Fighters Up

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “I’ve put your name forward and it has been accepted. The Adjutant will give you your orders.” The gleam in the wing commander’s eyes had brightened. Howard saluted and made for the door. “Good luck, Howard.”

  Howard halted and turned about. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Do you ski?”

  “No, sir.” A wild hope surged ... forlorn, he knew.

  “Now is your chance to learn.” Northam put a hand to his face, ostensibly to smooth his moustache; really, as Howard could see, to mask his broad grin.

  He faced the station Adjutant indignantly. The Adj. was a recalled Reservist, a portly middle-aged Royal Flying Corps pilot who hadn’t flown for fifteen years. A genial toper whose cheeks and nose were as bright red as the borders of his D.S.O. ribbon. Once a dashing young acting major and squadron leader, he was now a flight lieutenant.

  “Dammit, Adj! I don’t want to go back to Gladiators. I’ve got nearly four hundred hours on Hurricanes now.”

  “I know, old boy.” The pouchy face expressed sympathy. “Never mind, the Hurricanes will be waiting for you when you come back.”

  “When! I know what happens on these so-called detachments. It’ll be months ...”

  “No, no, no. This is only a sideshow: we’ll pull out in a few weeks, you mark my words.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “How good is your geography, young Boost?”

  “A bit vague about Scandinavia. Norway’s the western half of the long bit shaped rather like a drooping tool, isn’t it?”

  The Adjutant guffawed. “In that climate, I should think they do droop, old boy. Nothing like a spot of sunshine to perk one up, what?” A dreamy glaze shone in his eyes. “I remember, in Egypt ...” He gave his head a quick shake. “Never mind. Not for young and tender ears. I only asked, because I wondered if you knew exactly where it is you’re going.”

  “Not really.”

  The Adj moved to a map on his wall. “Here’s Narvik, right up here.”

  “Hell’s teeth! It’s more than a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, Adj. I hate the cold ...”

  The Adjutant went inexorably on. “You’ll have to fly off a carrier, of course ...”

  “That’ll be interesting!”

  “Better than flying a Hurricane off a ship’s deck. Anyway, you won’t be bored, Boost: the Boche outnumbers us at sea and on land ...”

  “And in the air, apparently.” Howard spoke with the wry resignation of a man who found no consolation at all in the Adjutant’s assurance that he need not fear boredom on this campaign.

  “Yes, you’ll get bags of fun. Don’t forget to pack a hot water bottle.”

  There was a girl. She was nineteen, ash blonde and very pretty. Her parents farmed rather grandly a few miles from the R.A.F. station, and Howard had met her at a mess party a couple of months ago. He was smitten. Not quite sure of his intentions: whether they included matrimony or were limited to enjoyment of her company and the pleasures of necking on every possible occasion, with the possibility of seduction never entirely absent from his thoughts, he had been paying her ardent attentions. There was heavy competition for her companionship and he looked glumly on the prospects of finding her still not permanently attached to someone else on his return.

  He telephoned her. “Sorry I can’t take you out tonight.”

  “Oh, Simon! I was so looking forward to it.”

  Not half as much as I was, thought Howard grimly. The memory of her lingering goodnight earlier in the week was painfully sharp. “I hate having to break a date with you.”

  “Night flying, I suppose?”

  “No, actually: I’m having to go away on detachment.”

  “Oh, Simon!” He pictured her pouting. It was a fetching pout. “For how long? Where?”

  “Can’t say how long, not allowed to say where, I’m afraid.”

  “How beastly of them.”

  “Them”, the faceless chairborne warriors at Group, Command or Air Ministry; reviled by everyone, even civilians when their boyfriends were snatched away by them.

  Beastly of him, this time, though: Ghastly Gus ... No-balls Northam. There was a rumour that his testicles had never descended into his scrotum: a rumour prompted by his misogyny, which was well known.

  “Yes, rotten. Should be back soon, though. I’ll write to you.”

  “It sounds as though you’re going awf’ly far, Simon.”

  I am; and I may not come back. The thought occurred to him for the first time. He had better let his parents know, too.

