by Max Hennessy
All the lines of communications troops had long since gone with every scrap of equipment that could be got away, followed by the experienced soldiers who had fought against the Germans and knew their tricks. But there was no longer time to pick and choose. It was now a case of every man for himself, and it was with the crisis at its worst that they learned from an agitated telephone call from a British attaché in Paris that the wounded pilots there were still awaiting transportation to the coast. Frantic contacts with London showed that Diplock had already reached home.
Barratt gestured. ‘Get off there, Dick,’ he said. ‘Round ’em up. Get ’em away. Most of them will be able to fight again and we’re going to need them. Get them to Dieppe or out via the Gironde.’
Driving to Paris, Dicken found its inhabitants already leaving for the Mediterranean coast, Bordeaux and Brittany, and, rounding up a fleet of ambulances and cars, he stuffed them with men in blue wearing bandages and plasters and set them on the road south. By the time he had finished, it was possible to hear anti-aircraft firing and the sound of aeroplane engines. Crumps, bangs and whistles were followed by the clink and clatter of falling splinters and the rush of tumbling brickwork. Great billows of black smoke were rolling across the city from St Denis, the Seine and St Germain to the west.
The following day he learned that nearly 300 people had been killed and there had been a lot of damage at the Citroën Works, city aerodromes and the French Air Ministry. People were still cramming the stations for the south and west and heading in streams for the Porte d’Italie, their cars laden with household goods, mattresses draped across the roofs in the hope of keeping out the bullets of strafing German aeroplanes.
There were still a few British service personnel about the city and, since Dicken had started the exodus south, they began to approach him for instructions. Commandeering service and private vehicles, he sent them after the others. It was clear by this time that the Germans would occupy Paris before long, but there were still a few people around who refused to be hurried. The American Ambulance Corps was still busy about the city, and, searching for a wounded sergeant, Dicken saw one of them, a woman with a sweet face and a low voice, holding the hand of a boy of about nineteen, who clutched his bloodstained flying helmet as if it were a talisman.
‘God bless America,’ he muttered as he passed and the woman turned and looked up, startled.
A French tank captain he talked to who had knocked out three German panzers insisted that his tanks had been superior all along the line to the German machines, but that the Germans were winning because the French politicians were a lot of craven-hearted cowards who had bolted for Bordeaux at the first alarm.
It was obvious there weren’t many days left before the Germans arrived. They were already coming up the Seine and their aircraft were over the city daily. Caught near the Champs Elysées by the thud of bombs that came even before the sirens sounded, Dicken started to look around him for a shelter.
The aeroplanes were appearing overhead now and, standing in the doorway of a shop nearby, he saw a woman in the uniform of the American Ambulance Corps. He recognised her at once as the woman he’d seen holding the hand of the wounded pilot. She looked bewildered, so he grabbed her arm and dragged her with him. Ahead of him he could see the sign, ABRI – shelter – and he pushed her in front of him down the steps just as the first bomb landed in the street. There was a tremendous crash and the air seemed to be sucked out of their lungs, then a cloud of dust filled the shelter to make them all start coughing. The American woman hid her face in Dicken’s shoulder, and, without thinking, he put his arm around her and pulled her closer.
The raid didn’t last long and after a while the American woman lifted her head. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Perhaps a drink would help,’ Dicken suggested, but she shook her head.
‘I’m sorry. I’d love to, but under the circumstances I’d better get back. There’ll be work to do.’
News arrived that the Germans had reached Rouen and it was clearly time to go. With no kit to pack, nothing but the revolver round his waist, Dicken called at the American hospital to thank them for all they had done. He had half hoped to bump into the woman he had met in the shelter but nobody could identify her from his description and time was hurrying by so he had to leave without finding her. He decided to travel by train to Blois where the Headquarters of the Advanced Air Striking Force had moved. But it was impossible to get near the Gare de Lyon for the crowds of people trying to escape. The Gare d’Austerlitz was similarly crowded and he found out that the lines were being bombed, anyway, and in the end decided to leave by road.
That evening he wandered round the streets which were empty except for an occasional car. The cafés and restaurants were all boarded up, the pavements deserted and devoid of the famous flâneurs, and the atmosphere was one of desolation. Walking up the Champs Elysées to the Etoile, he stood by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for a while, watched by a silent gendarme, and stared at the words on the tomb – Ici repose un soldat français mort pour la patrie – remembering bitterly how after the last lot the politicians had promised it had been the war to end all wars.
As they moved off the next morning, there was a strange mist over the city and a strong smell of burning. The rumble of gunfire in the distance seemed to reach him through the bones of the earth. He had acquired a car and a truck filled with fifteen RAF policemen and their baggage and was escorted by two RAF despatch riders, who worked wonders as they reached the crowded country roads. Looking back he saw a shroud of black smoke hanging over the city and the smuts from the fires settled on their clothes and made the faces of the despatch riders as black as negroes’.
