Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  “Thank you. The predicted winds,” the Met man began, and paused.

  “Are wrong,” the crews all said, and laughed. He smiled sadly and waited for their chatter to fade.

  “Old squadron tradition,” Bins murmured to Skull. “Brings them luck.”

  “About convoys,” Skull said softly. “There may be more up-to-date gen in one of those messages I gave you.”

  “Nothing crucial, you said.” Bins was searching the notes. “God damn it all to hell. A new convoy. Bloody damn and buggery.”

  “Surely it’s not too late—”

  “Not the point. Corrections are bad form. The chaps don’t like them.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You’ve put up a black, old boy.”

  When the Met man finished, Bins announced new convoy information: on the outward flight it would be northward, off The Maze; returning, northward off Thorpeness. “Avoid it,” he said. Nobody laughed at that. “A final reminder: beware of intruders. The Hun likes to prowl around East Anglia. You’re never home until you’re home.”

  A voice at the back said, “Pity the bloody convoys can’t shoot down the bloody intruders.” That won a rumble of approval.

  Briefing ended. A group captain wished them luck. The crews stood up and waited while the briefing officers left.

  Outside, the Wingco paused to look at the sky. Two layers of broken cloud, at greatly different heights, were moving in slightly different directions. “A spot of fog early on, to keep the intruders away,” he said, “then clearing in time to let our chaps get down. That would suit me nicely.”

  “Alas, fog is not normally so obliging,” the Met man said.

  “It’s been some time since an intruder got a kite, sir,” Bins said.

  “Is it? I’m not so sure. If we find a German cannon-shell in a wreck, does that mean the Wimpy got hit over Germany, staggered home and fell to bits in the air? Or did an intruder clobber it over King’s Lynn just as the crew relaxed?” Nobody had an answer. “Jerry’s bloody cunning. I wish I knew what his tactics are.”

  “We use intruders, too, sir,” Skull said.

  The Wingco’s head rotated like a hawk locating a sparrow. “What’s that got to do with the price of apples?”

  “If our intruders are successful over France, sir, perhaps we should ask them to tell us their tactics.”

  The Wingco grunted. He pointed to the Operations Officer, who had kept himself in the background, “Some fool has parked a Lagonda in my space outside the Mess. Tell the adjutant, would you?” He strode away.

  The Ops Officer said softly, “Nobody on the squadron owns a Lagonda.”

  “I do,” Skull said.

  “Well, you’ve just put up a black. Move the bloody thing, fast.” He hurried after the Wingco.

  “How was I to know?” Skull asked.

  “Well, you know now,” the Met man said.

  “A Lagonda,” Bins said. “That’s a bit rich, for a flight lieutenant.”

  “My aunt gave it to me. She can’t get the petrol, Lagondas being large and thirsty.”

  “Pug Duff drives an MG,” the Met man said. “Not large. Quite small, in fact. Like him. Lots of zip. Also like him. I’d say you’ve put up a considerable black.”

  “Nothing new,” Skull said. “When’s dinner?”

  4

  By sunset, the sky had cleared, with just a few faint scribbles of yellow cloud at great height. The air was mild. A breeze barely ruffled the grass. Skull and the Ops Officer stood outside the Operations Block and watched time pass.

  The Ops Officer’s name was Bellamy. He stood as if he were at ease on a parade ground: shoulders squared, hands linked behind his back, feet at ten-to-two, calves braced. He was a squadron leader with a pilot’s wings, and he was twenty-six. Bellamy had been in the RAF since he was sixteen, and he would have felt uncomfortable standing in any other way. He was lean and spruce, and he always looked alert.

  “Curious, sir, isn’t it?” Skull said. Unlike Bellamy, he was slightly round-shouldered, and he wore his uniform as if he were looking after it for a friend. “Here we are, doing this, and they’re over there, doing exactly the same. Wouldn’t it be odd if one day both sets of bombers met in the middle?”

  “Highly unlikely,” Bellamy said. “They usually cross the Channel from bases in France, Belgium maybe. We nearly always go out over the North Sea.” He stopped. What he had said sounded like an arrangement, even an agreement. “Not on the cards.” End of discussion.

