Battle Climb Read online

  Battle Climb

  Richard Townsend Bickers

  Copyright © Richard Townsend Bickers 1981

  The right of Richard Townsend Bickers be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1981 by Robert Hale Ltd.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Wendy and Mary

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  Extract from Bombing Run by Richard Townsend Bickers

  ONE

  The Spitfire tilted into a vertical dive and watchers twenty-five thousand feet below, their feet planted solidly on good Kentish chalk soil, watched for the kill. Some workmen mending the main road, which had been well battered by military traffic carrying troops to defend England against the imminent invasion, cheered. Here and there a farm worker paused as he carted hay or herded cows, wiped sweat from his brow and waited silently for the sweet moment when the diving Messerschmitt burst into flames. Two nursemaids, wheeling perambulators along a shady lane, stopped their chattering to stand intent with hands shielding eyes, exclaiming in excitement and admiration. Fighter pilots were their paragons. An invitation to a sergeants’ mess dance at Longley, the local airfield, was the apogee of their aspirations. Beery kisses and fumbling in dark corners with sergeant pilots was the subject of their frequent gigglingly exchanged confidences. They had seen aircraft shot down before and each time it was more thrilling than the pictures.

  Leading Aircraftwoman Ann Oldfield, who was a fighter plotter in the Operations Room at R. A.F. Longley, off-duty and sunbathing in a swimming costume behind the former airmen’s married quarters where she was billeted, remained lying on her tummy but raised herself on one arm and shaded her eyes with the other hand.

  She knew, which none of these other watchers did, that there was probably not going to be a Jerry flamer to delight their eyes. She had heard from talk among the pilots how frustrating it was that when they put a Spitfire or Hurricane into a vertical dive, gravity caused temporary fuel starvation: whereas the enemy’s fighters had fuel injection, which kept their Messerschmitt 109s’ and 110s’ Daimler-Benz engines running without hesitation. Those few seconds’ drop in the British fighters’ speed often made the critical difference between success and failure, life and death, a victory for the R.A.F. or escape for the Luftwaffe.

  Flying Officer Clive Upton said a loud “Damn!” although his radio-telephone was switched to receive, so there was no one to hear and share his annoyance.

  Lieutenant Werner Hintsch, in the Me 109, forced his head round against the pull of gravity to stare over his left shoulder at his pursuer, and grinned. There was no bitter malice in his grin; more the sort of mockery that any sportsman shows towards a discomfited opponent. Hintsch fancied himself as a middleweight boxer and felt about his adversary now as he did when he ducked under a straight left and jumped in with a hook to the guts. Only there wasn’t going to be any counter-punch this time, because he wasn’t going to hang around. His Gruppe’s 45 aircraft, and 100 others, had escorted a hundred Heinkel 111 and Dornier 17 bombers on a raid against airfields and radar stations in Kent and Sussex. They had been split up by Hurricanes and Spitfires. Hintsch had used nearly all his ammunition, reckoned he had shot down a Hurricane and damaged another, and had no petrol to spare either. He wanted to get home as quickly as he could.

  Upton had taken off on his third sortie of the day when his squadron, with twelve aircraft still serviceable, had been scrambled to intercept the raid. As he had told Roy Taylor and Tom Dellow, who had been his Numbers Two and Three before they parted company in the dogfight, he was brassed off that afternoon. He had fought two 109s on the first sortie, and both had got away from him when they dived at ninety degrees and he tried to follow them. On the second sortie, he had fired several bursts at a He 111, and although he had silenced the rear gunner and stopped its port engine, oil spraying from it had been flung onto his windscreen and temporarily obscured his view. He had last seen the bomber turning back for its base and diving to the safety of a lower altitude. He had then fired at another and seen chunks fly off various parts of it, but when he went for the kill at a hundred yards his guns ran out of ammunition.

  He was determined not to let this last chance of the day elude him. He had been flying five miles inland, parallel with the coast, after another inconclusive dogfight in which his section of three had dispersed a dozen fighters and bombers, when he spotted what he was looking for: a lone 109 on its way back to base.