Châteaudun came up and they moved on to Blois which was as crowded as every other town, then they began to follow the Loire until they came to Nantes. They had been unable to find food because of the horde of refugees moving ahead of them and were forced further south to Poitiers where they knew of an airfield where there might be aircraft going to England. Aircraft were moving all right but they were all packed to suffocation and, beginning to grow angry, Dicken found an abandoned Bristol Bombay. It was an old-fashioned high-winged twin-engined bomber which had been relegated to the status of a transport. It had a broken tail wheel and rudder but, with the aid of a corporal fitter, they got to work on it.
‘Will it hold up?’ Dicken asked.
‘I reckon so, sir. Just.’
Cotton and his team arrived soon afterwards with his Lockheed and an abandoned Fairey Battle they had found.
He greeted Dicken warmly. ‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘It’s all finished here. Just as I’m finished in England. I’ve heard the Air Ministry’s going to sack me. Feller called St Aubyn. How are you off for transport home?’
‘We’ve got an old Bombay and you look pretty full already.’
Cotton grinned. ‘Even an English secretary and her dog.’
The service policemen had managed to find a place on another aeroplane by now but there were plenty of ground crew who crowded aboard the Bombay and in the end Dicken found he had a group of twenty-one. Five more turned up just as the corporal fitter started the engines.
There were no maps and Dicken had never flown a Bombay but he put it to his passengers and found they were all willing to take a chance. Taxiing to the end of the field, he swung into wind with the tail wheel rattling and clunking as they rolled over the ruts. The fitter was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, his eyes glued to the dials.
‘Shout out if you see anything happening that shouldn’t happen,’ Dicken said, then swinging into wind he pushed the throttles wide open.
The clunking of the tail wheel grew louder and it began to sound desperately fragile. There was a bang and immediately Dicken thrust the stick forward and they thundered ahead with the tail in the air. Reaching flying speed, he eased back on the controls and felt the rumbl
ing of the wheels cease. As they lifted, they could see the bomb-pitted aerodrome and the crowds of refugees stretching across the countryside, cramming every road. Spirals of smoke seemed to rise from every village and town.
Climbing to a thousand feet, he tried a cautious turn.
‘If anything happens I’ll put her down near a ship or something,’ he said.
They followed the river to St Nazaire. Below them they could see a huge ship lying on her side. All round her there were boats and clusters of black bobbing heads.
After a while, he tried another turn and saw Brittany passing beneath him. The Channel was full of ships, all engaged, he imagined, in rescuing what was left of the BEF. Turning slightly east, he saw the Channel Islands. The engines were making strange noises and one of them was sending out a great deal of blue smoke, so that he expected it to burst into flames at any minute, and it was with some relief that he saw the Isle of Wight passing below. Immediately the naval guns at Portsmouth began to fire at them.
‘Get on the Aldis,’ he said to the wireless operator. ‘Give them “We are friendly.”’
The guns stopped but the wireless operator came back grinning. ‘They replied, “Bugger off,” sir.’
Recalling the losses at Dunkirk and the immortal words of one of the Lords of the Admiralty before the war, engraved on the hearts of all airmen, ‘Their Lordships do not consider that any warship competently handled is in danger from aerial attack,’ Dicken frowned. ‘Give them,’ he suggested. ‘“We’ll meet you here tomorrow with bombs and then we’ll see who buggers off.”’
The airman with the Aldis lamp gave him a startled look and he smiled. ‘Perhaps, after all,’ he said, ‘you’d better not. Co-operation between the services is bad enough already.’
As he swung north-east, he turned to the corporal fitter, ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked.
‘London, sir.’
‘Well, since you got the thing going, I reckon we ought to drop you as near home as possible.’
Navigating by railway lines, as they began to descend, their minds still full of the horror that was France, they saw a game of cricket in progress. It seemed unbelievable.
‘Pity we haven’t got a bomb or two to drop on them, sir,’ the fitter observed. ‘Just to make ’em realise there’s a war on.’
Dicken nodded. ‘I have a suspicion, corporal,’ he said, ‘that they won’t have long to wait.’
Six
Everybody who could be spared had been brought south to handle the hundreds of bewildered men arriving from France and among the first people Dicken saw was Hatto. He looked tired and had been on his feet without sleep for three days.
‘Madly war, what,’ he said. ‘Dowding’s treating it as a run-up to the battle for Britain and Keith Park’s holding 11 Group in readiness for the first attacks.’ He sighed. ‘At least we no longer have anybody to let us down and we’ve now got Churchill running the show instead of that old Birmingham umbrella manufacturer, Chamberlain.’
Seen in a clear light, it wasn’t a promising prospect nevertheless. Hitler ruled all Western Europe from Tromsö to the Pyrenees, and the threat of invasion was being countered by tearing down all signposts, railway signs and anything else that would indicate to an invading force where it was, while the ringing of church bells was forbidden except as an alarm. Since there were no weapons, there wasn’t much else they could do.
Somehow, however, there was a strange confidence that came down from the top. Churchill had no doubts about the outcome and said again and again that Hitler would never defeat England or even land an invasion force and, though RAF reconnaissance planes were already bringing back reports of landing barges gathering in the French Channel ports, everybody believed his powerful rhetoric.
