Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “Popcorn Red Leader, this is Teacake, what is your position?”

  Flash squinted at the silhouetted Hurricane. It was a 109 and he wet himself. He broke fractionally faster than the German and fled into an obliging cloud.

  “Popcorn Red Leader, this is Teacake, what is your position?”

  “Sodding uncomfortable,” he said. His leg was drenched. “Now piss off, you berk.” He came out of cloud and nearly hit a crippled Heinkel being chased by a Hurricane: the bomber jumped at him like a bogey-man, wings spread to grab, the fighter jumped after it, and their shadows flicked his face. They were so close that it took his breath away and he felt faint.

  “Popcorn Red Leader, this is Teacake, vector zero-four-zero.”

  He sucked down a good lungful of oxygen, and the colors slowly brightened. “Listen, Teacake,” he said. “You can stuff your vectors up your ass.”

  Pause. He weaved, and checked behind him.

  “Say again, Popcorn Red Leader.”

  “Stuff ’em up your ass!” he roared. “Ram ’em up your rectum!” The bomber stream seemed to have regrouped. Either that or he had found a second raid. Anything was possible. He was going too fast so he executed a very pretty barrel roll in order to shed speed and came up on the right rear of the stream. The turbulence was terrible. He kept bucking and pitching and losing the target. He closed up even more, fired, and shot himself. That was impossible but everything else had gone wrong and now, as soon as he pressed the button, something smashed into his left arm. It also knocked the stick out of his hand and sent the plane spinning out of control.

  It fell for the best part of two miles, mainly because he was too dizzy and stunned to do anything but flop about in his harness. All the way down, Teacake kept calling, making demands, giving orders. When Flash managed to grip the stick again it was twisted arthritically, but it worked.

  Things could have been worse. He felt battered and feeble but he could still use his left hand on the throttle. Better yet, when he killed off the spin and leveled out he knew where he was. He recognized the A20. That led to Ashford. Turn left at Ashford and you couldn’t miss Brambledown. He decided to share the good news. “Teacake, this is Popcorn Red Leader,” he called. “Returning to base, not feeling very well.”

  “Popcorn Red Leader, this is Teacake. Do not return to base. You must pancake elsewhere.”

  “Oh, balls to that, Teacake.” Flash was feeling relaxed. The cockpit was flooded with gauzy sunlight and the Hurricane was flying itself home quite competently.

  “Repeat, pancake elsewhere, Popcorn Red. You must divert.”

  “Don’t talk turds,” Flash said. “I’ve had enough for one day.” He had a bright idea. The best way to stop Teacake bitching and binding was to keep transmitting. “Put the kettle on, Teacake,” he said. Familiar landmarks came and went. “You’re a stupid pratt, Teacake,” he said. “You’re nothing but a piss-artist.” Brambledown came in sight. Much of it seemed to be on fire. Spitfires were landing and taking off, flying through the smoke. “Here I come, Teacake,” he called, “ready or not.”

  The Hurricane behaved itself beautifully. There were craters all over the place but it taxied between them and delivered him to his usual parking-spot. It was difficult to get out of the cockpit one-handed but he managed it. He was standing on the wingroot, waiting for some giddiness to pass, when a car roared up and a wing commander leaped out. “What the bloody hell d’you think you’ve been playing at?” he shouted as he strode to the plane.

  Flash recognized the voice. “You’re Teacake,” he said.

  “And you, you little bastard, have given me nothing but shit. What in God’s name’s the matter with you?”

  Flash thought for a moment. Cautiously he tugged the gauntlet from his left hand. It was full of blood. He poured the blood over the wing commander. After that he had to sit down, and by the time the ambulance reached him he was unconscious.

  When the day’s fighting was over and the squadron was released, only five Hurricanes flew back to Brambledown.

  Barton had survived intact; so had Quirk and two of the replacements, Jolliff and Fraser. Renouf was in hospital, badly burned: his hands were blackened claws, his legs were charred from the knee down, his face looked as if it had melted into a lump with a few holes in it. Donahue’s parachute had failed to open completely and he had broken his back. Steele-Stebbing and Patterson had made belly-landings. Steele-Stebbing had concussion and double vision. Patterson had a couple of teeth knocked out.

