Chapter 3

I just remember Blucher and his Prussians showing up at sunset and saving the day." "Wouldn't have been worth a tinker's dam if They had fetched along his hammers and nails. By sunset Wellington would have been in full flight. Napoleon had routed Blucher three days earlier. He'd have done it again with ease." The car went over the crest of a hill. Ahead, beyond green empty pastureland, lay the blue Channel, shining in the sun, and a hairline of French coast all ajong the horizon. They got out and stood amid high grass and red poppies blowing in a cool sea breeze. After an impressive silence, broken only by birdsong, Tillet said, Well, there we are. You're looking at Hitler's France." Turn by Turn they scanned the coast through a telescope Tillet brought out of the car's trunk. Small images of houses and ships shimmered on the far shore. "That's as close as Jerry's ever come," Tillet said. "Close enough, too." "The Germans took all the neutral attaches on a tour of France not long ago," Pug said. "Brought us clear to the coast. The Poppies are growing over there, too. We saw your chalk cliffs, and the Maginot Line guns they were pointing at you. Now I'm looking down the wrong end of those guns." Tillet said, "They're no problem. They lob a few shells over for terror, but they fall in the fields. Nobody's terrorized." Running westward along the coast, they passed through siicnt boarded-up villages, thickly tangled with barbed wire. Camouflaged pillboxes stood thick along the hills and in the towns. Pug saw a children's merry-go-round with the snouts of cannon peeking from under the platform of painted horses. Along the Hat stony beaches, jagged iron rods spiked up, festooned with wire. As waves rose and fell, queerly shaped tangles of pipe poked above the water. Pug said, "Well, you're not exactly unprepared." "Yes. Adolf was decent enough to give us a breather, and we've used it. Those pipes out beyond the waterline are just the old Greek fire idea. We set the sea ablaze with petroleum, and fry the Germans we don't drown." Barrage balloons came in sight over the hills to the west. 'Ah. Here we are." Tillet pulled up under a spreading old tree. 'Tortsmouth has two possible restaurants, but the city's taken a pasting. They may be short of crockery. I have some sandwiches and coffee in the boot."'Perfect." Pug trotted up and down the road, restoring circulation to his numb heavy legs, then sat beside Tillet under the tree. They ate the lunch wordlessly. Tillet appeared to have no small talk whatever. Pug did not mind, being more or less like that himself. "Look there," Tillet said, gesturing with the last of his sandwich. In the blue sky a patch of orange was flowering over the city, a barrage balloon on fire. "they're back today, after all. More coffee?" "No thanks." "Now, what's the damned fool doing hitting poor Portsmouth again? Yesterday he was going inland, where he should be." Tillet deftly packed the lunch things and got his binoculars. The air vibrated with the distant thump of A.A. firing and the hum of planes. "Shall we get along down there? I imagine it's a feint. It doesn't look like much of a show." "Right." Climbing in the car, Pug paused, and scanned the sky high to the east. "Look there, General." Tillet squinted skyward, saw nothing, and used his binoculars. His eyes widened. "Yes. That's more like it." He passed the binoculars to Victor Henry. The binoculars resolved the gray moving dot into swarms of airplanes moving north in tight V's across the cloudless blue. "Heinkels, a lot of log's, and some no's," Pug said. "More than a hundred of them." "No Stukas? They're sitting birds. Our pilots say it's hardly sporting to go after them." "I don't see any crooked wings up there. But they're pretty far off." "Care to join our observer corps, Captain Henry?" Tillet's Voice to him was slightly more cordial. More barrage balloons over Portsmouth burst into flame and went writhing lazily down in black smoke. Fires were burning on the docks; white smoke trails crisscrossed the blue sky. The car passed a black plane nose down, burning in a grassy field, its markings hidden by flames, By the time they reached Portsmouth, fire fighters were streaming water on the blazes, and people were out in the streets gawking. Though buildings were smashed and burning and rubble heaps blocked many streets, the town did not look anything like Rotterdam, or even some of the badly hit French towns. "Care to inspect the damage? You're welcome to, but it's a dreary sight. I'm thinking we might go straight on to the Chain Home station. Since Jerry does seem to be coming over today, you might find it interesting.""Sure thing." They had the ferry to themselves. The old wooden boat rolled nauseatingly on the little stretch of open water to the Isle of Wight. "People forget how choppy this Channel is," Said Tillet, clinging to a stanchion and raising his voice above the mind and the engine thump. "If the Germans do cross, they may arrive too seasick to fight. It's a factor." An olive-painted military car awaited them at the landing they drove across the bucolic island, passing one mansion after another shuttered and dead amid rolling wide lawns and shrubbery sprouting and flowering rankly. they saw no other car on their way to a cluster of iron and wooden huts around steel towers thrusting toward the sky, a grim blotch on the green holiday island. A tubby man with a scarlet face, the group captain in charge of the station, offered them tea in his little office, chatting about the raid On Portsmouth. He also mentioned with some pride a large sea bass which he had hauled from the surf at dawn. "Well, shall we have a look at how things are going? There's rather a large attack been laid on today, I believe." Victor Henry's first glimpse of British radar scopes at Ventnor, in a small stuffy room lit by one red light and foul with smoke, was a deep hock. He listened intently to the talk of the pale, slender man in gray tweed caned Dr, Cantwell, a civilian scientist, as they inspected the scopes'. But the sharp green pips were news enough. The British were miles ahead of the United States. They had mastered techniques that American ex. Plerts had told him were twenty years off. The R.A.F could measure the range and bearing of a ship down to a hundred yards or less, and read the result off a scope at sight. They could do the same to a single incoming airplane, or count horde of airplanes, and give the altitude too. These instruments were marvels compare(a) d to the stuff that he had seen tested on the New York last year and that the Navy had ordered in large quantities. Pug Henry had two immediate thoughts: that the United States Navy had to get hold of this equipment; and that the British were far better prepared for war than the world knew. He admired the quiet sense of drama with which General Tillet had bowled him over. That was well done. But it all hung on the fact that they had these remarkable radars. Here was a moment of confrontation between America and England masked in a casual visit, in an offhand atmosphere, in a smoky, dim little room smelling of electric machinery, on a playground island deserted by the rich, facing the displaced Maginot Line guns. 'We have nothing like this," he said.