The disaster in France had started up a new uproar over the old question of dive bombers and a bitter argument was going on over the RAF’s interpretation of the army’s close-support requirements. One group was struggling to convince the Air Ministry that its request for such an aircraft was thoroughly justified by recent events and, though the Air Ministry would concede nothing, was urging the design and production in quantity of large numbers of small attack dive bombers to work with the ground forces. The campaign got nowhere.
To his surprise, Dicken found himself appointed with increased rank to command a fighter station at Thornside. Having lost all his kit in France, however, he requested a few days’ leave in London to refit himself and, as he headed into the Grosvenor for a drink after a visit to the tailor’s, he bumped into a familiar figure. It was older and thicker round the middle than when he had last seen it but it had fought alongside him for months in France and Italy in the last war, and he had last seen it in the United States while searching for his erring wife, Zoë.
‘Walt Foote!’ he said.
‘Dicky Boy!’ Foote grabbed him and hugged him. ‘Nearly did a gloat dance,’ he said. ‘Remember how we used to do a ring-a-round-the-roses whenever we shot down a Hun or defeated Percy Diplock.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just back from China. I got to be a judge and the Government sent me out to handle a few things for them. I’ve just been to see your Foreign Office and I’m now on my way home to warn ours.’
‘About the Japanese?’
‘The war in Europe’s not going to be the only one. The Japs are going to take advantage of the fact that the British Empire’s fully occupied in Europe.’
‘Will America let them?’
Foote grinned. ‘America doesn’t give a damn about them grabbing what belongs to you, but they’ll soon start yelling if they lay their hands on anything in our sphere of influence.’
‘And will they?’
‘Brother, I’ve been operating China and Japan for years and I sure as hell think they will.’
As they talked, a woman in the uniform of an American Ambulance Corps appeared in the hotel and Foote stood up.
‘I’d like you to meet my niece, Katie,’ he said. ‘She’s just arrived from France.’
The woman laughed. ‘Paris,’ she said, pointing at Dicken. ‘June 7th.’
Foote was staring at them. ‘You’ve met?’
Dicken grinned. ‘You Feete get around.’
Foote remained in London only for one more day before going to Southampton to catch a ship for the States. Katie Foote was to remain in England, doing ambulance work, and she and Dicken agreed to take care of each other. As a free agent since his wife had died, it was something that didn’t fail to appeal because she was a tall attractive woman just getting over the trauma of a broken marriage. They saw Foote off on the train together and exchanged addresses.
‘Let’s meet,’ she said. ‘There should be time.’
Thornside was one of the London fighter stations with a Sector Operations rooms and satellite aerodromes at Beaston and Pewton, and Dicken found himself busy sixteen hours a day seven days a week.
An air fighting development unit was operating there and the aerodrome defences had all been attended to. But the hangars had been camouflaged during the Phoney War with brown and green paint to break up the regularity of the lines and, flying over it, Dicken pointed out that because it was surrounded by houses, it had not been camouflaged at all, simply made more conspicuous.
The experts, who had been trained to believe that camouflage meant trees, not houses, disagreed violently, but after a great deal of argument, the hangars were disguised as more houses with bright red roofs, windows, doors and gardens and the result was so effective that the pilots of the three squadrons stationed there complained they could never find the damn place and the adjutant finally conceded that the idea worked, claiming he’d just seen two swans crash- land as they tried to alight on an artificial stream.
With all three squadrons watching the sea as the Germans stepped up their at
tacks on Channel shipping, the place was often vulnerable to attack, so a station defence flight was organised, with any pilot – including Dicken – who happened to be available taking off in any aircraft that was handy.
Soon afterwards he was told to report to London to be briefed about a Polish squadron that was due to be attached to Thornside. There were a lot of things to remember – chiefly that the Poles had all reached England through France, Spain and North Africa, and were all a little touchy about their pride. They also had a lot of strange customs and after their defeat considered their honour important, but though they were itching to get at the Germans they were not to be allowed near them until they had learned some English.
The briefing took most of the morning. In the afternoon, Dicken contacted Katie Foote who agreed at once to meet him for a meal. The restaurant was crowded with men in uniform and there was now even a sprinkling of women in them, too. Also, where once all the uniforms would have been those of officers, now there was a mixture of other ranks as the crisis swept everybody into the services. Fathers with red tabs sat alongside sons in plain khaki without a single badge beyond their regimental flash. Like Dicken, Katie Foote was also in uniform and, like all American uniforms, it was perfectly tailored and showed her figure.
She was intelligent with a lively humour and Dicken enjoyed his evening more than he had expected. What had been only a polite gesture to Foote had turned out to be exciting and it was suddenly important to meet her again. As he found her a taxi, she leaned out and kissed him gently.
‘Thank you, Dicken,’ she said. ‘You’re a nice guy.’
‘I’m an old guy.’
‘Not that old.’
‘Nearly old enough to be your father.’
She smiled, ignoring the comment. ‘It was a lovely evening.’
