Summer of No Surrender Read online

  With a yell of 'Catch!' he launched it in Knight's direction. Caught off guard, the latter twisted under Moonshine's weight and flung out both arms in an attempt to catch the missile. The dog, with a yelp of excitement, dug his hind feet into Knight's chest and took off in a flying leap to try to intercept the bone. The powerful thrust upset the balance of Knight, who had already partly risen. For a moment there was a confusion of arms, legs, barking, a bounding dog and an officer tipped out of his deck chair. The chair collapsed on top of Knight; and Moonshine, now yapping hysterically with joy, managed to get himself trapped between his master's chest and the grass as he scrabbled excitedly to cover the last few inches which separated him from the prize.

  The noise and confusion woke all those who were still sleeping and brought officers and men tumbling out of rest huts and workshops.

  The C.O. took three strides to his door, flung it open and stood transfixed, as bug-eyed as though the Germans had dropped a battalion of parachutists on East Malford. When he saw Knight on the ground, apparently engaged in a wrestling bout with his dog, and Six-gun doing a war dance around them and the flattened deck chair, while making derisive and victorious noises, Squadron Leader Maxwell joined in the general laughter.

  He was grateful for Massey's clowning and endless high spirits: they took the tenseness out of his pilots' faces and, for a moment, they had forgotten everything in the relief of hearty amusement. It was the basic humorous situation that never failed; the slip on the banana skin, the prat-fall.

  Knight picked himself up and, poker-faced, allowing his friend no satisfaction, began brushing grass from his clothes. With feigned disgust, he said 'That wasn't cricket. Setting a man's own dog on him is against the rules ...'

  Massey jeered. 'You wanna pull your finger out ...'

  The noise of the telephone ringing in the crew room rose above the voices and the laughing. Seconds later the orderly yelled, from the door,' "A" Flight scramble!'

  A/Cl Tuttle, N. was, for the moment, happy in his work. He walked along the road from the Officers' Mess to his billet, whistling.

  He passed the officers' tennis court and approached the first of the Officers' Married Quarters. This house, bigger than the others, was occupied in peacetime by the Station Commander. There was a double row of other large, red brick houses, each standing in about a sixth of an acre of garden. A hundred yards beyond the last of these the road turned at a right angle and the Airmen's Married Quarters began: small, terraced dwellings in blocks of four. No families, officers' or other ranks', occupied married quarters now: all had been evacuated when war was declared, to make room for the many more men and women who would be posted in to bring the station up to wartime strength. Normally there were only two squadrons at East Malford, whereas there were now three. The barrack blocks on the main camp could not accommodate the extra numbers, so families had to leave.

  The W.A.A.F officers lived in the former Station Commander's house, and it was there that Tuttle was bound.

  Over his arm he carried an officer pilot's tunic; Flying Officer Knight's. If anyone in authority had asked him where he was going, he would have lied that he was taking it to the camp tailor for repair.

  A pilot's uniform was essential to his scheme for ensuring himself an admiring welcome from the factory and shop girls of his native city on his next leave.

  One of the other batmen, who shared his room in Airmen's M.Q., owned a camera; and also suffered from a sense of inferiority when competing for civilian feminine favours. Tuttle; slipping half a pound of stolen Officers' Mess butter across the counter with his money, had been able to buy one of the few rolls of film that the village chemist had in stock.

  This morning each was to take photographs of the other wearing Knight's best blue tunic. When they next went on leave they intended to wear civilian clothes (Tuttle was a notably sharp dresser), explain modestly that they liked to get out of uniform for a complete break from the horrors of war, and show photographs of themselves disguised as officer pilots to confirm their claims to death-defying valour in the cockpit of a fighter.

  Tuttle was a hefty middleweight with a brawny physique built by weightlifting. He was a moderately successful amateur boxer and not above taking a clandestine fiver to box professionally when he had the chance. Being of the same build as Knight, the latter's tunic fitted him well. His friend, who worked for some administrative officers living in married quarters, had no opportunity to borrow a pilot's uniform and would have to put up with whatever Tuttle could procure; which was unfortunate, because he was thin and stunted. Tuttle, however, had assured him that Knight's tunic would fit him a treat.

