A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “These things happen,” Barton said jauntily. “I should know. I got a Blenheim once.”

  Dalgleish had reopened the map. He was estimating the various bearings and times to the targets. “I’d much sooner do this at dawn, Fanny,” he said. “That way we’d have the glare behind us. Dazzle the buggers, right?”

  “But you’d have to go in low,” Barton said. “Lousy view of the target. Better later. Sun’s still in their eyes, it’s twice as bright, you arrive at five hundred feet, see what’s on offer, nip down, piss all over them, crack off home. Beats working for a living, doesn’t it? Right, I’m off to drink Baggy’s booze.”

  When he had gone, Dalgleish said, “Did he really get a Blenheim?”

  “It was the squadron’s first kill of the war,” Patterson said. “Mistaken identity. We all thought they were Ju88s. Awful boob. Fanny had to go and apologize.”

  That amused Dalgleish. “You wouldn’t catch Fanny apologizing for anything nowadays,” he said. “You’d get a kick in the slats before you got an apology out of him.”

  Patterson found the list of targets. He spiked it on a pencil and twirled it like a parasol. “I suppose all this gen came from Intelligence,” he said. Dalgleish nodded. “So it’s probably three days old,” Patterson said. “A day to take the snaps, a day to collate all the gen, a day to get it sent up here.”

  “So what? It doesn’t matter what we hit, as long as we hit something.”

  Patterson twirled the paper in the opposite direction. “Done much ground-strafing?” he asked.

  “As little as possible,” Dalgleish said. “The whole point of flying is to get away from all that unpleasantness.”

  * * *

  Barton’s information was wrong. His target was not a battalion of German infantry living under canvas. It was two battalions of German infantry and they were on parade.

  This was pure chance. One battalion was being replaced by the other and it chanced that a general on a tour of inspection decided to see them both at once. The men had scrubbed and shaved and polished and pressed, and now they were drawn up in columns of four with their unit standards planted in the sand and their officers strolling about, chatting, sweating and wishing the old bastard would for Christ’s sake come. He was forty minutes late.

  The only soldier not on parade was a corporal with a sprained ankle who was manning a forward observation post, five miles out in the desert. The British army was a long way off, but you never knew when some armored-car patrol might come looking for trouble or prisoners or cheap glory; and there were always aircraft to watch out for.

  The corporal had been on duty all night. He was weary, with the grubby fatigue that conies from hours of doing nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He had to keep a log, and now he was bringing it up to date: 0500 hours—nil, he wrote. 0600 hours—nil. 0700 hours—nil. He heard the noise of aircraft and jerked his head up, but his eyes flinched against the glare and refused to change focus fast enough. By the time he found the two planes a mile away they were leaving him, too low to reveal their wing markings. He got the binoculars on them at the second attempt, but his grip was tense and their speed was great: they kept slipping in and out of view. Still couldn’t see the markings. Looked Italian. Italian air force had a new fighter, Macchi 202. These were Macchis. Probably.

  He knew about the general’s visit. It took him five seconds to worry whether he should telephone the camp and maybe disrupt the entire parade with a false alarm and lose his stripes. Then he grabbed the phone. It took eight seconds for a sergeant to answer it. “You sure?” the sergeant asked. “No,” said the corporal. “Maybe they were ours, maybe they weren’t. All I know is they were going fast and low.”

  “Major!” the sergeant shouted, and ran. It took him twelve seconds to find the major and another six seconds to give him the information. The major thought hard. “He’s not sure?” he asked. He could see the general’s car approaching, entering the camp, motorcyclists leading. “No sir, not sure,” the sergeant said.

  The major did a brave thing. He dismissed the parade. He shouted the order to dismiss as loudly as he could. “Air attack! Air attack!” he bawled. “Take cover!” He was ten seconds too late. Barton and his wingman, Stewart, arrived in a storm of noise and a blast of gunnery. They began firing before they reached the camp, the aircraft slightly nose-down and the bullet-strikes always racing two hundred yards ahead, so that most of the men they killed were dead before the shadows of the Tomahawks rushed across them. Barton was amazed and delighted. What a mob! What a score! Stewart was so startled he could not quite believe it was happening. The flaming, juddering racket of his guns made his eyelids flicker, and briefly he saw the scene of scattering men and collapsing bodies like an old cinema film, badly projected.

