War Wounds

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  She had enjoyed chatting in German to Mister Harry; but always, of course, out of earshot of his father. It was a pity that neither of the girls spoke the language: it would be pleasant to indulge in women’s talk again in her native tongue. She felt guilty about listening to broadcasts from Germany and Austria on the wireless in her bedroom. She didn’t dare do so in her sitting-room next to the kitchen — the servants’ hall, it had been called, she learned, in the old days — where the sixteen-year-old girl from the village who came daily to help, and the elderly char who worked in the mornings, would hear and be shocked.

  Soon the girl would be old enough to join one of the women’s Services or find a factory job in Reading, making war materials. The day would surely come when she had to do all the work on her own. She felt gloomy that morning, seeing the Group Captain left lonely once more. It made her imagine the worst: no more young village girls to give her a hand, and the older women either growing too old to get down on their knees to scrub and polish floors, or taking more lucrative work in some factory.

  She crept away from the open door through which she had been observing Templer, and returned to her work.

  Templer, watching the sky, saw a Blenheim go past and fell to thinking of Harry rather than of the chances of being able to watch a dogfight.

  *

  Wing Commander Arnott still commanded the squadron.

  “Well, Harry, there are two spare observers and three wop/A.Gs for you to pick from. Squadron Leader Haynes will tell you all about them.” Haynes was the new flight commander, posted in on Snaith’s death. “You’ll need a week or so on nav exes and the Link, I suppose. Just to get the feel of things again.”

  Navigational exercises and the Link trainer were all part of a pilot’s routine training, however experienced he might be: Harry did not resent them.

  Haynes was younger than Snaith, burly, extroverted and pleased with life. Harry had met him in the past, here and there in the Group; at social functions and on professional occasions. They liked each other.

  “You make your own choice, old lad.” Haynes then gave a brief verbal sketch of the spare crewmen. Typically, he made them all sound like paragons because they were on his flight. The assessments were of dubious value, Harry felt. Haynes was too good-natured to denigrate anyone, and too loyal. He could, Harry had been told, be devastatingly scathing in private with anybody whom he felt was letting the flight down; but it remained private between him and the victim: unless the latter ruefully confided what had passed to his friends.

  Harry took on a sturdy Welsh pilot officer, Williams, as observer: twenty years old, a V.R., with the build of a prop forward and an air of competence and confidence. As wireless operator-air gunner, he brought a nineteen-year-old sergeant into the crew. Mellings came from Devonshire and Harry liked his soft speech and rolling Rs. He was an intelligent grammar school product, and it amused Harry that he looked the conventional townsman’s notion of a ploughboy: gangling, red-wristed, apple-cheeked.

  At the end of a week they were on the Dawn Battle Order.

  The briefing was more ritualised than of yore. A Briefing Room had been built onto the Operations block and here the eight crews who were on the sortie assembled. They sat on forms, facing a dais, behind which a map covered the end wall. Group Captain Hobdey came in, accompanied by Arnott. The waiting men stood up and the station commander told them to sit down. A row of chairs stood in front of the benches, and Arnott took one of these. Hobdey mounted the dais.

  “Your target, as you can see, is in the Pas de Calais. To be precise, there are two targets: enemy bomber stations at Cul-de-St. Pierre and Variole-en-Nichon. There is a squadron of Heinkels on the former and a squadron of Dornier Seventeens on the latter. By destroying aircraft on the ground, you will be inflicting essential damage on the enemy’s capacity for attacking this country. Both are targets of prime importance.”

  He sat down and Arnott took his place. He was personally leading the raid.

  “We’re going straight there and out again, by the shortest route. No dog-legs, no spoofs. Quick in and out. There will be no fighter cover, of course; but we should see them over the Straits: they’ll probably be busy, anyway.” There was laughter at this; of a notably strained sort. “We’ll fly at nought feet until we’re within a mile of the target, when we’ll climb to bombing height: two hundred feet. We’ll carry four two-fiftys and incendiaries. The H.Es will have a fifteen-second delay fuse. Don’t mess around looking for something to prang: go for the dispersals and the hangars. Don’t hang around: as soon as we’ve bombed, we’ll clear off. The first section will bomb the first target and the second will bomb the second: we’ll take them in the order the Group Captain gave them to you.” He explained the tactics they would use, gave the take-off time and time on target, and resumed his chair.

