The 190 could turn inside a Spit. But he could show this Jerry a thing or two.
The German pilot opened fire at extreme range. Over-confidence will kill you, thought Howard. He was enjoying himself. He hoped Payne was keeping an eye on him, as a good No 2 should, as well as on the enemy: Payne would learn something, too.
Howard brought the throttle lever back and lowered his flaps. It was a most audacious trick and one which few ever mastered; or even attempted. The Spit hung for a moment. Howard stall turned before the FW190 reached him. He could do this with impunity: the loss of speed had dropped him below the point at which it was aiming. It hurtled past at the moment that he shoved the throttle up to the gate, but not through it, and brought the flaps up.
He had given himself a beautiful no-deflection shot at his target; and an even easier one than if it were head-on.
He fired cannon and machineguns together. Tracer spurted angrily at the enemy. He saw strikes along its fuselage. But the pilot was protected by armour behind his seat.
Howard triggered again. No juddering of his guns followed, no fresh stench of cordite, no smoke, no flames from the muzzles, no tracer. He tried yet again, but the guns had jammed.
His mirror showed another 190 coming, just too far away for a sensible pilot in it to open fire. He looked for Payne and the other bandits. No point in looking for the second pair of Spits!
Payne was busy with two 190s. One was on his tail, the other off to one side and making beam attacks while Payne did tight turns. Two short bursts of fire from the Spit’s guns when Payne caught a fleeting chance of a shot went wide.
“Guns jammed, Agger.”
Payne was too busy to reply.
The FW190 that Howard had hit was turning and climbing for another go at him. Its winger was still in his mirror. He was evading it by the steepness and tightness of his turn. But the force of the G was getting to him, he was greying out. He couldn’t hold this turn much longer. He had to do something to draw those others away from Agger. They couldn’t know about his guns. He dived suddenly to gain impetus.
The enemy astern, taken by surprise, tore past. Howard brought the stick back and zoomed towards Payne and straight for the 190 on his tail, hoping to scare him away.
That 190 turned immediately to tackle Howard. Payne had evidently seen his leader’s earlier piece of superb flying. Howard saw his flaps come down and his speed fall off as though he had flown into a buffer, like a locomotive hitting a pair of them headlong at the end of a platform. But Payne was a long way from being Howard’s equal as a pilot. His aircraft instantly entered an involuntary flat spin.
The Me109, about which both he and Howard had forgotten, darted in with all guns firing. One FW190 also poured bullets and shells into the spinning Spitfire.
Howard felt the rush of the shock wave and heard the boom from the explosion as Payne’s aircraft - and Agony Payne with it - disintegrated into burning fragments.
Three FW190s began shooting at Howard. He put his aircraft into a steep spin, the last desperate resort of a fighter pilot in dire straits; the only means of extricating himself. He spun down from 20,000 ft to a large cloud 10,000 ft below, his head reeling. Relying on his instruments, he emerged into straight and level flight in the grey vapour.
When he cautiously nosed out of it, the enemy had gone.
Four
“Heinie! I didn’t expect to see you.” Thorwald had recognised the limping figure before even loosening his straps. He jumped down from the port wing and held out his hand. “How’s the leg doing? They’ve allowed you to keep on flying, then?”
“No such luck. They had to hack it off ten centimetres above the ankle, worse luck. The artificial part is all right, but it takes a bit of getting used to. Coming to this Staffel as Adjutant was the best I could manage for the time being.”
“They tried to ground you permanently, I suppose?”
“Sure. But I pointed out that that Englishman with both legs off, one above the knee ...”
“Bader.”
“Yes ... if he could fly with two tin legs, I can surely fly again with a few inches of tin shin and a tin foot.”
“What did they say?”
“ ‘Maybe ... but you’ll have to give it time’.”
“Good, that is encouraging. What about the arm, though?”
Leutnant Heirnrich Rumpf flexed his right arm and grinned. “If it’s good enough for pen-pushing, it’s good enough to hold a control column. The bullets went cleanly through, you know.”