  There was nothing more to say to his girl and he could not find much to say to his mother either; who was a great deal more probing.

  His destination in Norway was not, however, Narvik: not quite so far north: merely a frozen lake which was to serve as the squadron’s airstrip.

  The Intelligence officer gave little comfort. “Jerry’s got three hundred and thirty bombers here, including at least forty Stukas.”

  He had hardly spoken when the first of the latter appeared and bombs burst all over the airfield. This was the first of many daily raids. When on the ground, everyone had to sit them out in slit trenches excavated in iron-hard ground and snow.

  Airborne, the pilots were no better placed; except that they did have the satisfaction of hitting back instead of having to remain passive while bombs burst unnervingly close.

  Howard was on patrol as part of a section of three, on the day of his arrival, when the leader spotted a clutch of Ju87 dive bombers, the hated Stukas.

  “Here they come, chaps: one-o’clock, same height. We’ll climb before we have a go at them.”

  They had to keep the twelve bombers and their attendant eighteen fighters for’ard of themselves. The Gladiators did not have the speed to catch them if they once fell behind the enemy.

  “Tallyho!”

  But the British pilots need not have worried about not making contact. The Mel 09s obligingly turned to meet them.

  Howard sideslipped away from a pair that had obviously decided to kill him, and turned comfortably inside them: their greater speed made this quite easy. He dived almost as steeply as the Stukas, chasing the nearest one. He opened fire from 300 yards. On Air Marshal Dowding’s orders, fighters’ guns were harmonised to converge at 450 yards: the Dowding spread. Howard’s bullets had little effect. The return fire from the Stuka’s gunner, on the other hand, did.

  Tracer punched holes in the Gladiator’s wings. Howard blinked. This was his first time in battle. The first chance he had ever had, in fact. The next burst took him in the engine; which lost power. As he fell behind the Stuka, he fired another optimistic burst. The range was now exactly right, he hit its petrol tanks, and the dive bomber exploded with its bombs still aboard.

  Howard landed with a dead engine and spent the rest of the day either helping to dig trenches or sitting in one.

  The squadron’s losses mounted, mostly from bombing, which destroyed one or two aircraft on every few visits. Howard was numb with cold most of the time, whether in the air or on the ground. The Allied Expeditionary Force - there were French troops as well as British - was meeting with little success.

  A squadron of Hurricanes arrived, but also suffered losses from the bombing of its airfield as well as in combat.

  Howard, on patrol alone one morning, saw six Stukas and six Me109s approaching. They were 3000 ft below him and three or four miles away. He had ample time to make the best of a hopeless situation and began turning so that he could intercept the enemy from a position which would allow him to make an attack from the quarter.

  Two 109s left the formation and hared towards him. He waited until they were 600 yards off, then turned again so as to try to catch the bombers. The 109s turned after him, which was what he wanted. As the leader came for him, he turned sharply again and was able to get on his attacker’s tail. He fired and saw that most of his tracer was going harmlessly past, so widely was it spread. A few of his bullets, however, appeared to hit.

/>   He held the turning target comfortably and was again shooting at it when his own aeroplane shuddered and yawed under the impact of cannon shells from the second 109. He broke off his attack and banked vertically to turn inside the fresh assailant. He saw it tear past, came out of his tight turn - almost blacking out - and looked for the bombers.

  He saw them, but at that instant more shells and bullets tore his airscrew off, the engine seized and the Gladiator began to fall like a lift.

  Howard scrambled out and presently was floating down towards a wide expanse of deep snow. When he landed on it, he went in up to his armpits and was still floundering there half an hour later when some infantrymen rescued him.

  The next day, in another Gladiator, he was once more alone when a camouflaged flak sight began to hurl 20 mm tracer shells at him from quadruple mountings, and presently 37 mm guns joined in. He threw his aeroplane all over the air space to avoid their fire, but had to make a heavy landing with most of the fabric torn off its wings and holes in the fuselage.

