Once More the Hawks

by Max Hennessy

  The country had been saved by the skin of its teeth. Before the Munich meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain the previous year, the RAF’s front-line fighters had been Fury biplanes, machines with slow twin Vickers whose performance was purely academic, anyway, because everybody knew perfectly well that the aircraft that carried them would never get close enough to the German Heinkels and Dorniers to fire at them. The atmosphere had been heavy with depression and even the Super-Furies and Gladiators, which had four guns and a top speed of 245mph, were Stone Age machines by comparison with what the Germans flew. Of the 750 fighters Fighter Command had possessed only 90 were Hurricane monoplanes.

  They had been in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude and only the constant threats from Hitler had stirred things up until the squadrons were at last being re-equipped. Even so, the Hurricanes, intolerant of faulty handling and possessing a Merlin engine that was still giving problems, were far from popular.

  Staying up late on the last day of August to listen to the late news on the BBC, Dicken woke at five o’clock the following morning from a deep dream of marching feet to realise the sound came from a heavy knocking on his front door. Sitting bolt upright, he hurried to the window. Below, in the grey morning light he could see the postman standing on the porch with the village policeman.

  The policeman looked up. ‘Are you Wing Commander ND Quinney, DSO, MC, DFC, MM?’ he asked solemnly.

  ‘You know damn well I am, Fred,’ Dicken snorted.

  The policeman didn’t even blink. ‘Will you please come down to the door, sir. The postman ’as an important letter for you.’

  Putting on his dressing gown, Dicken opened the door. The postman handed him the letter.

  ‘Since when have you needed an escort to deliver a letter?’ Dicken asked.

  The postman gave a sheepish smile, then for the first time the policeman showed signs of being human. His face split in a wide grin. ‘You’ve got to put your uniform back on, sir,’ he said, ‘and go and shoot down some more of them old ’Uns. You’ve been called back.’

  Dicken stared at him for a moment, then wrenched at the envelope. The letter instructed him to report to Training Command, Shawbury, Shropshire, as chief signals officer.

  ‘God damn and blast it to everlasting hell!’ he shouted.

  The policeman looked alarmed. ‘Ain’t it that, sir?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Then what’s the trouble? Don’t you want to go?’

  Dicken glared. As an under-aged youth wanting to go to sea in 1914 he had become a fully qualified radio operator, though his mother, fearful of him being drowned, had refused to give her consent and he had gone into the RFC instead. But that first class certificate had dogged him throughout his career and at all sorts of odd moments he had found himself in charge of signals stations or groups in which, because he had long since lost this enthusiasm for wireless, he hadn’t the slightest interest. He was still trying to work out some means of avoiding the posting when the telephone rang. It was Willie Hatto.

  Like Dicken a veteran of the earlier war, Group Captain William Wymarck Wombwell Hatto had also had his career blighted by Diplock. With an American, Walt Foote, they had formed an anarchical trio that existed chiefly for the derision of pompous or downright bad senior officers, chiefly Diplock and his mentor, St Aubyn. Because his father, Lord Hooe, sat in the House of Lords and he had brothers in the Foreign Office and the Church, Hatto had been harder to hold down but even he had only recently managed to struggle up to group captain.

  ‘The balloon’s due to go up,’ he said at once. ‘The Germans have gone into Poland. Have you heard?’

  ‘I guessed. I’ve just received a letter telling me to report to Shawbury. As a bloody signals officer!’

  Hatto gave a hoot of laughter. ‘That old wireless certificate of yours!’

  ‘I’ve been on the telephone to the Air Ministry and asked for a squadron. The bastards informed me that owing to my advanced age and the new techniques of fighting, such a posting’s out of the question and I have to be a good boy and attend to the job they’ve picked out for me.’

