409 Squadron’s death toll was typical. During the summer and autumn of 1940, more aircrew were killed in Bomber Command than in Fighter Command. But it was Fighter Command that gripped the attention of the British people, because summer 1940 was the time of the Battle of Britain. When it came to newspaper space, Hampdens bombing Germany could not compete with Spitfires and Hurricanes clashing with the Luftwaffe over England.
At the height of the Battle of Britain, a bus came down from London to RAF Bodkin Hazel, a fighter aerodrome in Kent.
The bus brought Air Vice-Marshal Thurgood and an aide, Squadron Leader Perry, plus foreign correspondents from the United States, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain. They were there because, increasingly, foreign newspapers and magazines were skeptical of British claims that Fighter Command was defeating the Luftwaffe. Some said that Air Ministry press releases were pure propaganda, written to boost morale, not to be taken seriously, especially when it came to claims of enemy aircraft destroyed.
Well, Bodkin Hazel was at the sharpest end of the fighting, and Thurgood introduced the journalists to squadron and flight commanders. Fortunately, there was a scramble to intercept raiders and the visitors saw a mass takeoff. Not all the fighters returned. “They probably landed elsewhere to refuel,” Thurgood said. “Happens all the time.”
When he had debriefed the pilots, the Intelligence Officer joined the journalists. Flight Lieutenant Skelton was in his thirties, tall, with a beaky nose supporting horn-rim glasses. His forehead was domed, his cheekbones were wide, his jaws narrow. His nickname was Skull. “Any luck?” someone asked.
“One Heinkel 111 definitely destroyed,” Skelton said. “One possible.”
The journalists made notes, but they were disappointed. Twelve Hurricanes took off. All they got was one lousy Heinkel.
“To reach the bombers, our chaps often have to smash through the German fighter screen,” Thurgood pointed out.
“Any losses?” an American asked.
“One Hurricane,” Skelton said. “The pilot baled out.”
“Even Steven, then.”
For a final question-and-answer session, the correspondents assembled in a lecture room. Thurgood brought Skelton along for good measure.
Everyone had been impressed by what they saw; nevertheless, their questions were still very pointed. What Was the proof that the Air Ministry’s scores were right? If so many German planes had been shot down, where were all the wrecks? According to the RAF, most of the Luftwaffe had been destroyed, but the raids seemed to be getting bigger, didn’t they? Thurgood did his best but the longer it went on the more his answers sounded like excuses, which annoyed him. He resented having to deny allegations of false accounting at a time when the very survival of his country was under threat from a foreign dictator who had made a trade of dishonesty.
The meeting dragged to an end. He knew he had not convinced them. The room emptied until only a couple of the correspondents remained, asking the same old questions in different words. Thurgood forced a smile. “If you think so little of our claims,” he said, “why not go to Berlin and check theirs? The Lufwaffe’s scores are absolutely preposterous!”
One of the journalists looked at Skelton. “D’you have an opinion?” he asked.
“Undoubtedly the Luftwaffe’s claims are inflated,” Skelton said. “It’s a natural phenomenon. High-speed combat invariably has that effect. Airmen are not ideal witnesses. Risk creates optimism, and optimism creates—”
“Wait outside, Skelton,” Thurgood said stonily. When the journalists had gone, he recalled Skelton and blasted him for his interfering stupidity. The Intelligence Officer was unmoved. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, sir,” he said. “But what the Luftwaffe claims is beside the point. Proving them wrong doesn’t prove us right. If we believe our own lies we merely deceive ourselves and, by so doing, we aid the enemy. Surely that’s self-evident.”
“Don’t preach to me, flight lieutenant.”
Skull twitched his nose and made his spectacles bounce. “Preaching assumes moral alternatives, sir. War allows us no such choice. We cannot award a fighter pilot his kill just because we feel he deserves it. The truth—”
“Get out.” Thurgood sounded sick, and looked even sicker. Skelton hesitated. The air vice-marshal grabbed the nearest weapon and hurled it at Skelton’s head. It was a half-pint bottle of ink, government issue, short and chunky, and it should have cracked his skull. It missed by an inch and smashed a framed portrait of the King in RAF uniform. Ink drenched the wall. Squadron Leader Perry seized Skelton and hustled him out and kicked the door shut behind them. “You maniac,” he said. “Bugger off and hide! Understand? Hide.”
Skelton could not move. “Luther,” he said. “Martin Luther chucked his ink-horn at the devil and missed.” He saw the look in Perry’s eyes and he turned and trotted off.
Next day the air vice-marshal picked up the telephone and had an amiable chat with an old friend in Air Ministry.
“Chap doesn’t strike me as Fighter Command material,” Thurgood said. “Too long-winded. Beats about the bush. Full of waffle.”
Skelton was posted as an instructor in Intelligence to a Flying Training School in Aberdeenshire. It was called RAF Feck. “What’s it near?” the adjutant asked him.
“Absolutely nothing.” Skelton was examining a map. “Unless you count a village called Nether Feck.”
“Come on, Skull. It’s got to be near somewhere exciting.”
“Germany seems closest.”
The adjutant came over and looked. “Mmm,” he said. “Slightly off the beaten track.”
“It’s Siberia, Uncle. I’ll die up there.”
“Nonsense. The Scots are great fun. You wait and see.”
Skull went off to pack. The adjutant telephoned his opposite number at Feck, supposedly to confirm Skull’s posting but actually to find out something about the place. “What can I tell you?” the other man said. “Nine months of fog and three months of snow. That’s Feck.”
“Doesn’t sound very thrilling.”
“We make our own entertainment. Ping-pong and funerals, mainly.”
RAF Feck trained pilots to fly twin-engined aircraft. Mostly these were Blenheims.
In the fighting over France, Blenheims got shot down by the score. Clearly, something better was needed. Large numbers of Blenheims were made available for training units. This was just as well. At Feck, a day without a crash was cause for mild surprise.
At first, the scale of these losses shocked Skull. After a while he got to know a senior instructor, and he asked what caused them.
