Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “We’ll muddle through somehow,” Kellaway said.

  “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening,” Skull told him. “Already the Luftwaffe can do very nearly what it pleases over the invasion area. We don’t command our own air space any more.”

  “No, no. That can’t be true.”

  “Can’t it? Go and look at the advanced fighter fields. They’ve been knocked silly. Manston’s not working, Hawkinge is a shambles, and with effect from midnight Bodkin Hazel is abandoned. It’s too dangerous. We can’t defend it.”

  That gave them something to think about. In the gloom beyond the brightly lit table, Barton twitched and mumbled in his sleep.

  “So that’s what she meant,” CH3 said. “She knew we were pulling back.”

  “Retreating?” Kellaway said. “We can’t bloody retreat. This is England, for God’s sake.”

  “Come on,” CH3 said. “Let’s get Fanny to bed.” The sirens began to wail.

  Next morning there was a lieutenant of the Royal Engineers at the bottom of a crater beside the officers’ mess. He was trying to defuse a 250-kilo bomb. Breakfast was therefore served at trestle tables set up in the open several hundred yards away.

  It was a splendid morning. Even by seven o’clock the air was warm enough for the pilots to sit in their shirt sleeves. All three squadrons had been released to thirty-minute availability. The table in the ops room was strangely free of plots.

  Fanny Barton saw CH3 coming. “I’d better go and sign some letters,” he said, took his mug of coffee and left.

  CH3 sat with Skull and Quirk. “Doesn’t it ever rain in this country?” he said. “I mean, whose side is God on, for Pete’s sake?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Skull said. “The latest Air Ministry intelligence report on God was eaten by a plague of locusts.”

  “That’s a sign,” Quirk said. “The old bugger doesn’t like us.” He rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes.

  “You ought to be wearing your revolver,” Skull told CH3.

  “At breakfast?”

  “Everywhere and always. Haven’t you heard? Air Ministry’s issued Invasion Alert Number One. Attack imminent.”

  “Jerry can’t invade today,” Quirk muttered. “I haven’t finished my library book.”

  “It makes sense,” CH3 said. “If he attacks like he did yesterday we won’t have any spare fighters to go after his invasion fleet.”

  “Alternatively,” Skull said, “if you take on the invasion fleet then the bombers will have a completely free hand to destroy the sector stations and so on.”

  “Jerry’s finished,” Quirk said into his arm. “Fanny said so.”

  “Excuse me.” CH3 took his plate to another table, where Jacky. Bellamy was reading her notes. “I have a question,” he said.

  “See my agent. I don’t give interviews, remember? Except for money. Do you have money? Lots of money?”

  “Let’s not horse around.” He propped his head on his hand and studied her face. “You’re incredible. How can you look so …” But his mind stopped. He couldn’t think of the word.

  “It’s easy for me. I don’t have to climb the Alps several times a day and fight to the death while I’m up there.”

  “Chipper.” He had remembered the word.

  “How can you do it, day after day?”

  “Dunno. My question is …” But now he had forgotten his question. “Not chipper,” he said. “I remembered chipper … Christ, I’m tired.”

  “Eat your breakfast. Where’s your revolver? You ought to have a revolver.”

  “I can’t eat breakfast with a revolver, for Pete’s sake.” Sideways into his brain slipped the forgotten question. He chewed bacon and let the words assemble themselves, and when they were complete he said: “About the invasion. You told me Hitler won’t invade. In the pub, remember? Then last night you said he can invade whenever he likes. Something wrong there.”

  “No. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

  He groaned softly.

  “Okay, I’ll make it easy,” she said. “Everybody’s looking at the idea of invasion from the British perspective. They’re all saying the British army’s got no guns and the Home Guard’s patrolling the cliffs with Elizabethan pikes and so on, therefore Hitler will do another Poland. Nobody’s looking at it from Hitler’s point of view. I mean, put yourself in Hitler’s shoes. You want to get an army across the Channel. How?”

  “Paratroopers?” Quirk suggested. He and Skull sat down.

