Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  Nearly fifty years later at home in England, I opened a letter from my friend Jean Boulet, chief test pilot at Aerospatiale, and out fell a faded black and white photograph that had been taken at that moment. I have no recollection of anyone having a camera, but there I am in front of the Hiller in my tropical whites, wearing a back parachute, knife, grenades and pistol given to me by the CO, and the expression on my face clearly says, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ Jean said the photograph had come from an old friend of his – one of the men looking at the Hiller – and he’d found it in the bottom of a drawer he was clearing out as he prepared to retire. It came as a shock to me; I would very much have liked to know at the time that I would live another fifty years to see it.

  The men of the 7th Parachute Brigade were some of the hardest I have met in my life – thin and spare, they were built like barbed wire, deeply tanned and seemingly oblivious to the mortar bombs falling in the jungle all around. They had developed a fine instinct for survival; suddenly, a master sergeant grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down into a slit trench as the pattern of mortar bombing shifted towards where we were standing. It was a muddy trench, and it wasn’t long before my white stockings, shorts and shirt were filthy. Lying in the trench, the staff sergeant explained between explosions that his name was Wolfgang and he was an ex-SS paratrooper whose allegiance had shifted to France following the events of 1945. There were many former SS men in the Brigade, he said, soldiers of fortune who looked out only for each other. Some of the old hands had been fighting since they were children, through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and now this vicious colonial battle in South-East Asia. But for Wolfgang, the killing would soon be over. His contract with the French Foreign Legion expired in seven days, and he was going to join his brother Gunther aboard one of Aristotle Onassis’s whaling ships in Antarctica. His eyes widened as he spoke of the vast fortunes that were to be made in whaling. Gunther had been whaling in Antarctica before the war with the Erste Deutsche Walfang, making pots of money bringing back precious whale oil. And best of all, whales didn’t shoot back at you!

  Lying in a muddy hole in the steaming Asian jungle, the possibility of making huge amounts of money in a cold climate with nobody shooting at you sounded appealing. I arranged to meet Wolfgang back in Saigon to discuss the matter further; already the germ of a plan was forming in my mind for the use of helicopters in whaling operations. In the meantime, there was a lull in the mortar fire and as we emerged from the trench I saw that four wounded men were being placed in the helicopter. Two were laid on the Stokes litters, the stretchers on the outside of the helicopter. The other two were classed as walking wounded, although neither could walk without help. I told the Lieutenant Colonel that the Hiller wasn’t capable of carrying the weight of four passengers, even thought none of the wounded weighed more than 150 lbs. The colonel pleaded passionately with me to take all four. I don’t know why I succumbed to his entreaties – I must have switched off mentally, because with four passengers, me and the existing fuel load the 360A was 210 lbs over maximum all-up weight. It was a serious error of judgement on my part. In all likelihood the helicopter would fail to get airborne, and if it did it would probably crash, killing us all.

  With the walking wounded strapped into the cockpit on either side of me, I revved the engine to the maximum, raised the collective and barely got the machine light on its wheels. The ground in front of the helicopter was more or less level for about 150 yards before trees sprung up to a height of more than sixty feet. I nudged forward the azimuth control to try to get enough translational lift – the additional lift you get from forward movement – to clear the trees. After a few yards it was clear I wasn’t going to make it, so I ran the machine onto a slope and stopped. For my second attempt, I again revved the engine to the maximum, pushed the stick well forward and headed straight for the trees, waiting as the air speed climbed agonisingly slowly to 45 mph before applying collective pitch and turning slowly right to shift every ounce of power from the tail rotor to the main rotor to give me more lift. I scraped through the treetops, and no matter how I played with the collective and the engine revs I was unable to gain height. The two men either side of me, each with his head swathed in field dressings, looked too far gone to care. I don’t suppose they knew that they’d probably be better off on the ground, having it out with the Vietminh. Many times I brushed through the treetops in the jungle that seemed unbroken all the way to Saigon. It took the best part of an hour, but slowly the trees began to thin out on the outskirts of the city. I fought the urge to put the screaming machine down in a clearing, and after an age the perimeter fence at Tan Son Nhat slid beneath the helicopter and I made a running landing on a taxiway, where two ambulances and a group of doctors and nurses waited to take my passengers to hospital.

  I felt absolutely exhausted. My comfort was a sad-looking Monte-cristo cigar, the last one in a leather cigar case that normally held four. I walked about fifty yards clear of the helicopter, sat down on the grass and set fire to the cigar. A young lady in a white coat came up and explained she was a brain surgeon, come to collect a man with the bullet lodged in his forehead. Her name was Valérie André, she held the rank of captain in the 7th Parachute Brigade, and it was she who was to operate to remove the bullet. She thanked me profusely in a mixture of French and English for saving this chap’s life; he would certainly have died had medical help been further delayed. Valérie André was very pretty, and I accepted her thanks with good grace.

  The helicopter was being refuelled when word came that there was no need to return to the peninsula; the situation had improved and the less seriously wounded were being brought out in trucks. I was not sorry. The Hiller had been cruelly mistreated, but it was a brand new engine and in fact, it never gave me any trouble despite the torture I had put it through.