“How many victories was it, before the Tommies shot you down?”
“Only seventeen, but ...”
Thorwald clapped him on the shoulder. “Only! Oh, they’ll let you fly again, all right.” He laughed. “They need killers like you on the Russian Front!”
“You bastard, Juergen ... Sir!”
“I’m a lucky one, at least: you as Adjutant and Ernst Schellman as second-in-command. How many has he got now?”
“Thirty-two; before he took off just now! He’ll probably land with at least one more. Still less than your forty, though.”
Thorwald punched his old friend lightly on the chest. “Forty-three, Chum: I got three more in that little tangle up there.”
Rumpf shook his big head in a mime of incredulous admiration. “How do you do it?”
“I’ll tell you what, little man: I’ve always wondered how you can shoot ‘em down so prolifically, sitting on a fat cushion under your parachute.”
Rumpf stood only five feet four inches and had been lucky to be admitted to the Luftwaffe. He wouldn’t have been, but for his father, who was one of Hitler’s closest friends and a high Government official; and his paternal uncle who was a Luftwaffe general. In any dictatorship, influence and string-pulling counted for far more than in a democracy.
“If the cushion slips, I shoot from memory!” He looked up. “Here comes Ernst.”
Schellman came scowling from his aircraft, shook hands, said “Congratulations, sir,” and then added “Scheiss! they got two of the boys, Juergen.”
“Well,” Thorwald replied coolly, “I got four of theirs: a Blenheim with its crew ... and a Spitfire. I shot down two Spits, in fact, but one pilot bailed out.”
“Scheiss again: I got only one, this time ... and my aircraft is riddled.”
Thorwald ignored this item of information. “I expected to find a shambles when I landed ... if I could find a place to land among the bomb craters.”
“The new dummy airfield hoodwinked them nicely. Just as well: I had a telephone call to say it was well plastered by the Blenheims.”
“The camouflage experts have done too good a job: I couldn’t spot this place until I was down to a thousand metres.”
“Someone did land a Ju Fifty-two there last week ... or try to ... by the time he realised it wasn’t what it looked like, it was too late to go round again ... he poured on the power, but hit the wood on the east side,” said Rumpf.
Thorwald ignored that, too. “Hey! Two casualties? I’m not going to spend the afternoon indoors writing letters of condolence. I’m going to fly.”
“It’s all right: I’ll draft them for you and you can copy them out any time in the next forty-eight hours. The parents like to get a hand-written letter from the C.O., you know.”
“But I didn’t even know the chaps ... did I?”
“No, they were both new boys on their first Staffel. It’s all right, we’ll say ‘Although I have only just taken command, I have heard from everyone of the affection and high esteem in which your son was held ...’ ”
“You’re a cynical little sod, Heinie.”
Rumpf’s cheerful face tightened into anger. “So would you be if you’d had your foot shot off and a chunk of leg carved of by the surgeons ... and enough bullets through the arm to leave it permanently damaged.”
That was the third item in a few minutes that it was best to ignore and Thorwald duly did so.
“Come on, let’s talk to the lads.�
� He led the way towards two 190s that had just taxied to dispersals, and there were others in the circuit.
There were two more familiar faces among the pilots. They looked as impressed by his decorations and his three kills just now as the rest who had not met him before. Admiration and respect were not easily come by in such battle-hardened company. Thorwald turned to the four pilots who had not been detailed for the last sortie. They came forward to shake his hand as though they were almost too awed to touch it. Obviously they were very recent arrivals. That was good. He liked working on new material, breaking in novices, making sure they really could look after themselves adequately before he let them meet the enemy.
That had been an indulgence that the Staffel with which he was flying in the late summer of 1940 had been unable to afford. He would always squirm at the recollection. The Hurricanes and Spitfires used to appear out of the blue as magically as Verge-sur-Miches had appeared this afternoon; and, hugely outnumbered by Emils, would create carnage that was unbelievable until one landed and counted one’s losses. With an Army and Navy poised in the French Channel ports, ready to surge across to the shores of Kent and Sussex to invade England and capture London, counting on the Luftwaffe to make this possible by clearing the air for them ... it had been at first galling and then deeply humiliating to be fought off. Eventually it was the R.A.F. who had swept the Luftwaffe out of the sky.
