The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  Once we’d signed in I asked to see the Senior Officer (Flying), who turned out to be a harassed squadron leader of about twenty-eight. He was probably one of the younger squadron leaders of our new peacetime air force: in my day we’d have thought him already an old man. He looked up from a desk piled high with flimsies of flying orders and asked, ‘You wanted to see me, squire? What can I do you for?’

  ‘I want to see the station intelligence officer.’

  He tapped his pencil against his front teeth: nerves.

  ‘Don’t have one, squire. Not allowed under our treaty obligations and all that. No intelligence-gathering on friendly allies.’

  ‘I still want to see him.’

  ‘Can’t help you squire. Sorry.’

  Stalemate.

  ‘In that case I can’t help you either. I’m grounding my aircraft until after I’ve seen him – that’s three or four aircraft you’ll have cluttering up your airfield and not hauling freight. So when you next find your station intelligence officer who doesn’t exist, tell him I’m in the bar, partying with my crews, OK?’ I didn’t give him time to reply as I walked away, but I knew that he was staring at my back, and I heard the pencil clicking against his teeth.

  I was still on my first bottle of beer when a tall thin man in a tweed suit walked in and paused for a moment scanning the crowd. He had a thin, especially carved moustache, was carrying an old brown trilby, and smoking a straight pipe – like mine. When we made eye contact he nodded and walked unhurriedly over. I gave the lads the eye, and they moved away to another table. The new man sat in one of their vacated chairs. A German Mess boy had followed him over with a whisky and soda. Tweeds said, ‘Cheers, old bean. Thanks for the drink.’ He sounded upper-class, but a bit seedy.

  ‘Cheers yourself.’ I thought he looked Sexton Blake in one of those comics.

  ‘Must say, you don’t exactly look like a troublemaker.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was one. Charlie Bassett. Temporary manager with Halton Air.’

  We made a handshake. Brief and not clutchy. He said, ‘I know. I had the S O (Flying) bending my ear. Said we had a troublemaker on our hands. Threatening to clog the field up with unused aeroplanes.’

  ‘Awful. Who’d do such a thing?’

  ‘The sort of person who wanted a little chat with a person like me I suppose. ’nother drink?’ His not inconsiderable whisky and soda had gone already. Fast drinker. All he did was look towards the Mess boy, and drinks moved towards us. ‘So. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I was hoping that you could tell me. When I was first out here I found out that the RAF had been trialling some new equipment on one of our old Dakotas . . .’

  ‘. . . Didn’t know that, old bean.’ I believed him. He was paying attention and looked interested.

  ‘Didn’t last for long. Some of your engineers removed it at the very beginning of the Airlift. Then the Russians pinched my other Dakota and its crew, and gave them back three days later. That Dakota came back with its pilot seat missing, and the flight engineer had been tortured. Cigarette burns all over his hands.’ I decided to leave out the packages of liquorice until after I had dealt with Red Greg. My new friend frowned, but filled and lit his pipe before he responded, ‘Can’t be having that. Any idea why?’

  ‘He won’t tell me.’

  ‘Interesting . . .’

  ‘Sinister more like . . .’

  ‘Anything else, old bean?’

  ‘Yes. When we came back out along the corridor a couple of hours ago the Soviet fighter controllers were talking about us to their fighters.’

  ‘Speak Russian do you?’

  ‘No, not much. It’s just a knack a radio officer picks up. You know when someone’s talking about you, even if you can’t speak the language. I was a wireless operator: still am.’

  ‘. . . and you were in one of your Dakotas again?’

  ‘No. One of our Lancastrians . . . but you can’t miss the Halton aircraft; they’ve been painted as red as pillar boxes.’

  At least he had the taste to wince when I said that.

  ‘Interesting . . . and you suspect that all this adds up together somehow?’

  ‘What’s bloody going on?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue, old bean . . . but if you withdrew the threat to ground your kites I could try to find out for you.’

  I let out a long breath. ‘Consider it withdrawn.’

  He wanted Max and Ronson’s details. I didn’t mention Ronson’s other name. If the guy was any good he’d find that out for himself. He also wanted details of our aircraft: their airframe numbers, call signs – that sort of thing. He wrote them into a small policeman-style notebook with RAF grey board covers.