  Valérie André invited me to the hospital to see the results of my work, and as I rather fancied her I agreed to go. I was told to put my cigar out by a nursing orderly who gave me a green rubber apron, cap and mask. I followed Valérie into an operating theatre where my right-seat passenger was lying with a triangular frame over his head, like a Bunsen burner tripod used in a school chemistry lab. The tripod had been fitted with a circular ring, graduated in degrees, into which was set a metal collar to hold an electric drill. As far as I was concerned it looked just like the Black & Decker drill in my toolkit. Amazingly, the poor patient was awake – the operation was to take place under local anaesthetic. Calmly and precisely, Valérie André began drilling a ring of small holes around the area occupied by the bullet. I felt a wave of exhaustion come over me as two tiny rubber suckers were placed on the patient’s forehead, apparently to remove the bone and get to the bullet. I know no more, for I crashed to the floor in a dead faint and had to be dragged out of the operating theatre and laid on a bench in the passageway. I came to feeling groggy and slightly ashamed at my weakness. Captain André told me she’d removed the bullet, and there was a good chance the man would be restored to full health in a few weeks. I listened intently as she explained how fortunate the patient was that the bullet had lodged in what was known as the shield or buffer zone of the brain. I was happy to feign interest because Valérie had ravishing dark hair and very big brown eyes. Slim and extremely physically fit, she was an active combatant parachutist officer in the Brigade, and she called me ‘L’Ange Blanc,’ the White Angel. What’s more, she campaigned long and hard for helicopter field support.

  In the days that followed she arranged a private meeting with the officer commanding the medical corps, Medecin-General Robert. I had told her the story of how I’d tried to sell the Hiller 360 to the Armée de l’Air but had been unable to arrange meetings with the most senior officers who made the decisions. Over lunch at General Robert’s private residence, however, she made a passionate case for medical evacuation helicopters and managed to convert the General so completely that he began talking of having a squadron of twelve Hiller 360s under hi
s command. I showed him the letter from Hiller confirming my position as their exclusive sales agent for Indo-China and said that I had already overspent my budget – which was true; I’d even paid for the fuel for the rescue – and hoped that after this meeting a decision to buy Hillers could be made in principle within a few days. Otherwise, I said, I would be forced to return home. I was pushing my luck, but having read his mind I felt sure he was convinced of the urgent need for helicopter field rescue services.

  I met up with Valérie that evening at the Continental. Over drinks she told me that although I had been rather forceful in my approach to General Robert, it was no bad thing because in the afternoon he’d been in contact with the Armée de l’Air commander General LeClerc, who had assured him of support in his application to his masters in Paris. Seizing the opportunity, I wrote a letter to General Robert suggesting that facilities should be made available at the airport where pilots could be trained on my Hiller 360 until the medical corps had helicopters of their own. This too was well received, and I began training Normandy Squadron pilots on the machine.

  A few days after the rescue I was called into the General’s office in the barracks at Tan Son Nhat in the presence of half a dozen senior officers, subjected to a barrage of French and had the Croix de Guerre pinned to my chest. I was handed a piece of paper detailing the exploit for which it had been awarded, and returned the General’s salute in best Fleet Air Arm fashion. I felt privileged and very moved; I was a civilian attached to no one, and to be held in high regard by the men of the 7th Parachute Brigade and the Normandy Squadron was an honour indeed. I couldn’t help wishing they’d mark their appreciation by buying some helicopters from me.

  I was invited to dinner at the officers’ mess, and after everyone had had a few drinks one of the colonels stood up and proposed a toast. I understood most of it: we’re very pleased, he said, to welcome Alan Bristow tonight – as you know he’s been doing very good work with us rescuing our personnel with his helicopter, we would like with your support and approval to make him an honorary member of our mess. Bravo, they all said. I see no objections, continued the Colonel. In that case, Alan, I wish to extend to you the privileges and use of our mess while you’re in Saigon. Whereupon a man appeared behind me and smashed a very solid white plate on my head. I sagged as the plate shattered, and my good humour deserted me.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’

  It was tradition, I was told, it was their initiation ceremony. ‘You haven’t passed out, so you’re in.’ I thought it was bloody excessive. They might have put a crack in the plate first. Everybody was shouting for a speech, and I grabbed a glass of wine and swilled it down, then another. The speech was short: ‘The next bastard who does that, I’ll stick a knife in his belly.’ It went down well.

  But still no decision came on the helicopters, and my money was dwindling. ‘L’Ange Blanc’ went out several times on rescues, none as hairy as the first, and everyone agreed that helicopters should be a top priority. Sometimes I had to stay out in the field with the troops when night closed in; they always seemed to be well fed, and to have an endless supply of baguettes and Cognac. Once I was encamped with them after a fairly successful gunfight, and the pro-French Vietnamese soldiers were getting supper. They cooked liver with a sweet potato, something like a yam, and it was very good. We sat around a fire that kept the mosquitoes away and drank Cognac until it was time to set the guards out and turn in. ‘Nice bit of liver, that,’ I observed.