  Then the camp was behind them. Some red tracer chased the planes. Barton weaved a bit to spoil the gunners’ aim. Soon they were out of range. Barton climbed and turned for home. Stewart followed, covering his leader’s tail as a good wingman should. The strafe had been over so quickly, he couldn’t take it seriously. He found himself chewing hard on the inside of his mouth. He’d fired one long burst, that was all, and it had ripped through those men, flattened them like a gale of wind. Stewart was as keen to score as the next fighter pilot: he knew the exultant surge when an enemy plane exploded or spun down and crashed. But this was different. This wasn’t fighting. The old reassuring phrases slid through his mind: They started it. They’d kill you like a shot if they could. The only good Hun is a dead Hun. He was not reassured. He tasted blood and stopped chewing. Forget it, he told himself. It’s over. Forget it.

  * * *

  Dalgleish took Hooper as his wingman.

  Their target was a transport park. The good thing about this was the fact that trucks—unlike tanks or artillery—were soft-skinned and burned easily. The bad thing was that, because of the good thing, transport parks were heavily defended. When he was two miles away, Dalgleish saw that this park was empty. But the flak batteries were still there. They all opened up and soon Dalgleish was flying through a field of black blots. He called: “Break left!” and they turned and fled. It was the first time Hooper had experienced flak and he was impressed by its intensity. One moment you were in clear sunlight, the next you were bounced about by a storm of black smoke balls. Shrapnel rattled on his Tomahawk. He was glad to escape.

  Dalgleish went up to three thousand feet, cruised south and found what looked like a German army signals unit. Soldiers ran for cover as the two planes dropped, but they could never run fast enough. The Tomahawks went in side by side and sprayed the site good and hard. If there was any answering fire from the ground it soon gave up. The planes made a tight half-circle and came back and savaged what was left of the trucks and trailers, the aerials and the technicians. It was only a small unit and they left it burning fiercely.

  Tiny Lush and Greek George flew a hundred and forty miles on dead reckoning and found their target exactly where it ought to be, an Italian infantry camp, neat rows of tents all lined up for destruction except that half the tents displayed big red crosses.

  They prowled around it at a respectful distance and argued over the radio. Greek George didn’t believe it was a real hospital, or even half a real hospital. Lush said: “Forget it, George. If we start strafing their hospitals they’re going to come over and hit ours.”

  “Let us go down and beat the place up,” George said.

  “That’s crazy. What good would it do?”

  “Might draw flak. Can’t be a hospital if they got flak guns.”

  “Who says?”

  They argued some more. Lush grew bored. He had a cousin in the Medical Corps and there was no way he was going to strafe this camp. They left it and flew on. Far away in the biscuit-brown wastes of the desert a speck of bright red glowed and slowly faded. Lush dropped a wing to give himself a better view. Now a tiny spot of green came into existence at the same place. “Shut up, George,” Lush said. “I’ve found some
thing better.”

  The specks of color were signal flares and the flares had signaled the start of an infantry training exercise, complete with mortars and anti-tank guns. The two Tomahawks arrived at ground level and made a great nuisance of themselves, completely ruining the exercise. On the other hand, the German troops got in some practice with intensive small-arms fire. Greek George flew into a long burst from a machine gun and came out bucking and twisting and without much of a right wingtip. Something whacked Lush’s tail unit and sent him into a violent skid that raised a gush of sweat all over his body. But both survived and they flew home while German medics scrambled fast between the wounded and the dying, and the dead got heaved onto a truck, and the colonel in charge of the exercise picked himself up and used a handkerchief to clean his right ear of sand.

  Kit Carson flew as Pip Patterson’s wingman. Their objective was supposedly a fuel dump, but they never found it. Many miles short of the target they crossed paths with a force of German tanks and artillery which had probably received warning and was certainly on the alert. The flak was suddenly so dense and furious that Patterson heaved the Tomahawk onto its side and kept turning tightly until he browned-out, his head and arms feeling remote and empty. When the blood had completely forced its way back up his body, he searched for Kit and found him tagging along faithfully, a couple of lengths behind.