  Nobody said much when they dumped their gear in the crewroom. The air-raid warning sounded as they walked to their quarters, but that wasn’t worth a comment. Nor was the sunset: pure gold, fading upward to a silvery blue. Another blitzy day tomorrow.

  Barton meant to take the new boys to the pub but he lay down on his bed for a moment. It was pitch dark when he was awakened from a sweaty nightmare by the dreary wail of the All Clear. The rags of the dream clung to him like filthy cobwebs—he was landing a plane, twice as fast as a Hurricane, and all the controls were floppy and flabby, like wet cardboard—while the siren played out its bleak and colorless note. He reached above him and found the brass bed-rail and gripped it hard, summoning up reality. It was an old, familiar horror, this nightmare, and he knew how to send it away.

  Too late for the pub. In any case, he wasn’t sure he was fit to drive in the dark. A hot shower did some good. He still needed propping up, so he went in search of Kellaway and found him in his office. “How’s Flash?” he asked.

  “Oh, holding his own, so they say. He’s asleep now. They pumped him full of dope.”

  “That’s good. Fancy a game of snooker?”

  The adjutant was no damn good at snooker and he had a ton of work to clear up. Barton’s voice was flat and his eyes scarcely moved. “What a marvelous idea,” Kellaway said. “That’s just what I need.” He kept up a flow of chatter all the way to the mess. Barton did his best, but after a few words he always dried up and Kellaway had to fill the silence.

  The billiard room was empty. “You go first,” Kellaway said. Barton took a cue, aimed carefully and mis-hit the ball completely. “Bad luck,” Kellaway said. “Have another go.” This time Barton’s hands were shaking so much that his cue-tip kept knocking against the ball. “Tell you what,” Kellaway said. “We’ll have a sandwich and a beer.” He was about to ring for a waiter when Barton stopped him. “No need,” he said. “This is the stuff.” He shook a tablet from a little bottle.

  “Benzedrine,” Kellaway said. “Good, is it?”

  “Dunno why I didn’t think of it before.” Barton swallowed the tablet.

  “Too groggy, I expect. That’s the trouble with being groggy. You can’t work things out properly, can you?”

  “I’ll be all right now. You watch.”

  Within minutes his eyes were brighter, his complexion was fresher, his actions were brisker and he was talking freely.

  “How long have you been taking those?” Kellaway asked.

  “About a week.” He smacked a red so hard that it traveled around the table twice.

  “Don’t they keep you awake?”

  “So what? I can’t sleep much anyway. Your shot, uncle.”

  He was going strong, slamming balls crisply and even potting some, when Jacky Bellamy walked in with CH3 and Skull. “Hello!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m still attached to the Air Ministry wreck-hunters,” she said. “We’ve been checking out this area.”

  “Jolly good show.” He whacked a red and watched with pleasure as it caromed around the table. “Nice to know we’re keeping you busy.”

  She waited until the ball had come to rest. “Not as busy as you might think.”

  Barton swung his cue like a pendulum and looked at each of them in turn. “Never saw such a gloomy lot of sods in all my life,” he said. “Go on, then, tell me the trouble. It can’t be any worse than what’s happened already.”

  “I’ll give you the bar
e facts,” she said. “By my reckoning Fighter Command has been overstating German losses by a minimum of fifty percent and a maximum of two hundred percent over the last few weeks. It averages out at one hundred percent.”

  “Gibberish,” said Kellaway.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She was perched on the edge of the table, and in its brilliant light her features had an unusual strength and clarity. Skull, watching from the side, was briefly amused by the scene: Venus lecturing Mars, he thought, but he quickly challenged his own assumptions. Why should men hold a monopoly of the truth about war? He was ashamed of his arrogance.

