by John Harris
As they waited, the Harts and Audaxes began to take off again, howling overhead to gain altitude as the Dakotas were reported on their way in. As they clawed for height, they were followed by the slower Gordons, then the first of the Oxfords began to move towards the gate, ready for their rush through it on to the airfield. As they did so, there was another flurry of shelling from the escarpment, as if the Irazhis were trying to get in as many shells as they could before the bombing swamped them.
The Oxfords, still bright yellow in their training colours – and with the cupola and the bubble windscreen attracting attention as they caught the sun – stood out stark against the dusty brown landscape. A few shells fell on the airfield, but it didn’t deter them and they began to roar down the runway one after the other and lift into the sky. As they climbed, Darling began his running commentary.
‘Audaxes going in now, sir,’ he said. ‘My word, they’re low today!’
As they levelled off, he took up his place in the moulded bomb-aimer’s Plexiglass window and reported that he was ready. They could see the Dakotas beneath them, coming in to land one after the other and the puffs of dust they trailed behind them as they touched down and headed for the gate and the safety of the hangars. By the time everybody had dropped their bombs, the Irazhi guns were almost silent.
Going down to rearm and refuel, the Oxfords followed one after the other, while the Gordons did their death-defying dive-bombing act to allow them to get in. By the time the Gordons were ready to land the Harts would be available to take their place. It was a technique that had not been thought out but had been developed by individual pilots and followed by others. There were always aircraft in the air, bombing and firing their machine guns to prevent the artillery on the escarpment from shelling the airfield, and as soon as a new batch of machines had lifted off to take their places, their protectors went down for their turn at rearming and refuelling.
As Boumphrey climbed from his machine, the Dakotas were already in place, their engines silent, their doors open and men passing down cartons and crates to ground personnel waiting beneath them. The old Valentias seemed to have been left behind and the work was now being done entirely by the Dakotas which were faster and more manoeuvrable than the huge biplanes. The catering officer was gesturing to the piles of sacks, cartons and boxes he was gathering around him and, as fast as they appeared from the aircraft, they were pushed into lorries and driven away. Armourers were handing down boxes of ammunition and bombs and Sergeant Porlock, the artificer from the Royal Artillery, arrived to take command of several boxes of 4.5 shells for the howitzers from outside AHQ.
As the first aircraft was emptied, lorries and cars began to arrive, their occupants clutching their few remaining possessions. A child was wailing, its thin cry coming over the sound of a revving engine and the shouts of men pushing Blenheims into position so they could get out ahead of the transports. Among the civilians, Boumphrey spotted Prudence. She was with her father and two RAF medical orderlies, trying to get a stretcher containing the wife of one of the Indian bearers aboard a Dakota.
‘Bomb?’ Boumphrey asked.
She helped push the stretcher up to the reaching hands and, as it vanished inside the aeroplane, she turned and gave him a smile.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Baby. Due any time. She’s terrified for it because of the shelling and we decided she was better off where it was quieter. She’s been sedated. By the time she comes to life again, she’ll be where it’s safe.’
She waited with Boumphrey as the Dakotas began to manoeuvre for their rush at the gate and on to the airfield. She was stooping with tiredness and there were small dark circles under her eyes.
‘Are we winning, Ratter?’ she asked.
Boumphrey wondered. The Irazhis had broken the river bank beyond Kubaiyah to allow the river to pour out across the open plain and there was news that Fawzi ali Khayyam had arrived outside the fort at Hatbah with around 2000 of his A’Klab tribesmen so that Craddock was now more securely trapped than ever.
‘Well–’ he gestured ‘–so far we’re not losing.’
Just how long they could keep it up, however, he didn’t know. What they had achieved so far had been due to unremitting labour and sheer cheek but it still seemed only a matter of time. Once the water tower was hit that was that.
The Audaxes were in the air now, wheeling beyond the airfield for their attacks on the escarpment. The Harts followed, and Boumphrey took Prudence’s hand and squeezed it.
