To Squadron Leader Bob Spurdle, DFC,
to Squadron Leader R. W. “Wally” Wallens, DFC,
and to their comrades of the RAF
in the Second World War
Also by Derek Robinson
Fiction
Goshawk Squadron
Rotten With Honour
Kramer’s War
The Eldorado Network
Piece of Cake
War Story
Artillery of Lies
A Good Clean Fight
Damned Good Show
Kentucky Blues
Hornet’s Sting
Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
Red Rag Blues
Operation Bamboozle
Non-fiction
Invasion. 1940
A Good Clean Fight
Derek Robinson
An imprint of Quercus
New York • London
© 2010 by Derek Robinson
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Derek Robinson is a policeman’s son from a council estate who crossed the class barrier by going to Cambridge, where he got a degree in history and learned to write badly. A stint in advertising in London and New York changed that. In 1966 he moved to Portugal, wrote two unpublishable novels, returned to England flat broke, and finally got it right when Goshawk Squadron was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This novel of the Royal Flying Corps led to a sequel, Piece of Cake, which told the story—21 years later—of an RAF fighter squadron in the first year of World War Two. A Good Clean Fight follows that squadron to North Africa. The desert war was unique: in the absence of civilians, there was nothing to harm except the sand, the enemy, and yourself. Hence the title, which is also ironic, since there is nothing either good or clean about violent death. Robinson’s novels contain a streak of black humor and a certain debunking of the myths of war. The desert campaign was sometimes brutal but it was never glamorous and rarely glorious. There were major cock-ups, and there was great courage. A Good Clean Fight aims to do justice to both.
Derek Robinson lives in Bristol. When he’s not writing, he’s either publishing his best-selling guide to the local underground lingo known as “Bristle,” or playing much squash, against everybody’s advice.
A Good Clean Fight
CONTENTS
Chapter One: Walkover
Chapter Two: More Bright Breasts
Chapter Three: A Few Desert Sores
Chapter Four: Bad Form
Chapter Five: Zig Zag
Chapter Six: Pluck and Dash
Chapter Seven: The Easy Bit
Chapter Eight: Most Urgent
Chapter Nine: Chaps Come and Go
Author’s Note
CHAPTER ONE
Walkover
It was good to be alive and young and flying Messerschmitt 109s from Barce airfield in April 1942.
Barce was in Libya, near enough to the comforts of Benghazi and far enough from the Gazala Line, which was a couple of hundred miles to the east, near Tobruk. Beyond the Gazala Line (which existed on the map, but was mainly minefields, and so invisible) were the enemy: British, Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians, South Africans, Indians. So you were usually safe enough at Barce. If you were a Me 109 pilot you flew every day—training exercises, mock combat, gunnery practice—just to keep yourself tuned-up. When you landed you could go for a swim in the Med, maybe drive into Benghazi for a meal. It was a good life. Rewarding by day and relaxing by night. It would come to an end soon. One more big shove by the Afrika Korps and Rommel would be in Alexandria. Where would the British go then? India, probably. That was somewhat beyond the range of a 109, even with drop-tanks.
The only thing conceivably wrong with Barce (and the half-dozen other airfields along the coastal strip between Benghazi and Tobruk) was a range of mountains just to the south, called the Jebel al Akhdar; and even the Jebel wasn’t much of a problem because as mountains go they were more like high hills: in fact they had to work hard to reach a couple of thousand feet. Nevertheless, if the weather suddenly closed in—and it could rain like a bastard in this part of Africa—then a bit of careless navigation could lead you to try to fly slap through the limestone escarpment of the Jebel. So far nobody had succeeded in achieving this feat, although a couple of scorched wrecks marked the sites of brave attempts.
* * *
Captain Lampard and Sergeant Davis came across one of the wrecks just below the rim of the escarpment and sat in the shade of what was left of a wing while they looked down on Barce. It was midday and the heat was brutal. Lampard had chosen to leave their camp, hidden five miles back in the Jebel, and come here at midday because he reckoned nobody down there would be looking up. And even if someone did look up, all he would see would be dazzle and shimmer and, if his eyesight was phenomenally good, the army of flies that followed Lampard and Davis everywhere. If they followed Lampard rather more faithfully it was not because he was the officer but because he was six foot two and there was more of him to overheat.
Each man examined the airfield through binoculars while the flies walked around their ears, lips and nostrils.
“See the wire?” Lampard said.
“Yes. Concertina, the usual stuff.” Davis spat out a reckless fly. “We can cut it, easy.”
“Might be an alarm wire running through the middle. Cut that and bells start ringing.”
“Doubt it,” Davis said. “Look at the length of the perimeter. Bloody miles. Think of the current you’d need.”
Lampard thought about it while he went on looking, and then said: “Doesn’t matter, anyway. There’s a damn great gap. See? Far right.”
