The Last Enemy Richard Hillary (5 page)
I mention them together, but they could not have been more unlike. Harry, vast, genial, and thirty-two, with a cigarette permanently glued to his lower lip, was married and had a child. He had an Irish temper that flared up and then as quickly changed to shrill trumpetings of elephantine laughter. He had been on the Reserve for some time, having once flown Vickers Virginias. In Ireland before the war he had been in some job connected with Civil Aviation. Dixie, diminutive, desperately keen, and nineteen, with, off duty, the most startling taste in clothes, and shoulders to his suits that you could ski off, was just out of school and adolescing selfconsciously all over the place. He was as yet no great performer in the air, but pathetically keen to prove himself. When the others laughed at him, his narrow little face would tighten up with the determination to be the best pilot of them all.
This was a cross-section of the raw material out of which must be welded officers competent to take their place in Fighters, Bombers, and Coastal Command. After the day’s work was over we would gather in the Mess or adjourn to some neighbouring pub to pass the evening talking and drinking beer. And there as the months went by one could watch the gradual assimilation of these men, so diverse in their lives and habits, into something bigger than themselves, their integration into the composite figure that is the Air Force Pilot. Unknown to themselves, the realization of all this was gradually instilled in the embryo, pilots who lived together, laughing, quarrelling, rapidly maturing in the incubator of that station.
Much that is untrue and misleading has been written on the pilot in this war. Within one short year he has become the nation’s hero, and the attempt to live up to this false conception bores him. For, as he would be the first to admit, on the ground the pilot is a very ordinary fellow. Songs such as ‘Silver Wings’—
They say he’s just a crazy sort of guy, But to me he means a million other things,
make him writhe with very genuine embarrassment.
The pilot is of a race of men who since time immemorial have been inarticulate; who, through their daily contact with death, have realized, often enough unconsciously, certain fundamental things. It is only in the air that the pilot can grasp that feeling, that flash of knowledge, of insight, that matures him beyond his years; only in the air that he knows suddenly he is a man in a world of men. ‘Coming back to earth’ has for him a double significance. He finds it difficult to orientate himself in a world that is so worldly, amongst a people whose conversation seems to him brilliant, minds agile, and knowledge complete—yet a people somehow blind. It is very strange.
In his village before the war the comfortably-off stockbrokers, the retired officers and business men, thought of the pilot, if they thought of him at all, as rather raffish, not a gentleman. Now they are eager to speak to him, to show him hospitality, to be seen about with him, to tell him that they too are doing their bit. He’s a fine fellow, the saviour of the country; he must have qualities which they had overlooked. But they can’t find them. He is polite, but not effusive. They are puzzled and he is embarrassed.
He wants only to get back to the Mess, to be among his own kind, with men who act and don’t talk, or if they do, talk only shop; of old So-and-so and his temper, of flights and crashes, of personal experiences; bragging with that understatement so dear to the Englishman. He wants to get back to that closed language that is Air Force slang.
These men, who in the air must have their minds clear, their nerves controlled, and their concentration intense, ask on the ground only to be allowed to relax. They ask only to get out of uniform; in the Mess, to read not literature but thrillers, not The Times but the Daily Mirror. Indeed Popeye has been adopted by the Air Force. As these men fight the war they have no particular desire to read about it. They like to drink a little beer, play the radio and a little bridge. On leave they want only to get home to their wives and families and be left to themselves.
On some stations officers, if they are married, live out. On others it is forbidden. This depends on the Commanding Officer, some believing the sudden change from night-bombing attacks over Berlin to all the comforts of home to be a psychological error, others believing it to be beneficial. In most squadrons the pilots live on the station, going home only on leave. It is always possible to apply for compassionate leave in the event of serious domestic trouble, and this is nearly always granted, though the Passionate Leave applied for by some Squadrons doesn’t receive quite the same sympathy.
