Before the pilots who’d trained together went to their squadrons, they threw a last bash. As Red Tobin said afterwards, it got pretty drunk out. Eat, drink, and be merry! seemed uppermost in everybody’s mind. A.E. remembered that that phrase had another part, too. No one came out and said For tomorrow we die!, but it seemed to be on more people’s minds than hers alone.
She drank less than most of the men did. For one thing, she was the oldest person in the training group. She’d just turned forty-three; one fellow was thirty-eight, a few more in their early thirties, but most of the men ranged from eighteen to twenty-five. For another, she never had enjoyed getting smashed for the sake of getting smashed. And, for one more, a woman with any sense didn’t get loaded with a bunch of young men.
She knew them all. She was going to trust some of them with her life, and they’d trust her with theirs. All of which had nothing to do with the price of beer … or wine, or scotch.
A South African she’d called Pete for a while before finding out he spelled it Piet slipped an arm around her and tried to kiss her. She didn’t kiss him back, which was one of the points to staying within shouting distance of sober. He scowled and gave her a reproachful stare. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, his accent sounding almost German in her ears.
“Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s the matter with you?” she replied. “I’m old enough to be your mother.” She wasn’t kidding in the least; his spotty face said he couldn’t have been much above twenty-one.
“My mother doesn’t look like you,” he said, and tried again. This time, he put a hand against the back of her head so he could mash her mouth against his.
But she knew what to do about that. She’d long since lost track of how many would-be wolves she’d dealt with over the years. A woman both good-looking and famous drew them the way a sirloin drew hungry hounds.
Instead of trying to pull away from his tug, she went with it. Not at all by accident, her forehead hit the bridge of his nose, hard. He yowled like a cat with its tail under a rocking chair. He also let go of her so he could clap both hands to the injured part.
They came away bloody. More blood ran over his mouth and chin. “You filthy bitch! You meant to do that!” he said thickly.
“Damn right, I did,” A.E. said. “I told you I wasn’t interested. Didn’t you think I meant it?”
“I ought to—” Instead of going on, Piet made a fist.
Before he could do whatever he was going do to, a large hand came down on his shoulder. “Leave the lady alone, shithead, or I’ll make you sorry,” Red Tobin said evenly.
Piet growled something that wasn’t English and didn’t sound like an endearment. Then he added, “You and who else?”
“I’m the who else.” Andy appeared behind Red.
“Me, too.” So did Shorty Keough, though you had to look hard to find him.
Piet’s bloody nose did nothing to improve his scowl. “Screw you all,” he said, and stamped away.
“Thanks, boys, but you didn’t have to do that. I can take care of myself,” A.E. said. The next step after the butt to the nose was the knee to the nuts. She didn’t believe in fair fights with anyone who thought she was nothing but a nicely shaped toy.
“We didn’t do it because we had to. We did it because we wanted to,” Shorty said.
“You bet.” Andy Mamedoff nodded emphatically. “Going after the Nazis is bad enough. You shouldn’t have to take on guys who say they’re on your side, too.”
“Thanks,” A.E. said again, this time with more warmth. She’d known the Yanks put up with her, even if they thought she was crazy for wanting to fly fighters. Till this moment, she hadn’t been sure they actually liked her. How much knowing that meant amazed her.
Red Tobin promptly nicknamed Middle Wallop “Center Punch.” He and the other two American men were quartered in the barracks with the other male pilots. Flight Officer Darley, the squadron commander, proposed billeting A.E. with the WAAF personnel at the other end of the airfield.
“Sir, if there’s a scramble on I may not hear it in time and I may not be able to get to my kite fast enough if you do that.” A.E. was picking up the RAF lingo.
“You’re serious about this,” Darley said slowly.
“Would I be here if I weren’t … sir?”
The pause before the honorific made him send her a sharp look. She stared back steadily. “What do you suggest, then?” he asked.
“Every time I wind up at a base, they stick me in a tent. That’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“You won’t like it so well once winter comes on.”
