Battle Climb

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  She had come in quite early, for not even the two Geschwader Kommodoren wanted a late night. He had fallen asleep before then, and again when she had joined him and all was accomplished. But the second time it was a sleep disturbed by dreams of Spitfires and Hurricanes with red flashes at their gun ports and his friends going down in flames, roasting to death, or being blown into small fragments by their detonating fuel tanks. He had a nightmare about a Spitfire he could not shake off his own tail, which kept hitting him so that he felt the impact of its bullets on the armour plating at his back. It had not happened, but each time he flew now he was in dread that it would.

  With a galvanic movement of his whole body, and a cry of “Look out, behind you!” he came awake. He was trembling and hot.

  Hiltrud leaned over him, brushing his hair gently back and rubbing cool fingertips on his forehead. “What is the matter, Liebchen? Why are you so restless?”

  That was the last thing he intended to tell her; a confession of cowardice that would be, he thought. “I am all right.” He felt listless, drained of energy.

  “Why did you cry out, then? Tell me, darling.”

  “Nothing. Just a dream…”

  “I can imagine what kind of a dream... poor darling... don’t worry about what has happened; it’s all in the past... go to sleep.”

  She drew him tenderly against her and presently he slept again, but still muttering from time to time and shifting his limbs in spasms.

  ***

  Upton woke in a bath of sweat and sat bolt upright with his thoughts confused.

  He had just shot down a Me 109 and a Ju 87 and was lining up another Stuka in his sights when someone shouted, “Break!” and he could see nothing in his mirror or to either side and didn’t want to abandon this sitter. He had been sweating with concentration.

  With the blackout curtains drawn the room was pitch dark. He switched on the bedside lamp: it was two o’clock; he didn’t have to get up for an hour or so. He went to the washbasin and drew a glass of water, but it was tepid and did not satisfy his thirst. He thought of Ann, on duty in Ops, and wished she were here with him. He walked down the passage to the bathroom to relieve his bladder, and returned to his room even more wakeful. Lying on the bed with the bedclothes thrown back, he was still hot. He put the light out and went to the open window to breathe air that he hoped would be cooler. There was no breeze and the summer night was heavy. He went back to bed.

  The worst part of the day had been, once again, waiting between sorties. Fighting was a release from tension and he had the confidence of knowing that he flew an aircraft that was superior to the Messerschmitt 109 except for the irritating hiccup when he had to put it into a steep dive. But he and the others had learned what to do about that. They half-rolled and pulled through into the vertical that way. The disadvantage was that it also cost them a fragment of time, and there were not even seconds to spare in combat. He was more worried about letting an enemy aircraft get away than about being shot down. The first priority was to destroy bombers, or at least to damage them so badly that they had to abandon their sortie. The second was to bring down fighters. He was beginning to feel guilty every time he had to break off an attack on a bomber to deal with a 109; or, more likely, several. He particularly recalled, too, the Stuka he had chased into the balloon cables and how he had run out of ammunition and then had to pull away to avoid the balloons himself.

  He lay there rehearsing attacks in his mind, going over the day, piecing together the fragments he remembered of each engagement. He had the eagerness of a boy trying to improve his batting or his place-kicking. Air fighting was the highest expression of what he had chosen to do for a career and he worked hard to improve at it. He fell asleep once more carrying out an imaginary barrel roll around a pursuing 109 to put it in front of him: it was an ambitious manoeuvre and he did not stay awake long enough to calculate where the target would probably be and how much deflection he should allow if it fell for his trick.

  ***

  Kreft had gone early to bed, bored by his companions. More than ever on such evenings he lamented that he had no means of entertaining himself with music. He had to force himself to write up his diary and was quite unable to do any sketching. He was re-reading a favourite novel but suddenly felt impatient with it and had no inclination for any other book to hand.

