A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “They vary. Some more, some less. Fickle, is what they are.”

  “It looks very much as if some fat Luftwaffe quartermaster has dumped his rubbish on us.”

  They walked back to the truck and sat on the tail-gate.

  “How about the stars?” Rinkart asked. “Can’t you fix our position with a sextant, or something?”

  “That’s sailors. Airmen use an astrolabe. I haven’t got either, and I wouldn’t know how to use it if I did. My celestial navigation was so bad, the school was getting ready to dump me when my ears did it for them.”

  “What it comes down to,” Rinkart said, “is you’re a failed navigator, and we’re lost.”

  “I never asked for the job,” Schneeberger said indifferently. “Why don’t you take it? You know as much about it now as I do.”

  “Have you told Jakowski?”

  “Would it make any difference if I did?”

  “Probably not. As long as we keep crossing these damn dunes we must be going east, and that’s what matters to him.”

  The repairs cost them an hour.

  “That’s an hour we’re going to make up,” Jakowski told his officers. “Nobody stops until I do. Not to blow his nose, not to eat his rations, and certainly not to admire the view from the top. Any questions?”

  “What if a truck breaks down?” Rinkart asked.

  “We pick it up on the way back.” Jakowski glanced at Schneeberger, but Schneeberger was busy sharpening his pencils. “All right. The trick of this maneuver is for each driver to avoid another man’s tracks. Broken sand gives no grip. We go up in line abreast. Order and discipline. That’s the formula for victory. Let’s go.”

  Everyone was glad to be on the move. Using Nocken’s law of dune-driving, they first went halfway up the previous slope, turned and used the downhill rush to create enough impetus to charge up the facing dune. Nobody paused at the top: on the contrary, everyone knew by now that the faster you dropped, the faster you climbed.

  At first they charged the dunes as one man, in line abreast. Then, inevitably, some trucks or drivers proved faster than others, and the formation became ragged. Jakowski waited for nobody. He had taken the best vehicle, a sporty little battle-wagon, and in Sergeant Nocken he had the best driver. The combination was exciting. “Put your foot down, Nocken!” he shouted as they went howling down over a dune. “What are you afraid of?” Nocken obeyed. The battle-wagon rocketed over the top. It was actually airborne for a few feet. Jakowski turned as they went racing down the other side and watched his vehicles come leaping into view, one after the other, like skiers on a mountainside. Excellent, excellent!

  Rinkart, in the middle of the column, had stopped worrying. Jakowski’s plan was set in motion; there was nothing anyone could do to alter it. He relaxed. Schneeberger, at the tail, watched his compass and continued to plot a course. The task might be pointless, but it was his duty and he did it.

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Nocken had discovered a curious and encouraging thing. All dunes were not alike. Some were better than others for driving up. The curious part about it was that height and gradient were not necessarily an obstacle. Nocken had noticed that a low dune, not particularly steep, could be quite difficult to climb. On the other hand, a high dune with a much steeper face often seemed to welcome him. The difference, he realized, was the surface. For some reason the sand on a moderate dune didn’t give his wheels much grip; it was soft and slack. The steeper the slope, the harder the sand. His wheels had something to bite into.

  There was a limit, of course. Some dunes were just too steep. The trick lay in picking the right compromise. Nocken could look at a dune and know in his heart what was possible, and where, and how fast, because Nocken had a heart like a sixteen-cylinder Mercedes-Benz diesel engine.

  His discovery pleased him. He decided to tell the major about it at the next stop. Then Nocken made another and even more important discovery about the shape and structure of the Calanscio Sand Sea.

  As usual Jakowski was urging him to greater speed as they rushed to the ridge; as usual the battle-wagon bounded over the top like a great puppy just let off the leash. Then Nocken had perhaps a fifth of a second to discover that this dune was crescent-shaped at the top, that the crescent was hollow, and that the battle-wagon was flying horribly far out into space. Its engine screamed because its wheels met no resistance. That was the last sound Nocken heard. The battle-wagon crashed on its nose a hundred feet down the slope, bounced and rolled and flung him out with most of the steering wheel through his chest. Jakowski was already lying far behind him, his face between his knees because his spine had snapped.