“If I’m still here in winter, we can worry about it then.”
Darley took If I’m still here exactly the way she’d meant it. This time, his examination struck her as measuring. “Quite,” he murmured, and then, “Well, let it be as you say.”
For her first couple of weeks at the base she got ferry duty, taking Spitfires to other bases where they were needed and coming back in a Miles Master or some other two-seater. Since Shorty, Red, and Andy drew the same kind of assignments, she didn’t complain. And every hour in a plane she was still learning did her good.
Sure as the devil, the Germans kept hitting England, and particularly RAF bases, harder and harder. Middle Wallop took a walloping. A.E. had just landed in a trainer when Ju 88s appeared overhead and started unloading bombs.
She stood frozen for a moment. Red’s warning shout unfroze her in a hurry. She dashed for a trench by the runway, and dove into it just before the bombs started bursting.
The roar, the blast like a slap in the face, dirt pattering down on her from a couple of near misses … This was combat, combat when you couldn’t shoot back. The war suddenly felt less abstract, more personal. Those Nazi sons of bitches were trying to murder her! She wanted the chance to pay them back.
Red Tobin popped up from another trench not far away. He didn’t seem to notice he was wearing a good-sized chunk of dirt in his hair, the way a pretty girl might wear a flower. Grinning at A.E., he said, “Wow! That was fun!”
“Now that you mention it,” she answered tightly, “no.” Despite her effort to control her voice, it wobbled. She felt as she would have after a crash landing she managed to come out of unhurt. You always felt the consciousness of disaster when you flew. Sometimes you felt it like a slap in the face. This was one of those times.
She got her first chance for revenge a few days later, when the squadron CO declared her and the other three Yanks “operational.” She wasn’t sure she liked that; it sounded as if they were new bits of machinery bolted on to the RAF.
She also wasn’t sure she liked the job they got handed. RAF fighters flew in vics of three: a leader and two wingmen. Two vics made a flight; two flights made a squadron. The nice, neat—to A.E.’s mind, rigid—squadron needed a couple of extra planes weaving along behind to keep an eye peeled for trouble from the rear and above.
“Tail-end Charlie, that’s me.” Andy Mamedoff sounded more cheerful than he looked.
“That’s all of us,” Shorty Keough said. Plainly, when you were buzzing around by yourself your chances were worse than they would have been with friends close by. If you lived for a while, you’d graduate to a spot in the formation. If you didn’t, somebody else would get a chance … till the limeys ran out of somebody elses, anyhow.
They went into action the next day. Before they did, Flight Lieutenant Darley spoke to his pilots in the crowded little wardroom. “I want you all to take a good look around. Most of the men sitting here with you will be dead a year from now.”
The charming Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory had told A.E. much the same thing. No American would have. Americans always were, or at least acted, sure they could come through anything. Englishmen took a grimmer, or maybe just a more realistic, view of the world.
“Those Nazi bastards are going to try to knock England flat,” the squadron leader went on. “We’ll do our damnedest not to let them. Good luck, one and all! Let’s go
to the planes.”
They scrambled several times that day, but never got airborne. As the sun finally set that evening—England lay so far north, summer days seemed to stretch like taffy—A.E. didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
One of the genuine Englishmen in the squadron, a pilot who’d seen a lot of action in France and over the Channel, had no doubts on that score. “Any day they aren’t shooting at you, my dear, is a bloody good day, and you may take it to the bank,” he told her.
My dear grated a little; he wouldn’t have said that to Andy or Shorty or Red. But he would have called them old chap or old boy or something like that. She decided it wasn’t worth fussing about. Next to burning in the cockpit like a rump roast forgotten in the oven or taking a bullet or a shell fragment in the leg or in the face, it didn’t seem so bad. You had to pick your fights. She’d picked hers, by God.
The squadron did go into action the next day. The Yanks alternated on rear-guard duties. A.E. would have flown before; that day, it was Red and Andy’s turn. Andy barely made it back to the base. A 109 had shot up his Spitfire from behind. The plane had been elderly when he got it, and was a write-off now.
