Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  For forty minutes Group Captain Mewell worked the rust out of his aerobatics and he was soon able to judge how much extra power and speed were needed to perform more complex manoeuvres like outside loops. He noted the exact point at which the speed fell off, the normally taut controls grew soggy and one wing fell away in a stall. Nose down and happily recovering in a few hundred feet, Mewell decided that flying is by its very nature a youthful activity. To fly is to be young. To fly oneself, that is, not to be flown; not to be packed into a metal tube like grease in a grease gun and extruded unchanged at your destination. But to inherit an empty sky, flirt with clouds; with canvas-covered wings and your own skill make a mock of gravity while an incense of burned Castrol and hot engine blows into your face: that is the essence of being young even if your earthbound self has to revert to middle age shortly after landing. It was a kind of miracle, really. The view ahead was through a V of struts, and sideways between the wings the sky was seen through an X of bracing wires. Yet the very airiness of this latticed cage seemed to emphasise the freedom. Free at last of the endless office work, the grim managerial grind, the bureaucratic demands of maintaining an operational bomber station in a cold war that seemed increasingly lunatic. He essayed a hectic sideslip and it was as if the draught on one cheek went right through his head, blowing clear the residues of daily life, the impurities of service politics and what felt like the leaden pellets of responsibility that were incrementally weighing him down. And so the thoughts came and went fleetingly amid the complex co-​ordination of hand and foot that set the world beyond the cockpit twirling and pivoting in fabulous abandon.

  Considerably rejuvenated and feeling slightly sick, Mewell at length glanced at the fuel gauge and compass and set a course for home. Wearsby’s trapezium of runways soon appeared and he throttled back, steadily losing height. He picked out the taxiway by the control tower, keeping a sharp lookout for any other aircraft in the vicinity, but saw none. The airfield looked unaccustomedly deserted. It was evidently one of those mid-afternoon lulls. He lined up for the landing, waggling his wings to attract the caravan’s attention but no lamp blinked an OK at him. On the other hand neither did it signal to him to stay clear. He touched down in a perfect three-pointer that simply added a dollop of cream to his pleasure, rolled out gently in about seventy yards, taxied aside and switched off. As he undid his straps with a sigh of satisfaction a blue Standard car came racing up. He unlatched both cockpit sides and suddenly experienced a brief flash of disorientation so powerful he wondered if he mightn’t be having a stroke.

  An officer in a wing commander’s uniform had leaped from the car.

  ‘And just who the fuck . . .’ he began, but his voice tailed off as he saw the group captain’s insignia. ‘Oh. Sorry sir. I, er, thought you were someone else.’

  Mewell didn’t recognise the man and his puzzlement grew. ‘Who are you? Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Mellaby, sir. RAF Blackstock,’ came the equally puzzled response. There was a long pause.

  ‘Oh bugger,’ said Mewell mildly, standing up in the cockpit and looking around him, shaking his head.

  *

  ‘Bit of a balls-up, Pugs, I’m afraid,’ he said some days later, raising his gun expectantly.

  ‘These airfields are pretty close together round here,’ his companion said sympathetically. ‘They all look much the same from the air. It’s a mistake anyone could make.’ He then spoilt it by adding, ‘Especially if his eyesight was going and he could no longer read a compass. And we’ll overlook that he was once a navigator.’

  ‘Yes, well, no need to rub it in,’ said Mewell ruefully.

  The two friends had met for an afternoon’s rough shooting as they often did when they could get away from their respective duties. Group Captain Mewell was not much of a shot, as soon became apparent. There were two loud bangs and the pigeon he had fired at with both barrels went whirring off unmolested towards the airfield. He broke the weapon disgustedly and ejected two smoking cases on to the coarse grass.

  ‘Bad luck, Spotty,’ said Group Captain Tolbrooke equably.

  ‘You’ve cheated, Pugs. You’ve obviously put all your birds into flak jackets. Plus this ammo of yours is all over the place. Look at this stuff –’ Mewell took two fresh cartridges from the pocket of his shooting jacket. The red paper cylinders were stamped with black broad arrows. ‘Christ, it’s twenty-five years old.’ He dropped them into his gun with hollow plops and closed it. ‘What is this, Pugs – an austerity drive?’

