Once More the Hawks (21 page)

Dicken shrugged. ‘That crew wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t,’ he pointed out. ‘As it is, we have one more aircraft and one more crew for tomorrow than we would have had, and there are seven young men out there who are still alive. What’s the state?’

‘They’re still coming in. We’ve got off lightly, judging by the reports, we’ve lost around thirty-seven aircraft. Which is what was expected. We can cope with that.’

The returning crews were excited and thankful to be alive, especially the crew of Y-Yoke. Even the return had not been without incident because Norman, once more on the point of tears, had been obliged to confess he was lost once more. With the compass destroyed, a freezing gale passing through the cockpit and the aircraft shedding pieces all the way across Europe, Dicken had flown them home with his map on his knee. He had recommended to Gregg that Norman be sent back for further training.

As the crews began to disperse for breakfast and sleep, he headed for the Ops Room. Howarth was there with Hatto.

‘Still one or two to come,’ Howarth said.

His hair flattened by his flying helmet, Dicken found a chair, lit a cigarette and sat in silence. Everybody was watching the board, waiting to see that last ominous space filled in with the time the aircraft landed.

Section Officer Paget was sitting behind the table, answering the telephone, getting up every time they heard the roar of engines overhead and climbing the ladder to the board to fill in yet another space. X-X-Ray. S-Sugar. M-Mother. They were all there. One after the other the spaces were filled, until only one remained empty. Section Officer Paget sat silently at her desk. Someone brought her a cup of tea which she drank without speaking, while Dicken sat watching her, still smoking. Above her head the empty space remained, blank and frightening. As Dicken’s eye travelled along the line of information – the bomb load, the time of take-off, the crew – he stopped at the name of the pilot:
Flight-Lieutenant Diplock.

Eventually an orderly came in and drew the curtains and he was surprised to see it was almost daylight. He wasn’t sure what to say as he looked at the small pretty face, bleak in its misery behind the desk. He would have preferred to be in the crew room talking to Scrivens’ crew or at the hospital checking how Scrivens himself was, but somehow he didn’t wish to leave her.

She continued to sit there, staring into space, the look on her face one of incredulity and disbelief. Someone brought her another cup of tea but this time she didn’t even notice. Then the telephone rang. This time, Dicken reached it before her.

It was the Observer Corps to say that a Lancaster had just crossed the coast heading in their direction. When he told her, her face lit up, and when soon afterwards they heard the roar of engines her expression became warm and alive. But the aeroplane continued overhead without stopping and her face fell again. When the telephone went once more it was the watch tower to say the machine had belonged to 83 Squadron.

They continued to sit there until the sun came up. Dicken had already quietly persuaded Hatto to ring round the aerodromes to find out if Diplock had landed anywhere else. He hadn’t and Air/Sea Rescue reported that they had checked all ditchings, so he wasn’t in the sea. Eventually, he could stand it no longer and, rising, he took the girl’s arm and led her to his car.

The interview with Harris turned out to be less difficult than Dicken had expected. The raid had been a success. Out of 1046 bombers and 88 intruders a total of forty-four had failed to return, a percentage loss of 3.9, which was acceptable and seemed to indicate that the policy of saturation had reduced the casualties. Despite the German propaganda ministry’s claim that the raid had been a failure, it was clear that the damage had been on a far greater scale than anything yet seen.

It seemed to Dicken, as he left High Wycombe, that it was time to go and see young Diplock’s mother. A signal had gone off to his father in London but it had brought no sort of response and he decided to drive over to Deane.

It was a strange feeling entering the house. It had belonged to his wife after her father’s death, but she had rarely lived in it, preferring America to England and hotels and a nomad life to thrusting down roots in the village where she’d been born. It was in this house that he’d first wooed her sister, Annys, Diplock’s mother. It was here when, on being turned down because he was late to take her to a dance after he’d been flying, that he’d turned to Zoë. The place hadn’t changed much. Indeed, he even recognised some of the pictures, and the summer house where he and Zoë had first clutched each other in the dark still stood, though it looked a little decrepit now and sadly in need of a coat of paint.