  Airmen were lighting a row of gooseneck flares, which dimly outlined the flare-path. “We’d better stooge over to the caravan,” Bellamy said. They walked to his car. “Have you a nickname?” he asked. “Intelligence Officers usually do.”

  “I’m Skull, sir. Short for Skelton.”

  “Drop the ‘sir,’ Skull. Save it for formal occasions.”

  They set off. “Have you a nickname?” Skull asked.

  “It used to be Butcha, because I looked so young. Butcha is Hindustani for boy.” Bellamy did not smile; he rarely smiled unless he thought smiling would improve morale. “Complete change of cast since then,” he said. “Nobody remembers that stuff.”

  The caravan was really a four-wheeled trailer, painted a bold checker-board all over, parked near the takeoff end of the flare-path. A Perspex dome, big enough for a man’s head, was fitted to the top.

  Around the perimeter, Wellingtons were starting up and pilots began testing their engines. Each roar grew and grew until it had the harshness of a challenge. As it fell away, another challenge took over.

  Two airmen stood up when the officers climbed into the caravan. One man was in charge of an array of radio equipment; the other was wearing earphones. “Anything yet?” Bellamy asked him.

  “R-Robert’s got trouble with the oxygen, sir,” the man said. “They’re changing some bottles.”

  “Thank you.” Bellamy took the headset and stepped onto a wooden box. Now his head was in the dome. “Give Flight Lieutenant Skelton a set, please. I want him to hear this.”

  At first Skull heard nothing but the slush of atmospherics. The radio operator gave him a chair and poured him some coffee. Then a voice said: “E-Easy to Sandstorm.”

  “Sandstorm receiving you, E-Easy,” Bellamy said.

  “E-Easy, request permission to taxi.”

  “You may taxi, E-Easy.”

  After that a steady stream of requests came from other captains: J-Jig, F-Fox, B-Baker, M-Mother, R-Robert. Then the first Wellington asked clearance for takeoff. “You are clear for takeoff, E-Easy,” Bellamy said. His head slowly swiveled as he followed the bomber. Skull freed one ear to listen to the charging bellow.

  “E-Easy airborne at nineteen oh five,” Bellamy said. The airman wrote it down. There was a long pause while Bellamy watched the navigation lights get smaller and higher, before he gave the next Wellington clearance. Nobody seemed in a great hurry. It took twenty minutes to get the flight away. “Thank you,” Bellamy said as he returned the headset. “Jolly good coffee,” Skull told the radio operator.

  They drove back to the operations block. “So what happens now?” Skull asked.

  “Oh, the usual. Dinner in the Mess. I believe there’s a good film at the station cinema. Charles Laughton.”

  “I meant the raid. I was surprised we didn’t wait to see them in formation.”

  “Not a hope. The chaps tried night-flying in formation last year. Wellingtons collided with tedious regularity. Awfully dark up there.”

  “So each bomber makes its own way to the target. And then bombs individually?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that multiply the risk of error?”

  “Quite the reverse. It multiplies the chance of success. Fly as a group, and if your Master Navigator goes wrong, everyone goes wrong.” Bellamy spoke crisply. He did everything crisply; he believed it was crucial that everyone understood exactly what to do, or men died unnecessarily. “This isn’t like Fighter Command,” he said. �
��This isn’t smash-and-grab in the sky and then home to pick up your popsy. Bomber Command is in the long-distance business of delivering high explosive by the ton, to the door. We think about it very carefully.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Have you met the station commander? Group Captain Rafferty. Grand chap, fine leader. Come on.”

  They went in. Rafferty was standing in the middle of the Ops Room, whirling a black telephone by its flex. Three Waafs, seated at desks, watched him. “Ask me what I’m doing,” he said to Bellamy.

  “Yes, sir. What—”

  “I’m trying to strangle this raving fool on the other end.” Rafferty caught the phone and shouted into it: “Listen! I don’t want your excuses and I don’t need your apologies! Simply tell the airman who endangered R-Robert that if he ever installs a faulty oxygen bottle again I shall personally …” He jammed his shoulder against the phone and put his hands over the ears of the nearest Waaf. “I shall personally seek him out and ram it up his ass.” He removed his hands and hung up the phone. “You didn’t hear that, did you?” he asked a different Waaf.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you didn’t understand it, did you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Disgraceful. Who’s this?”