  Hatto laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The CO at Shawbury’s Cuthbert Orr and he’s all right. And, look, I’m at the Air Ministry at the moment with my own department. I’ll find you a job. We could do with someone with some sense. The place’s in a panic because the bloody politicians are delaying carrying out their promise to declare war and while we’re sitting with our thumbs in our bums the Germans are wiping the floor with the Poles. If they don’t wake up, the Luftwaffe will be first off the mark and bomb us in the first minute after the declaration and the Navy’s worried sick that the German fleet will nip out while we’re still at peace and place its ships across our trade routes.’

  Almost the first person Dicken met at Shawbury was Flight-Sergeant Handiside, who as a corporal had first welcomed Dicken to the RFC in 1915. He was wearing civvies and looked stouter than Dicken remembered.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ he said with a grin. ‘They recalled you, too?’

  Cuthbert Orr, who had been Dicken’s CO in India and China, was as burly and ebullient as ever. His moustache and eyebrows were sprinkled with grey now but he was itching to get into the fighting and he welcomed Dicken warmly. He, too, had crossed the path of what he called the Unholy Duo.

  ‘I see that pill, St Aubyn, and his lapdog, Diplock, have sorted themselves out a couple of cushy jobs at the Air House,’ he said at once. ‘Still, they never produced much between them in the way of guts.’

  To man the station’s ground defence weapons – mostly ancient Lewis guns on tripods – were a large number of recalled soldiers who had rushed after the Munich fiasco and Chamberlain’s promise of ‘Peace in our time’ to take advantage of the Government’s offer of increased pensions, never dreaming that they’d ever be called up. They were mostly in their late fifties and sixties and moved torpidly about, some of them even using sticks, one actually using two sticks. They wore ungaitered trousers and khaki sidecaps unadorned by any badge so that they looked like elderly convicts and they had long since forgotten what they’d ever learned and were mostly already trying to wangle their discharge.

  ‘Just another example of the Government’s hurried thinking,’ Orr pointed out dryly. ‘Now that the weather’s turning cold, the poor old buggers are going down like flies.’

  The war started officially for Britain two days later. It was a Sunday and, as he listened to the Prime Minister’s gloomy tones, Dicken found his attitude was less one of worry than of relief, a feeling that ‘Oh, well, now at least we can get on with it.’

  ‘From now on,’ Orr said, ‘I suppose everybody had better wear steel helmets.’

  Two minutes later, getting into his car to view his outposts, his helmet hit the roof with a clang and he fell back as if pole-axed.

  ‘God damn!’ he said. ‘The first British casualty of the war!’

  They had all expected the fighting to start at once but, apart from a little skirmishing along the Franco-German frontier, nothing happened and the British Expeditionary Force landed on the Continent without difficulty and moved to positions along the frontier. Poland vanished beneath the German attack, Udet’s Stukas proved to be all he had claimed, and a new word, Blitzkrieg, entered everyone’s vocabulary.

  England didn’t change much, however. Nobody seemed to be doing any fighting or, for that matter, making any preparations for doing any fighting. The Government was refusing to allow the RAF to drop bombs anywhere near German civilians, which meant that targets were severely restricted, and a suggestion that they set the Black Forest on fire with incendiaries was turned down indignantly with the fatuous comment that it was private property. They were trying to fight the war with one hand tied behind their backs.

  Shawbury was far enough away from the coast to be even less invo
lved and the major interest there was the complaints of the older of the old soldiers recruited for ground defence. They were billeted in sergeants’ quarters, two to a room, each with its little stove, and when coal was delivered to them and dumped between the huts, the older men were shoved aside by the younger of their comrades and got nothing, so that they were having to endure the increasing cold without any means of keeping warm.

  The signals job didn’t last long. Because there had been no real fighting yet, nobody was taking the war very seriously and communications were still amateurish. Radar stations had been built ten to fifteen miles apart along the south coast of England which, with posts of the Royal Observer Corps, were linked with the filter room and Observer Corps Plotting Room at Fighter Command Headquarters at Stanmore. Still plagued by his 1914 radio certificate, it became Dicken’s job to make the communications function properly.

