by Michael Gill
I nearly jumped out of my skin when our new toy, the squadron Jeep, drew up alongside.
‘Hop in,’ shouted Bob Laurie, looking much less like a careful Scottish Writer to the Signet. ‘They’ve lost an engine.’
Right on cue an amazing spectacle reared up on the opposite side of the airfield. It could have been a crazy artistic vision of Frankenstein, the dying moments of a metal monster. Even as we watched, the whole righthand side of the monster peeled off and went cart-wheeling across the airfield to a scattering of bicycles, airmen, back-up planes and ambulances.
‘He hasn’t got control,’ shouted Bob. ‘Any moment he’s going to blow up!’ As if in answer, the monster ground a supply hut to powdered concrete. A wild figure leapt out of the top hatch to shouts of applause. It was the Wing Commander’s long-limbed navigator, waving his arms and dancing over the tangle of junk which had once been a bomber. He was shouting some long and complex message. What was it? ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen . . .’
The Wing Commander shimmied his considerable bulk through the ruins of the fuselage. We agreed that it was a more decorous way to arrive than coming through the ceiling like the navigator. But what had happened to all that high octane fuel?
‘We dumped it in the North Sea,’ said the navigator. ‘Think I would have danced on top of full tanks?’
After a bitterly contested summer the German discipline began to crack. For a few heady days it seemed the war might end that autumn. But it proved indeed a bridge too far, though all 137 Wing’s resources were marshalled to bomb together – forty-eight Mitchells and thirty Bostons. This was to break up German troop concentrations in the woods south of Caen. Appallingly bad weather held up the Air Force’s chief duties – to act as the spearhead for the Army. The airfield became a monument to lost friends.
Early in October we took over the German airfield of Vitry-en-Artois in northern France. It was better maintained than Hartford Bridge. What struck us all were the pads of matching grey leather above the urinals. Intensive research revealed that these were for the foreheads of the impressive young airmen who would regularly drink themselves insensible. Our French interpreter and guide was surprised that the pragmatic British had not worked out a similar device . . . Thinking it over forced us to admit that our drinking bouts tended to go on haphazardly until a quick dash for the outside door was necessary. Yet there also seemed something unwholesome in such excess as the Germans anticipated.
It all came down to customs that had been established long before the Wright Brothers took off in their skinny little concoctions of wire, string and sails. Only three weeks before, German fighter planes had taken off regularly from the concrete runways. Now it was our turn to savour the amenities.
Now that we were based on French soil, and here to liberate this ancient enemy, 342 Squadron sounded a fresh note of cheerful optimism and comradeship. Moreover, it was clear that the German pilots had done themselves well. An eighteenth-century chateaux was our new headquarters. It seemed the right place and the right time to celebrate the return of the native – a lorryload of champagne, more little tins of caviar than I had believed were still in existence and, of course, an adequate show of beautiful women. It was mid-October and getting a little late to celebrate the victory of the Battle for Normandy in secluded bowers in the frosty garden. Moreover, there was something unbalanced in the revellers. It was not only differences of ages and languages, there was something else. I realised that behind the music in the Glenn Miller style there was a continual droning. It was not in English or French. Could it be? It could. I remembered there was a Scots officer who, in times of stress (like now), resorted to the bagpipes.
I was curious to see who the bagpipes were summoning forth. It wasn’t difficult. Once I was inside the French windows, the corridors acted as resonators. I turned a corner, and it was the close-up of the crew of the disintegrating Mitchell back at Hartford Bridge. But there was a different plot. My arrival was the cue for a rearrangement of the scene. The piper slung his pipes under his arm and went off to deafen another part of the chateau. The navigator piled two chairs on top of each other. The wireless operator took up his position by a small barrel. Beside the bed there was a splendid black-haired temptress. There was something irresistibly comic about the scene: the plump and middleaged Wing Commander, comfortably wrapped in his somewhat tattered silk dressing-gown, dividing his attention between the oysters in their barrels (specially flown up from Whitstable the day before) and the glamorous serving maid. It might have been a scene recorded by Hogarth. The wireless operator dug out an oyster from his small barrel. The navigator cracked open the oyster and sprinkled it with fresh lemon juice. The dark lady took it between her teeth and transferred it to the Wing Commander’s mouth.
