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

‘Good day to you, Feldwebel Herr Doktor.’

‘Good day, my dear Baron.’

Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_1bbba226-2893-5ad5-bc0d-62382c826052)

The teleprinters in the Operations Block had been clattering since lunchtime. The message from HQ Bomber Command had gone to the Group HQs and from there the messages reached the airfields including Warley Fen.

CONFIRMING TELEPHONED ORDERS FOLLOWING ARE EXECUTIVE ORDERS FOR THE NIGHT OF JUNE 31ST, 1943

There followed a gibberish of abbreviations and code words that defined the nature of the attack. Flare colours, air and ground marking, cascade heights and times, turning-points, assembly areas, bombing heights and times, bomb-loads and Met forecasts giving the predicted winds at the bombing heights and conditions at base airfields at the time of return.

Hurriedly the technical officers began to build the plan into lectures and diagrams that would constitute the afternoon briefing. Flight Lieutenant Giles, the Bombing Leader; Flight Lieutenant Ludlow, the Navigation Leader; and John Munro, the Squadron commander, conferred. The Meteorological expert expressed the doubts that forecasters always have about other men’s predictions.

The executive orders were as yet communicated only to those who had to know. As an added security precaution, the guardroom had been told to close the main gate and forbid personnel to leave the airfield except with the written permission of the Station Adjutant. In spite of the gaping holes in the perimeter fence the embargo was observed by everyone – partly because there was so much work to do that no one could find an opportunity to get away for a lunchtime beer in the Bell.

Deprived of the noise and movement of the airmen, the village became as quiet as the airfield was busy. When an attack was being prepared even the public bar of the Bell maintained a decorous sobriety.

Cynthia Radlett, the barmaid, had wiped the tables, rinsed and polished the glasses, fetched more bottled stout from the cellar and swept the floor. She looked enviously at the four farmers who had been drinking and gossiping ever since lunchtime. Now it was almost opening time again. Those who complained of women chattering could never have listened to farmers’ talk. It was a good thing that the village policeman was busy out on the green facing Mr Wate’s spin bowling, or he’d be complaining about them drinking after closing time. At last one of the men came to the bottom of his glass. He put it down with a sigh and wiped his lips.

‘Beans I told him, put in beans. Anything else and the wire-worm will eat them.’ The three men nodded and stole a glance at Ben Thorpe.

Old Ben’s voice was rasping and slow. ‘Ten Acre was always full of wireworm.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to walk up to Parson’s Meadow, Ben?’

‘Nah,’ said the old man and blew his nose loudly. They could not tell how upset he was, for an old man’s eyes are always wet.

‘After the war you’ll never know the difference.’

‘Nah,’ snorted Ben. ‘It’s the finest piece of grazing for a hundred mile. My dad weeded it and dunged it himself for nigh on fifty years and his dad afore.’ The old man was crying now, there could be no doubt of it. ‘I shan’t watch them plough her up and sow their damned ’taters there. I’ll not live to see her back to grazing again.’

‘Weorf’ is the old English word for draught animal. Warley meant a place where such animals could graze. Now the War Agricultural Committees had given grazing to the plough and one of the few patches of grassland left was the lower end of Trimmer’s Meadow that the village used as its cricket field. Today it was only a knockabout match, but towards opening time a small crowd of airmen and villagers gathered outside the Bell. They applauded the batsmen, advised the bowlers and dozed in the afternoon sun.

No previous cricket season could equal this one: Royal Engineers Norwich Depot versus RAF Warley, A Flight versus the village; teams from all over East Anglia came to play cricket on the green, shove-ha’penny and darts in the public bar and drink the Bell’s warm bitter. The cricket pitch was smooth and flat, although since it was slightly below sea level it was muddy in wet weather. The RAF had sent carpenters to rebuild the old scoreboard and the Station artist – LAC Gilbert – had supervised its repainting. Sammy Thatcher’s shed had been moved and rebuilt. Although it could only hold one team at a time, there were no smiles when it was referred to as the pavilion.

Today Bill Beacham, village policeman and domino champion, was the last man batting for the scratch team the village had put up. He hadn’t scored for nearly a quarter of an hour but none of Mr Wate’s spinners daunted him and he stonewalled with grim determination. The war had brought Police Constable Beacham promotion to sergeant and when the RAF moved in he had been officially told to ‘cooperate with the RAF police in matters affecting Service discipline and national security’. There was even talk of him having a police constable to help him. ‘Help him home from here on a Saturday night,’ said Cynthia, and everyone laughed because like most good jokes it wasn’t a joke at all.

The Group Captain proudly boasted of an unbroken record of friendship between his airmen and the people of the village. Like most official thinking, the Group Captain’s was purely negative. He meant that there were no instances on paper of physical, social or legal hostilities. On the other hand there was no great affection either. When a villager announced the arrival of a lorryful of airmen outside the Bell with the remark, ‘Here come the Wehrmacht,’ this too was a joke that wasn’t a joke.

