Mantell began his pursuit at 1445hrs. At 1515hrs all visual and radio contact with him was lost, and there are reports of his aircraft being seen spinning to destruction minutes later. The wreck was found on a farm near Franklin in Kentucky. Mantell’s body was in it, and his wristwatch had stopped at 15.18. The air accident enquiry which followed concluded that Mantell had been affected, maybe even killed before the crash, by hypoxia from oxygen deprivation. This is where it should have ended, except . . .
The Air Force first announced that as a result of misidentification Mantell actually chased the planet Venus. They subsequently changed Venus to a weather balloon, then back again, before plumping for two weather balloons. In some reports they also moved on to Venus and two weather balloons. But, intriguingly, that’s not quite the end of the story either.
In 1953 one Richard Miller circulated a self-published Prologue in which he claimed that he was in the US Air Force in January 1948, serving at Scott Air Force base near Belleville, and listened live to the Mantell interception transmissions as they came in over a closed communications link. He agreed that the transmissions from Mantell which had already been reproduced were accurate, but then added:
This is where the official Air Force account ends. However, there was one further radio transmission at 3.18 that afternoon. His last statement has been stricken from all of the official records. He said, ‘My God. I see people in this thing.’
I don’t think Miller’s account has ever been corroborated, but it makes a great story, doesn’t it? Every time I read Mantell’s alleged last message I get goose flesh!
There are probably several identifiable mind maps that writers use to create their geography. I try to describe places that I know or have seen but occasionally find myself, like a small boy standing in front of a pick’n’mix sweets counter, moving buildings, farms and landscapes around a bit. The Parachute cafe I have put down on the edge of Lympne Airfield in Kent was actually outside Drem Airfield in East Lothian, not half an hour from where I am sitting. It was famous for dangerously huge fried breakfasts. Drem is where the Drem Lighting System for recovering aircraft at night was developed, which in turn evolved into the airfield approach lighting system which now safely guides down to landing virtually every night flight made . . . so the next time you are making a night landing, mouth a quiet thank you to the people at Drem in the 1940s. The airfield was transferred from the RAF to the Navy, but quickly returned to agriculture after the war ended. Many of the airfield buildings were simply civilianized, and remain in use. If you are lucky, employees at the restaurant, farm shop and kitchen centre will tell you of the persistent and unnerving wartime ghosts with whom they share what was once the Wren’s quarters.
The reference Charlie makes to ‘a maniac with a horse and cart’ around the narrow lanes of Kent and West Sussex is a reminder I wrote myself of my grandfather, ‘Kiki’ Owen. A chauffeur to wealthy families for much of his life, he had the privilege to be fined twice in magistrates’ courts for the offence of speeding on the open road: once on a pedal bike, and once with a horse and trap!
War surplus aircraft were smuggled to the emerging State of Israel, and there was an unsuccessful Israeli plot to blow up Ernie Bevin. Israeli terrorists perceived him as opposing the establishment of Israel, and anti-Semitic to boot. I don’t know if they were right. I find that historical footnotes like this drop almost accidentally into my stories like pieces falling into place in a jigsaw.
I have CAMRA London to thank for finding me again The Canterbury on Fish Street Hill. It’s long gone now, but in the 1960s it had stupendous beer, legendary barmaids and was a drinking haunt of the Customs Officers who worked the Pool of London. Some of those, at the end of their careers, maybe, were WWII ex-servicemen, and they taught me my trade, and how to be a man. I always think of them, particularly Johnny, with gratitude and admiration. John Swift of the Folkestone Classic Cinema Club told me where Charlie went to the pictures in 1948, and what film he saw. My thanks to him and all of the others who help me to research and build my stories: I am constantly amazed by the help I receive from complete strangers.
Air accidents feature prominently in this narrative, but don’t let it put you off flying. Anyone nervous about commercial flying as a passenger today should really look at the air accident statistics and reports for 1947 and 1948: aeroplanes were falling out of the air all over the place. The casualty statistics for aircrew, passengers and aircraft in that period simply would not be tolerated today. The only saving grace I can see is that the passenger aircraft of the 1940s carried far fewer passengers per flight than modern aircraft do, which means that the accidents – greater in number than today by a factor of maybe as much as ten – killed far fewer people. There is no doubt in my mind that air passenger travel today is (fingers crossed: I’m about to fly off to Kuwait) safer than at any other time in history.