“Usually we never know,” the man said. He looked tired. “I have a few theories. For instance, power is intoxicating. We give these boys an airplane. Last year they were riding a bike. Now they’ve got fifteen hundred horsepower at their fingertips. They go solo, they can’t resist flying too fast or too low, or banking too hard. Power seduces them, you see. But one tiny mistake gets magnified by all that power. It only takes a second to lose control.”
“Can’t you weed out the dare-devil types?” Skull asked.
“All pilots have a streak of dare-devil. Otherwise they wouldn’t be pilots, would they?”
Skull remembered the sober and experienced pilots he had known who had chosen to fly underneath bridges for no sane reason that anyone could identify. Some had died. “It seems such an idiotic waste,” he said.
“Well, there are other reasons for crashes,” the senior instructor said. “Some pilots lack faith. They don’t trust their instruments. They fly by the seat of their pants, and the physical sensations they feel, or think they feel, tell them they’re climbing when the instruments show they’re diving. Or they’re convinced the airplane is turning when the instruments show otherwise. And so they kill themselves.”
Skull was beginning to be sorry he’d asked.
“Flying is a very unnatural affair,” the senior instructor said.
Skull could not blot out the dull thump of a distant explosion, the klaxon summoning the crash crew, the hammering bell of the blood wagon; but he did his best to ignore them. They weren’t his business. His business was in the lecture room, explaining the why and how of Intelligence. The trainees were not especially interested. They were eager to fly, to qualify, to get to an operational squadron before something went horribly wrong and the war ended. So he lectured them as he used to do at Cambridge, speaking to a crowd of bored undergraduates who were as relieved as he was when they were free to go off and play games.
In his spare time he went bird-watching, as far as possible from Feck. He took his leave allowance one day at a time, drove to St. Andrews, browsed the university library and indulged in an orgy of reading. When spring came, he went into the hills and did some trout fishing. It was an odd life. The newspapers told him about the Blitz. Heavy bombing had reached as far north as Glasgow. But Skull’s war was confined to RAF Feck, and there seemed no reason why Air Ministry should find a need for his services anywhere else; until one day a signal curtly ordered him to proceed to London. No explanation.
“They’ve bombed the Sheldrake,” Champion said. “The bastards.” For a moment the shock left him breathless.
“I’m surprised that you’re surprised,” Skelton said. “The rest of London’s been blitzed. Why not your club?”
Champion recovered and strode forward. ARP barriers shut off Pall Mall but his wing commander’s rings got him through. Skelton, only a flight lieutenant, followed.
“Just look,” Champion said. “Some idiot Kraut pilot hasn’t the wit to find the docks, so he drops his stupid bomb on the Sheldrake. I mean, just look. I’m on the wine committee.”
“Past tense, surely.”
“Bastards. Absolute bastards.”
A man approached them, an elderly man made to seem older by a covering of dust and a smear of dried blood on his temple. He had a soldierly bearing. “Mr. Champion, sir,” he said.
“Good Lord, it’s Tizard. Are you hurt, man?” To Skelton he said: “One of the club servants … This is a sad sight, Tizard.”
“Indeed it is, sir. But we’ve saved the club silver. And two can play at this game, sir. I served in the last show, and take it from me, sir, the Huns haven’t got our backbone. You know me, sir, I’m not a vindictive man, but I hope the RAF blows Berlin to smithereens.”
Champion patted his shoulder. “Good man, Tizzard … Well, we shan’t get any lunch here, shall we?”
“The Army and Navy Club has offered our members its hospitality during the emergency, sir.”
They walked to the Army and Navy.
It was springtime, but the air smelled of bonfires: city bonfires, stinking not of dead leaves but of charred linoleum and half-burned mattresses, tinged with the harsh aroma of dead fireworks. It was eight months since the Blitz had first introduced Londoners to this smell. Now they scarcely noticed it.
The two officers said little until they sat down to lunch.
Ten years before, Champion had been an undergraduate at Cambridge and Skelton had been his tutor. They had disliked each other. Skelton was a youngish history don; his special interest was Tudor Puritan sects. Champion did not take the Puritans seriously. He was not stupid but he was lazy. Sometimes his essays manipulated facts in order to suit his views. Skelton found that intolerable. What made it worse was Champion’s bland indifference when he got found out. “If you were an accountant,” Skelton told him, “you’d be in prison.”
“Quite a few Puritans went to jail.”
“For their beliefs. You distort those beliefs.”
“If they were alive, they might find I’d improved them.”
“And if you want to write fiction, then change your degree. Read English.”
Champion wrinkled his nose. “They’re all pansies. They all wear mauve socks.”
“So do I, occasionally. Write me an essay on the effects of bigotry on Tudor clothing. You’ll find it quite startling.”
Champion found it damn dull. Skelton amused him: he was too donnish to be true, under thirty yet already developing a scholarly stoop. He wore tweeds as faded and shapeless as a poor watercolor. During tutorials he propped his head on his hand. He had a lank mustache. His glasses were horn-rimmed and heavy. Skelton was practicing to be an old man, thirty years ahead of his time.
Champion thought this a waste of life. He knew what he liked about Cambridge: rowing in the college eight, drinking beer in pubs, and flying Gloster Gamecocks with the University Air Squadron at weekends. Reading history was just a way of enjoying three good years. He got a middling degree, went down, and never came back. There were many like him, all easily forgettable, and Skelton forgot them.
Some years later, Skelton had a short and shattering love affair. He thought of quitting the university, the country, perhaps the world. His load of yearning and contempt and rage was so great that it left him weary and helpless. Not knowing why, he did something absurd: he enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve. With his feeble eyes they’d never let him fly, so it was all pointless. The RAF welcomed him and gave him a uniform. At weekends and at summer camps it trained him to be an Intelligence Officer. He shaved off his mustache, stood up straight, and looked ten years younger. To his surprise, Intelligence was as interesting as history and airmen were more entertaining than dons. Eventually he learned to salute without embarrassment. He even forgot the bloody woman, sometimes for weeks at a time.
