The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

He was fortunate to have a rich hoard of memories to unlock and examine. Until he passed through the gates of Stalag Luft III he had lived a life of extraordinary variety. One adventure succeeded another and each one took him into new realms that stretched his mind and expanded his horizons. He was not yet twenty-five, yet he had lived enough dramas to furnish several books. Or perhaps just one big one. He was the hero of his own picaresque novel, tossed here and there by capricious fate, yet always seemingly under the protection of some benign power that ensured that all was all right in the end – or at least until now.

  He had grown up in poverty, suffering the humiliations of the poor. His father, also William Ash, toured Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, hawking samples of women’s hats around haberdashery stores. Sometimes Bill went with him and witnessed encounters with the owners, ‘thick-set, loud-voiced men…who invariably greeted any salesman about to unpack his samples with the words: “What are you bringing that crap in here for?”’3

  They moved houses and apartments often, as his father’s income failed to cover the rent or mortgage payments. The automobiles he depended on to scrape his living were regularly repossessed by finance companies, ‘like horses shot from under a cavalry subaltern in a rout’. His father took each setback with saintly grace, becoming ever gentler and quieter, until Bill was ‘never sure whether he was there at all or not’.

  His mother, born Margaret Porterfield, was a handsome, strong-willed woman. She filled him with her frustrated ambitions, drumming his lessons into him nightly so he passed every test at school, winning pins, badges and certificates which brought a glow of achievement to their lodgings.

  There is nothing in Bill’s writings to suggest that his family life was unhappy. He was affectionate towards his father, respected his mother and adored his younger sister, Adele. Early on, though, he began to run away from home. The first time was when he was seven or eight. On one occasion he got all the way from Dallas to Fort Worth before he got bored with the adventure and turned himself in to the police. Looking back, he could not decide what made him do it. ‘It was not that I particularly disliked home or even school,’ he wrote, ‘but simply that I did like running away. It may be connected to my inability to lie in bed in the morning in case there is something interesting going on which I may be missing… It was called spring fever and I no more felt obliged to excuse it or apologize for it than I would for a cold.’4

  Normal family life came to an abrupt end when he was still a teenager. Adele was sent away to live with better-off relations, and his mother joined his father on the road, while Bill was installed in a boarding house to fend for himself. Poverty did not bother him. It brought its own gifts, among them independence.

  Almost as early in life as he could remember he went to work – washing cars, sweeping yards and selling the Saturday Evening Post. He managed to save up $200 towards his college education – only to lose the lot when, following a worldly neighbour’s advice, he invested in stocks which were wiped out in the 1929 market crash. When in 1935 he arrived at the University of Texas he had to hold down at least two jobs to pay his way. He took a liberal arts course and graduated summa cum laude, but in a country that was still dragging itself out of the Depression this was not enough to secure him a proper post. He found a job as a cashier in a Dallas bank. Sometimes he was called on to operate the lift. One day he ran into a teacher from the university, who was shocked to find a former student in such lowly circumstances. Didn’t his employers know that he had a degree? he asked. Bill replied that they did but had ‘agreed to overlook it’.5

  When that job came to an end he took to the road, travelling in boxcars or hitch-hiking. There were many like him, shuttling from Dallas to Chicago and Detroit and back again, in search of whatever work they could find. When he hit a new town the first thing he did was to study the small ads in the local paper, looking for church suppers, charity bazaars and parent–teacher meetings, where he could turn up and help himself to the free snacks. Then he would sign up as a door-to-door salesman for a hosiery company or suchlike, pick up his box of sample stockings and sell them for a few dollars at the local flea market. Once he got a job selling menswear in a Kansas City department store. He turned up at work in tomato-coloured ladies slacks – a leftover item of his father’s stock, with a sash cord for a belt.

  All this had been an education, too, giving him first-hand experience of the harshness of free-market capitalism. Yet he had also seen much to confirm his natural optimism. The people he met in hobo jungles and railroad cars were on the whole decent to each other and generous with whatever little they had.

