Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  They could sit back and count their blessings. But, hold on, one was missing. How could that be? It was the Kiwis. Somewhere in the minutes of maximum confusion they had slipped away. Must have gone down low, probably hedge-hopping back to base. But they didn’t come back to Hartford Bridge or any other RAF base. After a couple of days they were left on the operations blackboard: ‘missing’.

  In the mid-years of the war, the centre of aerial conflict was with the daylight bombers and their main targets were support for the Army in its tank battles in the Western Desert. There was another use for these day-time marauders: propaganda. Low-level missions produced some spectacular footage in which tanks, artillery, armoured patrols and refuelling tankers seemed from the air like animated toy soldiers.

  The two film photographers Ted Moore and Chuck Evans had joined 137 Wing at a time late in 1943 when the Germans were making attacks on shipping; these destroyed such large numbers of vital oil and food reserves that some economists believed the Germans could win the war by starving us out. Ted Moore had told me he had decided to ask for a transfer to another front – probably in the Far East. The unique role of the cameraman-cum-pilot gave Moore and Evans more authority than their actual rank as flight lieutenants suggested.

  Ted Moore was a small compact person from South Africa. Before the war he had been a news cameraman on Pathé Pictorial. Chuck Evans had been his assistant. Tall, with dark wavy hair and an open cheerful expression, he usually accepted Ted’s opinion, but now his wife was expecting their first child. Not surprisingly, she hoped to persuade Chuck to stay on the European front. Our CO was likely to view Chuck’s attitude with favour. As you will remember, his wife was expecting their first child.

  Ted had told me all this over a late evening drink in the Officers’ Mess tent at Hartford Bridge. He felt his view of the war had reached the limits that could be shown from the somewhat cumbersome spare seat of the Mitchell.

  Now, for some reason, he called me over. As I often did, I was walking from breakfast in the cluster of bell tents in the valley to the 226 admin office on the far ledge of the airfield itself. I had only just become aware that the figure pacing up and down the puddle of dirty oil on the middle of the now empty dispersal area was the man I had talked with a couple of nights before.

  He looked at me absently and asked what I was doing on the edge of the runway.

  I explained this was a short cut from breakfast to a view of the squadrons coming back.

  ‘That’s it, you don’t want to get in their way. Someone might be injured.’ He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a filthy rag. He looked at it with surprising intensity, then said, ‘He left this behind.’

  It was an extremely tattered miniature woollen teddy bear. Apparently Evans never went on a mission without it. This morning, over-sleeping, in the bustle to get off, he had mislaid the bear. Ted had found it and was waiting to give it back to its owner just as soon as he physically could. It wasn’t long before we heard the preliminary tremble in the air that spelt the approach of thirty-six bombers in close formation. Wait, in the second box of six there was a gap, there was one plane missing. If we had been waiting in the flying control tower we could have been in communication with the squadron commander and we would have known what had happened and which plane was missing. But now we had to wait for the planes to lose height, to land and come taxiing over to their individual dispersal bay. By that time we had identified by its absence which plane was missing. It was indeed the Mitchell that Chuck Evans had been flying in. No one had seen it go down.

  Years later Ted Moore achieved fame with the top cinematography award of the year for A Man for All Seasons.

  Long before that had happened a whole lot of medals and citations were presented to us on the airfield itself by the King and Queen. I had heard that the King could be frightfully shirty if things didn’t work out the way he had expected. Something certainly went wrong that afternoon.

  Virtually the entire personnel of 137 Wing were formed up into a hollow square. Junior officers formed a guard of honour. I was both the youngest and one of the tallest so was in a position to hear the row. Something had delayed the royal party. Standing to attention for over an hour might be all right for a Guards regiment, but it made the mixed company of RAF, French and Dutch crews very restive.