  Nothing for it but to put out the light. He saw once again the obscenely swollen silver monsters two thousand feet above him and four hundred yards ahead. And the Spitfire astern. He re-lived the steeply banked turn with his belly to the barrage balloons and their cables while he climbed. The Spitfire shot at him once more, then broke away; no ammunition left, obviously. Twice he spiralled up before he risked slipping between two balloons, a hundred feet below them and as close to one as he dared, to give him .the best hope of avoiding its cable and the next one.

  Once through, he had dived steeply and flattened out above the village rooftops, going as fast as he could for the sea.

  A dozen 109s buzzed round him and the other survivors and helped them across the Channel. It was an unhappy twenty minutes from the time he nearly hit the balloons to the moment when he was safely over France. He had seen four of his comrades’ aeroplanes shot down and wondered how many more had been lost. The final tally had plunged him into introspective silence and he had been worrying ever since over what would have been his fate if, like one of the others, his dive brakes had jammed through damage and he had been unable to retract them. Flying at a hundred miles an hour, a boy with a catapult could almost have shot him down.

  He switched on the light, got up, and poured himself some brandy. When he had swallowed it and gone back to bed he felt less miserable but still wakeful, so he tried again to read his book.

  Voss came back from l’Ange Bleu whistling cheerfully.

  There were two new girls and the one he had tried was charming. She had not hurried him, had poured him a glass of wine, and chatted to him with apparent interest about his family and his life as an airman. He had been so gratified that he had stretched out his visit to twice the usual time and not begrudged the additional two hundred francs. He was wondering now whether he should have talked quite so freely about the Geschwader’s operations, but it was too late to worry about it now and the girl was surely too young to be suspected. Carried away by the wine and her youth, he had shed his fears by talking about them to so sympathetic a listener. Now he was ready for a night’s sound sleep. His room-mate, who had accompanied him to the brothel, had pulled his leg when at last he reappeared in the parlour, but Voss had merely said, smugly, “You’re jealous, that’s what. “

  “If she’s so good, I’ll have her next time.” A retort that did not please Voss at all, for he had deluded himself that there was a special rapport between the girl and himself; he did not wish to be reminded that she was available to anyone with the price in his pocket.

  Abed in his quarters, he fell to reflecting about the frightening moment when he saw they were trapped by the barrage balloons. But Kreft had proved himself to be a skilful and clever pilot; and instead of the balloons, Voss kept seeing the girl’s pretty young face and the rest of her charms and he quickly went to sleep promising himself that he would see her again in a week’s time instead of enduring his usual fortnight of celibacy.

  After all, if Kreft had got them out of that mess, he could extricate them from anything.

  NINE

  Within an air fleet, tactical operational control lay with the two Fliegerführer, the air commanders: Jagdfliegerführer, who commanded the fighters, and Kampffliegerführer, the bomber commander. It was they who planned the details of the onslaught on England, but they also allowed some autonomy to the Geschwader Kommodoren; particularly when they were men of the unusual quality of von Brauneck and von Höhndorf. In any event, the exalted status of their respective patrons guaranteed the two adventurous friends a minimum of interference from mere air commanders and freedom from retribution if their plans failed.r />
  The directive about operations against Britain stipulated the strategy and broad tactics. The air fleets interpreted them. The Fliegerführer laid down the specific tactical plan. The Geschwader Kommodoren executed them; and added a few refinements of their own.

  Hence, although von Brauneck and von Hohndorf had some apprehensions of censure from their respective Fliegerfiihrer both considered themselves adequately protected from a higher level. Although they had referred to the need not to outrage the former, neither felt constrained to abandon their joint adventures over southern England.

  But there was time to give more thought to what they would do. The next morning, 14th August, dawned cloudy and unsuitable for large scale operations.

  It was a breathing space that Fighter Command needed even more than the Luftwaffe.

  In the past week, 19 Blenheim fighters had been lost or damaged badly enough to be withdrawn from the battle; along with 104 Hurricanes and 63 Spitfires.

