The Breaking Wave

by Nevil Shute

  I knew nothing about this at the time, of course; I only knew I hadn’t had an answer to my letter. By the time that might have troubled me I was back on operations in the R.A.F. and I had closer and more intimate troubles and excitements of my own to occupy my mind.

  I dropped a rank to Squadron Leader and got away from Fighter Command in September 1944, and went to Aston Down to convert on to Typhoons. I can’t say that I liked the new machine with its thick wings and its enormous Sabre engine, but the day of the Spitfire was practically over in Europe. In that last stage of the war the Luftwaffe was better equipped than we were and our fighters and our fighter bombers were having a rough time in France; the Focke-Wulf Ta. 152 was a better fighter than anything we had till the Tempest became operational, and in the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter they were streets ahead of us, though this machine was reported to be killing more Germans than English in its first months of operations due to its high landing speed and its unreliable engines. Still, there it was, and if you met one in a Typhoon or a Spitfire it was likely to be curtains unless you had a great numerical advantage.

  I went to Belgium at the beginning of November 1944 and took command of my Typhoon squadron on Evère aerodrome just by Brussels. The squadron was armed with eight rockets on each aircraft and was principally employed on shooting up railway trains, bridges, and flak positions; the last duty was murder, for the German flak was accurate and intensive in those days. True, the range of the rocket enabled a breakaway to be made sooner than if the attack had had to be pressed home with cannon, but even so casualties had been very heavy in the squadron in the months since the invasion. In my squadron of fifteen machines casualties had been running at the rate of over two a week for months on end, and only one pilot who had landed in France with the squadron in June now remained, though two others had completed their tour of operations and had been relieved. Three replacement pilots for my squadron crossed to Brussels with me in the Anson.

  It was an anxious and a trying time for me at first. Morale in the squadron was not good, and everyone was well aware that their new squadron leader had been off operations for a year—none more than me. In that year fighter-bomber tactics had progressed enormously and I was definitely out of touch; the saving grace was that I knew that myself. I had a frank talk with the Group Captain the day after I arrived, taking my stand perhaps upon my D.F.C. and bar. I told him that for the first ten days he mustn’t expect a great deal from my squadron and that the fault would be mine; after that he would get good results from us. He bellyached a good deal but he took it, and for a week I played it very, very safe. In that week I got the squadron pulled together a bit, and after that we went to town upon our sorties.

  Shooting up flak positions, I discovered, is a matter of planning the attack beforehand and good discipline; one can keep down the casualty rate if the right machines start firing in the right direction at the right time. We got our casualty rate down quite a lot and at the same time did our job as well as anybody else. We got more railway trains than Huns. I got one Messerschmitt 109K certain and another probable in my six weeks of operations, but we never mixed it with the German fighters if we could avoid it, for with rockets on we were no match for them and without rockets our main duty was to get home in one piece. We had a fighter cover normally who fought for us.

  It all came to an end for me on New Year’s Day, 1945. That was the day when the German fighters made their massive attack upon our aerodromes and did enormous damage to the R.A.F. and to the U.S.A.A.F. They concentrated everything they had and came over at dawn with about 650 Focke-Wulfs and 450 Messerschmitts in three formations, and within an hour most of the aircraft dispersed on our aerodromes were blazing ruins by the runways.

  We had a show on that morning, and we were in the process of scrambling when the Jerries came over. I had just taken off with Red Two beside me and I had my head down in the cockpit at about two hundred feet as I got the undercart up, throttled back, and set the pitch. I looked up, sensing there was something wrong, and saw a burst of tracer flying past me; there was a violent shock as one smacked into the armour at my back. I got my seat down in a hurry and saw a Focke-Wulf pass just underneath me, and another one, and then the air was full of them and our own flak everywhere. My radio went dead, and I saw Red Two go down and crash in flames upon a house.

