Damned Good Show Read online

  DAMNED GOOD SHOW

  To Flight Lieutenant Frank Lowe, DFM,

  and to his comrades of RAF Bomber Command

  in the Second World War.

  *

  Also by Derek Robinson

  Fiction

  Goshawk Squadron

  Rotten with Honour

  Kramer’s War

  The Eldorado Network

  Piece of Cake

  War Story

  Artillery of Lies

  A Good Clean Fight

  Kentucky Blues

  Hornet’s Sting

  Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

  Red Rag Blues

  Non-fiction

  Invasion, 1940

  DAMNED GOOD SHOW

  DEREK ROBINSON

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 2009 by Derek Robinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-62365-322-4

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Contents

  Part One High Alert

  Fine Fettle

  The First Whiff of Gunshot

  Wide Blue Yonder

  This Happy Breed

  Beaten to a Froth

  Awful Restless Stuff

  Stabilized Bollocks

  Strangle the Butler

  One Civilian, Now Dead

  Duty, Gentlemen!

  No Improvement

  We Shan’t See Him in a Hurry

  Part Two Risk Creates Optimism

  Beware Intruders

  Random Havoc

  Truth Always Hurts

  Bang Like Rabbits

  Jinx Popsy

  A Different Point

  Fact Isn’t Truth

  A Very Large Black

  A Whole New Slant

  Blast Waves

  A Certain

  Piece of Cake

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE

  High Alert

  FINE FETTLE

  1

  The group captain aimed his pipe at the wireless set. A Mess waiter hurried to switch it off.

  “Never trust a man who carries an umbrella wherever he goes,” Rafferty said. “He thinks it will protect him. He deludes himself.”

  “I know it’s a big job, being Prime Minister,” Hunt said. “I just wish he wouldn’t sound like an undertaker who’s lost the body.”

  They were in the Mess anteroom of RAF Kindrick, a bomber base in Lincolnshire. From here, 409 Squadron flew twin-engined Hampdens.

  Only a handful of officers had joined them to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast. 409 Squadron had been on alert for a week, and all flying personnel were in their crew rooms, listening to their own wireless sets. Rafferty was station commander: a big, broad, hook-nosed group captain with medal ribbons and faded wings from the First World War. Wing Commander Hunt led the squadron. He was thirty and looked younger, except for his eyes. Peacetime flying in the RAF had always been a risky business. Before they got Hampdens, 409 had flown canvas-skinned, fixed-wheel, open-cockpit biplanes that were not far removed from the machines of the Royal Flying Corps. Hunt liked a degree of danger; he believed the RAF thrived on it, and ultra-cautious pilots annoyed him. But he also resented pointless waste, including time wasted writing letters to next of kin. His feelings showed in his eyes. He had angry eyes.

  “Chamberlain backed the wrong nag,” the Intelligence Officer said. “He’s lost his shirt.”

  “Got rotten odds, anyway,” the adjutant remarked. “I said so at the time.”

  “We can’t put all the blame on Chamberlain,” the Medical Officer said. “Let’s face it: everyone cheered when he flew back from Munich. ‘Peace in our time,’ he told them, and that’s exactly what they wanted to hear. Even the Daily Express—”

  “Gibberish!” Rafferty said. “Pure gibberish. He waved that bloody silly piece of paper as if Hitler had very kindly given him the last bit of bog-roll in Europe.”

  “In a sense, he had,” the Intelligence Officer said.

  “That speech …” The adjutant pointed at the wireless. “I wonder if he wrote it. ‘Consequently this country is at war with Germany’ … Not the most thrilling call to arms I’ve heard.”

  “And all in aid of Poland,” the Intelligence Officer said. “That’s a clever trick, considering Poland’s beyond the range of any of our bombers.”

  “Cheer up!” Rafferty heaved himself out of his armchair, and everyone stood. “The good news is we’re in business! The balloon’s gone up. The gloves are off, the fat’s in the fire. Cry havoc and something something something.”

  “Let slip the dogs of war, sir,” the MO said.

  “Too damn true,” Hunt said. He looked at his watch. “Briefing in twenty minutes.”

  2

  It was the wrong kind of day to go to war: mild, sunny, not much breeze. That sort of weather, in early September, was meant for watching a decisive match in the county cricket championship, with a pint of beer and a popsy who couldn’t tell a square cut from a ham sandwich, and didn’t care either. Rafferty was forty-three, a bit old for popsies. As he strolled with Hunt to the briefing room, he was thinking about that line, Let slip the dogs of war. Did it do justice to the boys of 409 Squadron? Dogs of war? Decent, cheery, honorable chaps? Then he remembered some of the pilots he’d known in the RFC. Not what you’d call nice men. Ruthless killers, more like. Fellows who didn’t enjoy their breakfast unless they’d crept up behind some foolish Hun, put twenty rounds in his petrol tank and made a flamer of him. Dogs of war, all right. About as chivalrous as jackals. Still, this war would be different. The bomber boys weren’t looking for blood, their job was to knock out precise military targets, every bomb a coconut, until one day Der Fuehrer would discover that he had no more toys to play with. With pluck and skill, 409 could become the crack squadron of Bomber Command. With a bit of luck, Rafferty could become an air vice-marshal. Press forward hard enough, and you find yourself leading. Quite right, too.

