by Max Hennessy
With the weight gone, the Oxford lifted in a huge swoop and wavered until Boumphrey adjusted the trim.
‘All the lot?’ he asked as he regained control.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Your fault, Darling? Panic a bit?’
‘No, sir. I selected half. I think there must be a fault in the bomb rack electrics.’
‘More than likely,’ Boumphrey agreed, ‘considering the speed they were pushed together. But never mind. On the whole it works and the armourers can have a look at it. Did we hit anything?’
‘One of ’em seemed to go straight in, sir. T’others missed, I’m afraid.’
‘One ought to be enough to do the job,’ Boumphrey said. ‘And you’ll do better with practice. Well done. Give yourself a chocolate bar. Just one thing: In future, let’s have your report properly, old son. The correct method is to say “Bombs gone” or “Bombs away”. It don’t matter much. It don’t worry me particularly either but if you’ve got a nervous chap at the controls he might get confused with all that chatter. “Bombs gone” is just enough to tell him the machine will need a little trimming and that, if the nonsense is coming up at him fast and furious, he can push off for home. Next time, can we do it that way?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Darling sounded suitably crushed.
‘No need to be downhearted though,’ Boumphrey assured him. ‘It was a good show for a first try. Ten for effort, Darling.’
For a while longer, they sat above the fight. Boumphrey knew he ought to head for home but for a moment the sight of the swarming aircraft fascinated him. Then he realized that, despite the damage they were doing, RAF, Kubaiyah, didn’t have a thing which could stop one of the Irazhi tanks driving, if it chose to, right up to the door of Air Headquarters. Nothing except bombs. They had to fly, fly, fly, knocking out anything that moved, bombing and gunning, finding new targets as fast as they destroyed the old ones. The best thing he could do, he decided, was land, pick up more explosives and get ready for another go.
At least in Darling he seemed to have picked a good partner. Despite his understandable excitement, the boy seemed to be good at his job. He was unafraid and even appeared to have an eye like a hawk, and he was keeping up a running commentary on what was happening as Boumphrey concentrated on picking his way through the whirling machines back to the airfield. They’d all read reports of the dogfights over Southern England during the Battle of Britain and he supposed this was what it must have been like – except that back home there wasn’t such a hairy mixture of obsolete biplanes as there was here.
Just ahead of him he saw a Gordon waver and part of the starboard wing fall off as it was hit. It went into a spin and dropped away, but the pilot managed to regain control and put it down on the edge of the field. As he passed overhead, Boumphrey saw two figures scrambling clear and the machine spread flatly on the ground like a dead bird.
Another Oxford was landing ahead of him, just settling for its touchdown. It was doing it neatly and cleanly; the wheels had just contacted the earth and it was just beginning to slow down when it received a direct hit from a shell. Boumphrey flew through the lifting cloud of black smoke and flame, and put the machine down on the other side, almost hitting the fire engine and the ambulance as they hurtled across the field.
There was a short queue of aircraft waiting to go through the gate from the airfield into the enclosure behind the hangars and, rather than stop and present a target for the Irazhi gunners, he swung the machine round in a large circle. He had to do it twice before the gate was clear and he could sweep through to the shelter of the hangars.
Immediately he stopped, fitters and riggers swarmed over the machine and the armourers arrived within seconds. They hadn’t enough bomb trolleys and everything was being man-handled from lorries. Aircrew and pupils who were not flying started to bomb up at once. Engines were shut off and by the grace of God none of the running men was hit by a whirling propeller.
‘Take any hits, sir?’ A sweating flight sergeant appeared at the window alongside Boumphrey.
‘None I know of, Flight. I think we came through untouched. Who was that who blew up just ahead of me?’
‘Mr De Sousa, sir. With two pupils.’
‘And the Gordon at the other side of the field?’
‘Sergeant Chapman. He’s all right. So’s his observer.’
‘How’re we doing?’
‘Not bad, sir. But the shells are doing a bit of damage. There’ve been casualties. What’s it like up there?’
