Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Even our announcers on the BBC, who as you know are very prim and circumspect, are making “digs” at them every so often. The impatience of waiting for a German talk, after one of our men has been speaking is terrific!

  Gosh how I miss the central heating. I am permanently freezing cold, and I have had to take to my woolen underwear! Horrors.

  I don’t think I can think of anything else. I know you would love to hear something really worthwhile, but a) I don’t know any and b) my masterpiece of a letter would be thrown away by the censors. So you will have to take what I can give.

  We are both very well & Bill sends all love, so do I,

  Rose.

  The novelty of it all—the blackout and the sandbags and the radio broadcasts—wore off as winter wore on. The days dragged into weeks, then into months. Christmas came and went. Soon those who had reckoned it would all be over by the New Year lost their bets. The only thing Billy was fighting was boredom. The winter was one of the coldest and most unpleasant he had ever known. “Freak weather,” he wrote, “I’ve never seen anything like it before.” The first week of February was all rain, but it was so cold the water froze before it could run away. “Every single thing was covered by 2 to 3 inches of ice. That was true down to each single blade of grass, wire fences, telephone wires, and of course, all buildings. It was as though someone had wrapped everything in a thick coat of cellophane.” On the weekend of January 27–28 he had been up in London as usual, with Rose, but it had taken him twelve hours to get back to Yatesbury, by road and rail. “And when I got back I found all the pipes had burst, no food was getting through, and practically no heat as coal couldn’t get through on the roads.” The weather was so bad that the pilots had been grounded. There was nothing to do other than indulge in that most English of pastimes, talking about the weather. “It’s been the only and predominant factor in our lives since I last wrote to you,” Billy told his parents.

  What fighting there was seemed so remote, so far removed from his life. The first German bomber had been shot down by British forces, at Whitby, a few hundred miles away on the northeast coast. Billy was heartened by that. “They will soon begin to realize the nice hot reception waiting for them if they persist in poking their noses in unwelcome places!” And from the far side of Europe, where Russia had recently signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis and then promptly invaded its neighbor Finland, came more news that made him feel optimistic: the Finns were finding the so-called winter war against the Russians to be “some of the finest shooting in the world, rather like a nice low-flying pheasant.” “As for our own little war, it seems to be taking much clearer shape now and I still think it’s going to be over well before the end of this year.”

  When he wasn’t training, Billy spent his time reading, writing, and worrying. His parents were thinking about moving south, away from Paris to their house in Biarritz. He thought they’d be “safe as houses” down there. He even wanted Rose to move in with them, from London. “Although she’d be the last to admit it, I know she is feeling pretty run down and has very little resistance against colds, sore throats, etc,” he wrote to his mother, and it would be “terribly sweet of you to offer to have her, and I wish you’d press the point again direct to her, as she really needs it.”

  It seems ludicrous, with hindsight, that Billy imagined his wife would be safer in the south of France than in England. But his mother’s letters did make it sound idyllic. “The trees are coming out,” she wrote. “The fruits are rampant, woods covered with violets, buttercups and wild daisy, and the birds singing their hearts out.” Billy had even heard that Jack Heaton was knocking about that part of the world. Which made him envious. “Some day I’m going to retire to a little Basque farmhouse myself.” It was only in early April 1940, when the Germans invaded Norway, that Billy, and his parents, began to feel uncertain about how safe the south of France was. Billy’s mother was increasingly convinced that the United States would have to join the fighting. She had now made her peace with Billy’s decision and wrote to Peggy, encouraging her to do the same. “The invasion makes me boil,” she wrote. “And if you are not beginning to understand your brother now, you never will. My idea is that after the election of Mr. Roosevelt, possibly next spring, America will have to come in. Yes, it’s a great pity. But it’s going to take a lot to beat these b___s.”

  Rose, anyway, was having none of it. She wouldn’t move until she knew exactly where Billy was going to be posted. Finally, at the end of March, he had finished at Yatesbury and was sent on to Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, for advanced training. They rented what Rose described as “a darned nice furnished house, perched on a hill above the most adorable little village of Minster Lovell.” It was so close to his camp that he was allowed to live off the base. The house wasn’t far from where he had gone to school in Sutton Courtenay. It made him feel as though he had come full circle. “I go over to Sutton Courtenay quite often,” he wrote. “It’s about 13 miles away, and still looks much the same as it did 13 years ago. Christ that’s a long time.”