Then?" said Dr. CantweB, lighting a cigarette. "Are you sure? They're pretty far along at MIT, we understand, with this sort of thing." 'I know what we've got." Pug saw on General Tillet's face, in the red fight, the shadowy gleam that comes of drawing a good hand of cards: a deepening of lines, a brightening of eyes, nothing more. "How the devil do you obtain such a sharp beam? I pressed our boys on this. The answer was that it was a question of stepping down to shorter and shorter wavelengths. Beyond a certain point you can't do that, they say, and still get the power to shoot out the pulses to any distance." The scientist nodded, his eyes almost shut, his face as blank as possible. But he too, Pug thought, was a happy man. Then, yes, that's the problem, isn't it?" he mumbled. "But they'll certainly get around to the answer. It's a question of tube design, circuitry, and so forth. Our cavity magnetron does a pretty good job, at that. We're not entirely displeased with it." "Cavity magnetron?" "Yes. Cavity magnetron. One gets rid of the grid in a vacuum tube, you see, and one controls current flow with an external magnetic field. That allows for the more powerful pulses. It takes a bit of designing, but your people will certainly work it up in due course." "No doubt. Got any cavity magnetrons for sale?" Both Tillet and Dr. Cantwell burst out laughing, and even the enlisted men at their scopes turned around and smiled. The scarlet-faced group captain peered at a scope where a boyish operator was chattering into a headphone. "Hullo, looks like we have another circus heading this way. Fanning up over Le Havre again. A couple of dozen would you say, Stebbins?" "Thirty-seven, sir." Excitement thickened in the dark room as reports came in from several scopes. A young duty officer wearing headphones strolled from scope to scope, making ngtes on a clipboard, talking to the operators. To PLig Henry's eye this was smooth expert work, like the controlled tumult in a submarine conning tower during an attack run. General Tillet said, "I take it you think rather well of our cavity magnetron." "It's a ma or breakthrough, general." "Hell. Yeas. Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.""Pretty useful toys," said Pug, watching the duty officer write down the ranges and bearings that the radar operators were barking. "Exact intelligence of the enemy's location and movements, without disclosing your own." "Well, of course. We're damned grateful for our boffins. A few Englishmen did stay awake while our PO]iticians kicked away air parity and all the rest of our military posture. Well, now that you've had a look, would you just as soon pop back to Londonr I thought we might have to stay here a day or two to see action, but Jerry's been obliging. We can break our trip overnight at some decent hotel, then whip up to London. A couple of people there would like a word with you." Outside 10 Downing Street a single helmeted bobby paced in the morning sun, watched by a few sightseers on the opposite sidewalk. Remembering the grim arrays of SS men in front of Hitler's marble chancellery, Victor Henry smiled at this one unarmed Englishman guarding the Prime Minister's old row house. Tillet brought him in, introduced him to a male secretary in a morning coat, and left. The secretary led him up a wide stairway lined with portraits-Pug recognized Disraeli, Gladstone, and Rariisay MacDonald-and left him waiting in a broad room full of beautiful old furniture and splendid paintings. Perched on a petit-point sofa, all alone, Pug had plenty of time to grow nervous before the secretary returned to fetch him. In a small hot cluttered room that smelled of old books and dead cigars, the corpulent old Prime Minister stood near the window, one hand on his hip, looking down at a spread of photographs on his desk. He was very short and very stooped, with graceful little hands and feet; he bulged in the middle, and tapered upward and downward like Tweedledum. As he turned and went to meet Victor Henry, his walk was slow and heavy. With a word of welcome he shook hands and motioned Pug to a seat. The secretary left. Churchill sat in his armchair, put a hand on one arm, leaned back, and contemplated the American naval captain with filmy eyes. The big ruddy face, flecked and spotted with age, looked severe an d suspicious. He puffed at the stump of his cigar, and slowly rumbled, "We're going to win, you know." "I'm becoming convinced of that, Mr. Prime Minister," Victor Henry said, trying to control his constricted throat and bring out normal tones. Churchill put on half-moon glasses, took up a paper and glanced at it, then peered over the rims at Henry. "Your post is naval attache in Berlin. Your President has sent you here to have a look at our RDF, a subject in which you have special knowledge. He reposes much confidence in your judgment." Churchill said this with a faint sarcastic note suggesting that he knew Pug was one more pair of eyes sent by Roosevelt to see how the British were taking the German air onslaught; also, that he did not mind the-, scrutiny a bit. "Yes, sir. We call it radar.""What do you think of my stuff, now that you've seen it?" 'The United States could use it." Churchill uttered a pleased grunt. "Really? I haven't had an opinion quite like that from an American before. Yet some of your best people here have visited Chain Home stations." "Maybe they don't know what we've got. I do." "Well, then, I suggest you report to your President that we simple British have somehow got hold of something he can use." "I've done so." "Good! Now have a look at these." From under the outspread pile of photographs, the Prime Minister drew several charts and passed them to the American. He dropped his gnawed stub into a shiny brass jar of sand, and lit a fresh cigar, which trembled in his mouth. The colored curves and columns of the charts showed destroyer and merchant ship losses, the rate of new construction, the increase of Nazi-held European coastline, and the rising graph of U-boat sinkings. It was an alarming picture. Puffing clouds of blue and gray smoke, Churchill said that the fifty old destroyers were the only warships that he would ever ask of the President. His own new construction would fill the gap by March. It was a question of holding open the convoy lines and beating off invasion during these next eight months. Every day danger mounted, he said, but the deal was bogging