Love, Death, Chariot of Fire
Page 1
LOVE
DEATH
CHARIOT OF FIRE
Winton Higgins
WINTON HIGGINS is a writer and academic. He was born in Sydney in 1941 and holds degrees from the Universities of London, Stockholm and Sydney. After a brief period at the NSW Bar he changed careers to research, write and teach in the social sciences, first at Macquarie University, then the University of Technology Sydney. He has taught genocide studies at both, and sat on the board of the Australian Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies for two decades. As a creative writer he won the 2002 NSW Writers’ Centre’s short story competition, and in 2003 published his Holocaust-themed travel diary, Journey into Darkness. (Brandl & Schlesinger). In 2016 he published Rule of Law (Brandl & Schlesinger), an historical novel about the first Nuremberg trial. He lives in Sydney with his partner; they have two daughters and three grandchildren.
ALSO BY WINTON HIGGINS
Journey into Darkness
Politics against Pessimism
(with Geoff Dow)
The Magnitude of Genocide
(with Colin Tatz)
Rule of Law
Love
Death
Chariot of Fire
A novel
Winton Higgins
Brandl & Schlesinger
First published by Brandl & Schlesinger in 2020
www.brandl.com.au
© Winton Higgins, 2020
The moral right of Winton Higgins to be identified as the author of this work is hereby asserted.
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.
Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover and book design by Andras Berkes-Brandl
ISBN 978-0-6485232-9-1 (print)
ISBN 978-0-6485233-0-7 (epdf )
ISBN 978-0-6485233-1-4 (epub)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
Printed in Australia by Ligare
For Ronja, Lotta and Indra
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
William Blake, And did those feet in ancient time
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 A race
Chapter 2 A binge
Chapter 3 A patriot
Chapter 4 An interview
Chapter 5 A turning point
Chapter 6 A nadir
Chapter 7 A convalescence
Chapter 8 A flop
Chapter 9 A flyer
Chapter 10 A meeting of minds
Chapter 11 A mock-up
Chapter 12 A fortieth
Chapter 13 A prototype
Chapter 14 An ill omen
Chapter 15 A Spitfire
Chapter 16 A doom
Chapter 17 A king
Chapter 18 A battle
Chapter 19 A decline
Chapter 20 A detour
Chapter 21 A departure
Thanks
Chapter 1
A race
It’s Monday 26 September 1927 and Venice has captured the attention of the world. By midday a crowd of some 200,000 spectators has spread out along the city’s four miles of beach which accounts for over half the Lido – the north-south isthmus facing the Adriatic Sea. Behind it lies the lagoon separating it from the city. People are sitting on picnic rugs and beach towels, which they have to keep cramming closer together to make room for latecomers still streaming onto the beach.
Ice-cream vendors are doing a brisk trade as they wheel their carts along the esplanade behind it. Small speedboats bustle between the beach and a pontoon for international officials anchored a hundred yards out from the shoreline. Seagulls wheel and cry out overhead in protest at the invasion of their terrain.
Many in the excited crowd carry flags to wave when the action starts – both the Italian green-white-red tricolour with the House of Savoy’s coat of arms occupying the central stripe, and the black fascist emblem with the rods-and-axe fasces in the middle. The flags that flutter in the breeze from the tall poles lining the esplanade match those of the spectators, though punctuated here and there by Union Jacks.
The same crowd flocked here yesterday to see the international Schneider Trophy contest – a time trial for racing seaplanes – but rain forced its postponement. Today the crowd is back in full strength, undeterred by yesterday’s disappointment, the beginning of the working week, and the cloudbank just visible on the northern horizon.
The spectators have good reason to return. And not just because the sun is shining again. Last year the Italian team set off for Virginia with an order from Benito Mussolini, il Duce himself, to snatch the trophy from the formidable Americans. They had secreted bottles of Chianti in the floats of their three scarlet-painted Macchi M.39 seaplanes stowed in their ship’s hold. The Chianti would lubricate the coming victory celebrations; America’s alcohol-prohibition laws weren’t going to scotch the proper observance of the Italian team’s triumph!
The team steamed home afterwards, the Chianti duly imbibed, the trophy in the bag, together with a new world speed record of 258.5 miles per hour, and the right to run the next contest from home soil.
The trophy itself seems to exude Latin flair and to belong in Italy – where it might well end up staying. The country that wins three contests in a row gets to keep it in perpetuity. It’s a figurine wrought in silver and bronze on a cylindrical marble base: a nude, aerodynamically-sculpted Zephyr swooping down to kiss an ocean wave that’s welling up to meet her lips. The stodgy Americans and British call her the Flying Flirt.
This year the Americans haven’t managed to develop a credible entry in time and are out of contention. As are the French, who inaugurated the contest fifteen years earlier. In front of a home crowd, which includes Crown Prince Umberto and a bevy of other exalted personages, the Italian team has only to beat its British counterpart to retain the trophy and trigger a national celebration without equal.
