Being driven along the perimeter track in a pick-up van, Alden was ruminant, sitting beside the driver. The driver was a W.A.A.F., a little scrap of a thing who looked as though she would have to exert all her strength if she had to lift a spare wheel. He had never expected to be driven in a Service vehicle by a girl. He had never expected to acquire a crew such as had been wished on him. Fussell was as conventional a Wop/A. G. as one could find: the epitome of the best type of Regular airman. But if a Fijian as second pilot and observer were not bizarre enough, his turret gunner was, in a way, even more unexpected. The British Services had a tradition of gentleman rankers. In the Boer War they had rushed to enlist in the Yeomanry and, in the Great War, in the infantry. But an obvious public school product from an equally obviously county family was still an anachronism.
He felt the satisfaction of accomplishment that morning. He was at last a bona fide Beaufort captain with his own crew. He was about to make his first flight in an operational Beaufort that was in all respects ready for action. He would have liked Elizabeth to appear at dispersals, a genie summoned by rubbing a magical lamp; to meet his crew and watch him take off. She was a charmer and he had become very fond of her. He looked forward to writing to tell her about his new crew members. She would have something amusing to say in reply.
The aircraft looked pristine and, when he went aboard, it exuded the attractive aromas of newness. K for King would surely behave itself. It was surely vice free. It was surely not prone to any of the weaknesses that had killed and injured so many fellow pilots and crews in the last few months.
The Beaufort housed its crew at close quarters, which gave it a cosy, or at least matey, atmosphere which was at odds with its tough looks. Alden climbed the ladder below the waist hatch on the port side and walked across the wing root to the top hatch, through which he descended to his seat on the port side of the cockpit. Lalabalava entered by the waist hatch, squeezed past the pilot's seat and into the navigation compartment. Immediately behind Alden was a sheet of steel armour plate. On the other side of this, Fussell settled to his wireless equipment. Dymond-Forbes, the third entrant by the port waist hatch, checked his gun and ammunition supply in the rear-facing turret, then went to his take-off and landing position: the seat of the Elsan chemical lavatory, close by. When Lalabalava had affixed his chart to his desk, checked his instruments and bomb sight, and then the Browning machinegun and its belt, in a blister below the floor - firing astern and aimed with a mirror - he took the 2nd pilot's seat on the captain's right. The crew checked in by turns on the intercom as the engines warmed. The aircraft trembled faintly and the dials and gauges on the instrument panel responded to rising temperatures and pressures, the flow of electric current, the magnetic pull from the North Pole.
Alden taxied to the downwind end of the grass airfield, stopped at an angle to the wind and completed his checks.
He released the brakes and pushed the throttles forward. The Beaufort accelerated and began to pull strongly to the left. It was not vice-free and Alden jerked upright as if icy water had been dashed against his bare back. He corrected the swerve and wondered whether, after so many hours on the type, he might be running out of luck; like so many others, some of whom had had no luck at all and been killed the first time they tried to fly one of these recalcitrant brutes.
The aeroplane bored healthily off the ground and through the wintry air. Draughts eddied about the cockpit. The heating system was not one of the type's best features. Alden was relieved that he did not have to climb higher than 5,000 ft. What, he asked himself, was the Beaufort's best feature? Easy to answer: its ruggedness. One had to assume that it would stand up well to being battered by enemy fire. Nobody knew yet if this were so. He wondered how long it would be before he found out for himself.
Lalabalava had returned to the navigation station and presently gave a change of course. 'Stronger beam wind than Met said, Pilot,' he explained.
No doubt there would be many more discrepancies between the meteorological forecast and actuality. The prospect did not displease Alden. He wanted his crew to be beset by as many problems as possible. The more difficulties they had to cope with on an exercise, the better they would be at handling emergencies on ops. He had been bred under a system, both at home and at school, in which adversity was regarded as being in its own perverse way a virtue. Cold water, hard beds and harder knocks, vigorous and painful exercise, corporal punishment, wearyingly long hours of study: all these made a boy into a man. That was what his parents and teachers had told him and he had accepted its truth. The pre-war Services imposed the same pattern. The results were that you learned to rely on yourself and to be worthy of the reliance of others. You learned to rely on your fellows who had been moulded by the same conditions. You knew, in fact, where you and they stood. God knew what the wartime influx of imperfectly disciplined men - and, God help us, women - would do to the fabric of Service custom. On one thing he was determined: no crew of his would be allowed to depart from those stern old principles.