  In turn, Monks, who was still running the Intelligence section, the squadron Signals officer, Armament officer and the station Meteorological officer — still a civilian — made detailed contributions.

  Harry left briefing impressed by the contrast between this polished professional presentation and the casual performances that he had taken for granted less than three months ago.

  “Nice, short trip,” he remarked to his crew.

  “I’ve had the same thought sometimes, when I’ve had the ball and there was only five yards between me and the goal line. But it’s amazing how many men can get between you and scoring a try, look you, even over those few strides.” Williams sounded more cheerful than his words suggested. He was looking positively pleased about the prospect of shouldering his way through enemy opposition.

  Mellings looked equally unconcerned. “Like the I.O. said, we should be much too low for Jerry to get a shot at us until we get to the target; and then it’ll only be a few seconds before we’re out again.” He looked at Harry. “Isn’t that right, sir?”

  “As far as it goes, Mellings, but we’re counting on you to knock out some of the flak around the airfields.”

  Mellings grinned. “At least they’ll be keeping still, sir: not like a shooting at a drogue ... or a Messerschmitt; which I haven’t had a go at, yet.”

  Harry turned to Williams. “Bill, I want to see our bombs drop on dispersed aircraft, where we can see the damage; not on hangar roofs: hangars are too often empty or there’s only one aeroplane inside.”

  “Anything to oblige, Harry.”

  “Williams-The-Bomb, isn’t that what they’d call you at home?”

  Williams grinned in his turn. “Let’s hope it won’t be Williams-The-Miss.”

  “There’s another kind of miss, m’dear ... sir ...” It was a hasty correction. “I wouldn’t mind being known for pranging that sort.”

  Mervyn Mellings, to Harry’s astonishment, constantly expressed a lively interest in the opposite sex. It came, he supposed, of deprivation in a small rural community; the abundance of W.A.A.F. at Massingham seemed to bemuse and inflame him.

  William Williams and Mervyn Mellings. He confessed that he had been influenced by the alliterations when selecting them.

  First light revealed that the few clouds in sight were drifting away and the day promised to be fine. Harry was glad to be making his first sortie since returning from Germany at this hour of the day. He knew that, in the Fighter groups, squadrons were preparing to take off on dawn patrol. Coastal Command crews would be returning from six or eight hours over the Atlantic as others were leaving to replace them. It was good to feel that he was sharing the load with so many others and that their tasks were so diverse. Inculcated with team spirit since, at the age of five, he went to pre-preparatory school, he went about his work all the more confidently because he was part of the biggest combined effort in which he had ever participated.

  The palms of his hands felt clammy in their silk gloves, nonetheless. His dominant doubt was about how he would react when subjected to enemy fire after so long a respite; and after the tragic results of his last encounter with it. He compelled hi
mself to an overt display of calmness and good cheer; and wondered how successfully he was deceiving his crew into believing that he had no qualms.

  Their demeanour of indifference to what awaited them did not delude him. He recalled his own first operation clearly, and the apprehensions that had accompanied it. He remembered the way in which others on their first operation, sometimes men who were flying with him when one of his regulars was enforcedly absent, had paraded an air of nonchalance, when they had confided their fear to him or had betrayed it by one of the many well-known symptoms.

  Mellings, who fancied himself as a crooner, was compulsively singing When You Wish Upon A Star. Williams was humming The Ash Grove. Harry was irritated by the mis-matched airs and tempted to tell them both they were getting on his nerves: instead he put up with it all the way to their aircraft in a three-ton lorry. He knew they would stop as soon as they were occupied.

  Their Blenheim was B for Beer, a patched veteran, but with replacement engines which had flown only twenty hours. On air test the previous evening it had shown a tendency to drop its port wing, which made it tiring to fly. But Harry was prepared to accept a little fatigue on a short trip, for the bonus of two almost new engines.

