101 Nights

by Ray Ollis

  ‘This form, Farlow,’ said Chiltern coldly, waving it at him, ‘is an application from you begging a commission.’

  ‘Surely it is a mere formality, sir.’

  ‘One does not approach one’s king and ask for a great privilege, Farlow, regarding it as ‘a mere formality’.’

  ‘No, sir, but …’

  ‘The more you say, Farlow, the more you damn yourself.’

  ‘But, sir …’

  ‘That will be all, Farlow.’

  Vincent said, ‘Yessir’, saluted, turned about and walked to the door.

  He twisted the knob but then half-turned back to speak.

  Then he changed his mind and walked out.

  None of the crew would refuse to fly another tour, but none of them welcomed Chiltern for a skipper. Joe told of his experience with Chiltern’s bag-carrying sergeant and said; ‘If Chiltern was burning to death I wouldn’t do him the honour of pissing on him.’

  As a crew they flew one training flight together and were put straight on the Battle Order. The old crew were fully trained and that Chiltern himself should need further training was more than anybody, even the Squadron Commander, liked to suggest. The only change in the old crew was in their Special. Johnnie, who had been screened,6 was replaced by the oily Willy Schydt, still very much a sergeant.

  At the briefing for Squadron Leader Matthew Thomas A’Becket Chiltern’s first operation of his long service career the atmosphere was so electric that the men almost forgot their own tensions and rekindled the squadron enthusiasm. The war in the air was going well. The Squadron Commander told them they must now make a terrific effort to keep the Hun disorganised and stop his reinforcements reaching the front, and that if they did, the war would be ‘over by Christmas’.

  Tonight’s target was Cologne: the railway yards and bridges.

  ‘We have to get across the Rhine,’ said the Squadron Commander. ‘Our armies have reached it here and there and been forced to stop. Behind the Rhine Hitler will try to make a stand. We must stop him. His armies are in flight now. We must keep them that way. So remember, on this charge cry; ‘England, Bomber Harris and Christmas turkey at home!’7

  This news did not particularly please two of the men who heard it. One of those men was Sergeant Schydt and the other was Squadron Leader Chiltern. Each was thinking that the race was near its end and he had left his run too late. That was why Schydt decided to act immediately and why, too, when he approached Squadron Leader Chiltern about his commission in the dressing-room that Chiltern’s mood was so much worse than usual. He was positively rude to Schydt instead of just his usual unpleasant self.

  On their training flight, Vincent had suspected why Wall had never navigated successfully. En route to Cologne he confirmed it. He was watching his compass repeater carefully and checking the ASI and altimeter. Then he spoke:

  ‘Nav to skipper. Will you watch your course, please? You are four degrees off. And we’re climbing too quickly. We should not reach height until five degrees East.’

  There was a little gasp before Chiltern replied, ‘I like to climb quickly, navigator.’

  ‘So the Germans can pick you up on radar and get their fighters into the air? We should not reach height before five degrees East.’

  ‘There is no need for you to explain tactics to me, navigator.’

  ‘But there is a need for you to fly my courses and airspeeds. Otherwise I can’t navigate.’

  ‘The discovery that you could not navigate would not surprise me. I have had qualified navigators before who could not navigate.’

  The crew sat stunned. From here on, it seemed, they would have to fight not only the enemy but each other. It was something none of them believed could happen. Not a word was said. As they droned towards the Ruhr their very aircraft seemed sullen.

  Some things were new since they had flown regularly before. Joe and Yarpi wore electrically heated suits and gloves. ‘This suit,’ Joe said when he tried it, ‘is the only perfect climate outside bed.’

  Vincent was experiencing heavy German jamming on Gee. Theoretically radar could not be jammed, but the Hun simply transmitted so much false radar, termed ‘grass’, that it became increasingly difficult as they flew towards Germany to distinguish the correct blip from the false ones.

  Schydt was silently jamming and every voice he throttled was a German voice; the Specials no longer spoke themselves, nor were the long-range radios speaking from England.

