by Andy Bull
It wasn’t long before the rest of 601 Squadron was coming in to land on the runway behind them. As Archie Hope coasted to a stop, he saw a damaged Hurricane off to one side of the runway. As squadron leader, his first thought was always for the safety of his pilots. “I taxied my aircraft across, and found two ambulance men who had lifted Fiske out of the cockpit and laid him on the grass alongside,” he said. “The aircraft was smoldering rather than burning.” He jumped down from his plane and shouted across to ask if he could give them any help. He saw they were fumbling with the straps across Billy’s shoulders. “They didn’t know how to undo his parachute harness, so I showed them.” He looked down at Billy, saw that he had burns over his feet and ankles, and all the way up his legs to his knees; his hands and face, too, were blistered, black and bloody. Hope told the medic to put medicinal cream on the wounds.
Forty years later, Hope’s memory of those moments had faded. He no longer trusted his own recollections. “When I saw him he was not fully conscious or making a lot of sense & I certainly didn’t ask what happened,” he wrote. “I don’t suppose anyone else did later.” But in another, much earlier account, only a decade after the battle, he remembered that he had spoken to Billy. “He was more or less conscious and told me that his aircraft had been damaged by return fire from the rear gunner of a Junkers 87 which he was attacking somewhere near Bognor Regis. I cannot remember whether he destroyed the aircraft or even whether he was able to lower his undercarriage before landing.” The truth of it is lost now; the stories are scrambled. But the second version, which was accepted by Cleaver, Clyde, and the other pilots in 601, is the nearest we have to an account of exactly what happened to Billy in the minutes before he made his Mayday call.
Clyde caught a glimpse of Billy’s body, laid out on the runway. “The ambulance and fire tender were alongside the aircraft in a matter of seconds,” he said, “and he was lifted from the aircraft. I was some distance away and since everything necessary was being done I didn’t become involved.”
Hope stayed only long enough to satisfy himself that Billy was going to be OK. Once they had loaded him into the ambulance and set off back toward the sick bay, he walked across to dispersal. “I told the rest of the squadron what had happened, and I remember saying that Billy wasn’t too badly injured.”
On the other side of the airfield, Dr. Courtney Willey was working in his makeshift sick bay, now overflowing with the dead and dying. The ambulance carrying Billy had to wait until Willey could turn his attention to it. When he climbed in through the back doors, he found Billy was badly burned but still conscious. He dosed him up with morphine and told the driver to take him to the Royal West Sussex Hospital in Chichester. Before they could set off, they had to wait twenty minutes until the roads around the station were clear. Billy, doped and delirious now, began muttering to himself. He kept asking, over and over again, “Is my airplane OK? Is my airplane OK?”
It seems odd that this particular thought was so fixed in his mind as he faded in and out of consciousness, until you consider the question all his friends were asking themselves and each other that evening: Why didn’t he bail out? Billy’s mother-in-law was sure the fire “must have started too low, and his one chance was to try and land and get out the minute it touched the ground—but I’m afraid he must have been semi-conscious by then.” But 601 pilots Mouse, Archie, and Little Bill disagreed, as did the ground crew. They felt, instinctively, that he had flown home through the flames because he was determined to save his aircraft. He knew that they were too precious to write off. “Just how Fiske managed to fly and land his plane in such atrocious pain it is impossible to say,” records the official history. “But the Legion knew why he did it, and within days his Hurricane was back in the sky.”
The only thought in Billy’s head in those minutes was to get his Hurricane back to Tangmere in one piece. He had drawn on all his skill, courage, and experience to get that plane home, all the while enduring agony more extreme than most can know. His final act at the wheel, when he pulled the fighter out of a dive and brought it down into a crash landing, was perhaps the most astonishing of the many remarkable drives, rides, flights, and races he had made in his life.
And where was Rose? She wasn’t at Chidmere. She’d decided to drive up to London that morning, to go shopping on Piccadilly. She had called Tangmere at noon to check in with Billy. “We weren’t supposed to call the field,” she said. But she always did. This time he wasn’t free, so she called again, right after lunch. “I couldn’t get any information, except that I could hear over the phone that the field had been bombed. Our husbands always warned us not to be dramatic if an air raid came, and not to phone the aerodrome. But I couldn’t keep away from the phone.” She called back again, fifteen minutes later, “even though I knew Billy would be angry.” They told her that he had been taken to hospital. Her first thought was “Thank God, Billy’s been hurt. He won’t have to fight any more.” Later, it pained her to think about how flippant she had been, even though she knew “every woman whose man is fighting wishes that, whether she admits it or not.” She jumped into the Morris and drove out of London as fast as she could. It took her three hours to reach Chichester. “And all the time I told myself that this was so lucky because surely he had done no more than perhaps break an arm or a leg and that would keep him out of the war for a while, and maybe he would get through the whole war all right. Over and over I said that.” The refrain ran through her head. If she said it often enough, it would be true. “I had told myself again and again that Billy could never die.”