  The air was full of aircraft, all unfriendly, and the cloud base far above. I stuffed my Typhoon down to deck level, breaking to port. On the ground the Fortresses and the Dakotas and the Typhoons and the Spits all seemed to be burning in rows; the Jerries certainly had made a mess of us. I got a Focke-Wulf fairly in my right sight for a moment and pooped off all my eight rockets at him, more to get rid of them than anything else, and two of them got him on the port wing and broke it off. The wing flew past, mercifully without hitting me, and the rest of the machine went down and rolled along the ground in a flaming ball.

  I went on turning putting all my strength upon the stick, practically blacked out, probably at about three or four hundred feet, but I hadn’t got a hope; there must have been hundreds of them. Somebody got me from the side with a big deflection shot; there was a crash between me and the engine, half the instruments leapt from the panel and crashed into my face, there was a frightful pain in both my feet and a hot waft of burning rubber that told me I was on fire. I shoved the throttle through the wire to emergency full and shot straight upwards for the clouds, and by the mercy of God at that moment there was nobody upon my tail. I jettisoned the hood as I went up and wrenched away the oxygen and radio, and with each hand in turn I managed to draw my damaged legs close up to me in spite of the pain. Then I pulled the stick back and turned her over, waited an instant and pushed it forward and got thrown out cleanly, probably at about two thousand feet. I had enough sense left to pull my parachute and then I think I may have passed out, because I can’t remember anything about the descent or landing. The next thing I remember is sitting on the snow with some chaps of the R.A.F. Regiment about me putting tourniquets upon my legs; one of my feet wasn’t there at all, and the other was a mess. There was a Bofors gun nearby; I was very lucky to have got down so near help for I was bleeding like a pig. Then a doctor came and gave me a shot in the arm and I passed out again.

  That is how my service in the R.A.F. came to an end.

  A couple of days later I was flown in a Dakota direct from Evère to an aerodrome near Shrewsbury in the west of England, and I spent the next four months in the R.A.F. hospital there. They operated three times because they tried to save the left foot but weren’t able to. I was very depressed in those months, because it’s not funny to lose both your feet when you’re thirty years old. You don’t realise that in time you’ll get accustomed to the disability, that in years to come you may have just as much enjoyment out of life as you had before, though in a different way. I was passionately fond of winter sports and ski-ing as a young man and all that was over for me now, and swimming also, and long walks over the hills. I had black moods when I was in the hospital that lasted for days on end, cursing myself for an idiot that I had ever baled out. I should have had the guts to take it.

  Outside the R.A.F. I had few friends in England, and as the months went on my Service friends were all dispersed. I didn’t want to see anybody, anyway. I am ashamed to say that in those months I thought little about Janet Prentice; when I did so it was in cynical reflection that she had not bothered to answer the letter I had written to her. I’m not very proud of those months of self-pity, but that’s what happened.

  Presently I was moved to the Orthopaedic Hospital at Clifton just outside Bristol, and I was there till November 1945. We had considerable freedom as patients in that place while we were being fitted with artificial feet and learning to walk on them, for part of the treatment was that we should get used to taking part in normal life. I had, of course, as much money as I liked to ask my father for, for wool was already high and Coombargana was doing well in spite of the rabbits; I was far bette
r off than most of the other chaps. The obvious thing for me to do was to buy a car to get around in, but there were difficulties and frustrations all around that one. No new cars were available and the six year old one that I bought gave constant trouble which I wasn’t really fit to cope with, for I couldn’t stand at first on my new feet for more than a few minutes at a time. The petrol allowance I could get, though generous by British standards in those days, was far too small to let me range widely over England, and I was allowed no new tyres at all. There was little that was healthy, therefore, for me to spend my money on and it mostly went on drink and rather dreary parties with the nurses; I suppose I was already too old to take much pleasure in a wild time with the girls.

