Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  My confidence about the WANTAC signals did lessen slightly in the car, I must concede. Whether the fair interval we hoped for would actually now develop on Tuesday remained to be seen. Even if it did, the conditions would be far from the minima set out on the BIGOT sheet. Moreover, other large, unpredictable depressions were wheeling across the Atlantic. At least that meant that the Germans, observing the rough seas and strong winds now ripping across the Channel, would decrease their invasion reconnaissance …

  I sped along against a southward flow of heavy military traffic. The storm battered the windows of the Packard, which were filled with successive, half-glimpsed images of military transports, all dipped headlights, angles of metal, camouflage nets. Embouched for a moment among vehicles, I glimpsed a tank commander looking for a reason for the hold-up. Rain-lashed, he stood upright in his turret, moving from one side to the other to get a better view. Poking out of soaked camouflaged sleeves, his white hands gripped the edge of the hatch.

  Yates said he had arranged for me to go in a glider. I didn’t like the sound of that very much, but I supposed it was better than taking my chance on a landing craft. I hated the idea of drowning. Some of the poor buggers would have to drive jeeps off the landing craft into five feet of water. I’d seen them down in Portsmouth, dipping their hands into vast drums filled with a compound of grease, lime and asbestos fibres and coating the points and distributor with it under the bonnet, then driving down the harbour slipways into the water to practise. These jeeps had upright exhausts, like snorkels. All you could see as they moved along was the vertical protrusion of the exhaust, with its little flapper-cap going like billy-o, and the head and shoulders of the driver.

  I had felt like that until very recently – as if I was just keeping my head above water. Now I was stronger, I thought, as the traffic whistled on the wet road. What I had learned, apart from the proof itself, and it was simultaneous and coterminous with it, was that all things are ephemeral, although connected by a web of marvellous affinity … one that stretches from the bounds of universe to those of individual being. How wonderful it would be to be some kind of scientific superhero, able to fly without let from one misty region to the next!

  We passed a sign for Chobham, I think it was (the lashing rain made it hard to see), and I remember it was at more or less that moment that my conviction of total connectedness suffered a blow, as I saw the continuity between me and all the thugs and monsters of whom Hitler was simply then the most prominent. But looking back now, with sharpened eyes, I see the link to the maniacs is simply one of the facts that any system must legitimately ignore. At least, it must if it is to preserve its identity.

  How rarely we see it, the full picture. Through our fogged perceptions and illusions of control, how rare is that man or woman who can stay still in the strange land of dissolving elements, constant change and unpredictable fortune that is called life; can stay still long enough to perceive an ideal of the whole. And, in becoming still, become aware of his or her own flow: the buried stream of a genuine self, murmuring quietly as it winds its course. Only another’s eyes can show the way to this place, and those have now been closed to me. What’s left is not the ghostly aspect of her, but that of myself – of my own former inwardness that now follows me round like a strange dog.

  If, tracking me down, that figment of my past were to ask me how to tell the future, I would advise it to look for patterns within systems and perturbations at their edges. Spy out what is new and – often more important – what is disappearing. Variations of input count for a lot, as does the speed at which a system operates and at which information propagates through it. When there’s a big difference between those two speeds, a shock-wave can result. Ideally, information should pass through a system at a rate which allows that system to adjust to it.

  That is what we have learned. That is the news from the future, conveyed through a fountain pen to a former self, as if the pen itself were a torpedo shot into the past from the bows of the ice ship. That is what I’d tell that persistent old dog of my young self, as he moseyed his way through wartime traffic to an uncertain fate, unknowing of the love and the loss which lay before him, unaware that he was hovering between Africa then and Africa now, where he might seek the plain where his old life rose.

  By 9.30 p.m. I was at Newbury among the men of the 82nd US Airborne Division, being taken through line after line of bulky young paratroopers. Some were dozing with their packs on their backs, their faces smeared with camouflage cream; others were sitting up alert, their expressions filled with anxiety by the great undertaking.