  They weren’t there long, only a couple of months, but it was a happy time, the last they had together. Bleak as the winter had been, it was a warm spring. Billy was able to fly in his shirtsleeves, through blue skies and great white puffs of cumulus clouds that he could skirt around as though they were mountain peaks. Rose’s presence was, he wrote, “a great comfort.” They had bought a second car—“another old crock,” called Molly the Morris—so that he could commute into the airfield, and a dog, too, an Alsatian named Sinbad. While Billy was on duty, Rose would walk herself into a standstill trying to give Sinbad enough exercise. Or she would be out back, tending to their chickens. Billy was a little surprised to see how easily Rose took to the quiet life in the country. “I wish you could see our establishment,” he wrote to his mother. “It’s really pretty good and Rosie is the most efficient settler-inner and house-keeper I have ever seen. She works like a Trojan from dawn till dusk and is as happy as a clam. The country looks lovely now—and from the air the flowering bushes and trees show up for miles.” He had to leave at 6:30 a.m. each morning six days a week, and was allowed only an extra hour’s grace on Sundays. He was back home at six each evening, “which is swell.” And then they would curl up by the fire and listen to music, “hot blues” most often, on their crackly old wireless set. On the odd occasions when he had twenty-four hours of leave, the two of them would shoot off to the nearby golf course at Frilford Heath and play a round together.

  Bad news arrived early in April, in a letter from Billy’s father. He’d had word from the United States. On Friday, April 5, Jay O’Brien died. He’d had a heart attack, while he was at home, in bed. Dolly was by his side. They had become pillars of Palm Beach high society. He’d actually spent the day with Joseph Kennedy, recently returned from his stint as ambassador to the UK. “The death of Jay O’Brien was quite a blow to Palm Beach,” Kennedy wrote. It was a shock; he was only fifty-seven. He had seemed fine when they’d seen each other on the golf course in the afternoon, and again at the theater that same evening. Jay died after dinner that night. Dolly decided that he should be buried in New York, his spiritual if not his actual home. The New York Times gave his obituary a decent show, alongside a picture, in profile, which would have pleased him. There was no word from Clifford Gray—no one seemed to know exactly where he was. But Eddie Eagan was at the funeral.

  For Billy, busy in wartime Britain, there wasn’t time to mourn. “What a very sad thing about Jay,” he wrote, when he learned of the news. “But on the other hand, he had a bloody good life and went full blast to the end so perhaps it’s the best possible thing that could have happened. There’s one thing about dying anyway, so many nice people have died in the last few years, one is assured of pleasant company on the other side of the pearly gates—and I’ll bet they are laughing like buggery at us poor mortals.”

  The war was closing in. The Germans had invaded Belg
ium, and now that the fighting was in France, Billy’s parents were finally making plans to move back to the United States. They were looking to buy a house in Hillsborough, California; Peggy and Jennison were handling the negotiations for them. They had hoped, and planned, to get across to London to visit Billy. But now they were cut off. It was time to get out of Europe, and the only way to do that was via a ship from Lisbon, in neutral Portugal.

  On June 18, a fortnight after the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, addressed the House of Commons. Billy and Rose listened to the speech on their wireless set that night, never prouder, never more resolute, never more fearful.

  What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

  Three weeks later, Billy finished his flying training and was awarded his pilot’s wings. His final report noted, “Although average in ground subjects, his flying ability and officer qualifications were assessed as above average.” The final verdict was that “he should make a sound squadron pilot.” Of course, he and Rose headed for London for the night to celebrate. They met up with Ben Bathurst. He presented Billy with another pair of RAF wings to stitch onto his uniform. These ones were tattered and worn so that he wouldn’t stand out as a greenhorn. It was a mark of respect, an acknowledgment of his commitment since they had met that night in the Savoy and first discussed how he could go about joining up.

  Before Billy finished his training, he was sounded out by a man at the Air Ministry about whether he would consider going back to the United States to work for the RAF as a press and public relations man. He’d long since abandoned the pretense that he was Canadian, and they thought he could do good work on the propaganda side in Washington. There was an awareness, even then, within the British Foreign Office that, as the diplomat T. North Whitehead put it, “we are only likely to win this war if we obtain the whole-hearted co-operation of the United States.”

  Billy refused. “I’ve done nothing yet,” he told them. “Why should they want to see me? Wait till I’ve shot down some Heinkels. Then, if you still want me, I’ll go over.” He hadn’t spent the best part of a year in training just so he could go make pretty speeches and pose in photos for the American papers. “He is quite determined to go and join 601,” wrote Rose. “The same squadron as Billy Clyde. They are all his friends, which would make it all infinitely more enjoyable than joining a squadron where he knew no-one.”

