Battle Climb Read online

  “Is that really all vou feel about it?”

  “I feel angry with the British all the time, for dragging this out when they could make an honourable peace and save a lot of lives... and limbs... it’s not always being killed that’s the worst... being burned or blinded would be worse.”

  Her grip tightened on his hand and she leaned closer to him. “Don’t talk like that, Werner.”

  He returned the pressure. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been at this game long enough to be able to look after myself.”

  “Touch wood when you say that.”

  “I have no superstitions: I got rid of them when I learned that a man makes his own luck. I only had six months in Spain, but it was long enough to teach me that. And I relearned the lesson in Poland... and again when we brought our blitzkrieg to France.”

  “I hope I’m lucky for you.” She looked directly into his eyes and gave him a loving smile.

  “Whatever that means. There’s one thing I do know: that you make me very excited. And I know another thing: I have to be up at first light.”

  “Then we had better go back to my place now, hadn’t we?”

  “I was going to ask if you’d like to go upstairs here; but if your place is all right…”

  THREE

  The bars in the Angel were full and overflowing onto the lawn at one side of the pub where, in the warm summer evening, it was pleasant to sit at one of the white-painted wooden tables. But the fun was indoors, where friends were packed together and no one complained about overcrowding.

  Ann watched Clive Upton fight his way back from the counter with a half-pint of shandy for her and a pint of bitter for himself, with Roy Taylor and Tom Dellow on his heels with their fresh pints. There can hardly be an officer or N.C.O. pilot left on the station, she was thinking, and hardly any ground officers either: this place must be a goldmine.

  Everyone always seemed to finish up here, wherever they had been; and if they were not going anywhere else first, they came straight here after dinner.

  Clive had taken her to dinner at a grander sort of pub a couple of miles down the road where they had eaten rather acidular tomato soup, a small portion of alleged steak, a trifle that could have been soggier, she supposed, but not much; and drunk tepid lager. Afterwards they had come on to the Angel as a matter of course. Clive’s dark green Morris Eight tourer was parked among the motley assortment of old cars that were characteristic of any pre-war and wartime R.A.F.station: most of them set out every evening grossly overladen with cheerful passengers and not a few had to be pushed or otherwise cajoled into starting at closing time. It was all part of the R.A.F. atmosphere and of the reasons why she was so fond of Clive Upton; and, to a lesser extent, of his colleagues.

  Roy and Tom also had WAAFs in tow, and carried the drinks for them that Upton had just bought: one shandy and one dashing gin and orange.

  Pilot Officer Taylor was sturdy, freckled and shy and the girl he had brought was as bold as brass and literally licking her lips as she devoured him with her eyes. She was known as Lusty Lois.

  Sergeant Dellow was tallish and thinnish and darkish and moustached. He had been a history teacher at a grammar school in the west country and had flown with the Volunteer Reserve in his abundant spare time. He was a bit of a thruster and thoroughly enjoying himself in the Service. His girl was a saucer-eyed Scot from Stirling who still thought drinking on Sundays was sinful and was destined to have her eyes opened even wider by the eager Sergeant Pilot Tom Dellow. This was not a Sunday, but her nose twitched as though she could detect a trace of sulphur and brimstone in the air while she swigged her shandy-gaff. To the squadrons she was known as Hands-off, which had no allusion to driving or flying, but referred to her Calvinistic attitude to amorous advances, even of the mildest kind. It was nicely alliterative with her name, Helen. Hands-off Helen presented a titillating challenge to the ex-schoolmaster and dormant lecher in Sergeant Dellow.

  “So what’s been going on in 11 Group today?” asked Upton. “You girls are the only ones with all the gen... you Ops. Room types.”

  “You know we came off watch at one-o’clock,” Ann reminded him.

  “We don’t even know what happened before one-o’clock,” Upton retorted. “Except from our own distinctly narrow point of view.”

  “Obscured, in some instances, by oil on windscreens,” said Taylor.

  “Careless Talk Costs Lives... Walls Have Ears,” said Lois, all bust and lust, quoting the posters with which the whole country was plastered.