  ‘You should know where it comes from,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘The Vietnamese get them from the battlefield.’

  ‘You mean ... it’s human?’

  He nodded. For decades afterwards I was unable to face liver, until one day my housekeeper cooked a little bit, burned it to a frazzle, and I ate it before I knew what it was. It tasted quite good, and I occasionally have a little now, well cooked. But the pro-French Vietnamese detested the Vietminh and were happy to cut them up for supper. I’ve seen them playing football with their enemies’ heads, and the Vietminh treated them with the same savagery, alive or dead.

  The Indo-China war was vicious and dirty, the French were wise to cut and run and the Americans should have had to good sense to stay out. One of the most dreadful sights I saw, which lives with me now, was when I’d flown in to pick up wounded and couldn’t land nearby, so I put down on the outskirts of the town and was met by a group of about twenty French troops. We started to walk the half-mile into town, and just by the first houses a couple of laughing children came running out of a doorway towards us. They were perhaps ten or twelve years old. The Captain raised his machine-gun and shot them dead, and their bodies skittled down the street. The Vietminh used to give the children hand grenades and tell them to give them to the French soldiers – they couldn’t afford to take any chances.

  Closer to Saigon, I was being driven along a road in a Jeep with one of the men who later became a helicopter pilot, Lieutenant Louis Santini. All of a sudden he yelled ‘Get down!’ and shoved my head below the dashboard. A wire stretched across the road shattered the windscreen. There had been men working in the fields either side, and as we approached they dropped their tools and pulled the wire taut. But by the time the car stopped, they’d vanished. Everywhere, we heard of men being killed in the night, by civilians, by children, by prostitutes, by booby-trapped ox carts.

  As arranged, I met up with Wolfgang for an evening’s drinking the day before he left military life behind him for ever and set off to make his fortune in the whaling grounds. The more I saw of Indo-China, the more whaling appealed to me. Wolfgang gave me his brother Gunther’s address. ‘See you in Hamburg,’ he said.

  The French had a semi-detached mercenary unit whose job was to wipe out senior Vietminh figures and their supporters. They were made up largely of ex-members of the Maquis or former Legionnaires; they were well-funded by the French military and their preferred weapon was ‘le plastique’ – Semtex. They would be tipped by the French that a certain person should be bumped off, and they’d go out at night and do the job. Their leader was a shadowy figure called Alain Cros, who lived at the centre of an extraordinary security network – he had an apartment above a market, and whichever way you went into it you had to walk through a shop with a guard on the door. My funds were low and I thought I might make some serious money by helping him out, but he was circumspect.

  ‘You’ll probably just blow your hands off,’ he said.

  Cros thought that at first I should come along as a bag carrier, and perhaps later I could be shown how to set fuses properly. Five of us went out in the dark, and my companions quickly and silently set a series of charges on a row of three houses, the middle one of which was owned by a man who according to the French ran the Vietminh newspaper and had been responsible for the murder of two French officers. We were 200 yards away when it went up, and it was an expert job – the walls of all three houses collapsed inwards, and it seemed likely that the target had been eliminated. All had not gone well for us, however, because within thirty-six hours two of Cros’s associates had been shot dead in the street. ‘Better watch yourself,’ said Cros.

  I’d effectively been an innocent bystander, and a newcomer to boot, so I was less concerned than I should have been. I had moved from the first-class accommodation Henry Boris had arranged in the Continental Hotel to a cheaper room on the first floor, where the hotel extended above a row of shops. It was my habit to give the room a cursory check before I went to bed, and I’m sure I would have noticed any fuse or trigger mechanism.

  At 5 am there was a mighty explosion, the floor beneath me gave way and I was pitched into the jeweller’s shop below, still in the bed. I woke up lodged among the display cabinets in a cloud of dust and smoke, and slid down the bed, cutting my feet on the glass. Alarms were ringing as I picked my way out through the front window, clad in vest and shorts, and into a deserted street. I was dizzy, but still had my hearing. Apart from cuts and bruises I was virtually unscathed.
They had hung Semtex on the ceiling below my bed, but Cros said later they had probably botched the job by placing the fuse so that it blew out of the charge rather than in, which reduced the explosive effect. I walked round the back of the Continental, up the stairs and into my room and picked my way around the edge to grab my passport, a steel box of money and some clothes, stuffed them in a bag and hurried around to Cros’s fortress.

  ‘I told you to watch yourself,’ he said. ‘You’d better lie low.’

  Cros had a word with the CO of the Normandy Squadron and I was thereafter billeted in the barracks at Tan Son Nhat. I received a stern warning from the CO to stay away from people like Cros.

  A couple of days later Valérie André came looking for me in a flush of excitement. ‘General Robert wants to see you,’ she said. ‘They’ve authorised a helicopter squadron.’ It was true. They wanted eight Hillers, yesterday. When I placed a call to Bill Vincent I could hardly contain my joy, and neither could he. Yes, they could expedite the dispatch of the first couple as soon as the finance had been sorted out, he said. The rest would follow within six months. Commission would be transferred to a bank account in Switzerland, the number of which I had thoughtfully provided him with previously.