When I started thinking about what I’d say here, I tried to remember the first spark for this story. And when I dug beyond the obvious – the Enigma machine, the defecting Germans landing in Scotland, the Blenheim crew, the coins in the pub ceiling – what I came back to was the old woman.
Believe it or not, that’s what I started with. I wanted to write a story about a mysterious old woman.
Originally I just wanted to create a bond between a young person and an old person. It is mostly because I am losing, and miss deeply, my wonderful grandmother Betty Flocken and her generation – she was born in 1916 and died in 2015. In the back of my mind I was thinking of Margaret Mahy’s Memory, which is about a troubled teen who ends up caring for a stranger with Alzheimer’s disease, and Penelope Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens, about a younger teen who has to care for her elderly aunts. But my stock in trade is World War II thrillers. How was I going to include a mysterious old person in my adventure story?
In the summer of 2014, the same summer that Betty Flocken suffered the fall that foreshadowed her decline and death six months later, I had one of the most wonderful experiences of my life: I took a flight in a World War II-era Avro Lancaster bomber. It, too, is among the last of its age, one of only two in the world that still fly, and I had a view from the gun turret as we circled over Niagara Falls. Afterwards, I chatted with the pilot, Dave Rohrer, who has spent more time at the controls of a Lancaster than any wartime pilot ever did. He told me about a pub he’d visited in England near a former World War II airfield, where a wooden beam over the bar was full of coins placed there by airmen who never came back from their missions. Dead men’s money, the bartender called it, telling Dave not to touch.
From that moment, I knew I had to write a story about those wishing coins and the bomber squadron who left them there.
When I finally got to work on the idea, I thought I could set up my young heroine and her ageing companion in a pub like the one Dave visited, near a wartime airfield. The local Royal Air Force bomber squadron could somehow get involved with the viewpoint character. I thought it would be fun (fun as in I will enjoy writing this, not as in this story will be light-hearted) if I explored Jamie Beaufort-Stuart’s background as a bomber pilot, which is only mentioned in passing in Code Name Verity.
In June 2018, I received a letter from an Australian reader who reminded me that it wasn’t just British and American men and women who flew in World War II, and requested that if I ever wrote a ‘Bomber Story’, would I please remember the Australians. As it happened, I was in the midst of writing a Bomber Story. So at my correspondent’s request I included Harry, Gavin and Dougie as one of 648 Squadron’s aircrews. In fact, the RAF bases in wartime Scotland consisted of very few Scots, and the rest of Scotland was full of foreigners too. There were Polish, French and Norwegian naval units in Glasgow; Polish, French and Canadian troops were based throughout the country; there were civilians from Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway and Spain; there were prisoner of war camps in Scotland holding both Germans and Italians. Later in the war, US military troops were also based in Scotland, of which about ten per cent were black. One wartime logging unit was made up of 900 men from British Honduras (now Belize).
I lived in Jamaica as a child and completed my first three years of school there, and over the past ten years I’ve become fascinated by the role of Caribbean men and women serving in Britain in World War II. I first became aware of them when I was writing Code Name Verity. I’d wanted to include a black airman at the end of that novel (and I did), because I hoped to paint in a little diversity among the mostly European and white cast of characters. My original plan was to make that airman American. But when I started digging, of course I discovered that the only black Americans to fly in World War II were the Tuskegee Airmen. They didn’t fly in France and they didn’t fly in bombers and they didn’t fly in integrated crews, and I needed my airman to do all those things, so I made him Jamaican instead of American. Out of some sixteen thousand men and women from the Caribbean serving in the military in World War II, about five hundred were enlisted in the Royal Air Force. The United States segregated their armed forces back then: the British, however reluctantly, did not. (When the US entered the war, the British bent over backwards to accommodate American Jim Crow regulations, resulting in frustration and resentment from servicemen and local populations all over the United Kingdom.)
It wasn’t just Caribbean men who volunteered to join the war effort. Considering themselves to be British subjects and motivated by patriotism, about six hundred Caribbean women joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service to support their ‘mother country’ in World War II. Another eighty served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They felt that they were fighting against the more ferocious institutionalised prejudices of Nazism – despite the ironic and infuriating prejudices they faced from their own governing bodies. For example, when the British sent two hundred Caribbean servicewomen to work in Washington, DC, only white women were eligible for the assignment, so as to avoid offending the Americans.