It might be imagined that there would be some lack of sympathy between the pilots and the ground staff of an aerodrome, that the pilots would adopt a rather patronizing manner towards the stores officers, engineers, signal operators, and adjutants of a station, rather similar to that condescension shown by the more highfalutin regiments towards the Royal Army Service Corps. But this is hardly ever true. On every station that I know there is an easy comradeship between pilots and technicians. Each realizes the essential value of the other—though I must admit on one occasion hearing a pilot define the height of impertinence as a stores officer wearing flying boots.
While on duty most pilots drink nothing and smoke little; when on leave they welcome the opportunity for an occasional carouse in London. They get a somewhat malicious pleasure in appearing slightly scruffy when dining at the smartest restaurants, thus tending to embarrass the beautifully turned out, pink-and-white-cheeked young men of the crack infantry regiments, and making them feel uncomfortably closely related to chorus boys.
But though these men may seem to fit into the picture of everyday life, though they seem content enough in the company of other men and in the restfulness of their homes, yet they are really only happy when they are back with their Squadrons, with their associations and memories. They long to be back in their planes, so that isolated with the wind and the stars they may play their part in man’s struggle against the elements.
The change in Peter Howes was perhaps the most interesting, for he was not unaware of what was happening. From an almost morbid introspection, an unhappy preoccupation with the psychological labyrinths of his own mind, his personality blossomed, like some plant long untouched by the sun, into an at first unwilling but soon open acceptance of the ideas and habits of the others. Peter had a biting tongue when he chose to use it. I remember one night we were discussing Air Force slang and its origins. I started off on some theory but he cut me short. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You must understand that in our service we have a number of uneducated louts from all over the world none of whom can speak his own language properly. It thus becomes necessary to invent a small vocabulary of phrases, equipped with which they can carry on together an intelligible conversation.’ At this time he was a very bad pilot, though his English was meticulous. In three months he was an excellent pilot and his vocabulary was pure R.A.F. I don’t know if there is a connection, but I wonder. With enthusiasm he would join in the general debunking when an offender was caught ‘shooting a line.’
Of the war. From time to time without warning a Squadron of long-range bombers would come dropping out of the sky. For a week or so they would make our station their headquarters for raids on Norway, the heavy drone of their engines announcing their return as night began to fall. One day nine set out and four returned. I watched closely the pilots in the Mess that night but their faces were expressionless: they played bridge as usual and discussed the next day’s raid.
Then one day a Spitfire Squadron dropped in. It was our first glimpse of the machine which Peter, Noel, and I hoped eventually to fly. The trim deceptive frailty of their lines fascinated us and we spent much of our spare time climbing on to their wings and inspecting the controls. For while we continued to refuse to consider the war in the light of a crusade for humanity, or a life-and-death struggle for civilization, and concerned ourselves merely with what there was in it for us, yet for that very reason we were most anxious to fly single-seater fighters.
The Course drew to a close. We had done a good many hours’ flying on service types. We had taken our Wings Examination and somehow managed to pass. Giddings, our ex-schoolmaster, was way out in front, and I, thanks to Peter’s knowledge of navigation and Noel’s of armament, just scraped through.
We had learned something of flying and the theory of combat, but more important, we had learned a little of how to handle ourselves when we got to our Squadrons. We awaited our final postings with impatience, but their arrival was a bitter disappointment. Only Charlie Frizell and two others were to go into Fighters: at this early stage there had been few casualties in Fighter Command and there was little demand for replacements. Noel, Peter, and I were all slated for Army Cooperation. This entailed further training at Old Sarum before we should finally be operational, operational on Lysanders, machines which Peter gloomily ‘termed ‘flying coffins.’ Giddings and a few other good sober pilots were to be instructors; the remainder were split up between bombers and Coastal Command.
And so we said good-bye to Scotland and headed south.