  All the decorations were carefully laid out. The adjutant, responding to a crib taped to his wrist, picked up the appropriate medal and placed it on a brocaded pillow. This was handed to one of the top RAF brass, I think it was Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. He held the cushion out for the King, who had to pick up the medal and stick it onto the recipient’s chest. No doubt this wasn’t as easy as it should have looked. But the King made it impossibly difficult. He wanted all the trestle tables rearranged, but there were no airmen to do the rearranging. They had been standing to attention for over an hour and were in no mood to be helpful; and the top brass had been wining and dining too indulgently: that was why they were late for their own parade. Trestle tables are all right if you have at least four handlers per table. Unfortunately there weren’t that many air vice-marshals to go round. I wrote to my mother: ‘If the pictures get on the newsreel, you will probably see me – looking an excellent imitation of a lamp-post! The King disappointed me by being in a bad temper and displaying very poor manners, but I thought the Queen was very charming and much prettier than I had expected.’

  She had looked me in the eye and said how youthful many of the air crews looked.

  IV

  A few days later we had some more distinguished guests, this time from across the Atlantic. Squadron Leader Walkerdene looked more than usually excited. He asked me to stay on duty in case the Yanks wanted to have anything explained to them. There were at least a dozen of them and not one less than a full colonel.

  It was the suggestion that they might need something explained that grabbed my attention. Hartford Bridge did indeed harbour an exciting modern invention that none of us had seen in action. Squadron Leader Walkie-Talkerdene ushered us all into the crowded control tower. He explained that one of the hazards of flying from Britain was the way the weather could change in a minute or two. He reminded the American Army men how they had had to make the invasions of Europe without the support of the Mitchells, Bostons and Mosquitoes of 2 Group. ‘Much help they would have been,’ muttered one of the American generals. ‘All that has changed now,’ Walkie-Talkerdene went on impetuously. ‘What we’re about to see has never been seen before. Observe, gentlemen, we are on a hilltop and there is quite a thick mist gathering in the hollows – enough to stop us flying, but no longer, thanks to the wonders of Fido. Switch on Fido.’ He gave me a meaningful nudge.

  For a few awkward seconds nothing happened. Then there was a dazzling flash that lit up every corner of the control tower, a shrill hissing like the threat of a dozen monster snakes, a powerful smell of petrol. It was all coming from the main runway. As we watched, flames raced forwards leaping like an athlete of fire down the concrete runway. The height of the flames seemed to vary, but to be around eighty feet.

  It was a barbaric sight and demanded that the viewer did not take too strong a breath of the tormented air in case the heat overwhelmed us and drew us into the magnet of fire, as was said to happen in the bombed German cities when the RAF inflicted a firestorm on them. Perhaps it was the memory of the dreadful torments that both the RAF and the Luftwaffe had launched on its enemy that made one of the senior American generals turn somewhat impatiently to Squadron Leader Walkerdene, who was just getting into his stride.

  ‘How much does this cost a minute?’ It was the sort of question that our squadron leader should have been able to answer, but, of course, he didn’t have a clue (nor did anyone else). We could only respond rather lamely that we would forward the figures to him, General Eisenhower, in his London headquarters. ‘In the meantime, it’s costing too much for a demonstration. Switch it off.’ In photographs for which he was prepared, Ike always looked jovi
al, but there was a tough side to his character.

  As for Fido, it was in practical use within a week and was, on the larger airfields such as Hartford Bridge, a valuable method of clearing the foggy air.

  It was just about this time that I began to realise how much I was enjoying myself. Within my first five weeks on an active service station I had met at close quarters the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower; the top fighting general, Montgomery; and the King and Queen at an unguarded moment. This was exactly the way I had daydreamed my war might be. Only one extra touch was needed: it was time to go on another mission.

  Once it seemed that it was time to put on my crash hat, there was no point in dawdling. The previous day, 16 July, the Mitchells had attempted to bomb a fuel dump south of Caen. Enemy defensive fire was so strong that we had failed to hit the target and we were briefed to return to it. There was no time to find the best available crew. I scrambled in with a non-commissioned outfit. They didn’t mind taking me, and that was it.