One British European Airways (now BA) passenger flight was lost in Germany in 1948 in the way I describe, and the Radio Operator whom Charlie knew was lost with it . . . doing his duty to the very end.
The Avro York flew with the RAF from 1942 to 1957, and I haven’t been able to obtain at first hand a pilot’s opinion of it as a type, although I’d love to hear from one, and be put right if I have erred. However, there are several air accident investigation reports of catastrophic undercarriage failures, and of pilots stopping runaway aircraft on the ground by simply raising the wheels. The York had a flat belly, and must have skidded like a sledge until it began to come apart. As well as the RAF, it was operated by BOAC, Dan Air, Skyways and several foreign air forces and airlines . . . and even as I write I am looking up to a beautiful little metal model of one. It looks a bit of a tyke actually.
Of the other aircraft with which Charlie became acquainted on Operation Plainfare it is the Avro Lancastrian that the general reader will be least familiar with. It was essentially a civilianized Lancaster Bomber. Those flown by Flight Refuelling Ltd can take a lot of the credit for keeping the engines of aircraft, vehicles, boats and generators running throughout the Berlin Airlift: they shipped in millions of gallons of precious fuel. The friendly Lancastrian I describe, registration G-AHBU, really existed. She was flown by Skyways, and bore the romantic name Sky Path. Sadly she died in flames at the delightfully named Nutts Corner Airfield in Northern Ireland some time later.
I can’t adequately summarize the Berlin Airlift in a couple of paragraphs, so I’ll just try to give you a journeyman writer’s flavour.
Operation Plainfare – the British part of the Berlin Airlift – began in July 1948 when the Russians closed the road, rail and canal links to western Berlin through which it had been supplied since 1945. The air corridors, covered by international agreement, stayed open, and the air supply proposal by the British Air Commodore Reginald Waite, although initially rejected by the Americans, eventually saved the city. It was the Americans who made the first move: on 26 July a number of war-weary C47 transport aircraft (we called the type the Dakota) flew 80 tons of medicines and supplies into Tempelhof Airfield a day after the blockade began. They coded their ongoing action Operation Vittles, and after that they never stopped flying. Neither did the British, who centred their Berlin operation at Gatow Airfield. Nor did the numerous private operators who were contracted to support the air forces: fortunes were made and lost, and airlines were born and died between July 1948 and May 1949.
The American pilot who started dropping chocolate and sweets, on handkerchief parachutes, to the German children was Gail S. Halvorsen. His aircraft was quickly identified by the young Berliners, who dubbed it ‘The Candy Bomber’: I like that. Such was the positive publicity it generated that he received official sanction, and before long Halvorsen had other pilots involved, and dozens of people who collected sweets and attached them to small parachutes. He called his private airlift ‘Operation Little Vittles’: I like that too.
Berlin, the most international of European cities, survived. It’s a city which knows ho
w to do that. So, after much deprivation, did the Berliners. If there is such thing as a character in the population of a city I always think that that of the Berliner is typified by an intelligent, indomitable stubbornness which gets them through the hard times. They don’t bang on about their survival. Survivors rarely do: they survive – they’ve nothing else left to prove. There are many fine books on the Berlin Airlift, that written by Ann and John Tusa particularly springs to mind. My own favourite is City Under Siege by Michael Haydock (Brassey’s, 1999). It is, necessarily, mainly described from an American point of view but, of all of the Airlift books I have read, it seems to convey something of the feeling of the Airlift: the urgency, weariness and a spirit of defiance. It’s the one I would recommend.
In my first novel, Tuesday’s War, I described a bombing raid on the German town of Celle in 1944. I was delighted to receive a letter from an ex-service policeman who had been posted there in 1948. He was able to tell me that although the town itself had largely managed to avoid the intimate attention of the RAF, its railway marshalling yards had been severely smashed up by RAF Typhoons at the very end of the war. I am pleased this novel has given me the chance to modify my earlier observations.
