‘Then there was the V-2 – I gather the first time they sent them, they sent three. One on Paris, one on Ghent, one on London,’ recalls Eileen Younghusband. The first V-2s were launched on 8 September 1944; hundreds more were to follow. ‘Churchill apparently wouldn’t tell anyone about them, and Hitler didn’t announce it until November. And it wasn’t until after he announced it that Churchill announced it.’ In fact, censorship around the explosions that started hitting London in those closing months of the war acquired a blackly comic edge amid the carnage and the tragedy. The authorities passed off the house-destroying, limb-mangling detonations as the result of arsenals exploding, or of gas mains blowing; saloon bar wags were soon making jokes about ‘flying gas mains’. But this was a form of death that you really could not see coming; unlike the doodlebugs, which buzzed, ‘coughed’ and then fell silent, the V-2 rockets – much more sophisticated and lethal in terms of design and purpose – simply whispered at enormous speed towards their targets.
‘You didn’t know till it was too late because the sound came after the fall,’ says Mrs Younghusband. ‘Of course more landed on Antwerp than on London – 300 more. And a lot didn’t land; they didn’t reach their targets. Some just went up and came straight down.’ Initially taking off from a static ramp in the Pas de Calais area, the missiles later had to be launched from lorries with a trailer. The missiles were never launched from the base; they and the lorries were moved out – ‘so that people didn’t know where the big supply was, I assume.’
Nor was Fighter Command entirely passive in the face of this technologically advanced threat; for its own technology had been evolving throughout the course of the war. At Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, WAAF radar operator Gwen Reading recalled vividly this stage of the war. ‘When the V-2s came along, we could plot them on special equipment,’ she wrote. ‘This set, known as “Oswald”, recorded the rocket for a few seconds … We could only watch Oswald’s screen for fifteen minutes before changing operator because the trace showed so briefly that if you blinked, it could be missed. A camera operating within “Oswald” was recording all that we had seen. As we espied our rocket, we yelled “Big Ben at Bawdsey” down the line to [Bentley] who, a few minutes later, instructed us to “change Oswald”. This was our cue to take out the film, insert a fresh one, and then send someone to our dark-room to develop the used film. From the information gained from our film, and those of other Chain Home stations, the launching site could be traced and hopefully our bombers sent to destroy them.’5
There was also a macabre foreshadowing of the nuclear era, and the possibility of giving warning of an impending atomic attack against any major city. With the V-2s, according to Gwen Reading, ‘Londoners could have been given a four-minute warning of the approaching rocket, but I suppose the disruption over the entire area would have been too great to warrant this.’
The fact that the authorities tried – and so signally failed – to create a news blackout around the strikes also demonstrates a sort of furious futility. The best that could be hoped for was not merely the destruction of launching sites – others would be found soon enough – but of the entire regime. That victory was a matter of weeks away.
Obviously it would be a source of jubilation; yet mixed with it must have been a shiver of foreboding about the world to come. For despite the unimaginable jeopardy and – for men and women operatives on the ground alike – extraordinary intensity and focus, there must have been a few who looked back over the last few years and thought to themselves: ‘I am going to miss this.’ Certainly, when we look at the post-war lives of the team at Bentley Priory, and all the stations and aerodromes around the country, the dull iron clang of the quotidian – the chilled grey landscape of a bankrupt Britain – somehow rings louder than it does for the other services. To the very end, there was something incandescent, even other-worldly, about the war that had been fought in the air.
Chapter Twenty-One
Grounded
The aftershock, for many, was intense; the weeks, months and years of flying to the defence of the country, and now the prospect settling down back on earth. For the men who had fought by the light of the moon, or in the thick billows of impenetrable cloud, or over clear-viewed domestic landscapes – the green rectangles, the lines of lanes, with which they were intimately familiar – this would mean in the most basic physical sense the shrinking of their lives. Despite the extraordinary danger, they had swooped high above the world and gazed at the firmament. To go from that to ordinary careers in ordinary offices, the hemmed-in cities, the flat views from train windows, was a sharp psychological jab. Some found that they could not stay away.
