The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  They were not needed over the weekend so they decided to try to find Walt Foote, who had served with them in France and Italy. Foote was from Boston and the telephone operator looked up a variety of Footes before finally coming up with a Walter C Foote, in Chestnut Street, off Bunker Hill.

  ‘Best part of town,’ the operator said. ‘You want I should call him?’

  Dicken’s voice was greeted with a yell of delight.

  ‘Jesus, Mae! It’s Dick Quinney and Willie Hatto! They’re here in America!’

  The following day a roadster as long as an ocean liner drew up outside the hotel and Foote, Dicken and Hatto started doing a gloat dance on the steps to the amazement of Foote’s wife and two children.

  ‘Meet the Feete,’ Foote grinned, waving at them. ‘How’s Parasol Percy? Anybody strangled him yet?’ His face clouded. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that guy,’ he said slowly. ‘I swear he killed my brother with his goddam orders. It’s a long time ago now but he still sticks in my craw.’

  He was working in the law department of one of the big American firms doing business in China and was interested to hear that Dicken had just come from there.

  ‘What’s it like? They’re talking of sending me to Hong Kong. Me and Mae and the whole family. It’d sure make a change from here. What are you doing in the States, anyway?’

  ‘Staff course,’ Dicken pointed out. ‘It seemed a good opportunity to come to America and dig out my wife. She’s over here.’

  ‘Bring her round and meet the folks.’

  Dicken frowned. ‘I have to find her first,’ he said.

  ‘America’s a goddam big country.’ Foote shrugged. ‘But we can try. I’ve got a little Waco I fly so I’ll ask around the airfield. Somebody’s bound to know something.’

  Their duties with the United States Air Force started the following day when they took a train to the army airfield from where they set out in two Curtiss two-seaters for Washington. Dicken’s pilot commented that he’d heard of his exploits during the war and, clearly intending to show him that the United States could produce pilots too, took, off in a steep climbing turn that was so near a stall it took Dicken’s breath away. Flying along Long Island, he dived boldly over the Bronx and into the centre of Manhattan, skimming along Central Park at a height well below the towering hotels and apartment blocks on either side, then zoomed up to roar over more high blocks of offices to look down on the grid pattern of the city, before descending over the Battery and flying at fifty feet above the waters of Upper Bay towards the Statue of Liberty, circling it so closely it was possible to see the faces of sightseers on the observation platform in the hollow head staring out through the open eyes. Holding his breath, Dicken wondered what would have happened to an RAF officer who had done such a thing over London.

  In Washington, they were received by the Chief of the Air Staff who offered transport anywhere they wished to go and the following day they flew to an airfield where an experimental station had been set up with an incredible thing called a wind tunnel, which enabled the engineers to watch the behaviour of air as it passed over the wings of aircraft in flight. From there they flew on to the Naval Air Station at Hampton Roads, then over the Shenandoah Valley to Dayton. Dicken’s pilot was more than pleased to allow him to handle the controls.

  They were given night flights over Dayton in a Curtiss piloted by an Army Air Corps lieutenant called Doolittle, who held one of the low-numbers in the licences which American pilots now needed to pilot a plane. Short in stature but with the build of an athlete and a ready smile, Doolittle already had a reputation as a daredevil and had been the first man to perform an outside loop. He was an expert instrument flier, however, and, despite his smile, was a serious aeronautical scientist, contemptuous of the old-fashioned seat-of-the-pants fliers who relied on their senses to tell them the altitudes of their machines. He had won the Schneider Trophy races in 1925 and no air race meeting in the States was complete without him.

  It was in Detroit that they met Rickenbacker, the American pilot who had been most successful in France. A tall, hawkfaced balding man who had originally been a motor racing driver, he had turned his hand since the war to designing cars and aeroplane engines and had produced one of the first ever small planes with landing flaps and a tail wheel, flying it a distance of 220 miles in two and a half hours on twelve gallons of petrol.

