Very few could keep up this hectic relaxation without an early night now and again, but there were even fewer who never took part in it at all. Perhaps it was because they had discharged an excess of adrenalin into their systems that these young men seemed so inexhaustible, or perhaps it was the alcohol which kept them going. It may have been just youth, abundant health and the effervescent energy bestowed by unfailing high spirits. Between scrambles most of them fell asleep.
No one mourned and no one spoke of the dead. They talked about their battles, with much weaving of hands to shew what this and that aircraft had done; they laughed abundantly and ridiculed each other. The most macabre incidents caused the greatest amusement. A predicament which could result in someone's death was watched by his comrades with ribaldry.
These incidents, providing light relief of the R.A.F.'s peculiar variety, were part of the fabric of those days. It was a time of change and adaptation. Commanders of other squadrons came on brief visits, to exchange experiences and views on tactics. Some squadrons occasionally experimented with sections of four instead of three, the newly-named 'finger four' formation, so called because the leader flew with one man behind and on one side, and two echeloned on the other; the formation thus resembled the four fingertips of a hand. Another new idea was to operate in pairs, the wing man never parting from his leader whatever happened.
Air fighting was becoming more brutal as well as more sophisticated. Until now, most of the R.A.F. had believed .that war in the air was a chivalrous, impersonal form of combat; unlike the sordid slogging match between infantry and artillery. Airmen understood one another's problems, as they fought to the death, and admitted some admiration, even if more or less grudging, for the skill of their opponents. This was an illusion which quickly crumbled in the intensity of that summer conflict.
Inevitably fighting became bad tempered and bitter. The strain on airmen s first aggravated by the stupidity and over eagerness of their own side. It was a common experience for British fighter pilots, parachuting to hope for safety, to be challenged, often fired at, by the Home Guard, who mistook them for Germans. Some of the R.A.F. were wounded by these too enthusiastic amateur warriors. Farmers pointed their shotguns and threatened, assuming that anyone who had come down from a battle overhead must be an enemy. It was bad enough for the British, who could quite soon convince the most sceptical uniformed civilian or minatory armed peasant of their identity by employing suitably well-chosen Anglo-Saxon expletives. But for the Poles, Frenchmen, Dutch and Belgians, whose foreign accents were baffling and unconvincing, the risk of death at the hands of those whom they were defending was always present in this situation.
There were other manifestations of bestial stupidity. Knight was shot down one afternoon .and as he parachuted towards a meadow he could see some strange activity: a dozen yokels were prancing round a haystack, waving their arms and performing a travesty of the goose step. They all carried pitchforks, rakes, scythes or billhooks. As they saw him coming down they paused; then, evidently satisfied that he was a friend, continued their procession. He could hear them chanting, drunkenly, 'We'll Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line'; and concluded, correctly, that they had drunk rather a lot of strong beer in the hot sunshine at their lunch break.
When he had released himself from his parachute and stood up, he saw the body of a German airman lying near the hay stack, with a parachute dumped near it.
He was sickened to see that the leader of the capering parade carried the German's severed head on a pitchfork. Another farmhand, immediately behind, flourished the scythe with which he had decapitated him.
They were grinning at Knight, inviting his approbation. He rushed at them, punching and swearing. He knocked down the leader, who dropped the pitchfork, sending the head rolling grotesquely into some nettles. He knocked out the man with the scythe and was tussling with a third, before the rest fell on him and, with drunken jibes, thrust him, still struggling, into a lorry. As he was driven away he saw the German's head affixed once more to the pitchfork and the gala resumed. They bundled him out at an anti-aircraft site and he went from there to a Police station; but nobody seemed to want to believe him when he told them what he had seen ordinary, decent Sussex farm workers doing.
When he reported to Herrick, the latter, with a face of doom, said 'You'd better hear what Six-gun has to say.'
'What the hell has he got to do with it?'
'Ask him.'
Knight turned to Massey. 'What happened?'
