Speed Kings (35 page)

THE WAR BEGINS

Billy Fiske's Journal, Page One.

October 29, 1939

This is not meant to be a diary, less a book. It's simply an attempt to record in chronological order, if possible, some of the experiences and events brought about in my life as a result of Mr. Hitler's indiscretions. They are probably not very different from the things that are happening to hundreds of thousands of other individuals. There's really only one reason other than my own amusement why they may be worth recording, and that is the fact that I believe I can lay claim to being the first US citizen to join the RAF in England after the outbreak of hostilities. I don't say this with any particular pride, except that insofar as my conscience is clear, but only it probably has some bearing on the course of my career . . .

Now that I've started I might as well go right back and begin at the beginning, which was in the city of New York on the day of August 30, 1939, the Wednesday before war was declared. And a hectic day it was, too . . .

To begin at the beginning, we actually need to move back another couple of days. In the early morning of Monday, August 28, Billy blinked, rolled over on his side, and flicked on the light by his bedside. He took a quick look at the clock. Two a.m.? Who the hell was calling at that hour? Whoever it was, the phone had been ringing for so long that they must be drunk, or desperate. He
resigned himself, at last, to the fact that he was going to have to get up and answer it.

“Hello?”

“Billy? It's Roger, Roger Bushell. Sorry if I woke you. Listen, is Little Bill there? It's urgent.”

Little Bill was their nickname for Billy Clyde, who was, at that precise moment, sound asleep in the guest bedroom. Billy could hear him snoring from out in the hall. That man, he thought, could sleep through anything. “One minute, Roger,” he said. And then he crept into Clyde's room and gave him a gleeful poke in the ribs.

Clyde's eyes shot open.

“Phone for you. It's Roger.”

Billy slunk back into his bed. But he didn't go back to sleep. Instead he lay up, listening in to the muted conversation going on in the hall.

“I see,” he heard Clyde say. “I see. Yes. All right. I'll come. Tell them I'll be back on the next boat.”

He heard Clyde put the receiver down. There was a pause. And then a knock at the door.

“Billy?” Clyde said. “Roger says things are cranking up. He says they're going to mobilize the squadron. If I get back now, they'll save a spot for me. Otherwise I'll be back in the pilots' pool.” If that happened, then it was likely Clyde would end up being assigned to another squadron, rather than 601, where all his friends were. “I suppose I had better call the girls and let them know.”

“No, Bill,” Billy replied. “It's late, best wait till the morning.” Besides, he had some thinking to do.

When Billy came into the kitchen in the morning, Clyde was already up. The
New York Times
was on the table in front of him. Billy could read the headlines from where he stood in the doorway: “Hitler Tells Paris He Must Get Berlin and Corridor”; “Berlin Thinks Door Is Left Open to Peaceful Solution”; “British Answer Today to Insist on Rights of Poland.” Over breakfast, Billy broke his news: he had decided to come back to England with Clyde, to join the RAF. By then, Little Bill knew better than to try to talk his friend out of it. He was too busy to spare the time, anyway. He needed to get a ticket on the next boat from New York to England. That was the
Aquitania
, which was due to sail in a little over forty-eight hours—little enough time to pack and wrap up his business at the firm.

Over the past eight months or so, the two of them had become close friends.
Clyde was working for Johnson & Johnson in Princeton. Billy, of course, was with Dillon, Read & Co., at its offices down on Nassau Street in Manhattan. Just as they were both called Bill, their wives were both Rose. The four of them had hired a house on Rhode Island for the summer, by the harbor at Watch Hill. The two women would stay there together during the week while their husbands went to work; the men would come up to join them on weekends. On the occasions when Clyde's work brought him into New York, he'd stay with Billy at the little flat he kept downtown, which was where he was that night. It had taken Bushell, who was over in London, some time to track Clyde down.

