War Wounds

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Watson, now risen to flying officer, said quietly as they were hurrying to the three-ton lorry that had come to fetch them, “A put up job. Pure Hollywood. Command must have kept this up their sleeve until they knew the Air Marshal would be in the thick of meeting the crews. And Group must have worked out a precise timing with the Air Commodore before he left.”

  “You’re distressingly cynical for your years,” Harry told him; thinking that he was probably right. “Target in Belgium, d’you think? I’ll lay you five to two on.”

  “No, thanks. Anything so dramatic must mean a trip to Belgium.”

  “Or Holland. I’ll lay you five to two about Belgium and evens Holland.”

  “Done: Holland. Five bob.”

  “That’s a mean venture for an F.O.”

  “Haven’t had my first month’s pay as an F.O. yet.”

  “Make it half a bar.”

  “All right; just to show you what a spendthrift I am.”

  The moment they entered the Ops Room their gaze went directly to the wall map. The red tape marking their route led to Maastricht, where the frontiers of Holland, Belgium and Germany met.

  “Fork out.” Watson looked mockingly at Templer.

  “Don’t be in such an indecent hurry.”

  And that was the only exchange for which they had time. There was urgency in the mood of the Operations Room staff, and both Air officers and the station, commander had already arrived by the time the three-tonners delivered the air crews.

  Among recent changes at Massingham, and following the Group’s policy of rotating controllers and senior Intelligence officers in order to broaden their experience and fit them for a variety of appointments and types of operation, Liversedge and Monks had both been posted there from Scantlebury. Both were on duty that morning.

  Liversedge had the first word. “Your target is tanks in the Maastricht area, in Holland. Your bomb load is four two-fifty-pounders. Height for approach and attack at the discretion of the formation leader. Command have laid on twelve aircraft.”

  Monks spoke briefly. “The situation is reported as fluid; which probably means chaotic. The Thirty-ninth Panzer Corps have entered Holland and are pressing hard westward, supported by J.U. Eighty-sevens, dive-bombing. It’s the same Blitzkrieg pattern that the enemy used in Poland. There will be sorties all day by Hurricanes based in France, so you might be lucky and have some cover. It depends whether your arrival over the target coincides with theirs.”

  Snaith was twitching as much with excitement as from his nervous affliction. He had been detailed to lead if a formation comprising aircraft from both flights should be required. Twelve meant six from each.

  He was aware of Arnott looming next to him.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, old boy, but I’ll take this one. You’ll have to stay behind.” Snaith was senior flight commander and therefore deputy squadron commander.

  “Sir!” But protest was useless.

  Arnott addressed the room at large. “We’ll go out at a thousand feet, bomb from between two-fifty and five hundred, according to the concentration of tanks, vehicles and troops, and the lie of the land ... the topography. I believe there are no hills in Holland, so we should be able to press on pretty low.”

  There was some laughter, but no one sounded really much amused.

  *

  In Snaith’s reluctant absence, Harry flew as No. 2 to the squadron commander: on his right, two wingspans away and a length astern. It was not his favourite position. He preferred to be in a V of three in the centre of a large formation; and thus benefit to the maximum from the combined fire of the dorsal gunners. On the right wing and in front, he felt very exposed.

  The Blenheim crews saw where their targets would be from fifteen miles away, even at a comparatively low altitude. Smoke from burning buildings, from crops that had been set alight by bombs and shells, and from the bursting of these, rose several hundred feet into the air and across a front of many miles.

  When they were within three or four miles of the battlefield, they began to discern Stukas, Ju 87 dive-bombers, descending almost vertically to deliver their attacks.

  They searched for fighters. Harry saw three fast-moving little shapes that shone silver in the sun. Messerschmitts? He looked for more. Then he saw first one and then another, and a third Stuka catch fire and crash, each making a huge explosion which sent up a dense column of black smoke.

  “Hurricanes,” he said.

  Watson said “Bloody good show.”

