Winds of War (70 page)

Tillet said, “Göring’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 operations room, 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 resemblance to General Tillet. He ignored the visitors for a while as he 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 offhandedly, 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 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, 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 lights moved up to white: RETURNING BASE.

“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 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?”

With 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 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 WAAF. 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 fiancé’s an RAF 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 doxy.

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.”

“Well, there’s precious little lechery around here,” said Pamela. “If 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 Vs 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 coning 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 Vs, 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 Göring’s last card? Some show of weakness! Yet a heavy toll of German 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 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 fires 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 all-out Valhalla attack.

So it seemed too in Soho, where they went to dine after the all clear. The Londoners thronging the sidewalk looked excited, undismayed, 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 Göring’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.

Victor Henry looked up at the sky. Above rifts in the smoke, 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.”

Pamela said coldly and abruptly, “I must return to Uxbridge. I’m 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 ‘ell with ‘itler!”

Victor Henry watched the start of the night raid from the balcony while she changed. His senses were sharpened by the destruction, the excitement, the peculiar beauty of the fire panorama and the swaying blue-white searchlight beams, the thick thrumming of the bomber motors, and the thump-thump of the anti-aircraft, which was just starting up. Pamela Tudsbury, coming out on the gloomy moonlit balcony in her WAAF uniform, appeared to him the most desirable young female on God’s earth. She looked shorter because of the low-heeled shoes, but the severe garb made her small figure all the sweeter. So he thought.

“They’re here?” she said.

“Arriving.”

Again she leaned her shoulder to his. Again he held her with one encircling arm. “Damn, the bastards just can’t miss,” he said, “with those fires to guide them.”

“Berlin can catch fire, too.” Pamela suddenly looked about as ugly as she could: a grim, nasty face with hate scored on it in the red paint of her mouth.

New fires sprang up along the river, and spread and ran into the big fire. More blazes flared out of the darkness far from the Thames. Still, most of the vast city remained black and still. A tiny bomber came toppling down through the smoky sky, burning like a candlewick, transfixed by two crossing searchlights.

“Oh God, they
got
him. They got one. Get more of them. Please.”

And in short order two more bombers fell - one plunging straight down in a blaze like a meteor, the other circling and spiralling black smoke until it exploded in midair like a distant firecracker. In a moment they heard the sharp pop.