I walked back to the command vehicle. It was the fat ADC at the table now, smoking a curved pipe. He motioned me to a chair across from him. I produced my straight billiard, and accepted a fill of dark tobacco. The sun had broken clear again. There was a travelling chess set on the table.
When he finally came on the line Cliff sounded tetchy, but his voice in the heavy black handset was as clear as if he was in a room with me,
‘What do you want?’
‘Hi, Cliff. Nice to hear you too. I’ve missed our little chats.’
‘Fuck off, Charlie. What do you want?’
‘I want a couple of Lancs, with a cookie and eight one-thousand-pounders in each. I want them to crack open a castle full of Jerry Paras on the Holland and Germany border; tomorrow at the latest.’
‘Why should I help?’
‘It’s holding up the brown jobs’ advance, and I think that Grace might already be on the other side. Heading off into Germany with a band of mad sods.’
‘Nazis?’
‘No; doctors and nurses.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The point is, Cliff, I am moving behind the advance with James and Les, and the advance has stopped. If Grace is already on the other side then she’s getting away from me. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. Let me think about it for a minute.’
He thought a minute; then he said, ‘I’ll call you back.’
‘That’s what I thought, Cliff. If Winston can’t whistle us up a couple of Lancs what’s the point of him being Prime Minister?’
I heard him give his little coughing laugh, and momentarily remembered the Cliff I had liked when I first met him.
He said, ‘Don’t get too good at this lark, Charlie. I might have to keep you on.’
I was called back to the little Austin radio van half an hour later. Cliff asked me, ‘Can you give me the coordinates for this place you are responsible for killing?’
I liked the you are responsible bit. I said, ‘I’ll hand you over to someone who can, as soon as we’ve finished.’
‘OK. It’s ordered for 10.20 your time tomorrow morning, and just to make sure you take requests like this seriously, I’ve asked your old squadron to do it. It’s going to be your mates up there being shot at, and there’s bugger-all on paper. They’re going to love you when they find out it won’t even count as a trip for them.’
‘Thanks, Cliff. What do I need to do now?’
‘Nothing. Make sure that the brown job leader has pulled all his people more than a mile back from the target, and has a company ready to go in and mop up as soon as the RAF’s finished. Anything else?’
‘I should confess that I didn’t tell you that the RAF had already been asked, and had turned the job over to the Americans, who were going to do it in a fortnight’s time. There might be some political knee trembling.’
‘Thanks for confessing that. I should confess that I already know.’
‘We’ll both need a priest at this rate.’
‘I’ve already got one, haven’t I?’ He gave that odd little laugh again. ‘What about those coordinates?’
‘Wait one,’ I told him, and handed the handset to the RAF Sergeant alongside me, telling him, ‘Give this officer the coordinates of that bloody castle. The RAF’s going to lose it for us.’
The Sergeant surprised me. He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ before he took it from me.
By mid-evening the bar was nearly empty. I asked McKechnie. He said, ‘Steak night. In peacetime this always used to be steak night in the officers’ mess. So they kept the tradition going for the R & R areas.’
‘You mean there’s steaks on the menu?’
‘Hell no, buddy. Just some grey and pink stuff the Scotties serve up. What are you drinking?’
‘Ethanol,’ I told him. ‘I could get used to this stuff.’
‘Don’t. Stick to beer. It will leave you a few brain cells.’
‘Bad as that?’
‘Worse. Where are you kipping tonight?’
‘Hadn’t given it a thought yet; and I don’t know where the guys I came in with have got to.’
‘Can you remember the number seven?’
‘Sure. That’s my birthday.’
‘That’s the number of the tent I’m billeted in. Sleeps fifty. There’s at least twenty empty cots right now. That’s where you go if nothing else has been arranged.’
I waited until James, Jamie, Albie and Les were half cut before telling them that I had laid on an air display for the following morning. The word spread like gonorrhoea in a monastery.
The LD Colonel sat alongside me on the boardwalk in front of the Quonset, and his ADC stood behind us. The Colonel had a pocket watch he kept consulting. The ADC sniffed a lot. He had a radio operator with a field set by him. It was an interesting piece of kit, but far too big and heavy to lug around for long. We paid a dollar each for our chairs, and the first E & T. As much coffee as we liked came for free. I needed the damned stuff to un-fur my tongue. I had slept in old tent number seven, but had little idea how I got there. The water I had washed in was cold, and had a petroleum rainbow floating in it.
The weather over the target couldn’t have been better for day bombing: it was clear, and a lazy grey. Ten miles north of us a bank of thin cloud hung like a sheet in the air: our aircraft would fly out of it. If the guys in the castle hadn’t got radar, or weren’t talking to someone who did, they wouldn’t know what was about to hit them. The castle was about three miles away in a low natural amphitheatre. I could see it above the line of trees I had skulked in the day before. McKechnie was about four chairs along from me: he had his boots and socks off and was passing the time trimming his toenails with an enormous fighting knife, and crooning. It was a Benny Goodman number: ‘Sing’. I could smell him from where I was sitting. Someone would have to speak with him about that. My dad was a few seats after that, making friendly conversation with the girl I had first seen him dancing with. Uncle Tommy sat the other side of her looking glum. That was good: at least he was back to normal. Right at the end of the second row to my right was a little guy with slicked back dark hair wearing faded RAF blues. I was sure that I had seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t be sure where because his back was to me all of the time.
