The Hurricanes and Gladiators were on dawn patrol, looking for Italian reconnaissance machines which would report the advancing force. The bulky shapes of Wellingtons and Bombays, carrying more bombs than the Blenheims could, looked formidable when the Blenheims passed them at dawn as they returned from their night bombing.
Butler had a characteristic comment to make on the heavies. “Dirty great things. Wouldn’t fancy being in one of those. I can’t see how even the Eyties can miss, even in the dark: lumbering along big as houses.”
Denton shared his feelings but kept them to himself. The Wimpeys were all right, with their 235 m.p.h. top speed and eight machineguns, two each in nose and tail turrets and two on each beam. The Bombays, however, capable of only 195 m.p.h. and defended by one gun in the nose and one astern, were already obsolescent as bombers by the time they entered squadron service a few months before the war. He preferred the fleet Blenheim, even though it was under-gunned as badly as the Bombay.
The R.A.F’s task during the first day of Wavell’s advance was to deceive the Italians into thinking that it was merely continuing its routine air raids. No special attention was paid to Sidi Barrani or the new fortifications.
The squadron’s first operation took them to Gazala, 35 miles west of Tobruk. After the arid bleakness of the desert it was always good to see the Jebel Akhdar, whose slopes rose some 35 miles still further west. It was an objective worth fighting to reach, with its promise of cool air, woods and farmland. From Sollum the landscape began to show signs of fertility and westwards from there the ground was rucked and creased by hills, rocky ridges and deep ravines that broke the monotony of flat desert and dunes.
There were three Blenheims from each flight on this task and Denton was leading for the first time. The other captains were N.C.Os and pilot officers of lower seniority than his. Two of the sergeant pilots had been on more operations that he had and it made him feel like a veteran to be leading them.
The weather over Libya had been worse than for many years. It was the rainy season and there had been floods which made some of the Italian airfields unserviceable. There had also been sandstorms which kept enemy aircraft grounded while the R.A.F., from its bases in Egypt, was able to fly. Even when the weather in Egypt prevented the R.A.F. from taking off, the Navy was able to bombard the enemy. In the past few weeks destroyers and cruisers had shelled Sidi Barrani so heavily that Denton was delighted to see, when over the town, that hardly any building with more than one upper storey remained intact.
Nearing their target the Blenheim crews saw masses of dark grey cloud that forced them to descend to under 5000 ft. The flak was fairly heavy and churned the air enough to make all six aircraft yaw and pitch, but they bombed with reasonable accuracy and turned for home in the lower fringes of the cloud to gain some protection although the predictors could still locate them.
They had left the target several miles behind and were in an area of clear sky when Denton spotted a C. R. 42 streaking down at them.
“Fighter at eleven-o’clock, range two, two thousand above.”
There was a pause while Butler turned from watching the tail.
“I can see him, Skipper.”
Critchley was scanning the sky all around. “Must be a lot more, but I can’t see any.”
No more could Denton and still the Italian pilot held his dive. Denton turned towards the fighter and the other Blenheims wheeled with him. He began to climb. When the range had closed to 300 yards the fighter and Denton both opened fire. Bullets rattled against the Blenheim’s wings. Other Blenheims were shooting at the attacker but did not seem to be hitting it
It dived below their level, where they could not bring their guns to bear, and turned, forged ahead and came in again, this time from below. Denton saw its tracer hitting the Blenheim on his starboard side. Butler was shooting at it. The fighter broke to come in again.
Butler sounded exasperated. “He’s coming in again from dead astern and below.”
“See any more of them, Ian?”
“Nothing.”
The Italian was showing considerable courage in taking on six Blenheims.
“Where is he now?”
“Six-o’clock, two hundred yards and climbing. He’s well below.”
“I’ll dive and give you a shot.”
Denton put the stick forward. The six Blenheims dived and in a few seconds the fighter was above them. The air gunners’ fire converged on it.
“He’s diving ... turning port ... under the rear section.”