  Hunt wasn’t thinking about promotion. He was wondering what it would be like to lead a squadron in action. He had a small face and a slim build. His nickname was Pixie, not very flattering but he didn’t mind because it meant that careless pilots who were called to his office got a shock from the blast he delivered. Some came out looking whipped. In the Mess, Pixie Hunt was relaxed, sometimes funny, and he enjoyed argument. In the air, he demanded high standards of flying and a fiercely competitive spirit. When one of his pilots began running around the airfield every day, in training for the
marathon in the next Olympic Games, Hunt got rid of him. He had nothing against the Olympics, but there was room for only one obsession in this squadron.

  That was in peacetime. Hunt wasn’t so blinkered as to think that 409 was trained to the peak of perfection. For a start, fuel and ammunition had been rationed—the Air Ministry was always on a tight budget—so there was very little night-flying, and usually none at weekends. For the same reason, his crews had no permanent air gunners or wireless operators. Those jobs were done by volunteers from the groundcrew, fitters or electricians or armament mechanics, as and when they could be spared from their duties. An AC2—the lowest rank in the RAF—got paid an extra sixpence a day for manning a gun in a Hampden. An AC1 or LAC got a shilling for manning a gun and a radio. Brave men and keen, and Hunt knew they’d do their best against the enemy, but he’d seen their scores at the annual gunnery exercises: dismal.

  At least the gun positions were enclosed, so gunners weren’t exposed to the freezing, battering gale as they had been in the bombers that the Hampden replaced. Too bad it didn’t have powered turrets. Swinging a machine gun was hard on the arms. It took a lot of practice for a gunner to track his target, especially when it was a fighter that was diving and skidding and rolling at two or three hundred miles an hour and looking thinner than a pencil when it was only two hundred yards away. Hunt knew that his part-time gunners never got enough practice.

  Too late to worry about that now.

  He followed Rafferty into the briefing room. All the aircrew officers were there. They stood. One direct hit from a Hun bomb and 409 would be finished, Hunt thought; and was immediately ashamed of such alarm and despondency.

  Rafferty told everyone to sit.

  “They’ve started it,” he said. “Again. Some people never learn. Now it’s up to us to finish it. Well, I know the Hun, and I’ll tell you this: when you kill him he’s dead. We killed great quantities of Huns in the last show. We duffed up the Hun then, and we’ll duff up the Hun again now. Wing commander?”

  Hunt stepped forward.

  “War is full of surprises,” he announced. That got their full attention. “Here’s the first. The United States of America is involved. President Roosevelt has asked all the nations at war not to bomb civilians.” He let the words sink in. “Mr. Roosevelt doesn’t want us to bomb undefended towns. That’s not a problem, we weren’t intending to bomb them anyway. He also doesn’t want us to attack any target if there’s any risk of hitting civilians living nearby. Britain has agreed. So has France. It comes to this, gentlemen: we must not bomb the German mainland.”

  A rumble of disbelief turned into loud laughter. This was anticlimax in spades. “Bags me two weeks’ leave!” someone called.

  “That’s not all,” Hunt said, and they were silent again. “Poland’s out of range, of course, but the enemy has a coastline. He has warships which threaten our shipping. They might even bombard our towns.”

  “Tried it last time,” Rafferty said. “Shelled Scarborough, Bridlington, Whitby Abbey. Sorry, wing commander.”

  “We can bomb German warships at sea or at anchor without upsetting Mr. Roosevelt,” Hunt said, “because a ship at anchor is not part of the mainland.”

  “Bloody clever,” someone muttered.

  “The Intelligence Officer will give you the details.”

  This was a heavy-set flight lieutenant, very bald, with a mustache thick enough to hide his expression. Above the medal ribbons, his half-wing of an observer had weathered to pearl gray. He was the only man in the squadron to wear spectacles. Everyone called him Bins, short for binoculars.

  He unrolled a map of northern Europe. “To refresh your memory: Germany has two stretches of coastline,” he said. “One on each side of Denmark. Obviously, the more important, for us, is the North Sea coastline. It’s nearer, and it has important naval bases at Wilhelmshaven and Emden, plus the inland ports of Bremen and Hamburg. Beyond Denmark, on the Baltic, the German navy also uses Brunsbüttel, here at the mouth of the Kiel Canal. All those warships are available for attack under the Roosevelt Rules. Provided …”

  He hooked another roll of paper over the map and let it fall open.

  “This is Wilhelmshaven. You see the town here, and the docks here. The area in blue is the bay. Now, if a German cruiser, for instance, is tied up to the dockside, you must not bomb it.” He surveyed them over his horn-rims. They looked unhappy. Good. That meant they were listening. “Civilians live nearby. Some may be dockers. Your bombs might harm them.”