I kept my fingers crossed because I was still thinking that Cliff might let me down. I think that that was why the LD Colonel and his retinue were seated around me: if the RAF didn’t show I’d probably be on jankers before lunch. I jumped when the Adj tapped me on my shoulder, but it was only to offer me a fill of pipe tobacco to settle me down.
‘Thanks, I will. I’ve always hated waiting for something to happen.’
‘Don’t see why, old boy. In my experience the RAF is late for just about everything it does.’
‘Thanks again. I’ll remind you about that when we’ve lost your castle for you.’
‘Do. I shall be properly contrite. The Colonel will offer you a medal, won’t you, sir?’
The pipe tobacco was heavy and sweet: I drew deeply on it, and filled my mouth with cool smoke.
The Colonel said, ‘Command wouldn’t wear it, but I’ll ask the French. They have the next sector, and they’ll put you up for anything. Very good at medals, the French.’
Les was hiding behind James England. I heard him grunt, ‘Fuck-all good for anything else.’
‘Hark,’ the Colonel’s Adj said, ‘. . . the herald angels sing . . . and lot’s more than two of them, Mr Bassett. Look out for the black crosses on their wings everyone, and get ready to duck.’
Nobody took him seriously because the first planes through the veil of cloud were six Spitfires, flying at no more than two hundred feet. They echeloned into line astern, and took turns at hosing the castle with cannon fire. Lights twinkled along their grey and green wings, and puffs of grey dust appeared about the old masonry. The radio operator had two pairs of bins: he handed me the smaller. They had been made by Zeiss.
The Spitfires hadn’t i
ntended to do any damage with their cannons, it was just a wake-up call to the poor sods inside. A statement of intent. Overture and beginners, my old skipper would have called it. The Lancasters came through the veil a bit higher. Say two or three thousand feet. That’s still not very high. If you fuck up at that height you can hit the ground in less time than it takes to fart. Which is probably exactly what you’re doing as you hit the ground. They had more Spitfires with them: they had to weave from side to side to get their speed down to that the Lancs were trundling in at.
There were three Lancs, not two: thank you, Cliff. Two of them climbed into a circle at about another thou – say four thousand feet. The leader flew a wider loop, and came straight back onto a bomb run. It was odd for me: I’d spent my operational tour flying Lancs by night – mainly over Germany – but I’d never seen one actually dropping bombs in daylight; not observed it from the outside, that is. I was surprised how steady it looked: my experience had been that of having been bounced about a lot on the bomb run. There was no opposing fire from the castle; perhaps that was something to do with it. It dropped two bombs: big cylinders with flat ends – no tail fins. It was curious; they rocked gently, and weaved slightly as they tumbled – like children being rocked to sleep by a parent.
The Colonel asked, ‘What are they?’
I answered without taking my lenses from them: tersely, probably, ‘Cookies: four-thousand-pounders. Eight thousand pounds of high explosive.’
‘Poor sods,’ James murmured just before the bombs disappeared into the castle. Bang on, both of them; but then you don’t miss much from that height – like a chicken laying eggs. What appeared to happen was this. The bombs disappeared. After a pause of maybe a couple of seconds the castle walls seemed to expand briefly, and then fall back into their original shape and configuration. Now the castle looked more or less the same, but was fatally damaged. It was skewed. A pall of fine brown dust and thin smoke, hundreds of yards high, hung in the thin air above it in a squat column. Then the sound of the two almost simultaneous detonations reached us like a double thunderclap. The audience clapped too, and cheered. I had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t really thought much about what my bombs had been doing when they reached the ground during those long months over Germany. All of a sudden I didn’t want to.
The two circling Lancs gave a couple of turns to let the pall begin to clear, and then one of them pulled away for a run. It was like watching a cobra gear up for a strike. Again, it was a finely executed run in – the bombing standard on the squadron had improved since my day. I counted the bombs away. There were twelve of them. Shark-shaped, with fins to steady them into their dive. Before anyone asked me I said, ‘Thousand-pounders.’
James didn’t say anything this time, but I heard him grunt.
Three of the bombs fell outside the walls of the place: two in open fields, and one in the moat. The one in the moat threw up a great curtain of water hundreds of feet high, which hid from us what the nine that hit inside were doing. I saw their great flashes of red and orange and yellow behind the veil of mist, and could see the shimmering ripples of blast in the rainbow-laden air above it. The blast effect intrigued me. It was like invisible rings visible, and spreading outwards and upwards. As the shit cleared I could see that the castle was altered even more. It was still more or less the castle shape and size, but the whole of its profile had spread out.
The radio behind us burst into life. The communicant appeared to be shouting in a very highly pitched voice. The W/Op answered in rapid, fluent German, then he told the Colonel, ‘The enemy requests permission to surrender, sir.’
‘I like that,’ the Colonel told us. ‘Very Germanic. Asking permission to surrender: we would have just thrown our hands up, and got on with it.’