  “Quite right, Lois,” Upton agreed. “But, looking round, I can’t see even one civilian within earshot... and only about half a dozen of ‘em in the whole place. So what’s been going on?”

  “We didn’t come out to talk shop,” Lois rebuked him.

  “We were gey busy,” Helen confided quietly, rolling her eyes around towards Upton. “And the girls on duty this afternoon said they nearly went crazy, too.”

  “Don’t let’s talk about it then,” said Upton. “That was not what I wanted to hear. Haven’t you girls got any nice, juicy gossip for us?”

  Ann, quiet at his side, watched him and worried for him. He kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other, drumming his fingers on his tankard, looking round the room. There were shadows under his eyes. Young though she was she recognised the signs of strain and tiredness and suppressed anxiety beneath all the nonsense of his chatter.

  She said, laughing although she didn’t feel much like it, “You are the gossip, Clive: all the rumours on the station are about what the squadrons have been doing that day.”

  “How depressing. I’m looking forward to the day when you girls are going to say ‘absolutely nothing’ when I ask you what’s been going on. That’s what I want to hear.”

  Don’t we all, thought Ann: a nice, quiet day with no hostile tracks on the table. And not just a reprieve but a permanent state of peace.

  Roy Taylor said “Jerry’ll get fed up with it pretty soon. Then you’ll complain because you’re bored.”

  “I might complain after I’ve had about a week’s sleep, but not before,” Upton told him.

  “Then you’d better not have a late night tonight,” said Ann.

  Lois put her thick lips close to Roy’s ear, he felt her warm breath. She whispered, with a giggle, “Are you ready for an early night, too, Roy ?”

  He turned and gave her his habitual expressionless look. “That depends what you mean.”

  “I meant,” she whispered again with another giggle, “are you tired?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Helen, watching this exchange but unable to overhear it, gave Tom Dellow a troubled look.

  “Not to worry,” he said cheerfully, “I’m feeling just about on my knees, like Clive. At closing time, I’ll be off to my bunk like a streak of lightning.”

  Helen set a precedent by touching him. She put a hand on his arm and said gently, “You need an early night, Tom: we’ll leave now, if you like.”

  Sergeant Dellow thought that if there were any chance of a stop-off in an air raid shelter or behind a hay stack, or even parked somewhere in his car, he’d be ready enough to go now and sacrifice a final pint; but he said, “No hurry: if we leave sharp at ten I’ll get my beauty sleep in.

  They filed out when Arthur Goldsmith called “Time, gentlemen, please,” without demur. They had had a couple of hours’ relaxation, enough to banish, for the time being at least, the unpleasant realities of the day and the morrow.

  Ten minutes after leaving the Angel the three young men and their girls had parted and gone their separate ways.

  ***

  While Oberstleutnant Otto von Brauneck and his bosom chum Major Sepp von Handorf relaxed in deep armchairs with their brandy and cigars, growing pleasantly elevated with the illusion of lucidity that good wine induces; while Leutnant Werner Hintsch and Hiltrud Kirschstein made love on the outsize bed in her comfortable suite in the chateau; while Pilot Officers Clive Upton and Roy Taylor,
Sergeant Tom Dellow, and Leading Aircraftwoman Ann Oldfield and her two Acw colleagues, Lois and Helen, exchanged a mild goodnight kiss or two: Oberleutnant Lothar Kreft and Unteroffizier Fritz Voss were also taking their pleasures.

  First Lieutenant Kreft and Sergeant Voss were pilot and radio operator, respectively, of a Ju 87 dive bomber in the Stuka Geschwader commanded by von Hohndorf.

  Both, in common with most bomber crews, were older than the average fighter pilot. Kreft, at twenty-seven, was a serious-minded student of literature, music and painting. In his spare time he preferred to read, listen to music, try to write poetry or a stylish war diary, or attempt bold little sketches and oil paintings of what he had seen from the air, to going out drinking or wenching. He was tall, spare, with a prominent nose and crinkly ginger hair.

