by Ray Ollis
With their single, teeny-weeny little bomb.
Flying firkin fortresses at forty thousand feet,
They’ve got the Norden bomb-sight and the Colonel’s in the seat
They’re flying swell formation but we really must repeat:
They’ve only got one teeny-weeny bomb!
They were only bombing Calais …
They were only bombing Calais …3
They sang on happily, quite without malice. Despite words that the uninitiated might think were insulting to Americans, Krink, the American in their midst, joined in lustily.
‘Say,’ interrupted Krink, ‘that reminds me of a joke I heard about the USAAF …’ They all stopped singing and looked at Krink. ‘Let me think … I know it was about briefing …’
‘One of these days you’ll announce a joke that you really remember.’
It was a Krynkiwski failing to either forget his jokes altogether or, even more annoying, to forget the tag-line. Now Krink was saved the embarrassment of trying vainly to remember by a voice in the next compartment saying, ‘Tickets, please!’
‘The inspector! What about Raff?’
‘Here, Raff!’ called Vincent. ‘Under my greatcoat. Now stay there, boy. Stay still! Still!’
‘Tickets, please,’ called the inspector at their door. ‘There are seats up in first class, sir,’ said the inspector when he saw Hyde’s pass.
‘We’re all friends. We’re travelling together.’
‘Very well, sir. ‘Ere!’ His explosion was reminiscent of the inspector at Grimsby as his eye fell on Raff peeping out from under Vincent’s coat.
‘’Ere! Wotchoo got there?’
There was no point in attempting to hide Raff now.
‘A dog, officer,’ said Vincent, unable to think of any rank higher than ‘officer’ in railways terminology. ‘His name’s Raff. He’s our mascot. He travels everywhere with us; even on raids. He barks when he sees a fighter coming.’
‘Yeah? Well, I bark when I sees dogs in my compartments. He’s gotta have a ticket and he’s gotta travel in the van.’
‘Oh, officer. He gets frightened in the van; he thinks they’ve taken him POW.’
‘Well … where’s his ticket?’
‘He travels,’ announced Krink, ‘on the difference between our three first-class tickets and the three third-class fares. Look, I’ll show you …’ Krink fished in his pocket and brought out a flask of brandy. ‘Have a drink.’ The inspector looked suspicious. But he also looked thirsty.
‘What’s this got to do with it?’ he asked.
‘Just go ahead. Have a drink,’ said Krink, breezily.
‘Or would you rather have Scotch?’ asked Joe, producing another bottle. ‘Scotch or brandy?’
‘Well, brandy if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Sure it is. Go ahead. Have a brandy.’
The inspector drank a burning mouthful from Krink’s flask.
Krink and Joe then raised their bottles to the inspector. ‘Here’s to you,’ they said. The inspector flushed.
The bottles were passed around. Each man drank and each man seriously toasted the inspector. He stood, smiling self-consciously.
‘Have another before you go,’ said Krink. The man flushed again.
‘Well, if you don’t mind.’
They all protested extravagantly that they didn’t mind a bit. The inspector finished his gulp, smiled again timidly, patted Raff on the head, and with a murmured ‘Well, thanks,’ left the compartment. Raff was as good as in London.
Hyde, Krink, Johnnie, Yarpi and Joe had all booked at the Regent Palace Hotel. When Krink heard it was right at Piccadilly he was delighted. ‘Are we happy in the circus?’ he asked affirmatively.
Magnetic set off, with no great show of enthusiasm, for his home in Lewisham, H-H left his address in Knightsbridge with Hyde but explained that he was going off immediately to see Barbara at Chiswick. Vincent still had a short train-trip to make; ‘It’s only half an hour in a slow train,’ he explained. ‘I’ll take Raff with me; he’ll enjoy the open spaces down at Horley. Surrey is neither London nor the country; and yet it’s a little bit of both.’
They parted, agreeing to meet again in town that night.
Joe had suggested they meet at an old pub off Fleet Street, ‘Noted’, he said, ‘for its international clientele.’
‘Let’s meet for drinks at Coger’s,’ Joe had said.
‘Right-ho,’ H-H had agreed. ‘Make it Coger’s.’ But while Joe had pronounced Coger’s to rhyme with Rodger’s, H-H used the long ‘o’ as in flow: ‘C-oh-dgers’.