  ‘Mine seem to be working all right,’ said Tolbrooke mildly. His game bag contained several corpses including a hare. ‘I thought we’d use them up. We’ve just found a hundred cases of them in Stores. Apparently the government issued them at the start of the war so the chaps could cotton onto the idea of leading. If a rear-gunner practised how far ahead of a pigeon to shoot then he could supposedly bring down a Messerschmitt. I fear you would have made a very poor rear-gunner, Spotty.’

  ‘That’s probably why they chose to sit me up front –’ The sentence was cut off by the bang of his companion’s gun and a cock pheasant he had barely registered as getting off the ground thumped to earth. ‘Golly, that was quick,’ he said admiringly. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Pugs old boy: you’re pretty nifty with a gun.’

  ‘I probably get more practice than you do,’ said his friend. ‘Oh dear, look at these spurs.’ He had picked up the limp bird and was examining its legs. ‘Hard as nails. Last year’s model at least, maybe even the year before. An old survivor.’

  ‘Until today.’

  ‘Quite. He’ll make stock. Or at least Belinda will.’

  The two resumed their leisurely stroll. East Wittenham, some twelve miles to the south of Wearsby, was home to a couple of squadrons of Victor bombers. By some freak of surveying prior to 1939 its eastern boundary included several hundred acres of desolate fenland which, although surplus to military requirements, had never been returned to its previous owners. It now afforded rough shooting for the commanding officer and, come to that, anybody else on the station that fancied it. The two old friends valued these meetings as offering opportunity for some blameless privacy, unlike their respective houses full of adolescent children and wives. It was by sheer chance that they had ended up commanding adjacent stations in Lincolnshire. They had first met in 1944 at Stalag Luft I, up on the Baltic in Pomerania, both having been shot down a couple of months apart. After the camp was liberated by Russian troops they were repatriated and stayed in the RAF. Thereafter their careers had run roughly parallel although until recently they had not seen much of one another, largely because Tolbrooke had been stationed abroad a good deal in the Middle East and Singapore.

  A couple of rabbits scuttled away but neither man made any effort to shoot.

  ‘How’s morale with you, Spotty?’

  ‘Not very happy, to be honest. How about here?’

  ‘Much the same,’ Tolbrooke said. ‘I suppose you heard we lost a nav radar the other day? Hanged himself in his garage.’

  ‘Do we know why?’

  ‘The MO wrote up the usual stuff about his balance of mind being disturbed. His wife said he’d gone very quiet recently. But I’ve had the rest of the crew in and they all suggested it was the QRAs. They’re upset, obviously. A thing like that plays havoc with morale. He had a mongol son, you know, and wanted to spend as much time at home as he could, helping the wife. Of course at an admin level it also buggers up the crewing. I don’t know about you, but in Victors we try never to split up the trio of captain, nav radar and nav plotter. That’s the core of a V-bomber, isn’t it? The AEO’s got to be someone they get along with who can join the family, while co-pilots just come and go. So I’ve had to stand down the entire crew until we can get a replacement navrad they’re all easy with.’ Tolbrooke shook his head. ‘And so it goes on, Spotty.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just. Since we can’t be overheard, and I trust you’re not wired for sound like one of those spy thriller johnnies
, I don’t mind telling you that I sometimes have my doubts about these iron men we’ve got at the top. Not about them as warriors, of course. Both LeMay and Grandy have brilliant war records, as did Bing Cross. But that sort of inflexible belligerence of LeMay’s sometimes fills me with alarm, I’ll be honest. This “management control system” of his – it may be OK for SAC but it just isn’t British. It’s not the way we do things here. Yet Grandy evidently goes along with it. Maybe MCS is the right thing, with rules carved in stone for absolutely everything a bomber crew does every twenty-four hours. The right number of razor strokes when shaving, the correct way to lace up shoes, all laid out on endless bits of bumf and signed at every step. All right – I exaggerate, but not by much, Pugs, not by much. It’s not a natural way to live and it’s damned hard on the men.’

  ‘I suppose if Armageddon’s the alternative then hard is what we need.’

  ‘H’m. Arguable. Sometimes the whole American approach feels to me more like brinkmanship than it does like deterrence. And if the past is anything to go by that’s hardly ideal. Look at Korea. And if they’re not careful it could be the same thing over in Vietnam.’