  ‘’nother snifter, old bean?’

  I can pick ’em.

  There was a bit of a party that night because an RAF bod dropped his York in the middle of the main runway and shut down a lot of the flying. Inbound flights – including Dorothy – were diverted. The RAF pilot had been faced with the same problem as Dave Scroton had a few weeks earlier: once his York was on the ground he couldn’t stop it. He used the same braking effect as well: just selected undercarriage up, and let her slide along on her belly spitting out a trail of sparks, flame and smoke. It made a spectacular firework display in the dusk. The speed with which the crew abandoned her after she’d stopped sliding, and the distance they put between the plane and themselves before they paused for breath, left me wondering what she was carrying.

  You might have thought the party was just like old times, but it wasn’t. It still didn’t feel like war, so the old spirit was lacking. Most of the men just sat around small tables looking shagged out and drinking. I suppose that there must have been about twenty girls to dance with, but they were hardly overworked, and before twenty-three hundred they gave up trying. I got drunk, which was irresponsible – but I am irresponsible, so no change there – and I saw a few of the dead guys I used to fly with. That often happens to me at parties. I spent an hour arguing with dead Marty about a bombing trip we’d done to Peenemunde in 1944. Bozey had been dancing with an ugly blonde and when he came back flopped down alongside me and asked me why I’d been talking to an empty chair. I just laughed.

  An erk found me and asked me if I could spare a moment: somebody wished to speak to me. The somebody was the station IO, who was standing in the corridor outside the Mess hall. He said, ‘Sorry to drag you away, old bean. Message for you. Sounded cryptic to me so I thought I’d deliver it in person.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘An Irish priest in Berlin. When are you going back to the Big City?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘He says you’re long overdue for confession and should look him up when you get back. Mean anything?’

  ‘Damned if I know.’

  ‘Thought you’d say that. ’night, old bean.’

  He didn’t believe me, but why should he?

  Chapter Nineteen

  I hopped a clapped-out old Anson to Lübeck in the morning, nursing a hangover. Despite what you might think, that was a good sign. It was repositioning empty. The pilot looked like Jimmy Edwards. I suppose that he might have been Jimmy Edwards, except that Jimmy was supposed to be packing them in at The Windmill. The aircraft was one of two owned by a small mob from Newcastle, and had been chartered by the government to move bods around between the airfields we were using for the Lift. I thought it was easy money for them, until a month later one crashed near Limoges. It killed all seven people on board, and an old man on the ground, sitting in his outdoor privy reading a newspaper. I hoped the pilot wasn’t the cheery soul I’d flown with.

  He had a regular dispersal spot at Lübeck on the far side of the field. That was one of the characteristics of civvy flying on the Airlift – the RAF had grabbed all the best hard standings near the Administration and Engineering buildings for themselves. Civvies found themselves stuck out over the Styx if they were overnighting, or waiting for a load. When the Anson’s curious li
ttle propellers stopped turning, and relative silence prevailed, we climbed down on to the concrete and stretched. He said he usually had to wait ten minutes for his transport to reach him. Then he said, ‘I know. I’ll take you to the museum first.’

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he had gestured towards a small hangar we had parked close to. He dragged one of its sliding doors open, and me the other. There were two ancient aircraft inside: they were both biplanes, had enough wire to make a hen-coop, and big black Maltese crosses.

  ‘Bugger me! How old are these?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirty-two, thirty-three years old.’

  ‘First War kites?’

  ‘That’s right: where’s Biggles?’ He had a deep chuckling laugh. The sort that made you smile when you heard it. ‘The white one’s an Albatross – a fighter plane. The other one is a Roland – reconnaissance job. Want to sit in them?’

  ‘Are we allowed to?’

  ‘No one will stop you. The Jerries say this place is haunted, and refuse to come in here. Now one of our erks claims he saw someone here a week ago, and our people have come over all windy as well.’

  I climbed up and sat in the fighter. It was grey with dust but I didn’t mind. This was the aircraft in my head when I read W E Johns as a nipper. The small wicker basket seat might have been made for me, and my feet settled naturally on the pedals while my hands found the joystick as if they had been born to it. For the first time in my life I wanted to learn to fly for myself. My companion stood up on a stirrup-shaped piece of metal from which you climbed into the cockpit, and explained the very simple controls and instruments to me. Then he asked, ‘You believe in ghosts?’

