by Jim Crossley
Now it was a question of getting back to camp.
The bike was unusable with a tyre torn off, so, retracing his steps, he pushed it slowly downhill towards a place where he could see some lights. Soon he and the machine were on an ox-cart trundling slowly towards the camp. The pain in his shoulder made him flinch from time to time as the cart went over a bump, but it didn’t seem to be serious. To his despair, he was not able to slip past the guards in the normal way but was intercepted by a German military policeman. “Herr von Pilsen? Good! You are to report immediately to the CO.” Although it was nearly midnight a light burnt in the administration building, so, tidying himself up as he walked and trying to remember the details of the story about the map reading flight which he had concocted with Karl, he prepared to face the music. The CO was an old ace of the Richthofen Circus and not a man to let a lapse of discipline spoil the career of a talented officer.
“Von Pilsen,” he began sternly. “You seem to have been out of camp contrary to instructions, also I understand that your navigational sortie today was not performed as you were ordered. Explain yourself.” All Hans could think of was an excuse about trying out a motorbike and falling off. He had nothing to say about the exercise.
“Well, be that as it may, I have good news for you, exciting news. You are no longer a Lufthansa employee, you are now an officer in the new Luftwaffe; furthermore, your instructors have reported to me that your flying is of a high standard, and I have recommended you for a new elite force – the dive bomber squadron. Well done, young man, help to make Germany great again! And next time you go chasing girls outside the barracks don’t take a plane with you.” With that he reached for a bottle which was never very far from his desk and, pouring two generous measures, clinked glasses with one of the first pilots selected for the fledgling air force.
Unlike Cousin Hans, William was not a natural pilot. His first solo scared him to death when he entered a patch of thick cloud just as he was steeling himself to land. Suddenly he could see nothing and became possessed by a complete fit of panic. Where was he going? Was he about to hit the ground? How would he ever find out where he was? Soon, of course, the little plane shot out of the cloud with the airfield well in sight and he completed his circuit, but he had been so transfixed with terror that he was tense all over and his hands shook violently on the controls. Somehow remembering what to do, he managed to throttle back, drifted in to a bumpy landing and thankfully ran to a halt, sweat pouring down his face. His instructor, a wise old ex-Royal Flying Corps bird, had seen all this many times before and tried to cheer his pupil up, but the damage was done and it took weeks before William stopped finding excuses to put off his lessons and took to the air again.
In spite of the attractions of flying and the delights of occasional ventures to sea in Columba, William was acutely aware that sometime he must do something serious with his life. He could not just go on living on his father’s legacy but jobs were scarce and with no qualifications what could he hope to do? He still affected the rather arty appearance and clothes which he had cultivated in London and was regarded with some fascination by the young ladies whom he met from time to time at local parties and dinners. In fact he was quite in demand at social events, and had a certain charm and slightly sophisticated air which set him apart from most of the eligible young men among the Tyneside gentry, but with no job and no great estates to fall back on, his attractions had obvious limitations. Cautious parents sought to steer their daughters in other directions. He had yet to find a soulmate of the other sex, and was very conscious that he needed some purpose and direction, a career even, before he could think of developing a serious relationship.
One day, after he had returned to the airfield after practising cross-country navigation in a hired Moth, he sat about in the bar of the flying club, idly sketching aircraft as was his habit. He became conscious of a man in a flying suit who seemed to be taking a lot of interest in what he was doing. Eventually the stranger introduced himself and the two got into conversation. Henry Fosweight – that was his name – was editor in chief and publisher of an aeronautical magazine, Wings, and also published books, mostly concerned with aeronautical affairs. He had admired William’s sketch and offered him five pounds for it on the spot together with full publication rights. William was quite taken aback, but gladly accepted the money which would pay for his afternoon’s flying. Deal done, the two repaired to the bar, and William soon found himself talking freely about his life, his attempt at an artistic career, his love of flying and of boats, and his search for some sort of employment.
