A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “He took a mobile bakery,” di Marco said. “Did you see it? A mobile bakery in the Sahara.”

  “In the last war the French had mobile brothels,” Hoffmann remarked. “Or so my father claimed.”

  “The British had mobile cinemas,” Schramm said. “Join the army and see Charlie Chaplin.”

  “I haven’t thanked you for all your help,” Hoffmann said.

  “My pleasure,” di Marco told him.

  “God help me, I believe you. You actually like it down there, don’t you?”

  “The Sahara is clean and strong and very beautiful, yes.”

  “It’s the asshole of Africa,” Schramm muttered.

  “Even the asshole is beautiful in God’s eyes,” di Marco said. “Try living without one and I am sure you would soon come to desire it keenly.”

  “Not stuffed with sand, I wouldn’t.”

  The mess windows vibrated as a 109 pilot tested his engine.

  “Look: you’re better qualified than either of us to make a judgment,” Hoffmann said. “What do you reckon Jakowski’s chances are?”

  Di Marco sucked beer from his upper lip. “Surely you mean Lessing’s chances.”

  “No. Lessing? We just saw Lessing. I mean Jakowski.”

  “Jakowski is dead.”

  “You can’t possibly know that.”

  “I have met him. He was as brave as a lion and he did not believe in the possibility of failure. To survive in the desert one must always believe in every possibility of failure. Courage is not enough. There are no lions in the desert.”

  “Lessing believes Jakowski will turn up.”

  “Yes, well . . .” For once, di Marco was slightly uncomfortable. He watched the 109 take off, climb and bank toward the sea. “Of course it is easy for me to talk. Jakowski’s operation is not my responsibility. I can offer an objective view, an informed opinion. I may be wrong. Even if I am right, it is you Germans who must make the difficult decisions.”

  “Go ahead,” Hoffmann said. “We’d like to hear what you think.”

  “Very well. If you will forgive me: Lessing is a good German soldier. He is like the Roman sentry who stayed at his post when the volcano erupted and poured lava over him. Lessing will go on finding reasons not to disobey Jakowski’s order, even though he knows that Jakowski led his men into the Sand Sea with insufficient water, faulty navigation and no expert knowledge of the most difficult and dangerous part of the Sahara. Let us be optimistic and say that Jakowski has one chance in ten thousand of surviving. Captain Lessing’s chances?” He thought as he finished his beer. “Less than fifty-fifty.”

  Schramm said goodbye; he had to check any signals that might have come in during his absence. As he sat at his desk, flicking through pieces of paper, it suddenly struck him that Jakowski really was dead. That bustling, hustling, ambitious man who never listened and never gave up was now stiff and silent and still. In fact, half his force were probably dead and the rest were facing death. For a moment Schramm could not swallow and his heart began to race. Death in battle he could understand and accept, but this was just wastage, pointless random wastage, and that he could not accept. He walked up and down the room a few times, sucked in some deep breaths and felt strong enough to put through a call to the hospital. Amazingly, she answered after the first ring. “Ah,” she said. “I have been thinking of you.”

  “I’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “So have I, alas. Three problems, and they are all shaved and prepared and waiting to be operated on, now.”

  “Blast,” he said furiously, and heard her laugh. “I can’t compete with that, can I?”

  “No,” she said. “You can’t. Goodbye.” And she hung up.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pluck and Dash

  An old, broken-backed Hurricane sat on the edge of LG 250. Its propeller blades had been peeled back like dying petals, its wings showed ragged holes where the machine guns used to be, and its rudder wagged sadly whenever the wind caught it.

  Ostanisczkowski tried first. He fell from the formation and was still picking up speed as he crossed the opposite edge of the landing-ground, fifty feet above the sand and nose-down. Tiny corrections brought the target into the center of his prop-disc. He leveled out at twenty feet, released his bomb and simultaneously pulled up hard and right as if the bomb had weighed a ton. In fact it was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound dummy.

  The adjutant, the doctor and the intelligence officer sat and watched from a safe distance. The dummy bomb bounced twice and went high over the Hurricane. “No coconut for Sneezy,” Skull said. Uncle made a note. The bomb slid to a distant halt. An inevitable rush of dust marked its end.