Denton switched on his radio telephone. “Levelling off. Hold formation. I’ll climb and draw him off. The rest of you should get a decent shot at him.”
If they all broke formation someone should find himself in a good position to shoot down the Italian, but it would look ridiculous for six Blenheims to scatter before one C. R. 42.
Denton began steep climb.
“What’s he doing, Sergeant?”
“He’s fallen for it.”
Butler fired a short burst and Denton weaved as he climbed. He could see tracer from the turrets of the other five. There was still no sign of any more enemy fighters.
“He’s going down, Skipper.”
Rejoining the formation, Denton saw the C.R. 42 beneath with smoke curling out of its engine. When sparks and flame began to appear, its pilot did a half-roll and dropped clear. His parachute opened and the Blenheims went on their way, Denton feeling no malice towards the enemy who had put up such a brave show.
Later that day they began the softening of the enemy’s forward positions that the Wellingtons and Bombays would continue to attack throughout the night. This was in preparation for the assault on Sidi Barrani planned for the next day. First the fortified outposts would have to be taken. The Blenheims’ target was a village fort called Nibeiwa, 15 miles south of Sidi Barrani.
The crews enjoyed a fine spectacle. The Navy was shelling a small port, Maktila, 15 miles east of Sidi Barrani. From their altitude they could see the flashes of the ship’s big guns and the shells bursting on the port and in the town. Since the collapse of France six months earlier they had been needing a heartening sight and here was one that cheered them.
At first light the next morning they were grouped around their squadron commander. He looked predatory and more than a little insane in his Arab head-dress, his fair moustache contrasting startlingly with his darkly bronzed skin.
“The battle for Sidi Barrani is planned to take from two to four days. The Army doesn’t expect to enter the town until tomorrow. Today’s objectives are the fortified villages ten miles south of it, called Tummar East and Tummar West. First, the Army has to secure Nibeiwa, which we’ve already knocked about pretty badly. The Seventh Armoured are going in with their Matildas, followed by Fourth Indian. The Mark Six B light tanks that have just arrived from U.K. will be in reserve. They’ll probably move in this afternoon. The Navy will be shelling all day: not only Maktila and other coastal objectives but also any enemy positions inland within range. It should be a bloody good party.”
It was, and because the Italian Air Force were either unable to take off at all on account of bad weather far to the west of the battle zone, where their bases were, or because they stuck to their standing patrols when they did get airborne, the R.A.F. was almost unmolested on its early sorties.
The fourth time Denton took off that day smoke from burning village forts rose and drifted hundreds of feet into the air. Tanks, both British and Italian, moved in clouds of sand. Flames spurted from the muzzles of field guns around Sidi Barrani and from British 25-pounders which were hurling a barrage at the town. Shell and bomb bursts sent graceful columns of sand high in the air to fall in leisurely cascades. Men ran forward from the British side with the sun glinting on their bayonets. Others scuttled from one defence post to another, from machinegun pits and slit trenches and ruined walls, to shelter among shattered buildings, trenches and sandbagged strong points. Small jets of flame flickered at the muzzles
of machineguns and made splashes of colour where grenades were exploding.
The three waves of tanks, the light Mk 6Bs in the van, with two squadrons of heavy cruisers in their wake, had swept past Nibeiwa and the two Tummars, East and West, to curve around and take them from behind, approaching thus from the west. Part of the attacking force had driven straight on, between Nibeiwa and Rabia, another fortified village to the south-east of it, to capture Buq Buq, which was 25 miles beyond Sidi Barrani.
To the west, Denton could see a flight of three Blenheims. They began to turn eastward and dive. An unpleasant premonition gripped him.
“My God! Look over there ... ten-o’clock.”
The other Blenheims belonged to a different squadron. Denton could not call a warning to them on the radio telephone.
Critchley’s expression was rigid with dismay; and he was not acting.
They saw the bombs leave the Blenheims’ bays and fall in a steepening parabola towards the British tanks and infantry. Two tanks lurched sideways and stopped. Infantrymen fell dead and wounded. A pall of sand and smoke hid the carnage. Denton felt a spasm of nausea and anger.