  The rest of the column followed. Order and discipline. The trucks came sailing over the top, sailed into nothing, plunged and smashed and made a stream of wreckage that rolled noisily down to the trough. Twelve trucks threw themselves after their commander, then an ambulance, then a radio truck, then one loaded with fuel. Rinkart was dead; Bruno was dead; Oskar was trying to breathe, but his lungs were crushed. The fuel truck exploded. The next truck driver heard the bang as he reached the crest, but he could not stop. Smoke boiled into the sky. The following truck skidded sideways and halted with five feet to spare. Its driver looked down and could not believe what he saw. Blazing fuel was trying to set the sand on fire. A ruined truck burst into flames and soon it began to spray ammunition. All the bodies lay still except one which, perversely, kept rolling all the way down the dune to the very bottom.

  Lieutenant Schneeberger found himself in command of the remains of Force A: three trucks and five men. Nothing could be done until the fires went out and the ammunition stopped exploding. He ordered an issue of rum, clearly the best decision he had ever made, so he repeated it. Then they buried the dead, collected five wounded and drove back along their tracks. By nightfall only two of the wounded were still alive.

  * * *

  The strafing went on and still the Luftwaffe put up no standing patrols; nor did the Italian air force. No enemy fighter appeared in the part of the desert reached by Hornet Squadron. What the enemy did was strengthen his antiaircraft batteries. Every day, flak fragments or heavy machine-gun bullets scarred the Tomahawks and every scar had to be patched. All the strafing was carried out at very low level and there was a running joke in the squadron about battle damage caused by German bayonets; but what all these missions were doing to the fighters’ performance was no joke. Each new patch knocked another fraction off the speed; every hour in the air took a bit more heart out of the Allison engine and already the squadron’s Allisons were growing old on a diet of dust and fine grit. The same abrasive mixture got into the guns, the undercarriage, the propeller-pitch mechanism, everything that required one surface to move against another. The desert was sandpapering the aircraft to death.

  The only thing that worried Fanny Barton was his failure to provoke the Luftwaffe to action. He called a meeting of the flight commanders and the intelligence officer. “Any ideas?” he asked.

  “What about night-flying?” Patterson said. “Spoil their sleep. That should make them pretty ratty.”

  “You mean on top of what we’re doing already?”

  “Yes. The Luftwaffe did it to us in France. We chased them all day, they bombed us all night, day after day, no rest. Sooner or later you get the jitters, I don’t care how tough you are.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Barton said. He had been watching the adjutant approach with a sheaf of papers for him to sign. “Uncle, you were at Pont St. Pierre when the balloon went up. Did we get the twitch?”

  “Of course not,” Kellaway said at once. “The chaps were first-rate. The whole squadron came through with flying colors.” He gave Barton a fountain pen.

  “That’s balls,” Patterson said. “Some blokes couldn’t hold a mug of tea without spilling half of it.”

  “Hangovers,” Kellaway said. “Bloody awful French plunk.”

  Barton scribbled and scribbled. “I can’t remember losing any sleep, Pip. Too damn ti
red to bother about bombs.”

  Patterson watched him concentrate on making his signature, and saw how his face crowded together a lot of lines that had been absent in 1940. Patterson was about to say: You were the one I remember spilling his tea, Fanny, and that was at dawn, before the first sortie, so God knows what you were like after the last . . . But he thought better of it and merely shrugged.

  “Can’t strafe at night anyway,” Pinky Dalgleish said. “Got to see to strafe.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of strafing,” Patterson said. He was tired of his stupid idea, nobody was listening, he was sorry he’d mentioned it. “Just flying about and annoying their flak. Keeping the buggers awake.”

  “Staunch,” Kellaway announced. When everyone looked at him, he said: “That’s what I’d call the way the squadron stood up to the Hun in France. Staunch. Damn staunch.”

  “Half the squadron,” Skull corrected. “Half the squadron stood up. The other half got knocked down.” He could see that Kellaway disapproved. “Truth doesn’t go away just because it’s unpleasant,” Skull told him. “France was a shambles. We were—”

  “I was damn proud of the squadron and I still am. Men died but they didn’t die in vain.”