  ‘It sounds to me as though you’re having doubts about our entire mission, Spotty. Ought I to be having a word with the Pentagon, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, feel free, old boy. That reminds me, there was a splendid USAF major at that bomb comp last year at Pinecastle who referred to the Pentagon as “Fort Fumble”. I really liked that. You can’t beat the military everywhere for taking the piss, can you?’

  ‘Speaking of which, you might just hold my gun a second, would you?’ Tolbrooke turned away and at a discreet distance spoke over his shoulder. ‘You may be right about the brinkmanship. We did come awfully close over Cuba, didn’t we? My Yankee friends tell me LeMay was pestering Kennedy day and night for a pre-emptive strike and damn nearly got his way, too. But Kennedy’s nerves and political savvy prevailed.’ The group captain turned, doing up his fly buttons. ‘Still, Spotty, ours not to reason why. We’re mere foot soldiers in all this. And I don’t mind telling you this foot soldier’s bothered by having one of his men commit hara-kiri. Frankly, it depresses the hell out of me.’

  ‘I know, Pugs, it’s bloody. I sometimes wonder if single men don’t fare better. But they do say married men are more reliable, being more settled – supposedly.’ An image of Amos McKenna passed briefly across Mewell’s mental retina. Not rumours, exactly, but there had been intimations that his star pilot’s current state was maybe not one of marital bliss. No-one wanted to pry into private matters but the squadron’s readiness had to come first. He had pulled a few strings to get him and his wife better housed. A bit more space sometimes made all the difference. ‘More settled,’ he repeated. ‘Did you get that psychologists’ report thing from the MoD?’

  ‘Yes, I remember hoping it wouldn’t start a campaign badgering our chaps to get hitched. My married quarters are stuffed to bursting point as it is. I’ve got pilots as well as aircrew living in rented cottages up to eight miles away from the station.’

  ‘Haven’t we all. But we hardly need these brain-shrinkers to tell us what the matter is. It’s not even the job, it’s the damn silly way they want us to do it. The men are great: brilliantly trained, keen as mustard and totally dedicated. But they’re not fools, Pugs, they’re not fools. They read the papers, they watch the box in the mess.’

  By tacit agreement both men had given up shooting and were carrying their guns broken over one shoulder.

  ‘So it’s dead obvious they must be discussing things,’ Mewell went on. ‘Why would their misgivings be any different from ours? It’s damned wearing maintaining this state of constant alert even if we do understand the rationale. And I don’t know if it’s the same with you, but none of my lot like this aircraft pooling system, either. It puts everyone on edge, especially the crew chiefs.c And worst of all it hardly helps to know the bloody Navy’s going to be taking over our deterrent role in five years’ time. There’s damn-all we can do about that.’

  c See Appendix 3, p. 295.

  ‘No. Sometimes, Spotty, I feel the cold winds of fate blowing about all our shanks.’ Nothing could have better indicated the long intimacy of these two men than the nicknames they used, particularly Group Captain Mewell’s. It clearly antedated the television-era ‘Muffin’ by which his men informally knew him. ‘To be honest, I’m doing my best to put my boy off any idea of a career in the service. I really think it’s very doubtful he’d have a guaranteed future to take him through to a pension. Ever since that frightful ass Duncan Sandys wanted to replace our aircraft with missiles the skids have been under us.’

  The two men had evidently elected to call it a day so far as shooting was concerned and were wandering companionably back in the general direction of Mewell’s Allard, a distant blob of British racing green against the autumnal tussocks. From somewhere out of view in the distance there came a sudden thunderous roaring and a dark cloud could be seen billowing up above the horizon. In swift succession four Victors in a scramble take-off suddenly leaped out of hiding from beneath the bulge of intervening ground. Both men paused to watch with a professional eye as the rapidly nearing white bombers lifted steeply one by one into the bald grey sky then banked to port, showing their crescent wings. Towing sooty plumes, they dwindled into the high overcast on individual courses. Long after they had vanished that part of the runway in view remained smogged with slowly attenuating dark haze while the very soil of Lincolnshire seemed to go on yielding up the sonic punishment it had just absorbed, much as drawing-room curtains steadily exhale last night’s cigarette smoke.

