“Hey, Earhart!” said Bill Geiger, a kid who’d been with 71 Squadron from the get-go. “You aren’t talking much. What do you think of all this?”
“We’re going to kick the snot out of Japan. If we get into the fight with the Nazis, we’ll kick the snot out of Germany, too. We’ll probably need a little while to get going, but we’ll do it,” she answered.
That met with general approval. It seemed obvious to A.E. Geiger went on, “Won’t it be great, flying under the Stars and Stripes?”
She was slower to reply this time. After a beat, she said, “They’ll want men with experience—you bet they will. They won’t have anybody who’s flown in combat except a few old guys who flew biplanes in 1918.”
Bill Geiger laughed the heartless laugh of youth. He might not have been born in 1918. “Those fellas won’t know much about how we do it now.”
This time, she got away with not saying anything. She remembered the RAF sergeant-pilot who’d trained her at Croydon. He’d known what he was doing, all right. The planes changed. What you did with them? Rather less.
When the United States declared war on Japan but not on Germany, A.E. wondered whether Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t thought Congress would approve fighting Hitler and his gang of thugs. As far as she could see, that was a judgment on Congress, if not on America as a whole.
But it turned out not to matter. Four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the USA. Like it or not, America was in the European fight up to its eyebrows. A.E. wondered what isolationist, America First Charles Lindbergh thought of that. As far as she could tell from the London papers and the BBC, he was keeping very quiet. After he’d spent so long making a pro-German jerk of himself, that had to be the smartest thing he could do.
A couple of days later, she ran across a back-page story in the Times of London. EAGLE LOST IN TRAINING ACCIDENT, the headline said. A Spitfire flown by an American pilot officer called John G. Magee had collided with another plane on a training flight. Both went down, and both pilots perished.
She scratched her head, wondering why the name seemed familiar. She didn’t think she knew anyone called John G. Magee, but still … Then she remembered. He was the poet who’d written “High Flight,” the piece the minister read out at Andy Mamedoff’s funeral.
The last sentence of the little story read Pilot Officer Magee was nineteen years of age at the time of his death. A.E. looked at that for a long time. Of course, lots of nineteen-year-olds were dying in horrible ways around the world right now. Having this one pointed out made her feel it more, though. So did his being an American, and a talented one.
“‘Put out my hand and touched the face of God,’” she murmured, remembering the sonnet’s final line. God had touched John Magee now, and he wouldn’t need any more touches after this.
“What did you say?” asked another Yank in the officers’ mess.
She repeated the line, louder this time, and added, “Remember Andy’s funeral? They read the poem there. The fellow who wrote it just died in a crash. He was nineteen.”
“Ah, hell. That stinks. That really stinks,” the other pilot said, and then picked up his teacup again. Not much more than nineteen himself, he was hardened to death. If you were going to fly fighters, you needed to be. Anything that could happen could happen to you. Sooner or later—likely sooner—it would.
A.E. glanced at the story again. The accident had happened on December 11, the day the Nazis officially went to war with the United States. John Magee had done what he could. Others would carry on.
Every time she flew a Rhubarb mission into France, she thought of Red Tobin. Word had come back through the International Red Cross that he was dead. There was even a photo of the grave where the Germans buried him. Like the English, they were polite to the remains of flyers they’d killed.
She was one of the leaders in a finger-four now. More often than not, Bill Geiger flew as her wingman. “Just don’t do anything silly and we’ll be fine,” she told him. “You watch my back, I’ll watch yours.”
“Gotcha,” he said, nodding in what she hoped was wisdom. Christ, he was young, though. She really could have been his mother.
Winter weather gave the raiders lots of clouds they could duck into if they ran into trouble. Coming out of the clouds where they wanted to was the tricky part. A.E. remembered Andy Mamedoff, too. But all she could do was all she could do. And by now she knew a lot more about navigation than she had when Fred Noonan did it for her on her round-the-world jaunt.
