Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse

The bunker was truly gigantic. Its entrance road sloped down to a levelled site several metres below ground level. In spite of this the bunker towered above the surrounding woodland. It was as high as an apartment building and as long as a city block. Its roof was three metres of concrete laced with steel rods and heavy steel girders. Every lesson learned in the first years of war had been embodied in its design.

‘It’s indestructible,’ said Max. ‘It will stand there for hundreds of years after the war is over. Even if you wanted to remove it, it would be impossible.’

Max was enjoying August’s surprise. ‘Take no notice of all those windows in the wall,’ said Max. ‘That’s just to give some light to the office workers. Behind that layer of offices, the concrete internal structure is many metres thick.’

The doors were one-centimetre steel, hung on hinges as big as fists. The concrete corridors were noisy with Luftwaffe personnel, many of them young girls. Max Sepp knocked briefly upon an office door and marched into an office crowded with Luftwaffenhelferinnen, uniformed girl communication auxiliaries. Max was on first-name terms with them. He collected a metal document-case and gave it to his driver to carry. Max settled down to gossip with one of the girl auxiliaries. From among the young officers who received Max’s cigars one elected to show August the ‘Opera House’ itself. He was a dark-eyed young man. He put the cigar away in his desk and reached for his cap. He had grown a blunt black moustache to imitate the one Dolfo Galland, the popular young general of fighters, wore. August guessed he’d smoke his cigar in similar mimicry. With a seeming disregard for convention or discipline he kept his left hand thrust deep into his jacket pocket in a rakish manner that well suited the night-fighter clasp on his chest and German Cross on his top pocket.

The young Leutnant took August upstairs. The outer shell of corridors gave on to the inner chamber at three levels. At the top of the staircase they passed through another identity check by an armed sentry. The Leutnant said to August, ‘There is a drill on at present – Pheasant Alert – so we must keep very quiet.’

As they entered the cool dark Battle Room August shook his head in disbelief. The Leutnant smiled; every visitor was amazed. It had become a show place for top Nazi VIPs and this was the place to stand for a first glimpse. As August’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that it was indeed like an opera house. Seated rank upon rank in front of them were Helferinnen, each one crisp and neat in her white uniform blouse. He saw only the backs of their heads, as would a person standing at the rear of a steep theatre balcony. Far below him, in the orchestra stalls, were rows of high-ranking control officers. Everyone’s attention was upon the stage. For hanging where a theatre’s curtain would hang there was a glass map of Northern Europe. The green glass map was fifteen metres wide and its glow provided enough light for August to see the rows of white faces peering at it and the papers on their desks. On the walls beside the map there were weather charts and a complex board that showed the availability of reserve night fighters. The cool air, silent movement and green light conspired to make the atmosphere curiously like that of an aquarium.

Each of the girls in the balcony with them had a spotlight. From the fresnelled lens of each one was beamed a small white T to represent a constantly moving RAF bomber or a green T to represent the fighter hunting it. As the map-references came over the girls’ headsets they moved the white bombers across Holland and Northern Germany in a neat line. Down in the stalls the phones were in constant use and there was a shuffle of papers and movement. The air-conditioning made a loud humming sound and it was cool enough inside this vast concrete bunker to make August shiver even on this warm summer’s day. From here phone and teleprinter cables stretched across the land to airfields, watchtowers, radar stations, radio monitors and civil-defence headquarters. Even U-boats, and flak ships off the Dutch coast, reported aircraft movements to this bunker which the Luftwaffe had christened the Battle Opera House.

Overlapping circles of light had appeared on the map. Each one was a radar station like August’s own. Each one had two night fighters circling above it waiting to pounce upon a bomber coming into range of its magic eye. Now and again one of the T lights was switched off as a bomber was destroyed.

The young Leutnant had noticed August’s Pour le Mérite and decided that he was worth a fuller explanation than most of the rubberneck visitors that he showed around. He pointed to the six rows of stalls far below them.

‘It’s in the two front rows that the battle decisions are made. The Major-General third from the left is the Divisional Controller. On each side of him he keeps an Ia – Operations Officer. On the far left is the NAFU or Chief Signals Officer. Second to the right of the Div Controller, the officer with the yellow tabs is the Ic or Intelligence Officer. The old man on his right is the senior Meteorology man. The second row of officers, the ones speaking into phones all the time, are Fighter Controllers carrying out the orders. On that same desk there’s a Flak Officer, Radar Controller and Civil Defence Liaison.’