The Diamond Bomber also existed. Her airframe number was 44–62276, and you’ll find her, and a cairn to honour her dead, at Ordnance Map Reference 56/161022. She’s on a high mountain glen named Succoth above Lochgoilhead. Pieces of the aircraft are scattered all around an impact crater still bare of vegetation after sixty years. She was a Boeing B29A Superfortress – the same type that delivered the atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and one of two B29s which left Scampton on 17 January 1949 en route for Kansas in the USA, via Iceland – they would refuel at Keflavik for the long hop over the pond. The pilot, Sheldon C. Craigmyre, had a crew of three and sixteen passengers. These people were all on their way home, their deployments to Europe completed: many had worked on the Berlin Airlift. When the weather over northern England deteriorated, the other Superfort turned back, but The Diamond Bomber battled on. Her wings iced up over the first mountain ridges of the West Highlands, and she plunged into history taking everyone inside with her . . . but, like the tale of Thomas Mantell, that’s not quite the end of the story . . .
She’s become known as The Diamond Bomber because of stories repeatedly told of her pilot carrying a fortune in cut and uncut diamonds, sourced in Germany before his trip home. People go up there looking for his diamonds – supposedly sealed into a tubular glass Alka-Seltzer bottle – to this day. It is alleged that he intended to start or buy into a family jewellery business. I hope that the story is true, because it is regularly resurrected by the press, and if it isn’t it still must cause pain to his family. As mysterious are the contemporary reports alleging that General’s insignia were found on the bodies and in the luggage of apparently enlisted men. The aggressive, vulgarly abusive chaplain who maybe wasn’t a chaplain – I’d love to know what documents he was burning – features in several of the contemporary eye-witness accounts, and there was a twenty-first body found later in the year, when the crew and passenger manifest bore only twenty names. This was tailor-made for Tommo’s exit, stage left.
You might have noticed as Charlie tells his tale, that life’s natural attrition has caused some of his friends or enemies – mainly his friends – to drop out from time to time. This was Tommo’s turn, and I’m going to miss him a lot. I was just beginning to enjoy writing about Crazy Eddy when he popped his clogs. What I found I couldn’t do was kill off Alice, the rattlesnake. In four books she has become, after Charlie, my favourite character, so I left her rattling her wicked temper on an Argyll hillside, with plenty of rabbits to live off. I reasoned that in her native US she would have coped with freezing winter temperatures, and hot summers . . . not unlike some parts of Scotland, so she might be OK.
I climbed the hill to catch up with Alice and find The Diamond Bomber a few weeks ago. After the finest kipper breakfast in the world in The Creggans Inn on Loch Fyne we made a seven-hour climbing march on forest track and rough hillside. You can see the remains of the aircraft glinting in the sun from a full mile away, like a field of mirrors. Nothing, however, can prepare you for the utter devastation of a giant aircraft reduced to its component parts in a violent crash, and the concentrated debris field that is still there 60 years later. My first thought as I broke out of the trees was, ‘This must be what the Titanic feels like.’ She sits up at the very edge of the tree line, surrounded by the dark peaks which claimed her and guarded by soaring ravens which call eerily over her grave and warn the unwary, this is where people die . . . this is where people die.
And why did Lympne Airfield figure so prominently in this story? That’s an easy one: 44 years ago I took off from there for Beauvais in France in a piston-engined Dakota aircraft, just like Charlie does. It was my first commercial flight as a passenger, I was spectacularly hung-over and I was holding hands with my new bride on honeymoon.
I’ll finish on the note of speculation which always haunts me as a volume of Charlie’s memoir draws to a close: will he fly again?
I don’t know. Publishing is a refreshingly brutal business, so it will all come down to sales in the end. Anyway, maybe Charlie and I deserve time away from each other.
Whatever happens, I am going to take him to Suez and the Canal Zone some day. My brother was there in the early 1950s, probably at the same time I was watching my first flying saucer. So were thousands of other brave men whose stories seem to have been forgotten or overlooked. It will be good to open the book on a few of them after all this time.
David Fiddimore
Edinburgh
September 2008
The Hidden War Page 46