  “Billy had stayed in contact with us all during his training,” remembered Mouse Cleaver, one of 601’s pilots. “And on the 12th, he called up Archie Hope, the Commanding Officer of ‘A’ flight, my flight, and said that he had completed his training.” Hope knew Fiske only a little, not nearly so well as Cleaver, Clyde, and the rest of the St. Moritz crowd. But he had heard good things about him. “Archie told Billy to stay put, talk to no one about postings, and that we would fly up and get him.” And they did. Cleaver went himself, in his Blenheim.

  601 was based down at Tangmere, toward the coast sixty miles or so south of London, not far from the village where Rose had grown up. She spent the week calling around the area, looking for a house to rent. She found one in Chidham, ten miles down the road from Tangmere, an old farmhouse named Chidmere, on a pond, with an orchard. She “packed all our bits and bobs” into a van, and they “all moved in a body,” her and the chickens and the dog.

  That very same day, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 16: “Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and, if necessary, to carry it out. The aim of this operation will be to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the prosecution of war against Germany, and, if necessary, to occupy it completely.” The first step would be to win air superiority. “The English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”

  Across the Channel at Calais, the German fleet began to assemble.

  Billy Fiske, An American Citizen Who Died That England Might Live. By Ronald Wong.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE LAST FLIGHT OF BILLY FISKE

  They woke before dawn. Four o’clock, as often as not. Sometimes earlier. And always with the same routine. The clang-clunk of the door shutting, then a hand on the shoulder. The deep sleepers needed to be shaken awake. A cup of tea or cocoa to soften the blow. And then a pen, and a tatty Stationery Office notebook, which they had to sign by torchlight to prove that they’d received their wake-up call. Up, wash, shave, dress—last on was the leather Irvin jacket, its thick sheepskin lining a welcome buffer against the cold air outside. On the lawn, good-morning greetings with the other pilots, all equally blurry-eyed. The first wait of the day, for the truck to come and pick them up, then carry them over to the dispersal area by the runway. More hellos, with the fitters and riggers who were already up and at work, warming the engines, checking over the repairs, loading the guns. The petrol bowsers idled nearby, and once the ground crew were done, the tanks were filled with high-octane fuel. Over at dispersal, in the readiness huts, the flight commander rang through to Operations to announce that the men were “ready for business.” And then, they waited. And waited.

  Those who could stomach it would scoff breakfast. They had twenty minutes to eat, each group in turn. Some were wound up too tight to have any appetite. Billy didn’t have that problem. “I live to eat,” he wrote, “and I love it.” Even powdered eggs. After that, some settled down with books and magazines—dog-eared copies of Lilliput, for the jokes and short stories, or the racier Men Only, for the pictures, according to taste. Others picked up games, darts, or shove ha’penny. In 601, they had a keen card school—poker, for high stakes. Time was when they’d played motorcycle polo, too, but they’d long since had to cut that out, since petrol was in such short supply. That said, 601 usually had enough to get by on. Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse had been appointed the squadron’s “petrol officer,” and he had decided that the simplest solution would be to buy a filling station. So they had enough to fuel their cars, at the day’s end, for the short trip to the Ship in Bosham, or their other favorite watering hole, the Coal Hole bar in the cellar of the Spread Eagle Hotel in Midhurst. Even in wartime, 601 was still a cut above. “They were such wonderful guys in 601,” Rose remembered. “They wore red linings in their tunics and mink linings in their overcoats. They were arrogant and they looked terrific, and probably the other squadrons hated their guts. But by God did they fight. Look at the records. None better. And they always did everything without any apparent effort. They had always been like that, all their lives.”

  By the time Billy and Rose arrived at Tangmere, in the middle of July 1940, 601 was just beginning to fray. The carefree atmosphere of the 1930s, which stretched right through into the phony war in the final year of the decade, had been dispelled during the fighting with the British Expeditionary Force in the battle of France. Two of 601’s pilots had lost their lives. Billy’s friend Roger Bushell had already been transferred, given charge of his own squadron, and then
shot down over Dunkirk. He’d managed to force-land in a field and was promptly taken prisoner at pistol point by a passing German dispatch rider. Others were luckier. Billy’s flight commander, Archie Hope, had been shot down twice, crash-landing on both occasions. The first time he’d managed to pinch a motorcycle from an abandoned military dump near Amiens and drive back to the base at Merville. The second time he came down on the beach at Calais and was evacuated back on a boat from Dunkirk. An RAF squadron was a small unit, including only twenty pilots. Each loss was acutely felt, and sapped a little more life and strength from the squadron. Especially as these early casualties were all old and firm friends, whereas the replacements were often strangers, fresh from flying school, with no combat experience.