  Voss was thirty, married, with two children. He had been a butcher by trade many years ago; and often thought that he still was: particularly when he and his pilot had been forced to machine-gun and bomb defenceless refugees on the packed roads of France that May and June, or to attack British and French hospitals clearly marked with a red cross. He spent his evenings writing to his wife or playing chess or cards; and once a fortnight visited a local brothel for the sake of his health: and went to confession the next day for the sake of his soul. He was a friendly man, but shy, with a good sense of humour evident in his bright blue eyes, too fat for his modest stature.

  This evening, Kreft had a lot to write in his diary. He was more than a little surprised at still being alive to do it.

  He had fought in Poland, but the old-fashioned, high-winged PZL 11c fighters of the Polish Air Force had scarcely troubled the Luftwaffe and were soon taken out of the battle by Messerschmitt 109s and 110s. In the Blitzkrieg on France he had had some bad scares from Allied anti-aircraft batteries, from French Morane and Potez fighters; and, worst of all, from R.A.F. Hurricanes. But nothing had compared with the reception he and his comrades had had on their attacks on England; and, above all, that afternoon.

  He counted himself lucky that he had been called upon only once during the day, for the Geschwader had made three raids across the Channel between dawn and dusk.

  His recollections of the attack on one of the fighter airfields in Kent were a patchwork of swift incidents, each of them frightening. The Stukas had suffered heavy casualties and the damage they had done did not, in Kreft’s view, compensate for the toll the British had taken.

  They had been intercepted before they even crossed the coast. It was only because there were eighty-seven bombers, a mixture of Dornier 17s and Junkers 87s, with exactly one hundred Me 109 and 110 fighters, against thirty-six Spitfires and Hurricanes, that the raid had not been turned back over the white cliffs. Another fifty or so British fighters awaited the Germans inland.

  These also tore into the raiders with great ferocity and skill; but, again, weight of numbers allowed the greater part of the bomber force to survive.

  Twice, aircraft flying immediately on Kreft’s wing had been shot down and both times pieces of their debris had rattled against his aircraft’s fuselage.

  Over the target airfield, the British fighters had held back while the ack-ack opened up. That had been even worse, because when they started their dive, the radio operators, who were also rear gunners, could not help in defence. And the pilots had to hold their dives without deviating. Kreft, who knew better than to think in such hackneyed terms, still could find no more vivid way of describing it than what he wrote in his diary: “like flying into the jaws of hell”.

  To right and left of him Stukas were hit and burst into flames. Ahead and behind, others were breaking up in mid-air or dropping — “like torches”, he wrote — before they could bomb, their pilots dead.

  Suddenly the airfield defences became silent and the fighters swept in to pick off the Stukas at their most vulnerable moment: as they pulled out of their dives. Kreft saw four more of his comrades blown to bits in that way.

  He put the diary aside and stood up to go to the table where he kept his painting materials. He would try to depict that moment over the target when he had been about to release his bombs. The details were vivid in his mind. Such a picture deserved a dramatic title. The Graveyard of Our Hopes? That sounded final, as though it were the last attempt to subjugate the R.A.F. And, unfortunately, it was not the last attempt by any means; they would have to go through it all again, many times. The Flames of Battle? There were plenty of flames, all right: from the antiaircraft gun muzzles, the Stuka’s own front machine-gun ports, the bomb-bursts, the burning buildings and aircraft around the aerodrome, the stricken Stukas.

  Kreft decided to paint the picture first and think of a title later.

  Unteroffizier Voss crouched over a table in a corner of the sitting room in the requisitioned house where the senior N. C.O.s messed. On a chess board in front of him the pieces were set out in a pattern he had taken from a book of chess problems. He was constantly trying to improve his game: his objective was to beat the only two men on the squadron who defeated him every time he played them. He tried to concentrate on the dummy game but his mind kept drifting to the glum thought that it didn’t look as though his chances of living to secure those two much desired victories were very good.

