Battle Climb

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “They’re diving, sir... can’t see if they’re Spitfires or Hurricanes... Spitfires, I think…”

  Kreft snatched a quick glance and saw a 109 spinning out of formation with flames rippling all over it.

  “Twelve Spitfires, Skipper... one’s going down... and another of ours... twelve Hurricanes to port... our boys have turned head-on at them…”

  A molten glare filled the sky in front. The Stuka on the Staffel C.O. ‘s left disappeared in a searing flash like lightning. The detonation of its bombs was like a thunder-clap. Pieces of it rattled against Kreft’s aeroplane. He flew through billowing smoke. His stomach began to clench and expand rhythmically and he felt sick and afraid. And mightily, mystically, exalted.

  Voss spoke again. He had been gazing all round, searching every square inch of sky and his tone this time was a little more high-pitched than usual, a sign of suppressed excitement. “Herr Oberleutant... look to three o’clock... very high... well above our high cover.”

  Kreft looked. The sunlight shimmered on yet another formation of small aeroplanes. They were diving, but not towards the bombers or escorting fighters. They were diving on the Spitfires. So von Brauneck had taken the precaution of an extra Staffel as top cover; and said nothing about it: some private arrangement between him and von Hohndorf; or, more likely, a jest on von Brauneck’s part, intended to surprise and gratify his bosom chum.

  But the Spitfires on the right and the Hurricanes on the left were still battering their way through the Messerschmitts.

  With an incandescent flare and an explosion that thudded against the eardrums despite flying helmet and earphones, the Stuka directly behind Kreft and to his starboard disappeared from view, hit in its fuel tanks by incendiary bullets. The tidal wave of disturbed air slammed the Stuka’s nose down, then lifted the starboard wingtip, then smashed it right down below the horizontal, then lifted the nose at forty-five degrees.

  Voss rolled and rocked in his straps. Kreft swayed back and forth and sideways while he forced the aircraft back onto an even keel.

  Longley was in sight. Hurricanes streaked across the airfield: along the runway and into wind if they could; over the grass and down- or across-wind if they must. Anything to get off the ground before the bombs started falling. Kreft saw the pointed wings of Spitfires racing to get airborne as well: the few spares that had not already taken off to intercept the raid.

  He forgot his friends at the Slade School of Art and in the studios of Chelsea. He forgot the promenade concerts at the Albert Hall which had delighted him so much. He forgot his admiration for Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens and J. B. Priestley. He forgot the hospitality he had enjoyed in English homes. He forgot the British girls with whom he had fallen in love, flirted, coupled. He thought only about the thrill that awaited him when his 1,542 pounds of bombs burst on the red brick building, camouflaged with green and brown paint, separate from the main camp; the officers’ mess. He loved a good, raging fire.

  Kreft made ready to attack. Sometimes Stukas attacked in line astern, sometimes in the Vs in which they flew to the target. This time von Handorf had ordered attacks in threes, to disperse the anti-aircraft fire; and give some mutual protection against fighters.

  Kreft verified that his engine cooling gills were closed and his airscrew was in coarse pitch; switched on his bomb release mechanism, bomb fusing switches and bomb sight.

  The three Vs turned towards their different targets; the aircraft in each V made for their individual ones. Kreft pushed down his Stuka’s nose in a near-vertical dive and brought the reflector sight to bear on the centre of the long building beneath him. Thirty seconds to go before bomb-release. He felt the familiar pressure of the harness around his body, in which he hung: thirteen stone in his flying clothes, supported in an almost horizontal attitude by webbing straps that pressed deeply into chest and stomach. The sirens howled and the wind screamed past the cockpit canopy. The Stuka was doing three hundred miles an hour.

  At a height of 1,400 metres a horn shrieked in his ears to warn him that he had four seconds before he released his bombs.

  A Spitfire ripped across the sky, slanting down from above and on his right, its eight guns flinging tracer at him. Bullets tore into his starboard aileron and both the inboard and outboard flaps. The Stuka lurched out of alignment.