  Of the 1,588 pilots for which Fighter Command was established there were only 1,379 on the strength.

  During the past seven days Fighter Command had had an average of just over 700 fighters of all types, Blenheims, Defiants, Hurricanes and Spitfires, available for operations. During the same period 43 Hurricanes and 31 Spitfires had been manufactured.

  The Luftwaffe, in Air Fleets Nos. 2 and 3, could call on 1,030 fighters, over 1,250 bombers, and replacement aircrew coming from the training schools at the rate of 800 a month, to augment their existing strength, which, in the two air fleets concerned, alone, was far greater than the whole of Fighter Command’s.

  The murky weather did not give the British pilots any extra time abed, however. By four-o’clock in the grey morning they were on the airfield, grumbling because the overcast made it obvious that the enemy would be unable to come over in great strength, if at all, and they may as well have been allowed another couple of hours’ sleep. But one never knew, for an odd bomber might come sneaking through or a Me 110 venture across to strafe.

  Upton was quieter than usual. He sprawled in an armchair in a corner of the crew room and settled down to catch up with some more sleep. He felt confused by his sudden awakening during the night and his dream of being in a dogfight. He refused to call it a nightmare, for he had had no frightful premonition of being shot down. On the contrary, he had been about to shoot down a 109 when he woke suddenly. But he had been sticky with sweat and his head had been fuddled as though he were blacking out in a hard turn, and it all added up, he told himself, to fear. He was ashamed of admitting that he was ever afraid. He knew that no one of average sensitivity and imagination was free of fear, but it was hard, just the same, to imagine Squadron Leader Maidment or Roy Taylor feeling afraid. He had seen fear cross the faces of some of the newest members of the squadron when a scramble order was shouted, he had heard it in men’s voices on the R/T, but he could not accept that a comparative veteran like he was had any excuse for evincing it, even to himself.

  Taylor, covertly looking at his friend, envied Clive Upton’s apparent indifference to the vagaries of their daily lives. Pink-cheeked, clear-eyed, his longish fair hair always flopping about and having to be brushed impatiently back with a characteristic movement of the hand, Clive seemed always about to laugh or to make a joke. He had never known a more cheerful chap. And underneath all that gay, carefree style he must be amazingly tough, his nerves must be like steel, for he seemed to be enjoying this high-wire existence they shared; and their tightrope was liberally greased for the unwary foot.

  He himself was more phlegmatic than Upton, but only he knew what it cost him to keep up that stolid, forebearing appearance. He woke every morning with the thought that when he got out of bed it may well be for the last time. He was not morbid by nature, but the pride that made him suppress his emotions so that he did not even betray high spirits when he felt elated rebounded on him with this black morning mood. He had a great fear of having to bale out. A month after he joined the squadron, before the war, two pilots collided when doing formation aerobatics. Both had baled out safely, but only one parachute opened. In recent weeks he had twice seen enemy bomber crew fall to earth with their parachutes snarled up, the canopies unable to free themselves from the rigging lines. If he had to die in his cockpit, he was ready for it. But the thought of falling helplessly through space, knowing that he was about to be squashed as flat as a hedgehog run over by a car, made him feel sick; and it was an idea he could not keep out of his mind.

  He envied the way Upton could lie back in his chair, close his eyes and apparently drift off into easy sleep.

  Tom Dellow sat himself amidst a small group of pilots whom he knew would be disposed to chat when they had made up an hour or two of lost sleep. He was still enjoying a residue of euphoria from his previous day’s misadventure. When he had had to leave his aircraft, the decision and the act had followed so swiftly on the recognition of the necessity, that he had had no time for fear of the unknown. He had been too afraid of what he did know: namely that his Spitfire was about to be enveloped in flames, and he with it. Once out of the cockpit and falling he had been too busy counting the seconds before he pulled the ripcord, to be frightened. He was tumbling through the air and looked forward to being steadied by his parachute; without any doubt that this would happen. And it had. He had not even been afraid that a 109 pilot would take a shot at him; the notion had not entered his head. He had instead been absorbed in watching the convoy: he knew that the corvette that had detached herself from the escort was coming for him. Ten minutes after he hit the water he was safely aboard her. It all added up to an experience that few men underwent and about which he could tell his grandchildren.

