Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  10

  SCRAMBLING FOR ORDERS

  I

  ‘Did you hear that, sor,’ the sergeant wheezed into my ear. ‘They are going to attack us from the hill on the other side of the valley. If we go through the river we should shortcircuit them and get the advantage of the high ground. Have to put the skates on though.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Sarge,’ I murmured. I had quickly learned to trust his judgement, even though I knew he was there to report on my conduct. That meant, I thought, that I had to do some daft things especially to catch the eye of authority when the staff officers were around. At the moment I was wriggling backwards through a snowy wood trying to avoid being trapped by gorse bushes and fallen tree trunks. Following the sergeant’s advice, he and I had crept into the wood and actually overheard the ‘enemy’ platoon discussing its plan of attack. If we could get back to our own chaps quickly we should have a decisive advantage in the coming ‘battle’. The wood thinned as the slope got steeper. Just as it turned into a cliff about twenty feet high, I saw beyond it on the next hill a cluster of the top brass, including the CO with his binoculars on me. With a wild whoop I leapt into space. I had seen there was what appeared to be a drift of snow at the bottom of the cliff and I remembered to hold my rifle stiffly out to one side. I was not completely daft.

  Just beyond the cliff the rest of my platoon were waiting in the last clump of trees.

  ‘Come on chaps,’ I shouted. ‘Sarge and I overheard their plans. We’ve got to ford the stream. They won’t expect us to come this way.’ (Not unless their sergeant is being as helpful to them as ours is to us, I thought with a tinge of gloom.)

  ‘Who else would be so silly as to go into a hill stream in mid-February,’ said Lofty, the big New Zealander. Holding his rifle above his head he ran straight into the water. (As the leader I should have been first in, but I couldn’t catch up with Lofty.) I expected the water to be about two feet deep, but Lofty stumbled and completely disappeared. He came up spluttering and frozen blue with cold. Wading carefully, I found the stream came up to mid-chest. It was unbelievably cold. Climbing out on the other side was like struggling through rapidly hardening concrete. You could feel the water turning to ice on your clothes.

  ‘C’mon you buggers! Run, damn you, run!’ I shouted. My shouts were echoed by the sergeant, who had gone to the far end of the valley where there was a wooden footbridge. His job was to invigilate our progress, not to take part in it. What was he shouting? ‘. . . Keep doubled up! . . . Live ammo!’

  Two starshells burst overhead, a sign that we had been spotted by the rival platoon. ‘Run, but keep down. They’ll be using live ammunition,’ I screamed.

  In confirmation, several whiplike cracks of rifle fire came from the woods ahead. Was it my imagination or could I hear the whistle of bullets? Now was the time to run all out. We could see the thin line of the enemy crouching on the edge of the trees. They looked somewhat upset by the sight of us, as well they might. ‘Wha . . . what do we do now, Gilly?’ said Simonds. He ran a catering business in real life.

  ‘Into them with the bayonet,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t actually kill ’em. Scare ’em to death.’

  Somewhat surprisingly the only real casualties were the oldest member of the rival platoon (his nose was broken when Simonds fired a blank at him at too close range), and one of my chaps who put his foot in a rabbit hole and broke his ankle. Of course, we all had severe colds the whole month of the battle school. It was amazing we did not get pneumonia.

  ‘Battle school,’ do I hear you saying? What has that to do with RAF Intelligence? You might well ask. You will remember that Too Too and I were left alone over Christmas in Hut 50. I began to think I had been forgotten when suddenly a movement order was dropped in on me, telling me to report to the officers’ training college at Cosford, near Wolverhampton, the very next day. English-centred RAF Admin always forgot that Stormont was on a different island from Britain.

  So I arrived two days late on 12 January 1944. Not that it mattered. The course was just another round of square-bashing, made worse in that we had to take it in turns to be the officer in charge. I was, without question, the most physically unsuited, the most inept and the most immature of all the cadets. The drill sergeants thought I was a hopeless case. If it had been up to them I would have been returned to Northern Ireland after the first day. Quite right, because I didn’t get any better. Just as the officers in charge of training us were beginning to think on the same lines as the sergeants, along came a piece of written work and I would easily get top marks. That put the officers in a quandary. After all, I was going to Intelligence was I not? There was a well-known respect for independent cranky brilliance in the RAF, like Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb. I might hope to render some small service to the state in that line, might I not?