Air ace Douglas Bader was one such. Finally released from Colditz in April 1945, he returned to Fighter Command – in charge of the North Weald station – and was there to lead victory flyovers some months later in September. He had the chance to fly his beloved Spitfire once more, and also to become acquainted with the new generation of planes coming through, such as the Meteor. But the post-war atmosphere was something that he could not quite find a taste for. Naturally, there was now no urgency, no drive; no enemy to shoot out of the sky. The rest was training – but Bader was also witnessing the dissolution of a mighty war machine, plane by plane, pilot by pilot. The epic efforts of the conflict were now being scaled back for peace. The other crucial missing factor was adrenaline: while routine flying had a beauty all its own, Bader had thrived on the knife-edge uncertainties of conflict. He knew that the future offered by this new air force would only make him melancholic and angry.
He returned to work for the Shell Company, which, in fairness, gave him the opportunity for travel; in fact, a great deal more than most others of his generation. Bader and his wife were to start flying right across the world on business. He was clearly a terrific asset to the oil company too; who could resist doing business with one of the greatest heroes of the war? He became managing director of Shell Aircraft. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, senior figures in the Conservative Party began to badger him; they could find him an agreeably safe seat somewhere, anywhere: would he please consider joining them? But Bader always refused rather curtly. Politics was emphatically not the line for him.
Then, in the mid-1950s, came Reach for the Sky, the biography of Bader that made him even more of a household name; followed swiftly in 1956 by the film, starring Kenneth More and proving one of Britain’s biggest box-office draws. ‘How magnificently everyone who takes part conspires to produce a really memorable and moving record of human courage and endurance!’ rhapsodised one newspaper critic. ‘Kenneth More takes the part of Bader and in his easy charm and dauntless single-mindedness, Bader could not have been better served.’
The same year came the award of the CBE. The recognition was clearly pleasing and gratifying; but even this could not have been enough for him. Bader’s energetic bullishness never left him, even in the years after the war. He successfully sued a tabloid newspaper in 1961 for suggesting that he had terrorised a party of schoolchildren by deliberately flying low over them. Even if the story had been true, this would have been a risky way of writing about such a widely admired hero.
As well as flying to all regions of the world on business (managing, on one occasion, a round of golf in Los Angeles with David Niven, Errol Flynn and James Stewart), Bader also quietly involved himself in a number of disabled charitable concerns. He was particularly attentive to children who had lost limbs; to this day, the Douglas Bader Foundation, based in west London, raises funds and organises scores of special events for young amputees. There is a consistent tone of cheerfulness and optimism; the website is headed with pictures of the ace in his flying heyday. Bader himself lived until 1982; even in his final weeks, he was giving speeches and having lunches with journalists at grand London clubs – happily encouraging hacks to drink while, of course, remaining teetotal himself.
What of the younger pilots? The story of Geoffrey Wellum – just nineteen years old as he fought in the Bat
tle of Britain – spoke not only of the immense stresses imposed by such combat, but also of the body’s miraculous powers of regeneration. He had continued with Fighter Command, flying on various ‘Rhubarb’ and ‘Circus’ missions over France until the summer of 1942, when he was posted to Malta. But while he was overseas, the stabbing headaches that he had been experiencing for some time in the cockpit suddenly became very much worse; the subsequent collapse hospitalised him. Harrowingly, he was aware of his head being held as doctors probed up through his nose – a sensation of excruciating pain followed by a cascade of ‘strawberry-coloured fluid’ through his nostrils. One of the doctors proclaimed that it must have been a cyst. The wider effect was that it left the young man, even now only twenty-two, feeling and looking very much older. Wellum was wracked with guilt, with an overwhelming sense that somehow he was letting his fellow pilots down. But he was flown back to England for a lengthy period of recuperation, during which he experienced profound depression and physical exhaustion.
