The Sea Shall Not Have Them
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Part I
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Part II
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Part III
I
II
III
IV
Next in Series
Copyright
‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’
was the motto of Air-Sea Rescue
High-Speed Launch Flotillas.
During the war 13,269 lives were saved from the sea by Air-Sea Rescue – often under the enemy’s guns. Of these 8,604 were air-crew.
‘Your superlative A.S.R. Service has been one of the prime factors in the high morale of our own combat crews. This organization of yours has picked up from the sea nearly 600 of our combat crew men since we began operations in this theatre. This is a remarkable achievement, made possible by only the highest efficiency and the greatest courage and fortitude.’
Lieutenant-General Ira C. Eaker
(Commanding 8th U.S. Air Force in Britain)
Part I
I
Across the wide Suffolk fields the wind blew with the coldness of winter, bringing with it the varied sounds of the aerodrome. Faintly, the men working on the sooty-painted night bombers dispersed round the perimeter could hear the scream of steel on steel from the workshops by the hangars and the noisy revving of an engine from the Motor Transport yard. Then, brittle and staccato, cutting sharply across all the other noises, came the sound of a Browning machine-gun firing – like the sharp tearing of a huge cloth – as armourers lined up sights on the range. The echoes seemed to carry more clearly on the wind than usual, as though held close to the earth by the low clouds that folded layer upon layer towards the horizon, where the trees stood prematurely bare of leaves in the shivering lace of winter dress.
The day was bright, but only because it was noon, for the gathering clouds seemed already to be pressing the light out of the day with their threats of rain. The cows beyond the perimeter were huddled in the lee of the hedge, their square sterns to the weather, their sad eyes staring mournfully in front of them. The swallows had long since disappeared and only the iron-songed crows remained, wheeling above the aerodrome buildings, their tattered wings black against the sky.
There was something that spoke of winter in the very air – the smoky blueness of the distance, the sharp angularity of the aerodrome buildings clustered behind the hangars. You could smell the chill in the wind from the stark way the windsock by the Control Tower stood out against the barren sky, a pointing finger to the frost and the not far-distant snow, and from the way the group of uniformed figures clustered in the shelter of the tall camouflaged building from which the aerodrome traffic was directed.
The Wing Commander’s jeep stood behind the Control Tower and, at the side of the building, out of the wind, the Wing Commander himself waited with his second-in-command and the Flying Control Officer. Beyond them the ambulance and the fire-tender were drawn out of their garages, their drab camouflage matching the grey day, their crews watching the sky. A few other figures bunched in the doorway of the crew-room, slouching figures in flying boots and leather jackets – flying personnel who had abandoned their chute and poker and their numerous trivial jobs. They, too, were staring at the sky.
About them all there was a tenseness, an expectancy that was not missed by the crew doing the inspection on the Lancaster parked in front of the maintenance hangar. The fitter, sitting by the starboard outer engine on the dun-coloured upper side of the main plane, his big boots hanging in space, watched them for a while, hardly aware in his thick jersey and overalls of the cold wind that buffeted against his back.
The Wing Commander was talking quickly in an outburst of nervous energy, his hands deep in his jacket pockets, walking about as he spoke, still staring hard at the sky, and the others were staring with him, so that the whole group had a heroic cast of urgency.
The fitter looked down at his flight-mechanic below him who had just returned from the flight stores.
‘What’s going on down there?’ He indicated the group by the Control Tower with a jerk of his spanner.
The flight-mechanic, fumbling in a tool-box, stared up at the fitter who craned forward to look at him.
‘Kite overdue,’ he said.
‘A kite? Who’s flying?’
‘Harding.’
‘What’s he doing flying? Thought his crew just forced-landed in France.’
‘He’s flying a Hudson back for a write-off at the Maintenance Unit. There’s only three of the crew coming back.’ The fitter tightened with his spanner the nut he’d been screwing down with his fingers and began looking for another among his kit. He was uninterested, dejected, like all Servicemen working overtime for no obvious reason. Then he lifted his head again, looking over the sprawling camp in which there seemed no sign of its vast life, beyond the tense figures by the Control Tower and a toy lorry charging round the perimeter in the distance.
‘Who’s coming back with him?’ he asked.
‘Sergeant Ponsettia. Flight Sergeant Mackay. And a passenger. They’re bringing some big shot back. Air Commodore Waltby, the rocket merchant.’
‘Why Air Commodore Waltby?’
‘V.I.P. He’s been visiting the rocket sites and he’s coming back with a load of gen on rocket-launching. He’s the Group Captain’s brother-in-law or something.’
‘Who told you? Groupy himself?’
The flight-mechanic pushed his hat back. ‘Keep my ears open, chum. That’s all.’
‘Think Harding’s had it?’ The fitter’s voice was lacking in compassion. Its owner had known too many aircraft fail to return during the long course of the war. He felt a certain amount of unconscious sympathy for human beings unluckier than himself. No more.
‘Well, he’s overdue,’ the flight-mechanic said. ‘That usually means only one thing. He must have got the chop.’ ‘Hard luck. Nice bloke. Wonder where he is?’