  He followed closely what was happening outside America, particularly in Europe, where democracy was being swept aside by the rise of Fascism. In Spain the legitimate government had been overthrown by nationalist rebels supported by Hitler and Mussolini. He was too young to go with the American volunteers who crossed the ocean to fight for the Republic. But by the summer of 1940, when Britain stood alone against the Nazis, he was ready.

  President Roosevelt was giving what material help he could to Britain, in defiance of a strong isolationist lobby, but America was still a long way from joining the war. Memories of the First World War were still fresh, and most Americans were unwilling to get involved in another of the old world’s murderous struggles. However, as a member of the Commonwealth, Canada had supported Britain from the start and Canadian squadrons fought alongside the Royal Air Force. Several thousand young Americans would volunteer for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) prior to America’s entry into the war prompted by the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.6 Late in 1940, Bill Ash became one of them. Looking back, it seemed to him that there was something preordained about his choice. ‘It is difficult to say precisely why I volunteered for the air force so long before the US came into the war, because from the time it was obvious that there was going to be a major conflict I seemed already to have decided that as soon as it actually started I would go,’ he wrote. He admitted that the dire economic conditions of the time contributed to his decision. Above all, though, it was a moral choice, ‘a purely emotional response to Nazi brutality’.

  ‘Seeing newsreels of storm troopers insulting and beating up Jewish people was… like seeing some lout bullying a smaller child – only infinitely worse because it was organized, licensed savagery,’ he wrote. ‘And then when my feelings were boiling with indignation, to see Western statesmen backing down before Hitler and the whole world apparently mesmerized by the naked cruelty running amok in Germany – well I was proper choked, that is all. Enlisting was simply a way of relieving the stifling sense of impotency I felt in the face of such gross inhumanity.’7

  The journey began with a plate of stew in the Hungry Man diner in Detroit, a hangout for itinerant job-seekers. He cleaned his plate then set off for the Ambassador Bridge that led across the Detroit river and into Windsor, Ontario, where there was an RCAF recruiting office. He failed the medical for being underweight, but was told to try again. He returned to Detroit, borrowed money and spent a fortnight building himself up. When he returned he was accepted.

  From now on he would not have to worry where the next dollar was coming from. The red slacks were consigned to the dustbin and he was kitted out in an elegant uniform, run up by the tailor at the Eglinton Hunt Club in Toronto, the club’s premises having been taken over by the RCAF.

  Before 1940, Bill had never been in an aeroplane. He started off with basic training at Elementary Flying School at Windsor, then moved on to the RCAF station at Kingston, near Toronto. There he got to grips with Fairey Battles, poor-performing British bombers which had been taken out of frontline service after being annihilated by German fighters in the Battle of France. The North American Harvard fighter trainer was a much livelier machine. It was noisy but highly manoeuvrable. Bill turned out to be a natural aerobatic pilot, coaxing rolls and loops even out of the lumbering Battles. He swooped under bridges and flew upside down for long periods, until he was tota
lly at ease with the controls even when inverted. His confidence was all the more remarkable considering that, despite understanding the laws of physics that governed powered flight, he could never really believe that heavy metal machines could remain airborne except by some kind of magic. ‘That basic incredulity is probably why I enjoyed flying,’ he wrote. ‘Every time I took off there was the exhilaration of something happening which I was not convinced could happen.’8

  In the spring of 1941 the vagabond scholar Bill Ash became Pilot Officer W. T. Ash and a budding fighter pilot, on his way to Britain and the front line of the air war with the Nazis. When he arrived the Battle of Britain was over and the thrill of survival had been replaced by the realization that a long, grim slog lay ahead. Bill viewed his new home through a literary prism. For him it was a pageant in which figures he had known only through books had come to life. In London he looked beyond the bomb-scarred, blacked-out streets, ignored the modern office blocks and saw the city of Dr Johnson, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. The people he came across in the streets and pubs were not a weary bunch of survivors but coffee shop wits, fin de siècle aesthetes and Baker Street Irregulars.