3
Spitfires
NOEL and I spent one night in London. Peter Howes collected us at about ten o’clock and we drove down to Old Sarum. During the drive we talked ourselves into a belated enthusiasm for Army Cooperation, and as we came on to the road skirting the aerodrome and saw the field slanting downhill from the hangars with machines picketed around the edge, we gazed at them with interest. There were an equal number of Hectors and Lysanders, heroic enough names though the machines might belie them in appearance. The Hectors were slim biplanes, advanced editions of the old Hart, but it was the Lysanders, the machines in which it seemed probable that we should be flying for the duration, that really caught our attention. They were squat, heavy, high-winged monoplanes and looked as though they could take a beating. We were less impressed by the two solitary guns, one fixed and firing forward and the other rotatable by the rear gunner.
The road running up to the Mess took us close by Salisbury, and the towering steeple of its cathedral was a good landmark from the aerodrome. The countryside lay quiet in the warm glow of the summer evening. A few minutes’ flying to the south was the sea, and across from it France, equally peaceful in the quiet of the evening; within a few weeks Britain’s army was to be struggling desperately to get back across that narrow stretch of water, and the France that we knew was to be no more.
The Course was run with great efficiency by a dapper little Squadron Leader by the name of Barker. We were divided into squads and spent from nine o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening alternating between lectures and flying our two types of aircraft.
To our delight, on the second day of the Course Bill Aitken appeared from Cranwell to join us. We had not seen him since together with most of our friends he had been posted to his F.T.S. several months before. He was the same as ever, rather serious, with deep lines across his broad forehead and little bursts of dry laughter. He did his best to answer all our questions, but when we got around to Frank Waldron and Nigel Bicknell he was inclined to become a little pompous. It appeared that the regulations at Cranwell had been somewhat more strictly enforced than in Scotland. Frank and Nigel had set off with much the same ideas as Noel and I up in Scotland, but with more determination as the rules were stricter, and consequently they had come up against more trouble. They had consistently attempted to avoid lectures, and Frank had crowned his efforts by oversleeping for the Wings Exam. He was also violently sick whenever he went up (which was not his fault), so the Air Ministry raised little objection when he applied for a transfer to the Scots Guards.
Nigel, it appeared, had found the restrictions an irresistible attraction, and no notice could appear without him hearing of it; he would solemnly produce pieces of red tape from his pocket and pin them around the board. This did not tend to encourage cordial relations with the higher authorities, and when he finally wrote an extremely witty but hardly tactful letter to the Commanding Officer, pointing out that Volunteer Reservists had joined the R.A.F. to fight the Germans and not to be treated like children, his stock was at its lowest ebb. He was not actually kicked out, but his record sheet was the blackest of the Course and his action resulted in a tightening-up of all restrictions.
‘When I left Cranwell,’ said Bill, ‘he was trying to hook himself a job as Air Force Psychologist.’
It was obvious that Bill did not approve, and one could not blame him. He thought their actions represented something deeper than mere fooling-about, a disinclination to face up to the war and a desire to avoid fighting it for as long as possible. He thought further that there were a dangerous number of young men with pseudo-intellectual leanings in the same direction—this last with a significant glance at me.
I disagreed with him. I thought he had made a superficial assessment and said so. I went further: I prophesied that within six months he would have to take those words back, that those very people who were being so unstable at the moment would prove themselves as capable as anyone of facing an emergency when the time came. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Anyway you know that war has been described as “a period of great boredom, interspersed with moments of great excitement.” The man who believes enough in what he’s fighting for to put up with the periods of boredom is twice as important in the winning of a war as the man who rises to a crisis.’
Besides Bill we discovered two other familiar figures, Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney. They had both been in the Cambridge Air Squadron before the war. Peter was, I think, the best-looking man I have ever seen. He stood six-foot-three and was of a deceptive slightness for he weighed close on 13 stone. He had an outward reserve which protected him from any surface friendships, but for those who troubled to get to know him it was apparent that this reserve masked a deep shyness and a profound integrity of character. Soft-spoken, and with an innate habit of understatement, I never knew him to lose his temper. He never spoke of himself and it was only through Colin that I learned how well he had done at Eton before his two reflective years at Cambridge, where he had watched events in Europe and made up his mind what part he must play when the exponents of everything he most abhorred began to sweep all before them.