  The photographic deception was not the only reason for Tuttle to be whistling as he sauntered most unmilitarily along. He was a good-looking youth, in a red-faced and greasy-haired fashion, with a knowing city way about him which appealed to the younger and more impressionable airwomen. The W.A.A.F. officers who lived in No. 1 O.M.Q. were served by two batwomen. The elder of these was already being provided with an active sex life by one of the ground officers billeted further down the road. The other, a farm girl of more humble aspirations, was a new arrival and only eighteen years old. Tuttle was after her rustic virginity; and confident of success between now and next pay day, which was a fortnightly event.

  He still had fourteen shillings left from his last pay day, six days ago, and there were weekly tips from his officers: so it was not as though he had nothing to offer but his charm. He was a suitor of comparative substance, although batmen were lowly paid and handicapped when rivalling technical tradesmen for female attention.

  With the tunic which was to be his magic cloak tucked under his arm, his forage cap tilted so far to the right that only his cauliflower ear prevented it falling off, one hand in his pocket and the other holding one of the Turkish cigarettes he stole every day from Simon Blakeney-Smith's room, he turned down the path to the back door of O.M.Q.l, anticipating a prettily blushing welcome, a cosy cup of tea with a slice of buttered toast and jam, and a few minutes' amorous mauling.

  He was half-way down the path to the back door when six Hurricanes roared overhead with a noise like a hundred double­decker buses (Tuttle was a bus conductor in civilian life). He stood and craned his head back to watch them. He recognised the letters of 172 Squadron on one side of the fuselage roundels. On the other side of its roundel the leading aircraft in the second section bore the letter 'E': that was Knight's kite, he told himself. So 'A' Flight bad been scrambled, had they? No hurry with the tunic, then.

  Them pilots was a lot of mugs, he thought with satisfaction. They spent all day out at dispersals, waiting with their nerves jangling for the scramble order to come. They flew and flew again, until they were so bleedin' weary they could hardly stay awake. They got shot at, wounded, burned, killed. And all for what? With the same objective at the end of the day as he had after spending it in safety and comfort between the mess, his billet and the W.A.A.F. Officers' quarters. While Knight and the rest of them flew their arses off (and got them shot off, too), he had a nice kip on his bed every afternoon; and often shared it with one of the off duty W.A.A.F. But in the evening, when they were finished with work, they were all after the same thing: taking a tart down the boozer for a pint and a song around the piano, then 'avin' it off in an air raid shelter or a haystack on the way back to camp.

  Tuttle knew who the mugs were in this war.

  Four

  Breakfast for the officers of No. 1 Staffel, II JG 97, was rich with the spoils of conquest. In the Fatherland they were used to poor bread, no butter, dubious sausage and imitation coffee. Here in France they sat down to huge, swollen omelettes, good dairy butter, warm loaves and delicious coffee.

  It was a noisy meal, accompanied by much arrogant talk full of bravado. Everyone said how he hoped the R.A.F. fighters would give battle that day instead of ignoring the Messerschmitt escort and attacking the bombers. The top cover German fighters were under orders to stay in position. Only t
hose who gave close escort to the bombers had a chance of mixing it with the Hurricanes and Spitfires. The daily breakfast time topic was how the Luftwaffe would clear the skies within the next few days so that the Wehrmacht could invade England.

  As each officer entered the dining room he clicked his heels and bowed to Oberleutnant Richter at the head of the table. Leutnant Erich Hafner, like his crony Otto Ihlefeld, always ate well when he had been with a woman. They had been

  together at training school and each now led a Schwarm of four aircraft. There were three Schwarme in a Staffel.