  If the day’s operation had been discouraging for his pilot, it had been even less pleasant for him. Although he was of a fairly placid temperament, he often wished his fate were not so much in the hands of another man. He felt helpless when anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters shot at them and Oberleutnant Kreft flew steadily on while all his own instincts shrieked for evasive action. When he could fire his 7.92 mm gun in their defence it gave him such relief and satisfaction that, although he did not know it, he wore a fixed grin. When all the other Stukas around him were also firing, so that all of them had the benefit of the combined weight of their rear guns, it was a fine sight and he had helped to bring down more than one attacking fighter in that way.

  In a dive, Kreft would fire the two 7.92 mm machine-guns in the wings to discourage the ground gunners or to strafe vehicles, buildings; and sometimes men, women and children. Voss wished he could do that too, and sometimes he had the opportunity when they climbed away after an attack. But he never voluntarily fired on civilians. The only times he had done that were in France during the summer Blitzkrieg, under orders. It haunted him so much that although he had received absolution for it long ago he still confessed to it every fortnight. He hoped to God he would not be forced to do it again over England.

  He found it difficult to cross the gap in rank and social status between himself and his pilot. He wished he could ask him outright how he felt about some of the things they had had to do. Kreft, with his love of the arts, must surely be as sensitive as he himself was to the sanctity of human life and the outrage of bombing and strafing refugees and hospitals. Bombing a building with a red cross on it was hideous enough, but when they machine-gunned a field hospital under canvas it was nothing short of an offence against the Holy Ghost. What chance could already sick and wounded men stand against bullets ripping through a tent?

  Voss gave up trying to solve the chess problem; and the other problems that were matters of conscience. He drained the glass of red wine that stood beside the chess board, then went to have it refilled; and when he had drunk that he would have another... and another...

  He didn’t feel in the mood to write to his wife this evening.

  FOUR

  At half past three in the morning the duty batmen woke the officer and N.C.O. pilots of the Longley Wing.

  Upton lay for a few moments with his eyes shut against the light his batman had switched on. This was the time of day he most disliked. Never by nature an early riser, always resentful of being forced out of bed by the first bell during his schooldays, he could never brace himself to accept the inevitable by leaving his bed immediately he woke. Presently he sat up and drank the cup of tea that was cooling on his bedside table.

  Every day held many unpleasant
moments, but he faced none more reluctantly than the wrench from sound sleep.

  There was the waiting at dispersals for the telephone in the crew hut to ring and someone to shout “Scramble!” Sometimes there were instructions to amplify the curt order: a compass course and height, or an orbit point. “Scramble one-eight-zero, make angels twenty... Scramble angels fifteen over base... over Beachy Head...” or some place known by a code word.

  The squadron kept a telephone orderly on duty in the crew room, but unless all the pilots were sunning themselves outside on the grass, or were all too drowsy, it was usually one of them who grabbed the telephone at the first ring, before the aircraftman could react.

  Waiting was bad, even though the boys were all there in a bunch and, if not too torpid, pulling each other’s legs and laughing a lot. Waiting meant butterflies in the stomach and, very often, an attack of nausea when the telephone rang. The bravest and most experienced of them were not impervious to this and there was often someone who had to run behind the hut and throw up.

  The fact that the telephone bell did not always mean a scramble made it worse. It was uncertainty which was hardest to bear. Sometimes the message was banal: So-and-so to report for dental treatment... or to the Station Adjutant... the Parachute Section…

  When a scramble did come, adjustment to it was instantaneous. Fighter pilots had the fastest reactions in the world.

  Pilots on readiness were required to be airborne in five minutes. In practice, they usually took about three. The order sent them racing to their aircraft where, according to individual preference, their parachutes were in position on the port wing or in the cockpit, with the straps spread so as to allow the quickest buckling on. Some people kept their parachutes to hand and carried them slung over their shoulders when they dashed to their aircraft; but that didn’t really save time because it slowed their running.

  Into the cockpit, do up the safety straps with the help of fitter or rigger (one of them had already helped with the parachute if the pilot preferred it on the wing to in the cockpit).