  “Flight Lieutenant Skelton,” Bellamy said. “New Intelligence Officer.” Skull saluted.

  “Ah-ha.” Rafferty perched his backside against a table-map that half-filled the room. “Oh-ho. Mr. Skelton.” He put his head back and stared down his nose. “Did D-Dog get away on time?”

  “It did,” Bellamy said.

  “I hear you escaped from Fighter Command, Mr. Skelton.”

  “I was expelled, sir.”

  “I thought as much. Air Ministry recommended you very strongly. Always a bad sign. What did you do?”

  “I raped an air vice-marshal,” Skull said.

  Bellamy’s teeth clenched but the Waafs didn’t even blink. Neither did Rafferty. “What with?” he asked.

  “The truth, sir.”

  “I bet that hurt. Well, this is a different world. Many years ago, people asked me to fly fighters, do all that tomfoolery at air shows—formation aerobatics, wingtips tied together with ribbon. Make the crowd go Ooh-ah. I chose bombers. Never regretted it. A chap can have a real career in Bomber Command. Bombing is what airplanes are for. The rest is frills.”

  “I quite agree, sir,” Skull said. “The trouble with Fighter Command is it’s all smash-and-grab in the sky and then home to pick up your popsy.”

  “Huh.” Rafferty stared at Skull, stared so hard that Bellamy chewed his lower lip and hurt himself. “Huh,” Rafferty said again. “Well, I’ll be in the Mess.” He went out.

  “I’ll show you where we do the interrogations,” Bellamy said.

  They went through a corridor to an adjacent hut. Long trestle tables, many wooden chairs, Air Ministry posters defaced by aircrew impatient to tell their story and go for their bacon and egg. Bellamy kicked a chair aside. “You just put up a black,” he said. “The groupie won’t forgive you in a hurry.”

  “For what?”

  “Smash-and-grab in the sky. Home to pick up your popsy. That’s his line. Bad enough that you stole it, but you threw it in his face! Poor show, old chap. Very big black.”

  “If I stole it, you stole it first.” Skull couldn’t take this seriously.

  “Not where he could hear me, for God’s sake.” Bellamy rapped his knuckles on the table.

  “Well, he should be flattered.”

  “Listen: these things matter. Rafferty doesn’t like Intelligence Officers. He thinks they get in the way. Frankly, I agree. A man who hasn’t flown has no right to question aircrew.”

  “I’ve flown. Went to Le Touquet in September 1939, in a Bombay troop-carrier. I was sick.”

  “Take my advice: don’t mention it here,” Bellamy said grimly. “It won’t improve your credit.”

  “What will?”

  Bellamy wanted his dinner. “Fly on ops and get shot down in flames,” he said. “The chaps will respect you for that.” He left. Skull hurried after him, and just got a lift to the Mess.

  5

  Despite changing some bottles, R-Robert still had oxygen trouble. Only the navigator was affected, but that was more than enough to worry the whole crew. If the navigator couldn’t think straight, they might end up anywhere. France. Poland. The Alps.

  The first hour was simple. They crossed the North Sea at five thousand because there was cloud at six thousand and the pilot wanted to get a good pin-point fix on the Dutch coast.

  The fix was positive: Walcheren, on the point of the Zeeland peninsula. It placed them twenty miles east of track: twenty miles off course. That might mean several things. Maybe the predicted winds had changed. Maybe a weather front was late. Or early. Maybe the navigator’s threes looked like his eights.

  Or maybe the compass wasn’t feeling very well.

  The pilot was Gilchrist, the ex-actor. It was a long time since he had put Rafferty straight about Shakespeare. Now he was a veteran, on his twenty-sixth op. Soon colored beads of flak began reaching for the Wellington. The pilot climbed into cloud and out of it, and kept climbing to fourteen thousand feet, by which time everyone was breathing oxygen.

  Twenty minutes later the wireless op spoke on the intercom. “Something’s wrong with the nav, skipper.”

  “See what it is,” Gilchrist told the second pilot.

