Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  Hunt gave up the search after three hours. His arms and legs ached from the endless struggle to keep the Hampden on track. He had long since lost contact with the others. He got a course for home from his observer and steeled himself for another three hours of this wretched, bruising flight.

  The last of his Hampdens touched down at ten minutes to midnight. Some of the gunners were so stiff with cold that they had to be lifted out of the aircraft.

  The crews went to interrogation, then to supper, then to bed. Rafferty and Bins strolled to the Mess for a nightcap.

  “At least we didn’t lose anyone,” Rafferty said.

  “Hell of a long way to go for nothing, sir. Suppose that German fleet was making twenty knots when it was spotted. Could be two hundred miles from Wilhelmshaven by now.”

  “You won’t mention that to the chaps.”

  “Of course not. The brighter ones know it anyway. They had plenty of time to work it out for themselves, didn’t they?”

  4

  After a late breakfast, Hunt called a meeting of the crews who had taken part in the operation. He wanted to pool their information. It made a small pool.

  Nobody had seen anything. Even if they’d seen a ship, in that lousy weather nobody could have told the difference between a German cruiser and a Swedish freighter. The Bristol Pegasus engines had performed well, thank God. But on such a long flight, navigation had been a mix of faith, hope and guesswork. And the Hampden was an icebox, especially for the gunners. Two hours made them stiff as wood, three hours turned them numb, after four they were in pain, after five … They couldn’t remember how they felt after five frozen hours. They couldn’t remember much of anything.

  “None of the other squadrons made contact,” Hunt said. “Not a wasted evening, however. Valuable training, jolly valuable.” He saw that they were not convinced of this. “We got thrown in at the deep end. A night op in stinking weather with orders to hammer the Hun in his backyard, and the war not a day old! You chaps came through with flying colors. All right, that’s all. Carry on, except Pilot Officers Silk and Langham.”

  The others left. Hunt picked up two buff files and flicked through their contents. “Luck,” he said. “Do you have any views on luck? You should. It’s lucky for you two this war came along when it did, isn’t it?”

  “Sir?” Langham said.

  “You’re what, twenty-two? Not many jobs out there for a pair of sacked bomber pilots with no ability except farting about.”

  Silk blinked, twice. Otherwise he showed no emotion. He was taller than average and strong in the shoulders, as a good bomber pilot should be. He had dark hair and a clean-cut, open face, the kind that old ladies looked for when they wanted to be helped across a road. Hunt had seen many fools or liars or both with clean-cut, open faces; he disliked Silk and distrusted him. Silk was too well-tailored, his collars were a little too crisp, the thrust of his tie a fraction too dashing. His hair was wavy, which was no crime, but it had a rich, burnished glow that made Hunt suspect excessive brushing. Long ago he had written in Silk’s file: Is this man a bloody fop? Where’s his handbag?

  “If you get kicked out, you’ll vanish,” Hunt said. “Into the army, probably. Lose your commissions, of course. Infantrymen. Brown jobs, that’s what you’ll be. Because why? Because we don’t need clowns in the Royal Air Force.”

  “Certainly not, sir.”

  “Shut up, Silk. Last June, on a navigation exercise, you flew a Hampden under the Tamar railway bridge in Plymouth.”

  “Chaps in Fighter Command do it all the time, sir.”

  “Don’t bring my squadron down to the level of those playboys, Silk.”

  “No, sir.”

  “In May, a Hampden beat up a point-to-point in Northamptonshire. Some clown flew around the course and jumped half the jumps. That was you, Langham.”

  “Sir, I explained—”

  “You invented a bunch of lies. One reason the RAF has always been short of funds for fuel and armaments is clowns like you make idiots of themselves in front of MPs at point-to-points.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And there’s more. Look here: tedious complaints of aircraft playing silly buggers. No proof, but I know it’s you two. And horseplay on the ground, too. God knows that Guest Nights can get a bit wild, but you, Silk, had to pick a fight with an air commodore.”

  “He challenged me, sir.”

  “He was drunk, Silk. Pie-eyed. Why didn’t you run away?”

  “Matter of honor, sir.”