  This idea depended on my maintaining my mental mastery, and here, I am afraid, my vanity sometimes let me down. The last and most important section of written work on the course was a piece of dogma masquerading as a question. It went something like this: ‘On a fighter sweep over enemy territory you shoot down an enemy fighter. The pilot bails out. What do you do?’

  Well, you might think this was a moral question. We were not going to descend to the murderous behaviour of the Blitzkrieg and the Nazi labour camp, were we? But that was not the way Air Ministry looked at it. True, this enemy plane had just been destroyed, but the pilot could be flying another one tomorrow. He could be in a position to exact vengeance on an Allied plane. After all, just a few minutes before I had endeavoured to destroy him, so why should I spare him now? As I knew, once we were fighting on enemy soil everything, and every person on it, was classified a foe. We had a specific order not to bring bombs back from abortive raids on Germany, but to drop them on any habitable farmhouse, rail junction or village that we were passing over.

  In the end, for me it was an aesthetic decision. Nothing would make me, from the safety of my Spitfire, blow to pieces another human being floating unarmed in space. Knowing this, and knowing there was a tough attitude fashionable among the older regular officers, personified in such phrases as ‘the only good German is a dead one’, it was selfindulgent to take a high moral tone, as I did, quoting the League of Nations and George Bernard Shaw.

  Apparently that was the last red flag. The CO was all for sending me to the nastiest outpost of Empire that could be found. Luckily, his junior officers thought privately much as I did. They told me that whatever the CO said I must agree to with enthusiasm. So when he asked me whether I was man enough to go on the toughest battle school yet created, I assured him there was nothing I would like better. Actually, much of the battle school was cleverly thought out and more enjoyable than the pointless drill of the main course. It certainly made me appreciate the clean sheets and numerous coffee breaks of the Intelligence School at Highgate, which was my next port of call.

  II

  A tall Victorian building on the very brow of Highgate Hill, creeper on the redbrick and a neglected garden rambling off into clumps of laurel: that was the Intelligence School. We were there for only a week. Its purpose was to fit square pegs into square holes. Various psychological tests filled the main periods. There were twenty of us, including several household names – a radio announcer and another frequent broadcaster. This time I was not the first in written work, but fluctuated between third and sixth. I was still the youngest by six or seven years.

  The chief lecturer put pressure on me to volunteer for Air Ministry. I would probably have agreed had I not fallen under the influence of the next youngest inmate. He, like me, had failed to get into air crew and was looking for an active substitute. He had discovered that an American plane, the North American Mitchell (B-25), was being flown by the RAF in the American manner: that was in a tight wingtip-towingtip group of six planes, an attack of three above and three below. This box of six flew in tight formation all the way to the target. The Americans flew each plane with pilot and co-pilot,
navigator and bombaimer, mid-gunner/wireless operator and rear gunner, a total crew of six. The short-of-manpower RAF flew on missions with a crew of four: pilot, navigator/bomb-aimer, wireless op/mid-gunner, rear gunner. That was fine, except that the leading plane had to dictate the responses of the other five so that they all bombed together. This meant that the leading bomb-aimer was for some vital minutes unable to keep the navigational side of his work going. He had crawled forward into the plastic nose of the plane and was taking all the other navigators through the coordinated disciplines of the bombing run. So a supernumerary navigator was apparently carried in the front plane. Frank Watson, my new friend at Highgate, believed that if we could get on the right side of the local commanding officer we would probably be welcomed to assist in providing an extra body in the front flight.

