just inland from the coast, a few miles west of Bournemouth. Middle Wallop was a little English country town. Next to a city like Salisbury, it was nothing much. Next to Warmwell, it could have been London.
A.E. had a tent, and in it she lived distinctly better than the men of the squadron did in their squalid barracks. Plumbing arrangements there left everything to be desired. Instead of using them, the men stepped into the bushes by the path to spend a penny. That was less convenient for her, so she endured the odorous facilities.
The flyers wanted breakfast as soon as it got light. They knew the Germans would be out and about early themselves. Civilian cooks resented getting up at three in the morning to fix bacon and eggs for the men defending the skies. They resented it so much, they flat-out refused to do it.
Left to their own devices, the pilots scorched things on their Primus stoves. Flight Lieutenant Darley quietly asked A.E., “Can you do any better than they are?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, sir. I’m a much better pilot than I am a cook. I’ll eat whatever they make, and I won’t grouse about it.”
Muttering under his breath, the squadron CO slouched off. A.E. let out a silent sigh of relief that he hadn’t chosen to push it. She’d told him a white lie. No one would ever accuse her of being a great cook, but she knew she outclassed her male squadronmates. But she also knew Darley’d only asked her because she was a woman. She was damned if she’d slave at a stove for no better reason than that.
She was flying tail-end Charlie when the squadron went up to protect a convoy moving east through the Channel. And the convoy needed protecting; Luftwaffe bombers, escorted by 109s and 110s, came north from France to harry it.
A 110’s rear gunner opened up on her. She returned fire: eight machine guns hitting back at one. One of the enemy heavy fighter’s engines began to smoke. It pulled away and fled back towards its base. She put more bullets into it, and it spun down, out of control.
Then she was dogfighting with a pair of 109s, and glad to break away when she could. The Germans didn’t fly in rigid vics. They had pairs: a leader and his wingman. Sometimes two of those pairs would fly together to protect each other. That seemed a lot more flexible than the RAF approach.
Before long, the German bomber pilots decided they weren’t going to be able to unload on that convoy after all. They turned around and headed for France again. Their escorts followed. “Let’s go home,” Flight Lieutenant Darley said. A.E. didn’t think she’d ever heard such welcome words in her earphones.
She felt … She didn’t know how she felt. Like a freshly washed dress that had just gone through the wringer—she couldn’t come any closer. She didn’t seem to own any bones. Why she didn’t ooze out of the seat and puddle on the cockpit floor, she couldn’t have said.
She remembered to lower the landing gear before she touched down. After bouncing to a stop, she opened the canopy, undid her harness, and climbed out. The first thing she saw, now that the prop wasn’t spinning any more, was that one blade had a bullet hole. The Spitfire had taken another hit on the left wing, and—she looked back—a couple of more in the fuselage. The Germans had been playing for keeps.
Well, so had she. Her squadron mates came running up, shouting congratulations. “You did for that one bugger—I saw him go in!”
“The way you got clear of those 109s! Like a watermelon seed squirting out between their fingers!”
She hopped down to the ground. Her legs barely held her upright. A couple of men wanted to pound her on the back. She shook them off, stumbled around behind the Spit’s far wheel, bent over, and was noisily sick on the grass. There’d been two young men in that Messerschmitt 110. They’d never see their parents or their wives and children—if they had any—again.
She’d killed them, was what she’d done.
Someone set a hand on her shoulder. She started to twist away. “Hold on,” the squadron CO said. “I did the same thing after I shot down my first Jerry in France. You can rinse your mouth with this, if you care to.” He held out a small, silvered flask, the kind you might have seen at a college football game during Prohibition.
“Thanks,” A.E. managed, and took a swig. She swished it around, then spat. “Shame to do that to such good brandy.”
“Sometimes you need it,” Darley said. “If you want to swallow the next one, that’s all right, too.” She did. The brandy slid down her throat, smooth and fiery at the same time.
“Thanks,” she said again, coughing only a little at the end of the word.
“And if you care to come to the pub tonight and hoist a few, sometimes you need that, too.” Darley’s smile was the more charming for being a bit crooked. “One thing you’ll find in a hurry is that oxygen and raw fear make sovereign hangover cures.”
“I don’t think I want to do that right now, but we’ll see for sure later on,” A.E. replied. He nodded and left it there. Even if he had thought she ought to cook for the squadron along with flying her missions, he made a pretty fair CO.
One day in early September, Shorty and Red got leave to go into London. They’d heard Colonel Sweeny was in town at last. Neither they, Andy, nor A.E. had yet to see a franc, a shilling, or even a good old American nickel for their time in France. Red and Shorty hoped to pry some dough out of him.