Thorwald didn’t like to think about it, but he could not help it and he was thinking about it now and vowing to himself that he would never turn these greenhorns of his loose to be slaughtered as so many of his old comrades had perforce been committed to battle.
He felt himself permanently marked by sorrow for what had happened and by guilt for whatever share he had had in not being able to do quite enough to outfight the R.A.F. and save those German airmen’s lives; and not enough to make the invasion possible, either.
“Right,” he said now, “let us see how many serviceable aeroplanes we have. I’ll get Gruppe Headquarters to release us for the next twenty-four hours so that I can see how each of you flies and teach you a few of my ways: starting in half an hour.”
“What’s the programme, then?” asked Schellman.
“Practice air fighting ... formation flying and aerobatics ... battle climb ... I’ll get a target-tug over tomorrow morning and you can all show me how well you shoot. That should keep us going. And there’ll be night flying tonight.”
“We were hoping to welcome you with a little party.”
“So you shall: after we’ve finished night flying.”
Schellmann linked his arm in Thorwald’s and drew him aside. “There’s a girl I think you’d enjoy meeting, Juergen ... I’ve alerted a few, in fact, to stand by for an invitation tonight.”
“After night flying, Ernst.”
“It will be getting a bit late ...”
Thorwald looked suddenly angry. “Women of a conquered race! They’re lucky we don’t treat them like slaves. Women who consort with the enemy of their country are no better than whores, anyway. You wouldn’t find German girls behaving like that ... not that such a situation is imaginable. Your lady friends will be at our disposal at our convenience, not theirs. Right?”
“Zu Befehl, Herr Staffelkapitän.” It was said with a certain amount of irony but there was a glint of knowing amusement in Oberleutnant Schellmann’s eyes, and of concurrence with his new C.O’s sentiments. He did add, however, “I don’t think anyone with even the most contemptuous view of the French could fairly call the one I have in mind a whore.”
And that was the fourth statement of the afternoon to which Thorwald turned a deaf ear. He went to the nearest telephone to speak to the Gruppe Kommandeur, who would pass on the request for 24 hours stand-down to the Geschwader Kommodore. A Geschwader comprised four Gruppen and could surely spare one Staffel for a while in the good cause of training.
The telephone call would also give him the opportunity to mention his three fresh victories. The Kommodore would also hear about them at once. He knew them both. The Kommandeur would surely pull his leg in a jolly elder-brotherly way, accusing him of butting in before he had even physically joined the Staffel. The Kommodore would telephone him in the mess later and - at the age of 32 - act the part of a delighted uncle. Both of them could be instrumental in giving him a leg up the ladder to his next command. He never lost sight of his career and never missed a chance to further it.
God helped those who helped themselves; and if he hadn’t done much to merit the Almighty’s patronage for the past ten years, since he reached the age of fifteen and discovered girls, the fact was that in the hard real corporeal world powerful sponsors in the right places could do more than He could.
Five
Howard tried his guns again on the way back to base. The cannon would not fire, but the machine guns responded. He supposed that the long tight spin had shaken loose whatever had caused the jam. He wished it hadn’t: it was going to be embarrassing to explain why he had been unable to give Payne effectual help beyond making a dummy attack on the enemy. His explanation for having ducked out of a fight would be even less convincing.
He wished that Group Captain Northam were still at his desk in Fighter Command H.Q. instead of Monkston.
For the first time, his personal problems penetrated the unadulterated pleasure he found in flying. Scenes from the past forced their way into his mind, emerging through his consciousness of the present as if they were scenes in a film, actuality merging with recollections, then dominating. Misty pictures forming in his mind’s eye in an oily haze took firm shape for a spell, faded to the present, and gave way again to some other episode from his subconscious memory.