  “Paratroopers, maybe,” she said. “But it takes two hundred transport planes to carry a mere five thousand paratroopers. Some get lost, some get shot down on the way. Say four thousand troops make it. Can Hitler beat England with four thousand men?”

  “Obviously there will be a landing by sea as well,” Skull said.

  “Right!” She was so eager that she couldn’t sit still. “Okay! So he comes by sea. How?”

  “Boats,” CH3 said.

  “What sort?”

  “Big boats.”

  “Why?”

  “Obvious. Fast. Strong. Bags of room.”

  “And then?”

  “Then what?”

  “Where do the goddam boats land?” she demanded.

  “One assumes they would go for Dover,” Skull said.

  “No, no, no.” Quirk waved the idea away. “Dover Harbour’s bound to be blocked. And Folkestone. In fact all the harbors near here can be blocked at the drop of a hat. Nothing to it. Piece of cake.”

  “I forgot you were a bloody sailor,” CH3 said.

  “Come on, then,” Jacky Bellamy urged. “You’re Hitler. What now?”

  “Land the troops on the beaches,” Skull said.

  “Fine!” She clapped her hands together. “Now we’re getting nowhere! How?”

  “Barges,” CH3 said. “Lots of flat-bottomed barges. Jerry’s got thousands of them. They go up and down the Rhine all the time.”

  “And what makes them go?”

  “Tugs, usually,” Quirk said. “Some barges have motors but mostly they have to be towed.”

  “So that’s your invasion fleet, is it? Forget the warships and the minesweepers for a minute, just work on getting your troops ashore. They’re on a lot of barges, are they? How many?”

  “Two hundred men per barge?” Skull looked at Quirk, who shrugged. “So five hundred barges would carry a hundred thousand men.”

  “Not enough,” CH3 said. “Double it.”

  “A thousand barges?” She seemed pleased with the way things were going. “Nearly all under tow? Right! What speed?”

  “Depends on the weather,” Quirk said at once. “Flat calm, maybe five knots, but if there’s any chop …” He made a face. “Dodgy bit of water, the Channel. Say you average three knots.”

  “Three knots. Fair enough. At that speed how long is it going to take to get those men across?”

  CH3 began to speak and then changed his mind. “If you want to know the time, ask a sailor,” he said.

  “It all depends on your route,” Quirk said. “Where you leave from and where you’re going to.”

  “What’s wrong with Calais-Dover? Shortest possible route,” said Skull.

  “You’re going to climb up those white cliffs, are you?” CH3 said. “Good luck.”

  “It was only a suggestion.” Skull was nettled. “If you don’t like it, what about landing at Rye? I seem to remember Rye has a nice beach. I went there as a child and it was always very pleasant.”

  “Don’t fancy Rye,” Quirk said. “I’ve sailed all up and down that coast. Lousy currents. Vicious.”

  “I never paddled very far out,” Skull said.

  “Where would you land?” CH3 asked Quirk.

  Quirk gave it some thought, shaking his head as he mentally disqualified one beach after another. “What’ll the weather be like?” he asked.

  “Changeable. It always is.”

  “If the weather’s perfect I can think of two places wher
e you might get ashore. There’s Sandgate, near Folkestone, and there’s Dungeness.”

  “That’s where we’re landing,” CH3 told Jacky Bellamy firmly.

  “I’m not too happy about Dungeness,” Quirk added. “You’ve got a whole string of sandbanks offshore.”

  “Boulogne to Dungeness,” she said. “How long?”

  “It’s not a straight line, I mean to say the tides whizz up and down at a hell of a lick and you have to go up-Channel so you can get carried back down-Channel later … How long? Oooh …” Quirk sucked his teeth. “You’d be lucky to do it in fifteen hours.”

  “Fifteen hours? Agreed? Good. Next question: when are you going to land? What time of day?”

  “Dawn is the usual time, isn’t it?” Skull said. “Surprise the defense and give yourself lots of daylight to fight in.”

  “Hey, wait a minute …” Quirk said.

  “Dawn it is,” she declared. “So when d’you set out? Fifteen hours earlier, yes? That’s 2 p.m. the day before.”

  “We can’t do that,” Skull said. “They’ll see us coming.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Quirk said. “Are you proposing to make this crossing by night?”

