The Irregulars (6 page)

This was the usual drill. Desperately shorthanded, the BSC recruited brains and talent where it could find them, often making only a cursory background check. They brought in friends, family members, and personable colleagues like a club voting in new members, the only qualifications being evidence of a certain confidence and imagination and the assumption of shared values. It was not easy rounding up likely candidates, as by then all the best men had already been snapped up by the older and more respectable departments. The BSC could hardly advertise their requirements, and the pressure to hire people on the spot forced them to spread a wider net than was always advisable. “This meant that recruiting could take place only by personal recommendation,” Sweet-Escott explained in his wartime memoir. “In effect you were compelled to put forward the names of your own friends if you happened to know they were not usefully occupied. It was largely a matter of chance whether you got the right man for the job.”

Once when they were having a hard time finding secretaries, Sweet-Escott could think of no one to recommend but his sister, Lutie, who happened to know shorthand. Just one word to the wise, and “within a week she was on her way to Cairo via the Cape and the Belgian Congo.”

With his reckless sense of humor and general air of insubordination, Dahl may have been mentioned to someone on high as having the makings of an ideal informant, if for no other reason than no one so badly behaved would ever be suspected of working for British intelligence. Any one of a number of people clustered around the embassy at the time could have put his name in the hat. If there was one man who might have taken a particular interest in the enterprising airman, it was Reginald “Rex” Benson, who, in addition to his duties as military attaché and senior adviser to the ambassador, was involved in the highest levels of British security. He certainly would have taken note of Dahl’s close friendship with Marsh, and the proximity to the vice president and other key cabinet figures it afforded, and might have thought it worth a try to see if the pilot could be turned into a “voluntary informer,” the preferred term for spy.

Dahl had no doubt that he was auditioning for membership in a secret society and that the initiation process would be as byzantine as it was mysterious and could take months, maybe longer. It was also entirely possible that he would hear nothing. As exasperating as his situation was, he had no choice but to busy himself with his work at the Air Mission and wait. Keen to prove himself to his prospective employers, he began collecting snippets of gossip he overheard at Marsh’s place. When he thought he had something particularly compelling, he would make contact and arrange a meeting: “I’d slip him a couple of bits of information which I thought might help the war effort, and him, and everything else.”

The dreamer in Dahl could not help getting caught up in the romantic world of espionage and special operations. The use of code names, initials, and phrases like “our friends” and “the firm” were reminiscent of the dime-store thrillers he had read as a boy, and while the skeptic in him knew this would be no more of a game than the Greek campaign had been, the other side, the restless, starry-eyed pilot who still thought back on his days chasing German Junkers as “a grand adventure,” could not resist the prospect of new escapades and excitement. He had been a gambler all his life. When he had worked for the Shell Oil Company offices in London as a trainee in 1934, he had regularly placed bets by phone on the two o’clock horse race and would sneak out of the office in late afternoon to check the results in the first evening paper. He had succeeded in beating long odds in his first tour of duty. Why not try his luck again? He had no training or experience that qualified him in any way for this duplicitous line of work, but as he later wrote, by that stage of the war “an RAF uniform with wings on the jacket was a great passport to have.” It would provide all the cover he needed. And if there was one thing he had learned since coming to Washington, it was that the capital was swarming with virtuous representatives of foreign governments, and almost no one was who they pretended to be.

S
INCERE AS HE
was in his desire to serve his country, Dahl’s sudden enthusiasm for intelligence work was motivated more by personal ambition than by patriotism. He had an entirely selfish reason for wanting to prolong his stay in the United States. During his first few months in Washington, he had managed to publish a story about his RAF experiences in a popular American magazine, and he was rather enjoying his first taste of literary success. He was desperate to stick around a little while longer to see how it all panned out. While he had initially undertaken the assignment as part of the British propaganda campaign, the piece had been well received, and he had been asked to do more. It had taken him by surprise, because back at school he had never shown any flair for writing and had been an indifferent student at best. If he could make something of a name for himself in America, where the hero-worshipping public was mad for war stories, he might be able to make a go of it as a career when the fighting was over. If he returned to England, he would be just one more wounded Battle of Britain pilot, and his stories would not have anywhere near the same currency—or the same chance of finding their way into print.