‘Me, now,’ he said.
Darling sat silently as he did his checks. Through the Plexiglass, he could see the explosions in the distance as the Audaxes went into the attack, then ahead of him the Blenheims began to move, one after the other, heading as fast as their pilots dared for the opening in the fence. The Mercury engines snarled as they made a swift turn on to the airstrip, then they were roaring down the field, trailing the usual cloud of brown dust. As the last one vanished, Boumphrey released the brakes and opened the throttle. As he moved forward, the Blenheims howled across the airfield, heading east.
‘Somebody’s going to get a nasty shock when that lot arrives,’ Darling observed.
By the time they had achieved height, the Audaxes and Gordons were already pinpointing targets. One of them screamed past the nose of the Oxford, its siren going so they could hear it even over the roar of the engines, then it went into a near-vertical dive almost to ground level and they saw it scooting along at low level to lay its bomb on one of the gun positions. They saw the flash and the puff of smoke and dust, and running figures, then, howling along the plateau, forcing the Irazhi gunners to keep their heads down, they watched the Dakotas move out from behind the hangars, one after the other, and take off towards the south and safety.
Dropping their bombs, they swung round for their landing, put the wheels down quickly and scuttled along the field towards the hangars as fast as they could while a new flight of Audaxes roared backwards and forwards along the escarpment to give them protection. Jumping down, they were told a lorry was dispensing drinks on the road to the polo ground. As they stood by it, a solitary aeroplane appeared over the airfield.
‘What’s that?’ someone asked. ‘One of ours?’
‘Must be. There’s been no warning.’
Since the air-raid warning system consisted only of the station accounts officer or the education officer on the roof of AHQ with a pair of field glasses and a large bell, this was no guarantee of safety, and the first speaker stared again at the approaching machine, his eyes narrow with suspicion.
‘It looks like a Savoia to me,’ Darling said. ‘Think it’s a bomber?’
‘Not for a minute. It’ll be a photographic machine.’
For a second there was silence and they were all watching tensely when they heard the scream of the bomb. They all flung themselves down, the lorry with the drinks promptly bolted, scattering mugs and food, and the machine guns round the airfield, which up to then had been silent, began to fill the air with streams of tracer. The bomb struck alongside the road, and a tree was stripped of its leaves as if by a miracle and a huge shower of earth, stones and sand went up. Lifting his head, spitting out grit beneath the shower of descending leaves, Darling glared.
‘The bugger must have dropped his camera,’ he said.
As the drinks lorry returned and they snatched a hasty meal of sandwiches, they could see the shells falling again and once more the bets started.
‘Up fifty fils they get the water tower today.’
‘Not they. They couldn’t hit a pig in a passage.’
‘They hit me!’ The voice was indignant. ‘Yesterday. As I came in. The bloody aeroplane looked like a sieve!’
The Oxfords took off again an hour later. The sun was high by this time, glinting off the iron roofs of the buildings and picking up glints of metal from the escarpment. Darling’s first effort was off-target and Boumphrey suggested they went lower.
Swinging round, he put the nose down and the sp
eed began to build up as the Armstrong Siddeley Cheetahs began to howl. Puffs of smoke appeared on either side of them but Boumphrey held the machine steady. It was shuddering a little now; then, as the speed built up further, there was a tremendous crash and debris flew in all directions through the machine. Boumphrey ducked, thinking for a moment they had received a direct hit, but they were still flying and as he glanced at the air speed indicator he realised he had blown in the bomb-aimer’s Plexiglass window.
Part of the nose was hanging loose and flapping noisily so that it sounded as though the aeroplane was falling apart. Darling was looking terrified as he held on by his toenails.
‘You all right, Darling?’ Boumphrey asked, pulling the stick back gently.
‘Yes, sir. What happened?’
‘It was me. The Ox-box’s top speed’s reckoned to be around two hundred miles an hour. I think I overdid it a touch.’