‘Come off it, sport,’ said Joe. ‘Pronounced ‘Codger’s’. It’s an old Australian word for a chap or a bloke; we call him a ‘codger’ and we pronounce it ‘Cod-ger’s’.
H-H put on the look of an outraged Oxford Don, which he could well have been, and replied; ‘Codger’ may be an ancient and honourable Australian word. But since this pub—‘C-oh-dger’s’—was named in the seventeenth century, before Australia was founded, I insist that the Australian vernacular cannot influence what Englishmen call it, which is, let me again assure you, ‘C-oh-dger’s’.
Joe smiled politely, bowed a little and replied: ‘Your point, sir. We meet at C-oh-dger’s.’4
When H-H met them there, however, it was only for a moment. Barbara Cunard was with him. H-H insisted on buying the first round and, while they drank it, announced: ‘Barbara and I are getting married tomorrow. Three o’clock, after the investiture. We’d like you all to come.’
There was a babble of congratulations and acceptances.
‘It’s so good of you to accept on such short notice, and during your precious leave,’ said Barbara.
‘But right now we’d like you to excuse us,’ said H-H. ‘Would you mind? Bags of visits and organising, you know.’
H-H and Barbara finished their drinks and hurried out into the gathering blackout.
When they had gone, Joe said, ‘You know, I’ve heard the English gentleman much maligned. But the few I’ve met are as likeable as anyone could wish. And folks can sneer about to-the-manner-born, but I’ve found they all have an easy correctness that’s theirs alone.’
‘You speak,’ said Hyde, ‘of the true English gentleman. It’s the near or would-be gentleman who’s a prig and a bore. I should know; we see enough of them strutting around Ireland.’
There followed a moment’s silence, until Krink suddenly slapped his thigh. ‘I’ve remembered that joke about the American’s briefing,’ he announced.
‘The General’s briefing ’em, you see: hundreds of Colonels and Majors with Mickey Mouse painted on the back of their flying-jackets. And he says: ‘The operational height for this mission is forty thousand feet. But any man who goes in at thirty thousand feet gets a Purple Heart. And any man who goes in at twenty thousand feet … I’ll give him the DFM. And any man who goes in at ten thousand feet, godamnit, I’ll give him a Congressional Medal of Honour. But, fellas, don’t go in at five thousand feet, will you? Because sure as hell you’d get all tangled up with the RAF.’5
Krink was facing his crew-mates as he spoke and had not noticed a knot of American flyers behind him. One of them tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Hey, laughter-boy,’ he said. ‘I dunno where you got the phoney accent or the corny gags. But let’s drop it, eh? We got a few funny stories to tell, too, but we’re too polite to blab ’em out in international company.’
Krink, far from being taken aback, answered quickly. ‘Who’s got a phoney accent? I was born right in the twin cities; St Paul’s my home town.’
The American eyed the RAF uniform. ‘Turned traitor, eh?’
Krink answered quietly: ‘Traitor? How come? Last I heard we was both fighting for the same side.’
‘Sure we are! Both on the same side; that is, I’m not so sure we’re both fighting.’
There were six 101 Squadron men present, and four USAF. Now, each group was facing the other, tense.
‘And which of us
would you suggest might not be fighting?’, Hyde asked.
‘Read any good books lately?’ said Vincent.
But the American was facing Hyde obviously with no intention of changing the subject. He shot a glance at Vincent and answered: ‘Yes, I have. It was a book about the retreat from Dunkirk and Singapore and Java and I seem to remember it was called How to Lose a War.’
Everybody was being calm and quiet with such intensity that the situation seemed far more electric than if voices had been raised.
Vincent took a long sip of beer. A studied gesture; because although it was long he certainly took no more than a sip.
‘I’ve read one, too,’ he said. ‘A thing called Queens Die Proudly by an American called White. Have you read it?’6
‘Not that I recall.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what it says about, for example, the battle of the Java Sea; I think I can quote. “The American Navy skirted the Jap back edge, firing on the run.” That sounds rather a shameful retreat to me.’