  We all knew that the Second Tactical Air Force was being built up for the forthcoming invasion of Europe by the Allies. It would be the biggest land battle since the First World War, and the operations/intelligence officers would have a front-line view. There were two close support bomber wings, each with three squadrons. Of these, 137 Wing operated from Hartford Bridge in Hampshire. Its Mitchell squadron was 226. Its 88 and 342 (French) Squadrons were still flying the elegant, but smaller Boston, where there was no room for an additional bombaimer. Operating from Dunsfold in Surrey, 139 Wing was completely converted to Mitchells. 98 and 180 Squadrons were RAF; 320 Squadron was Dutch. Watson had already had some flying experience with 139 Wing. He told me about it in graphic detail. He had arranged to go back to Dunsfold once this course was over. If I was to have the sort of grandstand view of the climax of the war that I now desperately wanted, I must get myself attached to 226 Squadron at Hartford Bridge. I explained this at length to the people at Highgate. They were famous for their string-pulling. I got my attachment to 137 Wing – at least temporarily.

  My feeling of elation lasted only twenty-four hours. A crowded train journey, standing up all the way, took me to Wallingford in Berkshire. From there RAF transport carried me to an imposing eighteenth-century country mansion, Mongewell Park. It might have been built to house Pitt and his War Cabinet, mulling over their plans to defeat Napoleon. In fact, it was now the headquarters of the Second Tactical Air Force, planning a new invasion of Europe. I had never seen so many circles of braid, so many ribbons and decorations, or heard so many booming voices and hectoring laughter. Though you might have thought that conversation was pitched so high to command attention, no one seemed to wait for an answer. They also had the unnerving aptitude of looking straight through you without seeing you.

  I made the foolish mistake of going into the bar at lunchtime. I knew it would be open to all officers irrespective of rank. I had not yet learned that many social rules in the forces were more honoured in the breach than in the event. If a junior officer wandered into such a high-powered gathering as this bar, he would simply be frozen out, ignored, talked through. No one below the rank of a group-captain (a full colonel in the Army or a Naval captain) would be served – unless he was decorated. That immediately changed the rules. A year or so later I was in a British Army bar in Germany, where the corporal behind the counter had the Victoria Cross. He was often drawn into the conversation by the officers he was serving.

  I was on the brink of giving up the attempt to catch the barman’s eye when I bumped into a short, dark and slightly built Squadron Leader. He was wearing the blue and white ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Cross below his pilot’s wings. To my surprise he smiled and asked if I was the new operations officer for Hartford Bridge. I said I thought I was, but how could he know? He pointed to the mirror behind the bar. ‘Don’t you look the part?’ Tall, gangling and uneasy, I certainly was. ‘No, it’s not that I’ve got the second sight. I’m your opposite number up here. I’m Bill Edrich.’

  Bill Edrich! I was too flummoxed for words. W.J. Edrich had gone in number three for England through the summer of 1938 when we were playing Australia and I was first getting deeply involved in the drama of cricket – a drama, like war, full of unexpected reverses. Edrich played in all five test matches in 1938 and failed in every one. Then, in the winter of 1938–9, he went with the England team to play a series against South Africa and in the very last match made the record-breaking score of 219. In 1940 he led a brilliant attack at low level on the docks at Rotterdam, which must have influenced the Nazi war machine in abandoning its plans to invade England and turn instead eastwards to the flat plains of Russia. I would have loved to talk to Bill Edrich about the rival conflicts of sport and war. A book by a famous cricket writer, Sir Pelham Warner, which my parents sent me for Christmas 1942 when I was in hospital in Ireland, summed up Edrich’s character very well: ‘When one realised the rough seas he had encountered for so long, his coming into his own again was a rare tribute to his courage, a courage so fully demonstrated subsequently in the grimmest of all wars.’ I was too much in awe of this almost legendary character to approach him socially, though we had a most amicable relationship on those many nights when we shared opposite ends of the scrambler telephone.

  There was little time on those occasions for a general chat. Nor was there on this first meeting. The bar was completely packed, distinguished elbow rubbing elbow. Edrich pointed out two tall blond figures at the far end of the counter: they were the Atcherley twins, famous for their exploits in 1920s aviation, at a time when hardly a week seemed to pass without some new flight being celebrated. Looking goggle-eyed at these figures from a past almost as distant as the Trojan War caused me to miss the opening gambit at the bar, unnatural squeals and yelps drawing my attention back. The line of drinkers was swaying from side to side. One portly figure was flat on his back. Others, bent double, were clutching their trousers and shouting imprecations.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s Basil, our CO. He thinks that from time to time we all need livening up.’ Edrich shook his head ruefully.