When war broke out he was called up at once. He served with a fighter squadron until he got banished to RAF Feck. The signal from Air Ministry that ordered him to proceed to London told him to report to Wing Commander R.G.T. Champion.
He was on the train, doing the Times crossword, when the faded memory of a mediocre undergraduate drifted into his mind. Surely it couldn’t be that R.G.T. Champion? A wing commander? But it was.
Soup was followed by whitebait, with a deliciously crisp white Bordeaux.
“I assume you’re paying for this,” Skelton said. “That bottle alone would take my pay for a week.”
“Lunch is taken care of, old chap. Tell me: what do you know about Bomber Command?”
Skelton looked hard at Champion. “You know I know damn all about Bomber Command. If you wish to tell me something, I suggest you do so without preamble.”
Champion ate some brown bread. “You haven’t changed, have you? I remember how you always crossed out the first paragraph of my essays.”
“With good reason. You were clearing your throat, arranging your thoughts, such as they were. What are your thoughts?”
“I think you’re wasted up at RAF Feck. This is a bomber war, and it’s going to be huge. We’re the only fighting force that’s hitting the enemy where it hurts, which is in his homeland. The army can’t, neither can the navy. Bomber Command is unique. So we need the best brains. We’re developing very big, very powerful aircraft, hell of a bomb-load, colossal range, phenomenal accuracy …”
Champion spoke enthusiastically, while Skelton finished his fish and enjoyed more wine.
“That’s what’s going to settle Jerry’s hash,” Champion said. “We’ve got the winning hand. If you get on the bandwagon now, the sky’s the limit, believe me.”
“Bandwagons don’t fly. Muddled speech reflects muddled thought.”
“Listen: bolt a couple of Rolls-Royce Merlins onto a bandwagon and it’ll fly like a bird. Or a Wellington. Which is now the best bomber operated by any air force anywhere. Ever been inside a Wimpy?” Skelton shook his head. “Now’s your chance,” Champion said. “409 Squadron recently switched from Hampdens to Wellingtons. They need an extra Intelligence Officer. They’re at RAF Coney Garth, in Suffolk. Not far from Cambridge, actually.”
“Why are you persuading me? Why not just post me there, and have done with it?”
They paused while game pie was served and Champion tasted a Côtes du Rhone and gave his approval. “If we drink enough,” he told Skelton, “we might be able to digest the inscrutable contents of this pie … Now then. This is a special job. 409 is a pukka squadron. Their kites are standard Wimpys, they fly the usual pattern of ops. But they have the best bombing record in the Command.”
“Somebody must be top. Maybe 409 are lucky.”
“Forget luck. The figures prove—”
“Oh, figures.” Skelton polished his glasses and squinted at Champion. “The numbers game. Are these the same figures that proved Fighter Command destroyed the Luftwaffe twice over, last year?”
Champion sighed. He put down his knife and fork. Speaking softly, he said: “I have access to intelligence summaries at the very highest level. Allow me to assure you that 409 Squadron are supremely good at their job.”
“Splendid. I’m not supremely good at mine. You wouldn’t want me to lower their standard.”
“We want you to find out how they do it, what makes them different. Pin-point the special qualities of 409 and maybe we can bring all the other squadrons up to their standard.”
“Ah! Now I understand.” Skelton pushed his plate aside. “C-in-C Bomber Command wants to be able to say that all his squadrons are above average.”
Champion smiled happily. “I knew I was right. Your mind works differently. You’ll see things with the clear eye of an outsider, things that everyone else takes for granted.”
Skelton grunted. “And what do I do with these startling insights?”
“Bring them to me when you’re ready.”
Skelton suddenly grew tired of the whole discussion. “Those people over there are eating treacle tart,” he said. “Get me a large portion, with cream, and I’ll go anywhere you like. But I think you’re making a mistake.”
They took coffee in the smoking room. “Why aren’t you flying?” Skelton asked. “You’re still young enough.”
“One prang too many. Some of our pre-war bombers were frankly ropey.” He tapped his head with a teaspoon. “The quacks grounded me.”
“Rotten luck.”
“One door closes, another opens.”
They went into Piccadilly. The sky was a fragile blue. The barrage balloons flying from Hyde Park scarcely moved in the breeze.
“It looks like another blitzy night,” Skelton said. “Will Jerry be back, d’you think?”
“Yes. And no doubt Jerry is asking himself the same question about our chaps. Would you like to know the answer?”
“Please.”
“The answer,” Champion said, “will be thunderous.” He smiled like a vicar announcing the next hymn on Mothering Sunday.
Skull drove into RAF Coney Garth at four p.m., in the middle of a fair-sized flap.
Aircraft were droning around the circuit. Vans and trucks were shuttling from hangars and workshops to Wellingtons parked at the perimeter. The Tannoy was chanting a string of messages. Skull had had an apple for lunch; he was looking forward to tea and toast in the Mess. Obviously that could wait. An airman showed him where the Ops Room was. Two armed Service Policemen guarded it. They admitted Skull only when 409’s Senior Intelligence Officer came to the door and told them to.
He was a Squadron Leader with a shiny head, thick mustache and busy eyes made bigger and busier by powerful spectacles. “Bloody glad to see you,” he said, almost accusingly. “I’ve lost a pilot officer and a Waaf sergeant, one posted, one gone down with flu, so that leaves me and Corporal Hawkins, and Group has changed the target twice since noon. What? Anyway, I’ve got everything sorted out now. Can you take over here? I haven’t eaten since breakfast. What’s your name?”
“Skelton.”
“Of course. You’re Skull. I’m called Bins. Right, I’m off.” He got into his tunic; Skull saw an Observer’s half-wing, much faded. “Final briefing, seventeen hundred hours.” The door banged behind him.
Skull, thought Skull. How did he know about Skull? One of the mysteries of RAF life was the way nicknames went ahead of a posting. “What’s the target?” he asked.
“Mannheim, sir,” Corporal Hawkins said.