There was still another half-hour before the Bell was officially open, but Cynthia took a pint of bitter outside to where Sam Thatcher was working at the base of the ancient oak tree that marked the boundary line.

‘How is it going?’ asked Cynthia.

Sam took the head off his pint before answering. ‘Same as that tree behind Percy’s house. It’s rotten inside.’

‘What a shame.’ She wiped her wet hands on her apron.

‘It’s getting old, Cynthia. It’s probably stood here for a hundred and fifty years or more.’ Sam had been drilling deep into the tree and pushing bonemeal mixtures into it to feed the wood. He put down his glass and finished plugging up a hole.

‘Will that save it?’

‘It will give her another fifty years, Cynthia.’

‘You’d better do my guv’nor after you’ve finished this tree.’

‘Now, now,’ said Sam Thatcher, ‘don’t start.’ He had no wish to be drawn into the feud between Cynthia and her employer. He looked across the pitch to where Police Sergeant Beacham was still blocking the frantic bowling, and beyond him to the airfield. ‘They’re off again tonight.’

‘Looks like.’

‘And that old wind’s going to change,’ said Sam.

‘Rain?’

‘No, not yet awhile, or my feet would tell me. But during the night that wind will swing round and they’ll be coming in right over our heads just about the time I’m turning over.’

‘Don’t say that, Mr Thatcher. I can’t get back to sleep when they wake me.’

There was a flutter of applause as Bill Beacham was clean bowled.

‘What I don’t understand’, said Cynthia Radlett, ‘is what they do all day. I mean, they don’t go raiding until after we close at night. I know they have to test their aeroplanes in the morning but what do they do there all day?’

‘They have to work out their navigation and decide where to drop their bombs. They do a lot of talking up there at the aerodrome.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Cynthia Radlett, ‘but it’s terrible for our business when they go off raiding.’ It was five-thirty. She walked back to the Bell and started serving drinks.

The most literary and sophisticated officer at Warley Fen was, by common consent, Flying Officer Longfellow. He was, appropriately enough, the Intelligence Officer. A tall blue-eyed man of thirty-eight, in his youth he had been an amateur boxer of some repute at Cambridge where he studied classics. After Cambridge he had worked on a small newspaper in the Midlands and graduated from that to a national daily. He had never excelled at news-gathering but had always been able to provide, at short notice, a couple of thousand words on the College of Cardinals (at the death of a Pope), helium (airship disaster), or surrealism (record price at Sotheby’s). Nor was Longfellow too proud to cover a wedding or review a film. In 1936 he left the newspaper’s full-time staff and went to live in Cornwall. He became the science correspondent. A few thousand words a month earned enough money to keep himself, his young wife and two kids in a small cottage with a view of the sea while he laboured on a book. It was a murder mystery, set in a Cornish tin mine, and although he modestly referred to it as a whodunit he had inserted the description ‘a psychological study in depth of the mind of the criminally insane’ into the publisher’s blurb. The Scotsman found it promising, The Observer thought it had grip, but a left-wing weekly said that ‘hand-made, and thus readily identified, cigarette ends have become a careless vice among the sort of villains who people this year’s mediocre detective fiction’. He was stuck halfway through a sequel about a carefully organized bank robbery when the war began. Longfellow volunteered.

An Intelligence Officer’s special responsibility was the Briefing Room. At Warley Fen it was a large wooden hut that could seat one hundred and fifty aircrew on benches. There was a stage at one end and behind it a map of Europe that stretched the width of the hut. Covering the map there was a red curtain that swept aside at the pull of a string. It had become usual for the Station commander to pull the string.

Along each side of the hut there were windows. They should have been shuttered at briefing time but lately the weather had been so fine and warm that they’d been left open. There were the usual ‘Careless talk costs lives’ posters and a notice board with Intelligence memos fastened to it with bright red pins. Specially arranged by Flying Officer Longfellow were the ‘This is your enemy’ displays: photos and three-view drawings of Bf110 and Junkers 88 night fighters as well as some speculative Air Ministry diagrams of what the newer German fighter planes might look like.

From the ceiling hung models of both enemy and Allied aircraft, each one clearly marked with its designation and wing span. Then there was the Accident Board with photos of aeroplanes drunkenly askew after sliding off the runway or with a prop blade eating up a tailplane after a taxiing collision. At one side of the stage there was the easel standing ready for the Met Department’s Cloud Board (icing cloud in red, non-icing cloud in blue, all stacked to show altitudes). On the other side of the stage, reaching to the ceiling, there was the Photo Ladder. This didn’t denote a proficiency in photography but showed the accuracy of the bombing, bomb explosions being plotted from the flashlight photo that each bomber took as its bomb-load landed. Lambert’s crew were in the top quarter of the ladder but Flight Lieutenant Sweet’s crew were well down.

