Air Strike

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “Cracker” Beale, Wing Commander Flying, sat next to the squadron Intelligence officer and eyed the pilots and their navigators with his habitual expression of stupefied incredulity. He was called Cracker behind his burly back because “Let’s have a crack at it” and “Cracking good show” were his two most frequent utterances. This florid, porcine bachelor, who had won three well-merited decorations for gallantry - D.S.O., D.F.C. and bar - was, despite his aggressively virile attitude and turn of speech, almost totally innocent of sexual experience; for he was morbidly shy. His comrades in arms were awestruck by his phenomenal bravery, attributing his coolness under fire to calculated disregard for danger. The truth was that his mental reactions were so much slower than his physical ones that it was only long after he had instinctively taken the right action to avoid flak or fighters that he realised the extent of the peril through which he had flown; if he ever did notice it at all.

  Standing by the entrance to the Briefing Room, greeting the returned aviators with such phrases as “Thank God you’re back safely, Jim bach,” “Praise the Lord you made it, boyo” and “The ‘and of God was over you today, Tommy” was the wing chaplain, Squadron Leader Ianto’ Parry-Jones; tipsy in the heat after his elevenses of a mug or two of rough local red wine, which had inflamed the gin left in his system from the previous night’s conviviality in the officers’ and sergeants’ messes, both of which he frequented every evening. Padre Parry-Jones was stunted, hirsute, voluble, insufficiently washed and a born tippler. His presence was tolerated at briefings and de-briefings as a demonstration of his loudly proclaimed creed of practical Christianity: which meant drinking with the boys, swearing with the boys and going whoring with the boys. Although he drew the line at actually joining his hairy little frame in sexual congress. He hoped to learn about their temptations by sharing them, and to influence them by establishing a proper man-to-man relationship with them. None of your namby-pamby, wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed, holier-than­thou sermonising for this evangelist from the valleys. He had been a much better serum half and featherweight boxer than he was ever likely to be as a parson, but the obtuse Wing Commander Beale regarded him as a good type of muscular Christian and was quite touched by his frequent attendances at the Briefing Room.

  The Intelligence officers never failed to put under lock and key the stone flagon of rum which was in their care, at the first sound of the clergyman’s arrival; even before his unfailing, genial enquiry on entering: “You’ll be giving the lads a tot of rum after this one, then, I expect, boyo?” A rum ration was issued to crews only after a particularly tough operation and in very cold weather. On such occasions the Intelligence staff took good care to make every man sign for his ration so that they could account to higher authority for the consumption of every drop. The Rev. Parry-Jones was still trying to find a way to beat the system, but meanwhile never gave up trying to scrounge a tot.

  This morning, his pious welcomes uttered, he sidled around the table at the far end of the room, to stand behind Wg. Cdr. Beale, muttering an occasional “Bl-l-o-o-d-d-y ‘ell”, or “Sod-ding flak” as he listened to the crews describing the attack on Taf.

  The squadron commander, Sqdn. Ldr. Grimes, broke off his report to give him a dirty look; but it was like bouncing peas off the hide of a rhino.

  Lord John Grimes, younger son of the Marquess of Grimston, bore the undeserved nickname of “Grubby” for the obvious associative and alliterative reasons. He enjoyed a large private fortune and had therefore belonged to the Auxiliary Air Force before the war. His tunics were lined with primrose silk, the colour affected by the auxiliary squadron in which he had served, and he flew with a yellow silk scarf at his throat. When in blue uniform, he wore yellow, instead of the regulation black, socks. He had been to Balliol, was a Catholic and cherished a strange distaste for the Welsh padre, of whom he thought as “that scrofulous, heretical little charlatan”. Deprived, during the Mediterranean summers, of his yellow-silk-lined blues, he further flouted regulations by having miniature pilot’s wings embroidered on his khaki shirts, which would have been intolerably bad form in anyone else, and wore hand­made suede desert boots from the Burlington Arcade. He refused to wear badges of rank with his khaki drill on the ground that everyone knew who he was anyway.

  Grimes went on: “My navigator reported that two aircraft were shot down on our run in...”

  “God rest their souls,” chanted Rev. Parry-Jones with a smothered hiccup.

  “... and I saw one of them myself, in flames, just before it went into the sea...’’

  “God have mercy on the poor boyos.”

  “I scored hits with all my rockets.” He glanced at his navigator for confirmation. “We blew the stern off an E­boat with our first pair. We put the rest into a merchantman of about two thousand tons that was moored in the middle of the harbour. They were all on the waterline and we left her listing badly. My Numbers Two and Three finished her off.”

  “Bl-1-ood-dy Jerries.”

  Grimes scowled.”D’you mind reserving your interjections until we’ve finished the entire de-briefing, Padre?”

  Wg. Cdr. Beale gave him a look of astonishment, as though he had desecrated the cloth.

  “All right, John boyo, but I’m with you in all this heart and soul, you know.”

  “Quod di omen avertant,” murmured Grimes, flourishing the rags of his classical Oxonian education.

  “What’s that, John?” called the group captain, stroking his scrotum through the thin material of his shorts’ pockets.