Everywhere Skull looked there were telephones. Some were labeled with initials that meant nothing to him. “You’d better start explaining—” he began, when a phone rang. Hawkins answered it. Mannheim, Skull thought. Where the devil is Mannheim? A map of Germany covered half a wall and he began searching. Another phone rang. The Sergeants’ Mess wanted to know when the aircrew sandwiches should be ready. Skull said Corporal Hawkins would call them back. He fended off the next two calls in the same way and then got a brisk Scotsman on the red phone. Instinctively, Skull knew it would be a mistake to offer him a corporal; on the other hand the man spoke too fast and used strange words. “Say again, please,” Skull said. “This is an awfully bad line. I missed half of that. Who are you?”
“NLO.”
“Still not good. Perhaps if—”
“NLO. Naval Liaison Officer, for Christ’s sake. Can you hear me now? Can you write? Then write this: convoy three seven green new position …” Skull wrote hard.
Phones kept ringing. When Bins returned, Skull had a small stack of messages to give him. “Anything crucial here?” Bins asked. Skull thought. “Um…” he said. He couldn’t remember what half the messages were about. Bins turned to Corporal Hawkins. “Got the target file? Good. Let’s go.”
The squadron was sending six Wellingtons to Mannheim; there were thirty-six aircrew in the Briefing Room. Skull listened carefully to the squadron commander’s description of the target, what it manufactured, and precisely where, and just how it helped the German war effort. Other officers took over. A stream of information came thick and fast—petrol load, bombload, takeoff time, diversion airfields, signal codes, recognition signals, alternative targets—until Skull let it wash over him. He looked at the crews. He had expected them to be older than fighter pilots; instead they seemed younger. Many gunners and wireless ops were twenty at most; probably only eighteen or nineteen. He saw pilots with schoolboy faces. He glanced back at the squadron commander: awfully young to be a Wingco. Three rings on his sleeve went halfway to his elbow. Skull felt curiously remote from this scene. He was nearly forty: a very old man to the crews. They laughed at something Bins was saying about searchlight concentrations. Skull missed the joke but he smiled anyway.
“Any questions?” Bins said.
“Who else is on this raid?” someone asked.
“Only Wellingtons. Thirty-odd kites. If you see something over Germany that’s not a Wimpy, shoot it down.”
“What about convoys? Can we shoot at them?” a pilot asked. There was groaning and whistling.
“Only one convoy,” Bins said. “Northbound off Cromer, so it should be well away from you. Anything else? No? Then it’s weather time.” He handed his pointer to the Met man.
“Thank you. The predicted winds,” the Met man began, and paused.
“Are wrong,” the crews all said, and laughed. He smiled sadly and waited for their chatter to fade.
“Old squadron tradition,” Bins murmured to Skull. “Brings them luck.”
“About convoys,” Skull said softly. “There may be more up-to-date gen in one of those messages I gave you.”
“Nothing crucial, you said.” Bins was searching the notes. “God damn it all to hell. A new convoy. Bloody damn and buggery.”
“Surely it’s not too late—”
“Not the point. Corrections are bad form. The chaps don’t like them.”
“Oh dear.”
“You’ve put up a black, old boy.”
When the Met man finished, Bins announced new convoy information: on the outward flight it would be northward, off The Maze; returning, northward off Thorpeness. “Avoid it,” he said. Nobody laughed at that. “A final reminder: beware of intruders. The Hun likes to prowl around East Anglia. You’re never home until you’re home.”
A voice at the back said, “Pity the bloody convoys can’t shoot down the bloody intruders.” That won a rumble of approval.
Briefing ended. A group captain wished them luck. The crews stood up and waited while the briefing officers left.
Outside, the Wingco paused to look at the sky. Two layers of broken cloud, at greatly different heights, were moving in slightly different directions. “A spot of fog early on, to keep the intruders away,” he said, “then clearing in time to let our chaps get down. That would suit me nicely.”
“Alas, fog is not normally so obliging,” the Met man said.
“It’s been some time since an intruder got a kite, sir,” Bins said.
“Is it? I’m not so sure. If we find a German cannon-shell in a wreck, does that mean the Wimpy got hit over Germany, staggered home and fell to bits in the air? Or did an intruder clobber it over King’s Lynn just as the crew relaxed?” Nobody had an answer. “Jerry’s bloody cunning. I wish I knew what his tactics are.”
“We use intruders, too, sir,” Skull said.
The Wingco’s head rotated like a hawk locating a sparrow. “What’s that got to do with the price of apples?”
“If our intruders are successful over France, sir, perhaps we should ask them to tell us their tactics.”
The Wingco grunted. He pointed to the Operations Officer, who had kept himself in the background, “Some fool has parked a Lagonda in my space outside the Mess. Tell the adjutant, would you?” He strode away.
The Ops Officer said softly, “Nobody on the squadron owns a Lagonda.”
“I do,” Skull said.
“Well, you’ve just put up a black. Move the bloody thing, fast.” He hurried after the Wingco.
“How was I to know?” Skull asked.
“Well, you know now,” the Met man said.
“A Lagonda,” Bins said. “That’s a bit rich, for a flight lieutenant.”
“My aunt gave it to me. She can’t get the petrol, Lagondas being large and thirsty.”
“Pug Duff drives an MG,” the Met man said. “Not large. Quite small, in fact. Like him. Lots of zip. Also like him. I’d say you’ve put up a considerable black.”
“Nothing new,” Skull said. “When’s dinner?”
By sunset, the sky had cleared, with just a few faint scribbles of yellow cloud at great height. The air was mild. A breeze barely ruffled the grass. Skull and the Ops Officer stood outside the Operations Block and watched time pass.
The Ops Officer’s name was Bellamy. He stood as if he were at ease on a parade ground: shoulders squared, hands linked behind his back, feet at ten-to-two, calves braced. He was a squadron leader with a pilot’s wings, and he was twenty-six. Bellamy had been in the RAF since he was sixteen, and he would have felt uncomfortable standing in any other way. He was lean and spruce, and he always looked alert.