Davis found the gap in the wire. It was where the coastal road passed closest to the airfield. As they watched, a truck swung off the road and drove through the gap. “That’s daft,” he said. “Why string up miles of wire if you’re going to leave a hole? I can’t believe it.”
“Maybe they shut it up at night,” Lampard suggested.
“Can’t see any spare wire lying around. No sentry, either. That’s sloppy, that is. Not like Jerry at all.” Davis was a Guardsman; he disapproved of sloppiness, even German sloppiness.
But Lampard had already lost interest in the unfinished wire. He had turned his binoculars on the built-up area of the airfield and he was watching the arrival of a large staff car, an Alfa-Romeo with the top down. Three officers and a dog got out. The dog was enormous, as big as a young pony. It cantered around the car, s
kidded to a halt in front of one of the officers, reared up, put its paws on his shoulders and licked his face. He stumbled backward and the dog fell off him. Lampard saw the silent laughter of the other men. One of them clapped his hands, soundlessly. The dog bounded amongst them and the man whose face it had licked shook his fist, then took a little run, swung his leg and kicked it on the rump. “Did you see that, Davis?” Lampard gazed wide-eyed at the sergeant. “First they invade Poland, then they go around kicking dogs. People like that have got to be taught a lesson.”
Lampard booted the blistered wreckage of the German airplane, hard, as they went back up the escarpment. “That’s blindingly obvious,” he said.
“I wonder how much one of these costs, new,” Davis said.
“Ten thousand pounds, I think. Twenty, by the time they’ve got it all the way out here.”
“So there must be about half a million quid standing around down there.” Davis paused to take a last, backward look. “I hope they got good insurance.” Lampard was already at the top, striding hard, rapidly moving out of sight. Lampard knew only two speeds: asleep, and apace.
* * *
They came back at ten o’clock that night with three more men: a lieutenant called Dunn and two corporals, Pocock and Harris. Apart from desert boots and black stocking-caps, they wore normal British army battledress, so dirty that it was more charcoal-gray than khaki. They were all bearded and their faces were sunburned to a deep teak that merged with the night. Each man carried a rucksack, a revolver and six grenades. Lampard also had a tommy-gun. There was no moon. From the top of the escarpment, Barce airfield was a total blank. Even the road that ran past it was lost in the darkness.
Lampard could find only one track down the escarpment so he led his party down it. The track wandered aimlessly and took them into clumps of scrub or across patches of scree. The scrub grabbed at their arms and tugged at the rucksacks. The scree collapsed beneath their feet and sent them slithering, hands raked by the broken stones. Before they were halfway down it was obvious that the track had lost them, or they had lost it, or maybe it had never meant to go all the way to the bottom anyway. Lampard waited while they gathered round him. The starlight was just bright enough to let him count them. “Any damage?” he said. Everyone was scratched and bleeding, but Lampard meant something serious, a broken leg or, even worse, a lost rucksack. Nobody spoke.
He followed the contours until he met a dry streambed. At least that’s what it looked like; it was certainly a gully that seemed to take the shortest route down the hillside. He stepped into it and dislodged a rock that made off at great speed, leaving small, rattling avalanches behind it.
“One at a time down here,” Lampard said. “Allow a decent interval. No point in stopping a rock with your head. This is liable to be a bit steep.”
He went first. It was more than a bit steep. By sliding on his hands and backside and braking with his boots he made fast, painful progress. Pebbles scuttled alongside him. Then it got steeper and the pebbles were beating him. He glimpsed a looming boulder blocking the streambed, got his feet up in time and flexed his legs; even so, the shock jarred all his joints and left him sprawled over the boulder with the gun-muzzle poking his ear and the grenades making dents in his chest.
When his breath came back he stood on the boulder. It looked very black on the other side. He tossed a stone and it told him his future: the gully dropped thirty feet straight down. Maybe more.
The others arrived at safe intervals. He led them round the boulder and tried to get back into the streambed lower down but, perversely, there was no streambed. Evidently the water went underground. There was, however, a new track. It wandered, but it always wandered downward. In five minutes they were on the plain. Fifteen minutes later they reached the road and they were looking at the gap in the wire and at notice boards stuck in the ground at each end of the gap. The notices said Achtung! Minen. They also carried a skull and crossbones. “That’s all balls,” Lampard said softly.
They eased their rucksack straps and waited. The starlight was slightly brighter now, and the notice boards, stenciled black on white, were big and obvious.
“Well, you’re the boss,” Lieutenant Dunn said. They were grouped closely together.
“Hang on,” Davis said. “Let’s think about this.”
“It’s all balls,” Lampard said. “Put up to scare off the Arabs.”
“I don’t remember seeing them this afternoon,” Davis said. “In fact I’m sure I didn’t.”
Dunn said: “You don’t think they might have mined the gap this evening, Jack?”
“Not a chance. Jerry transport uses it as a short-cut to get on and off the airfield. We saw them do it.”
Corporal Pocock, who had gone forward, came back and said: “You can see the tire tracks, sir. And plenty of footprints too. No sign of mines.”