He was shown in by an ancient maid who, to his surprise, recognised him from the past. When Annys appeared, she was calm and expressionless, though her eyes seemed to indicate that she’d been doing a lot of crying.

‘It was kind of you to call, Dicken,’ she said. ‘Did you see what happened?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t. But I was there and it must have been instantaneous.’ He was lying because he had no idea what had happened. No one knew. Young Diplock had been reported missing, presumed killed and, while his death could have been in one of the instantaneous explosions he’d seen in the air, it could just as easily have been in a Lancaster he had seen spinning away with part of its starboard wing missing, its crew pinned down by the effects of gravity, knowing for every second of that terrible dive to earth that they were doomed.

‘Did you know him well, Dicken?’

‘I got to know him. I had a high regard for him.’

‘He had for you, too,’ Annys said, her eyes on his face. ‘He told me more than once. He compared you to his father. Did you know that?’

‘He talked to me once. Not much, but I learned a little about the situation.’

Annys took a deep breath as though she were steeling herself to face an unpleasant fact. ‘He thought there was little to admire in his father.’ She seemed to be scourging herself and he tried to interrupt, but she continued remorselessly. ‘He’d made a study of his record.’

‘Surely, Annys–!’

‘Come, Dicken! We both know my husband. After a time, I didn’t find much to admire either.’

Dicken was silent and embarrassed.

‘He never comes home now,’ Annys went on quietly. Her head was up and she looked surprisingly beautiful. ‘He must have been informed of George’s death–’

‘I made sure he was.’

‘–but he hasn’t been in touch with me.’

‘I expect he’s busy.’

‘Yes, I expect he is.’ Annys’ mouth twisted. ‘You’ve heard of the Waaf, I suppose. I left London and came back here. He didn’t follow me. He never will now.’

‘I’m sorry, Annys.’

She sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s better this way. At least I know now where I am. If only George–’ she hesitated and he thought she was about to burst into tears, but she recovered quickly. ‘He was engaged, did you know?’

‘I met the girl. I took her back to her quarters when we learned–’ He stopped dead and extricated himself with some difficulty, hating himself and wishing he’d never come.

The temporary job with 21 Group Dicken had been given showed no signs of ending and by the time they had reached another year of the war it even began to seem permanent.

The war itself was changing. The Germans were stuck in Russia and their U-boat campaign, after a final murderous flourish, was coming to a dead stop, too. For the first time it began to be possible to see the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. The policy of relying on heavy bombers seemed at last to be paying off while the Germans, who had relied on light bombers, were in trouble. But the cost was high. Bomber Command’s losses crept up and men Dicken had known disappeared into the darkness over Germany – men with years of experience just as easily as the young men who arrived, fresh-faced and unblooded and still, even now, with ideals about what they were doing. Mostly they didn’t appear to care but he often saw them sitting alone, their eyes faraway, knowing perfectly well that their chances of enjoying the success of what they were striving for were slim indeed, and that when they went their deaths could be agonising and even horrific.

Several times, returning to see his mother who still lived near Deane, he saw Annys. Once she offered him a meal and when he arrived it dawned on him she had made a special effort, not only with the meal but with her own appearance. He decided to let the matter lie fallow for a while.

To his surprise, when Hatto next appeared in his office, he grinned and said ‘I’ve got a visitor for you.’

It was Walt Foote and Dicken leapt to his feet with a yell of delight. Solemnly the three of them joined hands and circled in the centre of the office, watched with bewildered amazement by Babington.

Foote was wearing the uniform of a colonel in the American Army Air Force. Rimless glasses gave him a paternal look and he was beginning to show the heaviness of increasing age. His grey hair was parted in the middle and showed little signs of thinning.

‘They made me a county judge, you remember,’ he said, ‘and, because I’d always been a reservist, when we got into this war they offered me a colonel’s commission and told me they needed me urgently. But when I reported to the Chief of Air Staff in Washington, they didn’t know what the hell to do with me and I spent the first month or two in the Army and Navy Club. Colonels were a dime a dozen so they transferred me to the Army Services Forces, only for them to yell they wanted me back a couple of months later.’