  He was very conscious of the Blenheim IV’s long nose. He kept thinking of the last one he had flown against the enemy and the ragged metal edges over which he had crawled out, after flak had truncated that proboscis which was the Mk IV’s distinguishing feature. He suffered a moment of the most intense sadness he had felt for John Watson and Broadley.

  From the moment that he started the engines his mind was clear of all unwelcome intrusions. As on every other operation, his thoughts were already on the return and a wish to get the job over as expeditiously as possible; and to do it well.

  Hurricanes and Spitfires were up over the Kent coast when the Blenheims crossed it. A coastal convoy close on their western side gave them a greeting: from the escort commander’s destroyer a lamp flashed “Hit them hard”; to which Arnott slowly replied “Thanks” on his downward recognition light.

  There was a welcome over the French coast also: 37 mm flak in streaks of orange tracer, 20 mm in successive red yellow and green, and red tracer from machine-guns. The quadruple-mounting 37 mm were the most frightening and Arnott was almost scraping the ground, treetops and roofs as he led the formation at a level where the guns could not bear accurately, sometimes not at all.

  There were barrage balloons whose cables were barely visible in the dawn light and at high speed. Harry felt tense and bilious as he waited for one to tear a wing off. When they had passed the balloons he forgot about them. No thought that he would have to fly through them on the way back entered his mind: it was concentrated on the target and the hope that Arnott would not be shot down; his confidence in Arnott’s leadership was unbounded.

  Mellings said “One-o-nines, four-o’clock, high.”

  Williams took a look. “I see them Skipper. They’re turning to follow us, but they’re not diving.”

  “Good.” It wasn’t really good at all, Harry was thinking. They were holding off so that the ground defence guns at wherever the Blenheims were bound for could shoot without fear of hitting the Messerschmitts.

  “Gunner to Captain ... eight more One-o-nines, eight-o’clock.”

  Harry briefly glanced back to his left.

  “They’re on patrol. They’ll be looking for our fighters, not us.” I hope, he added to himself.

  The first target announced itself by a flurry of tracer from the guns defending it. Three Heinkels were taking off in a hurry. Harry saw tracer from Arnott’s wing gun streaking at the nearest of them; and missing. But the gesture had unsettled the pilot, who swung slightly to his right. Arnott’s wing men had begun shooting and the combined fire was harassing all three Heinkels. The rearmost was probably a novice: Harry watched him bank sharply in a turn away from the stream of tracer. Another Heinkel, behind the first three, pulled up steeply to avoid it, hung for a moment and stalled in. A cloud of smoke and a succession of leaping flames engulfed it. Harry felt a gust of heat as he flew past.

  Arnott had taken them around the perimeter in echelon. His bombs fell accurately where several Heinkels were parked. His No. 2 bombed a hangar, his bombs hit the roof and the building caved in, burning.

  There were no more dispersed aircraft to be seen. Arnott spoke on the radio-telephone: “Nuts.” It was the code word for breaking off the attack and continuing to the second target.

  Harry found himself trembling. Was it tension or annoyance? He thought it must be a bit of both. He had been certain that there would be many more Heinkels around the airfield and that he would have a chance to bomb. He was feeling nauseated again; disappointment had a lot to do with it.

  The second enemy aerodrome was ready for them; flak opened up while they were well out of range. There was only one Dornier in the circuit; coming in to land. Why doesn’t the idiot clear off? Harry answered himself: obviously because he has no fuel or there’s something wrong with the aircraft. It landed at the instant that Arnott’s No. 3 dropped two bombs in the centre of the airfield, it ran straight into the burst and a gratifying disintegration showered pieces of it all around.

  Haynes, leading the second section, made for a row of parked bombers, with tracer humming about his ears. Harry, his No. 2, followed. He saw Haynes’s bombs burst in quick succession along the dispersal line. Fires started. Smoke obscured the view.