Still, even she was more than a little amazed when her finger-four came out from under the cloud cover right above one of the Nazi air bases near Calais. Several Focke-Wulf 190s stood on or by the runway. Those new German fighters worried her worse than 109s. By the reports, they were more than a match even for the new Spits: fast, maneuverable, and heavily armed, while their air-cooled radial engines could soak up a lot of damage without quitting.
But they were down there, and she and her friends were up here. “Let’s give them some,” she said over the radio. She shoved the stick forward to bring down her Spitfire’s nose. The others dove with her.
They made two or three passes over the field, shooting up planes and huts. Two of the 190s were on fire when they zoomed north again. The rest would certainly need patching up before going into action again.
Everybody came back to North Weald in one piece, which was the way things were supposed to work even if too often they didn’t. “Nice job, Bill,” she said. “Good to know things can go according to Hoyle every once in a while, isn’t it?”
“You better believe it!” Geiger answered. “Good to shoot at things without anybody shooting back, too.”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “yes.”
She went in to brief Flight Lieutenant Taylor on the raid. “Way to go,” he said when she finished. “The fewer of those F-Ws the Nazis can put in the air, the happier I am. They’re supposed to be very bad news.”
“I was thinking the same thing, sir.” Having said what she had to say, A.E. turned to leave.
“Hold on a minute,” Taylor told her. He reached behind him and grabbed a manila envelope. “This came through for you. Go ahead—open it.”
Open it she did, and pulled out a sheet of paper. Holding the sheet at arm’s length—yes, her sight was lengthening, not a bad thing in the air but not a good one without reading glasses—she saw it was a letter on RAF stationery, informing her she had been promoted to flying officer and signed (no doubt much to his disgust) by Sholto Douglas.
As a pilot officer, she wore on each uniform sleeve a skinny, black-bordered stripe of sky blue. A flying officer wore a fatter sky-blue stripe. Her new rank emblems were in the envelope, too.
“Thank you very much, sir!” she exclaimed, but couldn’t help adding, “I never expected this would come through.”
“You should’ve got it a long time ago, if anyone wants to know what I think,” Taylor said. As a flight lieutenant, he gloried in two stripes like her new ones on each sleeve. “You’ve done everything anyone could ask of you and more. The other pilots think you’re great. If you were a man, you’d outrank me by now.”
She shrugged, remembering Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory’s unwillingness to take her into the RAF at all, Flight Lieutenant Darley asking her to cook for 609 Squadron … and that attempted assault in the dark. She also remembered Andy Mamedoff, on getting promoted ahead of her, saying almost the same thing Taylor just had. Poor Andy!
“Sir, things are the way they are, that’s all,” she said. “They’re still a long way from how they ought to be. But I’m here. That pushes them a little closer, anyway.”
“That’s the right attitude, for sure.” Taylor cocked an eyebrow at her. “If you didn’t have that kind of attitude, you’d be screaming by now.”
“I keep telling myself I’m fighting on the right side,” she answered. “We’re making things better, not worse like the Nazis. Two steps forward and on
e step back, but we are. Maybe I’m part of a forward step. I hope so, anyway.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about on that score. Congratulations again,” Taylor said. She was smiling as she went to her cot to sew the new stripes onto her jacket sleeves. The squadron CO actually got it. One of these days, with a little luck, men wouldn’t need to get it. They’d take it for granted. The smile faded. She didn’t think she’d better hold her breath waiting.
Chapter Nineteen
By the time spring started giving way to summer, she’d been in the original Eagle Squadron more than a year and a half. That the RAF now held three squadrons full of Yanks said all the publicity the first few American flyers got had done its job. But she didn’t think about publicity much any more. She was just another pilot doing what her superiors ordered and trying to stay alive while she did it.
Then she discovered Hollywood had cranked out an epic called, yes, Eagle Squadron. It starred Robert Stack as the hero, Diana Barrymore as his girl, and, to her dismayed amusement, Evelyn Venable as, well, Amelia Earhart. The guys in 71 Squadron ribbed her unmercifully about that. She took the kidding with as big a smile as she could paste on her face at any given moment.