The physical trauma had built up as a reaction to the intense pressures of combat flying; what Wellum had refused to acknowledge to himself consciously had nonetheless left him physically devastated. But when one so young is addicted – and it is clear that Wellum was passionately devoted to flying – there is then the additional difficulty of getting them to quietly recover while denying them the solace of flight. Wellum went home and forced himself to re-learn relaxation and tranquillity – the pleasure of fishing by a quiet river.
Eventually he was able to return to active duty in the RAF, though now he was not involved in direct combat, but in training. He was introduced to the new generation of Typhoons. And so he took to the air once more and it became clear that this was all that he had ever really craved; not the fighting, but the beauty of gliding along on top of the clouds. He stayed with the RAF until 1961.
There were, of course, many who didn’t make it. During the Battle of Britain, 544 pilots were killed. Another 814 pilots died before the war ended. Many of them were men from other parts of the world who had signed up for the honour of fighting for Britain. Brendan ‘Paddy’ Finucane, an Irishman who had defied his own government to fight for the British, became the RAF’s youngest wing commander aged twenty-one in 1942; shortly afterwards, he was hit while flying over France, and perished in the Channel. The American pilot Vernon Keough, who had specialised in aerobatics, was on convoy protection missions in 1941; his plane was last seen spinning off in ferocious weather over the North Sea.
After the war, some found that their battles in the air had given them an extraordinary social magnetism. For instance, the frisson of glamour experienced by Douglas Bader in Hollywood was as nothing compared to the post-war activities of 92 Squadron’s Anthony Bartley: already familiar with troupes of admiring film stars turning up to the Biggin Hill station, he too had been guest of honour at Los Angeles parties – invited by notable British actors such as Laurence Olivier and feted by American ones like Clark Gable. Others, such as Basil Rathbone (most famous as the big-screen Sherlock Holmes), sought out Bartley – as he had done Bader – to make them the centrepieces of smart Hollywood dinners. On one glittering social occasion, Bartley met the young British actress Deborah Kerr. The pair of them found an instant connection; their wedding took place swiftly afterwards back in England at St George’s, Hanover Square. This, if anything, was the apotheosis of RAF elegance, confirming all the popular images of the dashing brave young men and their deserved place at the pinnacle of society. Moreover, they were turning their faces towards a future that many British people dreamed of: a life in the United States. They moved to California, had two children, and Deborah Kerr’s career grew and developed; the image of her and Burt Lancaster embracing on the sand as a wave hits in From Here to Eternity (1952) is as famous now as it was then.
And initially, it looked as though Bartley would be moving into film production; he studied the profession with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and then formed his own production company, writing and producing dramas for various television anthology series. For a time, Bartley worked for the television station CBS as its European representative. By the late 1950s, it became clear that he and Kerr had drifted apart. They agreed to an amicable separation. Bartley continued with his television career, joining the hugely successful Associated Rediffusion in the 1960s and remarrying. It was doubtless exciting to be involved in a new popular medium that was beginning to explore its own power and potential. And Bartley was well acquainted with the crossover between real life and screen dramas. Having fought so hard and so harrowingly in the Battle of Britain, he had gone on to perform aerobatic stunts in 1941 for the British film dramatisation The First of the Few. A pilot would accept any reason to take to the air – even to play-act what, months previously, had been lethally real. There must have been days in Bartley’s later television executive career that felt thin compared to all that had gone before. Given the innumerable stresses of his earlier years, though, he lived to a commendable age, dying in 2001 at the age of eighty-two.
