The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Chapter 3

  Richard Hillary flew his first Spitfire in July 1940. I was not yet fifteen. Now, when I reread The Last Enemy, I realize that we were contemporaries. Superficially, this is not true since when I joined the Resistance, he had just died, but in essence it is true. Hillary, a crack pilot in the RAF, was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf109 during a dogfight, having himself shot down five enemy planes. He was fished out of the North Sea with severe burns to his body, particularly to his face and hands, and went on to endure three months of hellish surgery in an attempt to repair the damage so that he might return to combat duty. He attended a number of conferences in the United States, and had time to write his brief masterpiece before returning to active service, working in the Operational Training Unit. The Battle of Britain, strictly speaking, had been fought and won, and the RAF had begun raids deep into German airspace. Hillary’s hands, in any case, no longer had the mobility and the dexterity necessary to fly a fighter plane. Truth be told, they also could not fully control a heavy bomber. During a night training flight on 8 January 1943, he crashed while at the controls of the Bristol Blenheim, taking with him his radio-operator Wilfred Fison. I have read The Last Enemy so often – I know that few people today are familiar with the book – that I feel myself to be both its guardian and its witness, and his memory, intact in me, permits me to proclaim myself the contemporary of Richard Hillary, the long-haired boy. The story he tells of his first encounter, one misty morning at a Gloucestershire airforce base, with a row of Spitfires that had just come off the assembly lines, the state-of-the-art of British aeronautical technology, machines as yet untried, jealously guarded for the Battle of Britain, which Churchill knew would be inevitable and decisive, these magnificent machines that pilots all over the Commonwealth dreamed of are the source of the passion for aeroplanes that haunts me to this day:

  The Spitfires stood in two lines outside ‘A’ Flight Pilots’ room. The dull grey-brown of their camouflage could not conceal the clear-cut beauty, the wicked simplicity of their lines. I hooked up my parachute and climbed awkwardly into the low cockpit. I noticed how small my field of vision was. Kilmartin swung himself onto a wing and started to run through the instruments. I was conscious of his voice but heard nothing of what he said. I was to fly a Spitfire. It was what I had most wanted through all the long dreary months of training. If I could fly a Spitfire, it would be worth it. Well, I was about to achieve my ambition and felt nothing. I was numb, neither exhilarated nor scared. I noticed the white enamel undercarriage handle, ‘Like a lavatory plug,’ I thought. […]

  Kilmartin had said, ‘See if you can make her talk.’ That meant the whole bag of tricks and I wanted ample room for mistakes and possible blacking-out. With one or two very sharp movements on the stick, I blacked myself out for a few seconds, but the machine was sweeter to handle than any other I had flown. I put it through every manoeuvre that I knew of and it responded beautifully. I ended with two flick rolls and turned back for home. I was filled with a sudden exhilarating confidence. I could fly a Spitfire; in any position I was its master. It remained to be seen whether I could fight in one.

  Clearly, the past is not my strong suit. Rereading what I have just written, other images, deeply buried, almost forgotten recollections, uncovered by the trepan of memory, flood back with all their original power, so much so that I feel as though I am confusing the strata of my existence, as if they were on display before me. Sartre, in the preface to his biography of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille [The Family Idiot], wrote: ‘We enter into death as into a mill.’ So perhaps I am dead, since the chronology of my life seems to have completely collapsed; by a thousand paths I venture into its circles and spirals.

  One day during the ‘phony war’, in the spring of 1940, before the German attack of 10 May, a French fighter plane – there were some, and very good ones – overflies the rooftop of our house in Brioude with a thunderous roar, the sound reaching us when the plane is already far off. But it comes back as the pilot makes several swooping passes at the same low altitude, dipping its wings a few hundred metres further on above a neighbouring house. My father explains that the lieutenant at the controls is the son of a woman we know and that this is his way of saying hello to his mother. The plane, he tells me, is a Morane 406, one of the finest French fighter planes. I had met the pilot, and although I’ve forgotten his name now, I remember being surprised by how tall he was. Much later, I would learn that fighter pilots are rarely tall for obvious reasons. I remember I was stunned by the extraordinary speed of the Morane, by the roar, by the pilot’s daring. I swore to myself that I too would be a pilot, though at that time Spitfires had not appeared over French skies and I knew nothing of Richard Hillary.

  A general alert over Clermont-Ferrand; sirens wail announcing an Allied air raid. In the dead of night, in the dormitories on the top floor of the Lycée Blaise-Pascal – it is February or March 1944 – all the boarders rush to the windows as squadrons of British and American bombers appear, great black shadows in serried formations, flying almost level with the rooftops of the school, defying the German flak, lighting up heaven and earth, creating broad daylight over their target: the Michelin factories, which they carefully mark out with multicoloured flares so as not to hit civilian houses. The thunderous noise of the bombing, which seems incredibly close, suddenly drowns out our cheering. Caught between the reddish glow of the burning factories beyond Montferrand and the implacable, never-ending stream of planes thirty metres above our heads, we don’t know where to look – Blenheims, B-17s or B-29s laden with bombs. No fear, just pure exhilaration, the herald of great things. We did not imagine that, having spent a sleepless night watching, we would be summoned at dawn to clear away the smouldering debris, an exhausting task for which we are rewarded, at noon, by a visit from Maréchal Pétain. In a vengeful speech he denounced Anglo-American barbarism, even though we ourselves had witnessed the great risks taken by the crews to ensure they dropped their bombs only on their intended target.

