Once More the Hawks

by Max Hennessy

  ‘I would like a flight in it,’ Udet remarked. ‘To see how it works. To see what the United States are producing.’

  Goering arrived late and once again there was the complicated choreography of Nazism, with everybody clicking heels and raising their arms. Though his large head was handsome, Goering’s appearance was spoiled by his stomach and double chins and the decorations that appeared to have been hung all over his person like wassail balls on a Christmas tree. ‘Chest trouble.’ Udet whispered. ‘Too many medals.’

  The Reichsmarschall greeted Dicken warmly as an old opponent but there was a calculating look in the pale blue eyes. ‘I have been looking at your aircraft,’ he said. ‘It compares well with our German Junkers. Have the British abandoned biplanes yet? There seems to have been a fixation about biplanes in England.’

  Dicken forced a smile. ‘Oh, we have the other kind now, Herr Reichsmarschall.’

  Goering smiled back but he hurriedly changed the subject as if he had no wish to hear of the potential of any power but Germany. ‘I’m having my home, Karinhalle, photographed,’ he said. ‘We’re using your film.’

  As he turned away, Udet’s voice came in a murmur. ‘He doesn’t want war,’ he said. ‘But he’s having a private air raid shelter built just in case. He thought England wouldn’t fight but now I’ve told him what you said he’s not so sure. He says Ribbentrop, our Foreign Minister, is in Moscow, trying to line up the Russians on our side.’

  ‘Think he will?’

  Udet shrugged. ‘It doesn’t seem to follow our Party line, nor theirs either, but if half Poland’s the prize, then it’s a possibility.’

  The following morning, they took off from the Tempelhof with Udet alongside Dicken and Babington in the rear of the machine. From 2000 feet it was quite easy to see the new airfields that were springing up and they duly recorded them by the simple procedure, while Udet admired the view or commented on the layout of the instrument panel and the handling of the machine, of Dicken reaching casually under his seat and pressing the hidden button.

  Beneath them they could see the whole layout of the German capital and, finding themselves over what was clearly a new airfield, Dicken pretended to shield his eyes from the view.

  Udet laughed heartily. ‘Berlin’s a splendid city,’ he said. ‘Built on the formation of the German Empire in 1870 to become the capital of a great European nation. It’s a symbol of German pride.’

  ‘It would be a pity to see it all destroyed, Erni.’

  ‘That would be impossible.’ Udet’s voice carried conviction. ‘Berlin’s too far from any enemy airfield.’

  The city seemed to be full of uniforms. Germany had always enjoyed smart tunics and caps and even the most junior officials wore them, but at that moment every hotel seemed crammed with them and they were obvious in every street. Another party was held in the evening at which Udet produced half a dozen wartime fliers, one of them a man Dicken had shot down during his last desperate fight with Udet’s Staffel. He was plump and balding with a deep scar on his face, acquired as his machine had crash-landed. But there was no apparent resentment and the atmosphere was cheerful, though the next morning as Dicken and Babington waited to pick up the receipts for the film they had brought the city seemed to have changed. The newspapers were full of fabricated insults to Germany by Poland and tension seemed to have mounted. From the front of the hotel, they could see squads of troops marching by, the sound of their feet ominous and loud. Staff cars carrying the Nazi swastika kept passing.

  ‘Faster than yesterday, don’t you think, Bab?’ Dicken said.

  Babington’s face was grim. ‘It’s a bit like sitting on a gunpowder barrel with the fuse burning,’ he agreed.

  That evening the city was plunged into darkness as blackout exercises were carried out but inside the hotel little seemed to have changed except for the fact that the uniforms seemed suddenly fewer and the men wearing those they saw were edgy and worried. When Udet arrived he was in civilian clothes and looked depressed. ‘We’ve signed a non-aggression pact with Russia,’ he said immediately. ‘They wouldn’t sign anything like that unless they intended to use it. I’ve been told to stand by. They didn’t say what for but it seems pretty obvious to me.’

  Dicken frowned. ‘It’ll mean war, Erni.’