“Curious, sir, isn’t it?” Skull said. Unlike Bellamy, he was slightly round-shouldered, and he wore his uniform as if he were looking after it for a friend. “Here we are, doing this, and they’re over there, doing exactly the same. Wouldn’t it be odd if one day both sets of bombers met in the middle?”
“Highly unlikely,” Bellamy said. “They usually cross the Channel from bases in France, Belgium maybe. We nearly always go out over the North Sea.” He stopped. What he had said sounded like an arrangement, even an agreement. “Not on the cards.” End of discussion.
Airmen were lighting a row of gooseneck flares, which dimly outlined the flare-path. “We’d better stooge over to the caravan,” Bellamy said. They walked to his car. “Have you a nickname?” he asked. “Intelligence Officers usually do.”
“I’m Skull, sir. Short for Skelton.”
“Drop the ‘sir,’ Skull. Save it for formal occasions.”
They set off. “Have you a nickname?” Skull asked.
“It used to be Butcha, because I looked so young. Butcha is Hindustani for boy.” Bellamy did not smile; he rarely smiled unless he thought smiling would improve morale. “Complete change of cast since then,” he said. “Nobody remembers that stuff.”
The caravan was really a four-wheeled trailer, painted a bold checker-board all over, parked near the takeoff end of the flare-path. A Perspex dome, big enough for a man’s head, was fitted to the top.
Around the perimeter, Wellingtons were starting up and pilots began testing their engines. Each roar grew and grew until it had the harshness of a challenge. As it fell away, another challenge took over.
Two airmen stood up when the officers climbed into the caravan. One man was in charge of an array of radio equipment; the other was wearing earphones. “Anything yet?” Bellamy asked him.
“R-Robert’s got trouble with the oxygen, sir,” the man said. “They’re changing some bottles.”
“Thank you.” Bellamy took the headset and stepped onto a wooden box. Now his head was in the dome. “Give Flight Lieutenant Skelton a set, please. I want him to hear this.”
At first Skull heard nothing but the slush of atmospherics. The radio operator gave him a chair and poured him some coffee. Then a voice said: “E-Easy to Sandstorm.”
“Sandstorm receiving you, E-Easy,” Bellamy said.
“E-Easy, request permission to taxi.”
“You may taxi, E-Easy.”
After that a steady stream of requests came from other captains: J-Jig, F-Fox, B-Baker, M-Mother, R-Robert. Then the first Wellington asked clearance for takeoff. “You are clear for takeoff, E-Easy,” Bellamy said. His head slowly swiveled as he followed the bomber. Skull freed one ear to listen to the charging bellow.
“E-Easy airborne at nineteen oh five,” Bellamy said. The airman wrote it down. There was a long pause while Bellamy watched the navigation lights get smaller and higher, before he gave the next Wellington clearance. Nobody seemed in a great hurry. It took twenty minutes to get the flight away. “Thank you,” Bellamy said as he returned the headset. “Jolly good coffee,” Skull told the radio operator.
They drove back to the operations block. “So what happens now?” Skull asked.
“Oh, the usual. Dinner in the Mess. I believe there’s a good film at the station cinema. Charles Laughton.”
“I meant the raid. I was surprised we didn’t wait to see them in formation.”
“Not a hope. The chaps tried night-flying in formation last year. Wellingtons collided with tedious regularity. Awfully dark up there.”
“So each bomber makes its own way to the target. And then bombs individually?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that multiply the risk of error?”
“Quite the reverse. It multiplies the chance of success. Fly as a group, and if your Master Navigator goes wrong, everyone goes wrong.” Bellamy spoke crisply. He did everything crisply; he believed it was crucial that everyone understood exactly what to do, or men died unnecessarily. “This isn’t like Fighter Command,” he said. “This isn’t smash-and-grab in the sky and then home to pick up your popsy. Bomber Command is in the long-distance business of delivering high explosive by the ton, to the door. We think about it very carefully.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Have you met the station commander? Group Captain Rafferty. Grand chap, fine leader. Come on.”
They went in. Rafferty was standing in the middle of the Ops Room, whirling a black telephone by its flex. Three Waafs, seated at desks, watched him. “Ask me what I’m doing,” he said to Bellamy.
“Yes, sir. What—”
“I’m trying to strangle this raving fool on the other end.” Rafferty caught the phone and shouted into it: “Listen! I don’t want your excuses and I don’t need your apologies! Simply tell the airman who endangered R-Robert that if he ever installs a faulty oxygen bottle again I shall personally …” He jammed his shoulder against the phone and put his hands over the ears of the nearest Waaf. “I shall personally seek him out and ram it up his ass.” He removed his hands and hung up the phone. “You didn’t hear that, did you?” he asked a different Waaf.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you didn’t understand it, did you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Disgraceful. Who’s this?”
“Flight Lieutenant Skelton,” Bellamy said. “New Intelligence Officer.” Skull saluted.
“Ah-ha.” Rafferty perched his backside against a table-map that half-filled the room. “Oh-ho. Mr. Skelton.” He put his head back and stared down his nose. “Did D-Dog get away on time?”
“It did,” Bellamy said.
“I hear you escaped from Fighter Command, Mr. Skelton.”
“I was expelled, sir.”
“I thought as much. Air Ministry recommended you very strongly. Always a bad sign. What did you do?”
“I raped an air vice-marshal,” Skull said.
Bellamy’s teeth clenched but the Waafs didn’t even blink. Neither did Rafferty. “What with?” he asked.
“The truth, sir.”
“I bet that hurt. Well, this is a different world. Many years ago, people asked me to fly fighters, do all that tomfoolery at air shows—formation aerobatics, wingtips tied together with ribbon. Make the crowd go Ooh-ah. I chose bombers. Never regretted it. A chap can have a real career in Bomber Command. Bombing is what airplanes are for. The rest is frills.”
“I quite agree, sir,” Skull said. “The trouble with Fighter Command is it’s all smash-and-grab in the sky and then home to pick up your popsy.”
“Huh.” Rafferty stared at Skull, stared so hard that Bellamy chewed his lower lip and hurt himself. “Huh,” Rafferty said again. “Well, I’ll be in the Mess.” He went out.