A gale of wind was blowing through the hole in the nose and Boumphrey looked about him to see what other damage had been done. The interior of the machine was full of pieces of wood and Plexiglass but the Armstrong Siddeley engines seemed still to be full of health and vigour. He tried the flaps and undercarriage.
‘Everything seems to be working,’ he announced. ‘How about bombs?’
‘I didn’t let them go, sir.’
‘Well,’ Boumphrey said, ‘we’d better not waste ’em.’
They landed with the loose Plexiglass swinging wildly. A machine gun was firing across the field and to their surprise they saw holes being punched in the fuselage.
‘Here, too?’ Boumphrey said irritatedly.
As he approached the gate the man on duty there waved them away.
‘We’re falling apart,’ Boumphrey shouted but he was still waved peremptorily away, so he circled as fast as he dared, expecting all the time the machine guns to open up again. But by this time armoured cars had appeared and were heading across the airfield at full gallop, their guns going. Beyond the perimeter, near the old rifle range, they saw Irazhi soldiers rise from behind a small bank and start to run for the slopes carrying a machine gun. With the machine gun fire stopped, the armoured cars continued to move about, careful not to offer themselves as targets for the heavier guns on the escarpment.
The Gordons were emerging through the gate and, as the last one swung on to the airstrip, a man stepped out and waved a green flag. As they passed through, a machine gun opened up from higher on the slopes and they saw chips flying from the brickwork of the buildings and heard more bullets being punched into the Oxford. As they swung round to a stop behind the hangars, what was left of the Plexiglass fell off.
The station engineering officer’s face appeared in the hole. ‘What in God’s name did that?’ he demanded.
‘Mice,’ Boumphrey said.
‘Don’t be bloody silly, Ratter!’
‘Solid air,’ Boumphrey explained. ‘We went down a little too fast.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I would say it was a sort of dive-bombing.’
The engineering officer glared. ‘Oxfords weren’t designed for dive-bombing,’ he snapped. ‘They’re supposed to be three-seat advanced trainers for aircrew training.’ Then his expression softened. ‘All the same,’ he admitted, ‘it was probably a good try.’
‘Ten for effort.’
‘You hurt?’
‘Neither of us.’
‘You’re bloody lucky. You might have lost the wings.’
As they studied the damage, the chief flying instructor’s clerk appeared from the operations room.
‘Chief Flying Instructor wants you, sir,’ he said.
To get there Boumphrey had to go through the hangar where an aeroplane was propped up between crutches, the undercarriage legs hanging down. Two cowlings were off and half the starboard wing was missing. Fitters and riggers were doing wonders with spares – begged, borrowed or cannibalised – and were already on the way to fitting a new wing.
As Boumphrey appeared, Fogarty was red in the face with rage. ‘What the hell do you mean, going up? You know you were told to stand down because of tonight’s operations!’
Boumphrey pulled a face. ‘Thought we were a bit short, sir,’ he said.
Fogarty sighed. ‘Sit down, Ratter,’ he said, pushing a cigarette case across. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Bit tired. But not too much.’
Fogarty looked at Boumphrey. He was a strange young man but the older officer had a great regard for him. Boumphrey, he’d noticed, was always scrupulously polite to everyone from the senior officer to the lowest airman or native bearer. He was shy and, as Fogarty knew, vaguely ashamed of his sense of duty, especially of showing it in front of others. Yet behind his odd self-effacing attitude there was a curious confidence, a strange solid belief in his own ability, an indifference to the opinion of others, as if he didn’t find it necessary for anyone else to appreciate what he was doing, so long as he understood it himself.
‘You look like death, Ratter,’ he said. ‘You’ve been doing too much.’
‘Not much choice, sir, is there?’
‘There is for the moment. Push off, get a meal and a couple of drinks and arrange to be called for tonight. Then get your head down and go to sleep.’