‘In that same battle,’ put in Joe, ‘HMAS Perth was still fighting when her decks were eighteen inches awash. She sunk a hundred and fifty thousand tons of Jap shipping before they got her and all this time your boys were full steam for Melbourne.’7
‘This writer explained,’ continued Vincent, ‘that it was not American policy to dissipate their forces “in lost causes”, adding that they “needed every man in Australia”. Why defend Australia and not Java? And I don’t think our cause ever was lost.’
‘I didn’t read that book. Anyway, that’s the Navy.’
‘Oh, he wrote lots about the Air Corps. Their entire bomber force was one squadron full of old Fortresses—you know the type, without rear turrets.’
‘Those boys were heroes. They sure took a beating.’
‘They certainly did; and to what effect? White writes of a force—I think it was eight bombers—setting off from Darwin to bomb Batavia. Half of them turned back but four did arrive, and there they bombed the Jap fleet. And do you know what they dropped? I quote: ‘four, beautiful blue six-hundred-pounders’. What deadly effect their being blue might have I cannot imagine, though White thought it worth mentioning. But I do know just what damage a total of sixteen six-hundred-pounders would do to a fleet. The Nips would just polish the spot where they landed and it wouldn’t even dent the armour-plate. Yet White paints such a picture of destruction that the eager American readers might think the Japanese Navy would be hard-pressed to put to sea again for months. Those flyers, as you said, were heroes. They had taken a beating. They had retreated for thousands of miles and they were still fighting. But that’s not the way the story was written. The retreat was forgotten and little skirmishes were made to look like great victories. What’s shameful about a retreat? I’m mighty glad some American Navy did survive the Java Sea encounter and later thrash the Japs in the Coral Sea. But get the idea that only the British retreat right out of your head. I seem to recall the evacuation of Manila was none too glorious.’
The American had subsided a little. ‘But that was in the Pacific, right at the beginning.’
‘The beginning? Hadn’t the war been going on for two years by then?’
‘Oh, your war had. I mean the United States’ war.’
‘You don’t imagine that morally it wasn’t just as much your war, do you? Except you were making no attempt at all to fight it then. ‘All aid short of war’, remember? And good luck to you; I’d rather stay out and make money than fight any day.’
‘You’re getting off the point,’ said the American. ‘What happened in the Pacific in those days isn’t what’s happening here now. The USAF in Britain is bigger than the RAF today. That’s what started this: who is doing the fighting.’
‘Shades of nineteen-nineteen,’ murmured Magnetic. ‘Who won the war?’8
‘Bigger? In what way?’ Vincent refused to be sidetracked. ‘How do you measure a bomber force? Not personnel, chum! You measure it by bombs. That’s what does the damage: bombs. One Fortress, with a crew of eleven, carries less than half the load of a standard Lancaster—and special Lancasters are carrying up to four times the Fortress load with a crew of six. RAF ground crew averages three men per bomber against the USAF’s fourteen.’
Vincent did some quick mental arithmetic. ‘That means that the ordinary man on an RAF bomber squadron does the work of five Americans, measured in terms of bombs on the enemy … and you note I say ‘on the enemy’, and not ‘on Germany’ because you’ve dropped precious few on Germany.’
Before the American could counter this thrust, Vincent asked him, ‘When are you going to bomb Berlin?’
‘Berlin’s a mighty tough target. You guys skulk over there at night. We gotta go in daylight, remember. I’d like to see you fly to Berlin in daylight.’
‘The RAF have bombed Berlin in daylight. In Mosquitoes. We broke up Hitler’s anniversary party, remember?’9
Joe had been busting to have his say and at last he burst in. ‘I trained in Canada and used to read US newspapers. And I hardly ever saw mention of the RAF. Plenty of ‘Americans bomb Lille’, then ‘Allied Bombers Pound Berlin’, but that the bombs on France were American and the bombs on Germany were British was carefully omitted—I’d even say that every attempt was made to make it read as though they were American bombs on Berlin. I was astounded to hear, when America had been in the war a year, that they had never once bombed Germany. The RAF raided Germany one day after war was declared. And we hadn’t two years to get ready while our friends held our end up. But your papers don’t tell the true story; no wonder Americans get a false picture. I see the same tendency in my own country—Australia. It’s sheer national boastfulness and it’s a sign of immaturity. But we’re growing out of it lately; perhaps because we’ve lately listened to so many Yanks. Tell me, sport, did you read about the first defeat of the Japanese army at Milne Bay?’10
‘Yes, I read about it.’