He wasn’t a write-off himself for one reason only: his armored seat back had just about kept a couple of 20mm shells from getting through. The steel was dented; Andy Mamedoff’s back wasn’t … quite. He got out of the cockpit as if he’d suddenly aged fifty years, and went on hobbling after his boots hit the grass.
“I bet I’m all bruised up back there,” he said. “Felt like somebody hauled off and slammed me with a Louisville Slugger.”
“With a what?” asked a groundcrew man who didn’t speak American.
“A baseball bat,” Mamedoff explained. “But I never saw the son of a gun”—he winked at A.E.—“till he opened up on me. I was flying along, getting ready to make a run at one of the Stukas over the Channel, and then—wham! After that, I was just praying I wouldn’t have to ditch.”
“Glad you’re here,” A.E. told him.
He winked at her. “You ain’t half as glad as I am, believe you me you ain’t.”
Chapter Eight
They flew down to Warmwell, Middle Wallop’s forward air base, the next day. Warmwell lay south and west of Middle Wallop: just inland from the coast, a few miles west of Bournemouth. Middle Wallop was a little English country town. Next to a city like Salisbury, it was nothing much. Next to Warmwell, it could have been London.
A.E. had a tent, and in it she lived distinctly better than the men of the squadron did in their squalid barracks. Plumbing arrangements there left everything to be desired. Instead of using them, the men stepped into the bushes by the path to spend a penny. That was less convenient for her, so she endured the odorous facilities.
The flyers wanted breakfast as soon as it got light. They knew the Germans would be out and about early themselves. Civilian cooks resented getting up at three in the morning to fix bacon and eggs for the men defending the skies. They resented it so much, they flat-out refused to do it.
Left to their own devices, the pilots scorched things on their Primus stoves. Flight Lieutenant Darley quietly asked A.E., “Can you do any better than they are?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, sir. I’m a much better pilot than I am a cook. I’ll eat whatever they make, and I won’t grouse about it.”
Muttering under his breath, the squadron CO slouched off. A.E. let out a silent sigh of relief that he hadn’t chosen to push it. She’d told him a white lie. No one would ever accuse her of being a great cook, but she knew she outclassed her male squadronmates. But she also knew Darley’d only asked her because she was a woman. She was damned if she’d slave at a stove for no better reason than that.
She was flying tail-end Charlie when the squadron went up to protect a convoy moving east through the Channel. And the convoy needed protecting; Luftwaffe bombers, escorted by 109s and 110s, came north from France to harry it.
A 110’s rear gunner opened up on her. She returned fire: eight machine guns hitting back at one. One of the enemy heavy fighter’s engines began to smoke. It pulled away and fled back towards its base. She put more bullets into it, and it spun down, out of control.
Then she was dogfighting with a pair of 109s, and glad to break away when she could. The Germans didn’t fly in rigid vics. They had pairs: a leader and his wingman. Sometimes two of those pairs would fly together to protect each other. That seemed a lot more flexible than the RAF approach.
Before long, the German bomber pilots decided they weren’t going to be able to unload on that convoy after all. They turned around and headed for France again. Their escorts followed. “Let’s go home,” Flight Lieutenant Darley said. A.E. didn’t think she’d ever heard such welcome words in her earphones.
She felt … She didn’t know how she felt. Like a freshly washed dress that had just gone through the wringer—she couldn’t come any closer. She didn’t seem to own any bones. Why she didn’t ooze out of the seat and puddle on the cockpit floor, she couldn’t have said.
She remembered to lower the landing gear before she touched down. After bouncing to a stop, she opened the canopy, undid her harness, and climbed out. The first thing she saw, now that the prop wasn’t spinning any more, was that one blade had a bullet hole. The Spitfire had taken another hit on the left wing, and—she looked back—a couple of more in the fuselage. The Germans had been playing for keeps.