“I’ll show you where we do the interrogations,” Bellamy said.
They went through a corridor to an adjacent hut. Long trestle tables, many wooden chairs, Air Ministry posters defaced by aircrew impatient to tell their story and go for their bacon and egg. Bellamy kicked a chair aside. “You just put up a black,” he said. “The groupie won’t forgive you in a hurry.”
“For what?”
“Smash-and-grab in the sky. Home to pick up your popsy. That’s his line. Bad enough that you stole it, but you threw it in his face! Poor show, old chap. Very big black.”
“If I stole it, you stole it first.” Skull couldn’t take this seriously.
“Not where he could hear me, for God’s sake.” Bellamy rapped his knuckles on the table.
“Well, he should be flattered.”
“Listen: these things matter. Rafferty doesn’t like Intelligence Officers. He thinks they get in the way. Frankly, I agree. A man who hasn’t flown has no right to question aircrew.”
“I’ve flown. Went to Le Touquet in September 1939, in a Bombay troop-carrier. I was sick.”
“Take my advice: don’t mention it here,” Bellamy said grimly. “It won’t improve your credit.”
“What will?”
Bellamy wanted his dinner. “Fly on ops and get shot down in flames,” he said. “The chaps will respect you for that.” He left. Skull hurried after him, and just got a lift to the Mess.
Despite changing some bottles, R-Robert still had oxygen trouble. Only the navigator was affected, but that was more than enough to worry the whole crew. If the navigator couldn’t think straight, they might end up anywhere. France. Poland. The Alps.
The first hour was simple. They crossed the North Sea at five thousand because there was cloud at six thousand and the pilot wanted to get a good pin-point fix on the Dutch coast.
The fix was positive: Walcheren, on the point of the Zeeland peninsula. It placed them twenty miles east of track: twenty miles off course. That might mean several things. Maybe the predicted winds had changed. Maybe a weather front was late. Or early. Maybe the navigator’s threes looked like his eights.
Or maybe the compass wasn’t feeling very well.
The pilot was Gilchrist, the ex-actor. It was a long time since he had put Rafferty straight about Shakespeare. Now he was a veteran, on his twenty-sixth op. Soon colored beads of flak began reaching for the Wellington. The pilot climbed into cloud and out of it, and kept climbing to fourteen thousand feet, by which time everyone was breathing oxygen.
Twenty minutes later the wireless op spoke on the intercom. “Something’s wrong with the nav, skipper.”
“See what it is,” Gilchrist told the second pilot.
He went back and found the navigator lying beside his chair, with the wireless op kneeling beside him, fixing his oxygen tube to a fresh bottle, turning the supply up to maximum. No effect. The second pilot squeezed the tube and found a blockage: ice crystals. He crushed them, and within seconds the navigator stirred. They got him back on his seat. They had to hold him: he was as limp as a pillow. He stared at the chart on his table. The course he had been plotting became a wobbly line that trailed to the edge and fell off.
Gilchrist went down to eight thousand, where they could all breathe normally. The navigator drank some coffee.
“How d’you feel?” the second pilot asked.
“Better.” There was dried blood on his face. He must have banged his head when he blacked out.
“Can you take a star shot?” Gilchrist asked.
“I can try.”
“Flak behind, skip,” the rear gunner said.
“Thank you. And searchlights ahead.” A small forest of lights had sprung up, restlessly slicing the night. “No loitering here, I think.” He banked the bomber through a quarter-circle and climbed away. In five minutes they were all back on oxygen.
“New course, skip,” the navigator said. “Steer one seven five degrees.”
“One seven five. How far to target?”
“Couple of hundred miles. I’m working on it.”
“Good show. Everybody else, watch out for fixes.”
But the German blackout was total. The navigator went to the astrodome and tried to take star shots. He took so long that Gilchrist told him to forget it. “Damn stars keep jumping about,” the navigator said. He went back to his charts, and saw tiny sparks wandering at the edge of his vision. He decided not to tell the pilot.
The wireless op moved to the astrodome and searched for fighters. An hour passed: an hour of steady, battering noise and broken cloud. By dead reckoning they were over Mannheim. But nothing had changed: empty sky above, deep blackness below, patchy cloud between.
“Bugger this for a lark,” Gilchrist said. “Can’t anybody see the Rhine?” Mannheim was on the Rhine. “Bloody great river, full of water. It’s got to be down there somewhere.” Nobody answered. “We’ll go down and take a dekko,” he said. As he began a wide spiral the wireless op said: “Bombs exploding, starboard.” The yellow splashes were very small. Mannheim turned out to be thirty-five miles away. Thirty-five miles off course.
“Bloody winds,” the navigator said. By then he was in the nose, squinting through the bombsight. His tiny sparks were still wandering.
Later the RAF called it debriefing. In 1941 it was interrogation. The station commander and the CO attended but the Intelligence Officer did the work.
Skull stood behind Bins and watched him work. The first crew home was J-Jig, at 0120. After more than six hours in the air they were both weary and chirpy, glad to get a mug of coffee with a slug of rum in it.
The first questions were the crucial ones. “Did you reach Mannheim?” Yes. “Did you identify the target?” The navigator (and bomb-aimer) said it was as plain as day. “Did you bomb the target?” Absolutely. Right on the nose. Piece of cake. “I saw the bombs go in,” said the rear gunner. “Bull’s-eye.” Bins wanted more detail: time on target, color of explosions, any secondary explosions, any fires, color of fires … Then he whizzed through a dozen items: flak, fighters, searchlights, sightings of other bombers going down, decoy fires, any technical problems, weather, winds …
“Predicted winds were wrong,” the pilot said. “We got blown east until we got a fix on the Rhine south of Mainz. Then it was easy.”
They were restless. Bacon and eggs waited: best meal of the day. Bins said, “Anything else I should know? No? Thanks. Well done.”
“Damn good show,” the group captain said.
