Agent of Death (29 page)

CHAPTER 34

‘
P
-
for
-
Popsie’

Long
-
Range
Liberator
of
Coastal
Command
,

Westbound
at
28
,
000
feet
,

100
Miles South
of
Fastnet
Rock
.

Wednesday
7
June
,
13
.
00
hours
local
time
.

‘Why not, sir?’ said the navigator. ‘Why can’t we land at La Guardia?’ His voice was a distorted, intercom crackle, just audible over the rumble of four Pratt and Whitney fourteen-cylinder supercharged radials, because I was back in flying kit, with earphones in my helmet and an oxygen mask on my face. I was even in a pilot’s chair – co-pilot anyway – to the right of the man flying the aircraft, with banks of instruments and a duplicate set of controls in front of me, and blue sky over white clouds in the windscreen. It was home from home for a bomber pilot, right down to the unending, constant vibration of the massive engines that made everything tremble.

‘What’s wrong with La Guardia, sir?’ said the navigator, and I looked at the map on my knees. It gave the locations of all US army and navy air bases within five hundred miles of New York City. The navigator had an identical map on his chart table in the aircraft’s nose, just below and in front of the flight deck. ‘Can’t you see, sir?’ he said ‘La Guardia field? Home base to the 523rd Army Air …’ he fished for the correct word, ‘… unit? Squadron? Thingy? Whatever the Yanks call it? It’s right in New York, which is good because we might be running low on fuel if we don’t find this Yank carrier pretty quick.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the pilot, turning to look at me. ‘We’re relying on the carrier being where it’s supposed to be.’

I said nothing, looked at the map again, and did some silent worrying over all the things I wasn’t supposed to tell them. Then I studied the map carefully.

‘If you must land in New York State, then … how about,’ I said, and ran my finger over the map, ‘how about Buffalo Field, Air Technical Service Command. It’s between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, near Niagara Falls. Why not go there?’ The navigator fell silent, and measured the distance.

‘But that’s another three hundred miles, sir,’ he said. ‘Could be another hour and a half, and we might not have enough fuel.’

I looked at the map yet again, and did my best. ‘Then try Middleton Field,’ I said, ‘on the Susquehanna river, near Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. That’s only a hundred and fifty miles south-west of New York, and the prevailing winds blow from the west, so you should be OK if …’ I stopped right there. They weren’t stupid. You don’t find stupid men flying bombers.

So the pilot looked at me again. ‘Sir,’ he said, as politely as he could to a senior officer who was talking bollocks. ‘We’ve got fuel for about eighteen hours, and that’s with extra tanks in the bomb bay. We’re meeting strong headwinds, we’ve got to cross the Atlantic, and we’re not likely to find your ship straight away. Once we’ve dropped you off, sir, we might be some hundreds of miles from the Yankee coast, and everything underneath will be very wet, and we’ll want to find some dry stuff to land on. So what’s wrong with La Guardia field? Sir? What’s wrong with landing in New York?’

*

The pilot’s name was Davies: Flight Lieutenant Dougie Davies of 53 Squadron. He was captain of the aircraft and a good officer who had an excellent rapport with his men: seven of them. I was introduced to him and them at Saint Ewal and they reminded me of my own crew in L-for-Leather, except that they all looked very young. But by then I might have been suffering from veterans’ syndrome, which makes everyone look like children.

Saint Ewal was like most RAF stations – flat, wide open, a cluster of big hangars, admin buildings, a control tower, a criss-cross of concrete runways, a wind sock, and a perimeter fence guarded by the RAF Regiment. It had been a nice little Cornish village once, but that was levelled by the bulldozers in the late thirties, for the defence of Britain when war was obviously coming. The day was bright, and people were cheerful with the news of the Normandy Landings, but I felt that I personally was being gazed upon rather seriously. I felt it from the moment that I arrived, and I thought that the nature of my mission had leaked out.