‘Who is the man in the tinted-glass office on the left?’ asked August.

‘Radio Intelligence Liaison Officer. He only comes out to talk with the Divisional Controller. Even then it’s in a whisper.’ He smiled, he had the cynical attitude to boffins that operational pilots always have.

The T-shaped lights moved slowly in a straight line towards Berlin.

‘What do you think?’ asked the Leutnant.

‘It’s damned impressive,’ said August.

‘It’s not always as calm as this, I’m afraid. On a real raid things get more hectic. I’ve seen them shouting at each other down there.’

‘And those little white lights don’t disappear so quickly,’ said August.

‘Ah,’ said the Leutnant. ‘That’s the real difference, I’m afraid.’ He spoke like a man who knew how big the sky was on a dark night.

They watched the ‘air raid’ proceed for a few more minutes. Still the white T lights that represented the bombers kept on their narrow line. The controllers practised dealing with the ‘stream tactics’ that the RAF had developed as a way of overwhelming the radar defences of just one zone instead of presenting single targets piecemeal to several radar sets and accompanying night fighters.

‘What about the Mosquito they send in to mark the target? If our planes could get up high enough to knock that down, the stream wouldn’t know where to drop their bombs.’

‘Exactly,’ said the Leutnant. He swung lightly round on his toes with his arm stiffly akimbo, giving him a curious effeminate stance. He eyed Bach speculatively and then decided to confide a secret.

‘Tonight we have a surprise awaiting them.’

‘The Ju88s supercharged with nitrous oxide?’

‘“Ha-ha” they call them – laughing gas, you see – you’ve heard about them, eh?’

‘What idiot thought of that code name?’

‘And 12.8 guns on railway mountings, we are going to try everything we know tonight. I don’t know, some fool in Air Ministry, I suppose.’

‘If they cooperate by flying over the railway guns,’ said August doubtfully.

‘They always come in from north to south, and always towards the Ruhr because – we think – that’s the limit of the electronic range. So we can make a guess at it. We’ll be more or less in position.’

‘Radio intercept predict a big one tonight,’ said August. He looked at his own radar station on the glass map, its range indicated by a dull lit circle. It was exactly placed between the RAF bomber airfields of East Anglia and the Ruhr. ‘I’m at Ermine,’ said August.

‘I know, sir,’ said the Leutnant. ‘I don’t think you’ll have much sleep before morning.’ Now August could see that the young Leutnant’s stiff left arm was artificial.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_1bbcb2b1-df0a-575c-80d7-ee68ab45879f)

Like all such depressions, this one had been born when moist air from the Azores met the cold dry air of the Arctic. The resulting muddled air mass moved eastwards over Britain until it reached the sea area to the west of Denmark which was called Heligoland. Here the centre of the depression paused. Hinged upon this depression, the cloud-marked cold front, like a thousand-mile-wide door, swung across Europe at twenty miles an hour. The front curved because its southern edge couldn’t keep up the pace. That southern end had only reached Bilbao in Spain when the centre was darkening the skies of Lyon and the northern sector was deluging the streets of Esbjerg with torrential rain.

In the high-pressure region that followed the front the heavy air subsided, warming by compression as it dropped. There was no more than the lightest of breezes, the clouds shrank even as you watched them, and the sun shone.

England had had its thunderstorms during the night and a morning of sunshine, but already a little cumulus had appeared over Wales and parts of the West Country. At Kroonsdijk, however, where the cold front had only recently passed, the skies were blue and the sun warmed the wet grass.

Unteroffizier Himmel eased himself into the pilot’s seat of his Ju88 parked at the end of the dispersal. The sun had been upon the metal fuselage for several hours and now the seat and controls were hot to touch and the smell of warmed fuel was as powerful as Glühwein. It was a luxury to be alone for a moment and apart from the sounds of the ground crewmen doing their pre-flight inspection it was as peaceful as a country graveyard. Himmel looked at the wet grass where an oil-patch made a rainbow pattern of red, yellow and mauve. A sandpiper landed and bobbed around the brightly coloured grass looking for worms until a mechanic closed the dinghy stowage hatch forcibly enough to frighten it back into the air.

The old piece of fuselage that the fire section had set alight sent a quill of white smoke into the still air. At its nib, Leutnant Beer in overalls was wielding a fire extinguisher under the command of Horst Knoll, the senior NCO of the fire section. Horst was a bad-tempered fellow who hated officers and did his best to make their lives as uncomfortable as his legitimate duties permitted.