Even now Boumphrey seemed unwilling and Fogarty pushed his lighter across. ‘This is your third narrow escape, Ratter,’ he said. ‘Nobody can keep that up. Courage’s an expendable thing. That’s something the RAF discovered while the army was still shooting shell-shocked cases for cowardice.’ He paused. ‘That was a pretty brave thing you did, you and young Darling, trying to save that Wellington.’
Boumphrey’s eyes widened. He hadn’t known that the CFI was aware of it.
‘And that was an inspired bit of flying when your machine caught fire yesterday.’ The CFI smiled. ‘I must admit it wouldn’t have occurred to me, but it’s a pretty obvious solution really. The wings carried the petrol and the wings were on fire. What better than to get rid of the wings.’
‘Made manoeuvring a bit difficult,’ Boumphrey admitted, a small smile of his own appearing. ‘Flew like a brick.’
Fogarty sat back. ‘Can you cope with what’s planned for tonight?’
Boumphrey considered. As he did so, the CFI studied him. He was by no means the sort of figure that the RAF put into its recruiting adverts, but after his inspired showing in the last two days, Fogarty realised he had been misjudging him badly. Flying often took time to come to some people. While some grasped the essentials at once, with others it was different, though when the knack was acquired these men were often better pilots because they had learned to be cautious, too. There was a saying among aircrew that at 100 hours a pilot thought he knew it all, at 1000 he was sure he did, and at 10,000 hours he was beginning to realise he had a lot to learn. Boumphrey seemed to have acquired both caution and knack simply by having them thrust on him.
Six
The mess had been hit again, the bar had holes in the roof and somebody was complaining bitterly about a fusillade of bullets that had slapped into the walls as he was writing his report.
‘It was a bit bloody disconcerting, I can tell you,’ he said. ‘Made my spelling go all to pieces.’
There were glass and wood splinters on the floor and an Indian bearer was sweeping up the debris, one eye on the window, his head cocked for the sound of bombs and shells. A temporary bar had been set up at the end of the anteroom and the native barman handed Boumphrey his drink quickly and dodged back into the cubby-hole where he kept his wares just in case.
Boumphrey swallowed his drink, called for another one, and headed for his room. The shelling was still going on and he could hear the crump of shells all the time around him. Underneath his bed, Archie, the dog, was whimpering a little at the crash of explosions, but when a near miss brought dust down from the roof Boumphrey joined the dog under the bed. The dog moved closer, still whimpering.
‘Cissy,’ Boumphrey said.
The floor wa
s hard and in the end he climbed back on to the bed and took the dog with him, by this time probably less frightened than Boumphrey.
He was awakened a lot sooner than he had expected and he was surprised to find it was Verity who had disturbed him. He turned over, pushed the dog to the floor and sat up.
‘Plans have changed,’ Verity said. ‘They’ve planted guns at the other side of the river and they have to be knocked out.’
‘Where?’
‘Bisha. Where that clot, Craddock, had his troop of Dragoons to watch the northern perimeter. The idea was that they were to form a strongpoint with their machine guns against any attempt to get round that side. But, of course, the fathead collected them – and their guns – and now the whole bloody lot are trapped in the fort at Hatbah.’
‘And Bisha?’
‘The station education officer saw Irazhis moving into position from the top of AHQ. There are four guns and so far they’ve only fired ranging shots but from there they could hit AHQ, the hospital and Workshops, and they’re a lot nearer the water tower. We expect them to come into action tomorrow.’
Boumphrey blinked away sleep. He had been dreaming that he was at home in England and he was finding it hard to absorb what Verity was saying.
‘We’ve got to take them out,’ Verity was continuing. ‘From where they are they can send shells straight across the polo ground whenever they like. They could knock off every machine we’ve got there.’
Showering and having a badly needed shave, Boumphrey stared at his face in the mirror, aware that if the water tower was hit all such ablutions would have to cease abruptly. He had often listened to Wood-Withnell on the sufferings of the men trapped in Kut and he could see similar problems in Kubaiyah. Every drop of water would have to be brought from the river and boiled and, for the number of people still in the encampment, that was a task that was clearly beyond possibility.