12
A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS
I
Not all of the half-dozen bombing raids I took part in were particularly eventful. I made the mistake of assuming that geographical variety would show up from 10,000 feet, which often it didn’t. I was disappointed by my first view of Holland. Our mission was to destroy the raised causeway between Zuid Beveland Island and the Dutch mainland. We achieved our objective. I wrote in my log book: ‘Belgium and Holland appeared dead countries, much inundated with flooding; dull country, dull weather, dull trip.’
This was in the autumn of 1944. The British and American armies were slugging their way slowly to the Rhine, but for the supporting Second Tactical Air Force, stuck in the mud of northern France, there was little to occupy the dreary days. Recognising this, the powersthat-be instigated a series of forty-eight-hour leave passes to the newly liberated city of Paris. Being democratic, there had to be equivalent proportions of airmen, NCOs and officers. Lots were cast to make the final choice truly impartial. Human nature then took a hand.
One of the first of the officers to draw lucky was Wing Commander Operations, Jack Adams. Stockily built with a briskly dark moustache, he looked far from the romantic self-sacrificing war pilot immortalised by Richard Hillary in the The Last Enemy. But appearances can be misleading. Jack must have had a romantic streak in his nature. He discovered that this first Paris trip coincided with my twenty-first birthday. He had seen Paris many times in the peaceful days before the Second World War, I never. Jack bequeathed his leave ticket to me on the condition that I used it to behave in a thoroughly reprehensible manner. I was not at all sure what Jack meant, but he said I was not to worry, I would know when it was happening.
My first impression of the romantic capital of art, music and joie de vivre was that it badly needed a fresh coat of paint. I was not in a position to come to any strong judgement, as it was the first foreign city I had seen. The journey from 137 Wing had been in the back of a threeton truck crowded with airmen who were, like myself, steadily getting soaked in the freezing fog of northern France.
When we were deposited at our modest hotel on the Left Bank, we were delighted to discover that every room had a private bath or shower, by no means common on the Continent at this time. Common or unique, I didn’t care. The hot bath followed by the embrace of freshly laundered sheets took charge of the next twelve hours. The next day was much the same. Most impressive was being saluted by the policemen on point duty – much smarter than our West End bobbies, I decided.
I chummed up with a British Army captain. He had gone straight from public school to Spain, as a Roman Catholic volunteer fighting for Franco – the only Englishman I ever met who supported the Nationalists to the point of fighting for them. Otherwise, there seemed nothing particularly odd about him. We went to the Folies-Bergères and afterwards invited two of the ‘girls’ out for supper. They had remarkably sharklike teeth and made it quite clear that they meant only to eat with them. Some time around two in the morning, with Trevor my Army friend, I found myself in a basement nightclub. Two French companies had made a merger and were celebrating by taking out the wives of the directors. We were invited to join the party. That suited everyone. The wives
were in their early forties and enjoyed flirting with these foreign officers. They were more interesting than the voracious Folies girls and they came with free champagne. This is perhaps what won the day. Returning from a trip to the Hommes, I saw Trevor spread-eagled on the floor of a small cubicle and looking decidedly green. The flutter of bar girls promised to look after him. I expect they did; I never saw him again. I had other things to occupy my attention.