Flyers from all three Eagle Squadrons were encouraged to attend the English opening in London, and had no trouble getting leave. A.E. wondered how many strings had been pulled, and by whom, to bring that off. If anyone knew, he wasn’t talking.
She went to the theater with her comrades. They had two rows of seats reserved for the Eagles, and people clapped as the American flyers took their places in them. Plenty of the men seemed to take that as their due, which bemused A.E.
When the house lights dimmed, she didn’t know what to expect. What she got was … the kindest thing she could think of was, it was something that could have been better. Quentin Reynolds’s voiceover made her think it would be a documentary, but it wasn’t. It was one more grade-B Hollywood adventure flick.
It did have stretches of newsreel and other genuine war footage mixed in. As far as A.E. was concerned, those were the best parts. The rest …
Robert Stack was untouchable in the air. Diana Barrymore was improbably beautiful and improbably patient. Improbably stupid, too, A.E. thought unkindly. A.E. also noted that Evelyn Venable was at least fifteen years younger than she was. The actress always had perfect makeup when she jumped into a Spitfire (except in the newsreel bits, there were no Hurricanes—with planes as with people, beauty counted). And she shot down more Nazis in the movie than A.E. had in almost two years in the RAF.
Some of the men from the Eagle Squadrons started jeering the picture before it was ten minutes old. They weren’t quiet about it, or polite. Before too much more time had gone by, they started walking out, sometimes singly, sometimes by twos and threes as one would nudge the guy next to him and they’d both leave.
A.E. stuck it out almost to the end. Nigel Bruce was actually pretty good as a senior British officer. She liked him better than Sholto Douglas or Trafford Leigh-Mallory, that was for damn sure. Finally, though, the hoke got too thick for her to take. As she slipped away in the darkness, only a couple of Yanks still sat in the seats they’d been given.
Most of the men were drinking at the Crackers Club, down the street from the movie house. Due to her unfortunate femininity, the doorman didn’t want to let her in at first. He did relent after the other Eagles loudly and profanely vouched for her.
At least half a dozen flyers asked her something like, “How come the gal playing you didn’t look more like you?”
“Ask the people who made the movie,” she would answer, or, “I don’t know,” or finally, when she got good and fed up with the question, “It’s Greek to me.”
It was a late night or an early morning, depending on how you looked at things. Finally, the Americans headed back to their bases, most of them the worse for wear. 71 Squadron had it quiet the next day. That let A.E.’s comrades recover from their binge at leisure.
Before long, she heard the movie producers and other big shots were sore at the Eagles for walking out. They got no sympathy from her; if they’d made a better picture, they might have kept their audience. But word also quickly got back to North Weald that the Yanks in 121 Squadron and 133 Squadron had had to fly the next day no matter how much booze and how little sleep they’d had.
Things didn’t go well for them, either. They were ordered to escort bombers back from an attack on the German airstrips near Abbeville. As it still did every so often, though, the Luftwaffe came up to hit the bombers. The Americans claimed three German planes shot down and one probable. But 131 Squadron had three killed and one hurt, while 121 Squadron lost one pilot and had its English CO badly injured.
A.E. wondered whether the Yanks would have done better if they’d got enough sleep and stayed sober. It wouldn’t have been the first time many of them flew with a bad case of the morning-afters. All the same, she wished the movie were better. They wouldn’t have started drinking so soon then, or drunk so hard. They might not have, anyhow. Water over the dam now.
From early August on, rumors floated through the RAF that something big was in the works. On the nineteenth, 71 Squadron found out what it was; British and Canadian troops would land at Dieppe, halfway down the Channel from Calais toward Le Havre. They wouldn’t stick around, just smash as much as they could and then cross back to England. With luck, they’d learn how strong Hitler’s Atlantic defenses really were.
71 Squadron would fly top cover over the raid, to help keep the Luftwaffe from tearing into the soldiers on the ground in France and the ships that had brought them and would take them home again. The other two Eagle Squadrons would be there, too, but 71 Squadron would be in it at the start.