‘On to the base of the flame,’ he was shouting to Beer, who was reluctantly closing in upon the foul-smelling wreckage and cursing. Horst Knoll, knowing exactly what the moving lips were saying, smiled and urged him forward all the more. ‘Don’t be afraid of the smoke, Herr Leutnant, get much closer and put the jet on to the base of the flame. Much closer, Herr Leutnant, much, much closer.’

At the far end of the line of matt-black aircraft Major Redenbacher’s aeroplane poked its snout from the dark hangar. Most of the spare mechanics were working on it. Suddenly the peace was shattered by the sound of engines. A Junkers with Leutnant Kokke at the controls was also preparing for an air test. Its chocks were pulled aside. Kokke gave a blip of throttle to start it moving around the perimeter. It moved away beyond the Alert Hut where the aircrew spent so much time. Outside it a dozen aircrew – air tests completed – sat sunning themselves. Most of them were younger than Himmel and few had been in the Luftwaffe as long as he had, but they’d come from all manner of units as their clothing showed. They’d seen service on war fronts from Finland to Egypt: British Army bush shirts, Czech flying boots, old Hitler Jugend shorts and Swedish leather jackets. Some sat shirtless, eyes closed in the deck-chairs, two played chess and some sprawled full-length on the wet grass arguing about engines and firepower and girls and promotion and medals.

No matter how much Löwenherz disapproved of their unsoldierly appearance it was a standing order of Major Redenbacher that at their Alert Huts the aircrews could ‘dress informally, always providing that the regulations concerning the wearing of identity tags around the neck are not disobeyed’.

Three flyers were standing in the hut doorway. Himmel looked at his watch and guessed that they were listening to the BBC, for this was the time that they broadcast the flyers’ programme. The carefully written technical talks always ended with a list of Luftwaffe personnel newly captured and newly dead.

Suddenly there was a loud thunder of cannon-fire and they all swung round to the firing butts. Above it a thin veil of blue smoke showed where Löwenherz’s plane was having its guns harmonized by the armourers. Someone made a joke, and then Himmel saw them all laugh and relax. It was the long wait for nightfall that built up the tension. That’s why Himmel always left his air test as late as possible.

One of Himmel’s ground crew removed the rudder lock and then walked round the aeroplane to check the ailerons and control surfaces. Himmel slipped his toes under the rudder-bar loops and fastened his seat straps. He ran his hand down his oxygen-lead connection to check it and then moved the control column forward and back and twisted the antlers to be sure that the controls were free of obstruction. Old Krugelheim, the chief mechanic, was getting a little impatient. Under his black overalls he was shirtless and without trousers, but still he sweated as he paced about under the nose of Himmel’s machine. He kept looking across to the hangar and Major Redenbacher’s aircraft. The cowling had been removed from its port motor and its most intimate parts bared to the oily inquiring hands of the fitters. The black-garbed men stood on a platform, arrayed around the disembowelled motor like witch-doctors at a Black Mass. One of them, chanting a line from a textbook, bent low into its entrails and flashed a torch deep inside. His open hand appeared and worldlessly a spanner was put into it.

Krugelheim looked up to where Himmel sat in the cockpit high above him. ‘The fuel pump,’ explained Krugelheim.

Himmel hoped sincerely that the black men would work their healing magic soon, for it was 15.20 hours already and if his own plane was not in service by nightfall, when the killing began, the Major had a habit of taking the nearest one. Himmel’s plane – Katze Four – was the nearest.

He slid the cockpit fully open and called down to the chief mechanic, ‘Have you seen Unteroffizier Pohl?’

‘No,’ said old Krugelheim. ‘He’s probably still talking to the Signals Officer.’

‘These aerials are a trial to us,’ said Christian Himmel. The old man walked under the nose to look closely at the ‘toasting fork’.

‘It’s the rain,’ he said. ‘If they stay dry for a few days they work perfectly. Here comes Pohl now.’

Someone in flying overalls, yellow lifejacket and parachute harness emerged from the hut, but it wasn’t Himmel’s radar operator. For a few paces he was obscured by the tail of another Junkers 88, but as he came round it they recognized Löwenherz. On this warm day none of the other flyers were wearing flying overalls. Like Himmel most wore lightweight helmets, shirts, shorts and lifejackets. It was just like Löwenherz to be in full flying gear.

‘What does the bloody Staffelkapitän want?’ said old Krugelheim. As if having a faulty fuel-line on Major Redenbacher’s machine wasn’t enough trouble for one day.