'Christ, you wouldn't believe it. You saw me shot down…'
'I believe that!'
'I baled out and landed in a field right next to a wood where two guys from a Ju. 87 had come down. Two soldiers came running out of the wood, with rifles, and one of them said "It's O.K., sir, we've done for the bastards.'' I asked them what in hell they were talking about and they just pointed to the trees and took off. I went in there and found two Jerries; one with his head bashed in and the other bayoneted.'
Angry and ashamed, Knight could only stand in silence. Presently he said 'If word of this kind of thing gets back to the Jerries, it's going to be rough on us if we have to bale out over there.'
II JG 97 had suffered as badly as 172 Squadron.
Baumbach, Weber and many others were dead. The chairs in which they had sat at the mess table stood in front of empty places which the new arrivals left alone.
The Staffel had lost several pilots from wounds or burns; others were now prisoners in England.
Mealtimes were dour and silent and there was a lot of heavy drinking. The pilots drank in their bedrooms, in the mess, and in the bars of Calais and Boulogne. They brought girls back to bed and went at them like blood-crazed Goths.
Keiling had started to bite his nails. Even the squat, unimaginative Brendel, Richter's second in command, had developed an uncontrollable jerk of the head, as though he were perpetually scanning the sky for enemy fighters.
The Staffel Commander was never far from the handsome young Keiling. In the evening, unless summoned by the Gruppe Commander to drunken, fornicating revelry in the chateau, he invited the boy to his quarters, where they sat in silence, listening to gramophone music.
Hafner had developed a dichotomic attitude towards his aircraft. It was an obedient, sensitive instrument in his hands, the means of self-protection; he respected and admired it, and there was no elation to equal the freedom of soaring above the clouds in. a clear sky, diving, rolling, looping, and flying his Me. 109 to its limits. But it was also the hated weapon which took him into danger. When he saw it every morning in the dawn light he loathed it. Presently it would be his duty to climb into that narrow shell and take it far into the dangerous air that the enemy held. As long as it was serviceable he was its slave. When he turned his back on it at the end of another day survived, he was satiated with fear and sadness. He had seen his comrades shot down and German bombers disintegrated in cataclysmic explosions; heard bullets on his own armour plating and whist ling through his wings and cockpit. His fighter with the wolf's head offering defiance to the enemy was the symbol of his fear and sorrow and his heart was cold towards it. But when he was on his way home victorious, he was joyous and he loved it with greater warmth than he had ever felt for a girl.
He came back from a mission one morning and walked across to Ihlefeld, his closest friend, who had landed earlier, took him by the arm and led him away from the others. 'My God, Otto,' he said in a low, shaking voice, 'what sort of war is this? What's happening to us? We're behaving like animals, not like men with a code of honour.'
'What's upset you, Erich?'
'Man, I couldn't believe my eyes. I had to go right down to deck level to get away from two Spitfires that were chasing me. I had no ammo. left and God knows where my Number Two had lost himself. I was making a tight turn to try to shake them off, when one of them grazed a tree on top of a hummock, and crashed. I saw the pilot get out, unhurt.' He paused and shook his head in disbelief. 'Another 109 app
eared from nowhere and gave him a burst. The poor swine was blasted right off his feet, flung ten metres up in the air…riddled. Is that necessary? If a man gets away with it, good luck to him; he's out of the fight until he gets in an aeroplane again and can shoot back. But shooting a pilot on the ground...that's sheer viciousness. It's murder.'
Ihlefeld put his arm about Hafner's shoulders. 'I know how you feel old boy. I wasn't going to say anything about this, because it's bad for morale; but I'll tell you, now. I saw one of ours shooting up a Tommy who'd baled out, yesterday. The poor devil was drifting down at two thousand metres, when this brave comrade of ours lined him up in his sights and let him have it; right through the body; he just burst apart. I don't mind telling you, I nearly puked.'
'God! I'm not surprised. Did anyone else see it?'
'Must have.'
'Hell! We can expect the same from the Tommies, then. What a damned idiotic thing to do.'