down. Roosevelt wanted to announce the lease of Caribbean naval bases on British islands as a trade for the destroyers. But Parliament would be touchy about bartering British soil for ships. Moreover, the PrestihdeenBtriwtiashntefldeeat written guarantee that if the Nazis invaded and won, would not yield to the Germans or scuttle itself, but would steam to American ports. "It is ability that I won't discuss, let alone publicly record," Churchill growled. -The German fleet has had considerable practice in scuttling and surrendering. We have had none." Churchill added-with a crafty grin that reminded Pug a bit of Franklin Roosevelt-that giving fifty warships to one side in a war perhaps was not a wholly friendly act toward the other side. Some of the President's advisers feared Hitler might declare war on the United States. That was another difficulty. "There's not much danger of that," Victor Henry said. "No, not much hope of that," Churchill said, "I quite agree." His eyes under twisted brows looked impish as a comedian's. Victor Henry felt that the Prime Minister had paid him the compliment of stating his entire war policy in one wily joke. "Here's that bad man's invasion fleet. Landing craft department," Churchill went on, scooping up and handing him a sheaf of photographs showing various oddly shaped boats, someair viewed in clusters from the , some photographed close on. "A raggle-taggle he's still scraping together. Mostly the prahms they use in inland waterways. Such cockleshells will ease the task of drowning Germans, as we devoutly hope to do to the lot of them. I should like you to tell your President that now is the time to get to work on landing craft. We shall have to go back to France, and we shall need a lot of these. We have got some fairly advanced types, based on designs I made back in 1917- Look at them, while you're here. We shall want a real Henry Ford effort." Victor Henry couldn't help staring in wonder at this slumping, smokey"reathed puddle of an old man, fiddling with the thick gold chain across his big black-clad belly, who with three or four combat divisions, with almost no guns or tanks left after Dunkirk, with his back to the wall before a threatened onslaught of Hitler's hundred and twenty divisions, was talking of invading Europe. Churchill stared back, his broad lower lip thrust out. "Oh, I assure You we shall do it. Bomber Command is growing by leaps and bounds. We shall one day bomb them till the rubble jumps, and invasion will administer the coup de grace. But we shall need those landing craft." He paused, threw his head back, and glared at Henry. "In fact, we are prepared now to raid Berlin in force, if he dares to bomb London. Should that occur while you're still here, and if you don't consider it foolhardy nonsense, you might go along to see how it's done." The pugnacious look faded, the wrinkled eyes blinked comically over the spectacles, and he spoke in slow jocular lisping rhythms. "Mind you, I don't suggest you return to your duty post by parachute. It would save time, but might be considered irregular by the Germans, who are sticklers for form." Pug thought it was extremely foolhardy nonsense, but he said at once, "I'd be honored, of course." "Well, well. Probably out of the question. But it would be fun! wouldn't it?" Churchill painfully pushed himself out of his chair, and Pug jumped up. "I trust General Tillet is taking good care of you? You are to see everything here that you've a mind to, good or bad." 'He's been perfect, sir." 'Tillet is very good. His views on Gallipoli I regard as slightly unsound, since he makes me out at once a Cyrano, a jackass, and a poltroon." He held out his hand. "I suppose you've seen a bit of Hitler. What do you think of him?" "Very able, unfortunately." "He is a most wicked man. The German badly wants tradition and authority, or this black face out of the forest appears. Had we restored the Hohenzollems in igig, Hitler might still be aragged tramp, muttering to himself in a squalid Vienna doss house. Now, alas, we must be at considerable trouble to destroy him. And we shall." Churchill shook hands at the desk. "You were in War Plans and you may be again. recommend that you obtain all our latest stuff on landing craft. Ask Tillet." "Yes, sir." "We shall require great swarms of the things. Great. .. swarms!" Churchill swept his arms wide, and Victor Henry saw in his mind's eye thousands of landing craft crawling toward a beach in a gray dawn. "Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister." General Tillet was waiting in his car. They went to a room in the Admiralty where huge wall charts showed the disposition of the fleet. In the blue spaces of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean, the little colored pins looked sparse and lonesome, but the sowing around the home islands bristled thick. Pins in a thin line marked the great-circle convoy path across the Atlantic; Tillet traced this line with his pipe. "There's the problem. We breathe through that tube. If Jerry can cut it, we've bought it. Obviously we can use some old destroyers you've got lying around from the last war, not doing much of anything." "Yes, so the Prime Minister said. But there's a political problem, General. Either Hitler's a menace to the United States, in which case we need everything we've got and a lot more-or he isn't, and in that case why should we let you have part of our Navy to fight him? I'm just giving you the isolationist argument." "Men, Yaas-Of course we hope you'll think of common traditions and all that, and the advantage of keeping us alive, and the possibility that the Germans and Japanese, dominating Europe and Asia and the oceans, might prove more disagreeable over the years than we've been. Now I'm still to show you those landing craft we've got up in Bristol, and Fighter Command in Stanmore-" "If I can, I'd also like to visit Group operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group." Tillet blinked at him. "Number Eleven? jolly good idea. Take a bit of arranging, but I believe we can lay it on." Victor Henry sat in the lobby of the Savoy, waiting for Pamela and her fighter pilot. Uniforms thronged past, with only a sprinkling of dinner jackets on white-headed or bald men. The young women, in colorful thin summer finery, looked like a stream of excited amorous angels. On the brink of being invaded by Hitler's hordes, England was the gayest place he had ever seen.