  Kit Carson tried next. He came in even faster, dropped his bomb earlier, and was wide by three lengths. Again, it skidded far into the desert. “Just like playing ducks and drakes,” the doc said.

  Pip Patterson, circling with Hooper and the CO, had watched these failures. He made his approach very low and left his release very late, the instant before he lost sight of the wreck. But the Kittyhawk had a long wedge of an engine that blocked the pilot’s forward view. Pip’s dummy bomb fell short, bounced high, and flew with the fighter over its target. “God Almighty!” Kellaway breathed.

  “No, he’s last,” Skull said.

  Hick Hooper’s attack was much steeper than anybody else’s. He bombed half a second before he pulled out, at three hundred feet, and missed by a lot.

  “Target’s in the wrong place,” the doc said. “Obviously.”

  Fanny Barton had his own idea. He swung across the LG in a high-speed curve, his Kittyhawk steeply banked so that he could always see the ruined Hurricane ahead, right up to the final moment when he flattened out and bombed, and missed.

  “Nearly hit my cookhouse!” Skull complained. “Damned hooligans.”

  “Put your cookhouse in the Hurricane, Skull,” the doc said. “You’ll be safe there.”

  There were no jokes when the pilots met beside Barton’s machine. Bombing from a fighter was a completely new technique to them. The Kittyhawk had been adapted to carry bombs, but that didn’t make it a bomber. If they approached the target at height they couldn’t see it when they were over it: the Kittyhawk’s wings stuck out on each side of the cockpit. Bombing became guesswork. If they came in low they could see the target ahead, but the bomb was traveling at the same speed as the Kitty, and it bounced and skipped far past the target. A slow approach would reduce the skip-factor, but nobody suggested flying slowly over an enemy airfield.

  Skull joined them. “What did it look like to you?” Barton asked, not much interested in the answer. He hadn’t wanted Skull to come to LG 250, but Air Commodore Bletchley had made it plain that he wanted an independent mind to make out the combat analyses and summaries, so Barton agreed and then put Skull in charge of the cookhouse too. The doc pointed out how appropriate it was to have a Skull in a skeleton crew. Barton put the doc in charge of latrines. That left Uncle. Barton put him in charge of airfield defense. There was no airfield defense, but the adjutant was happy enough, and apparently quite sane. It was Bletchley’s idea to include him in the LG 250 party on the grounds that he would recover his wits more quickly with familiar faces around him. The doc watched him closely and tried to keep him out of the sun.

  “It looked unpromising and unprofitable,” Skull said.

  “Thanks and goodbye.”

  “There must be a way,” Kit Carson said. “I mean, bloody hell, they wouldn’t put bomb shackles on a Kitty just for fun.”

  “I suppose you’ve considered dive-bombing?” Skull asked.

  “You can’t dive-bomb a Kittyhawk,” Hick said. “It’s a P-40. P for pursuit. Curtiss made it because the US Army Air Corps wanted something to pursue the enemy. Fact.”

  “Surely it can be persuaded to dive?” Skull made vague diving gestures. “Like a Stuka?”

  “Be your age, Skull,” Pip said. “You’ve been around long enough to know a Tommy or a Kitty doesn’t need p
ersuading. The kite dives like a block of flats. The problem is pulling out. Stukas have air brakes. See any air brakes around here? That’s four tons of airplane, for God’s sake.”

  “I heard of a guy who got a P-40 up to five hundred m.p.h. in a dive,” Hick said. “Took him ten thousand feet to pull out. Minus half his engine cowling.”

  “Goodness me,” Skull said.

  “What’s to eat?” Barton asked him.

  “One must assume the air commodore was mistaken.” Skull turned to leave.

  “What?”

  Skull stopped and scratched at the stiff darkness of the bloodstain on his faded blazer. “Baggy told me that some hotshot Australian pilot had succeeded in dive-bombing with a Kittyhawk,” he said. “Piece of cake, apparently, when you know how.”

  “And did he?”

  “Alas, no. Baggy didn’t know how.” Skull strolled away, still scratching.

  Barton picked up his flying helmet and knocked the sand out of it. “If I rip the wings off, Pip, you’re CO.”