Longfellow was proud of this Briefing Room upon which he and his clerks had spent so much time and energy. It embodied all the freshness and appeal of a commercial display or a newspaper layout. It was kept up to date every day and on the notice board there were a world map and a bulletin with a first-class summary of the war on all fronts, as well as a note on yellow paper in which Longfellow attempted to predict the strategic aspirations of the fighting powers. This supposition was clearly headed ‘Intelligence Guesswork’. Often during the day aircrew would wander into the Briefing Room, looking at the new displays or leafing through newspapers or copies of Flight, Aeroplane Spotter, Tee Em or one of the other technical magazines. Longfellow often claimed, ‘There’s not another Briefing Room in the whole of Bomber Command where the crews pop in and look round when there’s no briefing. Even if most of them only want to see Jane in the Daily Mirror, doze for half an hour and scrounge a coffee, by the time they wander out again they could have seen something that will save their lives.’

Cosily full of bacon, beans and fried eggs – a rare luxury – none of them now dozed. The room was full with the crews of all sixteen bombers. The men, sitting stiffly upright and white-faced with tension, were waiting for permission to smoke. As the time of danger approached men grew lonely and the flyers were dividing into their assigned crews. They exchanged comments and smiles with men they didn’t like and had only briefly seen since the previous operational flight four days earlier. For now men were drawing close, not to their friends but to six men who for the next few hours would share their good or fatal fortune.

Lambert’s two gunners for instance, Binty Jones and Flash Gordon, had a deadly feud dating from over two months before, but now they were exchanging jokes just as they’d done in the old days. They had met at the gunnery school and promised each other that they would insist on being in the same crew. They were thickset young men chosen, like most air gunners, for the short stature that enabled them to fit into the power-operated turrets. Flash was a dark-complexioned, gap-toothed Nottingham miner, a real pitman who’d worked at the coalface on the trickiest seam. His hair was very long and with the aid of generous amounts of hair cream he arranged it in long shiny arabesques. For fear of disturbing its patterns he would avoid wearing a uniform cap. His liking for gold-plated identity chains, skull-and-crossbone rings and white silk scarves and his unmilitary bearing had given him his nickname. He shared it with a strip-cartoon hero of the same patronymic. His wide mouth smiled easily. Digby had said, ‘He hasn’t got a mouth but a small hinge on the back of his neck.’ He was, in fact, proud of his white teeth. In spite of being exempt from military service he’d volunteered on his twenty-first birthday. He hated the pit; his only ambition was to survive the war and get an office job with a local tobacco factory. He was a cheerful boy with lots of energy and endless questions. He always wanted to know what his fellow airmen did in civvy street and he was not too shy to ask how much they earned doing it. Flash Gordon manned the rear gun turret.

Binty, a Welsh milkman – Jones the Milk – was also twenty-one. He usually manned the mid-upper turret, although a few times when Flash had a head-cold they swapped. Flash often got head-colds because, he said, the rear turret heater didn’t work properly.

Binty had joined the RAF when he was seventeen, which made him a peacetime airman by a few weeks. He believed that the superiority of the peacetime recruit was manifested by his very short hair, shiny boots and buttons, and razor pleats that he made by treating the inside of each crease with a layer of soap. His smartness was thus virtually unique among the aircrew NCOs. He was not beyond reprimanding airmen and even corporals for minor faults like having a pocket unbuttoned. This made him very unpopular.

He affected the old soldier’s vocabulary, sprinkled with mispronounced Arabic and adapted Hindi. Bint was his word for young girl and he used it frequently, for in spite of an unappealing face he was a womanizer of renown. He had quick eyes and a brain which he described as shrewd but which the rest of his crew knew was cunning. However, none of them would allow an outsider to describe Binty Jones as cunning and they all appreciated that his cleanliness and efficiency extended not only to his sex-life and motorbike but also to his Browning machine guns. Artfully he had laid a claim to the upper turret for which there were only two guns.

Binty and Flash had flown fifteen operations, all with Lambert. They had been close pals for nearly a year; drinking, whoring, fighting, and sharing girlfriends, gunnery exam answers, cigarettes and a 350-cc BSA motorcyle, until they had met a woman named Rose in a pub in Peterborough. Her husband was a corporal in the Eighth Army fighting in the desert. Flash Gordon said they shouldn’t see her any more but Binty said she was a sure thing and now spent more nights at her apartment than he did on the base. ‘No one can have their wives within forty miles of their base,’ said Binty, ‘but Station Standing Orders don’t say you can’t have someone else’s wife.’ The two gunners hated each other but now you would never have guessed it. Binty sat reading a tightly wadded Beano comic and nodding while Flash told him about a motorcycle that an electrician on A Flight wanted to sell for fifteen pounds. Flash admired Binty’s knowledge of motorcycles.

A fat fly buzzed and settled on Digby’s hand. Even a finger prodded at it failed to move it. ‘Lazy old bugger,’ said Digby.