  ‘You could land in a cow pasture,’ he claimed, ‘fold the wings back, disconnect the propeller and drive it off like a car, because it had a two-speed transmission.’

  Like other ex-wartime fliers he had since started an airline flying mail at the rate of three dollars a mile per pound.

  ‘We pushed up the income,’ he grinned, ‘by sending each other wet blotters, but some of the boys began to grow greedy and sent wrapped house bricks and a postal inspector spotted them.’

  Also in Detroit, they visited the factory of Henry Ford, who had recently turned his attention from motoring to flying, and had produced an all-metal tri-motored monoplane popularly known as The Tin Goose. He was dissatisfied with the power plants he was having to fit.

  ‘I’m looking for an engine which will do as much for flying as the four-stroke I put in the Model-T,’ he said. ‘Something revolutionary. Neat. Simple. Without the untidiness of a propeller.’

  ‘Without a propeller?’

  Ford smiled. ‘You ever seen a blown-up balloon released by a child?’ he asked. ‘It flies – a bit erratically, I guess, but it flies – because of the jet of air coming through the neck. With that sort of power, we’d need something better than the Trimotor, but give me the power and I’ll produce the airplane. Right now, we fly as quietly and as carefully as we can because folk regard flying as dangerous and it’s our policy to get ’em to look on it as safe and normal before we offer ’em something exciting.’

  They seemed to see aircraft everywhere – some of them new and of original design – and American enthusiasm showed in the gay colours of the Orioles, Wacos, Swallows and Jennies which gave the impression that there were a great many eager young men trying to wrest a living from them. After the more stolid approach of Britain, it was like a breath of fresh air. In the States, even the law was less demanding – perhaps even a little more dangerous – but the freedom to fly and build was implicit in the very numbers, and the newspapers gave flying sensational publicity, making it sound less technical and more exciting than British newspapers.

  American air force pilots were bounding with enthusiasm and professionalism but they longed to have an air force like the RAF, freed from the dead hand of the army, which, they claimed with some heat, was even deader in the States than it was in the United Kingdom. From a purely technical point, the trip was an eye-opener, with engine starters, operable from the cockpits, brakes, and night landing lights, none of which had yet appeared in the Royal Air Force, but the pilots claimed their organisation was hidebound and they were lagging behind in radio direction and operational control.

  Back in New York, they tried Foote again. He sounded delighted. ‘Got her,’ he said at once. ‘She’s still in Baltimore.’

  ‘What’s she doing in Baltimore?’

  ‘She’s taking part in the air races there.’

  ‘Zoë?’

  ‘Sure. Everybody who wants to be anybody in flying has to have a go at the races. But that’s not all. She’s aiming to fly in the Dufee Derby!’

  ‘What the hell’s the Dufee Derby?’

  ‘It’s a repeat of the Dole Derby.’

  ‘And what the hell was that?’

  ‘A guy called Dole, who was president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, offered twenty-five thousand dollars for the first man to cross from North America to Honolulu non-stop. A hell of a lot of people died and there was an uproar in the press. Eventually things quietened down some, and now this guy, Ryan Dufee, has started it all
up again. Like Dole, he says it’s because he believes Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic’s the forerunner of transpacific air transportation, but I guess he’s also got his eye on free publicity, because he’s made it a race by offering ten thousand for the second place. They’re due off in August.’

  ‘Zoë couldn’t find her way round the other side of a hill, Walt, let alone to Honolulu.’

  Foote laughed. ‘Hell, man, she’s not flying alone!’

  ‘She’s not?’

  ‘Hell, no! There’s a guy flying with her. He built the plane and he’s got a lot of experience. Guy called Casey Harmer.’

  Six

  So Casey Harmer had come back into Zoë’s life.

  It explained her long silences and her eagerness to get back to the States. Casey Harmer had first appeared in England from Canada about 1917 and after the war, Zoë had shot off to Canada as if the hounds of hell were after her in search of the job he’d promised – perhaps also Harmer himself. Now, after nine years, he appeared to be back in circulation.