  The horn’s note cut off abruptly: seven hundred metres. Furious at the last-second interruption in his perfectly set up attack, Kreft pressed the bomb-release. Instantly, the automatic system that pulled the Stuka out of its dive heaved its nose up, thrusting the pilot hard against the back of his seat and momentarily drawing a grey veil across his vision.

  Behind Kreft, Voss, who had been lying on his back during the dive, was flung violently forward, also greying out.

  The bombs burst on open ground behind the target. Kreft and Voss saw shards of glass erupt from broken windows, reflecting the sun.

  The Spitfire broke away and as Kreft’s eyes cleared he saw four barrage balloons across his path.

  EIGHT

  “They won’t want to try that again,” Arthur Goldsmith remarked confidently, pulling a pint of bitter and speaking across the bar counter to Clive Upton. “I counted fifteen of ‘em... dive-bombers I mean. Saw you boys get four and the ack-ack lads bring two down... and I don’t know how many Messerschmitts.”

  “You know the rules, Arthur: we’re not allowed to say anything.”

  “I know that, Clive. I’m not digging... just saying what a grand job you all did... and how it must have discouraged Fritz... Jerry... the ruddy Hun.”

  “Let’s hope it did.” Upton passed drinks back over his shoulder, then carried his own away to stand with Roy Taylor, Tom Dellow and their three girls. The girls had been on watch from 1300 to 1700 and were due on again at midnight: they had met them after dinner in the mess, high tea in the W.A.A.F. dining hall. The Angel was as full as usual, to the point where it seemed the walls must bulge.

  Sergeant Dellow complained, “I thought I’d get a new uniform... sea water’s ruinous... I’ll swear mine has shrunk... but they tell me I’ll be lucky.”

  “Your own fault,” Upton told him. “You should have lost it conveniently... your tunic, anyway... on the corvette.”

  “Or shot a few holes in it after the Navy had dried it for you,” Taylor suggested. “Lack of initiative, Sergeant.”

  Upton turned to the girls. “Tom shot a horrible line when he got back: said the worst part was being seasick after he was picked up.”

  They all laughed. Ann asked, “Would you rather they left you to swim ashore next time, Tom?”

  “Who says there’s going to be a next time? Thanks for the vote of confidence!”

  Tom Dellow’s ducking was old hat, anyway. The first sortie of the day was already obscured by later events: there had been several scrambles and everyone had flown at least three times. The big talking point was the raid on Longley.

  “I missed all the excitement, “ Lois said. “I was in the bath and it was all over by the time I’d got myself dry and decent and down to a shelter.” This statement gave the men an immediate provocative vision of nakedness and aroused their sexual response, which was precisely what she had intended. She looked at each of them in turn with a lazy smile, flicking her tongue across her lips.

  Helen remarked dryly, “You might have been quicker about it if it was a mixed shelter.”

  “Darling, if it was, I wouldn’t have bothered to dry myself or rush there in anything more than a towel.”

  Their humour was forced. The Spitfire squadron had lost one pilot killed, two wounded and two aircraft destroyed. The two Hurricane squadrons had, between them, lost three pilots killed and three wounded, with a loss of four aircraft.

  The air raid had misfired badly. A barrack block had been hit and one half of it, both floors, demolished, but there was no one in it at the time. A corner of one of the three hangars had been hit and the roof caved in at that point, with three deaths and four men injured. Th
e dispersals had been hit in three places: one of the crew huts had been blown down by blast and some of the pens in which aircraft sheltered had been damaged, but no aeroplanes had suffered. Two airmen and an officer had been killed and two airmen wounded. Air raid shelters and slit trenches had saved many lives, but only eight of the bombers had survived to drop their bombs and two had been shot down immediately after doing so. Two of the Ju 87s had deliberately made craters in the aerodrome where they caused the most hindrance.

  Upton and his party did not stay until closing time. The girls wanted to snatch an hour’s doze before going on duty, the three pilots craved deep sleep.

  Upton stopped his car in a lane that ran alongside the western boundary of the airfield, switched off the engine and turned to take Ann in his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder, her hair touching his chin, and for a minute or so they stayed silent and motionless. Presently she murmured, “I was worried about you all day.”

