Midnight Raid

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  He was feeling no more relaxed than Middleton. His throat felt tight too, and his bowels rather loose. On his first tour of operations, in the desert, he had been wounded: on occasions like this he remembered the many weeks of pain he had suffered then; and this morning these were brought back more sharply by a mental image of what had happened to their starboard wing men on the last trip here.

  The squadron flew sorties of two kinds; patrols on which they attacked targets of opportunity, and strikes against specific objectives. News of good targets came sometimes from reconnaissance flights and sometimes from agents and partisans.

  This sunny morning in late August the twelve Beaufighters were attacking a concentration of coastal steamers, tugs, barges and E-boats in the harbour at Taf. The trouble about juicy targets was that the anti-aircraft defences became stronger in proportion to their importance and additional flak batteries were brought in from other places to fight off attacks by the R.A.F.'s bombs and rockets. The Beaufighters each carried eight eighty-pound rockets and though they would create havoc when they fired them their crews knew they had first to face a homicidal reception.

  Middleton was sweating. It was hot in the cockpit at low altitude. Tension made him sweat, too. No euphemisms, he told himself; call it tension, but it's plain fear. He did not feel ashamed; he had known pilots who apparently were unafraid and they were all dead now.

  They were flying into the sun and despite his dark glasses there was a strong glare. When they turned for their run in, not only would the sun be out of his eyes but it would also be hidden by the hills and trees on Taf and the other islands to the south. He would have an unobstructed view of the target. And of the flak.

  They could not hold their present very low height on this attack, because there was a rocky islet a hundred feet high in their path. Also they needed altitude to pick out their targets and to dive on them. After that they had to pull up sharply and break away over a hog's back ridge that crossed Taf behind the harbour. They all preferred operations on which they could fly below fifty feet, with the wash from their propellers churning the sea into foaming ripples; thus, they presented the most difficult target to the flak gunners.

  Today's task was a hairy one. Everyone felt elated, at first, when briefed for a particularly attractive target, but jubilation wore off by the time they reached the flak belt. Then, they all wished this were over and done with; or that it had never happened in the first place; or that it were just another routine sweep, looking for something to shoot at. Perversely, when they returned from a humdrum sortie they felt cheated and to some extent as though they were cheating too; for it seemed pointless to spend a couple of hours in the air with little to show for it.

  "The natives are hostile, Carruthers," suggested Tommy Tindall.

  "The natives are friendly enough, Postleton-Smythe: it's the blasted jackbooted Herrenvolk who are acting nasty."

  Tracer was reaching out towards them now.

  Flight Lieutenant Middleton liked flying Beaufighters but wished, not for the first time, that he were back on a single-engined fighter squadron; Spitfires, Mustangs, Thunderbolts or Typhoons: memory suggested that it had been easier to stay alive when one had the whole sky in which to take evasive action than if one had to fly straight and level and the sea was only a few feet below, waiting to snatch at any misjudgment. It was no compensation to tell himself that he could have been worse off in heavy bombers, making a much longer straight and level run in to a target and with manoeuvrability after the attack limited to a few slow, clumsy diving and climbing turns. He had done his first tour of operations on Hurricanes and it hadn't seemed so safe then: but he had forgotten what it had been like, after four years.

  He wasn't worried about attack by enemy fighters, since the Spitfire and Mustang squadrons had driven most of them out of the sky over this theatre of operations by now. But they could not be ignored, for they kept reappearing stubbornly. And the flak was always there. It was never close season for shelling aircraft.

  The tracer scintillated in long, curving whiplashes of yellow under the bright sun as the formation heaved itself over the hundred-foot obstruction that closed the entrance to Taf's harbour. Heavy guns began to fire also and shells burst in smudged clusters of grey with vicious red centres.

  The squadron commander gave a few curt orders over the radio as the enemy shipping came in view. The leader of Middleton's section went into a short, steep climb to two hundred feet and Middleton, to starboard, and the pilot on the other wing, followed. There was a loud noise and a lot of flame and smoke as the aircraft on the section leader's port side exploded. Middleton caught his breath and said "Bastards."

