Dusk Patrol
Page 18
He did not need to frequent the crew room to know what was being said there this morning. He had imposed no constraints on the men who had flown yesterday’s op. There was no point in concealing reality. If a squadron’s morale was not proof against a blunt recital of the unpleasantnesses of an air battle, it was badly led and those who were affected should have been posted away long ago.
He felt bad about not having been on the show himself; but that had been on specific orders from the Air Officer Commanding the Group. He had joined the Royal Flying Corps as an eighteen-year-old in 1916, shortly after squadron commanders had been forbidden to cross enemy lines at all: an injunction frequently ignored, but never without retribution if discovered. In those days he had flown scouts, later called fighters. The fighter attitude had influenced him for life and he esteemed a dashing pilot more highly than he regarded a technically impeccable one. He trained his crews to maintain faultless close formation and to make changes of formation with parade ground precision. Yet he would sooner see an exhibition of daring and high spirits than conscientious and immaculate aerial drill. If he officially had to chide someone for skimming so low across the airfield that everyone had to fall flat, for roaring through a hangar in a Tiger Moth or Magister, for hurtling between the hangars with only a few feet to spare at either wingtip, for almost scraping the roofs, he privately approved of him.
Yesterday’s six had been led by a flight lieutenant, the deputy commander of A Flight. His aircraft was the first to be shot down. The wing commander was proud of the way in which the flight lieutenant had died. It had not been a waste of his life and his crew’s, as others saw it. He had left a fine example to the squadron.
Norton had a copy of the day’s Battle Order on his desk and he picked it up. Flight Sergeant Wheldon’s was the fourth name down. Wheldon was sound, no one flew better; except himself. Wheldon’s discipline was admirable and his influence over his crew, whomever it comprised, was firm. But he had never put a foot wrong, was too assiduously concerned about his career to risk a bollocking. The wing commander’s thoughts were still couched in the jovially thuggish phraseology of a pilots’ room at the Western Front. What Wheldon needed was a spot of ginger… a squib up his arse.
Norton was, as he would have said, ‘rather keen on the war.’ He was, in fact, very keen on any war. Greatly frightened though he had been at times when flying Sopwith Pups, Bristol Fighters and Camels, twenty-odd years ago, he had enjoyed it. Danger was almost as much an attraction as the delight of flying. He had won a Military Cross and bar. Between the wars he had flown Wapitis and Gordons on operations against rebellious tribesmen on the North-West Frontier and over the deserts of the Middle East. For these he had won a Distinguished Flying Cross. He had revelled in the fun of scattering angry Pathans and Arabs, knowing that his bombs and bullets left them mostly unscathed while they hid among the rocks or dispersed across the sands.
It was a constant goad to him that, at 42, he was older than the majority of squadron commanders and, now that the war would mean swift expansion and consequent promotion, he probably had a very few months in which to ensure that his squadron distinguished itself and that he had led them into action as often as possible.
The clock on his office wall, the calendar on his desk, exercised a despotism that made him restless.
He was glad when his telephone rang and he heard the station commander say ‘Ops Order just arrived, Nortie. Come along, would you?’
Group Captain Kirkpatrick knew very well that when Nortie Norton admitted to being rather keen on the war because Germany had ‘bloody well asked for trouble and it would be a pleasure to let Hitler have it’, he was being disingenuous. He himself loathed Germans for their innate aggression, their arrogant assumption of military superiority over the rest of mankind, and their ready submission to Hitler’s manic exhortations. In the last war, flying reconnaissance machines, then scouts and eventually bombers, he had hated the ugly form of the Huns’ damnable black Maltese cross on their aeroplanes. He had detested the pilots and observers for what they did to his comrades, and his animosity increased in the last year of the war when they were given parachutes while Allied airmen were still forbidden them. It seemed to him a mean advantage.
He was 45 now, and it was seven years since he had last commanded a squadron. When the Great War broke out he had completed his first year at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. The course was shortened and he soon found himself in France as an infantry subaltern. Seeing aircraft frequently overhead and meeting the men who flew them, then being taken up for a joyride over the trenches, gave him a glimpse of a way of life that he found irresistible. Within six months he had transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. Three years later he was a very young major in command of a squadron of DH4s, delighting in bombing Germany from French bases. On 1st April 1918 the Royal Air Force came into being and his rank changed to squadron leader. Presently his squadron re-equipped with HP1/100s, which had a 100 ft wingspan and carried sixteen 112 lb bombs: an even more satisfying machine with which to batter the Boche. After the war, despite his Distinguished Service Order, Military Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross, he reverted to flight lieutenant; but promotion came quickly. He qualified as a test pilot and was decorated with the Air Force Cross for his work at Farnborough.
Although he admired and liked Norton, and looked with affection on the type of Service pilot that he represented, with its high spirits, horseplay, bravura and sense of humour, he did not try to emulate it. Accurate flying, caution and the elimination of all possible risk were his criteria of excellence in a bomber captain.
He was looking grim when Norton came in, saluted and said ‘Good morning, sir.’
He gestured to a chair and pushed the Operational Order signal across his desk. ‘Another daylight on Hun shipping. They want nine from us this time and we’re leading.’
Reading the orders, Norton saw that two other squadrons were to take part, each sending nine aircraft. ‘I’m putting myself on this one.’
‘Yes, I rather thought you would, Nortie.’
‘A bit hard on A Flight having to put up three again.’
‘Quite complimentary, though.’
‘I hope they’re right about the weather on the German coast.’
‘They sent a Whitley on recce, to be there at first light. The met forecast is based on the captain’s report.’
‘Sounds all right, sir. Let’s hope the ships haven’t all left before we get there.’ Norton felt a gush of avid excitement.
Group Captain Kirkpatrick experienced a moment of mental ferment and a double emotion: satisfaction that this comparatively large force, under so blithely aggressive a leader, would hit the enemy hard; and a conviction that his own more prudent leadership would have been better suited to this particular operation.
Everyone mentally spelt Norton’s nickname ‘Naughty’. His reputation deserved it. Not only was he brave to the point of rashness and total disregard for danger, but he had also been court martialled in 1927, as a squadron leader, for persistent low flying; dangerous low flying that annoyed and terrified the public. That was the real reason, after a series of rebukes from his squadron commanders, station commanders and an Air Officer Commanding. It was an accumulation of offences. The ostensible reason was what Norton insisted had been merely a gesture of courtesy to visiting royalty. A royal duke, accompanied by the King and Queen of a small European country, had—unwisely—reviewed the two squadrons on a certain R.A.F. station. After the customary sedate flypast, the regal party had departed by car. It was then that Squadron Leader Norton had beaten them up as they drove along the road. He had hurtled at the car head-on, with his wheels inches above the road, and pulled up at the last split second, to conclude his salutations. Its chauffeur swerved into a ditch. As Norton was flying the standard day-bomber of the time, a two-seater Hawker Horsely, which was hardly ideal for aerobatics, his performance had been all the more brilliant; and all the more unnerving. The visiting Que
en had fainted. He had been reprimanded and lost twelve months seniority; hence his retarded future promotion.
Kirkpatrick had been in command of the sister squadron on the station then and he suffered a mild spasm, somewhat akin to an incipient coronary thrombosis, now, twelve years later, when he contemplated what Naughty Norton was about to perpetrate out there off the enemy coast this afternoon.
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