  A bundle of aviation magazines arrived the following morning from Foote. They included articles on women pilots and there was more than one on Zoë alone, together with photographs, invariably depicting her leaning on a wing strut or against a propeller, wearing a flying helmet and the bug-eyed goggles that were so popular. Her normal dress appeared to be jodhpurs or white overalls and her name was mentioned in the same breath with Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Thea Rasche and Ruth Elder, though always it seemed, tagging a little behind the others. Male aviation seemed almost lost in the publicity.

  Needing to know more about her, Dicken began to enquire round the hangars. The response was predictable.

  ‘Hell,’ one pilot said with a grin, ‘that one sure is a looker.’

  It seemed to be time to look her up and Dicken started making plans to go to the Baltimore air races. There were two clear weeks at the end of the course when they were free to do as they wished and as Hatto had disappeared to Washington to visit his Foreign Office brother who was at that moment with the Embassy there, Dicken persuaded Doolittle to fly him down.

  As they landed, in one corner of the airfield as part of the ballyhoo, an air display was taking place and several elderly machines stood in a flag-enclosed area. A man in a straw hat and yellow boots was collecting entrance money near a notice, ‘Hank Rabat will positively stand upright without support on the top wing of an aeroplane.’

  A machine was just climbing over the end of the field and a patch of undoped fabric rippled in the slipstream. One wingtip looked like a bandaged thumb, and there were several tears in the fabric of the fuselage that had been crudely sewn up, but the pilot wore the usual tight-fitting helmet with fluttering ribbons, and big bug-eyed goggles.

  ‘This is why I spend so much time with the science of the game,’ Doolittle explained. ‘Rabat loops a Ford Trimotor, though what the hell good that does, I don’t know. These guys are on their way out. Flying’s becoming respectable since they issued licences and they’re finding it harder every year now the government’s watching. An inspection would finish most of ’em, I guess.’

  A band, flat straw boaters on the backs of their heads, their jackets discarded to show red, white and blue sleeve bands, were thumping out a tune and a few people in flivvers were watching, nervously expectant, chewing at chicken legs and cold fried chops and scattering their newspapers and wrappings to the breeze.

  ‘Eventually, I guess,’ Doolittle said dryly, ‘somebody’ll change planes, wing to wing, and if they miss and fall nobody’ll give a damn. These guys aren’t aviators; they’re trapeze artists. Tomorrow, there’ll probably be six-inch headlines in the papers, “Plane Plows Into Crowd. Six Dead.” That sort of thing.’

  With almost thirty events, the programme included several cross-country races terminating over the field, and a woman pilots’ race round a course marked by three pylons. Somewhere near the finish Dicken had a feeling he would find Zoë.

  As he searched for her, to his surprise, he bumped into Udet, a little fatter than before, a little balder, but smiling as always and clutching a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘Udlinger!’

  ‘Dicken Quinney!’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Stunts.’ Udet grinned, led the way into a shabby office where his flying gear was piled on a chair and dragged out a flask. ‘You must come and visit me in Berlin,’ he said as he filled glasses. ‘The Tauentzienstrasse isn’t as good as the Place Pigalle in Paris but Berlin’s always good for entertainment.’

  ‘I’d like to see Lo again.’

  Udet gave him a sad smile. ‘That is over,’ he admitted. ‘It vas my fault, I think. Someone once asked her why she left me. She said, “I left him? You don’t know what you’re talking about. I couldn’t ever keep up with him.” I am here because in Germany things have changed. All is too much political. It iss bad now. I am glad to get avay.’

  Underneath his smiles there seemed to be a worry at the way Germany was heading and he had nothing but scorn for her rulers. Assassination, it seemed, was the order of the day and the political parties contained every creed imaginable, while an ex-Serviceman’s party known as the Stahlhelm, largely ex-officers and NCOs, could not forget that they had been chased through the streets after the defeat in 1918 and had their epaulettes torn from their shoulders by the parties of the extreme Left.

  ‘The German people long for a leader,’ Udet said, refilling the glasses. ‘Any leader. But they don’t know who, because there’s nobody who’s an obvious choice.’