Cunningham and his friend Webb had just shot down a Do. 17 between them. As the crew were scrambling out the bomber exploded, killing them all. Cunningham felt as though he had been reborn, so great was his delight: the exultation of victory had made him great with glee, and now this dramatic thunder burst of sound and bright colours filled him with ecstasy. Why the hell should they get away with it? Look what they were doing to England with their bombs.
He yelled at Webb on the radio, some incoherent phrase that startled the other: he saw him turn and raise a hand in acknowledgement.
Webb was a few yards in front of him and they raced together into the heart of the
bomber formation again. The dog fighting developed in its usual pattern: a sprawl all over the sky, bunches of aircraft suddenly breaking up, scattering, melting away.
There came a moment when a Hurricane, in flames, dropped ahead of them in an inverted spin. They both saw the pilot fall clear and his canopy open. An Me. 109 instantly opened fire and shot away the parachute, sending the British pilot down to a cruel end, with many seconds in which to contemplate it.
It was Webb this time who screamed some incomprehensible message over the R/T. His voice choked off suddenly and Cunningham knew that, like himself, he was heaving up the contents of his stomach. There was a foul smell of vomit in his oxygen mask and he impatiently unfastened it and pushed it aside, then wiped his face with his sleeve.
They saw two more parachutes and heeled over in a tight turn towards them. These they would protect. Then they saw that the men attached to the parachutes were both Germans.
Webb pulled away, but Cunningham drove deliberately at the nearer of the enemy airmen and carried away his shroud lines with his wingtip. He saw the German's face turned to him, screaming. He banked and made for the other parachute and destroyed it also in the same way.
Then he began to tremble so much that his hands on the control column made the Hurricane wallow and his feet set it yawing.
What had he done? What had he become in those few moments? Everything that he believed in had deserted him. All the principles that had been bred into him had vanished in an instant. He retched again and again. A slimy mess dribbled down his chin. His Mae West and shirt were fouled. The gaudy scarf around his neck stank of filth. He began to blubber.
He forgot that he had to fly this aeroplane. He let it take him wherever it would. And then he felt the pressure of 'G' crushing him, his head rolling wildly, and found himself in a steep corkscrew dive. He jerked himself back to immediacy, pulled the stick back and blacked out His hand moved on the throttle, the aircraft lurched. He came back to full consciousness whirling around in a spin. He straightened out, wiped his eyes and looked wildly around.
A stream of tracer tore past overhead and his eyes turned in shock to the mirror. A Hurricane just behind him was rocking its wings. It dived past and Webb waved at him to follow.
When they landed, Cunningham sat in his cockpit for a minute or two, resting his head on his arms. His rigger, standing on the wing, leaning over the cockpit, was full of solicitude. 'Air sick, sir? Come on out of it, then; we'll soon clean it up: I'll get some water for you to wash before you go to the crew room.'
When he clambered down to the ground, Webb was waiting for him. 'Sorry to scare you, but I thought you'd gone to sleep. I fired over your head to wake you up.'
Cunningham said nothing and they walked in silence towards Herrick.
Neither of them mentioned the two Germans.
That night they both got reeling drunk; for the first time in their lives. Webb blamed himself because his friend was drinking himself into a stupor. He knew that it was because Cunningham was filled with remorse; he had been on the brink of killing the two parachuting airmen himself, and felt now that he had been disloyal to a comrade in letting him do it on his own and carry the whole burden of guilt.
Early in the morning Knight and Sgt. Wilkins were scrambled to intercept an unidentified aircraft. They caught up with it over the Channel; a Junkers 88. They shot it down.
As they crossed the Kent coast on their way home, antiaircraft batteries opened fire.
Knight broke left. Wilkins broke right and a shell hit him square amidships. Knight heard the explosion and turned hard to look for his wing man. All he could see was a billow of smoke, out of which fluttered a few scarcely recognisable pieces of Hurricane.
