Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  He kept up the search for two hours. Maybe there was a convoy. Maybe it was in port by now. Paddy Mason got out the Aldis lamp and signaled to the other Hampdens: Return to base. At least the storm would blow them home.

  Stubby Gurnee lost the other two in an especially black rain squall. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t miss England. After two and a half hours there was no sight of land; only the perpetually angry sea. The radio was playing up: York couldn’t get a fix. At last Gurnee got a QDM from some station, but the signal was faint. When an aircraft asked for a QDM, the station responding gave a magnetic bearing. If the pilot flew along that bearing, then eventually, and making allowance for wind, he should reach that station. Gurnee got a QDM of zero three five degrees, which was almost northeast. But if England was northeast, Gurnee must be southwest. That would place him somewhere over the English Channel.

  “D’you believe that?” he asked his observer.

  “Only if the wind changed and blew us south.”

  Gurnee tried to get another QDM. No luck.

  The English Channel widens dramatically as you go west, so Gurnee was moving further and further away from the English coast. He heard nothing more. He didn’t trust that faint QDM. If it was wrong, and he turned and headed northeast, he would simply fly deeper into the North Sea. An hour later—after more than eight hours’ flying—he knew the QDM must have been right. Now he turned north; but now his tanks were down to the dregs, and soon the angry sea swallowed the Hampden like a titbit.

  Langham found Silk in his room, lying on his bed, not reading a book. “Guess what,” he said. “My popsy’s mother has just given us a house to live in.”

  “Fancy that.”

  “Big place. It’s even got peacocks.”

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  “Near Lincoln. Made me think, life’s a bit like playing Monopoly, isn’t it? Last night I was knee-deep in muck, running away from the army. Today I won a socking great country house.”

  “More like snakes and ladders,” Silk said. “Stubby Gurnee’s overdue. In the drink, probably. Him and his crew.”

  “Ah,” Langham said. “Yes. I suppose that is different.”

  For a few days, the MO discreetly observed the reaction of the aircrews, and saw their lack of reaction. Perhaps the Mess was slightly quieter the day after Gurnee was missing. It soon recovered. People were always coming and going on a bomber station: they got posted, sent on courses, developed tonsillitis, got lost and pranged the kite when they came down in Scotland and weren’t seen again for a fortnight. Everybody moved, sooner or later. Nobody lost any sleep over it.

  AWFUL RESTLESS STUFF

  The Americans were beginning to call it the Phoney War. For the French it was la drôle de guerre: the joke war. In Germany they watched nothing happen on the Siegfried and Maginot Lines and christened it Sitzkrieg: sitting war. Churchill, who was in Chamberlain’s Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, called it the Twilight War, which was too poetic for the British. They preferred the Bore War. It was a pun on the Boer War. All but the thickest recognized that. And Britain had won the Boer War. Britain always won, in the long run. Everyone knew that.

  Rafferty and Hunt were determined that 409 was not going to be allowed to be bored. The crews were kept busy. If they couldn’t fly, they trained. They did PT, ran around the aerodrome, were drilled on the parade ground; and they went to lectures, endless lectures, on meteorology, bomb-aiming, optimum cruising speeds and fuel consumption, air-firing, aircraft recognition, the history of the RAF, military law, oxygen depletion, more meteorology, astro-navigation, first aid including resuscitation, aircraft recognition again. And then one afternoon, when “B” flight was on standby, “A” Flight went to a distant corner of the aerodrome for a lecture by Black Mac on Why Bombs Explode.

  He stood beside an array of bombs, set up on the floor of a flatbed truck. The crews gathered in a half-circle. Silk and Langham hid at the back.

  McHarg enjoyed lecturing aircrew. It allowed him to put them in their place. For a start, he adopted a bogus, over-educated Scottish accent: Edinburgh, not Glasgow: the kind of sing-song style he imagined a university don or a successful advocate might use.

  “There are some folk,” he began, “who regard the British bomber pilot and his friends as the cream of the Royal Air Force. Gallant knights in armor, sallying forth to fight His Majesty’s foes. Nnn?” This tiny, nasal snort punctuated his lecture. “A romantic view. Truth is, the bomb does the damage, so the bomb deserves the credit. Nnn? Rather like the butcher’s boy on his bicycle, delivering the meat. Which matters more, the meat or the boy? Nnn? So now—”

  “Don’t agree,” said Tom Stuart, the flight commander. “Your sausages are no good if your butcher’s boy takes them to the wrong address.”

