Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  “You’re a very lucky man. He’s found a place for you in the Desert Air Force.”

  “Egypt.”

  “Probably Egypt to start with. Get you acclimatized. Then Libya, I expect. All depends where the front line is.”

  “I’m going to the Western Desert. You’re getting rid of me.”

  Champion found that quite amusing. “Please don’t overrate your importance, Skull. In fact Air Ministry picked the Desert Air Force because that’s where your old fighter squadron is based. I understand the same CO and adjutant are still serving. Your chance to meet old friends again.”

  “Hornet Squadron,” Skull said. “I got kicked out of Hornet Squadron a year ago. Now I’m getting kicked back into it.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Champion told him. “It’s what I’m here for.”

  They packed up the luncheon stuff and walked to the cars.

  “How can you go on doing your job?” Skull asked. “Counting the aircrew killed, night after night, and knowing it’s so much waste. Death as the price of triumph is one thing. Death as the cost of failure is obscene.”

  “I say!” Champion exclaimed. “That’s good. That really is good. Is it original? Stupid question. Of course it’s original. I must get it down before I forget it …” He took out a pocket notebook and began writing. He was still writing when Skull drove away.

  4

  Silk wrote several letters. Zoë replied with picture postcards of the Tower of London. Finally he got forty-eight hours’ leave and drove to London. He found Zoë at the Albany apartment with a five-month-old baby.

  “The older she gets, the more she looks like you,” Zoë said. “Can you see it?”

  “Only in the squint and the buck teeth,” Silk said. “And perhaps the cauliflower ears.”

  “If you’re going to be vile about her, you can go to your club. Isn’t that what men do?”

  “I haven’t got a club, and when we last met you hadn’t got a baby” He walked away and sniffed a vase of creamy roses. “Is she definitely yours? Perhaps you bought her. You live inside Harrods’ delivery area, don’t you?”

  “My God, you’re in a foul temper, Silko. Did you drive all this way just to be a brute?” She tickled the baby, who chuckled and produced a fine belch. “That’s what she thinks of you.”

  “What about Kentucky? Where are the stretch marks?”

  “Guy Chard-Cox found me a very clever masseur who made them go away. Fingers like Rachmaninov’s, Guy said. They gave me the most delicious frisson. I was sorry when the treatment ended.”

  Silk was searching through a stack of gramophone records. Anything to avoid looking at her. If he looked, he was lost. “You can’t stop cheating, can you?”

  “Can’t I? Well, half the fun of playing the game is cheating a bit.” She was brushing her hair, briskly, cheerfully. “I never denied I had stretch marks. Kentucky was a slight fib. The baby was in Kensington, with my cousin. I mean … Kentucky, Kensington: what difference does it make?”

  “Not much. I bombed Koblenz the other night. It might just as well have been Cologne.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “Come to think of it, it was Cologne.”

  “Stop babbling, and put your hat on. You’re driving us to Kensington, to leave the baby, and then we’re going to Richmond for lunch.”

  He held a record. “‘Embraceable You,’” he said. “I bet Tony gave you this.”

  She put his hat on his head, backward. “Do buck up. Men are so slow.”

  The hotel at Richmond was on the river. They had lunch in the garden. The air was pleasantly mild: autumn was late that year. Silk looked at the clear blue sky and thought: Mist tonight, and immediately put the thought aside. Not his problem.

  He asked the waitress, “What do you recommend?”

  “Well,” she said. “Nobody’s complained about the rabbit casserole.” They ordered rabbit and bottled Bass.

  “This place has gone downhill,” Zoë said. “I remember when …” Her glance flickered toward Silk and away from him. She picked up her knife and polished it with her napkin.

  “Oh, Christ,” Silk said. “You used to come here with Langham, didn’t you?” She hunched her shoulders, and kept polishing. “Well, he’s dead,” he said. “Langham bought it over Mannheim.”

  “Osnabruck.”