  “No? For all the difference they made, some of them might as well have cut their throats. It would have been far cheaper and a great deal less painful.”

  “That’s a disgraceful thing to say.”

  “It was a disgraceful bit of war.”

  “Shut up!” Barton ordered. “I don’t give a tuppenny toss for 1940. I want to know how we can get some results now.”

  “What would spice up the strafing,” Dalgleish said, “would be a few bombs. Nothing like a nice two-hundred-and-fifty pounder up your chuff to start the day with a bang.”

  “Well, you know the Tommy isn’t adapted for bombs,” Barton said, “but I’ll see if we can get the doings fitted. Good idea.”

  “I sometimes think Jerry might get more pissed off with us if we hammered his supplies,” Patterson said. “Rations and water especially. I mean, how would we feel if our water-tankers kept getting shot up by 109s?”

  “Bloody thirsty.” Barton thought about it and smiled. “Big, fat, Jerry water-tankers. Soft target, slow, no escort probably. Lovely grub! Let’s do it. Let’s hit ’em where it really hurts.”

  “I’ll get you map references for wells and water points,” Skull said. “There can’t be many, so the tracks should be obvious.”

  “Funny thing,” the adjutant said. He shook his head. “We had exactly the same problem with the Boche during a spell in 1917. He wouldn’t come up and fight. In the end one of our chaps flew over the airfield where that ghastly fellow Richthofen was based and dropped a challenge. Meet me in single combat over such-and-such a place tomorrow at half-past two, that sort of thing. Chap called Somerset, Tommy Somerset. Awfully good at conjuring tricks. Made things disappear. I could never . . .” Kellaway gave a gentle, perplexed smile.

  “Did he turn up?” Barton asked.

  “Richthofen? No, no. Complete washout.”

  “Right,” Barton said firmly. “Thank you, everyone. See you all later.”

  “Tommy got knocked down by a bus in Piccadilly,” Kellaway said. “Or it might have been Regent Street. There were conflicting reports.”

  “There always are,” Skull said.

  The flight commanders left. Skull remained. The adjutant looked at him, glanced at the CO, and decided to stay for a while.

  “The Duke of Wellington . . .” Skull began.

  “Wasn’t a fighter pilot,” Barton completed. “So the hell with him.”

  Skull turned to Kellaway. “The Duke of Wellington said that all the business of war is trying to find out what you don’t know by what you do know.”

  “Too deep for me, old chap.”

  “Guessing what’s on the other side of the hill. That’s what he called it.”

  “I don’t need to guess anything.” Barton said. “I fly over the other side of the hill twice daily. I can see what Jerry’s doing.”

  “But can you see what he’s thinking?”

  “Can you?” Kellaway asked.

  “I can try,” Skull said. “Suppose we begin with what we know. We know the Germans are no fools. When you start strafing them, all day every day, and it’s not part of a larger offensive, they must ask themselves why. We know that the Afrika Korps is a very tough army. It’s been strafed before. It’s not going to collapse just because a squadron of elderly Tomahawks attacks it. And we know our attacks are having less and less effect.”

  “Rubbish!” Barton said. “They’re running like rabbits.”

  “Debriefing tells me otherwise. One in three of your targets is a dummy, perhaps one in two. Jerry’s twigged what you’re up to, Fanny. He’s put more observers out in the desert, and further out, so by the time you reach the target his troops are in their trenches. And you’re flying through heavy flak.”

  “How do you know?” Barton growled. “You don’t know.”

  “I suppose it’s what we’d do,” the adjutant said. “I mean, if we kept getting strafed.”

  Barton’s eyebrows were one thick black line. “That just proves how much we’re hurting them. And I don’t believe all that cock about decoys. Bloody hell! What is this? A war or a duck shoot?”

  The silence lasted so long that it began to trouble Kellaway. “I suppose we could always ask Group’s opinion,” he suggested.

  “No! Never!” Barton slammed his hand on the table and made sand jump out of the cracks between the planks.

  “That’s fatal. They’ll think we can’t cope on our own. Next thing I’ll be running a weather-station in Greenland. No!” Another whack sent the sand leaping again.

  “Just a thought.”