In any case, Margaret and I were taken straight off the Dominie to a briefing in a Nissan Hut with a stove in the middle, and a little stage at the far end, and a wall full of big maps showing the south-west approaches to Britain. There, they served us sweet tea and sticky buns, while a combination of the intelligence officer and Margaret herself gave Dougie Davies and his men their final instructions and some papers – special for the mission – prepared with help from Eisenhower’s men in London.

That took about an hour, then we were outside in the June sunshine, where a considerable audience had gathered – officers, other ranks, and WAAFs – who mostly stared at me, now in flying gear, complete with parachute, life jacket, and a waterproof packet sewn into the inside lining of my tunic. The Station Commander was there too, an air commodore with ribbons from the Great War. He’d turned out to see me off and he removed a glove to shake my hand. Others did the same, then I got a small kiss from Margaret and a savagely whispered order:

‘Just try not to bloody drown yourself!’

She was like the chorus girls in
Pirates
of
Penzance
singing to the policemen off the fight the pirates, ‘
Go
to
glory
and
the
grave
!
’
while the policemen lament: ‘
no
reference
,
alack
,
to
our
chance
of
coming
back
.
’
It was odd. I hadn’t feel like that when I went off with Lord Leonard and his men. Perhaps it was because when I jumped I’d be on my own?

Meanwhile Coastal Command had the same sort of rituals as we did in Bomber Command, because we weren’t taken out to our machine on a truck. Instead, there was a line of wonky old bicycles leaning up against the briefing hut. There was a great number of them, bought, pinched or looted, and Dougie Davies’s chaps each chose one and began climbing aboard, flying gear, parachutes and all, while the air commodore and his brass stood to one side as if everything was perfectly normal.

‘Hope you don’t mind, sir,’ said Davies to me as we came out of the briefing hut, ‘the chaps always ride bikes and I take the car.’ He pointed to an MG Midget two-seater sports car, in racing green with a strap round the bonnet. It was considerably scuffed and the cockpit littered with mud and grass. On balance – and only just – I thought it better than riding a bike in flying kit.

We got in, and Davies revved the engine. Blue-grey smoke roared out of the exhaust, and there was a cheer from all present. Davies’s men shoved flying boots on pedals, and rocked and wobbled forward as the MG lurched away, and I was flung back in my seat as Davies changed gear – crunch, groan, crunch – and I hoped he flew better than he drove. Then he slowed down to let the bikes catch up and yelled back at his men in a pastiche of naval orders.

‘Squadron will form line astern on the flagship!’

‘Aye-aye, sir!’ they said, and we proceeded in formation down the main runway to the hard-stands where the big Liberators were parked, and all hands – that is to say Davies and his crew – joined their voices in
Daisy
!
Daisy
!
Give
me
your
answer
do
!

I joined in. It was typical aircrew behaviour, and it all looked wonderfully debonair and casual. Just the sort of thing that went down well in the cinema newsreels, with the commentator declaring: ‘See how our boys make light of danger! Bet the Nazis don’t joke like this as they fly. Look out, Adolf, they’re coming to get you!’

But really it was deadly serious. Given the casualty rate among aircrew and the actual chance of coming back, it was either act barmy or go barmy, or worse still refuse to fly, be judged as having
Lack
of
Moral
Fibre
, and pass into eternal shame and disgrace. So off we pedalled to find P-for-Popsie on the distant far side of the airfield, with the ground crew standing by, and the aircraft pulled off the hardstand by a tractor and lined up for the main runway. The ground crew grinned as we approached.

They seemed happy, but I wasn’t because I didn’t like the look of P-for-Popsie as she loomed ever nearer. I didn’t like her for the old airman’s maxim that if an aircraft
looks
good, then it
is
good, and the Liberator – a type I was seeing for the first time close up – didn’t look good: not one bit. It was so fat and slab-sided, and the undercarriage raised it so miserably low off the ground that its belly was all but scraping the tarmac.