They flew inland for a while, picking up the appointed landmarks, then turned east for the Lincolnshire coast. They were on course when they crossed out to sea. Half an hour later they turned north and then west, to cross in at a point on the coast of Yorkshire. And so it went on, turning out to sea to plot their position with bearings and fixes, then back inland to see whether they made landfall in the right place. Mostly, they did. When they did not, Lalabalava offered no excuses.
Sometimes they were between cloud layers and often they had to fly in cloud, over both land and sea. Alden found himself forced to climb higher than the intended 5,000 ft. from time to time, to avoid spending most of the five-hour sortie in cloud. At other times he had to descend to below 3,000 ft. to obtain a glimpse of the ground and verify his observer's navigation and the accuracy of his wireless operator's bearings. Although the Beaufort could be trimmed to fly hands-off for long periods, he had to fly manually all the time. Nor could he hand over to Lalabalava when he could have done with a short rest: this was essentially an exercise in navigation and Lalabalava was fully occupied.
They had been airborne for nearly four hours and were seventy miles out to sea when a thunderstorm that should not have affected them suddenly sent streaks of forked lightning shimmering through the clouds and peals of thunder rolling all about the Beaufort. The cockpit was lit intermittently by lurid flashes of dazzling intensity. The whole airframe shuddered and the wingtips flexed violently. The Beaufort was swept aloft on boiling currents of air, then pitched into forty-five degree banks. Other air masses thrust it down as though it were dropping vertically in a deep abyss. Successive outbursts of thunder crashed and echoed around the fuselage. The control column and rudder pedals juddered and swung. The aircraft yawed and skidded, sideslipped and seesawed.
Electrical discharges flickered and spread along the "' leading edges of the wings and danced eerily on the propeller blades. A fierce jolt shook the aeroplane from end to end. A loud metallic clang rang through it. The compass spun as if a lunatic were making circles around it with a powerful magnet.
Fussell's voice said, 'The wireless has packed in, sir. I think we were struck by lightning.'
Fifty miles from land, with the North Sea waiting to drown them. A time for calmness, and Alden did not feel calm. He felt tired and cold and angry.
'See what you can do, Operator. Observer, I'll stay on the present heading and go down below cloud.'
'We should spot the mouth of the Tyne dead ahead.'
'Understood.'
It was a long, shallow descent. They were still in cloud at 2,500 ft. Alden had expected to break through it before then. He held his angle of descent but the grey gloom that enwrapped them became no less dense.
'Any joy with the wireless, Operator?'
'Not yet, sir.'
'Where are we, Observer?'
'Thirty miles due east of Tynemouth, Pilot.'
'I'm going to climb above cloud.'
; Alden, questioning the reliability of the compass, held to the same heading.
Although his observer had unhesitatingly given him their position, he was working only on dead reckoning: using indicated air speed, presumed wind speed and direction, and rate of descent as his factors. There could be a twenty per cent error; or more.
Above the clouds, at 7,000 ft., beneath a brilliantly blue sky and sunshine, cloud tops stretched on every side as far as the eye could see.
There was no point in turning south while still safely far from high ground, intending to head landward again when he found a patch of clear sky. Alden wriggled his numbed buttocks and cursed the unreliable weather.
The exhilaration that always accompanied an ascent above the gloom beneath a layer of cloud, the sheer aesthetic delight of the marvellous view of hundreds of square miles of clear sky and bright sunlight, the unparallelled sense of freedom that flight bestowed, could not dispel his anxiety.
Presently he announced, 'I'm going down again, to break cloud before we reach the coast.'
