by Max Hennessy
The faces in front of him seemed incredibly young and innocent, pale and pinched-looking almost.
‘And remember it isn’t all attack. You’re going to have to defend yourselves. So keep a sharp lookout. Remember to keep your height, always turn to face an attack, never fly straight and level in the combat area, and make your decisions quickly. It’s better to act quickly even if what you do isn’t always correct.’
As the aircraft disappeared on their training programmes, Dicken turned to checking his ground staffs. As Hatto had warned, squadron commanders had played the age-old service game of getting rid of people they didn’t want, and there were several outrageous duds, one or two known service criminals who had come from detention, even one or two men called up from civilian life who had done time inside civilian jails. Among the Waafs, he discovered, there were three who were pregnant.
‘Send ’em back,’ he told the adjutant. ‘I’m more interested in the birth of a decent station than the birth of a new generation.’
The first sweep across the Channel was a ragged affair with Dicken sitting up above to watch how it went. The aircraft hit the French coast at Dieppe and flew in a wide circle, firing at anything that moved. A train was stopped and a convoy of lorries shot up, but the pilots, from being nervous, were now overeager. The formation became ragged and as they turned north Dicken saw he had lost several of his machines.
As they landed in England, he was already down and waiting. All the missing machines turned up later, some of them having landed first at other airfields. This time he didn’t criticise their spirit, only their flying discipline.
The second attempt was much better and they shot down a Junkers and a Messerschmitt. It wasn’t much but it was a start and everybody in the mess that night celebrated their first successes. The third sweep was even better and they came back this time with a score of three, one of them shot down by young Diplock.
‘Next time let’s make it four,’ Dicken suggested.
In fact, it turned out to be five. Hatto turned up to see them off and Dicken himself led the sweep this time. When he landed he was surrounded by young men with their arms on their shoulders doing what was a fair imitation of the gloat dance he and Hatto and Foote had been in the habit of doing.
‘Now where the hell,’ Hatto asked, ‘did they learn that?’
The adjutant smiled. ‘They read, sir,’ he said. ‘And it seemed appropriate to adopt it themselves.’
The following day they had their first casualty. There were no gloat dances this time but Dicken was pleased to see there was also no sign of depression. It was a period of excitement but also of sadness as the sweeps brought more deaths. Nobody had any doubts that they were harassing the Germans, but it was hard for Dicken to watch them leave, knowing that one or two would never return. Many of them came from the higher echelons of society but a lot of the NCOs had grown up in depressed areas and had not had easy lives, so that it was amazing how prepared they were to give their lives for a system that had never done much for them. They were all so young, too – like the sons he’d have had if he’d had any – and they made him feel ancient even as they tried to treat him as one of themselves. They weren’t even very different from the men he’d flown with twenty years before. Only their language had changed. Aeroplanes, known then as ‘buses’, had become ‘kites’, and something good was ‘wizard’ instead of ‘hot stuff’. He no longer worried about how they dressed and, for the most part, they gave him no cause to, because they’d realised that to be brave you didn’t have to look brave.
The hard flying was beginning to take its toll by this time and the mess alternated with heavy silences or the chatter of overexcited frightened young men. Occasionally he caught one of them staring into the distance, held by unimaginable terrors that he couldn’t – and didn’t wish to – put into words.
The year advanced, with Dicken leading a sweep whenever he could. Hatto didn’t approve.
‘That wasn’t the idea, old lad,’ he said. ‘You were supposed to tell them what to do, not do it yourself.’
‘I can’t ask men to do what I’m not prepared to do myself.’
‘These chaps are twenty,’ Hatto pointed out. ‘We’re over forty and too old for it. Well,’ he conceded, ‘perhaps I am but you don’t seem to be, I have to admit. Just take care, though, old lad. Things move faster these days than they did.’