This was nothing like the glum hedonism of the French in May, going down with knives and forks in their hands. Whenever the American had visited in a hard-driving week-and by now this included shipyards, navy and air bases, factories, government offices, and army maneulvershe had noted the resolute, cheerful spirit, borne out by the rise in production figures. The British were beginning to turn out tanks, planes, guns, and ships as never before. They now claimed to be making airplanes faster than the Germans were knocking them down. The problem was getting to be fighter pilots. If the figures given him were true, they had started with somewhat more than a thousand seasoned men. Combat attrition was taking a steep toll, and to send green replacements into the sides was fruitless. They could kill no Germans and the Germans could kill them. England had to sweat Out 1940 with the fighter pilots on hand. But how fast was the Luftwaffe losing its own trained pilots? That was the key, Tillet said; and the hope was that Goering was already throwing everything in. If so, and if the British could hold on, there would come a crack in Luftwaffe performance. The signal, said Tillet, might be a shift to terror bombing of the cities. "Here we are, late as hell," chirruped Pamela, floating up to him in a mauve silk dress. Pamela's flier was short, swarthy, broad-nosed, and rather stout, and his thick wavy black hair badly needed cutting. Except for the creased blue uniform, Flight Lieutenant Gallard looked like a young lawyer or businessman rather than an actor, though his brilliant blue eyes, sunken with fatigue, had a dramatic sparkle. Diamonds glittered in Pamela's ears. Her hair was done up in a makeshift way. Pug thought she had probably emerged from bed rather than a beauty parlor; and fair enough, in the time and place! The notion gave him a pang of desire to be young and in combat. Their table was waiting in the crowded grillroom. They ordered drinks. "Orange squash," said Might lieutenant Callard. " Two dry martinis. One orange squash. Very good, sir," purred the silver-haired waiter, with a low bow. Gallard gave Victor Henry a fetching grin, showing perfect teeth; it made him seem more of an actor. The fingers of his left hand were beating a brisk tattoo on the starched cloth. "That's the devil of an order, isn't it, in the Savoy?" Pamela said to Pug, "I'm told he used to drink like a proper sponge, but he went on orange squash the day we declared war." Pug said, "My son's a Navy flier. I wish he'd go on orange squash." "It'not bad idea. This business up there"-Gallard raised a thumb toward the ceili(s) ng-"hap(a) pens fast. You've got to look sharp so as to see the other fellow before he seesyou. You have to react fast when you do see him, and then you have to make one quick decision after another. Things get mixed up and keep changing every second. You have to fly that plane for dear life. Now, some of the lads thrive on drink, they say it blows off their steam. I need all my steam for that work." "There's a lot I'd like to ask you," said Victor Henry. "But probably this is your night to forget about the air war." "Oh?" Gallard gave Pug a long inquiring look, then glanced at Pamela. "Not a bit'. Fire away," "How good are they?" "The jerries are fine pilots and ruddy good shots. Our newspaper talk about how easy they are makes us a little sick." "And their planes?" "The jos a fine machine, but the Spitfire's a good match for it. The Hurricane's quite a bit slower; fortunately it's much more maneuverable. Their twin-engine i io is an inferior machine, seems to handle very stiffly. The bombers of course are sitting birds, if you can get at them." "How's R.A.F morale?" Gallard Hipped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with swift gestures of one hand, "I'd say it's very high. But not the way the papers tell it. Not that dashing patriotic business. I can remember the first time I fought Over England, when those dots appeared in the sky just where Fighter Control said they were, I had a bit of that feeling, I thought, rMy, damn their eyes, they're really trying it, and what the hell are they doing flying over my country? Let's shoot the bloody bastards down!" But right away I became damn busy trying not to get shot down myself. That's how it's been ever since." He smoked in silence, his eyes de and far away, his fingers dancing and dancing. He shifted in the chair, as though it were too hard. 'It's a job, and we're trying to do our best. It's a lot more fighting than we had over France. You can tell your son, Captain, that fear's a big factor, especially as the thing goes on and on. The main thing is learning to live with it. Some chaps simply can't. We call it LMF, lack of moral fibre. The brute fact is that as range decreases, accuracy increases. You've got to close the range. There's nothing to do about that old truth of warfare. But there's always the chap who opens up and blazes away from afar, you know, and runs out of bullets and heads for home. And there's the one who somehow always loses the bird he's after in the clouds, or who never finds the foe and aborts the mission. One soon knows who they are.