‘More danger from our own side than the Irazhis, I reckon. And we’re going to have to improve this business of getting to shelter, Flight. It leaves us on the field in full view and sitting ducks for the guns up there. When I go out again, I’m going out at full speed and I shall come back the same way.’ Apart from the two machines he had seen hit, there had been no other casualties in the air, but one of the parked Gordons, waiting for a pilot, had been destroyed. There was only one way to prevent them all from being destroyed and that was to keep up the nonstop bombing and gunning to keep the Irazhi heads down and prevent them bombarding the aerodrome as they undoubtedly would now.
The AVM had grasped the nettle and, no matter what they called it in diplomatic circles, the truth was that hostilities had commenced and Britain was at war with Irazh.
An Indian bearer, his face grey with fear, came hurrying up with a tall metal container of coffee balanced on his head. Heading for the hangar he put the container down and vanished inside. One of the ground staff, stripped to his shorts in the heat, appeared alongside Boumphrey and handed him a chipped tin mug.
‘Fancy a swig, sir?’
‘Thanks. No end kind of you.’
Boumphrey hadn’t left his seat when the flight sergeant lifted his thumb. ‘OK, sir. Off you go!’
‘Right, Flight. Just make sure that bloody gate’s clear, because I’m going through it at top speed.’
Pausing behind the hangars to complete his pre-flight checks out of sight of the plateau, Boumphrey lifted his head to see the flight sergeant waving at him to indicate there was no aircraft on its way in through the gate.
‘Hold your hat on, Darling!’
With a judicious use of the throttle and brakes and a great deal of luck, Boumphrey turned the corner to face the gate in the fence that led to the airfield, then he opened the throttles and shot past the startled flight sergeant at forty miles an hour to lift off as soon as he was clear in a steep climbing turn away from the plateau.
Darling looked startled. ‘My God, sir! That was fast! We nearly hit the post!’
‘Never mind.’ Boumphrey gave a self-deprecatory smile. ‘Next time I expect we will.’
2
By the time they took off for the fourth time that day, everybody was trying Boumphrey’s method. While the trees round the polo ground hid the Harts and the Audaxes until they were actually lifting into the air, the Oxfords, Gladiators and Gordons were in full view the minute they were on the airfield. So, as Boumphrey had done out of sheer necessity, they all started doing.
They completed their pre-flight checks behind the hangars, and one of the ground crew moved out, hidden by the hangars from the plateau and gave the signal that nothing was on the way in; then, with the engine roaring and the brakes squealing, the aircraft lurched, zigzagging at speed through the gate straight on to the take-off area and, without pausing, increased speed and lifted off in a steep swing away from the ridge of hills. By this time the pom-poms on the plateau were beginning to be difficult so, on the return, they began to fly in very low across the camp to avoid their fire, landed on the taxi strip close to the buildings, swung in at speed through the gate and whipped round the back of the hangars.
Osanna had tried to set up a debriefing system complete with a pile of debriefing forms – time on patrol, time off, that sort of thing, with descriptions of what had been hit – but too much was happening too quickly and in the end he gave it up and left it to the pilots to report any new targe
ts they thought important, with two or three clerks from headquarters to put it down in notebooks resting on the wing of a machine while the engine was still emitting its creaks and clicks as it cooled off.
There was no time for anything else because the casualties were mounting, though it wasn’t considered that a small flesh wound or minor damage to an aircraft was sufficient to stop flying. At midday sandwiches appeared from the mess and they ate while the machines were serviced, refuelled and bombed up. The man who brought them had a story of six Irazhi Gladiators appearing from nowhere to attack the station buildings. ‘Nearly got AHQ,’ he said.
Nobody had noticed them in the excitement but there was considerable joy at his description of senior officers diving under tables and his graphic picture of the row of august backsides sticking out.
‘Like a lot of hippopotamuses wallowing in the mud,’ he said gleefully.