  McHarg recoiled an inch. “That thought never entered my mind, squadron leader. Totally miss the target, d’you mean? Is that a common occurrence, would you say?”

  “No, but…”

  “That’s a relief, then. We can ignore such a rare event. Nnn? Yes. All agree, the bomb is king.”

  “He’s taking the piss,” Silk whispered to Langham.

  “Is there a question at the back?” McHarg asked, and stood on tiptoe. Silk and Langham ducked. “No? Well now, let us meet the bomb family. Here we have the General Purpose two-hundred-and-fifty-pound and five-hundred-pound.” The bigger bomb was about five feet high and was painted olive green. He patted and stroked it like a pet dog. “How many here think ‘General Purpose’ means it’s good for all jobs?” A few tentative hands went up. “You’re all buffoons,” McHarg said. “GP simply means it will fit in the bay of any RAF bomber in service. We have three main types of this bomb: high explosive, armor-piercing, and fragmentation. HE overwhelms the enemy, armor-piercing underwhelms him, and fragmentation whelms what’s left standing.” Nobody even smiled. He hid his disappointment. That had been his only joke, written down when he heard it told at an Advanced Armaments Course in 1937. Well, sod the lot of them.

  “I could talk for hours about the ballistic properties of the GP bomb,” he said. “Nnn? But what you want to know is precisely how the weapon is fused and armed. Nnn? Child’s play. Take a detonator and a pistol. Not a handgun, you understand. Nnn? This pistol is a mechanical device inserted in the weapon. Upon release from the aircraft, the pistol is automatically armed. It contains a striker. On impact with the target, the striker is struck, and it impels by explosion an initiator cap into the detonator, which initiates a sequence…”

  It took him twenty minutes. A chill wind was whipping around the aerodrome. Hands were deep in pockets, tunic collars were turned up, legs were starting to stiffen. “Turning to ballistics …”he said.

  “No. Forget ballistics,” Tom Stuart said. “Just tell us what can go wrong with bombs. And what can be done about it.”

  Everyone got interested.

  “Well, of course, armorers never let anything go wrong, because that would be unthinkable. Nnn? But I’ve brought along two examples of what could theoretically go wrong if …” He pointed to a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder. “Explosive is awful restless stuff. Awful curious. After a few years in a bomb dump it exudes. The word is from the Latin, meaning ‘sweat.’ It sweats through the pores of the casing and it crystallizes on the outside.” They edged forward to see. The bomb was coated with brown crystals like Demerara sugar. “The exuded matter can be scraped off. The scrapings are what we call … volatile.” He looked around until he found Silk. “A wee experiment,” he said, and gave Silk a hammer. Everyone fell back. McHarg used a wooden spatula to scrape some crystals off the bomb. He walked away and placed the spatula on the ground. “Give it a wee smack,” he said. Silk bent low, reached sideways, and gave the crystals a gentle tap. The bang sent him sprawling on his backside, and startled everyone except McHarg. He picked up the hammer. “Awful restless wee things,” he said.

  “So that’s one problem,” Tom Stuart said.

  “The other
thing is very, very unlikely. We’ve been issued with what’s called the Long Delay pistol.” He showed them one. “For when your bomb does not immediately explode.” He stared at Langham. “Now what would be the point of that?”

  “To annoy Jerry’s civil defense people,” Langham said. “Bomb goes off hours later.”

  “Or maybe sooner. There’s a nose fuse that’s very sensitive. The German bomb disposal laddies disturb it. Detonation occurs.”

  “Tough on them,” Stuart said. “Not us. Until the bomb gets armed, that fuse is harmless.”

  “So it is, squadron leader.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “In theory, there’s a very remote possibility that the arming device could be activated prematurely, while loading the bomb on the aircraft. Now, if its Long Delay pistol was set for, say, six hours…”

  It was too late for Stuart to stop the discussion. “You’re saying it would explode six hours later. Perhaps during flight.”

  “In theory. Not on this squadron, of course. My men take every precaution. No risk at all here.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Stuart said. “This lecture’s over.”