Nobody blames them. After a while they're posted out." He fell silent again, looking down at the smoking cigarette in his damped hands, obviously absorbed in memory. He shifted in the chair again, and glanced up from Victor Henry to Pamela, who was watching his face tensely. "Well -the long and the short of it is, it's us against the jerries, Captain Henry, and that's exciting. We're flying these machines that can cross all of England in half an hour. Excellent gun platforms. Best in the world. We're doing what very few men can do or ever have done. Or perhaps will ever do again." He looked around at the elegant, grillroom full of well-dressed women and uniformed men, and said with an uncivilized grin, the whites showing around His eyeballs, "If excelling interests you, there it is'-he made the thumb gesture-"up there." "Your orange squash, sir," said the waiter, bowing. "And just in time," said Gallard. "I'm talking too much." Pug raised his glass to Gallard. "Thanks. Good luck and good hunting." Gallard grinned, drank, and moved restlessly in the chair. "I was an actor of sorts, you know. Give me a cue and I rant away. What does your son fly?" "SBD, the Douglas Dauntless," said Pug. "He's a carrier pilot." Gallard slowly nodded, increasing the speed of his finger tattoo. "Dive bomber." "Yes." "We still argue a lot about that. The jerries copied it from your navy. Our command will have no part of it. The pilot's in trouble, we say, in that straight predictable path. Our chaps have got a lot of victories against the Stukas. But then again, providing they get all the way down, they do lay those bombs in just where they're supposed to go. Anyhow, my hat's off to those carrier fellows, landing on a tiny wobbly patch at sea. I come home to broad immovable mother earth, for whom I'm developing quite an affection." "Ah, I have a rival," said Pamela. "I'm glad she's so old and so Hat." Gallard smiled at her, raising his eyebrows. "Yes, you've rather got her there, haven't you, Pam?" During the meal, he described in detail to Victor Henry the way fighter tactics were evolving on both sides. Gallard got very caught u'p in this, swooping both palms to show maneuvers, pouring otrt a rapid fire of technical language. For the first time he seemed to relax, sitting easily in his chair, grinning with enthusiastic excitement. What he was saving was vital intelligence and Pug wanted to remember as much as possible; he drank very little of the Burgundy he had ordered with the roast beef. Pamela at last complained that she was drinking up the bottle by herself. "I need all my steam, too," Pug said. "More than Ted does.""I'm tired of abstemious heroes. I shall find myself a cowardly sot." Gallard was baying his second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding-he was eating enormously, saying that he had lost almost a stone in three weeks and proposed to make it up in three days-when the headwaiter came to him with a written note. Gallard crumpled it up, wiped a napkin across his mouth, and excused himself. He returned in a few minutes, smiled at them, and resumed eating, "Pam, there's been a change," he abruptly said when his plate was empty. "Our s uadron's rest off ops is cancelled. We'll get it when the weather's a little cooler." He smiled at Victor Henry and drummed ten fingers on the table. "I don't mind. One gets fidgety, knowing the thing's still going on full blast and one's out of it." In the silence at the little table, Victor Henry thought that the ominousness of this summons went much beyond the riskiness of recalling and sending up a fatigued, edgy pilot. It signalled that the R.A.F was coming to the end of its rope. Pamela said, 'I"en do you have to go back? Tomorrow?" "Oh, I'm supposed to be on my way now, but I was damned we]] going to enjoy this company, and my beef." "I shall drive you to Biggin Hill," "Well, actually, they're digging the chaps out of various pubs and places of lesser repute, Pam. We'll be going up together. Those of us they can find." He glanced at his watch. "I'll be cracking off soon, but the evening's young. No reason for you not to go on to that Noel Coward show. I've heard it's very funny." Quickly Pug said, "I think now's the time for me to leave you Ioth." The R.A.F pilot looked him straight in the eye. 'Why? Don't you think you could bear Pamela's drunken chatter for another little while? Don't go, Here she is all tarted up for the first time in weeks." "All right," Pug said. "I think I can bear it." The pilot and the girl stood. Pamela said, "So soon? Well, we shall have a nice long stroll through the lobby." As Pug got up and offered his hand, Ted Gallard said, "Good luck to you, Captain Henry, and to that son of yours in the Dauntless clive bomber. Tell him I recommend orange squash. Come and see us at Biggin Hill aerodrome." Left alone at the table, Pug sat and wiped his right hand with a napkin. Gallard's palm had been very wet. He did visit Ted Gallard's squadron, one afternoon a few days later.
Biggin Hill lay southeast of London, squarely in the path of incoming German bombers from the nearest airfields across the Channel. The Luftwaffe was persisting in a fierce effort to knock out Biggin Hill, and the aerodrome was a melancholy scene: wrecked aircraft, burned-out roofless hangars, smashed runways, everywhere the inevitable stinks of burned wood, broken drains, blown-up earth, and smashed plaster. But bulldozers were snorting here and there, patching the runways, and a couple of planes landed as Pug arrived. On stubby fighters dispursed all over the field, mechanics in coveralls were climbing and tinkering, with much loud cheerful profanity. The aerodrome was very much in business. Gallard looked very worn, yet happier than he had been in the Savoy Grill. In the dispersal hut he introduced Pug Henry to a dozen or so hollow-eyed, dishevelled lads in wrinkled uniforms, fleece-lined boots and yellow lifejackets, lounging about on chairs and iron cots, either bareheaded or with narrow blue caps tilted over one eye. The arrival of an American Navy captain in mufti dried up the talk, and for a while the radio played jazz in the awkward silence. Then one pink-cheeked fellow who looked as though he had never shaved, offered Pug a mug of bitter tea, with a friendly insult about the uselessness of navies. He had been shot down by a British destroyer in the Channel, he said, and so might be slightly prejudiced. Pug said that speaking for the honor of navies, he