  “Matter of a broken arm.” Hunt’s left foot kept kicking his desk. “That man couldn’t play bridge for six weeks. Six weeks. Didn’t stop him signing snotty reports on this squadron. And as for your record of alcoholic excess, Langham …” Hunt glanced at him. Peculiar pair. Silk looked too young, Langham too old. He reminded Hunt of the jack of spades. Black hair, dark eyes, an obvious shadow where he’d shaved. Pity he didn’t act his age. “I haven’t forgotten your obscene behavior with the barmaid and the snake.”

  “Allegedly obscene, sir. Case never came to court.”

  “Only because Group Captain Rafferty plays golf with the Chief Constable.”

  “She was an exotic dancer with a python, sir. They got into difficulties and I tried …”

  “Bunkum. Now listen. If this squadron hadn’t had such bad luck with accidents, I’d have kicked you out months ago. And I’d dump you now if it wasn’t for Adolf bloody Hitler. What gripes me is you’ve both got ability. Silk, you should have made flying officer long ago.”

  “I’m satisfied with my rank, sir.”

  “I’m not. War is good for promotion. Pull your fingers out. You could be flight lieutenants in a year. But for Christ’s sake keep your snotty little noses clean. Now buzz off.”

  Another pilot who had taken part in the operation, Tubby Heckter, was hanging about outside the building, playing with the adjutant’s dog. “Cozy chat?” he said.

  “Pixie offered me fifty quid to marry his ugly sister,” Langham said.

  “He tore you both off a strip. Thought so.” They headed for the Mess, booting an old tennis ball for the dog to chase.

  “The Wingco’s trouble is he doesn’t understand us,” Langham said.

  “What a shame,” Heckter said. “What doesn’t he understand?”

  “Oh, our modesty. Our humility.”

  “Not his fault,” Silk said. “He’s thicker than us, that’s all.”

  “He can’t be,” Heckter said “You’re one of the thickest blokes on the squadron.”

  “I’m not thick. I may be dense, but I’m not thick.”

  “Yes, you are, Silko. You’re as thick as fog. Pug Duff said so.”

  “Pug Duff? Dear little Pug, who trained with us? If I hadn’t let him sit on my lap he’d never have got his wings. Pug is my biggest fan.”

  “You pinched his girl,” Langham said. “He tried to kill you with a hockey stick.”

  “Well, my smallest fan, then.”

  “You can tell him how much he loves you,” Heckter said. “He’s been posted here. He’s in the Mess now.”

  Pug was a nickname. He got it when he was five, on his first day at school, in the playground. He started a fight with a larger boy. Briefly he had the better of it, using fists, knees and feet with a rare ferocity, but he soon exhausted himself. His lip was split and his nose was streaming when a master arrived, grabbed each boy by the ear and dragged them apart. “Enough!” he roared. Duff kicked him on the shins. The master released the bigger boy, who was in tears, and cuffed Duff so hard that his nose sent a splatter of red across the asphalt. Duff tried to punch him in the stomach but his reach was a good twelve inches short. “What a pugnacious child,” the master said. After that, Duff was called Pug.

  He was always short for his age, and always getting into fights; perhaps he tried to compensate for size by anger. Usually this kind of behavior gets worn smooth by the friction of the family. Pug Duff had no immediate family. His father had died in
gloriously one night in 1917, sitting in a cinema in Amiens when it got hit by a bomb from a German airplane whose pilot was lost, and tired, and decided to jettison his bomb and go home. Captain Duff was in the cavalry, so his death made no difference to the war. It made a huge difference to his widow. She lost her will to live, and the influenza epidemic did the rest. By 1919, young Duff was an orphan at the age of five.

  Aunts, older cousins, grandparents all took their turns at raising him, shunting him around England like a small, scruffy, wrongly addressed parcel with too much unpaid postage. He was a foul-tempered little brat. Why not? Wherever he went, nobody wanted him and nobody loved him.

  But there was enough money in his mother’s will to send him to boarding school, and that was a great relief to everyone.