  “Looks like Messerschmitts coming in from astern, Skipper,” said Sergeant Broadley; who had also been promoted. “Eight ... four-o’clock, up about a thousand feet ... about a couple of miles off.”

  “We should have time to bomb before they get there.” Harry hoped that Arnott would go in and out fast, and not orbit looking for targets. If there were masses of armour, lorries and infantry on the move, surely it would suffice to bomb indiscriminately among them.

  Tracer came curving up at them and he realised with some indignation that they were under fire from heavy machine-guns. He was always prepared for flak, but this seemed to him an impertinence. The tracer was coming from several directions. Half a minute after it appeared, light flak guns joined in, sending larger multicoloured streaks at the formation.

  Ahead of them, along the main road, at least a dozen tanks moved westward. Close behind were lorries packed with troops. Tanks were crossing fields on both sides of the road, ahead of the ones on the highway, and infantry were trotting behind them. Armoured cars raced along minor roads. Farm buildings, isolated houses and villages burned.

  Arnott led the Blenheims down in a shallow dive. They had practised this method of bombing and here was a good target for it. They released their bombs as they flew over the forward armoured vehicles, lorries and the infantrymen who were following them.

  Clods of earth and clouds of dust spewed up, among smoke and flames. Vehicles and the bodies of dead men were tossed aloft by blast. Harry found himself in the grip of an exultation that was entirely new. To see the invaders torn to pieces by his bombs was greatly more satisfying than seeing them fall in the sea, however close to an enemy ship, or even on its deck. The consequences were spectacular and fulfilled the innate lust for vengeance. The Blenheims continued their dive after they had bombed, and levelled off just above the treetops of the tallest woods and copses. Harry saw the body of a German soldier hurled so high that it went right over the top of his aircraft and was snatched away in the slipstream.

  Broadley, habitually unemotional in action, spoke with audible pleasure. “Bloody Jerry just been cut in half by our tail fin, Skipper.”

  “I hope he didn’t bend it.”

  “No. But his guts are all over it.”

  “Let’s strafe the bastards,” Harry said.

  The Blenheims were making a series of dives at whatever was worth shooting at, the pilots firing the gun in the port wing. Men were falling, lorries catching fire.

  A Blenheim slammed into the ground with a roar that shook C for Charlie’s tail unit and wingtips. Another was hit by the concentrated fire of half a dozen heavy machine-guns; instead of pulling out of its dive, it flew straight into a tank. The gush of hot and agitated air from the twin explosions and fires rocked Charlie so violently that a wingtip almost scraped a tall tree.

  Arnott led his squadron home at the same low level until they were well out of the range of enemy fighters. They then climbed to 2,000 ft. Excitable anti-aircraft gunners in a Channel convoy fired on them, and equally nervous soldiery on the Kent coast welcomed them back to England with a hail of tracer.

  “I hope they shoot more accurately at Jerry,” Watson said.

  “Next time, I’ll damn well shoot back.” But Harry knew he wouldn’t. That way lay a court martial, however much the naval and military gunners deserved reprisals. Their shooting was not always as wild as it had just been: they had shot down several R.A.F. aeroplanes already.

  The sortie was the first
of many similar ones. Day by day the distance to the battleground grew shorter as the enemy advance sliced through Holland and Belgium into France. Templer’s prophesy was fulfilled: when the German Army entered France, civilians began to flee from their homes in hordes. Day after day Harry saw rivers of humanity flowing westward. Men, women and children trudged beside and behind carts laden with clothing, furniture and kitchen utensils. Some of the carts were horse-drawn, others were being dragged and pushed by human effort; both men and women shared this heavy burden. The very old, the sick, and the very young children were privileged to ride; provided that the family owned a conveyance. Thousands who should have been helped in this way were compelled to tramp on until they dropped. Harry saw corpses lying at the roadside, where illness or exhaustion had forced them to rest; and there, they died.