  He dropped on it in a classic curve of pursuit and opened fire at two hundred yards. The Jerry, Upton thought, had been dozing, for his first burst slammed into the 109’s fuselage and tail unit before its pilot did anything about it. Then he tipped into the usual ninety-degree dive and Upton followed; but to compensate for the delay when his engine inevitably cut, he headed off to one side; cunningly. The German would have to cross his nose again to make the coast. Then he would get him.

  And he very nearly did. Both pilots had the same problem with icing inside their windscreens. As they lost altitude at over four hundred miles an hour both were clawing with one gloved hand to clear a patch through which they could see.

  Hintsch saw a cloud between him and the English Channel, and made for it. They were down to twelve thousand feet by now and although Upton had not gained on his enemy he was confident that when the German turned he would close the gap by holding a straight line. Through the small space he had also cleared in his windscreen he saw the Me 109 bank and muttered “Good show.” But then he saw the cloud and said something else, quite different, that would have made pretty Ann Oldfield blush if she had heard it.

  The 109 was three hundred yards away, Upton estimated, when it cut across his front; his guns were harmonised to converge at two hundred and fifty yards. He had about four seconds in which to fire before the target disappeared: it would have to emerge a mile or two beyond the coast, because the cloud only extended that far; but it might pop out any old where.

  Upton opened fire, saw smoke whip back from the diving Me 109 in the split second before it plunged into cloud, and said another bad word. He flew through the cloud, making a beeline for the nearest part of the Channel. When he came out of cloud he saw the sun glinting on his Me 109 flying just above the water, hopelessly far ahead of him; but still emitting glycol smoke. Resignedly he decided that the blighter would probably make it back to France, for he could now afford to climb high enough to glide there if he had to.

  Upton turned away, set course for Longley and lost height to fly below the scattered clouds. The hop gardens and orchards of Kent looked changeless and inviolable but the open fields were strewn with tall posts on which to impale enemy paratroops and gliders if the threatened invasion did come. England, thought Upton affectionately, looked her snug self; but those damned stakes were as great a nuisance to the R.A.F. as to the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht. Several pilots on the three squadrons — two Hurricane and one Spitfire — based at Longley had had good reason to deplore them. He himself, coming back from battle a few days earlier with an engine faltering by courtesy of a Me 109’s cannon shells, had lost power altogether at two thousand feet when approaching the airfield circuit and had been lucky to scrape over the boundary hedge: literally, for his wheels had scooped a swath of foliage from it. Further along, the hedge gave way to fencing and he ha
d narrowly missed being tripped by barbed wire. If he had approached from another side he would have been snarled up in telephone wires. And all because he could not make a forced landing in a field. Those anti-airborne assault obstacles and the concrete dragons’ teeth planted in other open places to stop tanks were, the Longley Wing pilots agreed, carrying war a bit too far.

  It was bad enough to have the Local Defence Volunteers or Home Guard, or whatever they called themselves now, assuming every baled-out airman must be a German and lusting to shoot or bayonet him, without the added risk of a sharpened, earth-embedded, stout vertical pole up one’s backside.

  ***

  Arthur Goldsmith, landlord of the Angel, R.A.F. Longley’s favourite local, was pottering in his saloon bar getting ready for opening time at six. With double summer time, two hours ahead of Greenwich, it was hot and sunny at half past five and he was opening the windows wider when he saw a Spitfire coming in to land.

  He and Maidie, his wife, always tried to count the fighters taking off on what must obviously be a scramble and to count those which returned. They had seen twelve Spitfires and twelve Hurricanes take off an hour earlier. Eleven Spits and ten Hurris had so far come back. Time was running out. He called “Maidie: here’s the last of the Spit boys.”