Colin was of the same height but of broader build. He had a bony, pleasantly ugly face and openly admitted that be derived most of his pleasure in life from a good grouse-shoot and a well-proportioned salmon. He was somewhat more forthcoming than Peter but of fundamentally the same instincts. They had been together since the beginning of the war and were now inseparable. I was to become the third corner of a triangle of friendship the record of which will form an important part of the rest of this book. It is therefore perhaps well to stress that Peter Pease, and not Peter Howes, is the peak of this triangle.
The work at Old Sarum was interesting. We studied detailed-map reading, aerial photography, air-to-ground Morse, artillery shoots, and long-distance reconnaissance. The Lysander proved to be a ponderous old gentleman’s plane, heavy on the controls but easy to handle. It seemed almost impossible to stall it.
Of flying incidents there were few, though once I did my best to kill my observer. We were on our way back from a photography sortie when I decided to do some aerobatics. As our Inter-Comm. was not working, I turned round, pointed at the observer, and then tapped my straps, to ask him if he was adequately tied in. He nodded. I started off by doing a couple of stall turns. Behind me I could hear him shouting away in what I took to be an involuntary access of enthusiastic approval. After the second stall turn I put the machine into a loop. On the dive down he leaned forward and shouted in my ear. I waved my hand. On the climb up, I saw him out of the corner of my eye letting himself low down into the rear seat. Then we were up and over. I straightened up and looked back. There was no sign of my observer. I shouted. Still he did not appear. I had a sudden feeling of apprehension. That shouting—could it mean…? I peered anxiously over the side. At that moment a white face emerged slowly from the back cockpit, a hand grabbed my shoulder and a voice shouted in my ear: ‘For Christ’s sake don’t do a slow roll, I’m not strapped in!’
He had taken my signals for a query whether I was strapped in. His cries had been not of joy but of fear, and when we had started down on our loop he had dived rapidly to the bottom of the cockpit, clutching feverishly at the camera on the floor for support and convinced that his last hour had come.
I headed back for the aerodrome and, after making a quick circuit, deposited him gingerly on the field, landing as though I had dynamite in the back.
Noel nearly cut short a promising flying career in a Hector. He opened up to take off with the pasteboard instructions for his second Morse exercise on his knee. As the machine gathered speed across the aerodrome the card had dropped from his knee on to the floor. He bent to pick it up, inadvertently pushing the stick further forward as he did so. The long prop touched the ground and the machine tore its nose in and somersaulted on to its back. It did not catch fire. As the ambulance shot out from the hangars, I remember muttering to myself ‘Pray God don’t be a bloody fool and undo the straps.’ Fortunately he did not and escaped with a badly cut tongue and a warning from the C.F.L that a repetition of the episode would not be treated lightly.
A surprising number of people have managed to kill themselves by putting on their brakes too hard when coming in to land, toppling on to their backs, and then undoing the straps—to fall out on their heads and break their necks.
Every night at nine o’clock the Mess was crowded with Army and Air Force officers, men who commonly never bothered to listen to the news, parked round the radio with silent expressionless faces, listening to the extermination of France and the desperate retreat of the British Expeditionary Force.
Privately we learned that Lysanders were hopping across the Channel two or three times daily in an effort to drop supplies to the besieged garrison in Calais, sometimes with a solitary one-gunned Hector for fighter support. As the Lysander was supposed to operate always under a covering layer of fighters, we could imagine how desperate the situation must be.
Then came Dunkirk: tired, ragged men who had once been an army, returning now with German souvenirs but without their own equipment; and the tendency of the public to regard it almost as a victory.
