Speed Kings (37 page)

When he wasn't training, Billy spent his time reading, writing, and worrying. His parents were thinking about moving south, away from Paris to their house in Biarritz. He thought they'd be “safe as houses” down there. He even wanted Rose to move in with them, from London. “Although she'd be the last to admit it, I know she is feeling pretty run down and has very little resistance against colds, sore throats, etc,” he wrote to his mother, and it would be “terribly sweet of you to offer to have her, and I wish you'd press the point again direct to her, as she really needs it.”

It seems ludicrous, with hindsight, that Billy imagined his wife would be safer in the south of France than in England. But his mother's letters did make it sound idyllic. “The trees are coming out,” she wrote. “The fruits are rampant, woods covered with violets, buttercups and wild daisy, and the birds singing their hearts out.” Billy had even heard that Jack Heaton was knocking about that part of the world. Which made him envious. “Some day I'm going to retire to a little Basque farmhouse myself.” It was only in early April 1940, when the Germans invaded Norway, that Billy, and his parents, began to feel uncertain about how safe the south of France was. Billy's mother was increasingly convinced that the United States would have to join the fighting. She had now made her peace with Billy's decision and wrote to Peggy, encouraging her to do the same. “The
invasion makes me boil,” she wrote. “And if you are not beginning to understand your brother now, you never will. My idea is that after the election of Mr. Roosevelt, possibly next spring, America will have to come in. Yes, it's a great pity. But it's going to take a lot to beat these b___s.”

Rose, anyway, was having none of it. She wouldn't move until she knew exactly where Billy was going to be posted. Finally, at the end of March, he had finished at Yatesbury and was sent on to Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, for advanced training. They rented what Rose described as “a darned nice furnished house, perched on a hill above the most adorable little village of Minster Lovell.” It was so close to his camp that he was allowed to live off the base. The house wasn't far from where he had gone to school in Sutton Courtenay. It made him feel as though he had come full circle. “I go over to Sutton Courtenay quite often,” he wrote. “It's about 13 miles away, and still looks much the same as it did 13 years ago. Christ that's a long time.”

They weren't there long, only a couple of months, but it was a happy time, the last they had together. Bleak as the winter had been, it was a warm spring. Billy was able to fly in his shirtsleeves, through blue skies and great white puffs of cumulus clouds that he could skirt around as though they were mountain peaks. Rose's presence was, he wrote, “a great comfort.” They had bought a second car—“another old crock,” called Molly the Morris—so that he could commute into the airfield, and a dog, too, an Alsatian named Sinbad. While Billy was on duty, Rose would walk herself into a standstill trying to give Sinbad enough exercise. Or she would be out back, tending to their chickens. Billy was a little surprised to see how easily Rose took to the quiet life in the country. “I wish you could see our establishment,” he wrote to his mother. “It's really pretty good and Rosie is the most efficient settler-inner and house-keeper I have ever seen. She works like a Trojan from dawn till dusk and is as happy as a clam. The country looks lovely now—and from the air the flowering bushes and trees show up for miles.” He had to leave at 6:30 a.m. each morning six days a week, and was allowed only an extra hour's grace on Sundays. He was back home at six each evening, “which is swell.” And then they would curl up by the fire and listen to music, “hot blues” most often, on their crackly old wireless set. On the odd occasions when he had twenty-four hours of leave, the two of them would shoot off to the nearby golf course at Frilford Heath and play a round together.

Bad news arrived early in April, in a letter from Billy's father. He'd had word from the United States. On Friday, April 5, Jay O'Brien died. He'd had a heart attack, while he was at home, in bed. Dolly was by his side. They had
become pillars of Palm Beach high society. He'd actually spent the day with Joseph Kennedy, recently returned from his stint as ambassador to the UK. “The death of Jay O'Brien was quite a blow to Palm Beach,” Kennedy wrote. It was a shock; he was only fifty-seven. He had seemed fine when they'd seen each other on the golf course in the afternoon, and again at the theater that same evening. Jay died after dinner that night. Dolly decided that he should be buried in New York, his spiritual if not his actual home. The
New York Times
gave his obituary a decent show, alongside a picture, in profile, which would have pleased him. There was no word from Clifford Gray—no one seemed to know exactly where he was. But Eddie Eagan was at the funeral.

For Billy, busy in wartime Britain, there wasn't time to mourn. “What a very sad thing about Jay,” he wrote, when he learned of the news. “But on the other hand, he had a bloody good life and went full blast to the end so perhaps it's the best possible thing that could have happened. There's one thing about dying anyway, so many nice people have died in the last few years, one is assured of pleasant company on the other side of the pearly gates—and I'll bet they are laughing like buggery at us poor mortals.”

The war was closing in. The Germans had invaded Belgium, and now that the fighting was in France, Billy's parents were finally making plans to move back to the United States. They were looking to buy a house in Hillsborough, California; Peggy and Jennison were handling the negotiations for them. They had hoped, and planned, to get across to London to visit Billy. But now they were cut off. It was time to get out of Europe, and the only way to do that was via a ship from Lisbon, in neutral Portugal.