  ‘Looking good, Pugs,’ said Mewell judicially as the thunder melted away into the top of the sky. ‘A shade more ragged than we’re used to at Wearsby, of course, but still not at all bad.’

  ‘Well, ours are faster than your tin triangles so we like a bit more airspace between them. And,’ Tolbrooke added, ‘at least they know where they’re going. If you’ve managed to pass on your own nav skills to your lads they’ll probably nuke York Minster under the impression that it’s the Kremlin.’

  Similar good-natured repartee brought the two men to Mewell’s car where they shed their equipment. ‘I’m sorry the boot’s so small,’ Mewell said without a trace of regret. ‘We’ll put your game in it and you’ll have to carry the guns between your legs again.’

  Tolbrooke opened the rectangular leather-covered case that had been propped in the passenger well. The rich antiseptic scent of Young’s .303 oil rose from the green baize lining. The label inside the lid giving Cogswell and Harrison’s London and Paris addresses was stained with it. He slotted his guns snugly back into their compartments. ‘Funny: I look forward to cleaning them almost as much as I enjoy firing them,’ he said happily.

  ‘They’re beauties, Pugs. I’m just sorry I never seem to do them justice. I’m not much of a shot. Never was.’

  ‘We can probably forgive someone who got a gong for downing a couple of Dorniers in one night. Though I expect you only winged them. Wrong sort of ammo, no doubt.’

  ‘Just get in the car, Tolbrooke. We at Wearsby have a way of taming East Witto Standard Vanguard drivers.’

  ‘Oh Christ.’ The huge V-8 engine chugged into life and Tolbrooke leaned back in his seat and braced one hand nervously against the vibrating aluminium dashboard while with the other he held the precious gun case upright between his legs. ‘Spotty,’ he said, just before Mewell could put the Allard into gear, ‘what do you say we have a party?’

  ‘What sort of a party?’

  ‘You know, a thrash. Morale-boosting. All our crews together. Including any Canberra lads and other odds and sods we’ve got stationed.’

  Mewell stared thoughtfully over the half-moon of glass that served as his windshield. ‘Some joint whoopee, you mean? Not a bad idea. Ought we to get Coningsby along as well, do you think?’

  ‘Ideally, yes. But the trouble is, once you ask them we’d be honour bound to ask
Waddo. Your great rivals in the rugger.’

  ‘True. Sounds like a recipe for mayhem. Still, even if discipline goes by the board for an evening it ought to cheer the lads up a bit. We’ll need to get onto our lords and masters to see about redistributing QRAs for twenty-four hours and get their OK. Good idea, Pugs. And now as it’s getting dark and it’ll be coming on to rain at any moment and there’s no roof to this car . . .’ He blipped the engine, listening to it go from deep grumble to howl and back again with obvious pleasure, his head cocked. ‘Reminds me – we had a Lightning pilot drop in the other day,’ he said above the noise. ‘Down to eighty pounds of fuel, can you believe? Eighty. Those boys like cutting it fine. So while they tanked him up one of our lads asked him what it was like to fly the thing. Apparently the real blast’s the acceleration on take-off. “You know what?” he said. “It rolls your foreskin back.” So, Pugsy, hang on to yours.’ And with a whoop Group Captain Mewell let in the clutch.

  10

  At the opposite end of Wearsby’s main runway from the fire dump, on the far side of rows of approach lights and an alarmed perimeter fence topped with strands of barbed wire, ran the main road. There, well to one side of the runway’s central line, a spacious lay-by had been thoughtfully provided by highway planning. This was possibly to enable the British taxpayer to view the airfield and catch a glimpse of where his money was going. More plausibly, though, it was designed to allow the Soviet trade delegation’s plane-spotters to take time off from promoting Sekonda watches. From beyond the fence the Russians had an excellent view through their binoculars of Wearsby’s Vulcans on their operational readiness platforms in all weathers where, unless they were in the air or elsewhere on the flight line, the aircraft sat with their little entourages of vehicles in a plain state of readiness. The whole point of deterrence, after all, was for it to be no secret. The bombers were equally visible at night, each one drenched in the orange glare of sodium lighting. There was no missing them.