  It was a harsh winter with RAF stations snowed up and, heading towards Norfolk over a road covered with icy slush, his car skidded into a ditch full of muddy water. A breakdown truck hauled it back on to the road but, because he was wet through, Dicken was given a lift to a nearby operational training unit to spend the night there. The commanding officer turned out to be Tom Howarth, who had flown with him in Italy in 1918, and the signals officer turned out to be Babington, beaming and already resplendent in a brand new pilot’s officer’s uniform. Howarth lent him a tunic and trousers and Babington a mackintosh and a cap which sat on his head like a tit on a mountain.

  ‘Fancy seeing what happens here, sir?’ Babington asked. ‘They do circuits and bumps through the hours of darkness to get them used to night flying.’

  Collected from the operations room by a wireless operator who had just finished his course and was awaiting a posting to a squadron, Dicken immediately found himself the subject of condescension by the trainee, a fresh-faced young man by the name of Fisher with a large moustache and Volunteer Reserve badges on his shoulders. At first it didn’t occur to Dicken why, then he remembered that on all training stations there were large numbers of teachers of physics and chemistry of his own age who had been given commissions to teach radio and electricity to the masses of volunteers and conscripts who were pouring into the service and, because they were desperately needed, their basic training had been rushed and they still had hands full of thumbs and were uncertain how or when to salute, still civilians despite their uniforms and regarded with a measure of contempt by the young men – for the most part just as new to the service themselves – who were training to become aircrew. It was clear that, because he was wearing Babington’s brand new mackintosh and side hat, Fisher was assuming he was one, too.

  They walked to the end of the flare path, a line of goose-necked paraffin flares which reminded Dicken how far behind the Americans the RAF’s airfield lighting was.

  ‘Better stand over there,’ Fisher said briskly.

  ‘You seem to know the ropes,’ Dicken said mildly. ‘Have you done much flying?’

  ‘About a thousand hours,’ Fisher said casually. ‘It begins to grow boring when you get that many in.’

  Dicken smiled. ‘I’m sure it does. Night flying?’

  ‘Plenty of that.’ Fisher picked up the Aldis lamp and flashed green to an aeroplane at the end of the runway that was anxiously giving its letter as it sought permission to land. ‘It’s in France where you learn to fly, you know. That’s why I’m here. Rest. Crashed. You wouldn’t know about that, of course.’

  The chatter went on all evening, Dicken thoroughly enjoying himself. The following day, he accepted Tom Howarth’s invitation to give a talk to the new aircrews.

  ‘Gives them a bit of a kick to see someone they’ve actually read about in magazines,’ he said. ‘Mind, you’ll very soon find out that they know who’s going to be fighting this war – them. And–’ Howarth smiled ‘–bless ’em, they’re dead right, of course.’

  The talk was short but for Dicken the most entertaining part by a long way was the sight of young Fisher sitting below him in the front row full of his own importance. By this time, Dicken’s uniform had been cleaned and dried and when he rose he was in the full fig of a wing commander’s rank with two rows of medal ribbons beneath his wings.

  Afterwards, he saw Fisher waiting by the door. He looked very hot under the collar.

  ‘Permission to speak to you, sir,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve been a bloody fool.’

  Dicken laughed. ‘Yes, you have a bit,’ he agreed. ‘But I shouldn’t let it worry you. It’s something we all suffer from at your age.’

  ‘I never dreamed, sir–’

  ‘Especially in that hat I was wearing.’

  Fisher managed a nervous smile. ‘I’ve just discovered who you are, sir. I’ve read about you. I owe you an apology.’

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ Dicken said. ‘But I expect you’ve discovered something I discovered very early in my career. When you shoot a line, it’s a good idea first to find out who it is you’re shooting it to.’

  The communications job lasted two more boring months before Dicken received a call from Hatto to report to the Air Ministry. He found Hatto in a bad temper.