The damp grey mass of vapour embraced the Beaufort once more. Moisture ran down the windscreen and windows. Draughts whistled through the cockpit, the gun turret, the wireless and navigation positions. Alden, always conscious of the engines' reputation, kept suspecting that he heard one or the other falter, race, go out of synchronisation, emit a drumming beat that could intimate impending failure.
The aircraft slid out of cloud. There was a clear space beneath of at least a thousand feet before the bottom layer's tops menaced the crew again. Alden had thought that he was already in the only lower layer. The break in the clouds gave him a short respite. There was a hole in the cloud layer from which he had just emerged. The sun poured through it, dazzling him. Ahead, the cloud beneath billowed at one point into a hillock some five hundred feet above its surrounding tops.
He saw an aeroplane coming straight towards him.
He banked and turned steeply, diving to avoid it.
But it was not coming at him, it was going in the same direction.
Their paths would cross at any moment.
He swung away in the opposite direction. Now he was directly facing that tall hummock of cloud: And again the other aircraft was racing head-on to crash into him.
Another violent turn and, this time, a desperate climb.
It was only then that he recognised the threat as the shadow of his own Beaufort.
Humiliated, he wondered what terrors and consternation his crew had suffered during his frantic evasive manoeuvres.
'Pilot to crew... sorry… the light's been playing tricks... thought I saw another aircraft about to ram us... it was our shadow. Sorry about that.'
'Observer to Pilot ... so did I! Thought it was going to slice us in half.'
Alden stifled a sigh of relief. His voice was steady as he said, 'That makes me feel a bit less of a clot. I'm going down again. How far are we from shore?'
'About ten miles.'
'All right. We should still be five miles off when we break through.'
The dive took them down gently another thousand feet. Alden saw... thought he saw... a dark vertical streak whip past his window. He blinked and levelled off. What tricks was his vision playing now?
An ovoid shape loomed ahead.
Lalabalava shouted, 'Balloons!'
Alden hauled the control column back, opened the throttles wider and looked down to see a barrage balloon disappear close beneath the Beaufort's belly.
He was trembling so badly that he had to force his limbs into ridigity lest they transmit their unsteadiness to the controls.
With forced calm: 'Where could we be, Observer?'
Lalabalava's subdued voice replied, 'Over Newcastle, I should think.'
Alden continued climbing until he was above the 4,000 ft. probable height of the balloon barrage. He broke cloud at a little under 6,000 ft. and turned south.
And there, a few miles ahead, was a big gap in the clouds. When he reached it he spiralled down until, at less than 2,000 ft., he was in clear air. There was an aerodrome ahead.
'That's Thornaby… I recognise it. The balloons must have been over Sunderland, not Newcastle.'
'Sorry, Pilot.' '
'It's all right, Lala... you couldn't do any better without bearings. How's the wireless, Corporal?'
'Still duff, sir.'
'Never mind, we'll be V.F.R. all the way now.' Visual Flight Rules: always a comforting fact.
Orbiting the airfield, flashing his downward recognition light in request for permission to land, Alden received a green Verey signal from the Watch Office.
He turned across wind at the end of his down-wind leg, judging the moment when he should make his final turn up-wind.
His starboard wing dropped suddenly, simultaneously with the knowledge that his starboard engine had abruptly become silent.
It had to happen sometime. The thought passed through his mind like lightning. But why now?
He feathered the dead motor and poured more power onto the live one as he moved the stick across to port. The wings levelled.
The starboard motor emitted a sudden bellow and raced crazily. The aircraft swung and lurched. The ground came racing up.
Fields lay ahead, but they were crossed by hedges and ditches and there were scattered clumps of trees.
If the aircraft lost speed it would stall; and the squadron would not be grateful for having to go through all the doleful ceremonial of a quadruple funeral.
If he tried to turn up-wind it would stall, too.
He had to pray that the starboard motor would not fail and he would have to point the aircraft down to squeeze as much speed out of it as he could. If that happened, he just hoped that he could haul the nose up in time to make some sort of a belly landing before it dived into the ground.
Five
'What does the J stand for?'
'Joshua, actually; but everyone calls me Lala: so carry on.'