  The weather was still tricky. After spending twenty minutes circling the airfield looking for a gap in the clouds we were recalled. These sudden changes in plan and enforced idleness were undoubtedly the hardest things to bear. Unexpectedly, in the early afternoon the Met Officer spotted a wider break and the chance that it was going to spread eastwards carried us hopefully into the air again. I was more scared than I had been the first time. But once over the beaches there was so much to see that the immediate action carried me along. The beach was much changed in the five weeks since I had last been there. It seemed the whole of the Normandy coast had been chewed over by some monster and then spat out.

  The attractive little town of Lisieux was a mass of sandy-coloured rubble. We were returning the invasion that we had had to endure so many hundred years ago from the Normans. Enemy anti-aircraft fire grew in intensity once we were above the valley of the Seine. The air was dense with ugly black smudges. Death might be in any of them. The crew sang ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer’.

  Suddenly, the hostile flak intensified before it was expected. We were on the bombing run. The plane shot sideways and upwards. ‘Bombs gone,’ shouted the navigator (a bit late in the day). Everything this crew did was a bit slow in happening. ‘Where’s the bloody box?’ shouted the pilot. ‘Go on, find it for us. Anybody got any suggestions?’ A box, you will remember, was a flight formation of six aircraft. Flying so close together was supposed to give us safety in numbers. It was quite terrifying. One moment we were in a mill of thirty-six aircraft, narrowly missing collisions; now there wasn’t a plane in the sky. What was worse, there wasn’t a cloud either. ‘Don’t know about you fellows, but I’m going home,’ said the pilot. ‘You better hurry up,’ said Mac the navigator, ‘there’s a gun battery loading up down there. Start taking evasive action now.'

  Four puffs, well away to the left, seemed less dangerous than the flying bomb in Piccadilly. Fifty seconds later the next round of four shells had cut the difference between us by half. The pilot cursed and waited for the navigator to give him a warning. ‘Off to the right now.’ There seemed nothing in the world except the toiling gunners below and the sweating quintet in the plane above. Now I understood what was meant by ‘ageing in a moment’. Everything seemed to rest on the mysterious symbiosis that linked the warriors on the ground to the lurching, zigzagging men in the air. Would it never stop? Just off to the left the shell bursts were getting closer and made the air tremble. That was the last chance for the German gunners. We were out of their range from then on.

  When we got back to Hartford Bridge (we were the last crew in) I got as fierce a drubbing from old Walky T. as if I had been caught climbing back into school. I listened carefully to what was said. A bombing raid was not a joy ride. If we had been hit by that aggressive gun battery, it was unlikely that I, as the unknown factor, would have had the opportunity to try to get out: that would have fallen to the pilot and navigator. They would probably not have made it either. In my year or so of active service I never knew anybody who escaped by parachute from a falling plane. It was better to suppose that you wouldn’t, or not to think about it at all.

  The fact that one lone British bomber had lost its way flying over Normandy and was able to get back to base without the appearance of a single Messerschmitt was another symptom of Germany’s loss of grip on the war. Once this begins to happen it is hard to stop.

  It would be wrong to suggest that the three Mitchell squadrons covered the range of activities going on at this very large airfield. No doubt there were more totally unwarlike men in raincoats sitting in a corner of the bar than I noticed. They tended to keep themselves to themselves. As one of them said to me, it would be better to know as little as possible. If you were caught you would be bound to be tortured. Better to know the minimum so you couldn’t betray your friends. These men were the exact opposite of the brash Aussies or introspective New Zealanders of 137 Wing. They waited only till the sky was right. That meant a pile of cumulus to dim the light of the moon. Then the clumsy old Lysander aircraft would be wheeled out to the end of the runway. The plane took off in the middle of the night as silently as possible. The two or three crews on this regular dropping run did their job well. One of their passengers even appeared back in his old seat at the end of the bar – for a few days at any rate. The conventions of war made the spy’s lot, even at this gathering place, somehow outside the comradeship that had evolved over the centuries in barracks and parade grounds.