  Patterson made a long detour, and when he was sure they were safe he was also sure he was lost. No fuel dump today.

  He found a narrow-gauge railway, but it was empty. He found a cluster of light tanks, but they were broken and burned wrecks left over from the last battle. In the end, he found a convoy of trucks, if three could be called a convoy. The drivers baled out and ran. Patterson and Carson took it in turns, battering the vehicles into blazing scrap. It seemed an expensive way to fight a war, sending two fighters nearly three hundred miles there and back to duff up three trucks.

  The last two pairs to take off were O’Hare with Doggart, and Ostanisczkowski with Bailey. O’Hare was an Irishman from the Republic; Doggart was English. Ostanisczkowski was Polish and he was always called Sneezy. Bailey was a Canadian who was usually called Butcher.

  O’Hare and Doggart had been given a target marked simply “troop concentration.” They arrived at about five thousand feet, got very briskly peppered by enemy flak batteries, and fell through the black fluffs like a suicide pact going off a cliff. At a thousand feet, red and yellow tracer built a bright bead curtain all around them and they opened fire, sprayed the ground in long shuddering bursts, flattened out when they could see the shadows of their Tomahawks rapidly magnifying, and beat it for home.

  “See any troops?” O’Hare asked.

  “Saw a lot of shit,” Doggart said.

  “Christ,” O’Hare said. He sounded disgusted. “We didn’t strafe them, Fido. They fucking strafed us.”

  “Fuel dump,” Doggart said. “Betcha.”

  “Shit in spades,” O’Hare said.

  They flew in silence for a few miles while they thought about it. With flak like that, flak at every height, spread all across the sky, layered black flak waiting ahead of you, streams of colored flak spilling across the air toward you, it was pure luck if you got through.

  “Fuel dump,” Doggart said again. “They always protect their lousy fuel dumps.”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” O’Hare said.

  Sneezy and Butcher Bailey chose to fly low, no more than a hundred feet, all the way to their target. The decision nearly killed them before they got halfway.

  Sneezy led. Bailey followed a length or two to the right, outside the slipstream. After about ten minutes, Sneezy tried to increase speed and found his throttle was sticking; it refused to open smoothly. He told Bailey to lead, and he fell back while he fiddled and fussed with the throttle lever. There was a variable-friction device designed to hold the lever steady; maybe that was on the blink. Sneezy kept one eye on the racing blur of the desert as he checked the throttle, but he needed a third eye. At the last split second he saw his propeller-arc about to hack into Bailey’s tailplane. He shoved the stick forward and instinctively slumped deep in the cockpit as Bailey’s Tomahawk wandered carelessly backward only a few feet above him, so near that he could see its tail wheel shivering and feel the shove of massively displaced air. Then he snatched the stick back as the desert floor jumped at him. For a few seconds he was so low that he sensed the thin cushion of air holding his plane off the sands. His muscles tensed for a crash that never came. The Tomahawk eased upward and he leveled off at five hundred feet, where he felt safe enough to breathe again. Bailey had had the same idea. “Dumb bastard,” Sneezy said to him. He was still too frightened to be angry. He looked at Bailey again and saw that his wheels were down. “Bloody stupid thing you did,” Sneezy said. Now anger began to soak through him like heat. The angrier he got the more Polish he sounded. “Kill yourself, you bloody dumb lousy idiot, but don’t kill me too.”

  “Didn’t do a damn thing, Sneezy,” Bailey said. “It just happened.”

  What happened had been a quick shudder followed by a couple of heavy clunks and thuds, the wheels-down light came on and a sudden drag cost the Tomahawk twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour.

  Bailey had grabbed the throttle, but too late: he glimpsed Sneezy’s aircraft sliding under him, insanely close. He shut his eyes and hunched upward, away from the collision. No crunch came. He had opened his eyes and climbed for safety.

  “Get your wheels up,” Sneezy said.

  “I tried,” Bailey said. “No go.”

  Sneezy drifted sideways under the other plane and looked. The wheels seemed firmly locked down. “Chuck her about,” he said.