  “It really doesn’t matter what Group thinks,” Skull said, “or what I think, or you think, or Baggy Bletchley thinks. All that matters is what the enemy does. That includes what he doesn’t do. Let’s face it, Fanny, he hasn’t put up any standing patrols and he’s not going to.”

  “You give in too easy. The game’s not over yet.”

  “The game is up, Fanny. You’ve stung him and he hasn’t jumped.”

  “I’ll sting him a bloody sight harder yet. Then he’ll jump. You watch.”

  “Or maybe you’ll get stung. Badly. They’re waiting for you now. You realize that, don’t you? You know how lucky you’ve been, so far.”

  “A squadron makes its own luck,” Barton said. The adjutant knew that clipped, flat voice. It meant the CO was fast running out of patience. Kellaway tried to catch the intelligence officer’s eye, and failed.

  “You can’t manipulate the enemy,” Skull said. “It’s time to cut your losses.”

  “Horseshit. I’m nearly there. One more strafe and the sky’s going to be lousy with 109s.”

  “Very well.” Skull shoved up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do as you please.”

  “Don’t worry, I shall.”

  “Yes,” Skull said, and for the first time a trace of anger sharpened his voice. “In a shifting and uncertain world, that’s one thing we can all depend on, isn’t it? You will do what pleases you.”

  “Oh, get out,” Barton ordered. “You’re a pain in the ass, Skull, you can’t fly, you’ve never been higher than you can jump, and you sit there telling me my job? Go away, you make me tired.”

  “Ah-ha,” Skull said. “I seem to have drawn blood.”

  “Meeting’s over,” the adjutant said firmly. He took Skull by the arm. “Come on, I need a second opinion on my new latrine pits.” He led him out.

  “Do it properly,” Barton called after them. “Take all day. Write me a nice long report.”

  Not looking back, Kellaway waggled a hand in acknowledgment. “Let him have the last word,” he murmured. “It’s his squadron.”

  They did in fact walk to the nearest pit. A whiff of explosive still clung to the shattered stone. “You seem to be determined to get yourself
sacked yet again,” Kellaway said.

  Skull thought about that and kicked a small pebble into the hole. “I haven’t got your diplomatic gifts, Uncle,” he said.

  “Bugger diplomacy. Let me tell you something. If it wasn’t for Fanny, this squadron wouldn’t exist. I’d be shuffling bumf in Cairo, you’d be giving slide-shows on aircraft recognition and the pilots would be driving Hurricanes along the Takoradi Trail. Not a very glorious end to a squadron that cut its teeth in the Royal Flying Corps.”

  “Takoradi,” Skull said. “Takoradi . . .” He sent another pebble rattling into the pit. “Was that really on the cards?”

  “It was. And if you think the chaps would prefer flying a bunch of gash Hurricanes straight out of packing-cases, probably assembled with the wings upside-down, four thousand miles across bits of Africa so nasty that even the dimmest native won’t live in them, and if the kite packs up and you survive the crash it’s a hell of a long wait for the next number eighty-eight bus . . .”

  “Which is almost certainly full anyway,” Skull said.

  “I’ve forgotten what I was saying.” Suddenly the adjutant’s mind was as blank as the desert. Its abdication alarmed him; he felt betrayed; this sort of thing happened too often nowadays. “What are we doing here?” he asked.

  Skull misunderstood the question. “Too deep for me, old chap,” he said. Another pebble was balanced on the toe of his boot and he lobbed it in. “You were speaking of what the chaps would prefer.”

  “Yes.” Kellaway’s mind cleared. “And it’s not Takoradi. Ask any of them. They didn’t join the Desert Air Force to become long-distance bus drivers.”

  “I see.” Skull nudged one more pebble onto his left boot with his right, but it fell off. “Fanny saved the squadron from Takoradi by volunteering to let it strafe itself to death. Am I right?”

  “No. Just give the CO credit for having the best interests of his squadron at heart. And for the love of God stop chucking stones into my latrine pits!” The adjutant had gone from calm reason to raging fury in an instant. He jumped into the pit and grabbed the pebbles and hurled them at Skull. “If you can’t get anything right, you four-eyed fart,” he shouted, “for Christ’s sake don’t make life more difficult for the rest of us!”