  Vincent tried to average and plot the actual courses that Chiltern flew. He prayed for the day when their Lanc would be fitted with an air position indicator: a machine which automatically computed air position from the readings of the compass and ASI. This machine plotted the actual course the skipper flew and not the one his navigator asked him to fly. Evidently Vincent’s experience with Chiltern was not a unique one between pilots and navigators.

  The run into the target amazed them all. They had to keep reminding themselves; ‘this is the Ruhr, this is the Ruhr.’ It did not look like a Ruhr target any more. This was once an aerial hell. So far, tonight, it seemed only an average target.

  As they were about to turn in to the target, though, predicted flak came on to them very suddenly. It was close and the next burst would be closer. They had three seconds to see the first bursts, judge the situation, give the order and be out of range before that next burst came. Bill said calmly, ‘Dive port, go.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Chiltern.

  Vincent’s reaction to Bill’s order had been to grab at his equipment to stop it flying off his desk as the aircraft fell away port faster than gravity. Instead of violent action, as his microphone had been switched on to give the new course into the target, at Chiltern’s unbelievable reply he cried, foolishly, ‘Christ!’.

  The flak answered for Bill. It sprinkled the sky nearer their port beam.

  ‘Because we are being predicted by flak,’ said Bill.

  ‘Very well,’ said Chiltern. ‘Diving port.’ And he dropped the nose gently and flew a timid turn. Everyone was surprised when the next burst managed to get above them and they were safe.

  When they were back on course, tracking for Cologne with three minutes to TOT, Chiltern began a little lecture.

  ‘Bomb aimer,’ he said. ‘always announce yourself before you speak. I must know who is talking so I can appraise what you can see and decide what weight to place on your advice.’

  ‘Yes, skipper.’

  ‘And navigator! I did recognise your voice and I must say I disapprove heartily of your outburst. Not only does it betray a lack of confidence in my own decision, it also shows an alarming lack of respect for sacred things. Neither of these things will I tolerate in my crew. I hope that is absolutely clear and that I shall not have to mention it again.’

  ‘Yessir. Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Very well. We shall forget it. With this warning: I dislike profanity intensely. It is unnecessary. Should I hear it from any of my own crew, in the air or even off duty, I shall be seriously displeased.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Left ten degrees,’ Bill interjected. ‘Bomb doors open.’

  ‘Bomb aimer! I have just finished telling you always to announce yourself.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Bill hurriedly. ‘But we’ll overshoot. Left twenty degrees.’

  Slowly the aircraft turned on. Bill’s orders were hurried and garbled and were soon wild with near-panic.

  ‘Skipper! Left! Hard! Quickly!’

  ‘This is a bad approach, bomb aimer. We shall go around again. Turning off.’

  Chiltern took them miles back and ran in again. Fortunately they had been timed near the start of the attack and there were still a few bombers around them when they made their second run.

  ‘Even then,’ Bill said after they had landed, ‘it was a rotten bombing run. I’d say ‘five left’, and by the time he had thought out whether or not he could find it in his captaincy prerogative to follow my advice the correct alteration was about fiftee
n.’8

  ‘And he wouldn’t put in supercharger when we should,’ added Magnetic. ‘And that spluttering when we touched down was because he insists on handling the throttles himself.’

  ‘I thought his landing was good.’

  ‘I’ll grant that he flies beautifully. He’s a perfect pilot but a dreadful skipper.’

  ‘Well, he’s ours whether we like it or not.’

  ‘We’ve certainly got a lot to teach him,’ said Vincent.

  ‘You’d hardly believe that he and Hyde could belong to the same air force; when you told Hyde ‘dive-port-go’ either the aircraft fell port or the stick came away in his hand. Gee, I wish we could’ve had Hyde back.’ As Joe said this he looked around wistfully at the others; nostalgia showed in every face.

  Two men who had said nothing were Yarpi and Schydt. All Yarpi’s old fears had returned tenfold. What good had come of a rest on the squadron? At any time during this rest he had been ready to fly. That he had flown little seemed unimportant. True rest—security from fear; certainty that for a week or a month his life was his own—he had not known. He looked like a hunted thing. Schydt, on the other thing, looked full of Teutonic hate, as though he had been tricked into turning traitor and now he was set on revenge.