Foote grinned at them. ‘A lot of people think we should fight the Pacific war first,’ he went on, ‘but Eisenhower, who was running Operations and Plans, said we couldn’t because we hadn’t enough shipping and that the first priority was an air offensive against Europe. Roosevelt’s noticed that, though the Germans have made Europe into a fortress, they forgot to put a lid on it. I’m at General Eaker’s headquarters. He was here during the Battle of Britain as a US observer and he knows Harris, so he set up his HQ at High Wycombe nearby. Used to be a girls’ school.’ Foote grinned again. ‘There were notices in the bedrooms, “Should you desire the services of a mistress, push the bell.” There was a lot of bell ringing until Eaker showed he wasn’t amused.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Administration. Helping to get our bombers into the air over Germany. It’s a slow business. So far we haven’t gone much beyond France and Churchill’s wanting to know why. We’ll make it, though, eventually. We still have a lot to learn about bombing.’

Hatto frowned. ‘So have we,’ he admitted. ‘And
we
’ve been at it for three years.’

Foote stayed at Dicken’s headquarters studying the war as it continued through its disasters and occasional triumphs. With the Germans flung out of Africa at last, they were all beginning to think more optimistically of the future.

There had been only two more 1000 bomber raids. The one on Essen was carried out in cloud, and bombs were scattered all over the Ruhr Valley – ‘At least,’ Hatto said, ‘those Nazis with country homes well away from the danger zones must have got a nasty shock’ – and the one on Bremen failed because of bad weather. But they were abandoned chiefly because of the great disruption they caused in Operational Training and Conversion Units, and from then on major raids had been carried out by forces varying between 400 and 600 machines.

Foote had news about his niece. She had married and was now safely tucked away in a small Virginian town and was expecting a baby.

‘Fortunes of war,’ he said. ‘He’s navy.’

From time to time, he flew with one of Dicken’s crews and came back looking worn-out and aged.

‘It’s a goddam sight more dangerous than it was in our day,’ he admitted. ‘There’s just a lot more of everything, and when it happens, it’s twice as big and twice as fast.’

Suddenly, however, in the Pacific the Americans were beginning to make headway against the Japanese who, the year before, had seemed invincible, and there was a lot of talk of help for the Chinese who had been fighting them on and off ever since 1931. The first person to get in on the act was Diplock, whose removal from his job with Coastal Command had been deftly engineered by the unforgiving Harris. Never without influence for long, however, he had promptly had himself put in charge of a military mission to China and had already left for India. He was shortly expected to fly to Assam, from where they would fly over the Himalayas.

‘He’s been upped to air vice-marshal,’ Hatto said. ‘To give him a rank equal to the occasion, and they’ve promoted Tom Howarth to go as his running mate.’ Hatto smiled. ‘Actually, he was hoping for the purchasing committee in Washington – a cushy billet in a war-free zone would have been just up his street – and had even arranged for his Waaf to go with him. Instead he’s got China, which won’t be anything like as pleasant, though Chungking’s a long way from the fighting.’

By this time the Americans were coming into the country in large numbers and the American 8th Air Force was beginning to join in the assault on the German homeland, pledged to precision daylight bombing. On their first raids, the 109s and Focke Wulfs had exacted a terrible toll so that they were obliged to think again, but they were committed to daylight bombing and it was one of Foote’s jobs to convince Harris of the practicality of it. He almost seemed to be succeeding when he was called to London, and two days later he appeared in Dicken’s office again.

‘I’m off,’ he said.

‘Where to?’

‘China. They consider that, being a judge and having spent several years there, I know all there is to know about the goddam place. I’m a liaison officer. At least, that’s what they say. With Chiang Kai-shek. But I reckon there’s more to it than that and they aren’t telling me the rest. But I’ll be in Chungking. I might even find myself working with Parasol Percy.’

Hatto’s wife put on a dinner party and they saw Foote off to India. Two days later, Hatto telephoned. ‘Parasol Percy,’ he said.

‘What about him?’

‘They were crossing the Hump in a Liberator. It never arrived. They’re looking round for a replacement.’