  I was introduced to Colonel Tommy Moorman, head of the 21st Weather Squadron, who were going in with the 82nd. He assigned me to Corporal Eugene Jourdaine, a thickset, round-shouldered man with bushy black hairs protruding from his nostrils.

  I was to act as Met liaison between the British and Americans, but since I did not have any RAF battledress, they let me wear Weather Squadron uniform. It had a motto on the shoulder, Coela Bellatores – ‘weather warriors’ – which pleased me greatly.

  I was amazed at the scale of the US Army’s weather operation. There were more than a thousand men in the 21st and another squadron, the 18th, of about the same number. But it was the US Army-issue camp-bed, one of that country’s greatest inventions, which impressed me most. I got some sleep that night, more than I had had for ages, conscience for once forgetting to worm its way into my head.

  5

  On the morning of Monday, 5 June, after a hot shower – this aspect of American technical excellence also delighted me – and a breakfast of eggs, bacon and waffles, washed down with black coffee, I telephoned Stagg at Southwick. Through that by now very familiar conveyance (so familiar I had developed a skin complaint in the cup of my ear), I learned of the extremely tense atmosphere of the previous night’s forecast presentation, during which Eisenhower and his battlefield commanders in the library at Southwick House had quizzed Stagg on the interval signalled by WANTAC.

  As heavy rain poured down outside and wind battered the shutters, Stagg had told them that by the early hours on Tuesday, he believed wind, sea, cloud and visibility conditions would all be tolerable enough to mount an invasion. The cold front which had brought the rain was now moving southeastwards and would clear the invasion site within two or three hours, Stagg said, and there would now be a weather window of one to two days.

  Tedder asked Stagg how much confidence he had in this forecast.

  ‘A lot,’ said Stagg simply. I knew what a relief it must have been for him to say those words, and after all that had happened in the past six months it gave me pleasure to hear them, too.

  More questions were asked, until finally Eisenhower turned to Montgomery. ‘Is there any reason we shouldn’t go tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ replied Monty. ‘I would say – Go!’ Leigh Mallory and Tedder were more hesitant, but Eisenhower over-ruled them.

  Stagg told me that after that evening meeting Eisenhower came up to him privately in the corridor and said, ‘Well, we’re putting it on again; for heaven’s sake hold the weather to what you told us and don’t bring any more bad news.’

  The further seaborne forces were already heading to France by the time Eisenhower spoke to Stagg, but it wasn’t until about five that morning that the order to restart the rest of the invasion was actually transmitted. The poised power of the gigantic, wound-up military spring, already forward in its very nature, was at last unleashed.

  For me it was all a bit more forward than I had imagined, for as soon as I got off the phone Jourdaine came running up to tell me that our division would actually go late that night (Monday), preceding the main invasion force, in order that the weathermen might send back their observations and their fast-moving paratroop colleagues secure essential positions.

  ‘D minus one is kinda D for us,’ Jourdaine explained, and I could have laughed with the shock of it all. All this time I had been preparing for one day and now we were going the night
before anyway. It seemed in the nature of turbulence that this should be so.

  There was still a lot of preparation to be done, so far as my own survival went. His nostril hairs twitching as he spoke, Corporal Jourdaine briefed me about the forthcoming glider flight and issued me with a small radio and a personal psychrometer (it resembled a football supporter’s rattle) together with some other instruments and an M1 carbine. Glistening with gun oil, the weapon was semi-automatic and different from anything I had shot with before, my experience of firearms being confined to small-bore rifles used to bag partridge and guinea-fowl for the pot.

  ‘I’ve used hunting rifles in Africa,’ I said, picking the carbine up from the pile of equipment in front of me, trying to seem casual. ‘But never anything like this.’ I could smell the cordite on the armoury, like spent firework and metal; also a faint aroma of petrol and greaseproof paper, which was the gun oil overlaying it. I felt extremely uncertain as to whether I wanted these scents of childhood back in my consciousness; but the thing about our perceptions is that they make us their prisoners as soon as we experience them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jourdaine, kneeling down to sort out some straps that had become tangled in the pile. ‘It’s not so different. But tell me, sonny, how come they picked you for this shindig? Surely you guys must have militarily trained weathermen who operate forward in the field with infantry?’