  “It’s up to you,” she said.

  “Hundreds of river barges under tow with no lights? All trying to fight their way across those tidal streams? All trying to miss the banks in the middle of the Channel? The Varne, Bullock Bank, The Ridge? Christ Almighty, I’d think twice about making that trip by day, in a good boat. Anyone who tows a barge from Boulogne to Dungeness at night is asking for trouble. Big trouble.”

  “Five hundred barges,” she said. “A thousand.”

  “That’s a formula for disaster.”

  “All right,” CH3 said, “send ’em across by day and make the landing by night.”

  “But then they would be completely exposed to attack en route” Skull said.

  “Not if they’ve got air cover.”

  “It’s not as easy as that,” Quirk said. “I don’t care how many planes you’ve got, it’s still bloody difficult to hit a destroyer doing thirty knots. D’you know what a destroyer looks like from two thousand feet? It looks like a paperclip. Turn me loose with a destroyer and I guarantee I’d carve up those barges long before any air cover got to me.”

  “Where’s the German Navy?” CH3 asked. “Picking its nose in a corner?”

  “What German Navy? I doubt if they’ve got twenty ships they can put together. We sank half their destroyers in the Norwegian campaign.”

  “And we lost ours at Dunkirk.”

  “We lost four,” Skull said. “Out of forty.”

  “If they couldn’t stop us getting the army away from Dunkirk,” said Quirk, “I don’t see the German Navy keeping us off this invasion fleet, do you?”

  “They’ll bloody Stuka you to death,” CH3 said.

  “At night?”

  “But if it’s really dark,” Skull said, “you might not see the barges. They might slip past you.”

  “I’m not talking about one destroyer,” Quirk explained. “I’m talking about forty, fifty, sixty destroyers. And a dozen cruisers and a couple of battleships and Christ knows how many corvettes and MTB’s. All we need is a few hours’ notice.”

  “You’ve still got to hit the barges,” CH3 said stubbornly. “Five hundred barges take a lot of shelling.”

  “Waste of time,” Quirk said. “Have you ever seen the wake a big ship throws up when it’s in a hurry? It’s enough to capsize every flat-bottomed barge that gets in its way. The Navy wouldn’t waste shells on Jerry. We’d sink him with our wash.”

  “Your theory, then,” Skull said, “is that this air battle is irrelevant.”

  “It’s more than a theory,” she said. “It’s a hell of a good story, because it’s based on hard fact. It’s a fact that the RAF alone can’t stop an invasion. If Hitler sends his fleet over by night the RAF won’t even see it, and if his stormtroopers hit the beach at dawn the Luftwaffe will give them an umbrella because right now it’s stronger than you are. However, none of that matters a damn because Hitler’s no mug. He knows he can’t get a thousand little river barges across the Channel while his Navy’s outnumbered ten to one, so he won’t even try.”

  “You’ve missed one thing,” CH3 said. “If the air battle doesn’t matter, why is Hitler going flat-out to win it?”

  “Beats me. Maybe he thinks he can scare you into giving in.”

  “In any case,” Skull said, “the man has very little choice. He’s at war. If his enemies won’t surrender he’s obliged to try and fight them, but at the moment his means are limited. He can’t use his Army. He can’t use his Navy, except for the U-boats. That leaves his Air Force.”

  “Which can’t beat the British Navy,” she said. “So England wins.”

  “No,” CH3 said unhappily. “No, no, no. You’ve got it wrong. You make it sound as if all we have to do to win is not lose. It’s not that easy! You don’t win wars just by not losing. People need a victory, they need to prove themselves. Damn it, Hitler’s knocked over eight or nine countries, he’s beginning to look unbeatable, people are actually starting to believe that master-race crap. What we need is a good juicy victory now, a great big spectacular bloody nose for Hitler. We’ve got to beat the Luftwaffe just to show it can be done.”

  “Even if it hasn’t been done?” she said. “Even if the scores are fake?”

  “I give up,” he said. “Write it any way you like.”