  He went to Wellington. It was a muscular school where they prepared boys for the Army, and Pug found plenty of fights without looking for them. Being small, he usually lost. After a year or so he calmed down. Sheer physical strength, he realized, proved nothing. The way to dominate was through success. He worked hard and put his rivals in their stupid place. He didn’t have a great brain but he got the most out of it. His short body expanded through ruthless exercise; when he was fifteen his chest was so wide that his shirt-sleeves reached his knuckles. Then, abruptly, the money came to an end and with it, school.

  He was standing on a railway platform, waiting for a slow train to a dull job with a reluctant uncle, when he saw a poster advertising the RAF School of Apprentices at Halton.

  Duff found a home in the Royal Air Force. For the first time he knew the solid reassurance of total security. He stopped worrying about his career, clothes, food, health, pay, religion, sport. Halton organized all that. In return it demanded that Duff learn what made airplanes fly.

  “Forget your air commodores,” a sergeant instructor said to Duff’s class of apprentices. “Forget your group captains, your wing commanders, your squadron leaders.” No light shone in their eyes. They had been in uniform only a few weeks, and anyone with rings around his sleeves was god. “Forget your drill corporals,” he said. That was different. Drill bloody corporals had been marching them up and down and across and around the parade bloody ground, cursing them, hating them, drilling all the individuality out of them. Forget drill corporals? The apprentices cheered up. “And for why?” the instructor said. “Because none of them can do what this little beauty can do.” He was standing beside an aero engine, a Rolls-Royce Kestrel, cut away to expose its workings. “Nobody, from drill corporal to air marshal, can get an airplane off the ground. Only an engine can make it fly.” He turned the propeller and they watched the slow march of the pistons. “Suck-squash-bang-shove. Make that happen a thousand times a minute, and your airplane will climb to ten thousand feet while the drill corporal’s still polishing his buttons. What is the purpose of the Royal Air Force?” he shouted. “Why does it exist?”

  “To fly airplanes,” they chanted.

  “Never forget it! If you’re not helping get an airplane off the ground, you’re not earning your pay. The Royal Air Force exists to fly. No other reason.”

  Pug Duff did well at Halton. Later, he applied for pilot training and did well at that, too. Eventually he got his commission. The public-school background helped: the RAF liked a chap who knew how to speak and which knife and fork to use. He had strong arms and legs. The RAF made him a bomber pilot. By the time he reached 409 at RAF Kindrick he was already a flying officer: one rank ahead of Silk and Langham.

  They found Pug Duff eating peanuts in the Mess anteroom.

  “There must be some mistake. You can’t have been posted here, Pug,” Silk said. “409 is a top squadron.”

  “Clerical error, I expect,” Langham said.

  “Silko owes me ten bob from two years ago,” Duff said, “and I got tired of waiting. Also, Air Ministry wants to improve the standard of flying on this squadron.”

  “Oh dear.” Langham signaled for drinks. “Poor Pug has lost his mind. How sad.”

  “Look under the bed,” Silk suggested. “Offer a reward.”

  “Talking of losing things,” Duff said. “I hear you two were out for hours and hours last night but you still couldn’t find Germany. Or was it Europe?”

  “No, it was Germany we couldn’t find,” Langham said. “We probably shan’t find Norway tonight, and tomorrow night we’re not going to find Luxembourg. Or is it Spain?”

  “I think it’s Ireland,” Silk said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Good God,” Duff said. “You’re a pretty useless lot, aren’t you?”

  “We share the work. I’m pretty, and Tony’s useless.”

  That ended the usual courtesies. They moved on to the eternal topics of pilots: the peculiarities of aircraft and aerodromes, the styles of leadership of COs and station commanders, the ups and downs of men they had trained with. Eventually Duff went away to freshen up before lunch.

  “Pug looks awfully keen, doesn’t he?” Langham said.

  “To tell the truth, I could scarcely see him,” Silk said. “I think he must have shrunk in the wash.”

  5

  This was the second day of the war. The storms had cleared the North Sea and moved on to soak Scandinavia. The same Blenheim crew that had spotted a battlefleet near Wilhelmshaven was sent on another reconnaissance and, amazingly, found yet more German warships, this time at anchor in Wilhelmshaven harbor. Once again, Bomber Command went into action. 409 Squadron was not required to take part.

  The attack was made in daylight. It was briefly reported by the BBC.