  The crews walked briskly away, glad of the exercise.

  “That was a bloody stupid thing to tell them,” Stuart said.

  “You asked what could go wrong.”

  “And what we could do about it. There’s damn all my boys can do about Long Delay pistols except worry. Thank you very bloody much.”

  “No mistake will happen here.”

  “How d’you know? How d’you know Gurnee’s bombs didn’t blow him up two days ago, over the North Sea?”

  “Gurnee was lost on a shipping strike. Long Delay pistols are never used for a shipping strike. You want detonation on impact.”

  “In theory.” Stuart turned and strode away.

  A hundred yards away, Silk said, “He picked us out. Did you notice? First me, then you. He was sending a message.”

  “What do Long Delay bombs look like?” Langham asked. “Do they look any different?”

  “Dunno. And for Christ’s sake don’t ask him. You might put ideas in his stupid head.”

  STABILIZED BOLLOCKS

  1

  All over Britain the blackout was complete. No streetlights; all bus and train windows painted blue; vehicle headlamps masked so that only a gleam escaped. Shops rapidly sold out of torch batteries. Pedestrians walked blindly through the night, colliding with lampposts, telephone poles, trees, and each other. Also with moving vehicles. There was no change in speed limits, and so twice as many British people were killed on the roads in wartime than in peace. It got worse as the nights grew longer. The war might be phony but the death toll was real.

  Tucked away in the calm and quiet of Lincolnshire, where the biggest hazard on the roads was a rocketing pheasant or partridge, RAF Kindrick was relatively safe. Shame about Stubby Gurnee, but replacements soon arrived. Life went on.

  Then the teleprinter clattered, and an order came down from Group HQ. With immediate effect, all Hampden aircraft carrying out training flights or air tests would do so with a full bombload, to duplicate operational conditions. It made sense; as Pug Duff pointed out, a crew should train the way it was going to have to fight. Even Langham agreed. He didn’t trust Black Mac, he thought the man was capable of hiding delayed-action thunderflashes in the kite, timed to go off at ten thousand feet. That was ludicrous, of course; he wasn’t so stupid as to play the fool with his own career. But Langham worried all the same. And he had one final air test to do. It was on the morning of his wedding.

  His Hampden was D-Dog. He’d flown Dog for months; she was his, she had no vices, he was proud of her. So were his ground crew. A sergeant rigger had checked the control cables and noticed that two had stretched slightly. This worried him. Control cables linked the pilot’s hands and feet to the control surfaces: to the ailerons in the wings, to the elevators and rudders in the tail. Slack cables took the edge off performance. The sergeant made adjustments.

  Strictly speaking, Langham was off duty. Rafferty had given him four days’ leave to get married. But Dog was his Hampden and he didn’t trust anyone else to do the air test. So after breakfast he lowered himself into the cockpit, with his observer in front and two gunners behind, and slightly less than a ton of bombs beneath.

  At once he felt comfortable and confident. He was at home in D-Dog, within easy reach of all the taps and switches. This was the office. It had an old familiar smell of oil and leather.

  Earlier, he had walked around the bomber, counted the engines, kicked the tires, manipulated the rudders. Now he went through the pre-flight test sequence, a routine as familiar as shaving. The ground crew were watching, waiting. He switched on the ignition and the starter magneto. He pressed the starter button for the port engine while the ground crew primed its induction system. The propeller kicked and jerked and suddenly spun as the Pegasus roared and belched black exhaust, and the airplane vibrated. The starboard engine started just as easily. He watched and waited for a few seconds. When he was sure they were both firing steadily he switched off the magneto. The ground crew screwed down the priming pump. Now the whole aircraft was pressed against its chocks, eager to go. He did the warm-up checks—hydraulic system, brake pressure—and then tested airscrews and superchargers and magnetos. He opened the throttles until the engines were howling for release, and he checked boost and oil pressure. All was well. He closed the throttles, waved the chocks away, eased the brakes off, and taxied slowly to the end of the runway. Over-eager pilots taxied too fast, got the tail wheel jammed in a rut, ripped holes in the rear end. Not wise.

  Now he did the Final Drill. Hydraulic power control: on. Trim tabs: neutral. Mixture: normal. Pitch: fully forward. Fuel: cock settings and contents correct. Flaps: select down eighteen degrees. Superchargers: M ratio. Gills: both cowlings closed.