  Udet’s shrug seemed defeated. ‘Ribbentrop doesn’t think so,’ he said. ‘He says Britain’s too decadent to go to war over Poland.’

  ‘Tell him not to be too sure.’

  Udet gestured. ‘For the love of God, Dicko, you can’t get at Poland except through Germany! How can you help her?’

  There was considerably less friendliness in the hotel by this time and even a few overt sneers, and the following evening the expected telegram arrived – ‘Mother ill.’

  That it was time to leave became obvious the next day when Udet arrived once more.

  ‘I think you’d better go, Dicko,’ he said. ‘I can tell you now in strict confidence if you give your word of honour not to pass it on, that orders have been prepared for the march into Poland. I’ve just learned.’ His eyes were watching every face as if he felt people might read his lips. ‘It was due to take place in forty-eight hours but I’ve just heard the order might have to be withdrawn. Some problem over that oaf, Mussolini. You’d better disappear while you can.’

  ‘What about you, Knägges? What will you do?’

  Udet frowned. ‘There’s a lot to do,’ he said. ‘Too much for old Knägges.’ His frown deepened. ‘Dicken, tell your people that all our dive bomber units have been re-equipped with Stukas. They’re rugged aircraft. They’re accurate and can pinpoint their targets. We have a lot of them and they’ll be difficult to stop because their crews learned their job in the Spanish Civil War. They come down like a cartload of bricks. Wie ein Klavier aus dem fünfsten Stock. Like a piano falling from a fifth-floor window. What have you got?’

  Not much, Dicken thought. The heavy bombers the RAF was banking on weren’t yet ready and so far there wasn’t much else. Even the Cooper bombs that were still being used might as well have been made by the Dundee marmalade factory of the same name for all the use they were. Since their puff went upwards, they were more danger to the crew which dropped them than to their intended victim.

  ‘Oh, we’ve got a few,’ he said.

  ‘Hawker Harts?’

  Dicken gave the German a quick look. Nazi intelligence was known to be good and it was true that up to February that year dive bomber training was still being carried out in the old adapted biplanes. They could achieve good groupings but the pilots had to cheat by going as low as they dared, a habit that might exact a nasty penalty under war conditions.

  Another cable arrived later that evening, indicating that ‘Mother’s health’ was failing rapidly, but when they drove out to Tempelhof the following morning they found it impossible to unearth anyone who could give the authority to let them leave, while the officials they approached were noticeably hostile.

  ‘The VIP treatment’s beginning to wear a bit thin,’ Babington commented.

  Would anybody miss him if he didn’t make it, Dicken wondered. There was no one dependent on him, no one who would be concerned if he failed to appear.

  As he thought about his dead wife, he frowned. His had never been an easy marriage, because Zoë Toshack, as she had always preferred to call herself rather than use her married name, had been an airwoman very nearly in the same class as Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson. Nearly, but never quite, and her last desperate attempt to reach the ranks of the immortals had been her undoing. Dicken had learned of her death while in India. As if it were a token of atonement for the years of misery she had caused him, with the exception of the house at Deane in Sussex where she had been born, she had left him all her wealth. He still hadn’t managed to touch it.

  As he thought of his wife, he began to wonder w
hat had happened to Marie-Gabrielle Aubrey. He had met her first in Italy in 1918 when she was nine years old and childishly eager to marry him. At the time he had thought he was in love with her older sister, but the sister had married an American and Marie-Gabrielle, turning up in Rezhanistan where Dicken had been sent to organise the evacuation of a besieged Legation staff, had coolly informed him that she still hoped to marry him. Because he was still married to Zoë Toshack, he hadn’t even thought seriously about her suggestion, though he’d not been unaware of her beauty, intelligence and courage. After the siege he’d discovered that the wife who didn’t want him was dead and that the girl who did had vanished, and he had never since been able to track her down.