  “No. Are you sure? I could have sworn it was Mannheim.” He took her knife away, and gave her his in exchange. “Don’t stop,” he said. “I expect the hotel’s got a few dozen more you can work on.”

  “We shouldn’t have come here, Silko.”

  “Why not? Keep up the good work and we’ll get ten percent off the bill.”

  She threw the knife at him. It bounced off his chest. “I hate you when you’re like this. Like … like a third-rate comedian.”

  “Well, I don’t hate you.” He moved the knife out of her reach. “And your jokes are much worse than mine. Mind you, I’m not in love with you, either. But then, you weren’t in love with Langham, half the time, were you? Ah, grub.” The rabbit casserole arrived.

  After lunch they strolled down to the water’s edge and watched the swans. “That film they were making at Coney Garth,” Zoë said. “It’s on everywhere. Target for Tonight. Huge success, the newspapers say. I’ve seen it three times.”

  “I haven’t seen it once, and I’m not going to. It’s all balls. I bet the kite lands and everyone lives happily ever after. I bet nobody gets the chop over Osnabruck.”

  “You’re never happy, Silko. What would it take to make you happy?”

  He thought about it. “There’s a new bomber called the Lancaster. Twice the size of a Wimpy. It’s got four engines and it carries a hell of a bombload a hell of a long way. I saw one the other day. Beautiful beast.”

  “Mummy used to say you can tell the men from the boys by the size of their toys.”

  They went to the hotel car park. He held open the door of the Frazer Nash. “Well, are we going to get married, or what?” he asked.

  “Not in that tone of voice, no.”

  She got in and he closed the door. He went around to the driver’s side, got in, shut the door. “Why do I have to do all the work?” he said. “You’ve got the vote and everything. You see if you can do any better.”

  “Silko, darling, if I marry you, will you promise to be kind?”

  “Shit and corruption!” he roared. “Of course I bloody will, you bloody silly woman.” He started the engine.

  She gave him a bright smile. “And I shall be kind to you,” she said. “Now for God’s sake try not to die.”

  END

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Damned Good Show is fiction based on fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which. In brief: my account of the war, and the way it was fought by Bomber Command in the first two years, is fact, whereas almost all the characters are fiction. There was no 409 Squadron in Bomber Command (409 was the “last three” of my RAF serial number when I served as a fighter plotter), and although RAF bases dotted Lincolnshire and Suffolk, none was called Kindrick or Coney Garth.

  The Phoney War and the Roosevelt Rules, the policy of shipping searches, leaflet raids and mine-laying are all fact; so are the Blitz and Bomber Command’s long campaign against German targets. Where specific operations are concerned, I have recorded their success or failure as accurately as possible. For instance, it is true that, on December 18, 1940, of twenty-two Wellingtons that entered the Wilhelmshaven area in daylight, twelve were shot down by Me 109 and Me 110 fighters and three made forced landings. The tit-for-tat raids on Scapa Flow (by the Luftwaffe) and on Hornum seaplane base (by the RAF) took place as described.

  Descriptions of the Hampden and the Wellington are as accurate as I could make them. The same applies to their tactics.

  In those days there was no such thing as a bomber stream. Each aircraft made its own, separate way to and from the target. Apart from the pilot, aircrew training was, by later standards, slapdash. In
1939–40, gunners and wireless operators were groundcrew doing an extra job. Some were AC1; a few were AC2—the lowest rank in the Service. Navigating was done by an Observer, a title left over from the First World War. Often the task was given to the second pilot, who might have had a few weeks’ instruction in navigation—during daylight. Before the war, flying by night was not seen to be the function of the RAF. In 1937, when Bomber Command attempted a rare nighttime exercise, two-thirds of the force could not find Birmingham, although the city was brightly lit. The RAF cannot escape all blame for this inadequacy, but by far the greater responsibility lay with successive governments which underfunded the Service. Flying training, especially by night, cost money, and the RAF never had enough. The wonder is that, when war broke out, Bomber Command aircraft found as many blacked-out German cities as they did. What is not surprising is that the RAF lost more bombers to accidents over Britain than to enemy action over Europe. Too many pilots flew into stuffed clouds.