Alden took a swig of whisky and soda. It was still too early in the war for publicans and mess Wines officers to have to ration it. He was a very moderate drinker and usually made a pint of beer last as long as it took most of his companions to drink two or three. But this evening he did not feel like drinking slowly.
'Are you on a Short Service?'
'Cranwell, actually.'
The highest credentials, then. It would be interesting to see how high in rank Joshua Lalabalava could rise; always assuming his survival beyond the already discouraging life expectancy of aircrew. A Fijian air marshal would be a stimulating innovation.
'It seems to take quite a lot to bend a Beaufort beyond repair.'
'Thank God!'
'Not that I'd mind that particular one being a write off.'
'Perhaps a good hard bump was what it needed. Maybe it was some distortion in the airframe that made it handle so awkwardly. Perhaps the wheels-up landing put it right.'
'I'd rather leave it to someone else to find out, when it's airworthy again.'
K for King still lay in a meadow a mile from camp, under a crash guard: disgruntled airmen with unloaded rifles, to keep German spies and civilian souvenir-hunters away.
Alden's crew had fared better than one of the others that had also been on navigation exercises. It had failed to return. No distress signal had been received from it. Its exercise area had been well to the south of theirs, clear of the thunderstorm. Also, it had taken off earlier and should have landed back at East Crondal even before the storm broke. The unanimous conclusion was that it had suffered engine failure at low level: half an hour in the offshore low flying area had been on its flight plan.
When Alden was detailed for low flying over the sea his stomach muscles kept tightening and his pulse rate stayed as rapid as though he had just played an hour's squash. He began to hate the sea: vicious, lumpy, threatening. Since boyhood he had been a keen dinghy sailor. Heavy weather in a small boat miles off shore had never bothered him. His enjoyment of sailing was not relat
ed to blue water and bright sunshine. He was surprised by the intensity of his animosity towards it when skimming twenty feet above the wave tops at two hundred miles an hour.
One afternoon his crew was on fighter affiliation: evasive action under dummy attacks from a Hurricane. The latter's camera gun provided evidence of success or failure. Dymond-Forbes, naturally, claimed that he would have shot the Hurricane down on most of its passes before it could fire a killing burst. As the Beaufort had no camera gun, the argument remained open.
For the sake of safety, the exercise was carried out at a starting altitude of 6,000 ft. Thus Alden was able to do spiral dives as well as climbing spirals. But he wondered how much benefit he derived from it, since he would be making torpedo attacks from eighty feet and would probably have to fly to the target at no more than five hundred feet.
Spring came to East Anglia. In April, a British expeditionary force, accompanied by one Hurricane and one Gladiator squadron, landed in Norway to fight the invading German Army, which was strongly supported by fighters and dive bombers. And still no Beaufort of any squadron in Britain had made a torpedo sortie; no operational sortie of any kind, in fact.
Torpedo and bombing practice, long navigational exercises over the sea and fighter affiliation seemed to be pointless and had become boring.
Until the day when mines were loaded into the bomb bays of four aircraft from each flight. Alden's was one of them. He had now been automatically promoted to flight lieutenant, through length of service which included his time at Cranwell, in the University Air Squadron and on the Reserve. He was next senior on the flight after Courtney: deputy deputy flight commander as Courtney called him. He was looking forward to seeing Elizabeth again with two rings on his cuff.
Meanwhile there was the first operational briefing to attend since the bad day when the Vildebeests had gone out. It was not an event that gave Alden or his crew a great sense of occasion. By comparison with dropping bombs on, or launching a torpedo at, an enemy ship, it seemed a passive rather than an active contribution to the war. They were to avoid enemy ships, not seek them out. The only danger they would run was interception by fighters. But they were going to do their work by night, and fighter pilots of both the R.A.F. and the Luftwaffe depended on moonlight and searchlights to illuminate a bomber; or minelayer. There were no searchlights out at sea, except on warships; which were to be avoided anyway. There was half a moon, but that would be of very little help to even the sharpest-eyed German flying at a couple of hundred miles an hour in a Me109 or Me110.
Torpedo Attack Page 7