  ‘Well, yes, we do,’ I replied, giving vent to the odd feeling of national embarrassment that, mixed with the crude stink of imperial memory, would come to be the default position in future years. ‘Some. We have some. But we’ve run out.’

  ‘Clean out, hey?’ said Jourdaine, straightening up. ‘You know, that’s the thing I’ve noticed most about you Brits. You’ve run out of everything. Lucky we came along to save you, huh?’

  I ignored the jibe, which already seemed fair enough in truth, and listened hard while he took me through the weapon’s safety drills, and then showed me how to strip and assemble it. It was indeed not so very different from what I had learned from my father, but, as Jourdaine ominously warned, ‘These Garands can go wrong sometime, if you’re not careful with them.’

  After explaining the weapon’s operating limits, Jourdaine took me outside to a firing range and I had a go at shooting. It was fun to do it again after all these years, and I didn’t do too badly in hitting the targets. In fact, my marksmanship didn’t seem very much worse than that of the men around me on the range.

  Jourdaine, who had packets of cigarettes strapped to each thigh, said it didn’t matter too much anyway. ‘There’ll be plenty of troops around us to do the shooting. Our job is to get the weather news back.’

  Around 11.30 p.m. that night, full of trepidation, I queued up with the others to board the giant fleet of planes and gliders. There were some nine hundred aircraft there, and three invasion-related airfields in Berkshire alone.

  Coffee and buns were served to us by Waafs as we waited in the queue. They looked strange and ghosted there, ivorine amid the signal lights of the airfield and the swirling smoke from the exhausts of the lorries which had brought the troops and were now departing. The vehicles made me think of the inhuman grotesqueries taking place in Europe, of which people were now beginning to speak a little, in very muted tones.

  The Yanks’ comments to the girls were something to hear, each soldier outdoing the next in ribaldry as he shot his line. I remember I found myself fondly hoping that Gwen and Joan – Liss & Lamb, as they’d come to be known in their years of fame – would be among those holding out the trays carrying refreshments, but they weren’t, of course. I wondered where Whybrow had sent them.

  Next a general came past and looked us over, muttering words of encouragement to the lines of waiting troops – coffee-slurping, bun-eating boys from Nebraska, New York, Kentucky, all at a peak of physical fitness and mental readiness. The exception, I began to feel afraid. I started worrying whether I would get a spell of dizziness, but then to my great surprise I saw a familiar face pushing through the khaki-clad crowd.

  It was Sir Peter Vaward, wrapped in a gaberdine mackintosh so white he might have just been swept, whirlwind-swivelled, out of a snowdrift.

  He held out his hand to me. ‘I just wanted to come up here, to see you off,’ he said, looking me in the face. ‘And to tell you something. Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I replied. ‘Well, a bit nervous, really. But you shouldn’t have taken the trouble to come.’

  ‘It was no trouble, Meadows. No trouble at all. It was something I wanted to do. Stagg has told me how hard you have worked and that your work with Ryman numbers helped pinpoint the calm interval.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, sir.’

  Uniformed figures moved past behind him, rippling like a landscape – half green, half glinting black. The signal light flashed from the makeshift control tower, illuminating Vaward’s physiognomy like a clock face in the dark. The tower itself was just scaffolding and boards, somewhere for the chief loadmaster to step above the panoply of swaying green men, beyond whom stood, in serried ranks, the black forms of the gliders that would be charged with them.

  ‘That’s what he told me. And other sources corroborate it: you should know that counter-intelligence followed you to the Isle of Wight. All you forecasters have been closely watched over the past few weeks.’