  He tried to brush the thoughts away but they refused to go. He still had a house which he had acquired for Zoë at Lensbury near Northolt. They had lived in it together for a matter of weeks only, then, while he had gone to Iraq, Zoë had disappeared to the States. They had never occupied it again, meeting only in hotels while the house was let to Service couples forced to live the usual gypsy life in other people’s houses, the husband always disappearing to the ends of the earth while his wife was left behind to pack and follow. Pack and follow. It was a motto by which Zoë had never been prepared to live. Determined from the day he first met her to follow her two ambitions – to fly and be independent – she had managed to fly but had never been able to be entirely independent and even when she had fled from Dicken’s side she had always seemed to need his affection.

  Since her death, he had refurnished the house, half-hoping that someone would come along to occupy it with him. But, though a few had tried, no one had. At least, he thought dryly, people of his age didn’t rush into marriage just for sex.

  There was still no sign of any permission to leave. Udet sent a message to say he was trying to obtain it but while other English tourists in Germany were bolting for the frontiers and the ports, because Dicken’s exit involved an aeroplane, permission had to come from Goering. By afternoon, they were beginning to grow suspicious.

  ‘Think it might be worth taking off and chancing it?’ Babington suggested.

  Climbing into the Lockheed and starting the engines, they taxied to the holding area near the runway. Immediately a red light flashed from the control tower.

  ‘Think we could do it?’ Dicken asked.

  Babington’s eyes were flickering over the field. ‘There are a lot of new planes on this field,’ he said. ‘Fighters by the look of them.’

  As they watched, a Luftwaffe machine, two engined and crewed by two or three men, taxied in front of them so they couldn’t move. They studied it carefully, noticing its armament.

  ‘Daimler-Benz engines,’ Dicken observed. ‘Must be the new Messerschmitt Zerstorer.’ Glancing at the map, he looked about him. ‘The shortest route out of this place,’ he went on, ‘is east to Poland, then north to Sweden. Unfortunately, if the Germans are massing on that frontier, that could be hazardous to say the least.’

  ‘Could we head for London for a few minutes as a feint, then bolt for Italy?’

  Dicken eyed the sky. ‘There’s hardly a cloud about.’ He indicated the fighters. ‘And, fast as this job is, I dare bet that lot are faster. They’d have us in no time. If there’s no permission or any sign of them bringing us back to the hangars by evening we’ll chance it and bolt at ground level for the Netherlands. The sun’ll be low then and in their eyes.’

  ‘What’ll happen if we don’t manage it?’

  ‘Internment, I suppose.’

  ‘And if we do?’

  ‘Home, of course.’

  ‘I meant if the war came.

  ‘Back into uniform. They’ll want everybody they can get. I saw them calling up the reservists in 1914. Boozy old men, a lot of them. They weren’t a scrap of good. The good ones all disappeared at Mons and First Ypres. The others – they slung them out or gave them jobs at base where they started the usual fiddles and made themselves comfortable for the rest of the war.’

  ‘There’ll be a few like that if it happens again,’ Babington said slowly. ‘What’ll you do?’

  ‘Desk job, I expect. Bit old now for fighting. How about you? Why don’t you go for a commission? If this war comes, it’ll be a big one and on the law of averages could take five or six years. And because we’re about as unprepared as we were in 1914, I reckon they’d be glad of experienced men, and there’s nobody more experienced than you Halton apprentices.’

  A car approached them. It was Udet again, in the full panoply of uniform this time. ‘All flying’s banned,’ he explained unhappily. ‘I’m still trying to get permission for you to leave.’ He looked worried and his face was moist with perspiration. ‘But it’s difficult,’ he went on. ‘Everybody’s on edge.’ He lit a cigarette with uncertain fingers. ‘There’s been a hell of a disaster. To the Stukas.’

  ‘I thought they were unsurpassable.’