“Well, Portman,” said his new friend, “we may both be in luck. I can’t offer you a job but I can undertake to buy pictures from you regularly, probably three or four a month, and maybe you can do the odd dustcover design as well. There are plenty of people who can draw aircraft accurately, but I’ve seen very few who can bring them alive as you can. Why don’t we give it a try?”
William, now a commercial artist, was, for a while, quite a success. Fosweight was as good as his word, and from time to time other commercial assignments came in on the back of his work for Wings. It was most satisfactory telling Walder, the solicitor, that he no longer needed to draw on the family funds to support himself, nor did he need any capital to establish the business. A studio was set up in the house and although Mrs Wellibond complained of the mess, the arrangement was quite satisfactory. Every working day William would lunch with Hugh, whose business also seemed to be thriving and they would discuss art, technology and life in general, together. With his work, sailing expeditions and flying all going on at once, William was quite busy for the first time since his school days, and he enjoyed the experience. All good things, however, have a way of coming to an end. At the end of the second summer of these arrangements (it was in September 1931), William noticed that he had not been paid for five paintings supplied the month before to Wings. The following week he was busy with Columba so did not see any newspapers, but when he returned, a thunderbolt struck him. It was in the form of a letter from a London accounting practice informing him that Wings and Fosweight himself, had been declared bankrupt. It was unlikely that William, or any of the other unsecured creditors would ever see their money.
A more robust character would have shrugged off such a set back and found other outlets for his artistic talents. William had, by this time, gained a modest reputation in publishing circles for his cover designs, but he was somehow stumped by it. He felt that people were regarding him as an idler, spending his father’s money and achieving nothing. He could not help comparing his own career with that of his father who had joined the Royal Navy as a cadet at fourteen, made a successful career as a naval officer, then played a major part in helping Parsons to develop the market for turbine engines, earning himself a fortune in the process. Thinking gloomily of his own prospects, William was well aware that there seemed to be no possibility now of following his father and joining the Royal Navy or the RAF. Both forces were in the grip of expenditure cut backs, and anyway he was now too old. Nor, as Walder had pointed out, had he qualifications or experience which might open the door to a business career. For several weeks he mooned about the house, feeling sorry for himself, then a casual remark made by one of his friends at the local flying club seemed to offer some slender hope.
“I hear,” his friend had said, “that those air force auxiliaries get a lot of flying in these days, lucky beggars, they don’t even have to pay for it.”
The Auxiliary Air Force was very like the Territorial Army. It was a kind of half-trained reserve, consisting of pilots, observers and ground staff who trained on a part-time basis so as to be ready for any future emergency. The recruitment process was frankly snobbish, pilots being expected to come from a particular social class. William found that there was a squadron based near Newcastle and equipped with twin-engined Handley Page 0/400 bombers. The CO of the squadron, a Group Captain, received William in his rather grand office and immediately started tal
king about various distinguished local families. He became interested when he heard that William knew many of the local county set, and that his father had been a decorated naval officer in the Great War.
“Yes,” he said, “I was Royal Naval Air Service myself you know. That was before they invented the RAF of course. Cracking good time we had trying to shoot down Jerry bombers at night. Never got one myself, but it was great sport. Some tricky landings in the dark; I nearly came to grief several times. Nothing like that in these times of course. Can’t afford to lose the aircraft these days.”
William told him about his own flying record, trying to conceal the rather dubious history of eighteen hours before his first solo. He need not have worried.
“What?” the Group Captain exclaimed. “You already have a licence? Normally we have to train you young fellows from scratch but you’re already there. Capital. When can you join?”