The Irazhi aircraft had done some damage. Where there had been solid buildings and trim verges was now surrounded by smoke, the crackle of flames, dust-shrouded rubble and an acrid smell of burning. Figures were beginning to appear from the wreckage, but the station warrant officer, his face blackened and his moustache askew, was fully in command, his rasping voice rallying men into coherent groups. Fire hoses were being run out, ambulances were racing through the smoke to where men were digging and pulling rubble aside with their bare hands. Near one of the huts an arm, severed at the elbow, lay on the ground and everybody was carefully taking evading action round it, pretending it wasn’t there.
The sound of the fighting, the tremendous roaring of aircraft engines and, above all, the explosions, had terrified Prudence Wood-Withnell. Her helpers had fled at once to the shelters but, feeling somehow that if the water tank were damaged she might have to spend the day filling buckets and baths, she herself had taken refuge under a table in the hospital sluice, where all the containers were emptied. The first bombs to fall near had reduced her to tears but then, realizing that she was doing no good at all in tears, she had pulled herself together and gone to help. The first injured man she saw was an airman who had lost a foot and the sight of the pulpy red mess at the end of his stocking turned her stomach over. Then one of the Indian bearers had been brought in with a splinter in the chest and the whole of his white cotton clothing saturated with shining red and she had realized that it was no time to be squeamish. They were already short-handed and every pair of hands was needed. Gulping down her nausea, she had turned to help.
Despite the formidable shelling from the plateau, which seemed to have blown out every wire mesh window in the place, the explosions had not disturbed the pair of nesting storks with their young on the radio mast above Air Headquarters.
‘I bet it gave them a fright though,’ Darling had observed.
Shrapnel still clattered on the iron roofs but neither the water tower nor the power station had been hit, though too many aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. The Audaxes and Harts on the polo ground, however, were effectively screened by the trees, while those machines behind the hangars were suffering only superficial damage. There was only one question in everybody’s mind as aircraft came in and swung into place behind the hangars to be checked for structural damage: could they be patched up enough to go back into the air?
* * *
As they cruised at 1000 feet, which Boumphrey decided would give them maximum accuracy, they could see the Audaxes dive bombing beneath them. The Harts had been designed for just this purpose and the Audaxes, an improvement on the Harts, were also proving quite adept at it. They were falling out of the sky into the ground fire with their bombs and guns, but everybody had his own method, and others were going in low and screaming across the plateau, making use of every available gulley, to arrive almost unseen over their target and drop their bombs from a mere hundred feet.
The air seemed alive with aeroplanes and by this time the Audaxes from the polo field had developed a technique of hammering the gun positions while the Oxfords, Gladiators and Gordons took off from the main airfield. Flight Sergeant Madoc was taking the armoured cars along the perimeter close to the plateau, well within range of the guns, roaring at full speed backwards and forwards between the shells and the aircraft taking off and landing, using his guns to force the Irazhis to keep their heads down.
It was decided they were becoming so successful, in fact, that they might get more of the women and children away. Contacting Wing Commander Atkin, the station admin. officer, normally a desk-bound officer, who’d been given command of the Audaxes and Harts, Fogarty explained what he intended. ‘We’re sending off the Valentias for the coast,’ he said. ‘So I want everybody you can put into the air to bomb the gun positions to keep heads down while they take off. Let’s make it 1500 hours exactly. Telephone me when you’re ready.’
Cars and lorries began to hurry from the camp complex to the area behind the hangars and stopped alongside the Valentias.
‘It’ll take twenty minutes to get ’em all away,’ Fogarty explained. ‘Can your people keep up a sustained bombing that long?’
‘Yes, they’ll do it.’
‘The armoured cars will emerge at the same moment and head north along the perimeter to draw fire away from the airstrip. While the guns are occupied in that direction, we’ll get the big boys away.’