  Did I know then that, barely five years later, at the American military airbase in Frankfurt, I would board a similar ‘flying fortress’ – the nickname given to the B-17 – one of the thousands of planes used to airlift supplies to the former German capital, in defiance of the blockade imposed by the Soviets in June 1948? Having spent a year in Tübingen, I had just been appointed as a teaching assistant at the Freie Universität Berlin – the newly created university in West Berlin, since the old Humboldt university was in the Russian sector and under Soviet control. I left for Berlin one icy November morning. It was the first time I had ever taken a plane and my excitement at this harsh baptism of air merged with that of my destination: I would be flying to the East. Aboard the B-17 Flying Fortress, we sat like parachutists, in lines that ran the length of the body of the plane, through the bomb-bay. I felt very moved. Even today, the reasons and the circumstances for my two-year stay in Germany, so soon after the war, remain mysterious to me. I will talk about them later, but I cannot elucidate them entirely. The B-17 touched down at Tempelhof, the airport where Hitler landed on his return from Munich, having eliminated, in Bad Wiessee, Ernst Röhm’s homosexual stormtroopers who had been instrumental in bringing him to power – something later depicted in a magnificent scene from Visconti’s The Damned. Tempelhof is a dangerous airport, situated as it is in the heart of Berlin, surrounded by tall buildings. I peered through one of the few windows – military aircraft rarely have windows – and flying over Berlin was like flying over a world in ruins, of stumps and crumbling walls. My intense excitement was mixed with dread: to me, Berlin was the great East, and I had always been fearful of the East. I felt fine when heading West. It was stupid, because I have many fond memories of the East and besides, the earth is round, even if it took me some time to persuade myself of this. But at the same time, something in me obscurely sensed that to go east was to transgress; to confront the anguish of those great theatres of death, to follow in the footsteps of the milli
ons who had never returned. The protocol resulting from the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, a meeting of high-ranking bureaucrats of the Nazi regime intent on extending throughout Europe the Final Solution that was already being carried out in the East, clearly stipulated that Europe was to be combed from West to East: ‘Vom Westen nach Osten durchgekämmt’. At the time I had not heard of Wannsee or the protocol, but my conscience could not but intuit something it would take me years to learn, to discover, to expose: there was some reason for my sense of dread. I lived in the northern part of Berlin where, shortly after my arrival, the Americans opened up a new airfield in the middle of the countryside, called Tegel, which was more accessible and less dangerous than Tempelhof for the planes taking part in the airlift, which, night and day, took off and landed every 45 seconds. In my first weeks there, rather than sleeping, I spent my nights at the end of the runway, in the biting Prussian cold and snow, waiting for the powerful headlights of the planes to suddenly pierce the darkness, then I would lie flat on the ground as the plane, landing gear now down and locked, all but grazed my scalp as it touched down. Nowadays, Tegel is the international airport of Berlin; the city grew up around it.