  He turned a little and kissed the crown of her head. She smelt of a pine-scented shampoo. “You’ve been in long enough to learn not to worry.”

  “It’s bad enough when I’m on watch and I can see the strengths on the raids, but it’s even worse when I’m not in the Ops. Room and... one imagines things.”

  He made a joke of it: “It would be hard to imagine bigger raids than the ones we’ve been getting. But there are plenty of us to cope with them... you saw for yourself, today.”

  She turned and put her left arm across his chest and around his neck and drew his face down to hers to kiss him. He slid his left arm down and about her waist and pulled her hard and close against him. After a moment she freed her other hand and encircled him with both arms, holding each kiss until she was breathless, breaking off to draw rapid, panting breaths, then clutched him again convulsively.

  Upton caressed her hair with one hand while the other stroked her side, the soft, taut young body under her tunic.

  Three or four minutes of this and she dropped her head on his chest and said, quietly, “Sorry to be so... intense... it’s been quite a day.”

  He smiled on her, unseen with her head bowed under his, and said gently, “I like it when you’re... intense, if that’s what it is... and I understand… and I’m... I’m... touched.”

  She sat up briskly and put both hands up to arrange her hair. “Time to go: you’ve got to get all the sleep you can... and I’ll be in trouble if I doze over the plotting table... I won’t, if I get some rest now.”

  “One more.” He held her in his arms for a moment and kissed her avidly and with great affection.

  ***

  “I wonder if those two pigs will really have the effrontery to return?” said Berthe Pelegrand.

  Hercule, polishing glasses she had just rinsed, a Gauloise waggling in a corner of his mouth, grimaced. “They have even more reason to since this morning. The English made mincemeat of them.”

  The local carpenter, leaning on the zinc with a glass of red wine in front of him, grinned and said, “Fifteen bombers I counted circling their field. I didn’t see fifteen come back.”

  “Six shot down, they say,” said the owner of the pharmacy, before lifting his glass of beer and tacitly toasting the destruction of the other nine.

  “I hear nearly forty fighters went out,” Hercule told them.

  “They lost six also,” announced the horse-butcher. “I have that on highly reliable authority.”

  “I wonder how many the R.A.F. sent up against that lot?” the carpenter said.

  “That’s the question,” agreed Pelegrand. “And we don’t know how many they lost, either. My guess is that they must have a hell of a lot of fighters to send up, if they gave the Boche such a mauling.”

  “Albion perfide,” the pharmacist murmured. “When we asked them for more fighter squadrons last Mav, they insisted they had none to spare beyond the miserly few they allowed us to borrow.”

  “And we owe it personally to le brave Churchill that we got any at all,” the horse-butcher agreed.

  Berthe had been looking at the watch on her plump wrist and at the door for the past half-hour. Suddenly she said, “Shut up, you lot.” The westering sun had cast two long shadows on the pavement.

  The jack-booted tread of the military policemen advanced with their shadows. They came into the bar, bold and contemptuous, one of them rapped on the counter and said “Two cognacs,” to the backs that Berthe and Hercule had turned on them to pretend to occupy themselves at the shelves of bottles.

  Pelegrand turned slowly and poured the drinks. He pushed the glasses across the bar on their saucers. In those days, these saucers differed according to the value of the drink and would accumulate beside a customer, one stacked on another, until he was ready to pay; there were no bills.

  One of the Germans said, “Don’t bother with the saucers,” laughed, drained his glass and shoved it back at Pelegrand with an imperious gesture to refill it. His colleague did the same.

  “You’d better get along to the kitchen,” the first man said to Berthe, who had turned to glower at them. “We’re hungry.”

  “I told you this is not a restaurant.”

  “And I told you we are not customers, but guests. Get along and make those omelettes. And bring out some cheeses. And a decent bottle of wine... white... well chilled.”

  Pelegrand said, “I’ll give you the money to go and eat all that in one of the restaurants down the road.”

  The bigger of the two Germans leaned across the bar. “Any more of your insolence and I’ll take you back to the Police barracks for the night in a cell.”