regretted the idiocy; but as a friend of England, he approved the marksmanship. That brought a laugh, and they began talking about flying again, self-consciously for a while, but then forgetting the visitor. Some of the slang baffled him, but the picture was clear enough: everlasting alert, almost no sleep, too many airplanes lost in accidents as well as combat, far too many German fighters, and desperate, proud, nervous high Mk spirits in the much reduced squadron. Pug gathered that almost half the pilots that had started the war were dead. When the six o'clock news came on, the talk stopped and all huddled around the radio. It had been a day of minor combat, but again the Luftwaffe had come off second best in planes shot down, at a rate of about three to two. The fliers made thumbs-up gestures to each other, boyishly grinning. "They're fine lads," Gallard said, walking Victor Henry back to his car. "Of course, for your benefit they cut the talk about girls. I'm the middle-aged man of the squadron, and I get left out of it too, pretty much. When they're not flying, these chaps have the most amazing experiences." He gave Pug a knowing grin. "One wonders how they manage to climb into their cockpits, but they do, they do." "It's a good time to be alive and young," Pug said. "Yes. You asked me about morale. Now you've seen it." At the car, as they shook hands,Gallard said diffidently, "I owe you thanks." "You do? Whatever for?" "Pamela's coming back to England. She told me that when they met you by chance in Washington, she was trying to make up her mind. She decided to ask you about it, and was much impressed by what you said." "Well, I'm flattered. I believe I was right. I'm sure her father's surviving nicely without her." "Talky? He'll survive us all." It's not going well," general Tillet said, maneuvering his car through a beetle-cluster of wet black taxicabs at Marble Arch. The weather had lapsed into rain and fog; pearl-gray murk veiled a warm, sticky, unwarlike London. Umbrella humps crowded the sidew. The tall red omnibuses glistened wetly; so did the rubber ponchos of the bobbies. The miraculous summer weather had given the air battle an exalting radiance, but today London wore a dreary peacetime morning face. 'The spirit at Biggin Hill is damned good," Pug said. "Oh, were you there? Yes, no question about spirit! It's the arithmetic that's bad. Maybe the Fat Boy's getting low on fighter pilots, too. We are, that's Hat. Perilously low. One doesn't know the situation on the other side of the hill. One hangs on and hopes." The rain trailed off as they drove. After a while the sun hazily sbonc Out on wet endless rows of identical grimy red houses, and sunlight shafted into the car. Tillet said, "Well, our meteorology blokes are on top of their job. They said the bad weather wouldn't hold, and that Jerry would probably be flying today. Strange, the only decent English summer in a century, and it comes along in the year the Hun attacks from the sky." "Is that a good or bad break?" "It's to his advantage for locating his target and dropping his bombs. But our interceptors have a better chance of finding him and shooting him down. Given the choice, our chaps would have asked for clear skies." He talked of Napoleon's luck with weather, and cited battles of Charles XII and Wallenstein that had turned on freak storms. Pug enjoyed Tillet's erudition. He was in no position to challenge any of it, and wondered who was. Tillet appeared to have total kno%vledge of every battle ever fought, and he could get as annoyed with Xerxes or Caesar for tactical stupidity, as he was with Hermann Goering. About an hour later they came to a town, drove along a canal of very dirty water, and turned off to a compound of sooty buildings surrounded by a high wire fence. A soldier at the gate saluted and let them pass. Pug said, "Where are we?" "Uxbridge. I believe you wanted to have a look at Group Operations, Number Eleven FighterGroup," said Tillet. "Oh, yes." In three weeks, Tillet had never once mentioned the request and Victor Henry had never repeated it. A flight lieutenant with a pleasant chubby round face met them. He was a lord, but Tillet clicked the long name out too crisply for Pug to catch it. His lordship conducted them out of the bright sunshine, down and down a long turning stairway into the ground. "One rather expects to encounter a white rabbit, doesn't one, Captain?" he fluted in Oxonian tones. "Hurrying by consulting its pocket watch, and all that. Nothing here that interesting, I'm afraid." They entered a shallow balcony in a small strange theatre. In place of the stage and curtain stood a black wall full of columns of electric bulbs, white except for a single line of red lamps near the top. At the side of the wall was a column of R.A.F terms for stages of readiness. On the floor below, twenty or so girls in uniform, some wearing headphones on long lines, worked around a large-scale table map of southern England. On either wall, in glassed boxes like radio control booths, men with headphones scrawled at desks. The place had an underground, earthandcement smell, and it was quiet and cool. "Burne-Wilke, here's your American visitor," said Tillet. The blond officer sitting in the middle of the balcony turned, smiling. "Hullo there! Frightfully glad to hear you were coming. Here, sit by me, won't you?" He shook hands with them. "Nothing much doing yet, but there will be soon. The bad weather's drifting clear of the Channel, and Jerry's getting airborne." Burne-Wilke rubbed his bony pink chin with one hand, giving Pug a quizzical glance. "I say, those aeroplanes you rounded up have proven ever so useful." "They can't play in this league," Pug said. "They're excellent on patrol. They've done some smart punishing of invasion barges. The pilots are keen on them." Burne-Wilke looked him in the eye. "See here, could you have produced those planes in two days?" Pug only grinned. Burne-Wilke shook his head and caressed his wavy hair. "I was sorely tempted to take you up. But you struck me as a chap who might just bring it off, and then we'd have looked proper fools. Hullo, there's a mutual friend. Didn't I first meet you with the Tudsburys, in a sweaty Washington receiving line?" Pamela was walking in to take the place of another girl. She looked UP, threw Victor Henry a smile, then got to work, and did not glance his way again. "This is all fairly clear, isn't it?" said Burne-Wilke, gesturing toward the map and the wall.