Before coming to the United States, Dahl had never considered becoming a writer and had stumbled into it entirely by accident. He had been in the country only three days and was sitting in his new office at the Air Mission, staring out the window and feeling useless, when he was saved by a knock on the door. A shy, slightly built man in his forties, with thinning hair and thick, steel-rimmed glasses, advanced hesitantly into the room and introduced himself as C. S. Forester. Forester wanted to interview Dahl about his death-defying crash in the Libyan desert, which he thought might make for an exciting piece in
The Saturday Evening Post
. In a soft, apologetic voice, Forester explained that the United States had only just entered the war, and bona-fide heroes were in short supply. Dahl was that “rare bird” on this side of the Atlantic who had actually “been in combat,” and his story could not fail to stir Americans.

Like many famous British authors, from H. G. Wells and Somerset Maugham to
Winnie-the-Pooh
creator A. A. Milne, Forester had been enlisted by the newly created British Information Services (BIS) to do propaganda work and write stories urging American intervention. The BIS had been established in the spring of 1941 to champion support for England in the American press and radio; it was really a catchall body for a whole range of British publicity and propaganda departments operating in the United States under the authority of the embassy in Washington. While Edward R. Murrow’s coverage of the blitz for CBS News brought the war into the homes of millions of Americans and allowed them to hear the sound of the air raid sirens and drone of German bombers overhead, the BIS sought to dramatize the Nazi threat with an organized cultural propaganda campaign of its own. In some ways, Murrow’s memorable broadcasts had served to point out the failure of Britain’s fumbling early forays into transatlantic propaganda, which had been alternately too ham-fisted, or too highbrow, to be effective. One dismal example was a major exhibition at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art on the theme of Britain at war, which had featured sketches of the bomb damage and works by Henry Moore, for which the Ministry of Information had pressed the celebrated poet T. S. Eliot into service. The result, called “Defense of the Islands,” was a rather obscure, free-verse meditation on how history was repeating itself, and England was taking up new weapons against an old adversary. It was hardly the sort of popular fare that would fire up ordinary Americans and strengthen their resolve to defeat the Nazi menace.

To arouse American sympathy, the BIS felt that what was needed was more compulsory tear-jerkers along the lines of
Mrs. Miniver
, an enormously popular book based on a London
Times
column chronicling the hardships suffered by an upper-middle-class Englishwoman and her family. Written by Jan Struther, the book had topped the bestseller lists for weeks, and by the end of the summer of 1941 Americans were snapping up fifteen hundred copies a week. Of even more direct value to the propaganda drive was Helen MacInnes’ latest thriller,
Above Suspicion,
a chilling tale of murderous Gestapo agents who hound a courageous British academic and his wife across Europe. It helped, of course, that MacInnes, one of Britain’s best-selling novelists, happened to be married to the BSC agent Gilbert Highet and had intentionally tailored the plot of her book to highlight the horrors of the Third Reich.

To step up Britain’s appeals to the American public and draw attention to the desperate need for aid, the BIS wanted to continue to reach a wide audience. Forester had answered their clarion call and had agreed to provide the sort of compelling human-interest stories that would dramatize the conflict and touch American hearts. In addition, these stories would showcase Britain’s bravery and fighting spirit with an eye to maintaining their forces’ prestige come peacetime. As Forester put it to Dahl, his brush with death might make for a rousing air force tale, with the kind of personal angle that hooked readers and made them identify with the British struggle. In any case, it was all to help the cause.