Fade ... mix ... dissolve ... these were the directions in a film scenario and in just that way old times came and went amongst the living moments.
***
He had never been assessed as an exceptional pilot, and at his initial flying training school he was graded only average. But from then on he had consistently achieved an “above average” rating.
So it was as great a shock to him as to his squadron and flight commanders when he forgot to put his undercarriage down one February morning in 1940 and severely damaged his Hurricane. With a station commander like Wing Commander Northam, any pilot guilty of an error was in a predicament roughly equivalent to a food-taster’s at a mediaeval court who funked his job and saw his monarch fall dead from a rival’s poison: badly placed, one might say.
The court of inquiry was the worst ordeal of Howard’s life since his first beating in his first week at his public school. The humiliation at what he had done was even worse than the fear of a punishment which would be detrimental to his career: he badly wanted a permanent commission.
It was the squadron M.O. who had averted a retribution which Howard did not, in fact, deserve. He had been taken from the crashed aeroplane to Sick Quarters by ambulance; semi-conscious. Not, explained the doctor, from shock or injury, but because he was suffering from a sudden and violent attack of influenza, had a high temperature and should not have been flying at all. Added to which, he had a grumbling appendix that must be removed at once.
Wing Commander Northam had chafed at the necessary delay in holding the enquiry and looked as angry as a tiger deprived of an easy kill because the buck it had been stalking caught its scent and fled, when no blame was put on Howard.
He was a tigerish-looking man: tall, heavily built, ginger-haired and ferociously moustached. A mediocre and bullying second-row forward in his grammar school and Cranwell days, with no scruples about dirty play when he could get away with it, he was jealous of, rather than favourably impressed by, Pilot Officer Howard’s prowess at rugger.
A month later, Howard, after a week’s sick leave and long periods on the ground occasioned by bad weather, expressed his exuberance at being able to fly again by testing his by now considerable skill to its limits. In the low flying area he had performed a series of aerobatics with perilously little clearanc
e between his aircraft and the ground. It was unfortunate for him that a battalion of infantry had been given permission to use part of the area for training. Howard’s antics had caused the soldiery to hurl themselves flat on their faces repeatedly and gravely interrupted their mock warfare. By one of those inter-Service confusions which arose daily, no clear orders had been issued for low-flying aircraft to keep clear.
After a highly uncomfortable interview with his station commander, the latter’s tigerish wrath whipped to a frenzy by the battalion commander’s sarcastic complaints, Howard got away with it.
Then came April 1940.
On the ninth of that month the German Army thundered into neutral Denmark; and swept on into Norway, supported by 500 Luftwaffe aeroplanes.
A squadron of Gladiators, obsolescent biplane fighters with a top speed of a little over 250 m.p.h. and armed only with four machineguns, was ordered to Norway to support the small British land force that was bound there.
Howard landed from a convoy patrol in his Hurricane feeling jaded. Low winter cloud forced fighters to circle the ships they were protecting at masthead height, so that they would be able to spot attacking bombers against the overcast if they broke through. This imposed a much greater strain than orbiting high and looking down, or around at the same level.
As soon as he entered the dispersal hut, longing for a cup of coffee or tea, someone said “The Boss wants you, Boost.”
In his squadron commander’s office he was told to report to the station commander immediately.
There was a gleam in Wing Commander Northam’s eye. “You have rather a lot of hours on Gladiators, I believe, Howard.”
“Well ... er … ye-e-s, sir.” Suspicion and reluctance ran riot in Howard’s thoughts.
“A lot of night flying on the type.”
Howard could not deny it.
“Two-Six-Three Squadron is going to Norway. The establishment has been temporarily increased for the campaign: which means they’re looking for experienced Gladiator pilots.” Northam had an ignorant disregard for singular and plural, Howard noticed: The squadron is ... they are looking ... The feeling of superiority this gave him did nothing to compensate for what he knew was coming.
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