A.E. didn’t worry about it so much. She wasn’t rich, but she was a long way from poor. Books and swings on the lecture circuit had let her cash in on her flying fame. Now that she wasn’t married to George Putnam any more, her expenses were down; he’d liked living well. And the post at Purdue she’d left to join the RAF brought in nice, regular paychecks. She hadn’t known those since abandoning social work for flight in 1928.
She understood she was luckier than the young men with whom she’d crossed the Atlantic. They needed anything they could get their hands on, since a pilot officer’s pay was a whopping £16 a month, which came to just over $67. Of course, pilot officers’ privileges also included room, board, and the daily chance to get killed.
And, if you were a Yank in the RAF, they included talking with the press, too. After her first kill, A.E. had given interviews to God only knew how many English reporters. When Edward R. Murrow saw the stories, she’d spoken with him on the radio, shortwave carrying her words across the ocean to the States.
She wasn’t a natural performer, but she’d done enough of it to know how. And she knew every word she said helped bring other American flyers to England to join the fight against the Nazis. Her fame and her sex were part of the reason Colonel Sweeny had been so keen to bring her to Europe to begin with.
Back at Middle Wallop again, the morning was quiet but nervous. The Luftwaffe had started bombing London instead of RAF airfields a couple of days before, and England had replied with a night air raid on Berlin. How Hitler would respond to high explosives raining down on his capital … was why the base was quiet but nervous.
The scramble came a little before 1600. “They’re hitting London with everything they’ve got this time!” Flight Lieutenant Darley called as the pilots ran to their planes.
A.E. knew the RAF had some fancy, supersecret, radio-related way to detect incoming German planes far out of range of eye and ear. She hadn’t asked about the details. Curiosity about such things was not encouraged. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t spill if you got shot down over the Channel or France and the enemy captured you.
She and Andy were going to play tail-end Charlie again. Neither one of them grumbled about it. They were heading into action … and, if they stayed lucky, it wasn’t likely everyone else would. Sooner or later, they’d be veterans with regular slots in a vic, and some fresh-faced kid just out of OTU would weave around behind trying to keep them safe.
Middle Wallop lay seventy-five miles west of London—fifteen minutes in a Spitfire. Long before she got there, A.E. saw pillars of smoke rising from the greatest city in the world. Somewhere over there, Shorty and Red were having their palaver with Charles Sweeny. She hoped they’d be all right. After a moment, she hoped Sweeny would, too.
As she drew closer, she saw the sky over London filled with planes: bombers, some still in formation, others scattered, dropping their cargo of death; and fighters both German and British darting this way and that, some attacking the bombers, others trying to hold the attackers at bay. Every antiaircraft gun for miles around was firing for all it was worth. Puffs of black smoke with flame at their heart punctuated the chaos.
When an antiaircraft shell burst near her plane, the Spitfire bounced in the air like a car with bad shocks hitting a pothole. She hadn’t thought her own side might shoot her down by mistake. She shrugged. She couldn’t do anything about it if they did.
As soon as the bombers unloaded, they ran for France as fast as they could go. That often wasn’t fast enough. RAF doctrine was for Spitfires to engage the Luftwaffe escorts while Hurricanes went after the bombers. Hurricanes weren’t quite up to matching 109s: not hopeless against them, but at a disadvantage.
A.E. quickly found doctrine flew out the window when you were up there trying to stay alive. She fired a short burst at a Do 17. The Flying Pencil kept flying, so either she missed or the Dornier was good at soaking up damage.
Then tracers flew past her own plane. She swung the stick as hard to the left as she could. G-forces almost made her gray out for a moment. Unwisely, the German on her tail tried to turn with her. A 109 might outclimb or outdive a Spit, but the British fighter turned more tightly. All of a sudden, she was on the Jerry’s tail, not the other way around.
She thumbed the red firing button. From this range, she could hardly miss—and she didn’t. Chunks of aluminum skin flew off the 109. Belching first smoke and then fire, it went into a long, spinning dive. She didn’t see the pilot hit the silk.
When her fuel ran low, she headed back to Middle Wallop. “Gas me up quick as you can and give me more ammo,” she told the groundcrew men who ran over to her plane. “I’ve got to head back. They’re still giving London hell.”
“How’d you do this time, ma’am?” a corporal asked.
“Got one—a 109,” she said.
“Good on you!” he said. One of his crewmates gave her a thumbs-up. Grinning, she returned it.
She closed the cockpit, fired up the Spit’s Merlin, and bounced along the airstrip till she got airborne. As she pulled back the stick to gain altitude, she realized that what some of the older hands had said after her first victory was true.
The second time you killed somebody, you didn’t feel a thing.