They moved down to Gravesend so they wouldn’t have to waste fuel flying over England before they got to the Channel. On the morning of the twenty-first, they went to their planes at 0445. The sun had begun to lighten the eastern sky, but wouldn’t climb over the horizon for a while yet.
A.E.’s heart thumped in her chest as the Spitfire’s Merlin growled to twelve-cylinder life. Two years before, she’d fought the Nazis above London. Now England was bringing the war to territory they held. That was progress, if you liked.
It was also likely to be the biggest scrap she’d flown in since the Battle of Britain wound down. All told, forty-eight Spitfire squadrons and eight more with Hurricanes would try to keep the Germans off the men and ships in the raid. That the RAF was throwing in so many planes argued it expected the Luftwaffe would, too.
The sun still hadn’t come up, but Dieppe was already burning by the time A.E. got there. Five more RAF Spitfire squadrons flew with the Eagles in the first wave. She’d hoped she’d be only a spectator. US Army Air Force B-17s were supposed to knock out those enemy air bases around Abbeville, keeping German fighters and bombers from getting airborne.
She’d seen enough by now to know that what was supposed to happen too often didn’t. Cloud cover over northern France was thick, which made good bombing harder—how could you hit what you couldn’t see? And the USA had barely started learning how to fight an air war. It lacked the RAF’s bitterly won experience.
So she wasn’t surprised when Focke-Wulfs came up after the Spitfires. She’d heard all the reports, but this was the first time she’d met the new fighters in the air. They proved at least as nasty as advertised. Spitfires started falling out of the sky, trailing smoke or spinning hopelessly out of control.
Some F-W 190s went down, too, but, she thought, not so many. She got a good shot at one, and raked it with 20mm rounds. Big chunks of aluminum skin flew from the fuselage and one wing. The 190 tumbled earthward on fire.
But another one was on her tail. She took a couple of hits before she could duck into a cloud and lose him. She swung hard left, zooming through the blinding mist. The German pilot, damn him, guessed with her. He opened up as soon as she came into sight again. Back into the mist she fled.
She flew as tight
a loop as she could, trusting her artificial horizon to tell her which end was up when she couldn’t do it for herself, and came out almost where she’d gone in. The German wasn’t racing toward her, guns already blazing. She’d outfoxed him this time.
She couldn’t read was what happening on the ground. In the air, chaos and death reigned. She radioed an urgent warning to a pair of Spitfire pilots who didn’t see F-Ws diving on them from behind. One Spit broke left; the other went right. She thought they both got away.
Eyeing her fuel gauge, she realized it was time for her to get away, too. “Returning to base,” she reported, and started north across the Channel. When she brought the plane down at Gravesend, the groundcrew men excitedly asked how things were going. “’Ell of a big dustup, from what the flyers’re saying,” one told her.
“That’s about the size of it,” she agreed.
They gassed up the Spitfire again. Armorers fed in fresh shells for the 20mms and belts of machine-gun rounds. Mechanics made sure the bullets that holed her fighter hadn’t done any serious damage. Satisfied, they declared the Spit ready to fly again.
Only she didn’t. All the Eagles from 71 Squadron came back safely, but they didn’t go back to the mêlée over Dieppe. The RAF fed fresh units into the fight instead. None of the Yanks complained. “If they don’t want me any more today, I won’t cry,” A.E. said that afternoon. “I am plumb satisfied.”
“You can sing that in church!” Bill Geiger exclaimed. “I’m not gonna cry if I never see another 190 in the air again, either, let me tell you.”
“Yeah.” She nodded wearily. The Spitfire V was a fine machine, but with their new plane the Germans had got half a step ahead. Somewhere in England, engineers would be sweating over their slide rules, trying to take back the edge.
Royal Navy ships brought back the Dieppe raiders still alive and able to leave France. England and Germany licked their wounds and drew what lessons they could from the little scrap. Stalin was unimpressed. He went right on yelling for a real second front as the Wehrmacht stormed east through southern Russia toward the oil fields in the Caucasus.
Or Even Eagle Flew Page 10
