Once More the Hawks

by Max Hennessy

  Copyright & Information

  Once More The Hawks

  First published in 1984

  © Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1984-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Max Hennessy (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755128079 EAN: 9780755128075

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Part One

  One

  To Dicken Quinney, the junction of the Rhine and the Mosel at Koblenz had always seemed a point of separation in Germany. North of Koblenz it was harsh; the south belonged to the Black Forest and a softer climate. Staring down from the cockpit of the big American Lockheed 12a at the two rivers, one the jugular vein of Germany, the other heading straight for the heart of its traditional enemy, France, he reflected that of all the European countries, he knew Germany better than any. He had fought in France between 1914 and 1918 but as part of a huge army with only brief contacts with the French people. There had been a spell in Italy during 1918, a spell as attaché in Holland, and a spell in Greece as instructor, until one of the political upsets in that country had changed its policy and he had been withdrawn. But all these appointments had lasted only long enough for him to pick up some of the language and little else, while he had visited Germany many times, firstly as pilot to a newspaper proprietor flying regularly to Berlin, later in the insecure period of the Thirties as attaché at the Embassy. Now, on the verge of retirement from the RAF, he was back again, this time working for a man called Sidney Cotton, who, like himself, had flown 1½ Strutters in France in 1916 and 1917. Tall, bespectacled, ebullient and a well-known figure in aviation, in recent years Cotton had become involved in colour photography and was now selling film in quantity to the Germans. He was selling it in other countries, too, but it was the Germans, with their increasing interest in it, who had long since begun to arouse suspicion among the more probing minds in the RAF.

  The gloomy Gothic pile of a ruined castle passed slowly beneath the wing of the Lockheed. Round it, the Rhine turned and twisted like a moving snake. Down there, Dicken reflected, barges were carrying goods from the industrial Ruhr through Holland to the sea, and at the moment, in the heat of the late summer, the Rhine ferries were full of holidaymakers, the German drinking songs filling the night with tunes that sounded almost like military music.

  ‘Mannheim coming up,’ a voice behind him called out.

  His navigator, Frank Babington, recently retired from the RAF as a flight-sergeant and recruited by Cotton for his skill with cameras, was watching the route carefully. As they passed over the double kink in the river at Mainz and Wiesbaden, Dicken could see the haze ahead that indicated the factories for the making of electrical equipment, chemicals and motor cars. He knew Wiesbaden well with its Imperial palace, its state theatre and its wide gardens, and he found himself wondering how many more times he’d be looking down on it from the air, because his time as an active airman was almost finished and he couldn’t imagine himself having the money to possess an aircraft of his own when he left the Service. Despite his record, he was still no more than a wing commander, thanks chiefly to the fact that barring his path to senior rank had always been the implacable form of Cecil Arthur Diplock.

  Diplock had married Annys Toshack, the girl Dicken had been in love with in 1914, and joining the Royal Flying Corps late in 1916, had, despite his poor showing as an airman, contrived by the cultivation of the people who mattered, to pass him in rank and now finally sat across his route to promotion. A desk officer at RAF Headquarters, under the patronage of his old wing colonel, now Air Vice-Marshal George Macclesfield St Aubyn, a man of the same breed, he had influenced the whole of Dicken’s career. Dicken’s skill, his knowledge of flying, had meant that he could never hold him back completely, but he had managed to prevent any swift rise, so that now the only alternative seemed to be to retire and seek employment elsewhere.

  At the thought, Dicken frowned. His retirement was due within days now and he didn’t look forward to leaving the RAF. The job with Cotton was only a temporary one, replacing one of Cotton’s men who was sick, and he had no one with whom to share his retirement. His wife, Zoë, sister to Diplock’s wife, had died in 1930, and he didn’t fancy growing old alone. But merely flying from one place to another without any purpose seemed an empty pastime. Which was why he was now flying for Cotton.

  Because of the growing German threat, even at the time of the Munich agreement when Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had been obliged to kowtow to the German dictator, since information about German fortifications, airfields and military establishments were necessary while there was still time, Cotton had been recruited by the British government to acquire it by clandestine methods. As the private owner of aircraft and well-known throughout European aviation circles,
he had already worked for the French Deuxième Bureau and had finally set up an independent unit of his own. A determined and ingenious man on intimate terms with the senior Nazis in Berlin, he had found a dozen ways of satisfying the requirements, though the official RAF attitude to him – largely conceived, Dicken knew, in the department of Air Vice-Marshal St Aubyn and Group Captain Cecil Arthur Diplock – had always remained one of ambiguity and jealousy.