  His large, rubicund face was shiny from exertion in the heat. Maidie, as portly as her husband and flushed from tending her garden at the back of the pub, bustled in and stood beside him. “Yes, I heard it. That’s all right, then. I expect the Hurricanes had to forced-land somewhere, don’t you?”

  How could he be expected to know? he asked himself; but he nodded and said “Yes, I expect that’s it.”

  They knew all the pilots on the wing by sight and most of them by name. In the past three months, ever since the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland on 10th May and the fighting in France broke out so fiercely, many of those faces had gone for ever. They tried to comfort each other until they were confronted with the truth. “Is Jim coming in this evening?” they would ask some pilot. Or Tom, Dick, Harry or Nobby. All too often the answer would be a headshake or a cryptic “He’s not back yet” or “He bought it this afternoon” or “Missing”.

  Arthur and Maidie Goldsmith lingered at the window and searched the sky. They were both in their fifties and he was tall and barrel-shaped while she was much shorter and round as a butterball. Arthur wore a Royal Flying Corps tie day in and day out: he had been an Orderly Room sergeant with a fighter squadron in France from 1915 to 1918 and even the boisterous, scoffing young pilots of 1940 were willing to listen to his reminiscences of Albert Ball and Micky Mannock, of Lanoe Hawker who used to shoot down enemy aircraft with a .300 single-shot deer-stalking rifle held in a bracket and aimed to clear the propeller of his BE 2, of von Richthofen the Red Baron, and the great French pilot Guynemer.

  Arthur spoke of them quite unselfconsciously, for before he transferred to his safe job in the R.F.C. he had been a Territorial Army infantryman: a fistful of machinegun bullets in the right leg had left him with a stiff knee and a medical down-grading that kept him out of the trenches or the air. He made that perfectly plain to all new acquaintances; he had done his bit and was proud of it. If he and Maidie had had any sons they would have been ashamed if they, too, had not volunteered to fight. They had none and looked on every pilot who came to their public house as a son.

  “I’m glad all the Spits are back, anyway,” Maidie said again. “I expect we’ll see the last two Hurricanes turn up presently. “

  “I expect so, dear.”

  “Come and have tea, then. I’ll put the kettle on while you wash. He let me have a nice ham this afternoon.” “He” was a regular customer who farmed locally, and for every pig he slaughtered legally killed another clandestinely: which helped his friends as well as his tax-evasion.

  “He’ll land himself in trouble one of these days,” said Arthur; he always said that. He went upstairs to spruce himself up, swinging his stiff leg and singing “Run, Rabbit, Run”: probably some association of ideas with the ham, for he set rabbit traps in the fields and woods; he and Maidie were very fond of curried rabbit and jugged hare.

  Ann Oldfield had not counted how many aircraft were scrambled. She was asleep in the sun when they took off. Their noise woke her but by the time she sat up they were out of sight. The Operations Room crews were on three watches, which meant that they worked varied shifts for forty-eight hours and then had a twenty-four-hour stand-down. Ann had come off duty at 1300 hours and after lunch had, with some other girls, come straight out to lie on the tatty little lawn in front of their A.M.Q. billet and improve their tan while they dozed.

  For a nineteen-year-old, life in the W.A.A.F. on a fighter station in the south-east of England was high adventure. The girls who worked in the Ops Room were intimately involved in the battles fought almost daily by the squadrons on the wing. Many of them were romantically involved as well. They knew which pilots were ordered off and what their tasks were; they plotted the track of every enemy encroachment and every defending fighter formation or singleton, on the big general situation map table that filled most of the Ops Room floor; they heard much of the R/T conversation, through loudspeakers, between the operations controllers and the fighter leaders or individual pilots. They knew instantly when anyone was shot down and sometimes they heard his dying words.

  They danced with the pilots at the twice-weekly all-ranks dances in the N.A.A.F.I.; and the pilots visited the Ops Room from time to time to watch the procedure and learn to understand the controllers’ problems: also, to cast an eye over the girls. About the controllers’ problems they didn’t care very much: they could not in any event be anything like as great as their own problems, they considered. Sometimes, in fact, their problem was the controller!