* * *
In the Operations Room in the camouflaged headquarters building beyond the hangars the Squadron Leader Controller placed a flat counter on the middle of the blue patch on the plotting table that represented the English Channel and pushed it with his pointer to a spot near the coast of the Continent.
‘That,’ he said to the Group Captain, ‘is Harding.’
Squadron Leader Jones had a soft Welsh lilt in his voice that spoke of wild blue hills and gentle valleys, and he had a friendly confidence which made Group Captain Taudevin feel better as he thought of the missing aircraft and the men in it. He was a small slight man, typical of Wales, going bald and younger than he looked. He glanced at Taudevin and tapped the counter again. ‘There’s still time, of course, to hear they’ve forced-landed somewhere,’ he pointed out.
He stared reflectively at the long plotting table in the centre of the room, set out in the form of a map of the United Kingdom, the Channel and the Continent, and bearing movable counters to plot aircraft belonging to the station or flying in its vicinity.
Behind him, a corporal WAAF scratched with a piece of chalk at a squared blackboard on the wall which carried the numbers of aircraft, their pilots’ names, their destinations and their estimated times of arrival.
The machinery which covered the destiny of the missing Hudson had slipped quietly into motion, each individual piece fitting jigsaw-like into t
he others. Signals Traffic Room at Group Headquarters had received reports of an emergency signal from an aircraft over the sea shortly before Taudevin’s Signals Officer had originated a message to them indicating the absence of a Hudson Coastal Command machine piloted by Flying Officer Harding, stationed under Taudevin’s command. There was no excitement. Indeed, there was still no alarm – for Harding might yet turn up elsewhere, might even still be flying – but the cogs of a normal search for an overdue aircraft had already begun to click into place. Coastal Command had been informed in routine fashion and, through them, the Naval Captain in command of the Light Coastal Forces in the Channel. A hundred separate individuals stationed in a dozen different places were already concerned with Harding’s absence.
Jones tapped with his pointer to the sea in the vicinity of the marker which represented the missing aircraft.
‘I gather there are Air-Sea Rescue launches north and south of this area approximately,’ he said. ‘And at least one naval launch. There are also two Walrus amphibians in the area. It’s only an approximate position, unfortunately, because we’re not certain what happened. But Felwell and Harbry picked up a weak Mayday signal without a call-sign and managed to get a rough bearing on it, which placed it in that area. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long enough for them to get anything accurate. That was probably Harding’s last cheep before he ditched.’
Taudevin looked round the long room with its tall Windows, its WAAF plotters, and the bulldog clips on hooks which held sheaves of paper containing operations directions and weather reports. He was a wiry little man, young for his rank but with the old eyes of command. He had been a famous fighter pilot in the early days of the war but a crash at Malta had finished his active flying career in a vivid burst of orange flame that had left him a little older, and with bright mottled hands twisted into claws by burns which wrenched at the skin until it was folded into creases shiny with newness. He was a man of nervous mannerisms and sudden stillnesses that left you wondering if he were listening to you; his pale eyes tranquil, silent, busy with his own thoughts to the exclusion of everyone else, alone in spite of the business of the aerodrome around him.
He stood still now, apparently unhearing, staring through the window at the low clouds which hung, sick and heavy as a wet blanket, over the fields. As far as he could see there was no break in them anywhere.
Jones was still speaking. ‘Aircraft are flying over the area, sir, of course, and any one of them might pick up a signal from the squawk box in the dinghy. Unfortunately, the weather’s a bit dicey and that might prove the complication.’
‘What’s the picture on the weather?’ Taudevin asked sharply, as though he had suddenly wakened from a trance.
Jones reached for the internal telephone. ‘I’ll get the Met. people to send someone up. He’ll be able to give you the general picture more clearly than I can.’ He spoke into the telephone. ‘Oh, hello, is that you, Tom? Slip in here and give us the picture on the weather, will you?’
Flying Officer Howard, the Meteorological Officer, who came in a moment later, was a small scholastic-looking man with spectacles. He spoke deferentially to the Group Captain and had the manner of one who hated to commit himself about anything.
‘Well, sir,’ he began, ‘we’re all right here at the moment, but Stornoway, up in the Isles, reports cloud at five hundred feet. Visibility down to a thousand yards. They’re ten-tenths overcast there. Heavy rain and a gale-force wind. No flying.’ He spoke rapidly in short, jerky sentences, as though he were a weather report himself.
‘What does that indicate?’ Taudevin asked, not turning from the window, his mind still sharply on Harding.
‘I’m afraid, sir, we’re in for a nasty blow. There’s a trough of low pressure moving south-south-east at about twenty to twenty-five miles an hour.’
‘How long have we got before it reaches the Channel?’
‘I think it will be blowing hard here and completely shut in by this time tomorrow – or even earlier. Flying will be out.’
The Meteorological Officer put his charts, blue-and green-tinted and marked with the tiny numbers which indicated meteorological offices, on the Controller’s table. It was as though he were saying, ‘There it is, if you don’t believe me.’