The Schneider Trophy rules call for a triangular circuit over water; contestants are to fly seven 50-kilometre laps for a total of 350 kilometres. The officials have laid out the course with the spectators in mind: the whole eleven-mile Lido coastline facing the Adriatic from Porto di Lido down to Porto Malamocco constitutes one side of the triangle, the second follows the sandbar south from there down past Porto Chioggia, while the third and longest stretch returns in a straight line back to Porto di Lido.
Each low-flying aircraft will hug the coast, thundering past the crowd at close quarters, fourteen times in all, to complete the course. The spectators will not only see them, but will also hear the screaming engines and breathe in the intoxicating exhaust fumes of high-octane aviation fuel that will displace the briny scent of the sea.
As the starting time approaches, loudspeakers pump out martial music, and the scoreboards spread along the beach display nationalistic fascist slogans. Spectators closer to the southern end of the beach can see the frenetic activity around the Italian hangar; those nearer the northern end can see British technicians running around and shouting as well.
At 1.40 pm the crowd near the southern end erupts as the seaward doors of the Italian hangar slide open and the conical nose of a scarlet Macchi M.52 advances into view. Held steady by six men in waders, the machine rolls down the slipway on its shuttle, from which it breaks free when its floats slice into the water. The single low-slung wings, and the sleek fish-shaped fuselage and cruciform tail section, seem inspired by science fiction. Two more identical aircraft follow it. All three ar
e towed out to their starting positions beyond the pontoon to roars of encouragement from the beach.
Towards the northern end of the beach a group of Union Jack-waving supporters cheers as the three British entries – their fuselages adorned with large RAF roundels – make their own way from their hangar into the water. The locals stare at these strange craft with intense curiosity. Those who’ve done their homework would recognise the biplane as the Gloster Aircraft Company’s Gloster IVB, while the other two are identical monoplanes, S.5s, painted silver and blue. Above the low-slung single wings they’re bereft of the usual struts to secure the wings to the fuselage, the wire bracing is minimal, and their cockpits are set well back over the wing roots. The fuselages, tapering back to an integrated tail, are so slender that they seem barely able to contain an engine and a man behind it.
The ‘S’ stands for Supermarine Aviation Works Ltd – a small firm that owes its name to the quaint logic that if a machine that travels under the water is to be called a submarine, then one that flies above it must be a supermarine. All three British aircraft were designed and built in neighbouring shabby work sheds, leftovers from a disused coal loader on the eastern bank of the River Itchen in Woolston, Southampton.
As the British seaplanes are towed away, a man of medium height wearing a nondescript dark suit, a fedora and a binoculars case slung over his shoulder, hurries out of the rear of the British hangar and makes a dash for the Belle Époque-style Hotel Excelsior diagonally across the esplanade. He is too preoccupied to acknowledge the greetings and bows of the bellhops, but takes off his hat (as one ought when coming indoors) before storming up the seven flights of carpeted stairs two at a time, to reach the roof garden. His brushed-back fair hair and blue eyes are thus revealed. He has a prominent forehead and cheekbones set over a square jaw and a determined chin. The manner of his ascent shows him to be a fit amateur sportsman (cricket, rowing, tennis). He is Reginald Joseph Mitchell, thirty-two years old but already well ensconced in his job as Supermarine’s chief designer. He’s recently taken a place on the company’s board as well.
The Excelsior’s roof garden commands an excellent view of the starting line directly across the water from it. It’s been reserved for British officials and their guests. Around forty individuals, plus five attendants dressed in the hotel’s livery, have spread themselves around the benches and the planter boxes with their ornamental shrubs. Most have come equipped with binoculars, or at least opera glasses. The majority are either embassy and consular staff, or higher-ups in the Air Ministry and the two firms fielding entries in the contest, together with their wives.
Beside the civilians there’s also a small group of RAF officers, members of the High Speed Flight. Mitchell has befriended them while working closely with them over July and early August down at the RAF station at Calshot, the main base for military seaplanes, and easily accessible from Woolston via Southampton Water. This cooperation arose out of the ministry’s decision to support the British team for this event. His wife Florence – a tallish woman in a short-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, fetching white blouse and fawn pleated skirt – stands in their midst. As officers and gentlemen, they’ve taken her under their wing, putting her at her ease on this fraught occasion.
Flo and the air force men turn towards Mitchell and smile, acknowledging his arrival. He smiles back, and exchanges air kisses with Flo, before quickly moving to an empty spot up against the stone balustrade overlooking the beach and the sea.
In his life so far several strokes of good fortune have come his way, the uncanniest of all being his marriage to Flo. She suffers his obsessions and occasional outbursts of frustration without complaint, while divining his needs and then meeting them. Even after their union was blessed seven years ago with the birth of their son Gordon, whom Mitchell’s parents are looking after at their home in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. She’s eleven years older than her husband, and he relies on her added maturity. He wishes he could be even half the spouse she deserves, and he could be but for his thraldom to his fierce twin deities, Flight and Speed.