‘Sir?’ the W/Op prompted him.
‘Tell them By all means, and to stay put until I’ve worked out what to do with them.’
The third Lancaster had pulled out of the circle. The Colonel told his ADC, ‘Give them the gun, Harry.’ Then, ‘Pity they dragged their bombs here all for nothing.’
The ADC fired off a Very Pistol too close to my right ear for comfort, and dropped a huge blue light in the sky. The pilot of the Lanc was a comedian. He did the run as if he’d not been given the scrub signal, and at the last minute, instead of dropping his eggs, waggled his wings and went off low across country. Two Spits followed him, weaving from side to side. The Colonel turned and looked at me.
He said, ‘Very good, RAF. That medal: which one had you in mind?’
I was prevented from answering by the Negro pianist. He had a white batboy’s jacket on, and had come to stand behind us. He was counting aloud. He got to sixteen.
The Colonel asked, ‘Sixteen, George?’
‘Yes, Colonel. Sixteen souls climbing up to heaven through the smoke.’
‘If they had about a hundred or so Krauts in there,’ the Colonel told me, ‘that’s maybe fifteen or sixteen per cent of their establishment. We’ve gone rather easy on them really.’
I decided that I didn’t like the cold-blooded bastard, but it was all a bit late for regrets, wasn’t it? He who laughs last, and all that.
The Colonel sent his ADC down later in the morning to take the surrender. We had had to wait until the Press Corps arrived. A company of hard Hun Paratroopers opting out of the war was bound to make all the front pages. There were a hundred and fifty of the Allies’ finest down there to meet them. Probably twice as many Press people as military. And a load of guys rubbernecking. That included me: I’d just won my first land engagement, after all, and still had To the victor the spoils on my itinerary. When the heavy wooden gates of the castle pulled back the first thing that came out was a trickle of smoke. Then a white handkerchief tied to the muzzle of an old Mauser rifle. When nobody shot at that, a head in a grey ski cap bobbed out and back a few times. Then a scrawny Captain in dirty greys stepped out, and onto the causeway over the moat. He did a dozen paces on his own before the LD ADC stepped up to meet him. The first thing they did was shake hands, reminding me of sketches I had seen of Livingstone meeting Stanley. Or was that the other way round? The German gave the ADC his rifle with the white flag. (That explained the unfortunate front-page photographs the next day, giving the impression that we were surrendering to them.) Then the Kraut turned back to face the door, and waved his men out.
By that time I’d moved in close myself, and could hear what was going on. I counted the Krauts out onto the causeway. I’ll swear none of them was over nineteen years old. Spotty teenagers mostly, hungry and tired in Para smocks too big for them. Their mixture of weapons looked as if they’d come from a museum. Including the middle-aged Hauptmann sixteen of them surrendered. George had got the number right, but the wrong way round – there were only sixteen of them left.
The ADC shook hands with the Captain again, and said something that sounded diabolically like, ‘Sprachenzee Anglische? Do you speak English?’
The Hauptmann looked pained; as if he’d failed an exam. He smiled apologetically and said, ‘A little. Only a little.’
‘You have many wounded?’ That was Harry again.
The small German looked mystified,
‘Nein: no, only these.’ He indicated his rag, tag and bobtail street gang, who were carefully laying their weapons on the causeway. They had an inordinate number of potato masher grenades for so small an army; I remember that. The mortar that had caused the casualties I had seen the day before looked like a home-made job: it had started life as a drainpipe. Harry tried again.
‘You have many dead, then? Many kaput?’
The Captain looked even more mystified, if that was possible: I didn’t know if it was the question, or the hotchpotch of lingo it was posed in. He shook his head.
‘No. Only these.’
I don’t know when it began to dawn on us that the little Kraut was walking out with precisely the number of men he went in with. One of the Press Corps guys scrambled up ont
o the causeway. He gave the Kraut officer a cigarette, and asked him, ‘You are Paras? Fallschirmjägers?’
‘Nein. Volkssturm.’
‘Never heard of it, matey.’
‘People’s Army. You call it the Land Defence Volunteers in your country, I think.’
‘Fucking hell.’ That was Les. He’d crept up on us. ‘It’s the Home Guard.’
That was what we struggled to come to terms with as we moved away from the embarrassment as quickly as we could. This motley crew of a man, and a few boys in pieces of uniform too big for them, had held up the Allied advance for almost two weeks, and killed dozens doing it. And we’d had to throw a dozen Spitfires and three Lancs at them before they gave up.
‘It’s just occurred to me . . .’ I said to Les.
‘. . . Yes, I think I know what you’re going to say, sir. It’s not going to be as easy to get to Berlin as Winston thinks, is it? Don’t you think that someone should tell him?’
‘Tell the Major,’ I said. ‘He can do it. Perhaps, for once, they won’t shoot the messenger. Anyway, he’s had it far too easy for the last week or two.’
‘Don’t be too hard on him. He never asked to go soldiering . . .’
‘. . . and this isn’t soldiering, Les, and what’s more, you bloody know it.’
‘It’s not my fault, either, sir.’
Charlie's War Page 21