The following day, as Dicken prepared to leave on another sweep over Dieppe, he heard that Cuthbert Orr had just been killed flying a Wellington over Essen as an air vice-marshal. The news left him a little depressed but he snapped out of it quickly and, banking the squadron, began to close them into a wing formation in line astern and set course at 170 degrees. A fourth squadron joined them, tagging on behind, and he found he was leading forty-eight fighters streaking south.
Switching on his gunsight, he roared across the Channel, keeping low to avoid radar detection. It was a bright day with white puffballs of cloud and the sea a slatey blue. As they approached the French coast, his earphones became full of noise as he began to pick up the cries of pilots already involved in a fight.
‘That’s Jimmy going down!’ he heard. ‘Get out while you can!’
Somebody was having a rough time just ahead of them and he tensed, straining his eyes to search the sky in front. The hairs on the backs of his hands began to prickle under his gloves and he felt the strange unwillingness he had always felt before going into a fight. When the fun started, it would vanish quickly enough but it was always a little like plucking up the courage to plunge into a cold bath.
Suddenly, from nowhere, he saw a fighter approaching him head-on, then another lower down, then several more, all heading homewards. He recognised them as Spitfires and Hurricanes. With Dieppe only ten miles away, he began to climb and the machines knifed their way upwards. He could see the town below him now, a column of smoke rising from the port area. The aeroplanes eased into a looser formation, then just ahead he saw wings glinting in the sun and almost at once he heard the voice in his earphones of young Diplock, who was flying as his wing man.
‘Dyton Leader. Large gaggle of Huns eleven o’clock high.’
‘Dyton Leader, I see them.’
The enemy machines, thirty to forty FW 190s and ME 109s, were manoeuvering to dive.
‘Break port!’
The cry in his earphones made him stamp on the rudder and jam the control column over. The Spitfire stood on one wing as he turned into the attacking enemy, and the formation broke up into desperate manoeuvering. More Germans streaked down and the Spitfires separated into sections and pairs. Still climbing, Dicken pulled into a sharp turn and an FW 190 rose up ahead. As he lined up behind it, he realised that the German wasn’t aware of him. The machine was squarely in his sights but farther away than the 250 yards he advocated and he decided to try a long shot. Pulling the stick back to allow for the drop in the trajectory he pressed the button and the Spitfire shook as the 20 millimetre cannons roared. Immediately the Focke-Wulf reared up, trailing a thin stream of smoke and as the range shortened he fired again. The FW’s wheels dropped and the smoke grew thicker, then it rolled over and began to drop towards the sea in its final plunge. Pulling the Spitfire round in a tight turn, he saw more Germans diving to the attack and, as he banked to stay out of their path, he caught sight of a big formation to the east. Diplock’s voice came, calm and unemotional.
‘Dyton Leader. Strong reinforcements coming in. Fifty plus, slightly inland.’
By this time the fighting had scattered all over the sky. Then, as he came out of an S-turn, he saw a lone 109 just ahead. As the enemy grew larger and came within range, he pressed the trigger button. Diplock fired at the same time and the German machine began to lift sharply. At once, Dicken’s windscreen went black with oil leaking from the German and as he wrenched the Spitfire aside, the 109 exploded. He felt the S
pitfire shake as something hit it and realised it was no longer under control.
Dropping below the fight, he heard Diplock’s voice. ‘Dyton Leader, are you all right?’
‘I’m all right,’ Dicken replied. ‘Get the hell home. There’s nothing you can do.’
The Spitfire was plunging out of the sky now in a twisting spiral. Eventually, he managed to lift the nose but the machine wasn’t responding properly and he knew he was too low to bale out so he had no alternative but to put the machine down.
The ground below consisted of small fields and high hedges, but then he saw a road and decided to land on that. Throttling back, fighting the machine’s tendency to drop its nose, he swung into his approach as the road straightened out. As he did so, however, a German lorry came round the corner. He managed to hold the machine up and float over it, and the driver gave him a scared look and ran off the road into the ditch. Almost immediately, another lorry appeared. Great Ned, he thought, killed in collision with a lorry! Dog-fighting with German transport! What a bloody epitaph!