  By the time I left the Orthopaedic Hospital tottering on my new feet I was disenchanted with England, and only anxious to get back to Coombargana, my own place, where anyway the sun would be shining and petrol and new tyres would be available for me to travel on, whatever the regulations might say; I knew that much about my countrymen. I booked a passage home by sea for February, not caring to fly, and got enough black-market petrol to drive my car to Newhaven. In France there was unlimited petrol for anyone who had the money to pay for it and freedom of movement was restored to me, and by the time that I got south of Lyons the sun was shining. I spent a pleasant couple of months exploring the south of France and Italy as far as Rome, and in those months I got back some of my mental poise again.

  The ship did a good bit to dispel it. I returned to London a few days before sailing for Australia and sold my car, but I was hamstrung without it. While I had the car I was a free man, able to travel and enjoy life like other people, but without it on the ship I was a pitiful cripple. I had a couple of falls in the rough weather of the Bay, one in the dining-room in front of everybody, and everyone was very sorry for me, which made me furious. I spent most of the rest of the voyage in my cabin, having my meals there, wondering if I was a fool to go back home to Coombargana if I could never ride a horse again. Up till the time I had left home, of course, the whole of the work about the property was done on horses.

  There was a Queenslander from Rockhampton on board, a chap called Petersen who had lost a leg at Arnhem; he had been a paratrooper and had spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. He was in much the same state physically and mentally as I was, and we used to drink and talk about the war each night in my cabin or his, and sometimes we would get a crowd together for a poker game, playing pretty high. I don’t think I went to bed entirely sober any night of the voyage or before two in the morning; I used to lie in bed till about noon and then get up and sit around in the cabin trying to read and drinking a good bit, till evening came and all the women out on deck went in because it was getting cold, and I could go out for a breather without people staring at me or being sympathetic. Then would come dinner in the cabin and the serious business of the day, which was talking about the war and drinking.

  We got to Fremantle at last and there my father met me. He had booked seats for us on the air line to Adelaide but I didn’t want to fly; I had a scunner against flying at that time which took about two years to fade. So Dad came round to Adelaide with me in the liner, and I must say he was good. He saw that I was drinking pretty hard and set himself to drink with me, matching Scotch with Scotch; when I talked about my war he’d start talking about his. We both got shot together each night on the way round from Adelaide and he won a lot of his own money off me at poker. He made my homecoming far easier than I had thought it would be, because when we got back to Coombargana and he laid off the grog because of Mother it was easy for me to play along with him and go slow on it too.

  Dad had met Harry Drew during the war and had brought him to Coombargana when they got demobilised and made him foreman; Dad was always a good picker of men. Mother was already getting disinclined to travel on her own, so Harry brought the old Bentley they had bought before the war to Adelaide to meet us at the ship, and we drove home in that. I drove it most of the way and it was a delight to be at the wheel of a decent car. In a car I could regain my freedom of movement and be equal to anybody once again.

  At Coombargana I found that Dad had come back from the war with some pretty advanced ideas about the mechanisation of the property. Before the war Coombargana ran almost entirely upon horses in the traditional style. I don’t think we had more than one truck on the station; we had an old kerosene tractor but I don’t remember that it was used much, and we conserved little fodder. I remember that we used the tractor for ploughing firebreaks before the war but I don’t think we ever ploughed up a paddock; we grazed entirely on the natural grasses of the district. All the real work of the property was done with riding and draught horses; all told we had about eighty horses on the place, to the ten or eleven we keep now.

  Dad, however, had spent much of the war in the Northern Territory in close contact with the highly mechanised American Army; he had seen a thousand miles of first-class bitumen road made at an incredible speed between Alice Springs and Darwin; he had seen vegetable farms to feed the army created from the bush by modern agricultural machines, producing the vegetables in a matter of months. He had watched all this carefully with his mind on Coombargana, sifting out what was likely to be useful to us from what was not. When I got home in the Australian autumn of 1946 I found that he had brought a number of disposal vehicles on to the station, most of which proved useless to us in the end because they had been designed for other service but which gave us valuable experience. The Bren carrier lies rotting in a briar thicket now because it didn’t really do anything we wanted and we couldn’t get spares for it, but we learned from it that a tracked vehicle was necessary to us in the winter and our big diesel crawler is the outcome of that knowledge. We still use a couple of the four wheel drive Chevrolet trucks he bought, but the disposal jeeps have long since given place to Land Rovers.