I had collected my overcoat and was trying to work out where this insignificant side street led. The nightclub was clearly closing down. At the entrance I bumped into someone whose perfume was familiar. She had sung a French version of the blues, not very well. But under the flashing lights, with the sparkling wine and heavy perfume, she had been part of the show. That was it – part of the show. We looked at each other. At that moment the rain came on with renewed vigour. One of those rickety French taxis squealed to a stop, the driver leant out and after a short argument we bundled inside. The taxi drove off and the argument in French continued fiercely. She explained that if I paid double the taxi would take me home later. That seemed an unlikely proposition, even after several glasses of champagne. I put the extra money down as a hostage to fortune – then there was my promise to Jack Adams. Nothing so far seemed to have matched his expectations for me. The street resembled a set for Les Miserables. The rain had stopped and the gaunt women on the corners seemed to be waiting for betrayal.
The war was still on. I had a reminder of this when, later in the night, my partner stirred next to me in her sleep. What long sentences. It wasn’t English, but it wasn’t French either. It had to be German. While I was wondering whether to wake her – she sounded so unhappy – I reminded myself that the Germans had been occupying Paris for four years. It would have been odd if there hadn’t been a few wartime romances, and with that consoling thought I dropped off to sleep in her arms.
When I woke the light was changing. I turned and reached for my bedfellow. She wasn’t there. I felt a sudden pang of loneliness. She was standing naked in the window, eating an apple with the first rays of sunlight gleaming on her skin. She turned and laughed at me. Now I knew what the Wing Commander meant. On my return I didn’t need to give Wing Commander Adams a complete account of my stolen weekend. He took one close look at my careworn features and burst into applause. ‘What, didn’t I tell you? Connie, come over here!’ They thought the bags under my eyes were a symptom of debauchery. What a thing to think.
Shortly afterwards I clinched a rare opportunity to go on operations with the dandy of the Wing, Tony Parsons. Parsons had deeply impressed me a few weeks previously when, having returned with a badly wounded rear gunner, he carefully brushed off his hat and executed a salute while coming down a collapsible ladder butt-end first. Having personally overseen the careful removal of the unlucky rear gunner, he took us on a tour of the fuselage. It was an impressive collection of jagged holes of every size and shape. It was difficult to imagine that anyone had survived that storm of shot and shell. For the first time we were to bomb Germany itself.
The target was a concentration of troops defending the Ruhr village of Udem. At the time I wrote: ‘Concentration of bombs across the village which disappeared under smoke and flame. Some accurate heavy flak from Goch. Fine cloudless weather and immense air activity over Germany – heavies going out to the Ruhr, rocket phoons diving on the Goch area. Heavy German artillery barrage west of Goch.’
We expected to return to the attack the next day, but at the last minute Army Intelligence discovered the enemy had withdrawn. Some weeks later I was being driven to our new airfield, Gilze Rijen in southern Holland. I saw a signpost to Udem and, seized by the mood of the moment, got my driver (under duress) to make a diversion. It looked as though the whole main street had been bulldozed into an enormous dust heap. Two towers were all that was left of the church, the school, the old cattle market. Clearing up was a massive task, but everyone took part. Many of the citizens were injured and there was no compensation for those who had lost arms and legs. A blinded musician sat on the rubble and added a note of defiance to the sorting of the broken bricks and stones. It was a daunting sight – yet it was being tackled with such energy and discipline that, paradoxically, we left Udem with a feeling of being uplifted, a feeling which often came to me later in my position of disarmament officer on the North Rhine Province.
My feelings about the enemy were hard to analyse. All my life my reaction to change has been aversion, an instinctive feeling of fright. This feeling never predominates for long, and underneath is excitement and, in this case, curiosity. There was also trepidation. How could the Germans do other than hate us, after six years of war? Did we not hate them? Plenty of things had been revealed in the last few months that gave me cause: the awful photographs of the shambling ghouls in the concentration camps, the naked corpses being shovelled into mass graves, Richard Dimbleby’s radio account of entering Belsen. We had known about the Nazi atrocities, but the occupation of Germany had revealed them to be on a scale that dwarfed the barbarities of Attila and Nero.