Louisa Adair is not really based on anyone but herself, but a starting point was Lilian Bader. Bader was born in 1918, in Liverpool, England, to a West Indian father and an English mother. After both her parents died she was raised in a convent school where she stayed until the age of twenty – it took her longer than most of her peers to find work because of her colour. When Britain entered World War II she joined the NAAFI (which ran military canteens), and early in 1941 she entered the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she was trained as an aircraft-instrument repairer, achieving the rank of acting corporal – and she even got taken up in a Royal Air Force plane so she could see flight instruments in action. Her experience of being taunted as a Nazi by a group of evacuee children who had never seen a German, or a black person, inspired Louisa’s unsettling experience on the bus to Stonehaven.
Only one Jamaican (a white man) flew in the Battle of Britain, possibly the only Caribbean man to do so, though several others, some of them black, flew British fighter aircraft later in the war. The Jamaican who fought in the Battle of Britain was Pilot Officer Herbert Capstick, nineteen years old in the summer of 1940. He was the navigator in a Bristol Blenheim aircraft. After changing squadrons later in the war, he was part of a crew who sank a U-boat in 1942.
I might not have ever paid much attention to the type of plane Herbert Capstick flew, except that a chance remark of Jamie’s in Code Name Verity forced me to create a Blenheim squadron for The Enigma Game. I must have done a quick search, ten years ago, to see what kind of bombers were being flown early in the war, and assigned Jamie to Blenheims. When I began writing this book, after only a little research I soon became obsessed with these overlooked Royal Air Force light bombers.
Thousands of Bristol Blenheims were in service at the beginning of the war, fighting in both the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain; the first bombing raid against Germany was made in a Blenheim. Blenheims were the most plentiful of the RAF’s aircraft as the war began, and more aircrews were lost flying them than any other type of RAF plane. As Jamie mentions, only one Blenheim pilot, Flying Officer Reginald Peacock, became an official ace by shooting down five German aircraft during the fierce air wars of 1940. I didn’t make up the story of the Blenheim crew who flew all the way back to their own base after a mission, shut down the engines, and died on the runway before they were able to climb out.
There is only one Blenheim flying today, rebuilt from parts, and based at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, England. A Canadian version of the Blenheim known as the Bolingbroke is currently being restored to ‘ground-running condition’ at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario, and a few other examples survive in static museum exhibits. I spent a day checking out the Blenheim on permanent display in the RAF Museum at Hendon, London, where the docent was kind enough to remove the front cockpit escape hatch so I could stick my head up into the nose of the plane (as Jamie does when he’s inspecting 648 Squadron’s aircraft in the rain) and try to imagine what it might be like to fly in it. Standing next to this Blenheim’s wing, with my head level with the rear gunner’s turret, I found my heart aching at how small the plane is. It is much smaller than other twin-engined bombers. It is two feet shorter than a Spitfire fighter plane and only a foot taller than a Messerschmitt 109 fighter. Its crew of three must have been tightly packed. And as one Blenheim pilot put it, if you met German fighter aircraft while you were flying, you didn’t come home.
But the RAF continued to use these planes well into the war, in Africa and the Far East as well as at home. As the war progressed, the armour and armament improved, and the Blenheims were often equipped with early and experimental radar. Jamie’s fictional 648 Squadron is most closely based on the real 248 Squadron, who also flew out of Scotland over the North Sea in the winter of 1940–1941. In real life, 248 Squadron did indeed pick up foreign language radio transmissions which they believed to be German.
The idea of overhearing German radio transmissions leads me to ‘Odysseus’ and his mission. Felix Baer’s landings in Scotland were inspired by two unrelated wartime incidents: the flight of Rudolf Hess made on 10/11 May 1941, and the interception of a German bomber whose crew defected to the United Kingdom on 9 May 1943. Rudolf Hess was, believe it or not, Hitler’s Deputy Führer when he flew to Scotland in a Messerschmitt 110 Luftwaffe night fighter fitted with long-range fuel tanks. Hess had consulted the aircraft designer himself, Willy Messerschmitt, about modifications and training on the aircraft to enable him to make the flight. To this day, no one is really sure what Hess hoped to achieve. Theories are that he might have had key information to deliver about Germany’s imminent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941; or he may have been invited by British Intelligence; or he may have acted as an emissary on behalf of someone else.