Forester was an extremely famous writer, and Dahl was somewhat flabbergasted to find him standing awkwardly on the other side of his desk. Forester had penned the hugely popular Captain Horatio Hornblower novels about navy life in the era of Admiral Nelson, which Dahl, along with most of his countrymen, had devoured. His novel
Payment Deferred
had been a hit play, and Charles Laughton had recreated his performance on the New York stage, and then again in the popular movie version. In the spring of 1940, Warner Bros. had engaged Forester to produce a screenplay of his Hornblower book that would reflect the best of British heroism. Forester had moved his family to America and after a stint in Hollywood, which he detested, had settled permanently in Berkeley, California. When war broke out, he had immediately set sail for England but was officially instructed by the British Ministry of Information to return to America and his inspirational tales rather that muck about as a stretcher-bearer in Britain. This suited Forester, who preferred to regard himself as a newspaperman who happened to write novels rather than the other way around, and he was inordinately proud of the reporting he had done during the Spanish Civil War. He took to his propaganda work with gusto and, in addition to his naval books and screenplays, cranked out a steady stream of articles about the Allied forces for both the British and American press. He frequently flew to New York, where he had an office at the British Information Service office in Rockefeller Center, and was often in Washington on wartime assignments, and kept an office at the embassy.
*

Forester treated Dahl to a lavish lunch at a small, elegant French restaurant near the Mayflower Hotel and pumped him for details of his experiences in the Syrian campaign. When they sat down, he took out a small pad and pencil and laid them on the tablecloth, but between the wine and the roast duck, he managed to jot down only a few notes. Dahl, for his part, had trouble communicating his story with enough gritty realism to satisfy his listener. He kept getting bogged down in details and pointless digressions and finally offered to put some thoughts to paper and send them over later. Forester approved of the idea but urged Dahl to be as specific as possible and to rack his brains for minute observations—“detail, that’s what counts in our business”—so that when it came time to fashion his scribbles into a real story, it would still have the unmistakable ring of truth. Dahl went home and spent a long evening wrestling with his memories of that doomed flight. He found that the words came more easily than expected, and he was finished by midnight. As a final flourish he tacked on the droll title “A Piece of Cake,” the term pilots used to describe every maneuver regardless of how dangerous. The next day he had an embassy secretary type up his draft and sent it off to Forester without a second thought.

Ten days later Forester wrote back: “You were meant to give me notes, not a finished story. I’m bowled over. Your piece is marvelous. It is the work of a gifted writer. I didn’t touch a word of it.” Forester had sent it under Dahl’s name to his agent, Harold Matson, asking that he forward it to Forester’s editor at
The Saturday Evening Post
with his recommendation. The
Post
accepted it immediately and wrote back asking for more stories from the talented pilot. Forester also informed Dahl that the
Post
was paying $1,000 for his maiden effort, and enclosed a check for that amount, minus his agent’s 10 percent commission.
*

Like many postmortem adventure tales, Dahl’s romanticized autobiographical account had only a glancing relationship with the truth. In the version he sent Forester, instead of ferrying his plane to his forward unit and crash-landing after he ran out of fuel, Dahl is pursued by an Italian patrol, and his Hurricane is hit by machine-gun fire before plummeting to earth in a ball of flame. Eager to impress his celebrated collaborator, Dahl could not resist the urge to fictionalize. He embellished freely, dressing up his desert misadventure with ground strafing, scrambling soldiers, and a trusty sidekick named Shorty. His literary license is perhaps somewhat excused by his bedridden narrator’s struggle to remember exactly what had happened to him: “Slowly it all came back; not clearly and brightly at first, but a little dimly, as though by moonlight.” The story unfolds in brief, vivid scenes and snatches of terse dialogue that owe a considerable debt to Ernest Hemingway, a writer Dahl much admired.

