By the time spring started giving way to summer, she’d been in the original Eagle Squadron more than a year and a half. That the RAF now held three squadrons full of Yanks said all the publicity the first few American flyers got had done its job. But she didn’t think about publicity much any more. She was just another pilot doing what her superiors ordered and trying to stay alive while she did it.
Then she discovered Hollywood had cranked out an epic called, yes, Eagle Squadron. It starred Robert Stack as the hero, Diana Barrymore as his girl, and, to her dismayed amusement, Evelyn Venable as, well, Amelia Earhart. The guys in 71 Squadron ribbed her unmercifully about that. She took the kidding with as big a smile as she could paste on her face at any given moment.
Flyers from all three Eagle Squadrons were encouraged to attend the English opening in London, and had no trouble getting leave. A.E. wondered how many strings had been pulled, and by whom, to bring that off. If anyone knew, he wasn’t talking.
She went to the theater with her comrades. They had two rows of seats reserved for the Eagles, and people clapped as the American flyers took their places in them. Plenty of the men seemed to take that as their due, which bemused A.E.
When the house lights dimmed, she didn’t know what to expect. What she got was … the kindest thing she could think of was, it was something that could have been better. Quentin Reynolds’s voiceover made her think it would be a documentary, but it wasn’t. It was one more grade-B Hollywood adventure flick.
It did have stretches of newsreel and other genuine war footage mixed in. As far as A.E. was concerned, those were the best parts. The rest …
Robert Stack was untouchable in the air. Diana Barrymore was improbably beautiful and improbably patient. Improbably stupid, too, A.E. thought unkindly. A.E. also noted that Evelyn Venable was at least fifteen years younger than she was. The actress always had perfect makeup when she jumped into a Spitfire (except in the newsreel bits, there were no Hurricanes—with planes as with people, beauty counted). And she shot down more Nazis in the movie than A.E. had in almost two years in the RAF.
Some of the men from the Eagle Squadrons started jeering the picture before it was ten minutes old. They weren’t quiet about it, or polite. Before too much more time had gone by, they started walking out, sometimes singly, sometimes by twos and threes as one would nudge the guy next to him and they’d both leave.
A.E. stuck it out almost to the end. Nigel Bruce was actually pretty good as a senior British officer. She liked him better than Sholto Douglas or Trafford Leigh-Mallory, that was for damn sure. Finally, though, the hoke got too thick for her to take. As she slipped away in the darkness, only a couple of Yanks still sat in the seats they’d been given.
Most of the men were drinking at the Crackers Club, down the street from the movie house. Due to her unfortunate femininity, the doorman didn’t want to let her in at first. He did relent after the other Eagles loudly and profanely vouched for her.
At least half a dozen flyers asked her something like, “How come the gal playing you didn’t look more like you?”
“Ask the people who made the movie,” she would answer, or, “I don’t know,” or finally, when she got good and fed up with the question, “It’s Greek to me.”
It was a late night or an early morning, depending on how you looked at things. Finally, the Americans headed back to their bases, most of them the worse for wear. 71 Squadron had it quiet the next day. That let A.E.’s comrades recover from their binge at leisure.
Before long, she heard the movie producers and other big shots were sore at the Eagles for walking out. They got no sympathy from her; if they’d made a better picture, they might have kept their audience. But word also quickly got back to North Weald that the Yanks in 121 Squadron and 133 Squadron had had to fly the next day no matter how much booze and how little sleep they’d had.
Things didn’t go well for them, either. They were ordered to escort bombers back from an attack on the German airstrips near Abbeville. As it still did every so often, though, the Luftwaffe came up to hit the bombers. The Americans claimed three German planes shot down and one probable. But 131 Squadron had three killed and one hurt, while 121 Squadron lost one pilot and had its English CO badly injured.
A.E. wondered whether the Yanks would have done better if they’d got enough sleep and stayed sober. It wouldn’t have been the first time many of them flew with a bad case of the morning-afters. All the same, she wished the movie were better. They wouldn’t have started drinking so soon then, or drunk so hard. They might not have, anyhow. Water over the dam now.
From early August on, rumors floated through the RAF that something big was in the works. On the nineteenth, 71 Squadron found out what it was; British and Canadian troops would land at Dieppe, halfway down the Channel from Calais toward Le Havre. They wouldn’t stick around, just smash as much as they could and then cross back to England. With luck, they’d learn how strong Hitler’s Atlantic defenses really were.