A few weeks later William found himself at a regular RAF station for advanced flying training, using Hawker Hart biplane fighters. He was awarded his “wings” there and a few months later returned for a conversion course where he learnt to fly multi-engined aircraft. This was not too challenging; the aircraft were old bombers designed to harass German rear positions in Belgium during the war. They were steady, stable machines, slow, but easy to handle and the trainees were never expected to fly in anything but the most benign conditions. He passed the course with no difficulty and was now ready to join 444 Squadron AAF based just outside Newcastle. He found his colleagues were an assortment of young fellows like himself and one or two wartime veterans trying to keep their hands in. They assembled every Saturday and, if it was fine weather, would undertake a gentle cross-country flight or a simulated bombing mission. In the evenings the flyers would usually find themselves invited to drinks and dinner in one of the pilot’s grand houses (three of them actually lived in castles) where there were always high jinks and often dancing and romancing far into the night. The Auxiliary Air Force was highly regarded as a pool of suitable young men by all the respectable mothers in the North East and their Saturday night invitations were much sought after by eligible young ladies. William enjoyed himself to the last degree. Handsome, if slightly “arty” in appearance, easy going and obviously well-connected (otherwise he wouldn’t have been in the Auxiliaries) he was always a popular figure. He felt, however, no need for a long-term interest in any one particular girl. He was charming to all of them, dancing, laughing and dining with many, even kissing quite a few, but his romances never went any further.
The AAF was not, of course, a career. Although members were paid a little for each day served, this amounted only to pocket money. As the months went by, however, William found that the squadron took up more and more of his time. As he lived quite close by and was seldom busy except during the sailing season, he was often asked to do odd flying duties during weekdays and he was always happy to volunteer. As often as possible he took Hugh along with him on these occasions, as his friend seemed to have become very interested in aircraft, and especially how they found their way – or didn’t – from place to place. Although not a member of the Air Force, Hugh had the necessary security clearance, and anyway, the squadron was relaxed and informal when it came to regulations. Flying the lumbering Handley Page bombers over the north of England and the North Sea, often in thick weather, presented all sorts of navigational challenges which the RAF in its wisdom chose to ignore during the blissful “Long Weekend” between the wars. They simply didn’t fly if visibility was poor. William, however, became fascinated by the process of flying “blind” and finding his way, continually checking wind speed, airspeed and heading and making corrections based on diagrams which only he could understand. Hugh’s quick and unconventional way of thinking devised all sorts of procedures and short cuts in the navigational process. Although he never became an ace pilot, William did establish quite a reputation being an excellent cross-country navigator, and his CO had no hesitation in reporting this to the Air Ministry.
One day, after a long and demanding flight to take part in an exercise over Scotland with some RAF fighters, William and Hugh were enjoying a quiet drink in the mess. Hugh looked carefully around him then asked, “Will, have you ever heard of RDF?”
“No, what does it stand for?”
“Well, it’s a bit complicated, but I have been playing about with it for some time on an Air Ministry contract. Actually, I make up bits of kit for a fellow called Watson-Watt who works at Slough for the Department of Industrial and Scientific Research. He thinks, and I agree, that somehow we can use radio waves to detect incoming aircraft, bombers perhaps, and so direct our own fighters to them. It’s all in the very early stages yet but I think I know how it might be made to work.”
“Sounds fascinating, do tell me.”
“Well, it’s top secret of course, but I think this is the best way to explain it. You know that if we try to send a radio signal through a sheet of metal, we find it is very weak on the other side?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the lost part of that signal must go somewhere, it can’t just disappear. I think some of it may be bounced back towards the transmitter. Now if we fit a receiver next to the transmitter tuned to the same frequency, it might be able to pick up the returning signal.”
“I can understand that but how much do we learn from it? All we can get is our own signal thrown back at us.”
“Well, that’s where it gets clever. You see, radio waves travel at the speed of light. If we send them in pulses and the receiver can pick up a pulse bounced off the target and detect the direction it’s coming from, somehow, in theory at least, we can tell the bearing, height and range of an incoming target. But it’s not easy as we have to deal with literally millionths of a second between transmitting the pulse and receiving the echo.”