On June 18, a fortnight after the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, Britain's new prime minister, Winston Churchill, addressed the House of Commons. Billy and Rose listened to the speech on their wireless set that night, never prouder, never more resolute, never more fearful.

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the
whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Three weeks later, Billy finished his flying training and was awarded his pilot's wings. His final report noted, “Although average in ground subjects, his flying ability and officer qualifications were assessed as above average.” The final verdict was that “he should make a sound squadron pilot.” Of course, he and Rose headed for London for the night to celebrate. They met up with Ben Bathurst. He presented Billy with another pair of RAF wings to stitch onto his uniform. These ones were tattered and worn so that he wouldn't stand out as a greenhorn. It was a mark of respect, an acknowledgment of his commitment since they had met that night in the Savoy and first discussed how he could go about joining up.

Before Billy finished his training, he was sounded out by a man at the Air Ministry about whether he would consider going back to the United States to work for the RAF as a press and public relations man. He'd long since abandoned the pretense that he was Canadian, and they thought he could do good work on the propaganda side in Washington. There was an awareness, even then, within the British Foreign Office that, as the diplomat T. North Whitehead put it, “we are only likely to win this war if we obtain the whole-hearted co-operation of the United States.”

Billy refused. “I've done nothing yet,” he told them. “Why should they want to see me? Wait till I've shot down some Heinkels. Then, if you still want me, I'll go over.” He hadn't spent the best part of a year in training just so he could go make pretty speeches and pose in photos for the American papers. “He is quite determined to go and join 601,” wrote Rose. “The same squadron as Billy Clyde. They are all his friends, which would make it all infinitely more enjoyable than joining a squadron where he knew no-one.”

“Billy had stayed in contact with us all during his training,” remembered Mouse Cleaver, one of 601's pilots. “And on the 12th, he called up Archie Hope, the Commanding Officer of ‘A' flight, my flight, and said that he had completed his training.” Hope knew Fiske only a little, not nearly so well as Cleaver, Clyde, and the rest of the St. Moritz crowd. But he had heard good things about him.
“Archie told Billy to stay put, talk to no one about postings, and that we would fly up and get him.” And they did. Cleaver went himself, in his Blenheim.

601 was based down at Tangmere, toward the coast sixty miles or so south of London, not far from the village where Rose had grown up. She spent the week calling around the area, looking for a house to rent. She found one in Chidham, ten miles down the road from Tangmere, an old farmhouse named Chidmere, on a pond, with an orchard. She “packed all our bits and bobs” into a van, and they “all moved in a body,” her and the chickens and the dog.

That very same day, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 16: “Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and, if necessary, to carry it out. The aim of this operation will be to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the prosecution of war against Germany, and, if necessary, to occupy it completely.” The first step would be to win air superiority. “The English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”

Across the Channel at Calais, the German fleet began to assemble.

Billy Fiske, An American Citizen Who Died That England Might Live. By Ronald Wong.

THE LAST FLIGHT OF BILLY FISKE

T
hey woke before dawn. Four o'clock, as often as not. Sometimes earlier. And always with the same routine. The
clang-clunk
of the door shutting, then a hand on the shoulder. The deep sleepers needed to be shaken awake. A cup of tea or cocoa to soften the blow. And then a pen, and a tatty Stationery Office notebook, which they had to sign by torchlight to prove that they'd received their wake-up call. Up, wash, shave, dress—last on was the leather Irvin jacket, its thick sheepskin lining a welcome buffer against the cold air outside. On the lawn, good-morning greetings with the other pilots, all equally blurry-eyed. The first wait of the day, for the truck to come and pick them up, then carry them over to the dispersal area by the runway. More hellos, with the fitters and riggers who were already up and at work, warming the engines, checking over the repairs, loading the guns. The petrol bowsers idled nearby, and once the ground crew were done, the tanks were filled with high-octane fuel. Over at dispersal, in the readiness huts, the flight commander rang through to Operations to announce that the men were “ready for business.” And then, they waited. And waited.

Those who could stomach it would scoff breakfast. They had twenty minutes to eat, each group in turn. Some were wound up too tight to have any appetite. Billy didn't have that problem. “I live to eat,” he wrote, “and I love it.” Even powdered eggs. After that, some settled down with books and magazines—dog-eared copies of
Lilliput
, for the jokes and short stories, or the racier
Men Only
, for
the pictures, according to taste. Others picked up games, darts, or shove ha'penny. In 601, they had a keen card school—poker, for high stakes. Time was when they'd played motorcycle polo, too, but they'd long since had to cut that out, since petrol was in such short supply. That said, 601 usually had enough to get by on. Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse had been appointed the squadron's “petrol officer,” and he had decided that the simplest solution would be to buy a filling station. So they had enough to fuel their cars, at the day's end, for the short trip to the Ship in Bosham, or their other favorite watering hole, the Coal Hole bar in the cellar of the Spread Eagle Hotel in Midhurst. Even in wartime, 601 was still a cut above. “They were such wonderful guys in 601,” Rose remembered. “They wore red linings in their tunics and mink linings in their overcoats. They were arrogant and they looked terrific, and probably the other squadrons hated their guts. But by God did they fight. Look at the records. None better. And they always did everything without any apparent effort. They had always been like that, all their lives.”