  Flying Officer Tindall observed "Bloody hell, that was close," in a voice that wavered.

  A moment later there was another thunderclap nearby and, looking back, Tindall reported "Smithy's had it." That was the pilot of the Beaufighter directly behind them, starboard wing man in the last section. Too uncomfortably close: a left .and right, as it were, and they had been lucky to slip through the middle.

  The two surviving aircraft in the third section, the leader's and Middleton's, swung right and put their noses down. Middleton felt sweat running down his ribs and drying cold on his back. An E-boat was crossing their path, her bows high and her stern well down, a handsome sight with bow waves and wash merging in a creamy froth of wake. Her guns were shooting at them. The section leader launched his rockets and four of them hit the E-boat. In a sheet of flame she heeled over and sank instantly.

  The rest of his rockets hit two barges, which were thrown clear out of the water and flopped down again broken­ backed and sinking.

  Middleton picked a tug moored to the quay, and fired. The tug boiled up in smoke and flame. One of his rockets hit a barge, which capsized.

  "Good shooting," Tindall yelled. He was gazing back. "The tug's set another barge alight, too."

  They skimmed over rooftops, treetops, scraped over the ridge with less than ten feet to spare, and hurtled down on the other side to fly home with the tips of their propeller blades no more than ten feet above the calm, blue water.

  Heavy machinegun fire followed them but they were out of range in half a minute.

  Middleton wiped his sleeve across his forehead and spoke into the intercom. "You all right, Tommy?"

  "Yes, but no thanks to our friendly neighbourhood Huns. I counted eight hundred near misses."

  "A miss is as good as a mile."

  "Thanks!"

  "Kite seems to be O.K."

  "I can't see any holes."

  It was the uninspired banter that always followed a narrow squeak.

  "How are the others getting on back there?" Middleton asked.

  "Both still with us. Only poor old Smithy bought it."

  They did not mention the aircraft in their own section which had been shot down. Neither that nor poor old Smithy was a fit subject for further discussion.

  Middleton, still sweating, and tired but satisfied, flew back to Afrona.

  *

  Zdenka and her German lover, satisfied too in their different ways, and she with much in common with Middleton's satisfaction, lay side by side on the warm, sandy beach of Sprot.

  The Beaufighters flew over them on their way home, but they were safe from view in the shade of a rock.

  Leutnant Scheusal, a podgy, amiable young man, satiated and drowsy, commented smugly "Only ten of them."

  "The other two must have taken a different way home." She had listened to the firing and explosions with pleasure marred by sadness. It was good to know that the tyrannical invaders were getting a pasting; distressing to think of those nice, brave young Englishmen who were trying to liberate her people being killed in the process.

  Leutnant Scheusal turned his head accusingly. "You mean you hope they have." He raised himself on one elbow and unexpectedly leaned over and bit her on the stomach.

  Zdenka gave a yelp of pain. There was always a streak of sadism in Scheusal's love play,
so she was not immediately frightened; but the look in his eyes when he turned to her again warned her to be cautious.

  "You hurt me," she said. But in a tone that she hoped would distract him from his dangerous train of thought.

  "Whose side are you really on, Zdenka?" He got a grip on her clavicle with his great horse teeth.

  "I seem to be under you, at the moment, you great big baby bear." She ruffled the hair on his back.

  *

  Group Captain Mason, commanding the wing, ambled about the Briefing Room with his hands in his pockets, batting himself to and fro, while the crews were being interrogated.

  He had been burned when his Hurricane was shot down early in the war, and the skin grafted onto one side of his face had a permanent and sinister, almost phosphorescent, sheen; which he tried to minimise by letting his moustache grow thick, wide and high up his cheeks. The result was, rather, to focus attention on his face. He was of medium height, with the lithe, compact build of a successful amateur steeplechase jockey; which he was.