  I had heard of Air Vice-Marshal Embry and his bloody exploits. Shot down over France in 1940, he had escaped, been recaptured and escaped again, killing three of his captives with his bare hands. There was an echo here of my essay subject on morality in war. Embry had asked for a glass of water and killed the man who brought it. No doubt he would have shot to pieces the parachuting enemy without compunction. I looked at him with a repugnant interest. Small, with twinkly eyes and a quick birdlike glance, there was nothing to suggest a sadistic monster. He was helping up the winded officer who had fallen on his back.

  The prank he had played on the bar loungers depended on surprise and speed. Coming in unobserved, he ran along the bent backs thrusting his hand into each trouser pocket in turn and giving the pendulous private parts a sharp tweak. The object was to get as far along the line as possible before being spotted. In this case he had tweaked four out of seven.

  This was only an extreme example of the violent horseplay that broke out from time to time in all the RAF stations to which I belonged. My last commanding officer had an even more spectacular and dangerous party trick. He would inhale a mouthful of lighter fuel, light it and exhale it at the same moment. The more sharply he blew, the further the tongue of fire would curve across the mess.

  When we left Hartford Bridge for France in October 1944, the damage to the Officers’ Mess reached epic proportions. Plunged in a pungent mixture of soot and black paint, the bare bottoms of all the station wing commanders were imprinted above the fireplace. Naked sooty feet wandered over the ceiling, meeting other parts of the human anatomy here and there. In this case we all had to pay for the redecoration. In general, the authorities took a surprisingly relaxed view of such boisterous antics. Virtually all senior RAF officers had been in air crew at one stage of their careers and knew the pressures and tensions that went with it.

  III

  The next day an RAF truck brought me to Hartford Bridge. After more than eighteen months in the Air Force I was at last going to be working among aircraft. Hartford Bridge looked the very prototype of an airfield.
Built among meandering lanes, gorse bushes and sandy dunes, the concrete works of man rose to a crescendo around the broad crossing of the two great runways – like a royal parade ground dedicated not to Apollo, the god of pomp and circumstance, but to Mars, the god of war, and his noisy brother, Vulcan. And indeed the clattering and hammering of repair work seemed never to cease on the clover leaves of lesser runways where the aircraft themselves clustered.

  Boston and Mitchell seemed to express entirely different temperaments, rapier against battleaxe. In fact, the Mitchell, with its two powerful Wright Cyclone 1250hp engines, could carry twice the bomb load of the slightly more streamlined Boston. I already felt an affinity for the Mitchell. On this, my first sight of one, I got my driver to wait while I ran across and laid my hands on its metal sides. The smell of high octane fuel and hot metal was as intoxicating as sniffing glue to an addict. The two fitters tinkering with the starboard engine must have thought me crazy when, my voice cracking with emotion, I asked if I could climb on board.

  ‘Help yourself laddie,’ said the senior.

  A perpendicular ladder with some three or four rungs carried me up to the navigational table in the central section of plane. In this compressed space the observer had to carry out the calculations that would confirm the pilot’s view of their position. A squeeze past the radar and a couple of climbing steps took me to the pilot’s seat, confronting a dense array of dials and gauges. Sure enough, next to it was the empty co-pilot’s seat. I patted it affectionately. It seemed characteristically well made in the heavy American style with plenty of protective metal around the seat.

  I had little opportunity to explore it any further in the next few days. I had joined an airfield at war, where I had a specific role which within a week I would be expected to fulfil. Much of this was left to me to find out for myself. I talked to armourers and engineers, to wireless operators and gunners; I went up into the control tower and watched how the aircraft were brought in by radio link; I flew on low-level training trips; I helped the photo-interpreter who taught me how to diagnose from shadows and patches of dust the mysteries of seeing the world from 10,000 feet (our average bombing height). Most important of all, I sat in the control room and helped Flight Lieutenant Hovendon carry out the preparation for a couple of raids: the job I was to take over.