  Coming back at dusk one evening, from bombing a railway junction to which supplies and reinforcing troops were being brought daily, Harry and his crew saw a mass of refugees cramming three miles of main road beside which shells were bursting. To the east they could see the field guns that were firing them, a red flash spurting out of the muzzles each time a cannon fired. They saw, then, that a hamlet, consisting of a few houses on each side of the highway, was in the hands of British or French troops. A gun battery was sited there, and shooting back at the enemy battery. Two tanks were hiding behind a barn, either waiting to move against the enemy, or under repair. Infantry soldiers appeared at windows, firing automatic weapons at low-flying enemy aircraft.

  Many of the German shells overshot their target and burst on the road, scattering dead and wounded men, women and children, horses, dogs, and some of the cows and pigs that many of the fleeing peasants were driving ahead of them.

  The Blenheims were at 200 ft and theoretically safe from fighter attack. The Me 109s and Me 110s mostly patrolled and hunted above 15,000 ft, for one thing; for another, low-level attacks on British or French bombers were hazardous, because they left very little room for pulling out of an attacking dive or avoiding hummocks, trees and buildings in a level one.

  Broadley warned, “One-o-nines, six-o’clock, up, Skipper.”

  A moment later, his guns rattled and Watson peered through the window on his side to try to see the fighters.

  Instead of the tracer he expected to see ripping into the Blenheim, he saw them change from level flight to a shallow dive.

  “They’re going under us ... God! They’re deliberately strafing those poor devils ...”

  The backwash from the Messerschmitts smote the Blenheim an instant before the fighters entered Harry’s field of vision. Sickened, he watched their bullets and cannon shells hurtle into the midst of the close-packed column. He was low enough to see people’s mouths opening as they screamed in terror or agony. He saw limbs torn off, bodies cut in half, the bedding and clothes piled on carts catch fire. He saw humans and animals fall and lie writhing among growing pools of blood; others falling dead.

  There were seven Blenheims left in the formation of nine that had started out. The dorsal gunners in all of them were shooting at the enemy. One Me 109 was hit and plunged onto the road, killing scores of refugees as it ploughed through them and many more when its fuel exploded.

  The fighters ignored the Blenheims. They kept up their attacks on the civilians until they had used all their ammunition and then turned away to fly back to their base.

  “They’ve got time to refuel, rearm and come back to give an encore, before dark,” Watson said. The bitterness in his tone expressed the feelings of them all.

  “They’ll call it a legitimate target,” said Harry. “Clearing the way for their advance. At dawn tomorrow, any dead and wounded still lying on the road will be crushed under Jerry tank tracks and lorry wheels.”

  Father was right, he thought. He should see this. I wonder if he ever saw anything quite as horrible in the last show. It makes me wish I were a fighter boy; I’d love to take on One-o-nines and One-one-os on equal terms and man-to-man.

  *

  He said as much to his father a few hours later, on the telephone. It was his mother who made the call; then, reassured of his welfare, handed him over.

  “Keeping you busy, Harry?”

  “I’m sure the workmen who are putting up new buildings here would strike for overtime pay, Father. As it is, they demand danger money: in case Jerry strafes the camp!”

  They shared a laugh. But Harry did not find it easy to summon laughter that evening.

  “I understand now what you mean by Hun frightfulness, Father. Our propagandists don’t need to invent atrocities; all they have to do is film them. Unfortunately, there are never any cameramen on the spot when the sort of thing I saw today happens.”

  “Refugees being strafed, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you can’t expect to find the press or the newsreel wallahs among a mob of civilians: they don’t expect barbarity: they go where the ground troops are fighting, to get their pictures.”

  “It seems to me this war has entered new dimensions, Father. It’s total. Nobody is out of it. And maybe the honest British workman is right to demand overtime for working in places like this.”

  “New dimensions, Harry? You sound like one of those Yankee journalists wallahs: what do they call them? War correspondents.”

  “My observer’s a keen photographer. He’s going to bring a camera along in future.”