“Sounds wonderful but jolly difficult to do. How can you pulse signals that quickly and recognise the correct returning echo?”
“Yes, yes there are lots of unsolved problems, but Watson-Watt is convinced that it can be made to work, and I think he is right. I’m working on some bits and pieces for it now. I am so excited and it’s wonderful to be able to tell someone. For heaven’s sake, don’t talk about it; it’s top secret. We think the Germans are working along similar lines by the way.”
“But, Hugh, why are you suddenly telling me all this?”
“Actually, that’s what I was coming to. We need a large metal aircraft, a Heyford perhaps, to make some tests. I told Watson-Watt that I knew a fellow who could fly a Heyford quite accurately and was one hundred percent trustworthy and he said “go for it”. If you agree, he’ll clear it with the RAF and we’ll have you and the Heyford for a week. Is that OK?”
Heyfords had just replaced the old Handley Page bombers of 444 Squadron. The Heyford was a machine that seemed somehow to have escaped from the First World War, although in fact the first one only flew in 1930. One experienced Heyford pilot put it well when he described the machine as “a steady aircraft, good for going to lunch in, not so good for going to war in”. A biplane with its fuselage slung under the upper wing and a fixed undercarriage, on a good day it could achieve a maximum speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour. It was made partly of metal and partly of wood and fabric. It had two 575 HP engines and a massive wing area so that it could carry, in theory at least, almost four tons of bombs. The pilot sat behind a small windscreen on top of the fuselage, the top of his body exposed to the slipstream. He was over seventeen feet above the ground when the aircraft was parked. For defensive armament the Heyford had two gun positions in which the gunners were situated in the open air, and a third in a retractable “dustbin” which stuck out beneath the aircraft. Fortunately for RAF aircrews, Heyfords were withdrawn from front line service just before 1939; they would have made easy meat for the greenest German fighter pilot.
For Hugh’s experiment, however, the clumsy old bird was perfectly adequate.
What William, with H
ugh acting as a sort of amateur navigator, had to do was to fly accurately between the BBC broadcast transmitter at Daventry and a receiving station near to it. Flares had to be fired at specific points on the flight. The Air Ministry wanted proof that the plane would actually produce a detectable radar echo. After a couple of false starts due to weather and some technical problems, the experiment took place in February 1935, and the result was definitive. Navigation had been difficult due to strong north winds, but the Heyford had managed to do exactly what was asked of it. Even with a one-kilowatt transmitter (one hundred kilowatts was at the time considered to be ideal), the echo was readily detected. It was now a case of engineering a proper, serviceable RDF set. Hugh was ecstatic and set to work with Watson-Watt’s team on circuit design. William returned, job done, to Newcastle and kept his mouth shut.
Hugh had been correct about developments in Germany. As early as 1904 the Germans had a set which would detect the presence of a ship by radio wave reflection, and in the early thirties they developed working pulse-modulated systems for ship detection and eventually for gun laying. Fortunately for Britain the development then got tied up in a morass of intercompany and inter service rivalry, and although technically their radar (as RDF came to be called) technology was at least as advanced as the British in1939, it was not deployed to its best advantage, and by the early 1940s had fallen far behind British developments.
Not long after the Daventry Experiment (as it came to be called) William was summoned into the CO’s. office.
“Portman,” he said, “I have some rather surprising news for you. This is a letter from the RAF inviting you to transfer from us to them on a short service commission. That’s for five years. You would keep your existing rank of Flying Officer with one year’s seniority. It seems that there was more to that week you took off on detachment than I realised. I won’t ask you what it was, I know that’s secret. It seems that they want you to continue to work in the same field. It’s all Dutch to me, but I am told I have to have your decision by midday tomorrow. Make up your mind and give me a call. Seems they want to post you somewhere in East Anglia, by the way. We’ll be sorry to lose you of course, but with the way things are looking in Europe, we may all be pressed into full-time operational work before long. Always said we could never trust the Huns.”