  A couple of days later, Pixie Hunt heard all about it from a visiting wing commander called Faraday, an old pal, now on the staff at Group HQ.

  “Command sent fourteen Wellingtons and fifteen Blenheims,” Faraday said. “Quite a strong force.”

  “Twenty-nine bombers should make a mess of something,” Hunt said.

  “The Wellington packs a punch. The Blenheim’s too lightweight for this sort of job. Anyway, five Blenheims cocked up their navigation and never found the target. Low cloud.”

  “Still leaves ten Blenheims.”

  “True. Those ten actually found a couple of battleships and a cruiser. Cloud was so low they had to attack from five hundred feet. No good. Bombs bounced off the decks like ping-pong balls. Meanwhile, heavy flak. Very heavy flak. Flak knocked down five Blenheims.”

  “Five out of ten,” Hunt said. “I see. And the Wellingtons?”

  “Most never saw a damn thing and came home. But six Wimpys plowed on, found a battleship at Brunsbüttel, bombed it, missed it. Two kites didn’t return.”

  “So we sent twenty-nine and lost… seven?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to calculate our losses as a proportion of aircraft that actually attacked.” Faraday got a pencil and did the arithmetic. “Seven out of sixteen is 43.7 percent.”

  Hunt could only stare.

  “Don’t expect to read about it in the papers,” Faraday said. “And don’t be surprised if operations are a bit quiet for a while. If my guess is right, Command is having a good think.”

  “Yes. Very likely.”

  Faraday got up to leave. “Oh! I nearly forgot,” he said. “The Danish government has complained that a Wellington bombed the town of Esbjerg. Killed two civilians. Esbjerg is one hundred and ten miles north of Brunsbüttel.”

  “Poor show.”

  “Quite. And the next bomber to stray over Denmark can expect several large Danish shells up its ass.”

  THE FIRST WHIFF OF GUNSHOT

  1

  Faraday was right: Bomber Command had a good think about North Sea operations and losses, and whether one was worth the other.

  Meanwhile 409 Squadron did nothing but train, and fly the occasional shipping-search patrol. The only ships they met were British destroyers, which fired at them. Apart from that, the crews saw no action. They soon grew bored. When war was declared everyone had been tense, eager, nervous, expec
ting massive air attacks and quick retaliation. All this hanging around made a mockery of courage, skill, the aggressive spirit. In mid-September, when Poland was obviously finished, Hitler agreed to the Roosevelt Rules. So now nobody was going to bomb anybody’s mainland. The war was a flop.

  Yet 409 was kept on stand-by. Nobody was fighting, everybody was getting cheesed off. Something had to be done. The Wingco made Pilot Officer Silk the squadron entertainments officer.

  “I don’t care what you do as long as you brighten them up,” Hunt said. “Give ’em something to look forward to, something to talk about except bloody Poland.”

  “Yes, sir. Is money available?”

  “Within reason.” The Wingco hunched his shoulders. “What’s that stuffed up your left sleeve?”

  “My handkerchief, sir.”

  “Silk, isn’t it? Some sort of clever-clever trademark, I suppose. I don’t like it. Makes you look like a ponce. I don’t suppose I can stop you poncing around the station, but at least you’ll do it properly dressed, without bits of haberdashery hanging off you. And listen, Silk.”

  “Sir?”

  “Entertainment does not include pornographic cabaret acts with naked dancers and reptiles. Understand?”

  “That was Langham, sir, not me.”

  “Don’t argue. Get cracking. If I see you standing still I’ll know you haven’t got enough to do.”

  Silk went in search of Tony Langham and found him soaking in a bath so hot the steam rushed out of the door. Langham had just landed after a four-hour patrol over the North Sea. “Fucking ice all over the kite,” he said. “Fucking squall line. Bounced about like a rubber fucking ball. Took her up to fifteen thousand. Fucking heating system failed. Instrument panel froze fucking solid. Icicles in the fucking oxygen tubes. Turned for home, got shot at by the Royal fucking Navy, so naturally my observer gave me the wrong fucking course, we made landfall at Berwick-upon-fucking-Tweed, and now I think I’ve got frostbite in the goolies.”