71 Squadron would fly top cover over the raid, to help keep the Luftwaffe from tearing into the soldiers on the ground in France and the ships that had brought them and would take them home again. The other two Eagle Squadrons would be there, too, but 71 Squadron would be in it at the start.
They moved down to Gravesend so they wouldn’t have to waste fuel flying over England before they got to the Channel. On the morning of the twenty-first, they went to their planes at 0445. The sun had begun to lighten the eastern sky, but wouldn’t climb over the horizon for a while yet.
A.E.’s heart thumped in her chest as the Spitfire’s Merlin growled to twelve-cylinder life. Two years before, she’d fought the Nazis above London. Now England was bringing the war to territory they held. That was progress, if you liked.
It was also likely to be the biggest scrap she’d flown in since the Battle of Britain wound down. All told, forty-eight Spitfire squadrons and eight more with Hurricanes would try to keep the Germans off the men and ships in the raid. That the RAF was throwing in so many planes argued it expected the Luftwaffe would, too.
The sun still hadn’t come up, but Dieppe was already burning by the time A.E. got there. Five more RAF Spitfire squadrons flew with the Eagles in the first wave. She’d hoped she’d be only a spectator. US Army Air Force B-17s were supposed to knock out those enemy air bases around Abbeville, keeping German fighters and bombers from getting airborne.
She’d seen enough by now to know that what was supposed to happen too often didn’t. Cloud cover over northern France was thick, which made good bombing harder—how could you hit what you couldn’t see? And the USA had barely started learning how to fight an air war. It lacked the RAF’s bitterly won experience.
So she wasn’t surprised when Focke-Wulfs came up after the Spitfires. She’d heard all the reports, but this was the first time she’d met the new fighters in the air. They proved at least as nasty as advertised. Spitfires started falling out of the sky, trailing smoke or spinning hopelessly out of control.
Some F-W 190s went down, too, but, she thought, not so many. She got a good shot at one, and raked it with 20mm rounds. Big chunks of aluminum skin flew from the fuselage and one wing. The 190 tumbled earthward on fire.
But another one was on her tail. She took a couple of hits before she could duck into a cloud and lose him. She swung hard left, zooming through the blinding mist. The German pilot, damn him, guessed with her. He opened up as soon as she came into sight again. Back into the mist she fled.
She flew as tight a loop as she could, trusting her artificial horizon to tell her which end was up when she couldn’t do it for herself, and came out almost where she’d gone in. The German wasn’t racing toward her, guns already blazing. She’d outfoxed him this time.
She couldn’t read was what happening on the ground. In the air, chaos and death reigned. She radioed an urgent warning to a pair of Spitfire pilots who didn’t see F-Ws diving on them from behind. One Spit broke left; the other went right. She thought they both got away.
Eyeing her fuel gauge, she realized it was time for her to get away, too. “Returning to base,” she reported, and started north across the Channel. When she brought the plane down at Gravesend, the groundcrew men excitedly asked how things were going. “’Ell of a big dustup, from what the flyers’re saying,” one told her.
“That’s about the size of it,” she agreed.
They gassed up the Spitfire again. Armorers fed in fresh shells for the 20mms and belts of machine-gun rounds. Mechanics made sure the bullets that holed her fighter hadn’t done any serious damage. Satisfied, they declared the Spit ready to fly again.
Only she didn’t. All the Eagles from 71 Squadron came back safely, but they didn’t go back to the mêlée over Dieppe. The RAF fed fresh units into the fight instead. None of the Yanks complained. “If they don’t want me any more today, I won’t cry,” A.E. said that afternoon. “I am plumb satisfied.”
“You can sing that in church!” Bill Geiger exclaimed. “I’m not gonna cry if I never see another 190 in the air again, either, let me tell you.”
“Yeah.” She nodded wearily. The Spitfire V was a fine machine, but with their new plane the Germans had got half a step ahead. Somewhere in England, engineers would be sweating over their slide rules, trying to take back the edge.
Royal Navy ships brought back the Dieppe raiders still alive and able to leave France. England and Germany licked their wounds and drew what lessons they could from the little scrap. Stalin was unimpressed. He went right on yelling for a real second front as the Wehrmacht stormed east through southern Russia toward the oil fields in the Caucasus.
Two or three weeks after it happened, A.E. learned that Flight Lieutenant—Wing Commander now—Walter Churchill got killed in the air over Sicily. He’d made a good squadron CO. She missed him. What she felt, though, was nothing like the devastation losing Shorty or Red or Andy—or Amy!—had caused her. She wondered if she was getting numb even to death.