Then he saw a cemetery on his right, with, running down the centre, a wide straight road. At least he wouldn’t meet any German lorries there. The quick and the dead, he thought. He was quick enough now, but he might soon be very dead. His wheels touched the gravel but it was deep and soft and as they sank into it the machine’s nose dipped and the tail kicked up. Snatching the stick back and touching the brakes, he felt the machine give a frightful lurch then the port wingtip struck a stone angel which dissolved into several pieces and the machine slewed round and thumped into one of the family vaults that filled the cemetery. It looked like a telephone box and had the words Famille Dunois carved across it and, as he slammed into it, his face banged against the front of the cockpit and everything dissolved into lights and shooting stars as he felt the tomb collapse on top of the aeroplane.
Recovering his senses, he saw a Frenchman in a smock and beret running towards him through the tombs. Behind him several German soldiers were climbing the wall of the cemetery. Wearily he climbed from the cockpit and leaned against the fuselage, dazedly eyeing the damage he had done to the Famille Dunois’ last resting place. One eye was closed and his face was sticky with blood from his nose so that he had to breathe through his mouth. He wanted to be sick and was certain the Germans would shoot him.
They were all round him now, waving their weapons and shouting, and he braced himself for the beating he was expecting.
Then he realised they were laughing, and one of them, a corporal, slapped him on the back. ‘Ein Klavier aus dem fünfsten Stock,’ he said and Dicken recalled Udet’s expression for an aircraft crash – a piano falling from the fifth floor.
The German fished out a cigarette and offered it. ‘You haf landed in a goot place,’ he said in a thick accent, his face wreathed in smiles. ‘Vat a pity you did not be killed. We could haf buried you here.’
Part Two
One
Half-blind in one eye and still snuffling the blood from his nose, Dicken was led away. As they reached the huts, one of the Germans sat him on a bed and a middle-aged man wearing a Red Cross brassard bathed his face.
At dusk, he was marched under guard to a nearby village where he was handed over to the German Feldpolizei who noted his name, rank and number and searched him to make sure he was unarmed before locking him in a small dark bitterly cold room on the top floor of an old stone building which he assumed was the Mairie. Flopping on to a low iron bed, he was suddenly caught by an attack of the shakes. His teeth chattered and he couldn’t stop himself shuddering. Eventually a German doctor appeared to staunch the bleeding and give him pills to stop the trembling.
Feeling better, he now began to suffer from reaction. Again and again he’d told his pilots that if they were forced to land in enemy territory the first five minutes were the most important, and he had often quoted the case of the pilot who had deliberately fooled the low-flying German fighters which had shot him down by lying back in his seat so that he appeared to be dead, then, as the fighters disappeared, had bolted for the woods and managed to reach England. He could only excuse himself with the knowledge that it had been at least five minutes after his crash before he had collected his senses enough to know what was happening.
During the evening two officers appeared in the doorway. As Dicken rose, the senior of the two started to shout at him. Dicken’s German was good enough for him to understand that a salute was being demanded but he thought it wiser to keep his knowledge of the language to himself.
The German continued to shout and eventually the other officer stepped forward. ‘The major insists that you salute him,’ he said in English.
‘Oh, does he?’ Dicken said. ‘Well, tell the major that I am the equivalent of a full colonel and that in the RAF it’s usual for a major to salute first.’
When the officer translated, the German major gave him a glare but he didn’t pursue the matter and proceeded to question him on the type of aircraft he’d been flying. Since the wreckage was in the cemetery only a mile or two away, there seemed to be no point in refusing the information.
‘You were shot down. Our airmen are good, are they not?’
‘Not as good as ours,’ Dicken retorted. ‘Because I wasn’t shot down. I shot down two of yours and was close enough to the second to have my machine damaged when the stupid bugger blew up.’