  Again the war was changing. The era of ‘quiet little daylights’ had passed. There were two reasons for this. First, the German armies were no longer making stubborn stands as they had at Caen, and close-support attacks were not necessary.9

  Secondly, winter was coming with its long nights, giving more scope for deep penetration. Railways, factories and stores became the targets again.

  It was not surprising, then, that their next target should be a tough one: the Dortmund-Ems Canal where it crossed the Ems river near Munster. It was a vulnerable point, heavily defended, and it would be difficult to find.10

  Fortunately, PFF now had another radar air to navigation and bombing, a cumbersome and expensive gadget called H2S, which both transmitted and received its own signal and therefore had unlimited range.11 A clumsy H2S cupola sticking out below the fuselage caused it to be named ‘the airborne udder’.

  Vincent prepared his flight plan with misgivings; to find this target they would need to fly better than vague courses and approximate airspeeds.

  They never did reach that target. Indeed, they failed even to take off. Their aircraft, N-Nuts, was unserviceable. During his pre-take-off check Chiltern found a 700 rpm drop on one magneto. They did not fly.

  Chiltern ordered them out of the aircraft and back to his flight office. There they stood before him while he sat upright at his desk and said in that ‘let’s-get-straight-down-to-brass-tacks’ way of his that they were to know so well; ‘Tonight my aircraft was sabotaged. This is most damaging to my service reputation. You are civilians; to you it does not matter, it simply saves you the inconvenience of flying to war tonight. But the Royal Air Force is my career. I will know the culprit.’

  He turned to Vincent. ‘Farlow, in my position, whom would you suspect?’

  Vincent stood stunned. Then he felt vast hate for this insufferable paragon. His mind rebelled as such insolence of authority.

  ‘I know these civilians well, sir. I have been to war with them all. Had I found a fault in my aircraft, and had I been tempted to attribute it to sabotage I would suspect myself.’

  ‘You suggest that I sabotaged N-Nuts?’ asked Chiltern, purposely putting the unpleasant interpretation on Vincent’s answer.

  ‘No, sir. That is as preposterous as the idea that I or North or Trinket would sabotage N-Nuts. I mean that I would doubt my suspicion of sabotage.’

  ‘Farlow, how many hours have you flown?’

  ‘About eight hundred, sir.’

  ‘I have flown two thousand five hundred, and what may be a suspicion to you is a certainty to me.’

  Chiltern never let a point pass. He seemed to list things in his mind and bring them out again when he thought they would be most unnerving. He tried this trick now. ‘You said you had been to war with all these civilians, and I believe you stressed the word, and you named North and Trinket and yourself as being as trustworthy as I. Why did you not name Krynkiwski or van Rijn or Schydt? And incidentally, I was not aware that you had ‘been to war’ as you dramatically choose to put it, with Schydt until last night. Had you?’

  ‘I had not flown with him before, sir, but I have known him well.’

  ‘How well?’

  ‘Quite well.’

  ‘What is his Christian name and where is his home town in Germany?’

  ‘I … er, I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Ah! You see! You vouch for men—even for members of an enemy nation—and then we discover you hardly know them. His Christian name is Wilhelm and he comes from Munster which, virtually, was tonight’s target. Is that not so, Schydt?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Squadron Leader Chiltern leaned back in his chair and looked keenly at each man in turn. Then he said, giving weight and import to every word, ‘I could check N-Nuts for fingerprints and doubtless learn to my own satisfaction who was the culprit. But each of you has a right in my aircraft and that alone could not convict you. Anyway, I believe I know who is guilty. This chat is to acquaint you all, and that guilty man in particular, with the fact that I am not a fool. I know much more about each one of you than you may like to think—and I have not always been pleased with your various qualities either social or military—so be careful. Mend your ways. Mine is going to be the most efficient crew on this squadron for one reason alone: I am going to make it so. Any man who tries to stop me I shall remove.’

  He looked again at Vincent. ‘And when I say ‘efficient’, Farlow, I do not mean that I will draw little yellow arrows on pieces of paper. What is this nonsense you’ve been spouting to the Commanding Officer?’