Well, so had she. Her squadron mates came running up, shouting congratulations. “You did for that one bugger—I saw him go in!”
“The way you got clear of those 109s! Like a watermelon seed squirting out between their fingers!”
She hopped down to the ground. Her legs barely held her upright. A couple of men wanted to pound her on the back. She shook them off, stumbled around behind the Spit’s far wheel, bent over, and was noisily sick on the grass. There’d been two young men in that Messerschmitt 110. They’d never see their parents or their wives and children—if they had any—again.
She’d killed them, was what she’d done.
Someone set a hand on her shoulder. She started to twist away. “Hold on,” the squadron CO said. “I did the same thing after I shot down my first Jerry in France. You can rinse your mouth with this, if you care to.” He held out a small, silvered flask, the kind you might have seen at a college football game during Prohibition.
“Thanks,” A.E. managed, and took a swig. She swished it around, then spat. “Shame to do that to such good brandy.”
“Sometimes you need it,” Darley said. “If you want to swallow the next one, that’s all right, too.” She did. The brandy slid down her throat, smooth and fiery at the same time.
“Thanks,” she said again, coughing only a little at the end of the word.
“And if you care to come to the pub tonight and hoist a few, sometimes you need that, too.” Darley’s smile was the more charming for being a bit crooked. “One thing you’ll find in a hurry is that oxygen and raw fear make sovereign hangover cures.”
“I don’t think I want to do that right now, but we’ll see for sure later on,” A.E. replied. He nodded and left it there. Even if he had thought she ought to cook for the squadron along with flying her missions, he made a pretty fair CO.
One day in early September, Shorty and Red got leave to go into London. They’d heard Colonel Sweeny was in town at last. Neither they, Andy, nor A.E. had yet to see a franc, a shilling, or even a good old American nickel for their time in France. Red and Shorty hoped to pry some dough out of him.
A.E. didn’t worry about it so much. She wasn’t rich, but she was a long way from poor. Books and swings on the lecture circuit had let her cash in on her flying fame. Now that she wasn’t married to George Putnam any more, her expenses were down; he’d liked living well. And the post at Purdue she’d left to join the RAF brought in nice, regular paychecks. She hadn’t known those since abandoning social work for flight in 1928.
She understood she was l
uckier than the young men with whom she’d crossed the Atlantic. They needed anything they could get their hands on, since a pilot officer’s pay was a whopping £16 a month, which came to just over $67. Of course, pilot officers’ privileges also included room, board, and the daily chance to get killed.
And, if you were a Yank in the RAF, they included talking with the press, too. After her first kill, A.E. had given interviews to God only knew how many English reporters. When Edward R. Murrow saw the stories, she’d spoken with him on the radio, shortwave carrying her words across the ocean to the States.
She wasn’t a natural performer, but she’d done enough of it to know how. And she knew every word she said helped bring other American flyers to England to join the fight against the Nazis. Her fame and her sex were part of the reason Colonel Sweeny had been so keen to bring her to Europe to begin with.
Back at Middle Wallop again, the morning was quiet but nervous. The Luftwaffe had started bombing London instead of RAF airfields a couple of days before, and England had replied with a night air raid on Berlin. How Hitler would respond to high explosives raining down on his capital … was why the base was quiet but nervous.
The scramble came a little before 1600. “They’re hitting London with everything they’ve got this time!” Flight Lieutenant Darley called as the pilots ran to their planes.
A.E. knew the RAF had some fancy, supersecret, radio-related way to detect incoming German planes far out of range of eye and ear. She hadn’t asked about the details. Curiosity about such things was not encouraged. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t spill if you got shot down over the Channel or France and the enemy captured you.
She and Andy were going to play tail-end Charlie again. Neither one of them grumbled about it. They were heading into action … and, if they stayed lucky, it wasn’t likely everyone else would. Sooner or later, they’d be veterans with regular slots in a vic, and some fresh-faced kid just out of OTU would weave around behind trying to keep them safe.
Or Even Eagle Flew Page 4