  “‘May the gods avert this’, sir.”

  Ianto Parry-Jones looked hurt and took a pace back, to lean against the wall: not only as an act of self-effacement but also because gin and red wine were making his head spin in the heat. “Dhu!” he murmured dazedly.

  “Padre means well, you know.”

  “If he’s so interested, sir, we could always take him on an op.”

  Mason gave an embarrassed laugh. He was by no means in awe of the peerage, having rubbed shoulders with them for five years at Harrow and tanned their bottoms what’s more. But it was his job to see fair play, he was thinking, and both Grubby Grimes and the God-botherer could be leprously derogatory about each other without actually saying anything overtly offensive, if he let this situation develop. He himself had no religious axe to grind. He was an agnostic. He couldn’t care less if the Catholic Grimes and the Protestant Parry-Jones wanted to have a go at each other. What he should really do was tell them they were both interrupting the briefing. But that wouldn’t do, because it would be rebuking the squadron commander in front of his inferiors in rank. So he said “Sorry to interrupt the de-briefing, Hargreaves. Please carry on.” Implying that he himself was to blame.

  The Intelligence officer smirked and went on with his interrogation. The group captain was really too much. He fancied him strongly. That combination of lambent skin and rapacious whiskers. Too much. Groupie made him weak at the knees and aquiver at the crotch, bless him. Flt. Lt. Hargreaves thought, too, that his lordship Grubby had put the squalid little proletarian bible-basher in his place.

  The story of the attack unfolded, uninterrupted except by a stifled giggle from Flt. Lt. Hargreaves.

  When it was over, he said “We’ll have the photographs this afternoon. Then we can see exactly what happened.”

  Cracker Beale wanted more: “It’s the photographs the P.R. types’ll take next week that I want to see. Is Jerry going to have another crack at assembling a convoy at Taf? Are they really going to re-fuel U-boats there?”

  Middleton had a view on that. “We’ll known soon enough if either happens, without having to wait for photographs. Never mind Taf, Wrack and Ruin and all the other islands we have to nip in and out of will be bristling with more flak batteries. Anyone going within range of any of ‘em will get shot up.”

  “Not necessarily,” Hargreaves argued. “They might lie doggo, to bluff us.”

  Tindall, however, agreed with his pilot. It was, anyway
, a matter of principle with him to do so. “Bluff would be too subtle for the Jerries. If they use Taf again as an assembly point or try to sneak a U-boat in they’re bound to get trigger happy.”

  Middleton asked “Get trigger happy? You didn’t think they were trigger happy today?” There was laughter.

  Tindall conceded “I should have said they ‘II get trigger happy again.”

  ‘Wg. Cdr. Beale had a theory to offer. “We could have a crack at a night op. With flares.”

  There was an astounded silence as twenty experienced pilots and navigators, the group captain and the Intelligence officer let this sink in.

  Presently Grimes spoke for them all: “God Almighty!”

  “No bloody blasphemy, John bach, if you don’t soddin’ mind.”

  “We’d better think about that one some more, Arthur,” Group Captain Shaw said to his Wing Commander Flying. “Carry on, chaps.”

  Dismissed, the crews drifted towards their messes under the brilliant Italian sun. They all slept in tents on the hillside and the officers messed in a large requisitioned house. The sergeants’ mess was an arrangement of interconnected Nissen huts which was in some ways more convenient. The whole camp was spread on a grassy slope above the airfield, facing the sea a mile away.

  Tindall was brooding on Beale’s latest imbecility. “D’you think Cracker really meant that, George?”

  Middleton had no doubts. “He’s dim enough for anything. Anyway, why not? He’d have to lead personally, and if he hit a hill or a tree on the way in, and killed himself, at least it would show the rest of us how much height we needed.”

  This amused Tindall. “You’re a callous bugger, George.”

  “Not at all. Fair’s fair. People who dream up crazy stunts should prove they can be done. I’m not against a night op. as long as the wingco leads, and kills himself first.”

  “I thought I saw a nasty gleam in Grubby’s eye when Cracker came out with that daft idea.”

  “He probably had the same thought as I did: let the blasted wingco lead the way.”

  “Perhaps he was thinking of inviting the padre along. He’d rather get rid of him than the wingco.”

  “He wouldn’t want the padre as a passenger.”

  “No, but the wingco’d take him: he admires the little clot.”

  “He’d change his mind as soon as Ianto started singing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ when thing started getting hot.”

  The notion amused them both and they elaborated on it until they joined the rest of the officers in the bar. The crews who had been on the morning’s operation were dissecting it again. Casualties of seventeen per cent, and four other aircraft hit, had left the survivors feeling elated at their good fortune. Voices were loud and faces flushed as the iced beer went down and they relived the excitement of seeing their rockets strike home and the freighters, barges, tugs and E-boats catch fire, capsize or founder.

  The members of the other two squadrons, the Wellington crews and Spitfire pilots, asked many questions and made more or less insulting comments.

  After lunch everyone went to the beach. The padre found few takers, as usual, when he offered lifts in his pick-up van. Tommy Tindall spoke for most of them when he said “You may be ready to meet your Maker, Padre, but I’m not. I’d rather walk.” For the clergyman drove like a fiend, frequently on the wrong side of the road, oblivious of bends and intersections. He talked all the time and paid more attention to his audience than to his driving.