  “Let’s look at one short period,” she said, and flipped open her notebook. “August eleventh to August twenty-fourth. Say, two weeks. Total claims: 743 enemy aircraft, of which 107 were said to have been destroyed by flak. That would leave 636 German raiders claimed by RAF fighters. Anybody care to guess how many of those were found? How many of the 743 turned up as wrecks on British soil?”

  Nobody cared to guess.

  “One hundred and thirteen,” she said.

  “A lot fell in the sea,” Barton said. He was standing opposite her, rolling a snooker ball from hand to hand.

  “More than a lot, it seems. According to HQ Fighter Command, nearly all the rest fell in the sea. When they were shown these figures and asked to comment on the discrepancy, the people at Fighter Command went off and studied them and came back and said their reports showed that eighty percent of all enemy aircraft destroyed fell in the sea.”

  “That must be an exaggeration,” Skull said.

  “Why?” Barton asked. “What do you reckon it should be?”

  “Well, assuming this squadron to be typical, I’d say about half-and-half is nearer the mark.”

  “Most of the intelligence officers I’ve talked to agree,” Jacky Bellamy said.

  Barton wrinkled his nose. “More like sixty-forty, I’d say.”

  “Okay,” she said. “As it happens I decided to play safe and make it sixty-forty. Sixty percent over sea, forty percent over land. Here’s how those mid-August figures break down. There were 743 claims in all. If forty percent came down inland, that means 297 German planes crashed where they could be found. As I said, we found 113 wrecks, which is a difference of 184. On that basis, Fighter Command overstated its claims by something like a hundred and sixty percent.”

  “Well, that’s got to be nonsense.” Barton shaded his eyes and looked for CH3. “Where’s the great organizer?” He found him sprawled across a chair in a shadowy corner. “You’re not saying much, CH3. Get your mighty brain in gear.”

  “Those figures only cover two weeks,” CH3 said. “That’s not much of a sample. We’ve been stooging about upstairs for much longer than that.”

  Barton turned and smirked at Jacky Bellamy.

  “I was going to spare you the worst,” she said, “but if you insist …” She turned a page. “The full investigation was backdated to August eighth. No special reason, they just picked a date and that was it. Add up all the claims since August eighth—I mean the official figures, the stuff you hear on the BBC every night—and you get a total of just under fifteen hundred German planes destroyed, plus about five hundred probably destroyed. Suppose only half the probables actually went down. That means the RAF claims it destroyed one thousand seven hundred and fifty German planes in the last month.”

  “Bloody good show,” the adjutant said.

  “One sometimes wonders where they keep coming from,” Skull murmured.

  “Shut up, Skull,” Barton ordered. “There you are, then,” he told her. “That puts the record straight, doesn’t it?”

  “There’s more to come. Monthly totals: RAF claims—seventeen-fifty; German wrecks actually found—three hundred.”

  “You didn’t look hard enough,” the adjutant said.

  “In all fairness,” Skull remarked, “the men from Air Ministry have been doing the looking. Miss Bellamy is simply an observer.”

  “Planes crash in woods, you know,” Barton said. “And lakes, and reservoirs and things.” He balanced the cue on his fingertip.

  Skull said: “One takes your point, Fanny, but that factor can’t account for such a huge discrepancy, can it? I mean, here we have an air battle over one of the most populous corners of this crowded little island, in daylight. It’s very hard to believe that so many aircraft could crash without being noticed.”

  “Observer Corps posts,” CH3 remarked from the corner. “Police. Ack-ack units. Home Guard. Army.”

  “In any case,” Skull added, “our own intelligence experts are very keen to examine German planes.”

  “Well, we couldn’t find more than three hundred,” she said. “Three hundred from seventeen-fifty leaves fourteen-fifty. Assume about half of them in the sea, that leaves an overstatement of about seven hundred. The conclusion I come to is that your official RAF claims are out by upward of a hundred percent.”

  “I suppose you’ll be saying next that we lie about our own losses too,” Kellaway said.

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “No, but you’ve heard the German claims.”

  “Yes, and I doubt if Luftwaffe pilots are any more reliable than RAF pilots.”

  “If you were a man,” Kellaway said, “I’d knock you down for that.”