  The Gruppe to which they belonged was commanded by a major and comprised three Staffelen. No.1 Staffel's Commanding Officer had fought for the Fascists in Spain and taken part in the rape of Poland and the Blitzkrieg on Holland, Belgium and France. To his pilots he was a kind of deity. To himself he was a worried family man with a father-like responsibility for sixteen young fliers. The Gruppe Commander, who not only had three Staffelen but some fifty pilots to cause him ulcers and sleepless nights, understood the problems of his Staffel commanders and often invited them to his chateau to get drunk and go to bed with French whores fetched from Paris, discreetly out of sight of their juniors. As Richter was not over fond of women, he appreciated the thought rather more than the deed. If the Gruppe Commander would invite him to bring apple-cheeked young Leutnant Hans Baumbach along for the night, now, that would be another matter. A willowy ex ballet dancer, Oberfeldwebel Franz Helbig, appealed to him most strongly; but these affairs were always difficult to arrange between an officer and an N.C.O. And if one did succeed, the boys were apt to be presumptuous, ultimately, with their smirking requests for leave and other favours.

  Richter greeted each of his officers with a cold nod and a curt word of response. One or two of the more ardent Hitler worshippers among them used to have the habit of slamming their boots together in the doorway and shooting their arms out in a Nazi salute with a cry of 'Heil Hitler!' But he had soon put a stop to that: it was more than could be expected of a man, to keep interrupting his morning victuals by flinging his arm out galvanically and mumbling 'Heil Hitler' through a mouthful of omelette and croissant. Besides, all that stamping and boot-bashing sent a bolt of pain through his head after a night at the chateau.

  Oberleutnant Richter was a tall, heavily built, blond man of twenty-eight; a skiing champion, a noted yachtsman (he enjoyed the intimacy of small cabins) and a keen wrestler. Women fell in love with him on sight and embarrassed him with their attentions. In an attempt to conceal his tastes from his comrades he accepted female adulation, while admitting frankly that he was not a tit-man or a leg-man but an admirer of a tight little butt. His pilots accepted this mild aberration as a normal stag eccentricity and any girl with a trim pair of buttocks was regarded as 'the C.O.'s meat' and duly presented to him.

  There was talk up and down the table of the day's prospects. The Staffel was proud of its Me. 109s but jealous of the Spitfires. Hurricanes were another matter: slower than the Messerschmitts, they were believed to be comparatively easy victims; and would have been a lot easier if they were not so bravely and brilliantly flown and strongly built. Two-thirds of Fighter Command's squadrons were, the German pilots knew, equipped with Hurricanes and only one-third with Spitfires. Each of them secretly wondered what the Luftwaffe's chances of success would be if the proportions were reversed.

  Meanwhile the invasion barges had been assembled along the coast of the Pas de Calais and the area was swarming with infantry, ready to go aboard in their life jackets and leap ashore on the beaches of southern England. Once there, they would soon be marching up Whitehall while the Luftwaffe celebrated with drinks in the R.A.F. Club in Piccadilly.

  To make it all possible the German fighters first had to sweep the Spitfires and Hurricanes out of the sky and the German bombers to put the R.A.F. fighter airfields and coastal radar stations out of action. They had to destroy every British fighter within range which was left on the ground. Only then could the barges laden with assault troops set out.

  The pilots of Richter's Staffel talked hopefully about how the R.A.F. would have to come up and fight when the bomber formations crossed the English coast; and then the escorting Me.109s would tear them to pieces. Only let them come up and meet us! they prayed. And they meant it.

  Sometimes Hafner remembered his three weeks in Britain as an eighteen-year-old swimmer. He recalled how he and his team mates had laughed when they first saw their British adversaries strip; and how their pride in their physical superiority had been humbled when they lost one contest after another. The modesty of those British youngsters often came to his mind and sounded a warning: some of them must be flying the Spitfires and Hurricanes that met him and his comrades every day over the Channel, the Sussex Downs and the hop­fields of Kent; the fighters which had brought death and disfigurement to so many of the Gruppe already.

  He wondered about the high spirited boy with whom he had made friends, exchanged visits and, for a couple of years, maintained a correspondence. He could remember him dearly, even after the lapse of four years: his physique was better than average and he had the fair hair and blue eyes which Hafner's own father would have wished for his son. They had met when the German team competed against one of the famous English public schools: a place Hafner recalled as a rambling, ivy covered group of ancient buildings set in beautiful countryside, where the boys were cut off for eight months of the year from any contact with the opposite sex. Very different from the Third Reich, where Hitler's boys and girls were encouraged to go camping and nude sunbathing and swimming together and let nature take its delightful course.