  To his intimates he was known as '''Shagger", for the good reason that he unfailingly attempted to perform, and frequently succeeded in achieving, sexual intercourse with any female between the ages of sixteen and sixty with whom he was left alone for more than ten minutes. His record time, established with a W.A.A.F. nursing orderly in 1941, on Christmas Eve and an examination couch in Sick Quarters, was eight minutes and forty seconds from initial meeting at an All Ranks dance to pants-down: which included a slow foxtrot and a quick dash from the N.A.A.F.I. to the sick bay. He had once caught a dose of clap from the grass widow of a French general, in Algiers, and been a virulent Francophobe ever since.

  "Cracker" Beale, Wing Commander Flying, sat next to the squadron Intelligence officer and eyed the pilots and their navigators with his habitual expression of stupefied incredulity. He was called Cracker behind his burly back because "Let's have a crack at it" and "Cracking good show" were his two most frequent utterances. This florid, porcine bachelor, who had won three well-merited decorations for gallantry - D.S.O., D.F.C. and bar - was, despite his aggressively virile attitude and turn of speech, almost totally innocent of sexual experience; for he was morbidly shy. His comrades in arms were awestruck by his phenomenal bravery, attributing his coolness under fire to calculated disregard for danger. The truth was that his mental reactions were so much slower than his physical ones that it was only long after he had instinctively taken the right action to avoid flak or fighters that he realised the extent of the peril through which he had flown; if he ever did notice it at all.

  Standing by the entrance to the Briefing Room, greeting the returned aviators with such phrases as "Thank God you're back safely, Jim bach," "Praise the Lord you made it, boyo" and "The 'and of God was over you today, Tommy" was the wing chaplain, Squadron Leader Ianto' Parry-Jones; tipsy in the heat after his elevenses of a mug or two of rough local red wine, which had inflamed the gin left in his system from the previous night's conviviality in the officers' and sergeants' messes, both of which he frequented every evening. Padre Parry-Jones was stunted, hirsute, voluble, insufficiently washed and a born tippler. His presence was tolerated at briefings and de-briefings as a demonstration of his loudly proclaimed creed of practical Christianity: which meant drinking with the boys, swearing with the boys and going whoring with the boys. Although he drew the line at actually joining his hairy little frame in sexual congress. He hoped to learn about their temptations by sharing them, and to influence them by establishing a proper man-to-man relationship with them. None of your namby-pamby, wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed, holier-than­thou sermonising for this evangelist from the valleys. He had been a much better serum half and featherweight boxer than he was ever likely to be as a parson, but the obtuse Wing Commander Beale regarded him as a good type of muscular Christian and was quite touched by his frequent attendances at the Briefing Room.

  The Intelligence officers never failed to put under lock and key the stone flagon of rum which was in their care, at the first sound of the clergyman's arrival; even before his unfailing, genial enquiry on entering: "You'll be giving the lads a tot of rum after this one, then, I expect, boyo?" A rum ration was issued to crews only after a particularly tough operation and in very cold weather. On such occasions the Intelligence staff took good care to make every man sign for his ration so that they could account to higher authority for the consumption of every drop. The Rev. Parry-Jones was still trying to find a way to beat the system, but meanwhile never gave up trying to scrounge a tot.

  This morning, his pious welcomes uttered, he sidled around the table at the far end of the room, to stand behind Wg. Cdr. Beale, muttering an occasional "Bl-l-o-o-d-d-y 'ell", or "Sod-ding flak" as he listened to the crews describing the attack on Taf.

  The squadron commander, Sqdn. Ldr. Grimes, broke off his report to give him a dirty look; but it was like bouncing peas off the hide of a rhino.