  There was another advantage to this rolling heathland. It was quite near London and yet relatively desolate. That brought another distinguished guest to see us in the early autumn. He had with him no petulant team of generals, only a small lapdog, but the guest merited a considerable amount of attention. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands might have passed for a playboy with the amount of care he lavished on his small canine. He demanded that his dog be given the seat next to him at lunch and fed him special titbits. I’m not sure that the dog didn’t accompany the Prince on the mission that had brought him to Hartford Bridge, but he might have found the Spitfire Mark IX noisy and frightening. The Prince was a skilled pilot and had come to see how this new version of our favourite plane was operating. The Mark IX Spitfire could manoeuvre at 39,000 feet, they said, but how adeptly? It was unlikely that the lapdog would help the Prince make up his mind. Before he left, he was fulsome in the plane’s praises. He had that characteristic Dutch mixture of hardheaded realism and a streak of disarming erotic fantasy.

  I should know. I was now sharing a cabin with a philosophical Norwegian. He had many of the same fey characteristics that went with the northern temperament. As I may not have explained adequately, the whole of 137 Wing was put under canvas in late April. This was to acclimatise us to work in difficult and alien conditions. It did indeed show that work in such conditions was difficult and alien. The powersthat-be quickly agreed that we needed the best possible conditions when fighting the Germans, so we were moved back into the Nissen huts that the Wing had occupied before its brief experiment into Boy Scoutery. Besides the orderly rows of huts, like lines of metal mushrooms, there were a few of a more substantial nature, usually shared between two or three admin officers. I was put in with Captain Torgelson, late of the Norwegian Flying Corps and now the senior flying control officer on the airfield.

  I cannot believe that it was mere coincidence that the oldest and youngest officers were put together. It was the sort of tease that gave Squadron Leader Walkerdene his twinkle. It also gave me an insight into a lifetime of daring and adventure. Captain Torgelson had flown with Nansen in the far north. After the Norwegian resistance crumbled in spring 1940, before the Blitzkrieg, Captain Torgelson went back to his post as headmaster of a senior secondary school in Narvik. He noted that the Germans had left a number of twin-engined sea planes anchored in Narvik harbour. They had sufficient fuel, Captain Torgelson reckoned, to reach the Shetlands. There was no time for checking the engines or studying a map. He had to go o
r stay. He went, without even saying goodbye to his wife.

  With no fuel to spare, he landed on Shetland sands. If I was shocked by his apparent indifference to the fate of his Nordic family, he maintained he was horrified by my lack of sexual experience. Arguments about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were soon bouncing around that sturdy little hut.

  This serious Norseman even found me a book in English to read, Human Sexual Energy, by Van Der Velde. It occurs to me now, did he carry this weighty tome with him in his escape from the Germans? It hardly seems likely.

  In the meantime, we had a new squadron commander. It was his first flight with us in late July. Bald-headed and sturdily built, he had a navigator who was the exact opposite in build and temperament: lanky, bony and hollow-eyed. He had the Distinguished Service Order and, at the age of twenty-six, had learnt how to handle a tough yet hard-working ground crew almost twice his age. How this team would respond to the wing’s new commanding officer remained to be seen.

  Every morning those who could find an excuse to go up to the airfield did so. After all, the airfield was the reason why we were there. It was also the carriageway that brought news from the wider battlefront. This morning there was something extra, something dynamic in the air. I tried to prise information from the excited ground crew. All they could say was that something had happened to our new wing commander. We should soon know; we could hear the vibrant power of the returning squadrons. I put on an extra spurt, running up the last steep slope, and saw the whole plateau bisected by the wide sweep of the runway in front of me.