“What sort of sign did you expect to see?” Davis asked.
“Dunno. Disturbed earth, that sort of thing.”
“The entire bloody gap is disturbed earth.”
“Listen,” Lampard said, “they haven’t mined it for the blindingly obvious reason that they’re going to need it again tomorrow. Satisfied?”
“You’re the boss, Jack,” Dunn said. “I hope you’ve reckoned the odds, that’s all. I mean, it’s just possible that Jerry’s decided not to use it any more. In which case—”
“In which case he’d close the gap with wire, which is ten times faster and cheaper than mines. Agreed?”
Short pause. “Unless he ran out of wire,” Davis said.
“For Christ’s sake!” Lampard said, pointing. “It’s concertina wire. It’s made to stretch, isn’t it?”
Corporal Harris had been tossing pebbles into the gap. “If we had some prisoners we could send them through to find out,” he said.
“Right, that’s enough talk,” Lampard said. “I go first.” He turned and strode into the darkness.
The others retreated rapidly to the edge of the road and lay flat. Lampard’s figure was a dim blur. “What if it really is mined, sir?” Pocock muttered to Dunn.
“I suppose that will become blindingly obvious, Pocock.”
Lampard reached the gap, crouched and stroked the biggest and freshest of the tire tracks. They were clean-ribbed and firm. He surprised himself by being reminded of the last time he had touched a woman. He was twenty-four, and women were fun, but war was better. He stood and stared. His body was pumped-up with energy. All his senses were supremely alert, competing to serve him best. He went across the gap in a rush of long strides, heels digging into the tire track. Nothing exploded. He wanted to laugh and cheer and throw grenades; now he knew he was unstoppable. Achtung! Minen, what a lot of balls! He strolled back, casually and a bit jauntily, hands in pockets, to the middle of the gap. “No problem,” he said. He jumped up and down. “Safe as Oxford Street.”
“My old granny got knocked down in Oxford Street,” Harris muttered.
They followed Lampard in single file.
“Mind you, she was pissed as a fart at the time,” Harris said. Lampard ignored him. They set off, in line abreast, widely spread.
Corporal Pocock was the first to find an airplane. They converged on him and walked around the Me 109, touching its skin and sniffing its expensive aromas, the fruity tang of aero-dope and the faint, fairground stink of once-hot oil. Now they could see the silhouette of another 109, and beyond that a smudge of darker darkness that promised a third. Lampard jogged down the line and counted ten fighters. He left Davis and Harris to take care of them and moved on with Dunn and Pocock at a brisk run.
Pocock found the second line of fighters, too. A thin mist was rising, enough to absorb the starlight, but a faint reflected gleam from a cockpit canopy caught his eye. He set down his rucksack and hurried on to find out how many more aircraft were parked here. Dunn and Lampard examined this one. “Pretty new,” Lampard said. “The paint’s still smooth and shiny.” He was standing on a wheel and feeling
the engine cowling. “It gets sand-blasted damn fast. What are you looking for?”
Dunn was fiddling with the side window of the cockpit. It clicked, and half the canopy swung open. “I had a thought on the way down that bloody mountain,” he said. “Why not stuff the bomb beside the seat? That way you get the fuel tank. It’s L-shaped, the pilot sort of sits on it. Make a lovely bonfire.”
“If it’s full. Might be empty. Anyway, we want the airframe. That’s the expensive bit.”
“You know best.”
Pocock returned, gasping but triumphant. “Twelve of the buggers,” he said.
“Marvelous. Tell you what,” Lampard said to Dunn, “put half the bombs in the cockpit and half on the wing-roots.”
“A controlled experiment,” Dunn said. “The spirit of true scientific inquiry.”
“Wait for me here.” Lampard jumped off the wheel and made off into the darkness. This is too easy, he thought. Where’s Jerry? No sentries? No dogs? It’s a pushover. A walkover. A cakewalk. A piece of cake. There was benzedrine in his pocket, but benzedrine would be wasted on him now. He saw the massive shape of a bomber. His blood was thumping like jungle drums.
It was a Junkers 88, twin-engined and huge. “You beauty,” he whispered. He decided to place a bomb on each wing, between the engine and the fuselage, but the wing was high above his head. He ran to the tail, took two bombs from his rucksack, and used his elbows to heave himself onto the tailplane. He began to walk forward, but the curved fuselage was wet with mist and he slipped and fell, knowing that he was falling and kicking off so that he landed on his feet and rolled over. That seemed enormously funny. For a few seconds he lay on his back and laughed without making any sound except for a bit of wheezing. “All right, you slimy bastard,” he said. He put the bombs inside his shirt.
Next time he sat on the fuselage, straddling it with his legs, and heaved himself toward the wings. Then it was easy. He stuck pencil-fuses into the bombs, planted them and jumped down. It was all so simple. The more he did, the easier it got.
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