  Lord John Grimes, younger son of the Marquess of Grimston, bore the undeserved nickname of "Grubby" for the obvious associative and alliterative reasons. He enjoyed a large private fortune and had therefore belonged to the Auxiliary Air Force before the war. His tunics were lined with primrose silk, the colour affected by the auxiliary squadron in which he had served, and he flew with a yellow silk scarf at his throat. When in blue uniform, he wore yellow, instead of the regulation black, socks. He had been to Balliol, was a Catholic and cherished a strange distaste for the Welsh padre, of whom he thought as "that scrofulous, heretical little charlatan". Deprived, during the Mediterranean summers, of his yellow-silk-lined blues, he further flouted regulations by having miniature pilot's wings embroidered on his khaki shirts, which would have been intolerably bad form in anyone else, and wore hand­made suede desert boots from the Burlington Arcade. He refused to wear badges of rank with his khaki drill on the ground that everyone knew who he was anyway.

  Grimes went on: "My navigator reported that two aircraft were shot down on our run in..."

  "God rest their souls," chanted Rev. Parry-Jones with a smothered hiccup.

  "... and I saw one of them myself, in flames, just before it went into the sea...''

  "God have mercy on the poor boyos."

  "I scored hits with all my rockets." He glanced at his navigator for confirmation. "We blew the stern off an E­boat with our first pair. We put the rest into a merchantman of about two thousand tons that was moored in the middle of the harbour. They were all on the waterline and we left her listing badly. My Numbers Two and Three finished her off."

  "Bl-1-ood-dy Jerries."

  Grimes scowled."D'you mind reserving your interjections until we've finished the entire de-briefing, Padre?"

  Wg. Cdr. Beale gave him a look of astonishment, as though he had desecrated the cloth.

  "All right, John boyo, but I'm with you in all this heart and soul, you know."

  "Quod di omen avertant," murmured Grimes, flourishing the rags of his classical Oxonian education.

  "What's that, John?" called the group captain, stroking his scrotum through the thin material of his shorts' pockets.

  "'May the gods avert this', sir."

  Ianto Parry-Jones looked hurt and took a pace back, to lean against the wall: not only as an act of self-effacement but also because gin and red wine were making his head spin in the heat. "Dhu!" he murmured dazedly.

  "Padre means well, you know."

  "If he's so interested, sir, we could always take him on an op."

  Mason gave an embarrassed laugh. He was by no means in awe of the peerage, having rubbed shoulders with them for five years at Harrow and tanned their bottoms what's more. But it was his job to see fair play, he was thinking, and both Grubby Grimes and the God-botherer could be leprously derogatory about each other without actually saying anything overtly offensive, if he let this situation develop. He himself had no religious axe to grind. He was an agnostic. He couldn't care less if the Catholic Grimes and the Protestant Parry-Jones wanted to have a go at each ot
her. What he should really do was tell them they were both interrupting the briefing. But that wouldn't do, because it would be rebuking the squadron commander in front of his inferiors in rank. So he said "Sorry to interrupt the de-briefing, Hargreaves. Please carry on." Implying that he himself was to blame.

  The Intelligence officer smirked and went on with his interrogation. The group captain was really too much. He fancied him strongly. That combination of lambent skin and rapacious whiskers. Too much. Groupie made him weak at the knees and aquiver at the crotch, bless him. Flt. Lt. Hargreaves thought, too, that his lordship Grubby had put the squalid little proletarian bible-basher in his place.

  The story of the attack unfolded, uninterrupted except by a stifled giggle from Flt. Lt. Hargreaves.

  When it was over, he said "We'll have the photographs this afternoon. Then we can see exactly what happened."

  Cracker Beale wanted more: "It's the photographs the P.R. types'll take next week that I want to see. Is Jerry going to have another crack at assembling a convoy at Taf? Are they really going to re-fuel U-boats there?"

  Middleton had a view on that. "We'll known soon enough if either happens, without having to wait for photographs. Never mind Taf, Wrack and Ruin and all the other islands we have to nip in and out of will be bristling with more flak batteries. Anyone going within range of any of 'em will get shot up."

  "Not necessarily," Hargreaves argued. "They might lie doggo, to bluff us."

  Tindall, however, agreed with his pilot. It was, anyway, a matter of principle with him to do so. "Bluff would be too subtle for the Jerries. If they use Taf again as an assembly point or try to sneak a U-boat in they're bound to get trigger happy."