  All okay. He looked again at the wings. The starboard flap often came down faster than the port flap, which made their angles unequal. But not today.

  One last and definitely final check. He turned the control wheel from side to side and watched the ailerons respond. He called the upper gunner on the intercom, and played the rudder bar with his feet. The upper gunner confirmed that the twin rudders and the elevators were moving freely. “Anything behind us?” Langham asked. Once, during Initial Training, he’d seen an airplane take off quite literally in the shadow of another machine that was trying to land. Unforgettable. “Nothing in the sky, skipper,” the gunner said.

  Now they could go. It was only an air test, up and down in half an hour, but Langham never took chances with cockpit drills. Killing yourself by bombing a battleship through flak as thick as soup was one thing. Falling out of the sky because you forgot to open or shut a tap was plain foolish.

  Control shone a green light.

  The brakes came off as the throttles were opened. A Hampden’s body looked like a suitcase but it had wings like a buzzard, and at eighty-five miles an hour Langham gave the control column a firm backward pull and D-Dog stopped pounding the grass and rose as if gravity had suddenly quit. The raucous howl softened to a sweet and steady roar. He raised the undercarriage and let the speed build to one hundred and twenty before he began a serious climb. At a thousand feet he raised the flaps. Dog, perfectly balanced, responded to every touch.

  Ahead stood Lincoln cathedral, the biggest thing in the county, so Langham flew there.

  He knew it well from the outside, because its three soaring Gothic towers made such a splendid landmark, but he’d never been inside. “I’m getting married there this afternoon,” he told his observer, a Rhodesian called Jonty Brown.

  “I know. I’m invited.”

  “Pity about the weather. I wanted sunshine.”

  “Try upstairs.”

  At five thousand feet a layer of thin, pearl-gray cloud covered the sky like paint. Langham climbed and burst through it. The sky was Mediterranean blue and the sun scattered its dazz
le recklessly. “Good idea, Jonty.”

  “Like this every day in Rhodesia.”

  “How bloody monotonous.”

  He spent ten minutes putting the Hampden through her paces and everything worked until, for no apparent reason, the port engine began losing revs. Nothing else seemed wrong: temperature, oil pressure, boost were okay. Maybe the revs gauge was faulty. But Dog was swinging slightly to the left. He throttled back the starboard engine. Now Dog swung a little to the right. “Behave yourself, you bitch,” he muttered. He was trimming the rudders, searching for a balance, and losing speed. Port engine revs kept falling.

  “Give me a course for base,” he said.

  “Dunno, skip,” Jonty said. “It’s just an air test, I thought you knew where we were.” Langham swore. Jonty said, “Get below cloud and I’ll soon find you a landmark.”

  “Sorry to bother you, skipper,” the under gunner said. “There’s a Wimpy watching us. Seems very interested.”

  Langham swore again. Within a few seconds the Wellington was a wing-length away on the starboard side. Too close. The thing was twice his size; it could eat a Hampden for breakfast. He banked left, a touch too sharply, and corrected the beginnings of a wallow. “The Wimpy’s signaling,” Jonty said. A lamp flashed from its astrodome. “Tell them to go to hell,” Langham said. That was when his cockpit became bedlam.

  The upper gunner appeared at his shoulder, holding a birdcage. “The pigeons aren’t very well, skip,” he said. Two carrier pigeons were, like the bombload, part of Dog’s operational baggage. “Look.” He opened the cage door, to give a better view. The birds fluttered and fell over each other. “Get that bloody junk out of here!” Langham roared. The bomber hit a small air pocket and lurched. The gunner stumbled and dropped the cage. The birds escaped and in an instant the cockpit was full of panicking wings and claws and beaks. Langham beat them off with one hand and used the other to turn Dog away from the damn-fool Wellington. It was a lousy turn. He felt through the seat of his pants that Dog disliked it. She was not responding properly. He gave her full rudder. Now she was worse. His ears were full of gabble on the intercom. He searched the panel for the turn-and-slip indicator and couldn’t see it for pigeons, wings flapping, feathers flying. One wild sweep of his right arm knocked them aside and they vanished. By now he knew what was wrong. Dog was skidding. Not turning, but skidding. And falling fast.