  He made no bones about the fact that German airmen were being trained in secret under a variety of disguises – and had been for years – on the banks of the Voronezh in Russia.

  ‘And, of course, we are building aeroplanes,’ he admitted.

  The army, he explained, had provided the pretext for a large scale provision of funds by German industrialists. With the French army occupying the Ruhr and clearly not intending to leave, they had said that the only way for Germany to regain its industrial strength was to drive them out, and the industrialists, realising what the prizes could be, had found the money. Fokker aircraft – ironically powered by British Napier Lion engines – had been acquired from Holland, and young Germans in civilian clothes were being sent off with forged passports to learn to fly them. For the look of the thing, Russian machines were dispersed about the airfield and Russian soldiers provided the guards.

  ‘But everything comes from Germany,’ Udet continued. ‘Shipped from Stettin to Leningrad. The machines are in crates, and bombs are smuggled across the Baltic in small boats. Vhen there are accidents and bodies haf to be brought home they come in cases labelled “engine parts”.’

  He gestured with the whisky flask. ‘They tried to get me as Chief Flying Instructor,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m making too much money in my own vay and I don’t like uniforms. On the other hand–’ the old familiar grin came ‘–they do vell with the girls.’

  ‘Do the German people know all this?’ Dicken asked.

  ‘But of course, my friend. And they are proud of it. Germany is air-minded in a way that the English have forgotten. Didn’t ve make a public ceremony of the return of the Rittmeister from his grave in France? Thousands turned up. I was there myself. So was President von Hindenburg, several senior officers and many of his old eagles. There are a lot who would like to see the Richthofen Geschwader flying again. And it will.’

  ‘How?’

  Udet shrugged. ‘We teach the liddle boys to glide. There’s nothing in the Versailles peace terms that say ve mustn’t have non-powered aircraft and you can learn a lot about flying in a glider. Enough to move quickly, when the time comes, on to powered aircraft. And Lufthansa, the airline, is run by a type called Erhard Milch, who was a flier during the war. They are good. Even your RAF uses their blind a
pproach system. Goering vorks for them, too, and he and Milch are like that.’ Udet held up two fingers. ‘They’re in it up to here.’ Udet’s hand went to the top of his head. ‘Goering is surrounding himself with fliers und he is telling them “to cherish hatred for the British and the French”. Between them, they are picking the cream of the German youth, and civilian air liners can become bombers just like that.’ His fingers clicked. He leaned closer. ‘Do you know Heinkel has a machine mit a 750-horse BMW engine that is faster than the RAF’s latest fighter?’

  ‘I expect we know about it,’ Dicken said, doubting it even as he spoke.

  Udet smiled. ‘You don’t behave as if you do. Our politicians don’t. Only this Bavarian ex-corporal, Hitler, who runs the National Socialists. And him I don’t trust. I use his picture as a target for pistol practice.’ His smile had changed to a frown.

  ‘He talks already of war. Und how he talks! I’ve heard him. He doesn’t believe in conciliation, understanding und world peace. Next time, you see, he von’t have to do the fighting, and politicians are always good at going in for wars when they don’t have to wage them. But his aims are for a greater Germany and, I, my friend, am a German and vill do vhat I can to help. There is something here today you must see. During the war did you never notice that vhen you strafed our trenches you aimed your bombs by aiming the airplane? The American Marines have developed that as a technique. In 1919 they discovered they could hit a target more often by diving low at an angle of forty-five degrees, and they began to use it to deal mit the uprisings in Haiti and Santo Domingo. Last year a detachment was cut off in Nicaragua and their DH4s drove the enemy away by this dive-bombing. Such methods could win a war.’

  ‘Which war?’

  ‘The next one.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  Udet gave him a wide grin. ‘Sooner than you think, my old friend. If you take the trouble to look, you’ll notice that the Nazis are on the move. The streets of Berlin are full of SA men and if you listen carefully you’ll hear what they’re saying.’