  “Is this the correct behaviour your commanders tell us they have ordered you to show towards us?” asked Pelegrand.

  “It is the correct behaviour to show to rumour-mongers and suspected spies, my fat friend.” The German reached over and pinched a large portion of Berthe’s buttock between a large thumb and finger. “Get on with it, Madame.”

  “If you don’t apologise to my wife,” said Pelegrand, slowly, red in the face, “I’ll show you how this came to be called Le Bar des Sports.” He swung round and stabbed a finger at several framed photographs around the walls. “That was me as a young man, when I was finalist in the amateur national heavyweight boxing championship... and when I was boxing and wrestling professionally.”

  Both the Germans laughed and the one who had insulted Pelegrand’s wife tapped his pistol holster and said, “This is my answer to your threats, and I don’t think any boxer or wrestler in the world has a defence against a bullet.”

  Putting his face close to his tormentor’s, Pelegrand said, “Your Commanding Officer will hear of this.”

  “I hope he doesn’t: I’ll be in trouble for not arresting you in the first place instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt. But remember, one more rumour and I’ll have you in cells for interrogation and investigation: count yourself lucky I’m not S.S. or Gestapo, or you wouldn’t get this second chance.”

  “Do what you like to me, but you leave my wife out of this.”

  “All we’ve told... asked... her to do is cook us a simple meal. She has to do that for yourselves, anyway.”

  Berthe appeared in the door that led to the kitchen. “Come and get it... and I hope it chokes you.”

  “If it does, you’ll be the next to choke.” The big German raised his hands and made a squeezing motion, grinning with cold eyes.

  ***

  The two Geschwader Kommodoren were consoling them-selves with more liquor than they could hold. This time, in deference to his heavier losses, von Hohndorf was host. They had dined in company with his staff and afterwards moved to his own sitting room.

  “By God!” von Höhndorf said, “This makes me more determined than ever to bring it off. But we are going to need much better protection.”

  “Your fellows were magnificent,” von Brauneck told him yet again. “And Kreft was damned unlucky to be shot up at the last second; he would have flattened the officers’ mess, but for that s
tray Spitfire.”

  “I can’t understand how it got away from your fighters.”

  “It must have been one of those that took off in a hurry to avoid your bombs.” Von Brauneck knew it was not, though.

  “You gave us much more effective protection on the way back than on the way in,” von Höhndorf accused him. “That’s not fair, Sepp, and you know it. “

  “Well, next time it’s got to be a really big attack. Every aircraft I can muster and every one you can put up. The Fliegerfiihrer won’t agree to it otherwise.”

  I’m not so sure, Sepp. I come back to what I said before: we may stand our best chance with a very small formation, of the highest quality, attacking at a very carefully chosen time when we can attack with maximum unexpectedness and inflict the greatest damage.”

  “Whichever way we do it, we’re damned well not going to incur such heavy casualties; especially for such meagre results.”

  “Revenge will be sweet,” said von Brauneck.

  ***

  Werner Hintsch stirred uneasily in Hiltrud’s arms. He had been restless all the afternoon, since landing back from the raid on Longley. The encounter over the convoy had unsettled him and the day had developed badly. On the Longley affair the Spitfires and Hurricanes had hit hard and often: in small numbers, but from different directions and with stubborn repetition. The formation had broken up after the second R.A.F. onslaught and the enemy had got through to the bombers.

  He had been up a third time, on a much bigger raid, and again the enemy had been waiting for them: only in small numbers, but from several directions and usually with the advantage of height or sun, or both. He had fallen asleep lying on the grass after the last sortie; an uneasy sleep of bad dreams. Hiltrud had to drive von Brauneck over to dine with von Höhndorf, and he had gone secretly to her quarters to wait for her. The Geschwader Kommodore would not have minded, but good manners demanded discretion.

  Last night he had had to leave her after two hours, but tonight he had hoped to spend the whole night with her at the inn where they had dined then. When she disappointed him by the news that she had to drive von Brauneck that evening she had added: “Come to my suite and wait for me; and you can creep out early in the morning.”