Bins took care of M-Mother, then F-Fox and E-Easy. Everyone was pleased: all the Wellingtons had landed. The crews of B-Baker and R-Robert came in together. There was a rush to get to Bins’ table. B-Baker won. R-Robert went to an empty table and dragged out the chairs as noisily as possible. “Shop!” the pilot called. He pounded the table.
“You know the drill,” Bins said to Skull. “Keep it brief, make it snappy.” He gave him an interrogation form.
Gilchrist didn’t wait to be questioned. “Found Mannheim. Recognized the target. Bombed the AP.” Skull looked puzzled. “The what?” he asked. “Aiming Point,” the pilot said. The others put on expressions of comic disbelief: the bloody IO didn’t know what an AP was! “Rear gunner saw our bombs straddle the target,” Gilchrist said.
“Two d’s in ‘straddle,’” the rear gunner said.
“You’re very kind,” Skull said.
“No fighters. Usual flak. Nothing special at all,” Gilchrist said. “Whole trip was a doddle.” Some of the crew were standing up.
“I suppose the Rhine helped,” Skull said. “It runs dead straight out of Mannheim for about two miles, is that right? The perfect landmark.”
“Perfect,” the navigator said. He was feeling much better. “Coming out, we flew straight up the Rhine.”
“Interesting.” Skull made a note. “And the oil tanks beside the river: were they on fire?”
“Not half. Burning like blazes.”
“Flames reflected in the water?”
“That’s right.”
The crew of B-Baker were clumping out of the hut.
“I’ll finish off here,” Bins said. “Anything else you want to tell me? No? Thanks. Well done.”
“Damn good show,” the group captain said. Gilchrist and his men hurried out. Rafferty and Duff followed them, leaving the Intelligence Officers to write up the operational report.
“Don’t gossip with the chaps,” Bins told Skull. “Ask your questions, get the gen, finish.”
“I wasn’t gossiping.”
“I heard you chattering about flames reflected in the Rhine. Nobody gives a damn. The chaps want their meal. God knows they’ve earned it.”
“I was curious to know if they remembered seeing burning oil tanks alongside the river north of Mannheim, that’s all.”
Bins put down his fountain-pen and looked at him. “There are no oil tanks on the Rhine north of Mannheim.”
“R-Robert saw them burning like blazes.”
Bins found a bit of blotting paper and cleaned the nib. He drew a perfect circle to make sure it worked. “Look,” he said. “First day on the squadron and you’ve put up three large blacks. For Christ’s sake don’t do any more damage. This job is tricky enough already.”
“Shall I make us some cocoa? At RAF Feck my cocoa-making was highly commended.”
While Skull made cocoa, Bins found R-Robert’s report and obliterated the bit about burning oil tanks. In the margin he wrote Irrelevant jocular remarks, and initialed it.
S-Sugar was the oldest Wellington on 409 Squadron.
She had taken a lot of knocks: slashed by shrapnel, wrenched by storm-force winds, dumped on bumpy runways by pilots who were ten feet higher than they planned to be. Also baked, soaked and frozen by the British weather as she sat at dispersal. But Wellingtons were designed to take punishment. She was still strong enough to haul a load of bombs to Berlin, provided all her bits worked.
When a new crew arrived at RAF Coney Garth, Pug Duff gave them S-Sugar and told the pilot, Jeremy Diamond, aged twenty-one, ex-medical student, that he had two weeks in which to knock his crew into shape. “Fly all the hours God gives,” Pug said. “Don’t wait for sunshine. Good weather teaches you nothing. Learn in the rain.”
Diamond did just that. After a week, he took off and flew east, on a navigation exercise plus bombing practice. Over the North Sea the weather turned foul.
The radio was receiving yards of harsh static and nothing else. The demons of cumulo-nimbus bounced the bomber until the navigator was too sick to do his job. Diamond climbed until he was above the weather, at nine thousand. He turned back, reached the coast and found the bombing range. Nine thousand was far too high. He went down until the navigator said he could see the targets through the bomb-sight. Diamond didn’t believe him, the nav sounded weak, maybe he was still sick; so Diamond banked the Wimpy so that he could look down and see for himself. Just as he banked, the nav said, “Bombs gone.” Which meant the bombs had swung sideways with the Wimpy. Too late now.
Diamond turned north, hoping to escape the weather, but the weather went north, too. He tried to climb above it, and the wings iced up. The more he climbed, the worse the ice, until the Wimpy was laboring. He had to go back down into the muck. The port engine packed up and now he couldn’t maintain height even if he wanted to. He was searching for a hole in the cloud when he scraped the top of a Yorkshire hill that should have been thirty miles away, and he terrified himself. Ten seconds later he flew into another, bigger hill.
New boys began at the bottom. The sprog crew got the worst kite. Why waste a good Wimpy when you could waste a duff one? It was only common sense.
Rain was still falling next day. It fell on RAF Coney Garth as the adjutant showed the station commander an order from Group. The order directed Rafferty to arrange an appropriate visit, without delay, to a civilian who had been accidentally bombed.
“You go and see the fellow,” Rafferty said.
“No fear,” the adjutant said. “Not my pigeon, sir.”
“Be a sport, Douglas. You’re awfully good at this sort of thing. Honeyed tongue, and so on.”
“Honey’s on ration, sir. So is tongue, come to that.”
“Every bloody thing’s on ration. Except bleating civilians.”
In his flying days, Rafferty’s nickname had been Tiny. Now his presence was even more massive. He was afraid of very few things, but one was angry civilians. “Why don’t we send Pug?” he suggested. “It’s his squadron. I’m just the bally caretaker here.”
“Squadron’s on ops tonight.”
“Send Bellamy, then. He’s not flying.”
“Bellamy’s giving the briefing.” The adjutant paused, and played his ace. “It seems this chap is a former MP, sir.”
Rafferty gave in. “I’m not going alone,” he said.
“Well, Skull’s available. Used to be a Cambridge don. Never lost for words, although I can’t say I understand them all.”
Rafferty perked up. “Skull can do all the talking. I’ll just …” The adjutant shook his head. “Well, I’m damn well not going to apologize.” Rafferty muttered. “Sod ’em all.”