After days on the beaches without sight of British planes these men were bitter, and not unnaturally. They could not be expected to know that, had we not for once managed to gain air superiority behind them, over Flanders, they would never have left Dunkirk alive. For us the evacuation was still a newspaper story, until Noel, Howes, and I got the day off, motored to Brighton, and saw for ourselves.
The beaches, streets, and pubs were a crawling mass of soldiers, British, French, and Belgian. They had no money but were being royally welcomed by the locals. They were ragged and weary. When Howes suddenly met a blonde and vanished with her and the car for the rest of the day, Noel and I soon found ourselves in various billets acting as interpreters for the French. They were very tired and very patient. It had been so long. What could a few more hours matter? The most frequent request was for somewhere to bathe their feet. When it became obvious that there had been a mix-up, that some billets looked like being hopelessly overcrowded and others empty, we gave up. Collecting two French soldiers and a Belgian dispatch rider, we took them off for a drink. The bar we chose was a seething mass of sweating, turbulent khaki. Before we could even get a drink we were involved in half a dozen arguments over the whereabouts of our aircraft over Dunkirk. Knowing personally several pilots who had been killed, and with some knowledge of the true facts, we found it hard to keep our tempers.
In fairness to the B.E.F. it must be said that by no means all returned as rabble. A story of the Grenadier Guards was already going the rounds. In columns of three they had marched on to the pier at Dunkirk with complete equipment, as though going for a route march. A Territorial officer, seeing them standing at ease, advanced and started to distribute spoons and forks for them to deal with the food that was being handed out. His efforts were summarily halted by the acid comment of a young Grenadier subaltern:
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but the Grenadiers always carry their own cutlery.’
The French were less bitter, possibly out of politeness, but more probably because while they had seen few British aircraft, they had seen no French. But it was our Belgian dispatch rider who surprised and delighted us by endorsing everything we said.
‘How could we expect to see many British fighter planes?’ he asked. ‘There was a heavy fog over the beaches and they were up above.’
One fight, however, he had seen—a lone Spitfire among four Junkers. For him, he said, it had been symbolic, and he admitted having prayed. If that Spitfire came out on top, then they would all be rescued. His prayer was answered. It shot down two Germans, crippled a third, and the fourth made off.
We sat on till well into the night, talking, arguing, singing, getting tight; they, tired and relaxed, content to sit back, their troubles for the moment over, we taut and expectant, braced by our first real contact with the war, eager to get started.
Finally, through an alcoholic haze, we made our farewells and staggered out into the street. Somehow we located both Howes and the car and set off back for Old Sarum. We were late and Howes drove fast. There was no moon. Coming out of a bend, he took the bank with his near-side front wheel, skidded, touched the brake, and hit the bank again. We were still travelling fast. For a moment we hung on two wheels, and then we turned over, once, twice. There was a crash of splintering glass, a tearing noise as two of the doors were torn off, and then, but for the sound of escaping petrol, silence. That week I had bought myself a new service cap and I could see it wedged under Noel’s left knee.
‘Get off my cap, blast you!’ I shouted, thus destroying the silence and bringing down on my head a storm of invective, from which I gathered that none of us was seriously hurt. It turned out that we hadn’t even a scratch. ‘It looks,’ said Howes, ‘as though Fate doesn’t want us to go out this way. Maybe we have a more exciting death in store for us.’ Looking back, unpleasantly prophetic words.
A day or so later all leave was cancelled, no one was allowed further than half an hour’s call from the aerodrome, and the invasion scare was on. An order came that all officers were to carry side arms, and at the station armoury I was issued with an antiquated short-nosed Forty-five and six soft-lead bullets. I appealed to the armament sergeant.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘but that’s the regulation. Just content yourself with six Jerries, sir.’
That in itself would not have been so bad if only the ammunition fitted, which I soon found it did not. With only six bullets there was little temptation to waste any of them practising, but one day by low cunning I managed to get myself another twelve and loosed off. The first round fired but the second jammed. I had .455 bullets for a .45 revolver.