  His engine was still hot. It fired first time. Ten minutes later his Kittyhawk was at fifteen thousand feet, a speck of silvery dust that produced an occasional soft echo of a dull rumble.

  “One thing I forgot to mention,” Skull told Uncle. “There is a school of thought which believes that, at certain angles of dive, the bomb when released may strike the propeller.” Uncle was silent. “Too late now,” Skull said.

  All the way up, Barton worried at the problem of dive-bombing. It was a vertical business, or as near to vertical as you could get. By aiming the bomber, you aimed the bomb. It was like strafing downward. Dive a Kittyhawk vertically and it would build up speed so fast that when you were close enough to the target to be sure of hitting it, you were far too low to pull out. Pull out earlier and you were far too high to be sure of hitting the target.

  Tricky.

  He checked the sky and eased the stick forward. Assume the target is two thousand feet below. Assume you want to bomb at five hundred feet. He watched the altimeter unwind and felt his straps grip as the desert floor swung up to face him. Almost at once his right arm was exerting a lot of left thrust on the control column to stop the fighter rolling to the right. Automatically he put on trim, his left hand working the toggle switch that activated the electric trim-tabs: thank God for Yankee know-how. “Bomb now!” he said aloud, and tried to pull her out of the dive, heaving on the stick, vision browning out a little, feeling the nose come up slowly, grudgingly and not enough. He was still counting off the height in hundreds as the Kittyhawk smashed through what would have been the desert floor. As she recovered she rolled sturdily to the left and both his arms were busy, one reversing the trim and the other working the stick, just to keep her straight. What a bitch.

  He fooled about with near-vertical dives on imaginary targets for five more minutes, crashed (in theory) three times, and even so knew he would not have bombed within a hundred yards of anything smaller than a cathedral. What a stinking bitch.

  Low-level attacks missed. Vertical attacks crashed and missed. Which left what?

  At least he had learned one thing. Try to dive-bomb in a Kittyhawk and she rolled hard to the right. Pull out, she rolled hard left.

  Barton nudged the nose down and tested the strength of the right-hand roll. When the dive reached an angle of forty-five degrees and he could feel her itching to run away, the roll was still containable. At fifty-five or sixty degrees he had to brace his right arm against his leg in order to fight the roll. At seventy or eighty degrees he was losing the fight, the kite was juddering, the desert was a yellow swirl, and the powered trim-tab was giving him all the help it could. He quit while he was still just ahead, pulled out, browned out, and fought the opposite roll all over again as the Kittyhawk swooped back up to level flight.

  Sixty degrees was about as steep as you could dive and get away with it.

  What could you see at sixty degrees?

  Barton spiraled down to about two thousand feet and stooged around the LG until he reckoned he’d arrived. He shoved the nose down to sixty degrees and was rewarded with a perfect view of the ruined Hurricane. Sixty degrees wasn’t vertical, but that wreck hung in front of the Kittyhawk’s nose like a picture on the wall. He resisted the roll, never took his eyes off the target and bombed from what he guessed was five hundred feet. Perhaps less, because the desert rushed up hungrily as he pulled out. But it didn’t get him.

  Sand sprayed the target. “Spot-on!” Kellaway said. “Tickety-boo!”

  Barton landed. “Piece of cake,” he told his pilots.

  Lunch was bully-and-biscuit pie, an invention of Skull’s.

  The squadron practiced sixty-degree dive-bombing all afternoon, and by the end the Hurricane wreck was impressively battered. Barton was pleased. “Take off one hour before dawn tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll hit the Luftwaffe repair field at Benina. Won’t they be surprised?”

  Skull said nothing. He went away and studied his maps. Then he found Barton when he was alone. “My guess is they won’t be in the least surprised,” he said. “Benina’s between Benghazi and the western end of the Jebel al Akhdar. That whole area’s stiff with enemy. It’s lousy with landing-grounds. I can’t think of a more dangerous target.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” Barton said. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Curried Geraldo. Aren’t you going to tell me anything?”

  “Certainly. I’ll tell you everything when we get back.”

  “You might not get back.”

  “Jesus! What a fucking worrier you are, Skull. You keep worrying that we might get killed. Relax, for Christ’s sake. Of course we’re going to get killed. It’s a racing certainty. You can’t be a fighter pilot without getting killed sooner or later. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t matter a tiny toss. Feel better now?”