  When peace returned, my father went on living in Brioude. He remained there for more than a decade and I spent a two-month holiday with him there in the summer of 1945. On a grassy airstrip with no asphalt runway, instructors were giving flying lessons using single engine planes and gliders. I chose the glider because, of the club’s two Stampe biplanes – whose reputation for aerobatics and stunt flying made them the highlight of any air show – one was out of service and the other being serviced when I enrolled. In three weeks in Brioude, I earned my first three gliding certificates. The training glider was barely a plane at all, it was called ‘the Beam’. And it was little more than a wooden beam with rubber castors, one at the front, one at the back and two more, close together in the middle, beneath the pilot’s seat. There was no cockpit, the student had to sit out in the open air on a makeshift seat with the joystick between his legs, a rudder bar with two pedals at his feet and, in front, the only controls, an altimeter and an air bubble in a globe to indicate the glider’s position relative to the horizontal – a turn-and-slip indicator; behind, a pair of wings and, of course, the two tail fins. Training to be a glider pilot was a very particular discipline, one that I suspect has changed little to this day: you had to arrive on the airfield early in the morning and spend the whole day there, watch, ask as few questions as possible and, especially, keep all the planes maintained and ready to fly. You never knew when or if you might fly. I forgot to mention that the training gliders had two seats, the instructor was seated behind the student with a second set of controls. ‘The Beam’ was not – as gliders are today – towed aloft by a plane, but was pulled along by a metal cable from a windlass at the far end of the runway, several hundred metres from the glider: the cable of the windlass was attached by a snap hook to the nose of the glider. The instructor and the windlass operator communicated using hand signals: suddenly, the windlass would be taking in the cable, coiling it around a drum at increasing speed. To get the glider aloft, you pulled the joystick gently towards yourself and you stayed at about one metre from the ground until the cable had reached sufficient speed to make it possible to hoist this primitive machine into the air at a 45° angle. As it came to the point directly above the windlass – by which time it was important to have reached an altitude of 150 metres – a lever was pulled, abruptly releasing the cable, which fell back to the ground, whipping the air like a steel snake. Even with this heavy contraption that was difficult to manoeuvre and to steer, the feeling of freedom, of liberation at that moment was extraordinary, further heightened by the musical whistling of the air on the underside of the wing. But there was no time to dream, not even for a second: the glider had to be flown, otherwise it would drop like a stone and crash into the ground. Unlike planes equipped with an engine, a glider flies with its nose tilted towards the ground even when climbing, since it is speed alone that allows it to remain airborne, as the Americans say. But this was a training beam, there was no way to climb, it was simply a matter of descending while executing a number of figures; the student’s ability to perfectly execute these figures determined his success. This was how one earned one’s certificate. Moreover, Brioude airfield was not ideal for flying a glider: ascents were rare and unpredictable, you had to ‘scratch’ and ‘scratch’ hard to gain a few metres in altitude. One morning, after three weeks of theory lessons and assisted flights, the instructor suddenly said, without warning, ‘It’s all yours.’ This meant I was to be let loose in the glider on my own, with the open air as my only cockpit and no parachute since I would not reach an altitude where it would have time to open. I was anxious to perform well, but confident and proud. I was not afraid, I’ve never been afraid of things. Strapped into my seat, I was completely focused, soundlessly repeating to myself the lessons and the figures I had learned. I think I was given a helmet. The first exercise was to fly in a straight line, losing as little altitude as possible after passing over the windlass and unhitching the steel serpent, then banking 180° and lining up again with the runway and landing in the opposite direction to the one I had taken off in. All of the manoeuvres were perfect; I felt so little fear that, as I banked, I took my eye off the air bubble indicating the horizon and banked the heavy, makeshift glider too much, almost to the vertical, until it all but stalled. I quickly saw what I had done and corrected my mistake, though it had not escaped the keen eye of the instructor, and I completed my landing with a perfect flare-out. The instructor did not mark me down, considering that my daring might – in this profession at certain times – be considered an asset. There and then, he awarded me my first certificate. The second figure was more complicated: I had to describe a perfect figure of eight, which meant landing facing the same direction as one had taken off. As the makeshift beam lost altitude quickly, it was impossible to complete a figure of eight without reaching a much greater altitude before releasing the cable, which meant the windlass had to reel the cable in much more quickly. I made no mistakes this time; I was exultant. I was immediately awarded my second certificate, and volunteered to try for the third. For this, I had to abandon ‘the Beam’ and begin three days of training on a potbellied C-800, a real glider, built for speed and capable of attaining much greater altitudes. The third test was all about attaining altitude; I passed with flying colours, leaving Brioude with my three certificates and the commendation of the jury in my pocket.

  I promised myself I would carry on flying, but I didn’t. My life was taken up by more pressing matters, by a relationship with time and with others diametrically opposed to the discipline and the settled way of life implicit in a passion for gliding, a passion for solitude. I would have needed a whole other life. Modern gliders are honed, streamlined, with enormous wingspans, designed to climb high and fly fast. I flew in one a couple of years ago, taking off from an airfield on the banks of the Durance. I was in the back seat, obviously, the passenger seat; I was impressed, but I felt none of the excitement I had felt in ‘the Beam’ that first time. The thing that in my adventurous existence has come closest to that thrill was a recent attempt at paraskiing on a twin-control hang-glider: gliding across a valley at 2,000 metres towards the sheer mountain face opposite, waiting to catch a rising air current. This is the principle of gliding: you turn in circles, nose down, careful to stay within the often narrow rising thermal, twisting and turning within it like a motorcyclist all but grazing imaginary asphalt, dangerously ascending the rockface. Doing this, I managed to reach 4,000 metres. The instructor, won over by my fearlessness and my head for heights, assured me that it would take me about three weeks to complete my paragliding licence and fly solo. Unfortunately, I did not have the time; once again, I would have needed another life.

  This parenthesis, unplanned at this point in my narrative, is driven only by my concern for truth: contrary to what I have written, my pass
ion for flying was not prompted by Spitfires or by Richard Hillary. I cannot close this without a leap across time and space, from Brioude to Israel at the time when I was shooting Tsahal, which saw the apogee of my career as a pilot. As I was directing a film about the Jewish army, obviously I wanted to know as much as possible about the subject, to familiarize myself with all its branches – the artillery, the infantry, the paratroops, the border guards, the tank divisions, the navy and, of course, the airforce – to experience something as close as possible to the actual conditions of battle that I had already experienced during the ‘war of attrition’ between Egypt and Israel in 1968 and 1969 when, filming a report on the Suez Canal in the bunkers on the Bar-Lev line, I experienced first-hand heavy bombing by the Egyptian artillery. At the time I had also, in the course of long night patrols in the Jordan Valley, come under fire from Palestinians attempting to lead raids on Israel from Jordan, ‘skirmishes’ that were often very murderous. Israel’s losses during that strange war were such that, every morning, the photographs of those killed the previous day appeared in all the newspapers, often numbering a dozen or even twenty.