‘Who fought that battle?’
‘We did, I guess.’
‘Well, guess again, mate. The only American force at Milne Bay was a solitary unit of anti-aircraft gunners who arrived on the last day. The rest of the ‘Allies’ were Australians; many of them the same chaps who held Tobruk with the Desert Rats while the Yanks were still giving ‘all aid short of war.’
‘Hey, man!’ said Yarpi. ‘It was the South Africans in Tobruk.’
Now the Empire was at war within itself.
Joe turned on Yarpi. ‘What’s that, sport? Though the South Africans were in Tobruk they didn’t hold Tobruk. That was the last time it was surrounded and they capitulated in three weeks. The Aussies had held it for nine months and it never looked like falling.’11
Joe had introduced the first hostile note into the party and Vincent chuckled pointedly as he said; ‘I was with the Aussies in Crete and they were getting out of there pretty fast, Joe.’
‘In Crete? Well, maybe they were. You can’t hold an island without supply lines.’
‘Maybe the same thing happened to the South Africans in Tobruk. I’ve heard it said that the real credit for the stand of Tobruk should go to the Royal Navy. They got supplies in and casualties out during that whole nine months.’
‘I don’t care who wins this war,’ said Magnetic. ‘America, Australia, even South Africa if it makes her happy—but I wish they’d win it soon and shoot Hitler and let’s all go home.’
‘There is one man I would like to discover,’ said Johnnie. ‘Not the man who wins the war but the man who begins it. Let us all hate him and hunt him out and destroy him and never again boast of how well we have killed.’
Every man turned and looked at Johnnie and there was a long moment’s silence. Then Hyde thumped Johnnie’s shoulder and, addressing the Americans, said; ‘That was spoken by a German.’
‘Let’s put him in the Peace Delegation after the war.’
‘If we do, Johnnie,’ said Vincent, ‘don’t fall into the old British rut. The trouble with this country is
that, after every war, we carefully disarm the people we fought last when the wise thing to do would be to disarm the people we shall probably fight next.’12
The discussion had known several tense moments—natural when many things so near to national pride had been broached—but the Americans, already eager to bury the hatchet, thawed completely when Hyde insisted on including them in the next round of drinks.13
It is never very long, when young men are out together, before somebody wants to eat. Joe announced that he ‘could go a steak and eggs’, and when Magnetic, the Londoner, said it was out of the question to procure steak in food rationed London, Joe assured him that ‘Sloppy Mo, behind the Cheshire Cheese serves a bonzer steak—horse meat, of course—and fair rubber eggs’. Hyde asked the Americans to join them.
They declined politely, explaining that beefsteak, which was unheard of in RAF messes, was served ‘with monotonous regularity at Base’.
At Sloppy Mo’s they ordered Mexican soup which turned out to be a milky water with floating worms of red and green chilli. Joe ordered an entree ‘to awaken our outraged palate’. When it came it was a slice of garlic sausage. ‘This meal is going from bad to wurst,’ said Vincent. But they enjoyed the steak of ‘prime horse’. Surely this was food for heroes.
Raff was with Vincent when he met the others outside the Registry Office. Then H-H arrived, driven by Barbara in a sleek Riley.14 The flyers were introduced to many other people who had been waiting nearby. The last introduction was when Barbara formally met Raff, then everybody trooped into the Registry Office where quite the most poised of that distinguished company was the nonchalant Raff. If his canine ear had caught the many titles during the introductions his perky manner did not reveal his awe.
Hyde acted as one of the witnesses of the quiet, drab little ceremony. Without choir, without music, without ritual, even without flowers, it was an unimpressive wedding indeed. Vincent saw a tear in Barbara’s eye and was surprised; the ceremony was not moving. Or was she crying for the wedding she had dreamed of? No matter what the setting she could hardly have looked lovelier; in grosgrain suit of palest blue, accessories of sandy fawn and a fairy-light hat that did not more than pamper her pretty hair—she looked Venus enough for any Apollo.