By the time Rose got to the hospital, Billy was out of the operating theater. When she walked into his room, she saw him, his skin swathed in “black goo” to treat his burns. He looked up as the door opened and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“He was conscious for a little while,” Rose remembered. “And when he was delirious, all he would talk about was his plane. He wanted me to go and see if it was all right.” Rose’s mother said, “It was so dreadful for her seeing him looking so different. And though the burns on his face were superficial compared to those on his legs, it wasn’t, of course, the Bill she knew. I would have died to have saved her that memory. Tho’ she knows he wasn’t conscious or suffering.”
As he slipped away into sleep, Rose stepped outside to talk to the doctors. It was going to be OK, they told her; he was going to pull through. While he slept, she drove down to the post office and sent a telegram to the Dillon, Read & Co. office in New York. It was the best way she could think of to reach his parents, who were now living at the Waldorf-Astoria, having come back from Lisbon by boat.
Bill had bad crash this morning his legs and hands severely burned doctor thinks very good chance pray to god stop will keep in constant communication love Rose Fiske.
Billy died the next morning, August 17, 1940. He was twenty-nine. The doctors said it was “post-operative shock.” And so, later that day, a second telegram arrived at Nassau Street:
Darlings Bill died this morning early from severe shock and burns from crash never recovered consciousness after I first saw him suffered no pain am trying very hard to be brave you must be too for his sake I feel he should have military funeral and be buried here but will arrange anything you wish may I come and stay when able to get away you can be very proud of him he has been so very brave all through all my love I wish I had not got to send this cable.
The doctors told Rose that if he had lived, he would have been paralyzed from the waist down. She tried to find some succor in that. “I’m glad Billy died,” she said, months later. “He loved speed, constant movement. If he’d lived he would never have walked again. That in itself would have killed him.”
They buried him on the Tuesday, at Boxgrove Priory, a mile away from the northern boundary of Tangmere. None of Billy’s friends from 601 made it. The day before, August 19, the squadron was withdrawn from the front line, moved to RAF D
ebden in Essex. They had suffered too much, and lost too many. Rose wore black, a fur hat, and a simple necklace, a gift he had given her for her birthday. She had been so busy the last few days she hadn’t had time to stop, or think. She’d had to organize the flowers and a wreath from his family and to write notices for the papers. But more than that, she was “overwhelmed at the letters from all over the world, despite a war going on, and from people I’d never heard of, who wrote to me with so much feel of loss.” There were telegrams from Hollywood, St. Moritz, New York, San Francisco, London, and even Lake Placid. Representatives from the Air Ministry were at the funeral and from the US embassy. Lord Beaverbrook sent a wreath. So, they say, did Winston Churchill.
Lord Brabazon of Tara, who knew Billy from St. Moritz, wrote an appreciation that was published in the Times. “A very gallant gentleman—Billy Fiske has given his life for us,” “Brab” wrote. “As a racing motorist, as a bobsleigh rider, as a flier he was well known, but as a Cresta Rider he was supreme. Taking some years to become first class, his fame eventually was legendary. No record he did not break, no race he did not win, he was the supreme artist of the run; never did he have a fall, he was in a class by himself. As an American citizen, blessed with this world’s goods, of a family beloved by all who knew them, with a personal charm that made all worship him, he elected to join up in the ranks of the Royal Air Force and fight our battles. We thank America for sending us the perfect sportsman. Many of us would have given our lives for Billy, instead he gave his for us. The memory of him will live long in the Alps where he had his great successes. In the hearts of his friends it will endure forever.”
They draped his coffin in two flags, the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, then loaded it onto a trailer and drove it across to the church. The pallbearers walked beside the coffin, a marching band came after. And once they had lowered his casket into the ground, they fired a final salute over his grave.
Later that very same day, the prime minister addressed Parliament, and the nation. “The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and their devotion,” he said. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
“I am at last beginning to realize I shall never see Bill again,” Rose wrote that night. “I am so proud to have been his wife.” She needed to get out. Away from Tangmere, away from Britain, away from the war. She booked a ticket on the Scythia, bound for New York, and put in an application for a travel permit. She wanted to go and visit Billy’s family. But there was one thing she had to do before she left.
A fortnight later, on a warm weekday afternoon, she arrived at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in East London. She asked to see Mouse Cleaver. Of course he wasn’t listed under that name, but they looked and found that they had him listed as Cleaver, G. N. Up she went. Mouse’s eyes were bound entirely in bandages. They were picking the shards of Perspex out of his pupils piece by piece, one operation at a time. They talked for a while. “She was, by then, over the initial shock,” he said, and though he couldn’t see, from what he heard she sounded “comparatively cheerful, maybe for my benefit.” She paused a while, then said, “We must keep on being brave.” They both fell silent. And then he felt her tears fall on to the back of his hand.
EPILOGUE
London, July 4, 1941. Independence Day. It was a long walk to St. Paul’s, especially in heels, but the sun was out, and besides, she thought the air would do her good. How bleak and broken London looked. Was it really only a year and a half ago that she’d walked these same streets and admired the pictures the chichi shops had posted up in their blacked-out windows? Back then the only thing she’d been worried about was stubbing her toe on a sandbag. She had changed; it was obvious even from the look of her. Her dark hair was already streaked gray. But there was tremendous strength in her face and determination in her walk. The papers described her as “distinguished” these days, where they had once called her “beautiful.”