"Fighter Command at Stanmore is responsible for air defense, but it lets each group run its own show. Our beat is southeast England. It's the hot spot, closest to the Germans, and London's here." He swept one lean arm toward the wall, straight up and down. "Those six columns of, lamps stand for our group's six fighter control stations. Each vertical row of lights stands for one fighter squadron. All in all, twenty-two squadrons. In theory, we dispose of more than five hundred fighter pilots." Burne-Wilke wrinkled his lips. "In theory. just now we're borrowing pilots from other groups. Even so, we're way under. However..." He gestured toward the bottom part of the black wall, where white lights burned in a ragged pattern. "Going up the wall, you step up in readiness, dU you get to AMORNE, ENEMY iN siGiErr, and of course IENGA. That's the red row of lamps. Our six substations talk to us and to the pilots. Here we put together the whole picture. If things warm up enough, the air vice-marshal may come in and run the show.-Oh, yes. Those poor devils under glass on the left collect reports from our ground observer corps, on the right from our anti-aircraft. So all the information about German planes in our air will show up here fairly fast." Pug was not quite as surprised as he had been at Ventnor. He knew of the system's existence; but this close view awed him. "Sir, aren't you talking about a couple of hundred thousand miles of telephone cable? Thousands of lines, a forest of equipment? When did all this spring into being?" "Oh, we had the plan two years ago. The politicians were aghast at the money, and balked. Right after Munich we got our budget. It's an ill wind, eh? Hullo, here we go. I believe Jerry's on his way." On the black wall, white lights were starting to jump upward. The young lord at Burne-Wilkes elbow gave him a telephone. Burne-Wilke talked brisk R.A.F abracadabra, his eyes moving from the wall to the map table. Then he handed back the telephone. "Yes. Chain Home at Ventnor now reports several attacks forming up or orbiting. Two of them are forty-plus, one sixty-plus." Tillet said, "Goering's been an abysmal donkey, hasn't he, not to knock out our Chain Home stations? It will prove his historic mistake." "Oh, he has tried," Burne-Wilke said. "It isn't so easy. Unless one hits a steel tower dead on and blows it to bits, it just whips about like a palm tree in a storm, then steadies down." "Well, he should have gone on trying." White lights kept moving up the board. An air of business was settling over the operationsroom, but nobody moved in an excited way, and the hum of voices was low. The air vice-marshal appeared, a spare stern sparse-moustached man, with a sort of family resemblancp to General Tillet. He ignored the visitors for a while as be paced, then said hello to Tillet with a surprising warm smile that made him look kind and harmless. The first lights that leaped to red were in the column of the Biggin Hill control station. Victor Henry saw Pamela glance up at these lights. On the table, where she busily continued to lay arrows and numbered discs with the other girls, a clear picture was forming of four flights of attackers, moving over southern England on different courses. The reports of the telephone talkers on the floor merged into a steady subdued buzz. There was not much chatting in the balcony. Henry sat overwhelmed with spectator-sport fascination, as one by one the red lamps began to come on. Within twenty minutes or so, half the squadrons on the board were blinking red. "That's about it," Burne-Wilke said off handedly, breaking away from giving rapid orders. "We've got almost two hundred planes engaged. The others stand by to cover, when these land to refuel and rearm." "Have you ever had red lights across the board?" Burne-Wilke wrinkled his mouth. "Now and then. It's not the situation of choice. We have to call on other fighter groups then to cover for us, and just now there's not much left in reserve." Far away and high in the blue sky, thought Pug, forcing himself to picture it, planes were now darting and twisting in and out of clouds in a machine joust to the death of German kids and British kids, youngsters like Warren and Byron. Pamela's pudgy actor, cold sober on orange squash, was up there in his yellow life jacket, flying at several hundred miles an hour, watching his rearview mirror for a square white nose, or squirting his guns at an onrushing airplane with a black cross on it. Two of the Biggin Hill fights moved up to white: RETURNINg, 13ASE. "These things seldom last longer than an hour or so from the time Jerry starts," said Burne-Wilke. "He runs dry rather fast and has to head back. They keep falling in the sea like exhausted bats. Prisoners say that the Luftwaffe has given the Channel an impolite name-roughly equivalent to your American 'shit creek."' Within a few minutes, the red lights blinked off one by one. The air vice-marshal left. Below, the girls began clearing markers off the table. Lord Burne-Wilke spoke on the telephone, collecting reports. He put slender, hairy hands over his face and rubbed hard, then turned to Pug, his eyes reddened. "Wouldn't you like to say hello to Pamela Tudsbury?" "Very much. How did it go?"Widi a weary shrug, Burne-Wilke said, "One can't stop every bomber. I'm afraid quite a number got through and did their work. Often once the fires are out, things don't look so bad. We lost a number of planes. So did they. The count takes a day or so to firm up. I think we did all right." As Pug went out with the young lord, leaving Tillet conversing with the slumped senior officer, he glanced back at the theatre. On the wall, all lights were burning at or near the bottom again. The room was very quiet, the earth smell strong. The staircase to the surface seemed very long and steep. Pug felt drained of energy, though he had done nothing but sit and watch. He puffed and panted and was glad to see the daylight. Pamela stood in the sun outside in a blue uniform. " Well, you made it, but not on the best day. Ted's down." Her voice was calm, even chatty, but she gave his hand a nervous squeeze in two ice-cold hands. "Are you sure?" "Yes. He may have parachuted, but his plane dove into the sea. Two of his squadron mates reported it. He's down." She clung to his hand, looking into his face with glistening eyes. "Pam, as you've said, they often climb out of the water, and go right back to work." "Oh, certainly. Leave that to Ted. I've asked for a special pass. I think I shall come to London this evening. Would you buy me a dinner?" A week passed, and another, and Gallard did not return. Pamela came several times to London. Once Victor Henry remarked that she appeared to be fighting the war only when it suited her. "I am behaving shockingly," she said, " using every trick I know, presuming on everybody's sympathy and good nature, and pushing them all much too far. I shall soon be confined to camp until further notice. By then you'll be gone. Meantime you're here." It became a settled thing among the Americans that Pug Henry had found himself a young W.A.A.F. To cheer her up, he took her often to Fred Fearing's apartment on Belgrave Square, the center for the partying American-British crowd. Shortly after the Christmas night row with Rhoda, the Germans had expelled Fearing for telling the truth about some bomb damage in Hamburg. Fearing was having such a good time with the London girls that, as he put it, he often arrived at the broadcasting studio on his hands and knees. His thrilling and touching word pictures of England at war were stirring up so much sympathy in the United States that isolationists were claiming he was obviously in the pay of the British. The second time Victor Henry brought Pamela to the apartment, Fearing remarked, catching Pug alone for a moment in the hallway, "Aren't you the sly one, Reverend Henry? She's small, but saucy.""She's the daughter of a guy I know." "Of course. Talky Tudsbury. Old pal of mine, too." "Yes. That's who she is. Her fiance's an R.A.F pilot missing in action." Fearing's big knobby face lit in an innocent smile. "Just so. She might enjoy a little consolation." Pug looked up at him. The correspondent was over six feet tall, and heavily built. "How would you enjoy getting knocked on your ass?" Fearing's smile went away. "You mean it, Pug?" "I mean it." "Just asking. What do you hear from Rhoda?" "She misses me, New York stinks, she's bored, and the weather is unbearably hot." "Situation normal. Good old Rhoda." The other men who drifted in and out of the apartment, usually with a woman, usually more or less drunk-observers from the Army and the Air Corps, correspondents, film actors, businessmen-danced or bantered with Pamela, but otherwise let her alone, assuming she was Victor Henry's deary. Once, early in September, when they were having a drink in her apartment and joking about this, Pug said, "'Lechery, lechery-still wars and lechery-nothing else holds fashion."' She widened her eyes at him. "Why, bless me. He's a Shakespeare scholar, too." "Aside from Western stories, Pamela, practically the only things I read for recreation are the Bible and Shakespeare," Pug said, rather solemnly. "It's always time well spent. You can get through a lot of Shakespeare in a Navy career." "if "Well, there's precious little lechery around here," said Pamela. people only knew." "Are you complaining, my girl?" "Certainly not, you leathery old gentleman. I can't imagine how your wife endures you." "Well, I'm good, patient, uncomplaining company." "God love you, you are that." At this point the air raid sirens started their eerie moaning and wailing-a heart-stopping noise no matter how often Pug heard it.