  I found that Dad was still using his horse to get about the property, though he had a sneaking affection for a jeep and was starting to drive where he had ridden formerly. When I got home I made a conscious effort to take an interest in the station though it all seemed terribly small and insignificant after the business I had been engaged in for the last six years. A horse was impossible for me, of course, or at any rate pretty unsafe, and at an early stage we got a jeep for my personal use about the property. With his army associations Dad could get to know what was coming up for sale, and he managed to produce a nearly new jeep for me that would give no trouble.

  It was a pity that it had to be a jeep, although we neither of us realised that at that time. A man in my condition depends so much upon his car; it means far more to him than a car would to any normal person. This jeep was identical in every respect with the many jeeps that I had driven in the war; it made the same noise, was painted the same colour, had the same soiled canvas seats; the gear lever came to hand in the same place, the steering was the same. It made too strong a link with the war days to be quite healthy; continually it brought back memories that had better have faded with the different scene and with the passage of the years. When I had had a drink or two I would be driving in the darkness round the perimeter track towards our Typhoons at dispersal with Samuelson and Driver and Jack Carter in the jeep with me, Jack Carter who was to collide with Driver over the target an hour later and fall together with him in a flaming mass, and Samuelson who was to pull out far too low over the train so that the flak got him and he crashed on the line ahead of the ruined engine, belching smoke and steam and cinders high into the air. There was the little clip above the instrument panel that I never learned the use of, in which Jack Carter left his pipe before we went to the machines, in which I found his pipe when we came back. Once or twice at Coombargana when I was a bit tired I reached out to take that pipe out of the clip, and it wasn’t there.

  Helen was living at home when I got back, though she was making plans to go to England in the spring and straining at the leash to get away. She was six years younger than I wa
s and might have been good company for me if things had been different, but mentally we lived in different worlds. I think the war made bigger chasms between Australian young men and women than in England, where girls were called up and had to serve in the armed forces like the men. In Australia war service for girls was on an easier basis, and Helen and her friends had had no difficulty in avoiding it and in pursuing their lives more or less uninterrupted through the war; indeed the pretext of doing war work in Melbourne had made it easier for them to leave the country and take a flat in town. For these girls the war had little reality; no bomb fell within two thousand miles of them, no death came near them, no military discipline forced them into contact with girls of another class; they came out of the war in much the same state of mind as they went into it, avid to get to London and to Paris, to the seats of fashion and of culture that the silly nuisance of the war had stopped them visiting before.

  Most Australian men returning from the war accepted their girls for what they were, reflecting perhaps that men are different from women and girls are like that. I couldn’t do it. Perhaps my disability had made me bitter and critical, but I had spent six years in daily contact with Englishwomen in the R.A.F. who had shared many of my own experiences, had been scared stiff when I was scared myself, had known the same discipline, had grieved for friends when I had grieved, had turned to cigarettes and grog to hide the grief as I had turned myself. These Englishwomen spoke the same language that I spoke and thought in the same way; compared with them Helen and her friends seemed shallow and trivial to me, people of no account incessantly preoccupied with details of their clothes and personal adornment, and their unending, foolish parties.

  On her part, Helen found me much changed by the war, and changed for the worse. I had gone to it a pleasant, affable, and intelligent young man, a good dancer and skier, popular with her friends. I had come back from it an unpleasant, soured cripple, contemptuous of her friends and their way of life, a man with a sharp, bitter tongue, and a fairly heavy drinker. I think my return put the lid on it for Helen; like most young Australians she wanted to get out into a wider world, and by the time I had been home a month it would have taken a dog collar and a chain to keep her at Coombargana.