  ‘Usual trouble,’ he said. ‘Somebody isn’t pulling his finger out. The navy’s complaining that unidentified aircraft are flying over Chatham and Portsmouth and that our Sound Locator System isn’t giving them the proper warning. “Sound Locator System”, as you well know, is the name we give to this radar device of Watson-Watt’s. It isn’t working as the navy wants it to, but they can’t get a satisfactory answer from the Air Staff. I’m going over there now. Your first job with this department, therefore, is to look after the shop till I come back.’

  When Hatto returned his face was grave. Even his monocle looked subdued.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  Hatto frowned. ‘Not half there isn’t. The navy’s getting no satisfaction at all. Every time they claim somebody’s flying over them all they get is a snotty letter complaining about the number of times they bring the subject up and insisting that the system’s reliable. And you know who signs the letters?’

  ‘I’ll have a guess. Diplock.’

  ‘Diplock. Chief of Staff to St Aubyn. And it fits the half-baked attitude at the top at the moment. After all, if all we’re doing is bombing the Germans with leaflets, why not this? If I can persuade the navy to lend us an observer would you be willing to nip out and come back in over Portsmouth? We can lay on Cotton’s Lockheed again and they won’t be able to argue if we have photographs.’

  The following day when Dicken reported at Heston it was warm with woolly clouds at five thousand feet. With a naval commander in the co-pilot’s seat, they took off without submitting a flight plan, flew west and climbed to 14,000 feet, then started the cameras and, heading south, came in over the coast at Portsmouth which they circled for fifteen to twenty minutes to give the warning system plenty of time to become aware of them. It only required one flight across the naval base to photograph everything that was happening and the pictures demonstrated not only all the installations but also the route of the flight. When he saw them Hatto thumped the table in delight.

  ‘This,’ he snapped, ‘ought to put a cork in that bastard Diplock’s ear!’

  Two days later Hatto arrived back from the Admiralty with a grim face, and produced a copy of a letter from the Air Staff. Signed by Diplock, it complained in a fretful tone about what it considered the navy’s persistence with something that didn’t exist. ‘Not only,’ it concluded, ‘were no enemy aircraft flying in the area referred to on the day in question, but no British aircraft were in the vicinity either.’

  ‘The ammunition the Admiralty want,’ Hatto said. ‘We’ve got the bastard.’

  They were summoned to the Admiralty the following day. From the number of gold-encrusted light blue hats hanging in the corridor it was obvious that a great
many senior air force officers were present. From beyond the closed doors the murmur of voices rose angrily. Summoned inside, they saw Air Vice-Marshal St Aubyn bent over the table staring furiously at the photographs Dicken had taken.

  ‘There but for the grace of God,’ Hatto murmured, ‘goes God. I suppose it’s only by the contemplation of the incompetent that we can appreciate the competent.’

  As the door closed St Aubyn looked round and then, at the other side of the table, they saw Diplock.

  ‘You two!’ he snapped.

  He had grown fatter since Dicken had last seen him, and his high protruding ears made him look more than ever like the Morane Parasol aircraft after which he had been nicknamed as long ago as 1916. The name had stuck and with the approach of war and the interest by the newspapers in the services, to Diplock’s fury the name, Parasol Percy, had even started appearing in the columns of the popular press.

  There was an immediate hubbub of voices, with the sailors smug and the airmen indignant and angry. But there was no getting away from the fact that the navy had proved its point. And it didn’t take long before the backlash arrived, and Hatto and Dicken were summoned to the office of Air Vice-Marshal St Aubyn who met them angrily.

  ‘You are air force officers,’ he snapped at them immediately. ‘You flaunted authority. You’ve given us a great deal of trouble.’

  ‘I beg to submit, sir,’ Hatto snapped, ‘that the one who’s giving us trouble is Hitler.’

  Though they defended themselves strongly it didn’t help much. St Aubyn and Diplock had had their casual attitude to their job shown up and they were in a spiteful mood.

  ‘I’m buggered if I can understand,’ Hatto said as they returned to their office, ‘why the battle between the Air Ministry and the Admiralty is of such importance that people like those two can take risks. It seems to me it might be better if they directed their energy into defeating Hitler.’