“Daft buggers.” Butler’s emotionless monotone expressed all that Denton and Critchley were feeling.
Critchley nudged Denton and pointed. “Look! Our types aren’t the only ones who make mistakes.”
They saw a wave of British infantry rush out from the shelter of ruined walls on the outskirts of Sidi Barrani and charge with fixed bayonets towards a line of trenches. The British light tanks opened fire on them. From the air it was plain to see that the men at whom the tanks were shooting wore khaki, not Italian green. In the fading light of the setting sun and with the smoke and dust that obscured their vision, evidently the tank crews could not make this recognition. Suddenly the tracer fire from the light tanks ceased.
“Thank God they’ve realised their mistake,” said Critchley.
“I suppose we can expect our own blokes to shoot at us any time now.” That, of course, had to be Butler.
After circling Sidi Barrani once to see how the assault was going, they crossed the coast and turned east to follow it home. The sun had touched the horizon and in his turn at low altitude it shone for a few moments directly into Denton’s eyes.
He did not see the C.R. 42 due west of them. He did not know it was there until he had completed his orbit and bullets began to hit the Blenheim from astern at close range. The port engine stopped at once and the wing dropped. Hardly had he corrected when there was a scream from the starboard propeller and a clatter of metal accompanied by a tongue of flame from the starboard engine. He feathered it. Smoke poured from beneath its cowling.
“Stand by to ditch!”
Denton’s mouth felt dry and his words, meant to be crisp and confident, sounded slurred and hurried to him.
They were only a mile offshore but did not have enough height to make it back over land. Not that that would be a good idea: Denton could not see a clear space in the deep dusk and he did not know whether the enemy still held the town. If it had not yet been captured, he knew that neither the Italian nor Libyan troops would hesitate to shoot them.
The surface wind was whipping the shallow inshore water into waves. Ditching was never a simple matter. The wind was from the north and in theory he ought to land into it. A turn, however, would risk a stall. He would have to alight across wind. If a wave caught a wingtip they could be tipped over and drowned before they could scramble out.
They hit the water with a reverberating, bone-shaking bump. Green sea cascaded over the Blenheim. It poured through the open windows. It swirled into the cockpit, rushed in from the broken perspex in the nose, gurgled and sloshed the full length of the fuselage, frothing around their legs and rising rapidly. It was astonishingly cold.
They piled out through the emergency hatch, dragging the dinghy and the navigator’s bag stuffed hurriedly with log and code books, a Verey pistol and cartridges. The wind cut chillingly into their wet skins.
“Think the Eyeties will come out to pick us up, Skipper?”
Butler’s teeth were chattering. He had spoken the thought that was in Denton’s mind.
“Don’t be such a bloody pessimist. Paddle!”
Critchley, short-winded from smoking and out of breath from exertion, gasped “I hope the Wops are too busy to bother about us.”
Paddling eastwards, they kept looking unhappily shoreward.
*
A destroyer picked them up, a great stroke of fortune, and with dry clothes and full of rum they were put ashore at Mersa Matruh, where a three-ton lorry was waiting to take them back to camp.
The squadron commander, with his organ-stop eyes frenetically alight, fiddled with his worry beads and bared his teeth in what passed for a smile.
“You’re the most expensive pilot I’ve got, Geoffrey. I’m not sure that the Service can afford to keep you in Blenheims. You use them at the rate that other people change their shirts.”
“At least we didn’t get shot down by our own side, sir.”
Wing Commander Nash frowned. This was a sensitive topic. As Denton had seen, other Blenheims had bombed British tanks and the tank men had machinegunned the Cameron Highlanders. There had been two other incidents. The Navy had fired at a section of Hurricanes and at a Wellington. They had damaged one fighter and forced the bomber to land in the desert.
Nash said “If the Navy or the pongoes take a pot shot at any aircraft of this squadron, we’ll bomb the buggers.”