Right now his burning need is to be left alone as he struggles to contain his anxiety while staying focused on what’s about to unfold on the water below and in the air above it. Of course Flo will know that. Probably the air force men will too. They’ve also had first-hand experience of his so-called artistic temperament. But if they do try to approach him, she will restrain them. He needs to concentrate. Besides, when his agitation reaches its present level he stutters when he tries to speak. He’s normally a sociable man, and the stuttering causes him acute embarrassment.
He has designed several planes before the S.5, including Schneider entries such as the Sea Lion II flying boat which won in 1922. Each test flight and each race has been an ordeal for him. What if he has miscalculated some small but essential detail, killing a man as a consequence? He may become the first person in the world to wear out a slide rule as he calculates and recalculates vital centres of gravity, loads and stresses, over and over again. Those two deities, Flight and Speed, would never forgive sloppy engineering, either at the drawing board or in the works’ construction area.
Mitchell’s anxiety has intensified since the Schneider contest in Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore two years ago. His close friend Henri Biard, chief test pilot at Supermarine, flew the S.4, the immediate predecessor of the firm’s present entries. It was Mitchell’s first monoplane. He’d been determined to cantilever the wings to reduce the drag caused by external struts and wires – excrescences that condemn a plane to fly in a maelstrom of its own self-generated turbulence. He needed a design that would get away from the conventional cobbling together of fuselage and wing that made an aircraft ‘a thing of rags and patches’ in The Mikado’s terms. For the S.4 it meant devising a reinforced, integrated metal airframe to bear the strain of high-speed manoeuvres with minimal external buttressing.
The fastest plane must also be the most beautiful. Mitchell has always been convinced of that. The S.4 was a pristine sculpture of sweeping lines, a revolutionary aeronautical masterpiece. And it performed so well in trials. Henri sang its praises after his numerous test flights in it. But during a test flight on the day before the contest, the S.4 suddenly plummeted into the water, port float and wing first, after rounding the first marker.
Mitchell witnessed the drama from a rescue launch. Miraculously Henri survived the crash, but afterwards couldn’t explain how he’d lost control of the plane. Maybe it was flutter in the wings, or the ailerons. On the other hand, maybe the problem was that Henri had not fully recovered from the influenza he’d contracted on the Atlantic crossing, and he’d lost concentration. He may even have blacked out as he swung around the marker at high speed. Whatever the cause, Mitchell will take the memory of the crash to his grave.
In designing the S.5, Mitchell has retained most of his innovations. It’s a bigger, even more powerful plane than its predecessor. Nevertheless, he's slimmed down the fuselage and floats still further to reduce drag, and had the rivet heads ground down flush with the plane’s skin for the same reason. He’s installed a heavier, 875 horsepower geared engine: a Napier Lion VII, which would add to the stresses on the airframe. To cater for its extra fuel consumption – and to compensate for the reduced space available for the tank in the smaller fuselage – he’s fitted the fuel tank into the starboard float. By making this float heavier he counteracts the tendency for the torque generated by the powerful engine to skew the aircraft’s forward motion to port on take-off.
He’s also added a metallurgist, Arthur Black, to his design team. All that wood and canvas in aircraft construction areas will soon become things of the past, taking the sawdust and stink of glue and size with them. In future he would rely more and more on metal for both airframes and skins, and he’ll need ever more resilient and flexible alloys. Black’s first job was to help him make the S.5 racer as unbreakable and flutter-proof as possible. So it sports a fuselage and floats made of Duralumin plate, reinforc
ed with steel members.
Together they seem to have also solved the problem of cooling such a robust engine, one running at high revs over a long course, by making drag-free sheet-copper radiators part of the wing surface close to the fuselage. A conventional honeycomb radiator, by contrast, would have created a lot of air resistance and critically slowed the plane. And they’ve run slim pipes along the outside of the fuselage to cool the engine oil.
Now the RAF pilots have taken the S.5s up many times, putting them through their paces – looking for their weaknesses to bring to Mitchell’s attention for correction. On the most recent tests they’ve come back empty-handed. ‘Very nice. No snags,’ was their typical comment as they wriggled up out of their cramped cockpits.
But Mitchell hasn’t shaken off the fear of what can happen under race conditions – a fear now exacerbated by affection for the two young flight lieutenants, Sidney Webster and Oswald Worsley, even now climbing up ladders from the tenders into their machines, wearing flying suits, leather helmets and life vests. He’s watching them through his binoculars. The fuselages are so tight that the design team had to take these men’s body measurements before putting the finishing touches to the cockpits. As if the planes were bespoke suits of armour.
He loves their combination of boyish enthusiasm and attention to detail. They’re as fastidious as he is. He could never forgive himself if they came to grief through some mistake of his, however small it might be. Under the new arrangements the RAF and the ministry bear responsibility for the pilots’ safety. Mitchell could never see it that way, though. His last, heartfelt words of advice before they headed for the slipway came down to this: ‘It’s far more important that you chaps come back in one piece than your winning the bloody race!’
Proceedings have stalled down at the starting line. The officials on the pontoon seem to be trying to communicate with on-shore colleagues with a wireless-telephone that isn’t working. The resort to gesticulation and megaphone doesn’t help either, not against the hubbub from the crowd and the loudspeakers.