The mounting pressure and anticipation of the last days and weeks of the war were a considerable strain. It was only a matter of time. Yet the Germans went on fighting with that single-minded brutal energy that had supported them against the combined forces of Britain, North America, Australia and most of Europe. We knew that their available manpower was not unlimited. What we did not know was how determined the Americans were to fight the Nazi system to the bitter end. As we believed we were. We were lucky that our secret weapon (the atom bomb) was just a few months more developed than the German rocketry. Had the situation been reversed, as it might easily have been, the whole course of human history could have been quite different and that was impossible to imagine.
Instead, we were able to treat the end of the war as a sort of jape, a time for comic relief.
In April 1945 we moved north. One evening, one of our most experienced pilots came into the dormitory and announced that he had commandeered a jeep and was going to have a look at the enemy, who were a few miles away where the front line was an intermesh of canals and flat fields. Stocked with supplies of Stein Hagen, I and some half-dozen others jumped on board.
We had begun by looking somewhat apprehensively for the enemy. We didn’t see one German. They had sensibly tucked themselves away somewhere. They weren’t missed. As the night wore on, more and more often we were stunned by our pilot’s brilliance in driving. There was one moment when I noticed the source of that brilliance . . . no one was driving the jeep. Somehow, in our drunken state, we were making our relatively slow progress alongside the dykes, illuminated by fantastic fireworks displays, with only the occasional zigzag keeping us from sudden death. During a detonation of fireworks I decided to find out how many of us there were taking the jeep ride. Normally, jeeps, being open-sided vehicles, carry about eight people, double the specified workload of four. Well, we were more than I expected – twenty-six.
The so-called driver slapped me on the back. ‘You’ll not forget this night, boy,’ he said, misty-eyed with Stein Hagen. I suppose that was true. By this time I was heartily sick of the war. I wanted to get on with what was going to be the rest of my life.
The disarmament wing, to which I was posted on the break-up of 137 Wing in the autumn of 1945, saw the most unhappy period of my RAF career. Allocated a jeep, a sergeant interpreter, a driver, and lists of enemy war equipment that it was my job to track down and destroy, I found myself sandwiched between two unpleasant types of human being. The sergeant interpreters were mostly young men whose parents had sacrificed themselves in order to get their favoured sons to the relative safety of Britain in the 1930s. They themselves had vanished into the Nazi death camps. The bitter hatred of these young men for anything German was understandable but deeply depressing. On my other side were the officers, many of whom had served in the Military Police in Palestine before the war. They were adept at finding ways to cheat the Germans out of whatever t
hey had left from the tattered remains of their homes. Characteristic of their approach was to declare that all the watches and clocks in a tenement block had been confiscated by order of the British Luftwaffe. The unfortunate German householders knew this was unlikely to be true, but what could they do? The sight of a brandished Mauser was a potent persuader.
The war began with Hitler’s defeat of Poland in less than a month, as he established the success of a new form of war, the Blitzkrieg. As the war continued its ruthless course, more and more of the vanquished enemy were needed to assemble Hitler’s own guns, tanks and submarines. Thus when I came to sort out one of the largest of Hitler’s war factories, Krupp’s works at Essen on the Rhine, I found out that the German involvement was fewer than three thousand workers against eleven thousand slave labourers imported from Russia, Poland and the Baltic. Now these starving scraps of humanity had been left with no hope except vengeance and a need to get back to their homeland.
We were living in the small village of Wülfrath, in the Ruhr, based in a former Nazi Brown House. One afternoon I glimpsed through the window three German civilian policemen stumbling and falling in the winding cobbled street outside. I’d heard about local robber gangs and I assumed the policemen had been involved in some kind of gang battle. The local Polish gangs were shifting further north looking for articles to loot. These policemen had not been armed and now appeared to be seriously injured. I ran upstairs to fetch my .38 revolver. I shared a comfortable room with Flight Lieutenant Jenkins, a radar expert. He was lying on his bed smoking a pipe. He was unmoved by the plight of the policemen, and made no answer when I asked him to accompany me. He was due to be demobbed in a couple of weeks and back to running his local cinema in Kent before Christmas.