  Bailey went up and chucked her about, not violently because the Tomahawk was not designed for wild aerobatics with the wheels down. But he gave her a good, brisk shake and a couple of hard bumps. Nothing made any difference. “Must be duff hydraulics,” he said. “What now?”

  “Na mitosca, Boska!” Sneezy said.

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that,” Bailey said.

  “You can’t strafe,” Sneezy said. Bailey didn’t argue. The Tomahawk felt sluggish and clumsy. “Stay up here,” Sneezy said. “I find something to hit, we bugger off.”

  They cruised about for a long time before Sneezy noticed a plume of dust that had to mean transport. It turned out to be an enemy tank-recovery unit, giant tractor-trailers loaded with damaged tanks. The column saw him coming and made a smart U-turn back into the fog of its own dust. Sneezy went in and blazed away, but he couldn’t see what he was hitting, or even if. Somebody could see him, though. As he left he felt the smack of heavy machine-gun bullets and saw splashes of raw metal on the engine cowling.

  Bailey’s ground crew knew there was something wrong when he came in sight with his undercarriage down. He landed cautiously, taxied to dispersal and stood around, mopping the spit from the radio-mike in his oxygen mask, while they went to work.

  “Look at that,” the sergeant said. “Some bastard shot you in the plumbing.”

  Bailey went and looked. “Probably an Arab. Or a German with a tea-towel on his head.”

  “Not a nice thing to do.”

  “That’s what Sneezy told them. Hello, here’s my taxi.”

  Barton arrived, driving the VW at high speed. He stopped by locking the handbrake and jumping out (there were no doors) while the VW was skidding broadside. It was still drifting across the sand as he spoke to the sergeant: “Can you fix it?” He meant the undercarriage.

  “Might take an hour, sir.”

  “Right. Hop in, Butcher. You’re late for the briefing.”

  “What briefing? We haven’t had debriefing yet.”

  “No time.” They got in the VW. Barton revved the engine hard and set off with a howl of wheel spin. “Lovely day,” he shouted. Bailey clung on with both hands. It was the same old day, nothing but heat, sand and flies. Barton thought it was lovely. Bully for Barton.

  T
he rest of the squadron had landed. They were in the mess tent, drinking tea, sprawled in canvas chairs, dozing, playing poker, scratching, yawning. Only Pip Patterson seemed at all interested in the recent sorties. He was talking to his Flight, asking if they had hit their targets. “We hit some bloody thing,” Doggart said.

  “So what was it?”

  “Sewage farm,” O’Hare said. “Bloody great German sewage farm.” He yawned and massaged his eyes.

  “Turds everywhere,” Doggart said. “Colossal exploding German turds.”

  Patterson gave up on them and turned to the Pole.

  “Was cock-up,” Sneezy said. “I strafed a big cloud of dust. Maybe tank transporters in it, I don’t know.”

  Patterson looked at his list of targets. “Nothing about that here.”

  Sneezy took the list, read it and gave it back. “List is cock-up,” he said.

  Pip Patterson folded his list of targets and put it away. He glanced around, saw Pinky Dalgleish watching him, and shrugged. “Oh well,” Dalgleish said. “Just another day on the factory floor.”

  Barton came bounding into the mess tent as the VW went skidding by with Butcher Bailey still in it. Only Hooper was surprised by this; everyone else had seen the trick before. “All here?” Barton said. “Good, fine, splendid. Now tell me, in five words or less, how you enjoyed yourselves. Pinky?”

  Dalgleish counted off the words on his fingers. “Flak, flak, flak, flak, flak.”

  “Same here,” said Lush, “only more so.”

  “Beats me how all that shit missed us,” O’Hare said. Bailey wandered in and belched. They all looked. “Just punctuation,” he said. Nobody even smiled. Bailey’s belches were part of the furniture.

  “Went up, came down,” Sneezy said to Barton. “Butcher had wheel trouble. Me, I blew holes in a cloud of dust.”

  That left Patterson. “Had a row with some panzer,” he said. “Didn’t win.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake don’t do that,” Barton said brightly. “Don’t bloody well win. We need the enemy to kick and scream and bleed all over the desert. So far today we’ve got five or six Jerry army commanders shitting bricks and they haven’t had their mid-morning schnapps yet. I like that. It gives me a rich, warm feeling inside.”