Nobody doubted that he meant it literally. Denton found it difficult to harbour hard feelings towards the Navy, who had rescued them after many hours of drifting out to sea in a strong current. They had been weary and almost exhausted by then. He could not feel much animosity towards the Army, either, remembering how the Hussars had come to their aid five or six months ago. He made no comment. It was the accepted convention that each Service spoke of the others with scorn.
He felt a sudden wave of intolerance for the puerility of inter-Service rivalry and squabbles, the obtuseness of Nash’s unabashed prejudices. A long and bitter arraignment would have been more acceptable than this casual, matter-of-fact expression of ruthlessness without any expressed justification for itself. It occurred to him that although most people looked on Teddie Nash with admiration as a brave man, there was a lot of the gangster about him; the same avid, corrupt cruelty close below the surface of Nash’s casual indifference. He told himself that sometimes he seemed to be paying too high a price for the privilege of being under the command of someone who was largely inspired by the apparent necessity to live up to an image. He would have liked to tell the C.O. that it was surprising how easy it was to forget things that one had once been certain could never be forgotten: like these absurd grievances. Sadly, he knew from the casual way in which Nash had spoken that he had given careful thought to what he had said. Denton was repelled and amused at the same time and he was thankful that he was able to feel amusement.
He thought he had better venture some comment.
“Let’s not lose our sense of proportion, sir.”
“There isn’t time to talk about a sense of proportion in the middle of a battle.”
There was a staggering primitiveness about Nash which made Denton’s stomach churn. Looking at him then, Denton had a vision of generations of Nashes all being transformed by their genes from polite, reticent and well-disciplined small, fair-headed boys into reserved, savage and violent adults with thick, brutal hands and well-kept nails and no perceptible streak of charity. There was something particularly menacing in this flight of fancy.
In the next moment Nash undermined this edifice of unfavourable impressions with equal casualness and forethought.
“There’s an aircraft to go back to the Delta for engine change. You can ferry it tomorrow and bring back a new one. You can stay overnight in Cairo.”
He made it sound as though it were a penalty for having lost another Blenheim, but Denton and his crew knew t
hat it was to give them a break after yet another shaking experience.
“And if you bend this one, I’ll castrate you with a blunt saw.”
Denton had not see Jean for three months. She had written to him only twice; but the notion of castration was repugnant.
“And by the way,” Squadron Leader Fry said, “your F.O. has come through.”
Promotion to flying officer came automatically after a certain period. There was no sense of achievement but the small rise in pay was welcome. Denton told his batman to have the wider strip of braid stitched onto the epaulettes of his shirts and bush jackets and the cuffs of his blue tunics. With the help of Air Formation Signals he sent a message to Jean MacGregor that he was arriving in Cairo next morning and hoped she could arrange to have the day off. Critchley sent one to Nurse Kinch.
“What are you going to do?” Denton asked Butler.
“See if I can find a bookie to give me good odds against getting shot down again.”
*
Denton telephoned the hospital from the officers’ mess at the maintenance unit outside Cairo.
There was the usual irritating question and answer prelude. He was tempted to announce himself as a wing commander or group captain to shorten the inquisition.
“Hello?”
“Jean! It’s Geoffrey.”
“Who?”
“Me ... Geoffrey.”
“Who’s speaking? The line’s very bad.” It was perfectly clear.
“It’s clear as a bell this end.”
“A what?”
“A bloody bell ...”
“Kindly don’t use that sort of language. Who are you?”
“Geoffrey Denton. Didn’t you get my message ... my signal?”
“Oh! Geoffrey. Hello. How are you? Where are you?”
“In Cairo. Darling, don’t waste time on formalities. Did you get my signal?”
“Oh, that? Yes.”
“You sound as though you couldn’t care less.”
“It was a surprise.”
“Even so ... a bit more enthusiasm ...”
“Geoffrey, if you’ve rung up simply to be aggravating, I haven’t any time to waste. I’m on duty.”
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