The following morning he was awakened by the sound of shouted orders in the street below. Standing on the end of the bed, through the window he saw a column of men, some of them wearing naval uniform, some civilian clothes, one or two even in RAF blue, halted in the street below. As he stared out, the door opened and the elderly man who had bathed his face the night before grinned up at him.
‘It’s no good trying to get out that way,’ he said in his halting English. ‘You’re joining the column out there in the street. Captured crews of merchant ships, a few naval men from our sinkings, one or two of your own kind. We’ve been collecting them in Dieppe. You’re en route for Germany. You’ll have to walk so I brought this.’
He offered a cup of the ersatz coffee and a portion of a French loaf filled with cheese.
The sergeant in charge of the column signed a receipt held out by the Feldpolizei who had held Dicken prisoner, as if he were receiving a registered parcel, and he was pushed into the column. The sailors were at the front, the officers at the rear, and one of the naval men, stumbling alongside, fell into conversation.
His ship had been torpedoed and the survivors had been brought into Dieppe with a lot of merchant seamen in a German freighter. ‘We kept hoping that perhaps the Navy would arrive alongside,’ he said. ‘Like they did with the Altmark.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘But this is France not Norway and it’s 1941 not 1940.’
They had been kept for several days in a football stadium converted into a temporary prisoner of war cage, a lot of the time in freezing rain, and they were all in a pathetic condition. The German guards were truculent and several of them struck out with their rifle butts. One elderly merchant sailor was having difficulty keeping up and the German corporal kept shoving at him until eventually he fell. As the German wrenched him to his feet, Dicken appeared alongside him.
‘Do that again, Corporal,’ he said quietly in German, ‘and I’ll make sure you’re reported.’
‘So!’ The German swung round, his rifle at the ready. ‘So we have an Englander here who speaks our language, eh?’
‘Well enough to report you where it’ll count.’
The German sneered but it was noticeable that he left the sailor alone after that, and eventually Dicken persuaded the sergeant in charge to have him placed in the lorry that was following them.
The rain came again and the march became a shambling stumble over the wet road, all of them drenched to the skin, bedraggled, woebegone and weary. Shuffling into a village called Hine, they wer
e herded into the church to spend the night. Straw was placed on the floor and the church filled with exhausted steaming men, one even asleep on the altar. The old sailor was near Dicken, sucking at a cigarette.
‘Kind of you to put in a word for me,’ he said. ‘Speaking German could be useful if you tried to escape. Going to ’ave a go?’
‘You bet.’
The old man sucked at his cigarette again then he nodded. ‘I expect something’ll turn up,’ he said. ‘They’d never miss one, would they?’
During the night, as Dicken dozed off in an uneasy sleep, he was wakened by an elbow jabbing into his ribs. It was the old sailor.
‘The place’s on fire,’ he said cheerfully.
Sitting bolt upright, Dicken saw that the straw alongside him was smouldering and sending up a column of thick smoke.
‘Did you do it?’
The old man grinned. ‘They’ll ’ave to let us out and it’s dark outside. Them gravestones would make a good ’iding place.’
‘You coming with me?’
‘Not likely. Too old. I’d only keep you back. As soon as we’re outside, make a run for it.’
‘Right.’
‘Ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’ The old man put his head back and began to yell. ‘Fire! Fire! Let us out! We’re burning to death!’
By this time the straw was crackling into flame, and smoke was filling the church. For a minute or two Dicken began to wonder if they were going to be burned to death or choke on the smoke but then the door crashed open and the sergeant and two German soldiers stood in the entrance, holding lanterns.
‘Gottverdammte!’ the sergeant yelled in fury. ‘Rouse the others, then get the priest and tell him his church’s on fire and we’ll need help.’
Eventually more German soldiers appeared, some of them only half-dressed, and began to shepherd everybody into the rain. As he went outside, Dicken felt the old sailor give him a shove.