  “Hard cheese,” someone growled.

  “Any German vessel, warship or otherwise, attached to the dockside is part of the mainland and therefore immune. But …” Bins indulged himself in a short pause, “… if the ship is out here, offshore, maybe anchored, maybe not, it’s considered to be at sea. You can sink it with a clear conscience.”

  “Are the Huns playing by the same rules?” a pilot asked.

  “The German government has not yet responded.”

  “Too busy bombing Poland.”

  “Possibly. A few words about Denmark, Holland and Belgium. They are neutral and anxious to remain so. Fly over them and you may get shot at by their anti-aircraft guns, perhaps even attacked by their fighters …”

  Bins answered a few questions and removed his maps. Rafferty stepped forward. The briefing had disappointed him: too flat, not enough gusto. “One last thing,” he said briskly. “Don’t believe anything an air marshal tells you.” That made them stare. “When he’s called Hermann Goering.” They laughed, which was what he wanted. “Half of it’s lies and the other half’s tosh. That’s not our style. The Royal Air Force might not get everything absolutely right but at least we don’t appoint an air marshal who’s too fat to get in a cockpit.” They laughed more freely. “And remember this. You’re lucky, damned lucky. This war isn’t going to be all mud and blood, like last time. This will be the war of the knockout blow, and you’re the boys with the big punch. Good luck!”

  Walking back to the Mess for lunch, Rafferty said: “The chaps are in fine fettle, aren’t they? Itching for a scrap.”

  “It’s quite crazy, sir,” Hunt said.

  “Of course it is, old boy. Totally lunatic.”

  “We’re not trained to bomb ships. Nobody in the Command is.”

  “Of course not. You counted on mainland targets. We all did. You’re damn good at hitting them, given a spot of decent weather.”

  “Warships dodge about so much.”

  “Yes. They carry a lot of guns, too.”

  “That’s another thing, sir. What’s the best way to hit a ship? Should we go in low?”

  “If it was me, I’d be up at eight or ten thousand feet, where the guns can’t reach. Not the light guns, anyway.”

  “From ten thousand, the target’s as thin as a pin and the bombs drift with the wind.”

  “Well, in that case the whole thing’s absurd.”

  “Crazy.” Hunt kicked the head off a dandelion. “But I suppose we’ll go ahead and do it anyway.”

  “Certainly. Lunatic orders are in the finest tradition of the Service. Don’t think too much. Just do it.”

  3

  At about that time, an RAF Blenheim took off and headed across the North Sea. The weather was calm. A couple of hours later, the pilot was pleased to discover that he was bang on course, high above the approaches to Wilhelmshaven. That was good flying, plus a slice of luck.

  Soon the crew looked down on a perfect view of fourteen German warships in formation: three battleships, four cruisers and seven destroyers. That was a really thick slice of luck. Immediately the Blenheim’s wireless operator reported the sighting. His radio wasn’t powerful enough to send a signal nearly four hundred miles. Bomber Command HQ received tattered fragments of the message and made no sense of them. Nobody’s luck lasts forever.

  The Blenheim turned for home and flew into a storm. For the rest of the afternoon the pilot struggled against a thumping headwind. He landed shortly before
five p.m. and made his report.

  When the order to attack reached 409 Squadron, every crew wanted to go. All week they had been at various stages of alert; all day they had been on standby, sitting in their crew rooms, playing cards, reading stale news in newspapers, dozing, waiting, thinking. The sudden promise of action blew away boredom, but not for everyone. “Five aircraft,” Hunt announced. “That’s all they want. Five. I’m leading.” He quickly picked four experienced crews. They took off at six-fifteen.

  Already the light was poor. To the east it was worse: black with thunderstorms. They crossed the coast at Lowestoft. It was their last sight of land for almost six hours. Before long the wind was gusting so badly that Hunt opened out the formation, to avoid collision. They flew with their navigation lights on. Hunt knew that his five were only part of a large force of bombers—eighteen Hampdens and nine Wellingtons—all aiming for the same spot on the map. The longer they flew, the greater the risk that two machines might try to occupy exactly the same spot at the same time. Each with a full load of bombs. He put it out of his mind.

  Once, in the fading light, he thought he saw aircraft far to the north. Then cloud blotted out the dots.

  The rest of the trip was a matter of increasing misery and fatigue. The Hampdens bucketed through a succession of storms. The rain made a racing skin on the windscreens and the pilots flew by instrument. Always the wind was violent, and without doubt it was changing direction. The observers were navigating by dead reckoning: we are flying on this compass bearing at that speed so, allowing for such and such a wind, we must be here. The storms made fools of the compass and blew the predicted winds to buggery. The Hampdens slogged on. With luck they ought to strike Germany somewhere in the hundred-mile gap between Denmark and Holland.

  Perhaps they did. The light was so poor and the weather was so thick that none of the bombers made a landfall. Nobody found Germany, let alone Wilhelmshaven, let alone a pin-thin, blacked-out warship.