They'd had a lot of fun, the four of them. Billy had introduced them to his old pals Eddie, Tippy, and Jay, who came up from his mansion in Palm Springs—which he'd christened “the Garden of Eden”—just to meet Rose. They'd all gone to see the new singer Carmen Miranda perform at the Waldorf-Astoria. But hanging in the background, always, was the threat of war. And while everyone else discussed it as though it were a distant thing, for Clyde the conversations were always overshadowed by the knowledge that he might have to return to England to take up his place with his squadron.

Once Billy had spoken to Rose, the next thing he did was call his lawyer out in LA. There were a lot of loose ends to tie up, like the investments he was in the middle of, with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, and the Aspen business, and the film company, which, though he hardly ever had anything to do with it these days, was now producing newsreels and educational shorts. Bad news. The lawyer just didn't see how Billy could leave New York now. It would take three months, at least, to get his affairs in order. “Billy,” Clyde said, “was so downhearted about it.” But Clyde didn't have time to dwell on his friend's feelings. He had to get over to Princeton to clear out his desk.

The two Roses came down from Watch Hill later that evening. Clyde's wife would be staying on in the United States for a while and would join him in the UK when she could. She and Billy began to plan a farewell party. The
Aquitania
was due to sail at noon on Wednesday, so they decided it had better be an early luncheon that day. Real early. They started it just after midnight. By the following morning they were holed up in the 21 Club. It had only just opened for the day, and they were pretty much the only people in there other than the staff, who were all preparing for the lunch rush. At 11 a.m., Clyde cut out for the harbor. The
Aquitania
was moored at West 50th Street, six blocks over. He hated long goodbyes, so he left the three of them at the club and caught a taxi to the pier.

At the waterfront, everything was in chaos. Only the previous day, President Roosevelt had declared that the federal authorities would be searching all foreign ships in American harbors, under the 1925 Neutrality Act, to check whether they were carrying weapons or other war materials. The German liner
Bremen
had been stuck in New York for two days while customs officials conducted their search. Her crew spent their time running lifeboat drills in the harbor, in case they were bombed or torpedoed when they finally got to sea. Like all the other ships, each and every one of her windows and portholes had been blacked out so she'd be harder to spot.

Clyde had been on board the
Aquitania
for thirty minutes when the captain's voice came over the ship's address system. He explained that the sailing of the French liner
Normandie
, also due out that day, had been canceled because she was carrying so few passengers. Those who had tickets to sail with the
Normandie
were going to be transferred to the
Aquitania
instead. The
Aquitania
's departure had therefore been put back; she would now be leaving at 7:30 that evening. Faced with an eight-hour wait at the docks, Clyde decided there must be better things to do with his final few hours in New York. So he walked back to 21, hoping the others would still be there. And they were. He walked up to the table and announced, in his cheeriest voice, “It's all over, I've won the war single-handed. Now, who'd like a drink to celebrate?”

“I sat down to tell them the real story,” Clyde remembered. “And Billy got a very serious look on his face.” Something in him had snapped in the short time since Clyde had left 21. Watching his friend go off to war, alone, without him, was more than he could take. “And he suddenly said, ‘That's it, I'm going.'” Billy got up and walked away from the table. He had seven hours to get ready. He sent a telegram to a friend in Washington to double-check on whether his British visa was still valid, called his lawyer to give him instructions for tying up all those loose ends, then went to the head office of Dillon Read and handed in his notice. He decided to hold off from telling his family what he was up to. That, he thought, could wait. That night, he and Clyde boarded the
Aquitania
together. This time, both their wives came down to wave them off, neither sure when or if they would see their husbands again.

The
Aquitania
was at sea for eight days. The voyage took a little longer than usual because the ship, completely blacked out through the night, took a zigzag course, an evasive action designed to confound any lurking German U-boats. On the fifth day of the voyage, three days out from Southampton, war was declared.