While she was in New York, she had given an interview to a friend from the old days, when she’d first been in the city. “I’ve changed a lot,” Rose told her. “My sense of values is different. Things that used to be important don’t matter any more. The clothes and jewels I used to want—all that stuff makes no difference now. I feel much softer and gentler toward people. I hope I have more sympathy and understanding for them.” It was a good piece. A little sentimental, perhaps, but better by far than a lot of the bunk that had been written about Billy since the previous August. The American press seemed so damn keen to make him out as a hero. He would have hated that. Just as he had back at Lake Placid. What got her was the way they exaggerated the details. As if what he had done wasn’t enough in itself. She’d heard of one that included the most preposterous account of his death, which had him climbing out of the wreckage of his fighter, “the old grin still on his face,” and calling for another plane so he could get back into the air. What rot.
She was on Ludgate Hill now. St. Paul’s filled the horizon. It seemed a miracle that it was still standing, surrounded as it was by rubble and the shells of bombed-out buildings. Of course it was anything but. They had made extraordinary efforts to save it, on Churchill’s orders. They’d installed tanks, baths, and pails of water around the roof and had special squads of firefighters patrol it with stirrup pumps. It had upset some, who felt that the services had let all the other buildings around burn just so long as they could save the cathedral. But it had been worth it, she thought. Churchill was right. He had always seemed to understand the value of things—speeches, ceremonies, symbols—and their effect on the public morale. Wasn’t that what today was about, after all?
She could see a huddle of men on the steps running up to the great front doors. Journalists, radio broadcasters, even a couple of cameramen. She had been told NBC would be broadcasting the service back in the States. There were a lot of unfamiliar faces there. Officials. Young fighter pilots, from the new Eagle Squadrons, fresh-faced and wet behind the ears, as Billy and the others had once been. There weren’t too many of the St. Moritz boys left now. Roger Bushell was in a prisoner-of-war camp. Mouse Cleaver was still in hospital, and still blind. Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse was dead. He had been shot down later in the Battle of Britain, finally paying for what his friend Max Aitken described as “his utter disregard for his own life.”
Rose found herself making small talk with the US ambassador, a granite-faced man named John Winant, all square jaw and side-parting. They spoke about her trip to the United States, and he offered his condolences on the death of Billy’s father, William Sr. He had died of a heart attack the previous October. It had been coming, but it arrived all the sooner because he was so distraught about his son’s death. Billy’s mother, Beulah, had gone off to the West Coast to live near Peggy. She had asked Rose to come too. But she wanted to get back to Britain. “Billy gave his life for my country,” Rose said in the press. “I couldn’t face myself if I didn’t go back and do what I can to help. I’ve got to do it. Something inside me keeps saying that all the time.” Winant introduced her to Brendan Bracken, too, though she didn’t really take in who exactly he was. “An MP,” she wrote. He was a little more than that—the minister for information, and one of Churchill’s closer confidants. He was there representing the prime minister. And then Archibald Sinclair, the secretary of state for air.
The four of them led the procession down into the crypt beneath the cathedral. Billy’s plaque was on the back wall, just off Nelson’s tomb. They gathered around. Sinclair gave a short speech, sweet but perhaps just a little cynical. It was written for the benefit of an audience of millions across the Atlantic, as much as for the few men and women there that day.
Pilot Officer Fiske had no obligation to fight for
this country. He was not an Englishman. He was a citizen of the United States of America. Yet a fortnight after war broke out, he joined the Royal Air Force. Having passed brilliantly through all the stages of his training, he was, on March 23, 1940, granted a commission in the RAF and was posted to No. 601 Squadron on July 13, a little more than a month before his death in action. He had left a promising career and a full and useful life to serve in the Royal Air Force. He was happily married; he was a member of a famous New York firm; he was renowned for his skill and daring at winter sports. Here was a young man—he was only twenty-nine when he was killed—for whom life held much. Under no kind of compulsion to come and fight for Britain, he came and he fought, and he died. The Latin Poet said that “it is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country.” In that decorum those British pilots who were killed that day with Pilot Officer Fiske were perfectly instructed. And these young men were Pilot Officer Fiske’s friends. Billy Fiske was one of those people who made many friends. He had a great many friends of his own generation in this country. He played with them and when the stakes became highest he stayed with them and died with them and they, through me, thank him. So he gave his life for his friends, and for a great cause, the common cause of free men everywhere—the cause of liberty. That is why we honor his spirit today. That is why we have written the chronicle of his deed in letters of bronze in the shrine of our Empire’s capital. He has joined the company of those who from Socrates to John Brown have died in freedom’s name and freedom’s cause. Of these men it was said more than 2,000 years ago that “Their virtues shall be testified not only by the inscription on stone at the time, but in all lands wheresoever in the unwritten record of the mind, which far beyond any monument will remain with all men everlasting.”