He yelled into his microphone, reporting the guns' mistake to the Operations Room. His first intention was to tempt the battery to identify by firing at him. He'd shew the bloody fools: he'd go down and blast them out of their snug sandbagged emplacements.
The controller's voice came calmly, ordering him to return to base immediately. He must have shouted some unguarded threat in his rage. He ignored the controller and dived to ground level, streaking out to sea again. He knew where some of the gun positions were in this area, and deliberately made three passes shooting at the first three he saw. Even if none of these had fired at Wilkins and him, they would soon spread the word to their trigger-happy chums. And if he were accused of a grave breach of discipline, he would claim that he had been firing at a low-flying enemy aircraft which the gunners had failed to spot.
On mid-morning the war struck for the first time at the very heart of R.A.F. East Malford.
All the deaths and injuries of the weeks gone by had been shared by everyone and the sense of involvement was complete.
But, however harrowing and sad, the killing and the wounding and the capturing had been experienced at second hand.
First hand involvement in the battle came when, one bright morning, eighteen Ju. 87 Stukas dive-bombed the station, fifteen Heinkels dropped their high explosives and incendiaries from ten thousand feet, and Me. 109s swarmed in to strafe with machine-gun and cannon fire.
Warning of the approaching raid came too late. The radar stations detected large enemy formations approaching the coast, but had no indication of their target. It was only when some of the raiders altered course that the Group Controller deduced that East Malford was the objective. Most of the other R.A.F. stations in the south had been attacked recently and East Malford's turn was long overdue.
Eighty-two Squadron were already airborne, scrambled to intercept the raid when it first appeared on the radar screens. Now, urgent scramble orders were given to 172 and 699.
Pilots rushed towards every available aircraft, whether it was on the operational roster or a reserve. The twelve men who had been detailed to fly on the next sortie had their own aeroplanes to run to; in addition, there were eight or ten pilots and four or five Hurricanes spare on each squadron. The most alert of the pilots beat their comrades in the race and left them, disappointed, to take shelter in slit trenches.
Knight, pelting at full stretch towards 'E' was overtaken by Blakeney-Smith. He saw Cunningham stumble and fall, and Webb trip over him; but both were up in a trice and in full stride again.
The air was reverberating with the thunder of hastily started Merlin engines. Dust flew from the propeller wash.
Knight, loo
king to his left, saw an airman stagger as he ran forward, doubled over, to pull the chocks away from Webb's aircraft. The man put out his arms to save himself, then automatically straightened. The tip of Webb's propeller blade sliced through him, carving his head, shoulder and one arm from his body. A fountain of blood gushed into the air and the mutilated corpse collapsed.
Knight felt a stab of pity for the youngster in the other Hurricane's cockpit. He switched on his transmitter and called urgently 'Roddy! Don't hang around. Get cracking, man. Get cracking.' As he gunned his own machine away he saw Webb move joltingly forward.
Hurricanes were racing across the field, taking off up-wind, down-wind and across wind. There was a brilliant flash as two met almost head on and fused in a tangle of metal. Smoke and flames were followed by an explosion.
More incandescent bursts off lame, eruptions of smoke, scattered clods of earth, as bombs fell.
Maxwell saw Blakeney-Smith's Hurricane soar into the air before any of the others. He himself was close behind. He sped after the attackers, opening fire on a Stuka at extreme range as soon as it came into his sights.
Harmon muttered angrily to himself as he clawed for height with the throttle pushed through the gate; he hated to torture machinery, and his engine was not yet warm enough to take these high revolutions without damage. He cursed the bombers and picked one off at the moment it was about to release its load: it disappeared in a pall of smoke and metal shards.
Massey, who had been delayed by an engine that wouldn't start, looked down and saw Dunal leaving the ground only a hundred feet beneath him. A bomb exploded ten yards from the Frenchman. He saw Dunal's Hurricane flung onto its back. A second later it ploughed in and buried itself deep in the turf, burning.
Summer of No Surrender Page 15