  Group Captain Mason floated on his back in the warm, shallow water, his moustache trailing like seaweed.

  Wing Commander Beale, full of adolescent enthusiasm, tossed a football into the sea with a rallying cry: “Come on, chaps, get cracking, officers v. sergeants.” He had made the P.T. flight-sergeant improvise goals out of oil drums, tethered to lumps of concrete and joined by a crossbar, and a travesty of water polo, with local rules, had become obligatory. Most people found it exhausting and the miserable majority suffered much ducking and bruising at the hands of a minority of robust swimmers who had played proper water polo and became too worked up about the whole business. But it kept Cracker Beale quiet and he enjoyed being toughly tackled and pushed under; which even the worst swimmers could do, and enjoyed doing.

  The padre, with a quart of beer inside him on top of the mid-morning’s red wine, slept in the shade of a derelict beach kiosk, his hairy, thin shanks pedalling galvanically now and then as he dreamed of heaven knew what dazzling side-steps and dummies at Cardiff Arms Park, with the English left standing.

  Jocelyn Hargreaves, glistening with a coating of the lotion he mixed himself, to guard his mottled skin against ultra-violet rays, sun bathed and eyed the swimmers. He anointed his tall, plump body with a concoction of olive oil, to promote a tan, cheap Italian gin to aid evaporation, and citronella to make himself smell alluring. In fact, the olive oil caused him to burn, the gin merely gave off fumes which induced a certain intoxicated euphoria; and the citronella was as repellent to sexual advances as it was to mosquitoes: not that there was anyone on the wing who would have made them.

  The Beaufighter crews, released from duty, could disport themselves as long as they wished but he would have to return to duty soon with Groupie and that terrifying Wingco Flying and the rest of those who had administrative duties. Meanwhile he lay in the sun, on the sand, pining for bygone happier days when he fluttered and fluted to his heart’s content around the interior decorating studio in Chelsea he shared with his partner and flat-mate, Rollo; who, lucky old bitch, had a weak heart which exempted him from the call-up. Perhaps even more than Rollo and the studio he missed the weekly parades of his Boy Scout troop and the two divine weeks of summer camping (sic). Now he searched the sea for Shagger Mason’s bobbing head, admired the bodies of the most graceful among his comrades and sighed wistfully. It was all right for them, the dear butch things; plenty of spare around town for the picking up; but as for him, he might as well still be in the desert. Italy abounded with luscious boys who looked like Botticelli angels, but he shuddered at the thought of the possibilities for blackmail to which an involvement with one of them would expose him. They would come whining for much more than the caramelle and sigarette for which they pursued anyone in British or American uniform; and there would be grasping parents and angry big brothers to reckon with too. It was a hard war.

  Afrona, with its hundred thousand inhabitants, a minor seaport and industrial centre, lay only five miles to the south of the airfield. The wing, comprising a squadron each of Beaufighters, Wellington bombers and Spitfires, operated from a single runway parallel to the coast and separated from the sea only by a main road, a few rows of houses and the wide beach. Those who had fought in North Africa found life in Italy quite luxurious. Those who had come straight from England enjoyed the climate and the abundance of easily available girls who would oblige for a few cakes of soap, bars of chocolate or packets of cigarettes. A blanket or an old battledress was the highest price one had to pay for their favours. Sometimes one had to pay in another way too, for the Service V.D. clinics were never idle.

  Group Captain Shaw emerged from the water and said thrillingly “Time to go back to camp. I’ll give you a lift, Hargreaves.”

  The Intelligence officer scampered obediently into the Adriatic and splashed merrily for a minute or two, to remove the oil.

  Wing Commander Beale towelled himself briskly, puffing stertorously, muttering “Must get cracking with some inter-squadron water polo and get a swimming gala organised. Damn good for esprit de corps.”

  The squadron Medical Officer, Flight Lieutenant Grummit, who was officially entitled to a motor cycle to take him to remote detachments on radar sites and the like, came roaring along the sands in his swimming trunks, a happily screaming Italian cutie on the pillion, hugging him tightly, in a bathing costume he had obtained for her by lancing a carbuncle on the shopkeeper’s buttock.

  Fortunately for Grummit the group captain drove off with the wing commander and
Hargreaves as he arrived, and did not see him. Shagger Mason was something of a disciplinarian, and Service petrol was not to be wasted on giving joyrides to civilians. Also, if he had observed the young doctor he would instantly have made advances to his girl, and with the advantage of his rank would no doubt at least have borrowed her favours if not alienated them entirely.

  Middleton and the rest of the pilots and navigators who had made the attack that morning told Grummit to stop making that damned row and fell asleep. Reaction had set in and they were thinking they were lucky to be alive. They were also thinking that they would have to go through the same experience again tomorrow or the next day. And again after that, if they survived.

  Middleton’s last thought before dozing off was that this war had become monotonous. Too predictable. He’d like some leave, but if he couldn’t have any at least a change of some sort would be refreshing.

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