  He went back and found the navigator lying beside his chair, with the wireless op kneeling beside him, fixing his oxygen tube to a fresh bottle, turning the supply up to maximum. No effect. The second pilot squeezed the tube and found a blockage: ice crystals. He crushed them, and within seconds the navigator stirred. They got him back on his seat. They had to hold him: he was as limp as a pillow. He stared at the chart on his table. The course he had been plotting became a wobbly line that trailed to the edge and fell off.

  Gilchrist went down to eight thousand, where they could all breathe normally. The navigator drank some coffee.

  “How d’you feel?” the second pilot asked.

  “Better.” There was dried blood on his face. He must have banged his head when he blacked out.

  “Can you take a star shot?” Gilchrist asked.

  “I can try.”

  “Flak behind, skip,” the rear gunner said.

  “Thank you. And searchlights ahead.” A small forest of lights had sprung up, restlessly slicing the night. “No loitering here, I think.” He banked the bomber through a quarter-circle and climbed away. In five minutes they were all back on oxygen.

  “New course, skip,” the navigator said. “Steer one seven five degrees.”

  “One seven five. How far to target?”

  “Couple of hundred miles. I’m working on it.”

  “Good show. Everybody else, watch out for fixes.”

  But the German blackout was total. The navigator went to the astrodome and tried to take star shots. He took so long that Gilchrist told him to forget it. “Damn stars keep jumping about,” the navigator said. He went back to his charts, and saw tiny sparks wandering at the edge of his vision. He decided not to tell the pilot.

  The wireless op moved to the astrodome and searched for fighters. An hour passed: an hour of steady, battering noise and broken cloud. By dead reckoning they were over Mannheim. But nothing had changed: empty sky above, deep blackness below, patchy cloud between.

  “Bugger this for a lark,” Gilchrist said. “Can’t anybody see the Rhine?” Mannheim was on the Rhine. “Bloody great river, full of water. It’s got to be down there somewhere.” Nobody answered. “We’ll go down and take a dekko,” he said. As he began a wide spiral the wireless op said: “Bombs exploding, starboard.” The yellow splashes were very small. Mannheim turned out to be thirty-five miles away. Thirty-five miles off course.

  “Bloody winds,” the navigator said. By then he was in the nose, squinting through the bombsight. His tiny sparks were still wandering
.

  6

  Later the RAF called it debriefing. In 1941 it was interrogation. The station commander and the CO attended but the Intelligence Officer did the work.

  Skull stood behind Bins and watched him work. The first crew home was J-Jig, at 0120. After more than six hours in the air they were both weary and chirpy, glad to get a mug of coffee with a slug of rum in it.

  The first questions were the crucial ones. “Did you reach Mannheim?” Yes. “Did you identify the target?” The navigator (and bomb-aimer) said it was as plain as day. “Did you bomb the target?” Absolutely. Right on the nose. Piece of cake. “I saw the bombs go in,” said the rear gunner. “Bull’s-eye.” Bins wanted more detail: time on target, color of explosions, any secondary explosions, any fires, color of fires … Then he whizzed through a dozen items: flak, fighters, searchlights, sightings of other bombers going down, decoy fires, any technical problems, weather, winds …

  “Predicted winds were wrong,” the pilot said. “We got blown east until we got a fix on the Rhine south of Mainz. Then it was easy.”

  They were restless. Bacon and eggs waited: best meal of the day. Bins said, “Anything else I should know? No? Thanks. Well done.”

  “Damn good show,” the group captain said.

  Bins took care of M-Mother, then F-Fox and E-Easy. Everyone was pleased: all the Wellingtons had landed. The crews of B-Baker and R-Robert came in together. There was a rush to get to Bins’ table. B-Baker won. R-Robert went to an empty table and dragged out the chairs as noisily as possible. “Shop!” the pilot called. He pounded the table.

  “You know the drill,” Bins said to Skull. “Keep it brief, make it snappy.” He gave him an interrogation form.

  Gilchrist didn’t wait to be questioned. “Found Mannheim. Recognized the target. Bombed the AP.” Skull looked puzzled. “The what?” he asked. “Aiming Point,” the pilot said. The others put on expressions of comic disbelief: the bloody IO didn’t know what an AP was! “Rear gunner saw our bombs straddle the target,” Gilchrist said.