  Udet shook his head, as if he were dazed. ‘They are. They are. It’s not that.’ He gestured. ‘Wolfram von Richthofen, the Master’s cousin – you’ll remember meeting him – he laid on a demonstration at the Neuhammer training ground for Sperrle and Loerzer. He didn’t like dive bombers but he’s got used to them and wanted to show what they could do. There was to be a mass attack using smoke bombs, by two groups.’ He dragged nervously at the cigarette. ‘They were instructed to approach from about 4000 metres and dive through a cloud layer that had been reported at between 800 and 2000 metres, and release their bombs at 300 metres. But there was ground fog near Cotbus and only one group recognised it for what it was. Gruppe G76 thought it was the cloud and the whole formation tore through it into the earth at full speed. Not one piano from the fifth floor. A whole lot.’ He drew a deep breath before continuing. ‘Only a few realised what had happened and pulled up, but they were hitting the trees and in seconds the ground was littered with debris. They’re trying to push the blame on to me. But it wasn’t my fault. I only supplied the damned machines. Somebody failed to tell them about the fog, but those bastards will try to wriggle out of things in case it loses them prestige with the Party.’

  He was obviously badly shaken and Babington, who had bought a bottle of German brandy to take home, opened it and offered it.

  Udet took a good swallow. ‘First time I ever thought of conducting a grossstadtbummel inside an aeroplane,’ he said glumly.

  He soon disappeared again but his car had hardly vanished from sight when they saw it returning.

  ‘Made it!’ Udet climbed out, grinning his relief. ‘I got my people to see Bodenschatz personally. You’re all right. And the disaster wasn’t as bad as we thought. It only affected one group and some of them escaped. There were only thirteen. But, hell, that’s bad enough.’ He lit a cigarette and frowned. ‘They’ve accused some controller who failed to warn about the fog. I expect the poor bastard’s for the chop. As for you, you can go. Anti-aircraft batteries have been advised. You’re to fly south at a height of three hundred metres.’

  ‘So they can hit us if they have to?’

  Udet handed over a sheet of paper containing their flight instructions. ‘For the love of God stick to the courses and heights shown,’ he said. ‘I don’t want your death on my hands, Dicko.’

  There was a pause, then Udet extended his hand. Dicken took it warmly.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Erni. Until next time.’

  There was a trace of Udet’s old smile. ‘If there is one,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll never win, Knägges,’ Dicken said earnestly. ‘And it’ll mean the end of Germany and the end of Hitler and the Nazis.’

  Udet shrugged. ‘Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end.’

  They flew south towards Switzerland, the cameras working all the way, and hit the Swiss border north of Z
urich. The sky seemed to be empty of fighters but there were a lot of bombers of various types heading east – towards the invasion of Poland, they assumed. Their camouflage was dark and as they passed beneath it was hard to see them against the ground. Crossing into Switzerland, they flew on into France and landed near Dijon for fuel. Heading north-west again, they hit the English coastline at Portsmouth.

  ‘Wonder if they’ll pick us up on the Sound Locator System,’ Babington said and they smiled because they both knew that the Sound Locator System was the name given to disguise a new radio scheme which worked on a system of bouncing waves from a ground station to identify friendly aircraft from hostiles. Turning east, they landed eventually at Heston.

  The Customs Officer greeted them with the usual laconic question. ‘Where from?’

  ‘Berlin,’ Dicken said.

  The Customs man eyed them as if he didn’t believe them. ‘Left it a bit late, haven’t you?’ he said.

  Three

  To Dicken’s surprise, the German invasion of Poland did not take place. Goering was believed to be sceptical of Ribbentrop’s claim that the British would never go to war over Poland and it even began to look as if Dicken’s talks with Udet had had their effect.

  His service career finished, Dicken headed for his house at Lensbury, and for the next two days worked about the garden, wondering what he was going to do now that he was no longer in a position to fly. He was not happy and considered writing letters to everyone he could think of who might be interested in him. There were firms producing instructors who were now turning out pilots for the newly-formed Air Force Reserve, but he didn’t try too hard to attract their attention because, despite the reassurances of the more self-satisfied daily newspapers that there would be no war, he had long since decided there would and found himself thanking God for the short service commission scheme that had been introduced and the eager young pilots who were willing to train at weekends.