By the time the piece appeared in the August 1942 issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
, it had been packaged as a heart-pounding battle yarn, appearing under the title “Shot Down over Libya,” and touted as a “factual report on Libyan air fighting” by an unnamed RAF pilot. Dahl had requested that his name be removed, citing “an old RAF custom.” Adding to the anonymous pilot’s allure was an editors’ note explaining that he was in the United States “for medical reasons,” an allusion to yet another corrective surgery, and a neat diversionary tactic to obscure Dahl’s presence as an official envoy of the British government sent to cheer on the Allies.
*

“Shot Down over Libya” was just the sort of patriotic fare the British Information Services wanted to peddle to the American press, and Dahl’s superiors encouraged him to do more pieces for the magazine. As a staff officer, he was required to submit everything he wrote for approval to the BIS, which deemed his action-packed tales effective propaganda. Even his correspondence with his new literary agent, Harold Matson, and various interested magazine editors was read by the British Embassy censor and bore a stamp for file references. Determined to make the most of this new opportunity and happy to have a way to earn some extra money, Dahl kept coming up with more stories about his adventures as an ace fighter. Virtually everything he wrote during this period was a mélange of personal experience and observations gleaned from fellow pilots, re-creating thrilling air battles, the fear of death that strangely vanished the moment the enemy appeared, and moments of mad abandon in the midst of so much brutality. He invented dialogue with the sure hand of a novelist, not the novice that he was. When he exhausted his supply of memories, he switched to fiction, his style becoming, as he later put it, “progressively less realistic and more fantastic.”

Dahl’s tightly plotted battle stories proved popular and resonated with American readers who were caught up in the patriotism and fighting spirit that swept the country in its first summer of the war. He soon began getting offers from other influential American magazines, and in the months to come his short stories would appear in
Collier’s, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal
, and
Town and Country
, among others. “It’s almost impossible to understand what an emotional time it was,” he recalled. “The Americans and British against Hitler and the Nazis, [we] were fighting for a tremendous cause, I mean saving the world, literally. And emotions were running endlessly high.”

Raised on stories about Norwegian trolls and wee people, Dahl decided to try his hand at a fanciful children’s story about the hazards of being an RAF pilot. Called “Gremlin Lore,” it was another vaguely autobiographical story about a pilot named Gus, who is happily chasing German Junkers in his Hurricane when his plane is sabotaged by a little six-inch creature bearing a large drill, who puts four neat holes in his wing and then bores straight into the engine, causing it to sputter and stop. The story introduces the reader to the existence of gremlins, the tribe of tiny mythical rogues who live amid the clouds, riding on fighter planes and bombers, and whom the RAF blamed for everything that went wrong with their aircraft, particularly crashes. The RAF had been rife with gremlin stories since the start of the war, and mentions of the bad-luck imps who annoyed RAF pilots dated back to India in the 1920s. The popular press had begun picking up oft-repeated tales of mischievous aerial pixies who hindered pilots in battle, interfering with radio transmissions, jabbing them in the back, and punching holes in their fuselage.

Aware that Disney was in the midst of making a propaganda film about military aviation called
Victory Through Air Power
, and that the strength of the Allied air forces had become a hot topic with Americans, Sidney Bernstein of the BIS sent Dahl’s unpublished story to the studio on the chance that it might be a timely subject for an animated feature. Dahl’s little troublemakers were a perfect fit with Disney, whose top box-office performers were tiny creatures from old folk tales—that year Dumbo led all other Disney films in gross income—and the studio was already working on the big-screen version of another British import,
Peter Pan
. In the unstable and unpredictable economic climate of 1942, Disney’s war films had provided a steady source of income, from aircraft identification cartoons for the army and navy to short-subject films satirizing the Nazis, including
Der Fuehrer’s Face,
which was originally entitled “Donald Duck in Nuzi-Land” and dealt with Donald’s exasperation with the Hitler regime. On July 13, 1942, Walt Disney cabled Dahl confirming that the gremlins had potential: “
BELIEVE IT HAS POSSIBILITIES. WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SECURING THIS MATERIAL
”