  ‘It’s a visual met wind check, sir.’

  ‘Delightful! We now check invisible wind visually. And what purpose, pray, other than that the colour is popular for rowdy sports cars and window boxes, does its being yellow serve? I would have expected you to choose BEM pink.’

  Vincent answered in the same precise tone. ‘It is yellow, sir, so that it will not be confused with the dark blue of the outward track, the green of the homeward track, the red of the flak areas and the light blue of the searchlight areas. And a BEM is red. Mine looks pink because it is faded; I have been wearing it a long time.’

  It was not quite the note on which Chiltern had planned this interview to end. However he had nothing more to say and dismissed them curtly.

  The men hurried from Chiltern’s office, then stopped in an outraged group to discuss this new insult; all except Schydt who crisply bade them good-night and left.

  ‘This guy,’ said Krink, ‘reminds me of the picture in my history book of the Englishman who provoked the War of American Independence; fleshy, flabby face, watery eyes, small teeth and a chin like a downhearted chicken. Only that guy wore a wig while this gink should wear a wig back-to-front so we wouldn’t see his fish-face or curly horse-hair.’12

  ‘His crew will be the most efficient because he makes it so,’ mimicked Joe. ‘I believe he honestly thinks he could fly better alone. It’s only the civvy pilots who need a crew and Squadron-Christ-Almighty-Leader Chiltern carries one too so as not to embarrass them. Him and his two thousand hours.’

  ‘Remember once discussing whether pilots were all-important?’ asked Magnetic. ‘This bloke might make us appreciate a good captain next time we meet one.’

  ‘He’ll learn,’ said Vincent. ‘He might become a wizard. If only he’ll grasp that it’s not the hours you’ve got in, but what you’ve got in those hours.’13

  — 2 —

  The Squadron Commander had sent for Vincent.

  ‘I have two things to tell you, Mr Farlow,’ he said.

  ‘First is that I think you have come up to scratch in this nav leader job, and second that Squadron Leader Chiltern hasn’t given you a very favourable commi
ssioning report. Have you rubbed him up the wrong way?’

  ‘Not intentionally, sir. Though I do find him difficult.’

  ‘Really? I find him charming and efficient.’

  ‘Will his unfavourable report squash my promotion, sir?’

  ‘Well, yes. That is, theoretically. But since Base put you up and I had already decided that you were doing well I’m going to force it through. It’s not very satisfactory having you in the sergeant’s mess, either, so I am allowing you to put up Pilot Officer rank straight away and to move into our mess. All right?’

  ‘Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!’

  ‘Oh, and just to please Squadron Leader Chiltern, put up a new piece of BEM ribbon, will you? He thinks your old one looks scruffy. He also asked me how you won it. I had to admit I didn’t know. How did you win it, Mr Farlow?’

  ‘It was a bit of a fiddle between Crete and Cairo, sir.’

  ‘I see. I had heard of people fiddling themselves gongs but you’re the first one I’ve met who admitted it. I would have thought that sergeants lacked sufficient influence. That’s all, then. See me in the mess tonight and I’ll buy you a drink.’1

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  As P/O Farlow, a new spring in his step, left Squadron HQ, he thought to himself; ‘And that, despite Mr Chiltern, is that.’

  It made him feel rather warm and smug.

  ‘It’ll mean leaving Magnetic and Joe and Johnnie and the chaps, though …’

  That thought made him, in turn, a little sad.

  Bomber Command was raiding Germany during daylight, in force, for the first time. The target was Emmerich where German army forces were massed in a forest. Bombers carried incendiary bombs; tactics were to set the forest on fire. Chiltern and his crew were flying.2

  The German army, they were growing to know, had heavy and well-trained anti-aircraft defences. Even the veterans were alarmed when they saw the barrage of flak over the target. Chiltern showed absolutely no fear.

  At night exploding flak showed one momentary twinkle and then was gone. By day, flak had to be very near for aircrews to see the flash because at all but critical ranges it showed as a puff of smoke which hung in the air where it burst. Over Emmerich it was impossible to see through; literally impossible to see through the black cloud of bursting flak. At the sight of it their respect for Americans rose considerably.