  Now that he knew what it was like to be shot down he faced the new day with equanimity.

  Squadron Leader Maidment welcomed the dull weather for the chance it gave his pilots to rest and his ground crews to bring more of his aircraft to serviceability. He was twenty-six and had taken command of the squadron two months earlier after having been a flight commander on another squadron. He was the fourth commander of the squadron since the outbreak of war: two of his predecessors had been killed and one wounded. He was engaged to an enchanting girl of twenty-one, an Air Commodore’s daughter, who was now in the W.A.A.F. They had become engaged the previous summer and their marriage had been planned for the following Easter. His fiancée was a fighter plotter at a coastal early warning in Sussex and since the air raids on R.A.F. stations had started he was as worried about her as about his pilots and ground crews. It did not sweeten his naturally fiery temperament.

  He felt a personal grievance towards the enemy for having spoiled his marriage plans and had exhibited it with such vigour and venom that he had earned one of the first fighter D.F.C.s of the war.

  His further complaint against the Germans was that they had almost certainly spoiled his prospects of an international rugger cap, because the war looked like dragging on for years and he would be past his playing prime by the time it ended. If, that was, he survived it at all.

  His intimate friends could never be sure which deprivation he felt the more. It was not easy to reconcile that tough and uncompromising mentality and hard, muscular physique with the attributes of an ardent swain or uxorious husband.

  The young squadron commander stood at his office window at six o’clock that morning, with his two flight commanders beside him, and glowered at the low clouds. “If Jerry knew his business, he’d be popping out of cloud every few minutes, strafing us,” he said. “Piece of cake for a 110; and we’d never catch the brutes; they could go home in cloud all the way. Can’t understand why they let a chance like this go. We can’t chase them; and our ack-ack can’t hit them if they just nip out of the cloud, shoot us up and hide again.”

  “They’ve probably got their square fat heads firmly on their pillows,” suggested one of his companions.

  “Well, I’d like to take the whole squadron across to their nearest airfield and show them what can be
done,” growled the C.O.

  ***

  Hintsch felt jaded. His night with Hiltrud had not sent him back to his duties as refreshed and invigorated as after their first time. He was suffering from the lassitude of over-indulgence and the staleness engendered by lack of sleep. He grumbled when he took his first look at the day: why the devil couldn’t Bull Siegert get permission from Geschwader H.Q. for the Staffel to be allowed to stay in quarters while the damned weather was so obviously non-operational? Then they could all get in some decent sleep.

  He had gone sluggishly to his own room, leaving Hiltrud sound asleep, wanting nothing more than to crawl into his own bed instead of having to shower, shave and drag himself out to the airfield. He had hoped, when he walked into the house, to be met with the news that the Staffel was released for another couple of hours. Instead, he had met Emil Festner on his way to the bathrooms.

  Festner had grinned, said, “Lucky fellow. Better hurry,” and himself hastened on.

  When they met again twenty minutes later over a cup of coffee Hintsch said, “You’re damned keen this morning.”

  Festner’s face was no longer amused. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

  “None of us would miss anything if we stayed in bed all morning, by the look of the weather.” But Hintsch knew what was driving his friend. Festner still chafed at Siegert’s harsh words the morning before.

  “I intend to be the first at dispersals,” Festner said. “If there’s a job going, even a weather reconnaissance, I want to be the one to do it. I can’t bear being on the ground; not after yesterday. I want to get at the damned Tommies.”

  “You’ll get your chance as soon as the weather clears. We all will. What’s the hurry?”