Part One
Odysseus
Flight Lieutenant James G. Beaufort-Stuart:
The night of 6/7 November 1940 – how many of us dead in that raid?
I don’t know.
I know nine men in 648 Squadron’s A-Flight were killed that night just because of weather. Two planes collided in fog just before landing, and one came down heavy with ice. But I don’t know how many in A-Flight fell to enemy fire.
How many in B-Flight, then? My own lads … I ought to know that, at least.
But I don’t. Not offhand. I’d have to sit and count. I probably made a note in my logbook. That night wasn’t the first time we took a heavy loss, and it wasn’t the last time. Buckets of blood. It wasn’t as many as last time. Anyway it’s hard to remember all the losses, which for Bristol Blenheim bomber crews was just about every mission, and I get some of the dead men muddled when I try to count. The Royal Air Force isn’t going to win the war flying Bristol Blenheims.
I’d argued with Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell before we took off on that mission. That wasn’t the first time, either. I knew he didn’t like me, and I risked an official reprimand, or worse, a demotion, every time I challenged him. We didn’t see eye to eye on anything.
‘We’ll never find German warships if we’re flying at twenty thousand feet!’ I told my commanding officer. I didn’t even try to hide my anger. ‘There’s no hope in hell of a Blenheim hitting anything from that height anyway. The bomb doors don’t always open when you want them to, and up there you can’t tell whether a speck out the window is an enemy destroyer or a bit of runway mud stuck on the Perspex!’
‘Are you quite finished, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart?’ said Cromwell, lowering his eyebrows like barrier gates. ‘You’ll fly at twenty thousand feet, and so will all your men. Orders are orders. That’s where Coastal Command wants you to fly. I take my instructions from headquarters and you take yours from me.’
Cromwell and I had been at each other since the day we first came together about two weeks earlier.
He got transferred to us in October when we moved to Shetland as the Battle of Britain came to an end. Our squadron patrolled the North Sea for the Royal Air Force, the RAF, just as we’d done at other bases all through the summer of 1940. But Cromwell’s role with 648 Squadron was new. Before he got lumbered with us, he’d commanded a squadron of speedy new Spitfire fighters. In August and September, while we were flying Blenheims under cover of cloud on low-level bombing raids targeting German ships, he’d been sending fighter pilots into soaring dogfights in the sun.
None of our experiences matched up. He couldn’t manage twin engines and didn’t join us when we flew. And he didn’t like it that at nineteen years old I was half his age, shorter and slighter than most of the other lads and barely needing a shave, yet I talked back. He didn’t like that all of B-Flight were on my side because they were Blenheim airmen too; maybe I looked like a schoolboy, but they knew I wasn’t. I’d been their flight leader since August.
And sending us on a bombing raid with only a half-moon to light us, above cloud at twenty thousand feet? I was reckless with frustration.
‘It’s stupid, stupid – everyone knows it. The men are complaining. You know it’s stupid. Above the cloud? We won’t be able to see the sea, let alone ships in the dark! And the air’s too thin up there for a Blenheim to operate efficiently. It’s not like flying a Spitfire! We cruise best at fifteen thousand feet, and when we’re in combat we take it as low as we can, it helps camouflage us. And the Jerries – the German fighters all know they can go higher and faster, and they circle like vultures, waiting—’
‘None of my Spitfire pilots complained about danger,’ Cromwell said coldly. ‘I expect more of a young man of your calibre, Beaufort-Stuart. This sounds like lack of moral fibre.’
Lack of moral fibre – that wonderful euphemism for cowardice.
I couldn’t let him accuse me, or worse, my 648 Squadron airmen, of being cowards.
I said stiffly, ‘Sir. I’m leading B-Flight on a mission tonight. I want the best for them.’
‘When you go in at low level, you get shot up by enemy anti-aircraft guns,’ Cromwell told me, as if I didn’t know. ‘We need to change our tactics.’
It was true that most of our losses came from guns on the ground or at sea level. I couldn’t argue with that. But I felt sure that a raid at twenty thousand feet would end in the same tears for different reasons, or at best, be completely pointless because we wouldn’t hit anything. It wasn’t the first time Coastal Command had tried it.
However, with no winning counterargument, off we went, hoping a few of us would make it back safely in five hours or so. Following orders.
The Blenheims were like a herd of shadowy brontosauri waiting on the airfield in the dark beneath the high cloud.
‘Come on, Scotty, buck up,’ said David Silvermont, my navigator, as we lowered ourselves in our bulky flight suits through the forward hatch of that night’s plane. Being the only Scot in the squadron meant that I mostly hadn’t been called Jamie for the past year or so, except on leave. ‘We can’t have you in a funk, it brings everybody down. The lads take your moods very seriously.’
‘Wing Commander Cromwell bloody well doesn’t,’ I retorted. ‘I wish he’d have a go at you sometime instead of me.’
‘No chance, as you’re the officer in charge. Anyway I am much bigger and older than you, and better looking too and probably smarter, so he doesn’t dare.’
‘And you have a bigger head than me!’ I laughed.
Most of those things were true, as David Silvermont was two years my senior and had been halfway through a medical degree when the war started. But he was also my best friend. He was easy to like and smooth with girls, with the brooding dark looks of a film star, and was good at breaking up fights and at making me laugh. Silver read poetry before he went to bed; he played Mozart on the cracked fiddle he’d found in the officers’ lounge when we were off duty; but those highbrow occupations didn’t stop him plotting a course by dead reckoning, or spotting enemy convoys, or having a sense of humour.
He was a wizard navigator.
‘What’s up?’ called our air gunner and wireless operator, Colin Oldham, from his place in the back of the Blenheim.
‘Just the usual scrapping with Cromwell,’ I grumbled. ‘Accused me of “lack of moral fibre”.’
‘Rubbish! He’s not flying tonight, is he!’ Colin exclaimed.
‘I expect he doesn’t like your poncey double-barrelled surname,’ Silver teased me. ‘It reminds the old Roundhead that your dad’s the Earl of Craigie, and then he wants to start the Civil War over again. Can’t have teenage toffs telling him what to do.’
Colin howled. ‘“The Old Roundhead”! Suits him!’
‘I don’t tell him what to do,’ I protested, checking the instruments and controls while Silver and Colin belted their harnesses in place. ‘I make polite suggestions about what not to do. And being the youngest of five sons doesn’t mean a thing. They ran out of titles before they got to me.’