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘No . . . ever seen any?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He paused before he replied, ‘Yes. So have I.’

  I scrambled down when I heard a vehicle approaching, and we were sliding the doors shut when an RAF jeep strolled up.

  They dropped me off alongside Whisky, which was moored up in the coal yards. I shook hands with the Anson pilot and thanked him. Then I shook hands with Dave Scroton, who was sitting on the step of Whisky’s open cargo bay smoking. I was pleased to see him. Whisky was full of dirty, lumpy sacks. Coals from Newcastle: it was a joke you couldn’t get away from on the Airlift. I couldn’t see Crazy Ed.

  ‘Where’s Eddie?’

  ‘Over the other side, being sick.’

  ‘Was he on the juice again last night?’

  ‘Not particularly. He had a fight with a Frenchman over a German girl, and his nose is a funny shape.’

  ‘Is he really any good, Dave, or shall I get you another engineer?’

  ‘Don’t even think about it, boss!’ It suddenly struck me that boss was the name most of my mates were using for me these days. I wasn’t all that sure I liked it. ‘Leave him with me. Ed’s brilliant in a crisis: he might leave it to the last minute, but he always does the right thing.’

  Just then Eddie ducked under Whisky’s nose, and leaned for a moment with his hand near the bint’s pink backside. I should have got a photograph. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and broke the spell. ‘Have you two stopped talking about me, or do you want me to go away and come back again?’

  ‘You’re a fucking maniac,’ I told him, ‘but your pilot loves you.’

  ‘Good job someone does, boss. I’m having no luck in any other department.’ That was sad, wasn’t it? The loadmaster, a tough little Londoner about whom I knew little, came out from behind a coal stack buttoning his fly. Time to go.

  We motored it sedately to the very end of Lübeck’s long runway, and got into the queue. There was a York and a Skymaster in front of us. Our progress was sedate because we were at the very top of our all-up weight; as we rolled over the small bumps in the peritrack I could feel her bouncing right down to the stops of her undercart oleo legs. Dave didn’t shoogle up after the aircraft that took off before us: he held Whisky back to give her the longest possible take-off run. To begin with I could have moved faster on a bicycle.

  ‘I have a new take-off technique for when she’s this heavy,’ he flung back at me over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s called the curvature of the Earth. When the Earth drops away from us we’re airborne.’

  He wasn’t that far wrong. The take-off run seemed to go on for hours. I shut my eyes when I saw the far perimeter fence coming up with no sign of lift. I opened them again when the rumbling stopped, and I felt the big main wheels bump home under the engine nacelles.

  ‘Remember how we stopped Dorothy when she lost her brakes?’ Scroton shouted at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s how I get Whisky to fly off with these loads. As soon as I get an ASI of ninety-five knots I select undercarriage up: and if she doesn’t fall on her tits then she’s flying, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, Dave.’ Maybe I could understand why Crazy Ed threw up now and again.

  I’ve told you before that when I wake up these days there’s often a tune or a song running through my mind. This time it was ‘Whisperin’’. The Lou Prager version I think. Then I heard the noise of unfriendly air screeching through an abused airframe. I was curled in a ball hard up behind the pilot and second’s seats in the cockpit, and had a headache. I’d also hurt my ankle again.

  ‘George Hotel Whisky. Gatow. Come in please . . .’ It was a faint and distant sound: a metallic girl’s voice coming through the earpieces hanging around Dave’s neck and she sounded pissed off. When I looked back down the fuselage I could see Trask, the loadmaster, lying across the sacks staring at me. He didn’t blink. I knelt between the seats, and was looking at Scroton when he opened his eyes.

  The yoked control wheel moved gently in front of him of its own accord. Scroton reached out for it, but the left-hand side of his body didn’t work. In particular, his arm didn’t work. He glanced down at it. I could see that there were no outward signs of damage. I could also see that it just wouldn’t work. I snapped a look forward, and down. We can’t have been flying at more than a couple of hundred feet. Alongside Dave, Crazy Eddie grinned fixedly at the shattered windscreen in front of him. His open eyes would never see anything again. His hands were folded as neatly in his lap as if he was in church. I asked, ‘You OK, Skip?’ Stupid question. He obviously wasn’t.