  ‘Mannheim below.’ Babington’s voice came again.

  Dicken lifted his hand in acknowledgement. He and Babington had flown together many times, in Iraq, India and England, and there was a rapport between them that made them easy companions despite their difference in rank.

  ‘New airfield down there, sir, by the look of it.’

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘Without question.’

  Babington’s smile came, a cheerful, confident smile. He trusted Dicken in the way that Dicken trusted him. He had been working with the Cotton organisation for some time and it had been Babington who had involved Dicken in Cotton’s work.

  ‘It’s a good job, sir,’ he had pointed out. ‘And not without its measure of excitement.’

  In that Babington was right because, known only to its crew, to Cotton, and a few others, the belly of the twin-tailed Lockheed contained secret RAF F24 Leica cameras of German manufacture. The sleek all-metal machine had been painted a pale duck-egg green because Cotton had discovered that colour tended to make it invisible from below when flying at height, and the cameras were smuggled aboard in ordinary suitcases covered with travel labels. Holes had been cut for them in the floor of the cabin and three of them, mounted one behind the other – the front one tilted to the right, the rear one to the left, the centre one pointing straight down – could produce overlapping pictures and at a height of 20,000 feet could cover a strip of country ten miles wide.

  They were operated by a button under the pilot’s seat which activated a motor that opened secret sliding panels; and the aircraft, maintaining a straight course, aroused no concern in the minds of the suspicious Germans as they built up their installations for the conflict which everybody in Europe knew was on its way. Already the system had been used to photograph Italian installations in the Dodecanese and on the North African coast.

  The present trip was officially to fly film to Berlin but Dicken knew that if the Germans found the cameras, they could be treated as spies, and since the film was being sent at a German company’s invitation, there was always the possibility that the Germans suspected what they were up to and they were flying into a trap. In any case, with hostilities likely within the next few weeks or even days, the hazard of being trapped by an outbreak of fighting on a German airfield was a real possibility and, as a precaution, it had been arranged that if things grew worse a telegram would be sent to Dicken in Berlin, saying his mother was ill and urging his return. Similar messages had been arranged for Cotton and others of his men in the danger zone.

  As the machine lost height and touched down, Dicken taxied slowly to the parking area. To enable Babington to dismantle the cameras and hide them in their luggage, he pretended to check his engines. As Babington signalled that everything was done, he switched them off and turned. Babington was pointing.

  ‘Trouble,’ he said.

  It seemed as if their fears of German suspicions were only too true because a squad of jackbooted, helmeted soldiers armed with rifles was doubling towards them. But, as they opened the door and began to climb out, the soldiers lined up in two ranks and the sergeant slammed to attention.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  The barked command, part of the elaborate choreography of the dictatorship, came with clicking heels and raised arms.

  Dicken responded briskly. Britain was not yet at war and it was of vital importance that he should be looked on as friendly. Then, as they started to walk between the lines, a familiar stocky figure appeared, its raised arm distinctly lacking in enthusiasm.

  ‘Erni Udet, by all that’s holy!’

  Dicken’s face broke into a smile at once. He had flown more than once with Ernst Udet, the best of the German pilots who had survived the 1914 war. It had been Udet’s circus which had shot him out of the sky late in 1918 and, at the time, limping around half-blind and full of holes and believing he would never fly again, he had cursed the fact that he had ever met him. But, meeting again in America, England and Germany since the war, they had become fast friends because Udet, much preferring carousing to fighting, had more than once dragged Dicken round the night spots of Berlin in a shattering pub crawl. He was an uncomplicated happy-go-lucky soul who had made and lost more than one fortune and more than one woman, and Dicken had first met him in person as an unemployed young air ace restless in the peace of 1920, juggling plates and driving a motorcycle round a night club near the Budapestherstrasse. He was a shallow, cheerful individual who hated the politicians of the iron-fisted dictatorship that was now stringing the streets of Germany with red swastika banners, crowding its squares and street corners with brown-shirted thugs, and filling the hours of darkness with torments for intellectuals, Socialists and Jews. But Udet was a German, too, and he had been trapped. Because he was international, as well known as an aviator in America as in Europe, he had resisted for years the blandishments of Hermann Goering, the head of Hitler’s newly-born air force, but it was as an aviator that Goering had finally ensnared him and now he carried the rank of a major-general. He had, Dicken reflected, done better than Dicken himself.