So that’s the Liberator
, I thought, and I hoped it had some virtues that I couldn’t see, which presumably it must have had since it was the main, long-range type operated by Coastal Command. It was an American
airplane
: a four-motor heavy with the same twin-tail layout as the Lancaster, and it was supposed to be a more modern design than the Lancaster, or the equally famous American B17. But even Americans thought the Liberator was ugly and they called it ‘the box the B17 came in’. By comparison, the Lancaster certainly wasn’t beautiful in the sense that the Spitfire or Mosquito were beautiful, but, standing on the tarmac ready to go, the Lanc looked as fierce as a boxer’s fist, while P-for-Popsie looked like a flying pig.

Then there was the usual handing-over procedure, with chitties signed and Dougie Davies and his co-pilot and navigator walking round the aircraft, checking and looking, and the aircrew exchanging repartee with the ground crew. Nobody piddled on the tail-wheel though, because there wasn’t one. They were good men and Dougie Davies invited me to sit in the co-pilot’s seat for the take-off.

‘You might find it interesting, sir,’ he said. ‘Very different from a Lanc.’

‘Have you flown, Lancs, then?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I did a tour in Bomber Command, then asked for Coastal Command,’ he nodded. ‘I fancied the change, sir.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘How d’you find it? The type?’ I looked at the Liberator.

‘It’s an ugly bugger, sir, but a fine aircraft. You’ll see.’

And I did. We all climbed aboard, settled in our places, the real co-pilot sitting somewhere cramped beside the bomb aimer, and I saw things I liked straight away. The first was the co-pilot’s seat itself: standard for American bombers, but the Lanc didn’t have one, so if the pilot copped it then it was down to the flight engineer to shove the remains out of the way, get into the pilot’s chair and attempt to fly the aircraft. Most captains made sure that their flight engineer knew the rudiments, but he still wasn’t a trained pilot, and I thought that having two pilots, with two sets of controls, was one up for the Liberator, giving the crew that much more chance of surviving the mission.

Then there was the tricycle undercarriage. I knew all about them, and I’d seen one on the Arado bomber that sprayed Ulvid. But I’d never been in a type with one, and I very much liked the fact that the aircraft’s fuselage was level with the ground, not sloped as in a Lancaster, which was nose up, tail down, so that when you’re taxiing out you have a fine view of the sky, and a lousy view of whatever is right in front of you. But the Liberator gave the pilots a fine view of everything, and that was good.

After that P-for-Popsie scored even more points. She was very heavily armed. A B1 special Lanc had only the four-gun, tail turret mounting .303s. Other Lancs had more, but the Liberator mounted a total of ten 0.5 calibre heavy machine guns that would smash up anything they could reach, armoured or unarmoured. Also she was a bit faster than the Lancs I’d flown, cruising at nearly two hundred and fifty miles per hour at twenty-eight thousand feet, taking just under half an hour to get up there, which wasn’t bad going.

So up we went, and got on very nicely, until couple of hours later when the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Morgan, started asking where he should take the aircraft once they’d got rid of me. We had details of course, speed and destination of USS
Saint
Mihiel
, and radar to spot her. But after that, Dougie would want to land somewhere and the navigator wanted to know where, and this put me in difficulty, because I’d been warned about secrecy from everyone including Churchill himself, whose attitude was remarkably like that of Stalin’s:

‘Our fighting men must not to be unsteadied by the threat of some dastardly stroke against their homeland.’ Those were Churchill’s own words, to me. But Davies and his crew were risking their lives for me, and facing a ditching if the tanks ran dry, and I thought that the matter was personal. Also, if I did manage to get aboard the USS
Saint
Mihiel
, I was – for sure – going to have to tell someone what was going on before they’d do what I asked, and Churchill would – for sure – be briefing Roosevelt with the full Mem Tav story via some other courier, in some other aircraft. So my final judgment was that it was up to the Americans to keep the lid shut on whatever the US Navy or Dougie Davies’s crew found out from me.