  The strong, fair haired boy was swimming captain of his school, and because Hafner was captain of the German team he was invited to tea in the English boy's study; they had liked each other and exchanged addresses. Letters followed, and then an invitation to Hafner to spend a fortnight in the English boy's home: the father was a doctor in a pleasant Berkshire town, and there were two younger brothers and a younger sister. It was a happy, hospitable family and Erich Hafner had enjoyed himself. Then, in the winter, he invited his English friend to come skiing with his own family for two weeks in the Bavarian mountains.

  Soon after that they both became air force pilots. But instead of creating a further bond it had separated them; German politics were not popular in Britain and regular officers looked askance at the rapidly growing forces of the Third Reich.

  Gazing across the narrow Straits of Dover, Leutnant Hafner often wondered whether Peter Knight were among those waiting on the other side to kill him.

  'A' Flight of 172 Squadron returned singly within an hour of taking off.

  Maxwell and the rest of the squadron who were at dispersals, ground crews as well as pilots and the Squadron Intelligence Officer, counted them in.

  Since they had heard Lee call 'Tallyho! Individual attacks …Go!' on the R/T set in the crew room, there had been no message from Knight's No. 2 man, Pierre Dunal.

  There was silence while all eyes searched the sky. Dunal was not the only pilot who had not yet returned. Then came the rumble of a Merlin engine in the distance and a few seconds later 'E', with four black, white-outlined German crosses painted on its nose, with a small white dog chewing a swastika shaped bone alongside them, zoomed low over the boundary hedge.

  The Hurricane came bumping and swaying over the grass, Knight cut the engine, clambered down from the cockpit and forestalled the obvious question by calling out 'Froggy's O.K. I saw him bale out near Folkestone. Landed on the beach. Some brown jobs were waiting for him. He'll be back any minute.'

  Lee said grimly 'He needn't hurry: he hasn't got an aircraft.'

  One of the squadron's two Polish pilots, 'Lottie' Lotnikski, said something to his compatriot which no one understood but the purport of which was quite clear.

  Knight turned on him. 'It's all very well for you to bind about his losing an aircraft, Lottie, but you weren't there. We ran into twenty-four of the sods, escort
ing sixteen Heinkels. What the hell were we supposed to do? We tried to go for the bombers, but the 109s kept boring in. I saw Pierre get a Heinkel before three of them bounced him.'

  The Pole made no reply. He and his countryman exchanged glances and shrugged. Nobody was going to change their view of the French Armée de l'Air. They and the rest of the surviving pilots in their squadron of the Polish Air Force had trekked across Hungary, Roumania, Bulgaria and Greece, subject to every kind of hardship and humiliation, and made their way to France to continue the fight. They had found a cynical, disillusioned French Air Force, reconciled to the inevitability of defeat and reluctant to fly. They had kicked their heels on French Military airfields, begging to be allowed to use the idle fighters which stood on the tarmac while most French pilots drank cognac all day and a few flew like haggard demons, trying to save their country's honour even though they had no hope of averting its fate.

  The French had treated the Poles with suspicion at best, usually with contempt. Commandants and colonels had told them unpleasantly that they had already proved their worthlessness when the Luftwaffe crushed them in five weeks. What they did not take into account, and probably did not even know, was that the 200 outdated fighters of the Polish Air Force had shot down 250 of the 2,000 German bombers and fighters which had swarmed over their country. Nor did the French admit that perhaps they themselves would have been battered to extinction already but for the presence of twenty-nine R.A.F. squadrons, eleven of them fighters, on French soil.

  The Poles, burning with resentment, shame and anger, were spoiling for a fight. The French sneered that they had been shewn to be no good at fighting; and did not know how to fly French aircraft types anyway.

  So eventually the Poles got to England and were welcomed in the R.A.F.; and allowed to fly the best fighters the British had.