  CH3 went to his room and buckled on his service revolver. The utter fatigue that had overtaken him at breakfast had passed and been replaced by an edgy nervousness. He recognized the feeling: it was his overworked body preparing for another day of scrambles and scraps, death and terror. It was cranking itself up for the usual cruel and extravagant demands of air combat, when the pulse would hammer at double its normal rate, the skin would be drenched in sweat, the lungs would gulp pure oxygen, and the brain would sometimes be starved of blood, sometimes be swamped with it. Another physical and emotional battering was on the way, and his body didn’t like the idea.

  He looked around the room. It was anonymous, meaningless. Suppose he didn’t come back today. Tomorrow someone else would move in. What difference would his leaving have made? None. What difference would his staying make? None either. Nothing he did would alter the outcome of this war. Jacky Bellamy’s clever ideas might even be right, or half-right, or half-wrong, or completely cockeyed. That didn’t matter any more. Nothing he did could save Hornet squadron. Since September began, Fighter Command had been losing the equivalent of a squadron a day. That would continue. Hornet squadron would go on living and dying in its own peculiar, random way. The whole exercise was pointless. It wasn’t his fight. It wasn’t his country. Anyway, he’d done his stint. Everyone said the important thing was to know when to quit. The ones who got the chop were always the ones who never knew when to call it a day.

  He went to find Fanny Barton.

  Instead he found a couple of airmen who said that Fanny’s office had been wrecked by a bomb. They were carrying what was left of his furniture to his new office, formerly a vegetable store. CH3 went with them.

  He watched them prop a broken desk on a couple of milk crates, and go out. He picked a battered squash racket out of a cardboard box and tested the strings. The room smelled of potatoes. Dusty sunlight drifted across it. More men came in and put things down. CH3 noticed his sense of edgy nervousness fading. The old exhaustion was creeping back. Even his eyes had stopped trying: the moving figures lapsed into soft focus. One of them asked him something and it wasn’t until the man had gone that he understood the question. Not that it mattered. He had no answer.

  The door banged open, and he blinked. It was Kellaway, carrying a cracked blackboard and gripping a piece of paper in his teeth. He stood the blackboard on a box and consulted the paper. “Tell Fanny that Micky says the new Hurricanes have been ferried in,” he said, and hitched his trousers as he half-s
quatted. There was a list of old names on the blackboard and Kellaway began chalking up new ones. “And tell him his replacements are here too,” he said. CH3 followed the movement of the chalk but the scribbles failed to register in his mind: they remained just scribbles. “I expect he’ll want to speak to them soon,” Kellaway muttered. He completed the last name and dotted an i, firmly and finally. His knees cracked as he straightened up. He was halfway to the door when he stopped, uttered a little grunt of annoyance, turned back and looked at the board again. He summoned up some spit and moistened his fingers. He smudged out the name Gordon and went away.

  CH3 stared at the ruined lettering until his tears came and made it completely unreadable.

  Fanny Barton walked in as CH3 was scrubbing his face with his handkerchief. “Hello!” he said. CH3 could only nod. Barton looked at the blackboard, and went back and closed the door. “It happened about half an hour ago,” he said. “The medics told me what it was, but I wasn’t listening all that carefully. Delayed shock, I think they said.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it was.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Barton stooped and studied the ghost name under the smudged chalk.

  “You know, Fanny,” CH3 said, “I always thought Flash was different. I thought, they’ll never catch him.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Barton licked his fingers and erased the smudge. Better nothing than a ghost. “I suppose there’s a Flash in every squadron.” He found a bit of chalk and wrote “CH3” in the gap. “Someone you’re convinced is different, and in the end of course he’s just like all the rest.”

  “Flash wasn’t like all the rest. Remember when I nearly murdered him up the apple-tree?”

  Barton laughed. CH3 grinned. He began to feel released, elated. The scruffy, potato-smelling room suddenly seemed brighter, more alive. He found himself laughing too. Everything was very, very funny. In the middle of the laughter the door opened and a chubby, middleaged civilian came in. He wore blue overalls and he was holding a telephone. “GPO engineer,” he announced cheerfully. “Where d’you want your phone, guv?” He twirled the lead.

  “Where d’you want your phone, Fanny?” CH3 asked.