"My God!" said Pamela. "There they come! This is it. Where on earth is Fighter Command?" She stood with Victor Henry on the little balcony outside her living room, still holding her highball glass, staring at arrays of bombers in wide ragged V's as they sailed through a bright blue sky, starkly visible in yellowing late sunlight. Anti-aircraft bursts all around and through the formations looked like white and black powder puffs, and seemed to be having no more effect. "Tangling with the fighter escort further south, I'd guess." Victor Henry's voice shook. The number of bombers staggered him. The mass of machines was poming on like the invaders in a futuristic movie, filling the air with a throbbing angry hum as of a billion bees. The pop and thump of scattered anti-aircraft guns made a pitiful counterpoint. One V-wave passed; in the azure distance several more appeared, swelling to unbelievable width and numbers as they drew over the city. The bombers were not very high, and the A.A. seemed to be exploding dead inside the V's, but on they thrummed. The muffled thunder of bomb hits boomed over the city, and pale flame and smoke began billowing up in the sunshine. Pug said, "Looks like they're starting on the docks." "Shall I get you another drink? I must, I must have one." She took his glass and hurried inside. More bombers kept appearing from the southeast. Pug wondered whether General Tillet could be right; was this a sign of weakening, a play of Goering's last card? Some show of weakness! Yet a heavy toll of an fighter escorts must be paying for the incredibly serene overflight of these bomber waves. The British fighters could knock these big slow machines down like tin ducks. They had proved that long ago, yet On the bombers came, sailing unscathed across London's sky from horizon to horizon, an awesome pageant of flying machinery. She brought the drinks and peered at the sky. "Why, God help us, there's more of them!" She leaned against the rail, touching shoulders. He put his arm around her and she nestled against him. So they stood together, watching the Luftwaffe start its effort to bomb London to its knees. It was the seventh of September. Along the river more and bigger fires shot skyward in great billows of dirty smoke. Elsewhere in the city random small blazes were flaring up from badly aimed bombs. After the first shock, there was not much terror in the sight. The noise was far off, the patches of fire meager and dispersed in the red and gray expanse of untouched buildings. London was a very, very large city. The Fat Boy's big try was not making much of a dent after all. Only along the burning Thames embankment was there a look of damage. So it seemed, in the view from Pamela's balcony of the first allout Valhalla attack.
So it seemed too in Soho, where they went to dine after the all clear. The Londoners thronging the sidewalk looked excited, undisruayed, even elated. Strangers talked to each other, laughed, and pointed thumbs up. The traffic flowed thick as ever. There was no trace of damage on the street. Distant clangs of fire engines and a heavy smokiness overhead remained the only traces, in this part of town, of Goering's tremendous attempt. Queues even stood as usual outside the movie houses, and the stage box offices were briskly selling tickets too. When they walked in twilight down toward the Thames, after an excellent Italian dinner, the picture began to change. The smell of smoke grew stronger; flickering red and yellow light gave the low clouds, thickened by ever-billowing smoke, a look of inferno. The crowds in the street grew denser. It became an effort to push through. The people here were more silent and grave. Henry and Pamela came to roped-off streets where amid noise and steam, shouting firemen dragged hoses toward blackened buildings and streamed water at tongues of fire licking out of the windows. Pamela skirted through alleys and side streets till they emerged on the riverbank into a mob of onlookers. Here an oppressive stench of burning fouled the air, and the river breeze brought gusts of fiery heat in the warm summer night. A low moon shone dirty red through the rolling smoke. Reflections of the fires on the other bank flickered in the black water. The bridge was slowly disgorging a swarm of refugees, some with carts, baby carriages, and wheelchairs, a poor shabby lot for the most part, many workmen in caps, and a horde of ill-dressed children who alone kept their gaiety, running here and there as they came. the smoke, Victor Henry looked up at the sky. Above rifts in the stars shimmered. "It's a very clear night, you know," he said. "These fires are a beacon they can see for a hundred miles. They may come back." e. I'm Pamela said coldly and abruptly, "I must return to Uxbridg beginning to feel rotten." She looked down at her flimsy gray dress. "But I seem to be slightly out of uniform." The sirens began their hideous screaming just as Pug and Pamela found a taxicab, many blocks from the river. "Come along," said the wizened little driver, touching his cap. "Business as usual, wot? And to jell with 'Itler!" tched the start of the night raid from the balcony victor Henry waned b while she changed. His senses were sharpe v the destruction, the excitement, the peculiar beauty of the fire panorama and the swaying blue-white searchlight beams, the thick thrumming of a number of motors, and the thump-thump of the anti-aircraft, going out on the gloomy moonlit balcony in her Pamela Tudsbury, in her W.A.A.F uniform," appeared to him the most desirable young female on God's earth. She looked -honer because of the low-heeled shoes, but the severe garb made,her small figure all the sweeter. So he thought.