  ‘OK, Charlie. Problem with my left arm. The others OK?’

  ‘Ed’s dead. So’s Trasky. Ed must have banged in the autopilot when we were hit. My foot is pointing in an odd direction, but it doesn’t hurt too badly yet. I saw that before, on a gunner at Bawne in the war.’ My leg didn’t feel wet or bashed about. Just a jangling pain.

  ‘Stop it, Charlie. You’re babbling.’

  ‘Yes, Skip.’

  The girl’s voice. ‘George Hotel Whisky. George Hotel Whisky. Gatow. Respond now please.’ She was browned off enough to be using the airfield’s proper noun instead of her call sign.

  Dave cleared his throat before he spoke into his mic set. ‘Gatow Gatow: This is George Hotel Whisky.’

  ‘You’re half a mile off track Whisky, and twenty-five seconds off ETA. Are you going to make your slot?’

  My mind felt dull. We both knew that Berlin was landing and launching so many planes that he had less than a minute either side of his landing slot to get in to. Outside that he was almost on his own. The papers were praising Berlin as the greatest airlift ever attempted. Half an hour earlier Scroton had told me it wasn’t the greatest, merely the most bloody dangerous. He wouldn’t be all that pleased to find himself so right.

  ‘Hotel Whisky. Are you OK?’

  ‘A bit bashed about, Tower. I’m in my slot . . . wish I was in yours.’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you injured, Hotel Whisky?’ They must have known something down there.

  ‘Gatow Gatow. George Hotel Whisky. I have injured on board. Five minutes to pancake.’

  Her voice was lower, matter-of-f
act. ‘Five minutes to pancake. Confirm.’ If she knew her business the sirens would already be sounding down there. Then I heard her calling out a contact sequence to the aircraft in line behind us.

  Scroton said to me, ‘Strap yourself in, Charlie.’

  ‘There’s nothing left to strap into, Skip.’

  ‘Brace, then.’

  I could see that his arm was rigid, but he could still use it to nudge his hand into poking switches on and off. He switched off the autopilot and we immediately wallowed sideways. He caught it. I asked him, ‘Shall I get the throttles?’

  ‘Would you, old son? So kind. Careful now. Where’s all the black smoke come from?’

  ‘It’s not smoke. It’s bleeding coal dust. That second MiG’s cannon shells went off in the coal sacks.’

  ‘OK. Hold on now.’

  Someone had once told me that Scroton used to side-slip Dakotas in just to be flash; now he did it for earnest. There were children and civilians waving thanks to us as he heaved Whisky over the airfield perimeter.

  Hardisty drove out with the ambulance to meet us, sitting alongside a Regular who wore a white armband with a red cross. Safety first. Hardisty looked white. Magda followed close behind in the hotdog wagon. Ridiculously I hoped that she didn’t see Eddie or Trask. We had to climb over the sacks and past Trasky to get out. I could see daylight coming into Whisky through jagged holes that weren’t part of her original design spec. Scroton got to the concrete before I did. As soon as I put my foot down I started to fall. I’d seen that at Bawne as well. Dave held me up with his good arm.

  Hardisty asked, ‘What now, boss?’

  My brain hurt, but I managed, ‘Tell them to get Ed and Trask out of there, and then taxi her round to the coal dump if she’ll go.’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  ‘You’re in charge until I can think properly again, or Borland gets back.’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  ‘What else?’ I asked Scroton.

  ‘MO next I should think, old boy . . . Check the damage.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We made it to the ambulance together; a one-armed man leading a one-legged one. I managed a weak grin for Magda, who hadn’t shifted from behind the wheel of the comfort wagon, and we rode in silence to the medical station with a couple of dead men. They didn’t seem to mind. Ed wasn’t marked, except for a smear of blood on the back of his head, matting his stringy hair. Trask had bits missing. I knew absolutely nothing about him. Was he married? A father? Were his parents still around? I realized that for the first time in my life it would be me writing to the bereaved family. I was composing the letter in my head when I passed out.