  “Then you’re an ass,” Skull informed him.

  “Say that again.”

  “Shut up, uncle,” Barton said. The benzedrine was beginning to wear off. “Those are all just figures,” he said to her. “Numbers. Anyone can prove anything by statistics.”

  “Sure. But there’s another side to the profit-and-loss picture, and that’s your bombers. Every night you’ve been raiding Hitler’s invasion fleets, all those barges in Boulogne and so on. Bad flak over there. Plenty bombers don’t come back.”

  “I fail to see the connection,” Kellaway said loftily. “Two separate battles.”

  “It’s one war.”

  “What happens,” CH3 asked, “if you add our bomber losses to our fighter losses and compare them with the German losses?”

  “By my count, the Luftwaffe comes out on top.”

  “Jerry’s on his last legs,” Barton said. “Must be.” He slumped in an armchair and yawned.

  As if to take his place, the adjutant got up and stalked around the room. “What’s the point of all this snooping?” he demanded peevishly. “Traipsing about the country on joyrides, getting in everyone’s way when you can see we’ve all got our backs to the wall … What good does it do anyone?”

  “Come to that,” Skull replied, “what good does it do to rely on thoroughly inaccurate data?”

  “Jerry’s finished,” Barton mumbled.

  “Tell me,” CH3 said, “what are you going to do with all this amazing information?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “A month ago it might have made a big story, but now … I have a feeling the score doesn’t matter any more. Maybe I’ll just file it and forget it.”

  “I know nothing of the newspaper business,” Skull said, “but a statistical analysis of air losses does seem a trifle … thin.”

  “There’s more to the story than that. If I’m right, the implications are pretty staggering. Because if the RAF isn’t winning this battle, then obviously the Luftwaffe isn’t losing it, and that’s what matters.”

  “Wrong,” Kellaway said, booming the word. “Only one thing matters now, and that’s invasion.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” she said. “And if it comes to that, anyone with eyes in his head can see that as far as control of the air is concerned, Hitler could invade tomorrow. So maybe I should write it up big.”

  “I never heard anything quite so contemptible,” Kellaway said. “The very idea is tantamount to an act of treachery.”

  “Stop being such a blimp, uncle,” CH3 said. “If she’s right, don’t you think the Luftwaffe knows it? They can count, they don’t need to listen to the BBC. And if she’s wro
ng, what does it matter?”

  “Blimp,” the adjutant said, wide-eyed.

  “There’s still such a thing as censorship, you know,” Skull told her.

  “Hear that, Fanny? I’m a blimp.” The adjutant sat down.

  “I can always get a story out, if it’s big enough,” she said. “Through the neutrals, through the embassy. There are ways.”

  “And then you’ll be expelled.”

  “I’ve been expelled before. It goes with the job. Talking of which …” She glanced at her watch. “I have work to do. See you all at breakfast, I hope.”

  “Not me,” CH3 said. “We leave with the dawn.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  The door closed behind her. Kellaway got up and peered at Barton. “Bloody women Yank gutterpress scribblers,” he muttered. “What do they know? Our chaps are hitting Jerry for six, aren’t they?”

  “Not while I’ve been around,” CH3 said.

  Kellaway turned and stared, thought about starting an argument, changed his mind, sniffed and said: “Well, we’re certainly holding our own.”

  “Not even that, I’m afraid,” Skull said. “Right now the situation can only be described as desperate, and I’m not talking about men and machines, although God knows we’re scraping the barrel for pilots. What’s really crippling us is the appalling damage to communications. All the sector stations have taken a terrible pounding. If you think Brambledown’s in a mess you should see Biggin Hill. And North Weald. They’re in ruins. And once the ops rooms get knocked out the whole ground control system fails and we’re paralyzed.”

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” CH3 said.

  “I tell you the system’s on its last legs. While you were up this afternoon, three raids came and went without interception. Three raids! And it’s bound to get worse. If the Luftwaffe keeps up these attacks, the entire air-defense system of southeast England will cease to exist in less than a week.”