  There were holes in his emotional stability too and his nerves felt as though whatever it was that had kept them steady had been stripped off until they were in as ragged a condition as his aircraft. He had been unable to hoist himself out of the cockpit for two minutes or more after he had undone his straps and essayed his first move to rise from the seat. He had forced banal conversation with his fitter and rigger; and the Intelligence officer, who made a point of being at dispersals to greet each pilot if the C.O. and his flight commander could not.

  That had been the first time that Howard doubted his capacity for endurance, his resilience and his general fortitude. The miserable sense of inadequacy and shame lasted no longer than his delay in quitting the cockpit. But, for a few seconds, his legs felt weak when he was standing on the frozen lake beside the battered Gladiator, his replies to the I.O’s questions came sluggishly and there was a fleeting instant when his vision became as grey as it did when he was on the verge of blacking out.

  The squadron was reduced to so few aircraft that he did not fly the next day: only five Gladiators were serviceable. On the day following there were three, and he made one sortie. The day after that, the squadron had none fit to put into the air. By the time it had a decent muster again Narvik was under attack once more and both the Gladiators and No 46 Squadron’s Hurricanes flew to a base beyond the Arctic Circle.

  Six days after 263 had resumed fighting, and two days after 46 had joined them, Narvik fell to the Allies. But this success came too late. The British and French force was unable to drive the enemy out of Norway and began to withdraw.

  Howard was leading a section on an offensive patrol, seeking to intercept an anticipated air raid while troops were being embarked, when he sighted what looked like a skein of duck flighting in the direction of the port. He wished they were duck: there were sixty or seventy of them. The bombers, Heinkel 111s, were in Vs of five, which in turn formed a giant composite V. The Me109s were in fours, above.

  Howard took his section in to the attack from up-sun and above, but lack of speed and an armament of only four guns gave the Gladiators barely a chance of one pass on which they might surprise, and knock down, one victim apiece.

  It was not even to be as rewarding as that. The Me109s were keeping a sharp lookout and spotted them well before they came within firing range of the Heinkels. There suddenly seemed to be hardly enough air space in which to move without colliding with a Messerschmitt. The air boiled with the turbulence they created in roaring past so close that they set the Gladiators rocking and yawing, pitching, switch-backing and swaying. Both Howard’s wing men went down in flames. One managed to bail out, the other was still trying to send a message on the R/T when his voice turned to a scream before it was cut off.

  Howard found himself in the centre of a circle of Me109s which hemmed him in. If he tried to break free, one would at once shoot at him. He did try, three times, varying his attempt to break out by changing altitude. Each time, he was hit.

  Finally, with fuel running low, he did what he had done many times on the rugger field: set his teeth and went hell for leather, regardless of the number and size of the men in his path. In rugger, it worked: he had often handed off fifteen-stone forwards so hard that they fell over. In the air, it was rather different. Bullets slashed through the wings and fuselage of his, by now creaking, Gladiator. The wind screamed in the muzzles of his guns and howled and bellowed through the rents in his airframe.

  His starboard wingtips smashed against a 109’s tail fin and tail planes. The collision made the whole aircraft judder, it gave him such a jolt that he felt his teeth and bones must have been shaken and torn away from their gums and tendons. His head snapped back and forth so violently that an intense pain spread through his neck and shoulders.

  But the 109 was spinning down, out of control and too violently for the pilot to extricate himself. Howard watched with pleasure as the German struggled half-out of his cockpit and his parachute released itself. The canopy caught in some projection and as he fell out at last he began to swing like a pendulum, attached to his spinning aeroplane.

  His dangling body swung into the propeller arc. The blades hacked it in two. Howard saw the severed lower trunk and legs fall free, while the torso and arms continued to swing, blood pouring from the yards of viscera that hung from the bisected corpse.

  His own aircraft was out of control and he bailed out. Landing awkwardly on ice, he broke an arm.

  The remaining Gladiators and Hurricanes were flown onto the aircraft carrier Glorious. Howard was too late to join the other members of the two squadrons. He was helped onto a Norwegian freighter which was going to make a dash for Scotland with a load of British and French troops, and Norwegians who wanted to volunteer for their exiled Army or Navy.

  On the way home, Glorious was caught by the battle cruiser Scharnhorst and sunk. Only three pilots of the Hurricane squadron survived.