  Skull felt that he was being patronized and he resented it. “In that case, nothing matters. Life and death are trivia, so why bother about anything? Defending democracy, liberating Europe, all the rest of it—who cares?”

  “Well, I don’t,” Barton said. “Fuck democracy, fuck Europe.” He yawned and stretched. “Give me a nice juicy target and see me blow it to buggery and back.” He smiled the smile of a healthy lunatic who has the keys to the asylum.

  That smile disturbed Skull. He tried to describe it to the doctor, but got nowhere. “If you think you can make sense of the mind of a fighter leader, you’re seriously ill,” the doctor said. “Take two aspirin and lie down for a couple of months.”

  Skull retired to his tent and his Al Bowlly records. “Easy Come, Easy Go” seemed like a suitable number. He wound up the gramophone.

  * * *

  Paul Schramm couldn’t sleep. He got up at four a.m. and walked around the airfield with the duty NCO in charge of sentries, until his leg tired him and he limped over to the signals block to ask if any radio messages had come in from Captain Lessing. None had. He went to the flight operations room and looked at the activity on their general situations map, a thing as big as a small room, which showed the area for a hundred kilometers around. Little was happening. An occasional transport plane came in to Berna airfield at Benghazi. The map stopped at the southern side of the Jebel, just where the Sahara began. “What happens if somebody flies down there?” he asked the duty officer. “Off the map?”

  The duty officer shrugged. “He goes straight to hell, sir, I suppose.”

  “I flew down there yesterday.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Hellish.”

  “Ah.” The duty officer waited but that was evidently the end, so he went back to his crossword puzzle.

  The cookhouse was coming to life. Schramm got a pot of coffee and took it to the station commander’s quarters. Hoffmann did not welcome being woken up. “For the love of God,” he groaned when he saw who it was. “Go and get married, Paul. Spare me these moments of bliss.”

  Schramm was taken aback. It was the last remark he had expected. “My profou
nd apologies,” he said stiffly. “I should have known better than to disturb you over a matter of life or death.”

  “Is that all it is? Pour me a bucket of that muck.” Hoffmann got out of bed. His face had collapsed in the night: he looked like his own death mask. “Who’s dead? Apart from me.”

  “Lessing’s men will be soon, if something isn’t done about them.”

  Hoffmann groaned again and drowned the groan in coffee. “We did something,” he said. He let his eyes close. After a while, coffee spilled from the cup onto his toes and he opened his eyes. “What do you want?” he asked. “Prayer? Good, I just prayed.”

  “Call General Schaefer. Get him to order Lessing out of there.”

  “You call him. It’s your idea.” Hoffmann picked up a phone and asked for General Schaefer in Tripoli. “Help yourself to coffee, if that’s what it is,” he said, and went out. Soon he could be heard singing in the shower.

  He was still singing when the switchboard rang and Schramm was connected with Schaefer. He knew what he wanted to say and he said it competently.

  “That’s all very interesting,” the general said. “Now let us consider the facts. Jakowski took enough fuel, food and water for three weeks. He has been gone less than a week. You say he’s lost but that’s not a fact. All it means is you can’t find him. Maybe Jakowski doesn’t want to be found. Maybe he’s shadowing a British incursion. There is such a thing as camouflage, remember. And his radio silence is planned and deliberate. We know that enemy patrols use that area, don’t we? That’s a fact. It’s why Jakowski went there in the first place. Captain Lessing’s orders are clear. If I pull him out now I abandon Jakowski. I trust my commanders, major. I trust Jakowski. I trust Lessing. Thank you for your concern. Don’t call me again. Goodbye.”

  Hoffmann was standing in the doorway, toweling his hair. “It’s only a world war,” he said. “Don’t take it to heart.”

  Schramm went to the mess and ate breakfast, and then checked the teleprinter to see if there had been any SAS activity. A German road convoy had been mined near Cir-ene, and an ammunition dump at Bir Semander had exploded. He telephoned the Luftwaffe intelligence officers at a few nearby airfields—Slonta, Derna, Soluch, Berka—and heard nothing of value.