  “I’m crossing to the other side,” Harry said, turning, and watching his wingtip as he did so; it was only a few feet above the grass when he banked.

  The flak was coming at him almost horizontally. He made a quick skid left and right.

  “Bombing.” He held steady; straight, level and so low that he could see individual clumps of grass flattened by his slipstream.

  “Bombing,” Williams said. His voice had a more pronounced Welsh cadence than normally. Harry could sense the tension among the three of them running along the intercom wires.

  Slivers of metal were thudding into the Blenheim. Harry held its lazy port wing up, cursing it. He felt the separate jerks as the bombs left the bay. He heard each one detonate and felt each blast of disturbed air. He saw dust and smoke, flames and debris. He saw men running. He lowered the Blenheim’s nose slightly and sprayed them with his wing gun.

  “Bombs gone.” Williams said it with a small chuckle and Harry wondered what had amused him.

  He could hear Mellings firing his guns.

  Then Mellings’s voice said, “We hit ‘em, Captain ... there’s a hell of a fire ...”

  “What are you shooting at?”

  “Jerries, sir ... up on the roofs, with machine-guns ...”

  Then it was over.

  The Blenheims left the scene of havoc they had created, in loose formation, accelerating to catch up with Arnott and formate again.

  “Don’t forget the balloons, Skipper,” Williams said.

  “I’ll lay you ten to one the C.O. takes a different route.”

  “Sorry, Skipper, I’m not a betting man; strict Chapel, look you.”

  Oh, John, where are you? thought Harry, appealing to Watson’s shade. “Eheu fugaces ... plus ça change, plus ce n’est pas la meme chose ...”

  It was almost over ... the worst was over ... it had been a successful prang ... but suddenly the fun had gone out of it all.

  He gave it a try. “You wise guy, Bill.”

  “Sorry, Skipper? What was that again?”

  “Never mind ... forget it.”

  Mellings said, with a note of glee, “Skipper, two One-o-nines, six-o’clock, same height, coming in ... what odds I hit one of ‘em?”

  That was better. Harry tingled with the excitement his air gunner had communicated.

  “None ... castrate you if you miss.”

  Seconds passed and Harry saw Williams’s head appear briefly, nod at him, and then disappear as he returned to manning the ventral guns.

  There was a burst of fire
from the dorsal turret, simultaneous with a spurt of tracer past the cockpit.

  A Messerschmitt 109 passed overhead, emitting smoke and flames.

  “We all hit him, Skipper, all three in the section.”

  The 109 crashed into the side of a wood.

  And now they could see the Channel; there was only the coastal flak to face, a matter of a few seconds; after that, the way was clear to Massingham and breakfast.

  “Good shooting, Gunner: but what about the other one?”

  “He pissed off, sir. I was waiting to see the whites of his eyes before I opened fire.”

  “That’s a shocking line. It’ll cost you a round of pints at the Three Tuns this evening, to keep us quiet about it. Isn’t that right, Bill?”

  “Dead right, Skipper.”

  They’d make a good crew, and Harry was thankful.

  *

  Harry was relieved to hear his father sounding cheerful on the telephone. It was the first time that Templer had called him; he made a call each evening and it had worried him that his father always sounded morose and sceptical about his prospects of returning to active service.

  “Glad I’ve caught you. Rang, of course, to congratulate you.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Harry’s D.F.C. had been gazetted that morning and his father had, of course, read it in The Times.

  “I still think they should give you something for your ... er ... escapade.”

  Aware that he was on an open line, Templer did not mention the word “escape”. He had been mightily impressed by Harry’s account of killing the German sentry at the Belgian frontier. That had stirred up a furious hunt for him, and he would have been shot if caught. The many weeks he had spent under the enemy’s nose in Belgium, his further courting danger by sneaking into France, and the boldness of his sea-crossing in a stolen motor launch, which a naval motor torpedo boat intercepted, had all convinced his father that he deserved a decoration. The D.F.C. had been awarded for his flying only.

  Templer added “An M.C. wouldn’t go amiss: they’ve given it to other fellas for the same sort of thing.”