  “Air Ministry ought to take official photographs. Tell your observer to keep his to himself, or he’ll be in serious trouble. Air Ministry are as sensitive about censorship as our local vicar is over scandal about choirboys.”

  Harry chuckled. “I’ll warn John Watson, Father. Tell Mother I’ll call tomorrow evening.”

  *

  Harry’s crew was among those released until 1000 hrs the following morning. They slept late. At mid-day they were summoned to the Operations Room.

  Liversedge, who was senior controller and seemed seldom to leave the place, even when it was not his time to be on watch, looked dull-eyed and weary. Monks, who was reputed to sleep in his adjacent office, was there and looked equally drawn and troubled.

  Six crews, under Squadron Leader Snaith, whose twitch had abated — perhaps, as Watson said, because he was getting used to having The Grim Reaper constantly at his shoulder; “like the rest of us” — attended the briefing.

  Liversedge nodded at Squadron Leader Monks. “You’d better give them the general picture first, Chimp.”

  Monks, who did more than a little resemble a chimpanzee, cleared his throat.

  “The last troops we can hope to evacuate from Dunkirk are being taken aboard today. By nightfall, there’ll be no chance of shipping out any more. To give the enemy a kick in the teeth and distract his attention, the powers that be have decided to surprise Hitler. Whether they do or not, they’ve certainly surprised me. And, I think, everyone else here.” There was some amusement at Monks’s wry tone and expression. “You chaps are going to bomb a power station and gasometers a few miles to the east of Aachen. The theory is that the enemy will be demoralised by an attack on Germany, while we’re still fighting for time to withdraw from France. The target has been chosen because it’s in an important industrial complex; and by knocking out electricity and gas supplies, production will be impossible for a couple of weeks.” He went on to tell them what to expect in the way of fighters and flak.

  Liversedge suggested two possible routes to and from the target. After discussion with Snaith, one was chosen for the way out and another for the return.

  Snaith concluded, “You are to be over the target precisely ten minutes before sunset, to give you the benefit of darkness on your way home.”

  Watson’s dry comment was heard by everyone and provoked laughter; it relieved the solemn realisation that they were to traverse territory that was entirely in the hands of the enemy, from the instant they crossed the Belgian coast on the way there until they crossed out again.

  “That means we’ll be spo
t on at sunset: we’ve never been less than ten minutes late on target yet. And that’s on daylights! I can never understand how the night types ever find their way at all.”

  “They often don’t,” said Liversedge. The others thought he was joking; but, lamentably, it was true, in those days of crude navigational equipment.

  The crews cursed the hours’ delay before them. They were rested after their good sleep, full of energy, ready to set out at once. A long, dull afternoon was in prospect. Harry Watson and Broadley checked their aircraft — C for Charlie again, looking rather battered by now — and air tested it. Broadley fussed over the guns and the radio for an hour afterwards. The other two pored over maps and charts, Intelligence reports, notes they had made at briefing about flak, fighters, searchlights, weather, wind speeds and directions at various places and altitudes. They all checked over the escape aids with which they had been issued after briefing: foreign currency, maps printed on thin silk squares, compasses hidden in buttons, iron rations. The long summer day seemed everlasting, now that double summer time meant two hours added to Greenwich time.

  When, at last, they had taken off and were over the Channel coast, they could see the thick column of smoke that had risen thousands of feet over Dunkirk in the past few days. They had seen it every day since the evacuation began and now it looked like a symbol of defeat. They steered to the north of it, hugging the water and then the ground as soon as they had left Kent astern. They saw other Blenheims, Wellingtons and Hampdens returning to England after attacking the advancing Germans. They saw Spitfires and Hurricanes going both ways: on the hunt for enemy bombers attacking the Dunkirk area, or going home with empty ammunition trays and fuel tanks.

  On the Belgian coast there was a flurry of light flak. Further inland, they ran the gauntlet of machine-guns. But the Belgian roads were not choked with refugees. The countryside looked peaceful after being over-run in so few days that little damage had been done.