Promptly at 1450 hours, the Audaxes and Harts lifted off and, climbing to 1000 feet, screamed down to hammer the guns on the plateau. While they were busy replying, the Gladiators took off and joined in, and Madoc’s eighteen old armoured cars emerged from the complex of buildings and began to roar along the perimeter, firing at anything that presented itself. The din was tremendous and a lifting cloud of smoke and dust hung over both the camp and the escarpment.
At the height of the fury, the first Valentia appeared from behind the hangars and headed for the field. By this time the fence had been pulled down to widen the gate, and it roared through at a good thirty miles an hour, lurching on the uneven ground, its huge biplane wings swaying. Facing the airfield, the pilot opened his throttles. Almost immediately a second followed, then a third. The Audaxes went in lower, screaming down almost to ground level.
The firing from the plateau, as the gunners were caught between the bombing of the aircraft and the automatic weapons of the armoured cars, began to grow wild, and Boumphrey decided to join the fun. The last of the Valentias was thundering down the airfield now, trailing its cloud of brown dust, and he saw it lift off. A solitary gun, temporarily unoccupied, sent a few shells after it and he saw them explode beyond the ditch at the end of the take-off area.
As he lined up to drop his bombs, Darling was bouncing about in his seat with excitement. ‘Left, skipper,’ he was yelling. ‘Left a bit more. Right. Jesus, there they go – I mean, bombs gone, sir!’
As they lifted away, the Oxford as usual touchy on the controls and awkward to handle, they heard a crash beneath them somewhere and saw holes appear in the cabin walls.
‘I suspect we’ ve been hit, Darling,’ Boumphrey said calmly.
‘You’re telling me, sir!’ Darling’s voice was high-pitched. ‘Hole back there big enough to put your head through.’
‘The undercarriage light’s come on. I think the undercart’s come down. We’d better try it.’
They could get no joy from the undercarriage. There was no sound of it moving and Boumphrey began to suspect that only one wheel was down, which was going to make landing a problem. Clearly something had happened beneath the machine because its notorious instability was more marked than ever and Boumphrey realized they were in difficulties. They were swinging round now over the camp and heading for the landing field and he was hoping to God they could get down safely before the tricky Ox-box dropped a wing and went into a spin. They were turning at the end of the field for their run-in when Darling yelled.
‘Sir, sir! We’re on fire!’
‘Where?’ Boumphrey struggled to keep his voice steady.
‘Starboard wing, sir. I th
ink it’s spreading. It’s coming from the starboard engine.’
Boumphrey’s eyes flickered to his right where the Armstrong Siddeley engine was pounding away. The machine was not fitted with fire extinguishers and he was aware that it was necessary to get it down as quickly as possible and get out and run, because of the Oxford’s tendency to burn fast. It was largely built of plywood and was well known for its ability to become a mass of flames.
His thoughts were racing through his mind like mad mice. How did he get a burning Oxford down safely with a damaged undercarriage? As he glanced about him below, he saw the fire engine racing across the ground towards them. Passing overhead, he saw them turn and one of the crew, riding on the running board, was pointing frantically, gesturing wildly at the aircraft. Boumphrey wasn’t certain what they were trying to indicate but he suspected it wasn’t that the engine was on fire, because the fact that he must have seen it should have been obvious to anyone. So he could only assume that his guess was right and only part of the undercarriage had come down.
His thoughts were still scurrying through his mind when he spotted the small brick huts of the rifle range. There were two of them, one a store where the targets were kept, the other where the target operators sheltered when they weren’t in the orchestra pit indicating hits, and he suddenly realized they might be his salvation. They were about fifteen feet apart – at least he hoped they were fifteen feet apart, though he had never measured them – and he decided to take a chance.
‘Come aft, Darling,’ he said to the cadet. ‘If I put this thing down as she is, you and I are going to be cooked meat because the wheels will collapse and she’ll go up in flames. Make sure you’re properly strapped in and hold your hat on.’
He turned again, the machine behaving awkwardly as it tilted, dangerously close to a stall and a spin. Righting it, he headed for the rifle range. Darling gave him a nervous look and Boumphrey tried to reassure him.