  To give an idea of the persistent difficulty of hitting a distant target in a totally blacked-out Europe, let me quote an experienced RAF night-fighter pilot, Air Commodore Roderick Chisholm, DSO, DFC. On September 22/23, 1943, he was at sixteen thousand feet over Hanover, watching a raid by seven hundred and eleven bombers, nearly all four-engined. (Chisholm’s job was to intercept German night fighters.) “Here, so I thought as we circled high above, was a whole town on fire. The extent of the fires was scarcely credible … I was to discover some months later … that the city had hardly been hit in this raid and that most bombs had fallen in woods outside.” (Cover of Darkness, Chatto & Windus, 1953.) Sixteen bombers were lost that night.

  The cause of the failure was familiar: the forecast winds were wrong. A week later (September 27/28) six hundred and seventy-eight aircraft went back to Hanover. Inaccurate forecast winds misled the Pathfinders. Again, most bombs fell in open country. Thirty-eight bombers were lost. Another week passed. On October 8/9, five hundred and four aircraft attacked Hanover. Twenty-seven were lost—but this time Bomber Command got it right and much of Hanover was destroyed, with huge fires and heavy damage to war industries.

  At first glance, a score of one out of three seems depressingly low. But in this same brief period, Bomber Command attacked seven other German cities in force. Five raids were successful, some highly so. This nightly pounding horrified Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. His forecast for the coming year was that “the British, if they know their business, will be able to blast and burn a major part of the Reich.” The lessons learned by Bomber Command in 1939–41 eventually paid off.

  Filling a thin-skinned airplane with fuel and explosives is hazardous. Accidents with bombs or mines were not frequent but they could be devastating. As McHarg revealed, some pre-war bombs had “sweated” their contents and created a layer of explosive crystals on the outside. A Long Delay Pistol (installed in a delayed-action bomb) could develop a fault which set it working prematurely. If it detonated the bomb inside the aircraft, no evidence would remain. By 1942, some Armaments Officers were aware of these hazards; I took the liberty of bringing McHarg’s knowledge forward a few months.

  Langham’s brush with “stabilized yaw” is a reminder that even the Hampden (which most pilots found enjoyable to fly) could turn round and bite. The trouble was a combination of human error and a design fault in the tail unit. If a ham-fisted pilot made a clumsy turn, the wings and fuselage might block the airflow. The twin rudders and elevators would be useless and the yaw would get worse. At height, the pilot might recover control. At low level, the Hampden toppled sideways and simply fell out of the sky.

  Damned Good Show includes some details of bomber operations that may seem strange, even bizarre. Did Hampdens really carry pigeons? They did. The radio might fail; if the crew had to ditch, the pigeons could take an SOS message back to base. Could a woman be smuggled onto a bomber, as Kate Kelly was? It happened. Usually she was a Waaf, and it was a training flight; but at least one Waaf flew on ops over Germany. Did bomber pilots really find their way home by using factory chimneys and railway signals as signposts? They did. Could Rollo Blazer have fallen to his death through a hole in the floor? The hole is not surprising: bombers landed with all sorts of flak damage; and I know of an instance where the rear gunner left his turret as soon as the aircraft touched down, walked forward and suffered the same fate as Rollo. Is it possible that the millions of leaflets dropped on Germany were classified secret in Britain? They were. When Bomber Harris became C-in-C in 1942, he derided “all the complicated secret document procedure” which Air Ministry ordered for the handling of leaflets, but he could not change it.

  I included an episode in which a retired brigadier complains that practice bombs have disturbed his breeding gulls. His attitude may seem absurd, given Britain’s desperate situation, but there were instances of similar behavior. On a night of foul weather in July 1941, an RAF bomber crashed on Northampton. The chief constable telephoned Bomber Command. “I can’t have this, you know!” he complained. Clearly, many civilians had little idea of the harsh realities of the bombers’ war.