Whatever his motive, his aircraft was spotted by a British detection station as he approached the north-east coast of England. Spitfire fighter planes were scrambled to go after him, but no one found him in the air. Hess apparently ran out of fuel and parachuted out of his Messerschmitt, which crashed south-east of Glasgow in Scotland (the remains of his plane are on display in the Imperial War Museum in London). He was found on the ground by a local farmer, given a cup of tea, and made a prisoner by the Home Guard. He insisted he wanted to talk to the Duke of Hamilton, saying that he hoped to negotiate a peace treaty between Britain and Germany. That didn’t happen. Hess doesn’t seem to have acted under anyone’s orders but his own; the result of his failed mission was that he spent the rest of his life in prison, successfully taking his own life in 1987 at the age of ninety-three – not his first attempt.
Obviously Felix Baer is not based on Rudolf Hess himself, although Hess’s flight made me feel that Baer’s was plausible. But the real inspiration for ‘Odysseus’ and his collaboration with British Intelligence came from an ‘Individual History’ report describing a German bomber, a Junkers 88, now in the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, in England. I’ve known about the events leading to the capture of this aircraft for some time – at least ten years – because I used the description of the RAF interception of this Ju-88 as source material for an interception scene in Rose Under Fire. On 9 May 1943, this Luftwaffe plane, with its crew of three, flew from Denmark via Norway and was then escorted by a group of Spitfires into Dyce near Aberdeen (the location of my fictional Deeside). One of the German airmen in the Ju-88 had been brought along at gunpoint, unwillingly; the other two may well have been working for British Intelligence since 1940. Intriguingly, it has been suggested that the pilot, Heinrich (or Herbert) Schmitt, may have landed in the UK twice before, in February and May 1941, both times on clandestine intelligence missions.
The RAF continued to fly this captured Junkers 88 on experimental operations throughout the war, and it was a gift for the British and the other Allied forces because it contained an up-to-the-minute German radar set which allowed the RAF to make some key adjustments to the existing technology that hid their own bomber aircraft from enemy detection. Despite the importance of this discovery, the details of the tech are so stunningly obscure and complex that I knew I couldn’t possibly use them to create a gripping read. I asked my husband to brainstorm ideas about an alternative secret for my German resistance pilot to sneak into Britain, something which could be considered equally game-changing for the war effort but a bit more exciting. He immediately suggested an Enigma machine.
I’m grateful to Mark Baldwin for his energetic and enlightening lecture on the use of the Enigma machine, and for the brief opportunity to touch those keys myself and see how the rotors work. The first Enigma machine to come into the possession of British Intelligence in wartime was captured in May 1941, not February 1941 as in this novel. I hope readers will give me a little poetic licence over this slight anachronism. The timing of The Enigma Game was dictated very strictly by some of the less sensational events of Code Name Verity; when I sat down to write, it was already ‘canon’ that Jamie had lost his fingers and toes to frostbite after ditching a Blenheim in the North Sea some time before March 1941. Perhaps Felix Baer’s Enigma machine was kept especially secret, or got snarled in administrative red tape, as Jamie worried it might. British Intelligence did make some shocking blunders; it’s not impossible.
It’s increasingly the case that my novels feel collaborative rather than an individual effort, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my international team of editors: Hannah Allaman, Emily Meehan, Lynne Missen, Ellen Holgate and Lucy Mackay-Sim, particularly Hannah and Lucy, who whipped this book into shape over three intense drafts. I’m also grateful to the talented writer Catherine Johnson, who graciously made time at short notice to give a careful reading of my manuscript and share her experiences as the daughter of Jamaican and British parents. And of course I would not be the writer I am today without the continued support of my agent and dear friend Ginger Clark. The same is true of my husband, Tim Gatland, who pointed out that I needed to run the Aberdeen rail line inland around my fictional RAF Windyedge, and who accompanied me on more than one reconnaissance flight along the North Sea coast of Aberdeenshire, even indulging me in a landing at ‘Deeside’.
And I want to acknowledge and remember the Blenheim airmen who inspired me and for whom my heart is eternally sore, in particular the young crew of 21 Squadron’s Blenheim R3914: pilot Harry Collinge, observer Douglas Osborne and wireless operator/air gunner Albert Moore. They were all between twenty and twenty-three years of age when they lost their lives on the night of 26/27 November 1940, crashing into a hillside in the north of England on their way home from an attack on a power station in Cologne, Germany. They were off course and didn’t have a working radio. Their plane was seen in flames before it hit the ground, but since they made it back to Britain they may well have been shot down by British anti-aircraft gunners, mistaking them for the enemy in the dark.
LEST WE FORGET.
Elizabeth Wein
Mt Gretna, Pennsylvania
July 2019