The sense of the air as another realm had seeped deep into the bones of Hugh Dowding. Although elevated to the House of Lords in 1943, he was denied the kind of honours and tributes – such as promotion to marshal – that routinely went to other senior air personnel. Unlike William Sholto Douglas, there was something about Lord Dowding that made him fundamentally – to use that most Establishment of expressions – un-clubbable. He remained adrift from the usual networks of colleagues and friends. Perhaps the other senior airmen were put off by more than his dry and abstemious manner. In the latter years of the war, Lord Dowding began writing books about his intense belief in, and passion for, spiritualism. He wrote, without inhibition, of suburban séances that he had attended, of the spirits of the deceased that had come through, and of his theories about the sort of landscape they inhabited. He also became deeply interested in Theosophy – the movement that suggested that all world religions had some deep common root. In this age, these beliefs would perhaps meet with a polite interest; in 1940s and 1950s Britain – a nation of spectacular social restrictions – they could be a source of huge awkwardness. Even Lord Dowding himself wryly remarked that there was something ‘non-U’ – not quite the thing, as another phrase from the time went – about the new faith that he had acquired.
But it was more than just social awkwardness; for he also came to believe that he was in communication with the spirits of dead fighter pilots. This was possibly territory too raw and fraught for many of Dowding’s RAF colleagues, who themselves would have been working hard to keep old griefs and traumas far from the surface. Such unease was manifested in the form of a temporary publishing ban: Dowding’s monograph Twelve Legions of Angels was suppressed on the orders of Churchill, ostensibly because it spoke of matters still covered by the Official Secrets Act, but also presumably on the grounds of taste, since it detailed long conversations with dead pilots – and it saw the light of day only in 1946. Coincidentally, speculation concerning airmen and the new heavenly dimension of light also found cinematic expression that year in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, in which David Niven’s pilot somehow cheats death – and attracts the subsequent attention of heavenly messengers – when his plane is brought down.
Later, as the Cold War UFO craze took off in the late 1940s (the first was seen in 1947) Lord Dowding confessed that he also believed utterly in the prospect of aliens in flying saucers. He went on early BBC television discussion shows in the 1950s to discuss the phenomenon with sceptics. Again, what might in some seem quirky or eccentric had a powerful internal logic for a man whose life was spent above the clouds; if there were spirits in this airy realm, then why should there not be powerful beings from other worlds too? They were united as souls who had defied the pull of the material earth below.
The spiritualist beliefs of Dowding’s bitter enemy, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, had apparently developed following the illness – and subsequent recovery – of one of his child
ren. As well as faith healing, Leigh-Mallory was said to be adamant about the existence of ghosts, and claimed to have seen one in Lincolnshire. Of course, sailors are well known for various atavistic beliefs; in the intense world of Fighter Command, perhaps it is not so surprising that experienced aviators, who had witnessed so much death, would come to believe that that simply could not be the end, that there was a world elsewhere.
And is there a possibility that Leigh-Mallory’s spiritual convictions had also been influenced by the death of his brother George – famously, the Mallory who climbed and perished on Mount Everest? The cult of mountaineering – of which George Mallory was a totemic figure – is in some poetic way quite similar to the love for flying. Mountaineering, especially in an age before technology made it accessible to all, was a mental as well as a physical ordeal. It was not merely a question of reaching unthinkable heights, or of conquering the most bitter wildernesses to do so, or indeed of facing the jeopardy of not having quite enough air to breathe. It was also about venturing into a different world, being a pioneer on a fresh new planet never before seen by human eyes. To look at photographs of George Mallory now is to see a man staring determinedly out into a hinterland that few others can guess at. Mallory froze to death near the summit of the mighty mountain; his corpse, a bathetic sight, discovered only in 1999. It’s hard not to wonder whether something similar in his brother’s soul craved the solitude of great heights, no matter the risk.
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For the women of Fighter Command, there was an equal struggle after the war to depressurise; to return to the roles that were expected of women without crying out in anguish at the flavourless blandness of this austere, bankrupt country. In that sense, Patricia Clark was swift to see the possibilities and equally swift to circumvent them. Just before the war ended, she suddenly found herself back in Stanmore at Fighter Command HQ, this time in the position of helping fellow women to negotiate their way back into a normal life. ‘The V-2s stopped. And then to give me something to do, they attached me of all things to the Education Officer,’ Mrs Clark says now. ‘The Education Officer had to go around Stanmore giving lectures on what was available educationally in order to help people back into Civvy Street.’
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 29