  New pilots were finished off in operational training units to prepare for combat before joining their squadron. He was sent to No. 57 OTU Hawarden in Yorkshire, where his tutor was Joe Pegge, who had knocked down eight German aircraft in the summer of 1940. He would meet many more veterans of the epic in the years to come, and the thrill of these encounters never wore off.

  On 30 June 1941 he arrived with a party of Canadians from the OTU to join 411 Squadron at its base in Digby in Lincolnshire. The unit was just a fortnight old. It was commanded by Paul Pitcher, who came from a wealthy Montreal family and was practising as a lawyer when the war broke out. He had gone to England in 1940 and seen action with the RCAF’s 1 Squadron in the Battle. Almost everyone else was a novice. Bill arrived with eight others from the OTU. They included vivid, lively characters like Don Blakeslee, an Ohio-born fellow American, who like him had joined the Canadians before the US got into the war, Eddie Asselin, a fast-talking French-Canadian, and the dashing Robert ‘Buck’ McNair. In the air force everyone had a nickname. Bill’s was ‘Tex’, bestowed on him back in training in Canada, on account of his origins. It did not fit his rather dreamy personality and literary interests, and he did not like it particularly, but it would stick with him throughout the war.

  411 Squadron already had its own identity. The badge showed a Grizzly Bear standing upright with paws outstretched like a prizefighters’ fists, above a pugnacious motto: Inimicus Inimico – ‘Hostile to the Enemy’. Building an efficient squadron from scratch was a challenge. The Spitfires they had been assigned seemed plagued with defects and the pilots appallingly accident prone. The first crash happened on 3 July, three days after Bill’s arrival, when an aeroplane was damaged after the undercarriage collapsed on landing. Two days later, Bill was forced to land at a neighbouring airfield after his engine overheated. On the same day one fighter crashed into another while taxiing. By the end of the month the Grizzlies had their first fatality – a sergeant pilot called R. M. Murray, who plunged into mudflats on the Lincolnshire coast while on a training flight.

  One of the most spectacular mishaps concerned Bill and Buck McNair. As Bill told the story, they were coming in to land at Digby in a Miles Magister open-cockpit two-seater trainer, with Bill at the controls, when McNair decided on a whim to make a practice parachute jump. Bill was against the idea and continued his descent. Buck nonetheless managed to drop out and descend unharmed to the ground. A rather different version did the rounds. According to this account, Bill had decided to engage in some impromptu aerobatics, Buck’s harness was not properly fastened and while they were flying upside down he tumbled out.

  Pitcher kept his men hard at it with a daily diet of mock scrambles, cross-country navigation exercises, and cloud and formation flying. On 27 August, the Grizzlies were at last declared to be fully operational. In September they began flying convoy patrols and occasional aggressive ‘sweeps’ over northern France, looking for targets of opportunity and daring the Germans to come up and fight. At first nothing much happened. Then the tempo picked up. On 27 September one of the pilots managed to bail out after being hit over the coast by ‘friendly’ anti-aircraft fire. A little later Buck McNair was shot down over the French coast, and was very lucky to be picked up by the Air Sea Rescue Services. For the rest of the time the work was surprisingly boring. They conducted frequent dusk patrols looking for German aircraft that rarely appeared, or cruised back and forth over convoys butting through the grey corrugated waters below.

  Away from operations, Digby was a pleasant place from which to fight a war. It was buried in the Lincolnshire countryside but the food on the station was good and the pubs of Lincoln were only a dozen miles away. There was also the opportunity of romance. Bill managed to date the daughter of the station commander at nearby Kirton-in-Lindsay, until she switched her affections to another pilot. As Canadians fighting for the old country, 411 had great propaganda value, and there were occasional VIP visits. One day the Canadian prime minister, William MacKenzie King, came to the station. He was photographed alongside Bill sitting grinning in his cockpit.

  In November they moved south, to Hornchurch in Essex. London was only a forty-minute Tube ride away. While his comrades headed to the bars, theatres and cinemas, Bill was more likely to seek out a concert. The authorities put on recitals to maintain civilian morale. If flying was scrubbed, as it frequently was during December and January, he was able to make it into town in time for one of the lunchtime concerts given at the National Gallery by distinguished performers like the pianist Myra Hess. At one, he spent more time looking at the pretty young cellist than listening to the music. He sent her a bouquet of flowers but never managed to introduce himself.