  That night a U-boat torpedoed the merchantman aboard which Howard was asleep. He spent two days in a lifeboat before a British destroyer rescued him and a few others.

  Six

  Thorwald made his pilots sweat that first afternoon, until sundown. First, the mechanics had to examine his aircraft for battle damage. There was none. Then he had to fly an air test, he alleged, to ensure that it was as good as it looked. Everyone knew this to be an excuse for a virtuoso display of aerobatics. The whole Staffel left its work for fifteen minutes to watch him perform.

  Schellman, ungrudging in his praise, blithely free of any kind of jealousy of anyone, watched him do three perfectly aligned upward rolls over the middle of the airfield, then turned to Rumpf with a laugh. “That won’t satisfy Juergen. He’ll do it again presently and try to squeeze out a fourth.”

  “With his luck, what’s he worrying about? One would think he had an inferiority complex, the way he seems to feel compelled to keep asserting his superiority.”

  It was not the reply Schellman had expected. He had turned his eyes away to see what Thorwald would do next. He glanced back at the little man who stood beside him with an expression of bitterness on his face.

  Softly, he said “Cheer up, Heinie: you’ll be doing aerobatics again very soon.”

  “If I gave up believing that, Ernst, I might as well go and shoot myself.” His tone reflected the look that Schellman had surprised. He gave a weak grin as though to imply that he was not really feeling as sour as he might have looked and sounded.

  Schellman put an arm across Rumpf’s shoulder for a moment. He was so fond of, and concerned about, him, that he temporarily forgot about the showing off that was going on overhead to the admiring exclamations of the ground staff and the inexperienced pilots. The old hands were watching critically and with an air of indifference, as though they could do at least as well themselves.

  “I tell you what, Heinie. We’ll borrow the Fieseler Storch that the Geschwader has for communications. You can start getting back in practice by flying it.”


  “Would you do that for me, Ernst? Really?”

  “Of course. We’ll get Juergen interested too: if we can actually get you up in a One-Ninety, and he endorses it, they’ll have to allow you to fly on operations again.”

  “The Kommodore will never let me borrow the Storch.”

  “He’ll let me. We’ll land in the nearest meadow and swap places.”

  This brought a happy look to Rumpf’s face. He tilted his head to gaze at the sky. “Look at that! That’s something one can’t do in a Storch.” Thorwald was diving almost vertically with the speed of a thunderbolt. He pulled out perilously close to the ground and thundered across the airfield inverted; so low that he had not enough clearance to roll out and had to climb fifty feet upside down before he could.

  Next on the programme came a battle climb in full strength. This was always a demanding exercise. The leader climbed as fast and steeply as he could make his aircraft allow. All the other pilots in the formation had to maintain their positions impeccably. That entailed constant adjustments of the controls and throttle. To stray as little as a metre to one side or the other, or up or down, when flying through a rough patch of air or undergoing wind or temperature changes, was sloppy. Not all aircraft of the same type performed exactly alike. Some pilots had to fly one that was slower than most of the others or had some inherent tendency to wander in a certain direction. Some were handicapped by sluggish engines. And all the way, to 30,000 ft, the leader kept up a commentary: picking on every slight lapse, cajoling, scolding, demanding ever closer formation. It was both tiring and dangerous, a bowel-racking experience however many times one went through it.

  That, followed by mock combat, each pilot in turn for ten minutes against Thorwald, and a spell of aerobatics in which he led them, three or four at a time, left some of them limp from exertion or tension. After an abstemious hour in the mess before dinner and a meal without wine, night flying began. It was less strenuous than by day, but its peculiar hazards put heavy stress on the nerves. Repeated take-offs and landings were boring but never without risk. A cross-country flight of only half an hour out and back put a strain on pilots’ navigation. Nobody ever entirely lost the anxiety that came when he was a thousand metres aloft in the dark and the flarepath lights were extinguished. It was easy to mistake someone else’s exhaust flames for a shooting star, or not to see them at all and collide. It was easy to lose your way. It was easiest of all to doubt your instruments.