They went in his official car. An airman drove. Skull had brought a file. “The complainant is Major-General Count Blanco de Colossal-Howitzer-Bombardment, sir,” he began. Rafferty stared. Skull said. “I cannot tell a lie, sir. I made that up.”
“Drop the ‘sir,’ Skull. And the jokes. Who is this blasted civilian?”
“Brigadier Piers Barriton, MC. Used to drive racing cars. Tory MP for ten years. A widower. Owns a farm with a large sanctuary for sea birds. He claims that both the farm and the sanctuary were bombed.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“The brigadier has one other passion. Fly-fishing.”
“Boring bloody nonsense.”
“True. But as we have some time, you might like to know the difference between a March Brown, a Greenwell’s Glory and a Tupp’s Indispensable.”
“Damn-fool names. All right, fire away.”
Brigadier Barriton met them at the front door of his farmhouse. He was in his sixties, angular, slightly hunched, with cropped white hair. Two dogs sat on the doorstep: orderlies awaiting orders. Rafferty introduced himself and Skull. The brigadier did not offer to shake hands. “You’ll want to see the bombs,” he said. His voice held a trace of Scottish Highlands. A trace of granite.
The further they walked, the muddier it got. The visitors had not thought to bring gumboots. The fields were flat and there was little to be said about them. Rafferty gave up trying to keep his trouser legs clean and he plodded behind the brigadier. Skull’s attempts at conversation got nowhere. “Wonderful skies in these parts, sir,” he said. “Do you paint, at all?” Barriton shook his head. “Neither do I,” Skull said sympathetically.
Rain had passed, but the sky was overcast and Rafferty could see a squall heading their way.
The first bomb was lying on a sack. Rafferty recognized 409 Squadron’s colors. All their practice bombs were painted yellow, with a red fin. Still, the brig didn’t know that, did he? “This is a job for the experts,” he said. “It may well be German.”
“I doubt that.” Barriton rolled it over with his foot. Stenciled down one side was 409 SQDN HOT SHOTS. “It struck that Dutch barn yonder. Went through the roof and made a mess of a ton of turnips. The other bombs are widely scattered.”
“You will be compensated in full,” Rafferty said.
“Tell that to my breeding gulls.” He set off again.
It was half a mile to the sanctuary. Rafferty and Skull looked at sea-birds circling mudflats, creeks and stretches of reed, with the gray North Sea beyond. Soon a thin rain began to fall. “It’s taken me ten years to persuade those particular birds to nest here,” Barriton said, “and now you go and bomb them.”
Rafferty was more interested in the black squall racing toward them. Young Diamond must have run into weather like this. Foul, turning worse. “Accident,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You think I’m making too much of this,” Barriton said. “Well, I fought the Hun and I know one thing. Germany will not be beaten by accident.”
Nobody spoke on the way back.
By the time they reached the car, the group captain’s feet were squelching inside his shoes; but that was not what angered him. Rain dripped from his nose as he watched the brigadier shut the dogs in a shed, and turn and stand, waiting for his visitors to go.
“Sir!” Rafferty said. It was so explosive that he paused to control his feelings. “Sir… I came here to apologize for a mistake, and I’ve done so. But I will not apologize for the hazards of war. Nor will I allow you or anyone to belittle the men I’m proud to lead. War is dangerous. Accidents happen. Brave men die. No doubt you knew a few.”
“More than a few.”
Rafferty gestured at the wet horizon. “You love your sea-birds, sir. Bully for you. I love my aircrew. Some of them disturbed your birds. The birds may come back. But the crew of that bomber will never come back. That’s all I have to say, sir.” He was about to leave when Skull stopped him. Barriton had opened the farmhouse door and was standing aside, waiting for them to enter.
Rafferty sat in the kitchen, near a coal-burning stove as big as a sideboard, and watched his stockinged feet steam. Barriton gave them towels, and made tea. Rafferty was silent; Skull talked easily. He noticed Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure on a bookshelf, and praised it, which led to piranha fish, and to scorpions, and desert travel, and crusader castles. Barriton had something to say about them all. One topic led to another. “Fame is over-rated, if you ask me,” Skull said. He picked up a tin of St. Bruno tobacco. “Everyone’s heard of St. Bruno, but who was he? Come to that, who was the great Greenwell?”
Barriton’s face changed; the boy in the man showed through. “Do you fish?” he asked.
“Not as often as the group captain.”
Rafferty cleared his throat, and tried to remember the difference between a March Brown and a Tupps’ Indispensable. Barriton said: “Take a look at my Greenwells. There’s no decent trout fishing in East Anglia, so fly-tying is the next best thing.” He was opening drawers and pulling out trays lined with yellow felt. Trout flies were lined up like gems in a jeweler’s. “What d’you think of that one, group captain?”
“My goodness,” Rafferty said. “That’s something. That really is something.”
“I hope that makes him happy,” Rafferty said. They were in the car, heading home. “These trousers will never be the same again.”
“You handled him beautifully.”
“Bloody retired pongo. Bloody blimp. Bloody has-been MP. Never flown in his life and he’s got the brass gall to be sniffy about our training methods.”
“Lucky for him. If he’d been younger I’d have flattened him. Men like that haven’t got the faintest idea what Bomber Command’s about.”
“Few people do.”
“They don’t know what courage and strength it takes to go on hammering the Hun, night after night. Brave men in Bomber Command. None braver than 409. Give ’em the chance, and they’ll make Hitler look silly.”
Skull watched the countryside go by. “All the same,” he said, “S-Sugar missed the bombing range by … well, by rather a long way.” Rafferty looked at his watch. “And how did they end up in Yorkshire?” Skull asked.
“Won’t this damn car go any faster?” Rafferty growled. The driver put his foot down.
“You did jolly well with his Greenwell’s Glories,” Skull murmured.
“It’s about time you called me ‘sir’ again,” Rafferty told him. “Straighten your tie. Do up your tunic. You look a complete shambles.”