  Ann had seen Clive Upton for the first time when she went to the Angel one evening on a double date with the girl who shared her room, and two Hurricane pilots. The Spitfire squadron had arrived at Longley that morning and had come in full pilot strength to make its number at the local pub. The reputations of the half-timbered, Tudor Angel Inn and of its landlord and his wife, had spread throughout 11 Group of Fighter Command, the group which covered south-east England. It was not the only favourite pub of such renown: as squadrons and individual airmen moved around on postings, good names were spread. Arthur and Maidie Goldsmith had been at the Angel for ten years and were well known to the R.A.F. long before 3rd September 1939. With the outbreak of war and the embodiment of the Auxiliary Air Force and the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, added to new recruitment and the call-up of regular reservists, the Angel had become crowded day and night and better known than ever. It was a natural first port of call for new arrivals at Longley.

  Ann met Clive’s eye across the ten feet of packed space that separated them. She stopped chatting to her escort and Clive broke off an animated conversation with two of his comrades. They stared at each other for several seconds, while she slowly blushed and he slowly began smiling. She jerked her head around to face her Hurricane boy again, but when she sneaked a look at Upton, he, although talking again, had not taken his eyes off her. Once more she looked self-consciously away.

  It was ridiculous, she told herself. There was nothing particularly arresting about this stranger; he was taller than most of the others in the room — that was why they had had a clear view of each other, she looking up and he looking over everyone’s heads — but he was lanky and rather slouching. He had straight, straw-coloured hair, longish, bunched above the ears. His features were sharp, with a prominent nose and chin and his ears protruded a bit. His stance suggested that he was casual and a trifle lazy, the sort of man who would drawl; but he laughed a lot as she watched him covertly and he seemed to speak rapidly in urgent bursts. As though he were firing his guns, she thought fancifully. There were no brass “A” or “VR” badges on his lapels, so he was obviously a regular. He was a flying officer, so he must have four or five years’ service: say, twenty-two years old. Un
less, of course, he wasn’t a short service commission type but a Cranwell graduate, in which event he would have had quicker promotion and be a year or so younger.

  She was not surprised when he spoke, over her head, to the pilot officer who had brought her. She knew instinctively whose voice it must be and deliberately refrained from turning to look.

  The quick-fire voice said “Hello, Timber, how are things?”

  Pilot Officer Wood, at her side, looked up and feigned astonishment. “Clive!” He pretended to search around. “Talking to me? I’m only a Hurricane type, you know.”

  Upton grinned. “Funny ass.”

  Timber Wood turned, with assumed resignation, to Ann. “This is a bad type called Clive Upton... Ann Woodman. We were on the same station a couple of years ago when his squadron still had Hurricanes. He’s quite a good type, actually.” Pilot Officer Wood sounded as though he meant it. “Good to see you again, Clive.”

  Ann turned, smiled, said “Hello” and noticed that Clive Upton had blue eyes.

  The next evening there was a dance in the N.A.A.F.I., she was off duty from 1700 hrs until midnight, and he had danced persistently — and not very well — with her; then invited her out to dinner on her next stand-off.

  That was two months ago and she seldom went out with anyone else now. As far as she knew, neither did he.

  She was going out with him this evening and when he came in to land almost directly overhead and no more than a hundred feet up, and waggled his wings in tribute to the group of scantily-clad sunbathers, she recognised the letter of the aeroplane he usually flew and felt a sudden lessening of a tension of which she had not been aware.

  TWO

  Lieutenant Werner Hintsch watched the oil pressure gauge drop rapidly. He had four thousand feet of altitude and the French coast, west of Calais, was two miles away. If he baled out he could paddle ashore in his dinghy or he might be picked up by a rescue launch. If he alighted on the sea he could also be found by one of the launches. If his engine cut he would barely have time to reach his base, so perhaps it would be better to bale out at once or ditch than risk a heavy crash on land.