  ‘I didn’t know, sir. We knew we were being listened to on the phones but not …’ It was unsettling to think spies had been traipsing around after us, but also faintly comic.

  One of the Yanks was complaining about the hot cross buns – pointing out that for such an important operation it should have been doughnuts. The queues were very long and slow. Vaward and I were moving on as we spoke, but only by very small gradations.

  ‘But it is other surveillance I have come to tell you about. Last night we decrypted a German signal from Paris expecting coastal winds that would make invasion too risky. Indeed, German naval craft putting out to sea to lay mines in the Channel were forced back into harbour by the stormy conditions. The point is, they don’t think there will be a gap in the weather. They don’t expect any Allied action for at least a fortnight. German commanders have been stood down. Weickmann’s invasion watch team have nodded.’

  ‘That is very encouraging, sir. Those decoders deserve a medal.’

  ‘So do the forecast teams. Even you yourself, Meadows. But you won’t get one, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Because of Ryman’s death?’

  Jostled by the passing soldiery, Vaward rocked slightly, as if his two heels were trying to achieve synthesis.

  ‘No, no. Because the success of the forecast – and it really does look like it might be successful now – cannot be identified with any one nation among the Allies, still less with a single individual. Just as failure couldn’t have been either. But well done, Meadows. Really well done. Even downing the plane has turned out to be useful. Heinz Wirbel is proving rather a find – it’s meteorology he loves, not Nazism. Any questions?’

  ‘No, sir. Thank you, sir. It’s very kind of you to have come.’

  I watched the white mackintosh disappear into the moving bodies: the swarming, variegated mass of troops which in that moment seemed emblematic of the stir of life, that circulation of bacteria into which all individuals must be subsumed.

  I continued waiting with the others. With shuffling steps we approached our wooden gliders. These were fragile things, almost too beautiful to send into war. We downed our cocoa and gave the mugs to more Waafs with trays.

  Lots of the Met section had haversack radios, with tall wire aerials. It was behind a soldier carrying one of these that I began mounting the small steps of the glider. Ducking down to enter the cabin (the radio man had had to bend his antenna into a curve), I took my seat in rows with the other men, surrounded by heavy packs, ammo boxes and other kit: trenching tools, gas masks, sacks of ration tins and hand grenades – and the rifles, of course.

  Nobody spoke much
, we were too apprehensive, staring at each other’s murky forms and sombre faces in the dim light of the cabin, our chests contracting and expanding in their tunics and webbing. Then the engines of the planes – mainly Dakotas – started up, filling the air with fumes and roaring.

  The propeller noise of big planes is like a clattering – as if a rift is being made in the sky – and that is indeed what was happening, since the blades of the propellers were forcing apart molecules of air very rapidly. Thunder is a larger version of the same process, and what I heard that day was thunder. Chopped thunder. Air that was being rent, riven, cleft. All in vain, for new molecules quickly rush in to fill the gap.

  Through the resolutely continuous medium of the atmosphere the sound waves travelled, cleaving together as they struck the eardrum. The membrane of my glider, too, was beating like a goat-skin drum. It pulsated with the rhythms of all those engines, making my diaphragm beat in response in my chest and my heart race accordingly.

  With the lights shining through the membrane and all the dark faces sitting about, the scene was reminiscent of a firelit pow-wow in the miombo woods that skirt Lake Nyasa. I remember one occasion so thick with drumbeats it made the whole glade reverberate, as if each tree had a voice.

  There was a lurch. Somebody whooped. We began rolling behind our Dakota on the runway, faster and faster until, seconds after the motorised plane, the glider took wing and, with an exhilarating, volatile movement, was lifted into the air. The sound of air rushing over us was astonishing, like a giant blowing over the plane in a constant stream.

  My head was sweating in my helmet, going alternately hot and cold as the sweat came and then evaporated. I tried to imagine the relative turbulence around the Dakota and the glider, and how the air flow round one affected the air flow round the other, but I could not concentrate.