  This was a rare failure. The poor boy from Texas found London hospitable and welcoming. There were organizations like that run by Lady Frances Ryder, set up ‘to assist officers who had no friends or relations in the United Kingdom’ and ensure they were ‘well acquainted with the homes of England and those who dwell in them’. Candidates were invited to tea in Cadogan Square and vetted for social suitability. Bill had attended one such demure gathering when he first arrived in the capital and later met one of the young ladies who helped out there. He persuaded her to look through the files and found out how he had been rated. She reported that he was judged to have ‘nice American manners… can go most places’. He was delighted. It was ‘like being mentioned in despatches’.9

  The verdict seemed justified when he was taken to a function by Walter Elliot, who was related to some friends of Bill’s parents in Dallas. Elliot was a Scottish farmer’s son who had risen high in the Conservative Party, serving as Minister of Health under Neville Chamberlain. The guest of honour was Queen Elizabeth and Bill was introduced to her. He had already met her husband King George VI when he visited Digby. On one of his social outings he found a proper girlfriend. Patricia Rambaut was beautiful, intelligent and well connected, and did her bit for the war effort by joining the WRNS. They were just beginning to get know each other properly when he was shot down. They wrote to each other loyally throughout all the years Bill was a prisoner, and the thought of seeing her again was one of the hopes that sustained him in the dark hours.

  He enjoyed these brushes with the high life. But he had come to Britain to fight, and for much of the time he felt he was not doing it well enough. Until his last day in the air he was never certain that he had shot anything down. The closest he came to a confirmed ‘kill’ was one evening in November 1941, when at the end of a dusk patrol he and his wing man were vectored onto a pair of Junkers 88 bombers which were heading out across the sea for home. He was still firing when they disappeared into cloud. The radar plots disappeared at this point, so it was hoped that they had both been destroyed, but that was not sufficient confirmation and it was not even counted as a ‘probable�
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  Bill often worried whether he had the level of aggression needed to be a good fighter pilot. Once he was returning from a sweep over Holland with Wing Commander Derek ‘Cowboy’ Blatchford when they saw a formation of unusual-looking enemy aircraft below. They dived down and identified them as trainers, presumably piloted by greenhorns. The aeroplanes were unarmed and Bill hesitated to open fire on such easy targets. He was spared further agonizing when he and Blatchford were bounced by six Messerschmitt 109s, which chased them halfway across the Channel before turning back.

  In early 1942 Britain was not losing the war. It was not winning it either. Each sign of progress was soon countered by a dispiriting setback. On 12 February the squadron was scrambled to escort bombers sent to intercept German warships which were making a daring attempt to reach home ports from their stations on the French Atlantic coast via the English Channel. Bill and his comrades had rehearsed such an attack in exercises, in coordination with a force of Beaufort fighter-bombers. When they made the rendezvous they were alarmed to see that the strike force consisted of six Swordfish torpedo biplanes whose antiquated appearance earned them the nickname ‘stringbags’. The gallant Swordfish were all shot down. Of the 675 RAF aircraft involved in trying to locate and stop the warships, only a handful engaged their targets, which escaped virtually unscathed. The ‘Channel Dash’, as it was known, was a triumph for the German navy and a humiliation for Britain. The Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen all made it home and a great opportunity to tear the heart out of the German surface fleet was missed.

  Bill’s air war reached its end on 24 March 1942. The sight of the mist lifting from the airfield that morning had cheered the squadron up. For three of the last five days heavy rain had put the runway out of action, and the pilots were restless and bored. There had not been many opportunities to get to grips with the Germans recently. More often than not the skies over southern England were blanketed in low cloud that dumped rain onto the waterlogged fields. Since moving, on 6 March, from Hornchurch to Southend, a forward base on the Essex coast, they had only flown three missions, and two of those had been convoy patrols, droning back and forth over Channel shipping, waiting for something to happen.10