Taudevin was silent for a while. His eyes were still and restful but his mind was racing over the possibilities of what might have happened. He was uneasily remembering seeing at Wattlesham aerodrome in the early days of the war, before he had left for the Middle East, a Blenheim which had hit the water while returning from Norway low enough for a momentary drift of the pilot’s attention to allow it to touch a wave crest. It had bent its propeller-tips and lost the airscoops from its engines, its tailwheel and its under gun-turret. And it contained a very startled pilot who hadn’t properly recovered from the shock of discovering what the sea could do to a metal aircraft at speed merely with a touch.
Taudevin found himself imagining such a thing happening to Harding, though he knew it could never have occurred through any drift of attention – not with Harding. In the normal way, Taudevin was not in the habit of worrying long about his aircrews when they were missing or overdue. It had happened before and it would happen again, and it was part of his job not to take too much notice of that. And, though he never enjoyed waiting for them to return from operations, once it was known what had happened to missing crews he had taught himself to dismiss them from his mind.
But Harding was not missing on an operational flight, he reminded himself, and in addition he had with him a V.I.P. whom Group and even A.H.Q. and London were anxious to have safely back with them. The fact that the V.I.P. was his wife’s brother-in-law and his own good friend did not weigh in the balance at that moment with him. His chief concern was with getting back a brief case full of important documents.
‘This time tomorrow,’ he said aloud to himself. ‘It doesn’t give us much time. I’ll get in touch with the Navy personally and explain the urgency. And I’ll contact Group and ask them if they can’t spare an aircraft or two for a sweep before the weather shuts down.’
‘It’s a pity the bearing we’ve got isn’t very accurate,’ Jones said. ‘I can’t imagine why we didn’t get a better one. Flight Sergeant Mackay’s a good wireless operator.’ Taudevin nodded, his expression unchanged. ‘It could mean a difference of twenty or thirty miles or more, and twenty or thirty miles at sea-level can be a long way when you’re searching for something as small as a dinghy. Just a bright day for flying – that’s all we want.’ He turned to the Meteorological Officer. ‘Are you sure there’s no chance?’
‘The barograph is falling a little already,’ Howard pointed out, as though with a vague sense of shame that he was unable to co-operate.
Taudevin studied the charts for a moment, his shoulders hunched, sucking a cold pipe. ‘Keep us taped,’ he said. ‘How about a plot every hour?’
‘I’ll do that, sir.’
Realizing he was dismissed, the Meteorological Officer picked up his charts and disappeared. The Group Captain thrust his twisted hands into his jacket pockets and walked slowly towards the balcony and looked at the grey sky.
‘I guarantee,’ he said slowly, ‘that every time anyone ditches in the sea the weather immediately starts to make things as difficult as possible. It took them two days to find me when I ditched in 1940. Fog patches and rain. I’ve never felt so damn lonely in all my life. And I’ve never been so cold. And that was summer time. We haven’t as long to get Harding. We can’t afford to wait until after this weather blows itself out.’ His eyes went bleak as he spoke, and Jones could feel a little of the chill that had struck across him that summer in 1940.
He stood in silence, waiting for Taudevin to continue, then the Group Captain turned and came back to the plotting table.
‘Group have been on the blower again,’ he went on. ‘They’re getting anxious. Waltby had some important material for them, I gather.’
The Controller remained silent, chi
efly because he could think of nothing helpful to say.
‘You know who Waltby is, of course?’ Taudevin stared at him with enquiring eyebrows.
‘Yes, sir, of course.’ Jones tried to answer briskly and Taudevin gave him a tired smile.
‘No, I mean that he’s my wife’s brother-in-law. He married her sister. Good friend of mine. His wife is coming down here to meet him when he returns. My wife is supposed to be meeting the train. She’s been away for the day and I can’t contact her until she gets to the station. I shall have to tell them when I go to pick them up. They’re bound to know immediately that something’s happened. He should have been with me.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Instinctively Jones glanced quickly at the plotting table and the lonely marker that represented Harding.
* * *
Back in his own room, Taudevin stood by the window watching the ensign which flew from the mast outside his office, rippling in the wind so that the roundel-marked Royal Air Force blue whipped stiffly across the sky. A couple of WAAFS came past, their heads down, each one holding her precarious hat down on thick hair which hung low over her neck, in direct defiance of orders which stated it should be off the collar. Beyond them, the bare trees slowly waved their topmasts against the sky.
Across the open space in front of headquarters Taudevin could see the guard changing by the main gate. He watched silently during the manoeuvring which removed the old guard and replaced him with the new one, and saw the corporal and his party move off again towards the guard-room, taut and solid-looking in their webbing belts. Taudevin approved with a nod, though he knew very well that the elaborate procedure practised on the main gate was chiefly for show, part of the spit and polish of the Air Force, a paragraph out of the drill manuals, and that at all the other points which warranted a guard the changeover was casual and friendly – and just as efficient. He also knew that his interest in the smartness of the guard was unnecessary – that had there been any slackness on the main gate the Administrative Officer, Squadron Leader Scott, who occupied the next office to his own, would already have been flinging himself across the wide concrete roadway in a flash of the ponderous, frustrated energy which was the motivating power in almost everything he did.
The Sea Shall Not Have Them Page 1