—

W
hy did he do it? What made a man “blessed with all this world's goods” give it all up to volunteer to fight someone else's war? Billy's English friends didn't have either the time or the inclination to worry about it. “As regards Billy's reasons for coming over, what his inner personal feelings were I cannot know,” wrote Mouse Cleaver many years later, “only surmise. He was a close friend of several of us, largely via the snow, [and] his wife was English. I might venture that he had become not so much English as more European. Maybe, maybe not. He was certainly not a rich kid looking for adventure. He knew exactly what he was doing, and the possible consequences.”

Plenty have tried to reason why. Among them, the writers, historians, and journalists who have touched on Billy's life have come up with a range of answers, the most common of which was the one provided by Michael Seth-Smith, who put the decision down to the fact that “Billy disliked the influence of Nazism intensely.” Billy stopped short of providing an explanation in his diary. “My reasons for joining in the fray are my own,” he wrote, “and have no place here. Undoubtedly a great many people think I'm the original bloody fool, but again the object of this journal is not to discuss the pros and cons of a fait accompli.” So no one has ever had the definitive answer.

Until now. On September 10, only days after he had arrived in London, Billy wrote a letter to his sister. Rose understood Billy's decision to volunteer. She had been prepared for it. His parents were startled by it, when he finally told them, but they soon came to accept it. But Peggy, who was living in San Mateo, California, safe with her family on the far side of the world, thought he was nuts.

Naturally, my coming over has been a shock to the family although I have tried to warn them I would do just that in case of war for the last two years. I want you to understand my reasons as you're the only sister I've got and I think we've always been closer than the average brother and sister. As you know, I've spent most of the formative years of my life here at school, Cambridge, etc, and most recently working here. I have far more friends here than in America. I have an English wife of whom I'm extremely fond, and altogether my roots are almost stronger here than any place I know. They've been damn good to me in good times so naturally I feel I ought to try and help out in bad if I can. There are absolutely no heroics in my motives, I'm probably twice as scared as the next man, but if anything happens to me I at least can feel I have done the right thing in
spite of the worry to my family—which I certainly couldn't feel if I was to sit in New York making dough.

Flash back through the years. “The two great characteristics to develop in any child are
courage
and
justice
,” Billy once wrote. “Broadly speaking, with these well-developed a person can face the world and be successful.” He came to fight because his conscience told him that he should stand firm with his friends, with his new family, for his adopted country. He had no better reason than that. He didn't need one.

But before Billy could serve, he had to be accepted. At this point, the RAF's Eagle Squadrons of American volunteers hadn't even been conceived, let alone organized. The idea for them was still being thrashed out, in fact, by Billy's two old friends the Sweeny brothers, Bobby and Charles, who had taken those runabouts around Nice, Cannes, and Monte Carlo with him in his Bentley back in 1930. Charles Sweeny soon set up a Home Guard unit for Americans who were “deep-rooted in England.” He wrote to his father and had him send over fifty tommy guns for the unit to use. A little later, when he got permission to start recruiting American volunteers for a fighter squadron, he sounded Billy out about whether he would be interested in taking charge of it—a job that eventually went to Bill Taylor, Rose's boss from the travel agency in New York. As Clyde remembered, “Billy insisted from the beginning that he would be posted to 601 or else he wouldn't join the RAF.”

If, that was, the RAF even wanted him. As soon as they had docked at Southampton, Clyde had gone off to join up with 601. Billy had headed to London, to his club at Dover Street, where he discovered that only British citizens or sons of British citizens were eligible to join the Air Force. They were actively recruiting from around the empire, but it was felt, then, that taking in volunteers from neutral countries, especially the United States, could be troublesome politically. The US ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, was actively discouraging Americans from getting involved. “As you love America,” Kennedy had said, “don't let anything that comes out of any country in the world make you believe you can make a situation one whit better by getting into the war. There is no place in this fight for us.” But then Billy never could stand American politicians. He decided “to pull every string” he could to get in.