  He was in full uniform and was beaming with pleasure. ‘I thought you vould like a guard of honour,’ he said cheerfully in his accented English. ‘And now I am a general I can order you one. Tonight, Dicko, there will be a magnificent grossstadtbummel – the best pub crawl we’ve ever had.’

  Two

  ‘What about Customs?’

  As Dicken spoke, Udet gestured at a large black Mercedes and shook his head. ‘All that is arranged,’ he said.

  They were driven to the Adlon Hotel where a private room had been set aside. It seemed full of uniformed men but Udet himself didn’t seem to have changed much. Despite his brilliant record between 1914 and 1918, he was an unwarlike man and his smile was as friendly as ever.

  ‘We’ve arranged a special suite,’ he said. ‘Goering vants to meet you. He’s boss of all industry in Germany now, of course, and in addition, he’s an old flier like us.’ He passed over a long flute of German Sekt, the sparkling Rhine wine the Germans drank as champagne. ‘How are you enjoying being a civilian?’

  Dicken shrugged and Udet smiled. ‘About as much as I am enjoying being back in uniform,’ he said. ‘They got me in the end, you see. They said my name was needed to boost German aviation so I couldn’t say no because I’ve always insisted aviation’s the only thing I’m interested in.’ He gestured with his glass. ‘But I’m not a major-general, Dicko. I’m a flier pure and simple.’ He held up his hands. ‘These are my antennae. I feel an aeroplane. I’m part of it when I fly. I am a seat of the pants flier. I can make an aeroplane talk. And what have they done? Put me in charge of Luftwaffe production of which I know nothing. I think I have put my head in a noose. I persuaded them to build dive bombers.’

  Dicken frowned. Dive bombing was a new concept of aerial warfare. First tried in 1914 against Zeppelin sheds at Friedrichshafen, it had been developed by the RAF to a fine art by the trench strafing of 1918. They had used SE5s then, because they were strong and could pull out of a dive without leaving their wings behind; but most of it had been done with Camels, because they went down like a stone and, if they didn’t fly out of their wings, went up again like a lift. The American Marines had improved on the method against Nicaraguan rebels with great success in the Twenties and had later demonstrated their skill at air displays across the States where Dicken and Udet had first seen it used. Since then it had been developed by a number of nations including the Fre
nch and the Swedes, but the RAF had become obsessed with long range heavy bombers and, though there had been a lot of disagreement, they were still only toying with the idea.

  ‘The flying artillery we saw in the States?’ Dicken said.

  Udet gestured. ‘It will work, Dicko.’

  ‘Will it have to, Knägges?’

  Udet grinned at his old nickname because it was odd to call a German general Titch. Then his smile died. ‘Would the British fight, Dicko?’ he asked. ‘If it came to a fight?’

  ‘They don’t want war, Erni, but they’ve put up with a lot: Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia. Albania. Does your Führer intend to go into Poland?’

  Udet’s face was bleak. ‘He might.’

  ‘Then I think we would.’

  There was still no certainty that they hadn’t run into a specially prepared trap. Dicken was certain that Udet wasn’t part of any plot against him but he’d let it drop that the hangar into which the big all-metal Lockheed had been pushed belonged to the Gestapo and they knew it would be thoroughly searched. There was nothing to indicate they had carried cameras because they were safely in Babington’s luggage, but there was always the possibility of the moving panels being discovered and questioned.

  The dinner that had been arranged for the evening seemed to include half the top brass of the Luftwaffe. In addition to Udet there was Sperrle, one of its leaders; Milch, Goering’s deputy; Bruno Loerzer, one of Udet’s contemporaries in the Imperial German Air Service of 1918; Bodenschatz, the great Baron von Richthofen’s old adjutant who was now Goering’s chief of staff; and Wolfram von Richthofen, the baron’s younger cousin who now commanded one of the Luftwaffe Fliegerkorps. This time the uniforms all belonged to the Luftwaffe and the wearers had all spotted the Lockheed and were eager to talk about it.