  The catalog of catastrophe told to Rollo and Kate by aircrew was based on fact. In particular, the descriptions of Arctic conditions inside bombers were not exaggerated; quite the contrary. All too often the heating system failed and thick frost or ice formed both outside and inside the airplane. Air so cold it hurt, teeth-jarring vibration, endless din, electrical interference from St. Elmo’s Fire, the lethal ferocity of cumulo-nimbus clouds—all this, and more, formed the regular diet of bomber crews. In addition there was the sheer grind of repeatedly attacking German targets that were more and more heavily defended. The odds were against completing a tour of thirty ops. In these circumstances, RAF Intelligence Officers were understandably reluctant to interrogate crews too closely when they came back from a raid that had been long, demanding, probably frightening, usually exhausting.

  Nearly everyone in Damned Good Show is a fictional character, including those at Crown Films and the Ministry of Information. (Anyone interested in Skull’s posting to the Desert Air Force should read A Good Clean Fight, published by The Harvill Press in 1993 and now republished by Cassell.) Three individuals are real (although I had to imagine their conversations). Professor Lindemann was in fact Churchill’s Scientific Adviser, and it was for Lindemann that David Bensusan-Butt produced the Butt Report, with the help of Constance Babington Smith’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. (Others played major parts in setting up that Unit. For the sake of simplicity, I allowed her to represent them all.)

  It took some time for the Butt Report to be accepted and acted upon, but its findings proved to be a watershed in the bombing campaign. Before Butt, Bomber Command had done negligible harm to Germany, at great cost in men and machines. After Butt, the need for much better methods of navigation and bomb-aiming was indisputable.

  The cinema had a job to do in wartime. Rollo Blazer’s efforts were all my invention, but in 1941 Crown Films did make a documentary about a Wellington crew’s raid on Germany. Target for Tonight used the crew of F-Freddie, from 149 Squadron. There are two ironies. One is that Target for Tonight was enormously popular and boosted aircrew recruitment just at the time when Bomber Command was at its lowest ebb. After the Butt Report, influential voices were saying that Bomber Command was a waste of men, money and materials. Some wanted it abolished. What the film claimed to show was, in fact, what Bomber Command was not doing to Germany.

  The second irony is that Target for Tonight, heavily praised for its honesty and realism, in fact gave a very cosmetic view of an operation. For all its documentary status, there was nothing spontaneous about it. All the dialogue was carefully scripted, and most of the supposed operation was shot in the studio. The raid was said to be at a low level against an important target, yet enemy defenses were skimpy. F-Freddie scored a direct hit. The general impression was that a single Wellington could easily find and destroy any target deep inside Germany.


  That, of course, was the message all Britain wanted to hear: something was going right at last. So Target for Tonight was completely justified. Morale is a weapon of war. And the hard fact was that, for all its failings, only Bomber Command was taking the war to the enemy homeland. Rafferty was right when he asked Skull to suggest an alternative. In 1941, there was none. The bombing campaign sent a signal to the British people: Keep it up—Germany is suffering. It sent a signal to America: Britain isn’t beaten. It sent a signal to Russia: Britain is fighting Hitler too.

  So the crews of Bomber Command had to carry on their nightly battle. It was not so much a battle to help win the war—that came later—as a much grimmer battle to avoid losing it. I hope Damned Good Show offers at least a hint of the extraordinary courage and endurance shown by the men who kept the battle going.

  In preparing this story, I was very fortunate to have the technical help of a former RAF bomber pilot, Flight Lieutenant Frank Lowe, DFM. During 1941 he completed a tour of ops on Hampdens; then, on July 28/29, 1942, in a raid on Hamburg, he was shot down (and made prisoner of war) when piloting a Wellington with a trainee crew. His advice has saved me from many slips and pitfalls. Any errors that appear are entirely my fault.