By the time Billy and Rose arrived at Tangmere, in the middle of July 1940, 601 was just beginning to fray. The carefree atmosphere of the 1930s, which stretched right through into the phony war in the final year of the decade, had been dispelled during the fighting with the British Expeditionary Force in the battle of France. Two of 601's pilots had lost their lives. Billy's friend Roger Bushell had already been transferred, given charge of his own squadron, and then shot down over Dunkirk. He'd managed to force-land in a field and was promptly taken prisoner at pistol point by a passing German dispatch rider. Others were luckier. Billy's flight commander, Archie Hope, had been shot down twice, crash-landing on both occasions. The first time he'd managed to pinch a motorcycle from an abandoned military dump near Amiens and drive back to the base at Merville. The second time he came down on the beach at Calais and was evacuated back on a boat from Dunkirk. An RAF squadron was a small unit, including only twenty pilots. Each loss was acutely felt, and sapped a little more life and strength from the squadron. Especially as these early casualties were all old and firm friends, whereas the replacements were often strangers, fresh from flying school, with no combat experience.

In the air, pilots worked in teams. They flew in V formations, with two wingmen tucked on either side of the lead plane, so close that there was a constant risk they would crash. Each pilot kept one eye on the other two planes and the other eye on the surrounding skies. It was easier to believe in an old friend to do it right, someone you had flown and fought with, than it was to trust a man
you'd only just met. Especially in 601. “There was a team feeling in 601 that the individuals wouldn't have had if they had been broken up and put in separate squadrons,” wrote “Little Bill” Clyde. “They were older than most, and they'd been flying for several years.”

Among the ground crew, and those pilots who didn't know him from St. Moritz, there was, at first, a measure of reservation about “this untried American adventurer,” as Billy was described in the squadron's official history. There was a lot of gossip about the fact that he had once dated Alice Faye, who was in the cinemas at that very moment, starring in a new picture about the American singer Lillian Russell. But, as the history adds, “Billy Fiske arrived at Tangmere with no pretensions, and no illusions.” He knew what it was to take on the responsibility for other men's lives. It was what he had always done on the bob run. He knew, too, how important it was to work as a team, which is why he had insisted on Eddie, Jay, and Clifford doing all those drills with him to learn the corners back in 1932. Besides, unlike some of the other new arrivals, he was already an old friend of the senior pilots. Max Aitken, Mouse Cleaver, Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, and Little Bill Clyde all vouched for him.

The five old friends had a lot to catch up on. Billy let the others do most of the talking. They told him about a day trip to Paris they'd made at the end of May, escorting Winston Churchill to a meeting with the French premier. Churchill had decided to stay overnight, and the pilots had been released from duty until the morning. The prospect of a free night in Paris was too good to resist, and, though they had no cash or change of clothes, Hope managed to borrow a large sum from a friend at the British embassy. “And so,” said Cleaver, “we set off for Lust and Laughter.” They were back at the airfield the next morning, in pretty poor shape. But they made quite an impression on one of Churchill's aides, Sir Edward Spears, who wrote, “These men may have been naturally handsome, but that morning they were far more than that, creatures of an essence that was not of our world; their expressions of happy confidence as they got ready to ascend into their element, the sky, left me inspired, awed, and earthbound.” Spears must have been a romantic sort, since Cleaver's recollections read a little differently. The assembly was, he said, “just about as hungover a crew of dirty, smelly, unshaven, unwashed fighter pilots as I doubt has ever been seen. Willie, if I remember rightly, was being sick behind his airplane when the Great Man arrived and expressed a desire to meet his escort. We must have appeared vaguely human at least, as he seemed to accept our appearance without comment.”

After hearing his friends' war stories, Billy was more desperate to get into the action. But he had to wait just a little longer, while he learned how to handle his new plane. 601 flew Hawker Hurricanes; all Billy's training had been in old-fashioned Tiger Moths and, later on, more modern Harvards. 601 had been equipped with Hurricanes earlier that year, ahead of schedule, a fact that had caused some displeasure among other squadrons, which suspected, rightly, that 601's pilots had used their political connections to pull a few strings. Max Aitken's father, Lord Beaverbrook, had just become Britain's first minister of aircraft production. In those early days of the summer, before the Battle of Britain, the RAF's biggest problem wasn't a shortage of pilots, but of planes. And while Beaverbrook had helped triple production in the space of six months between January and June, they were losing so many that the overall number available was lower on August 15 than it had been at any point that year.

The Hurricane wasn't the most glamorous aircraft in service. That was the Supermarine Spitfire, which was faster and more agile. But the Hurricane had the advantage of being simpler, sturdier, easier, and quicker to refuel, repair, and rearm. And, while it was a little slower than the Spitfire, it was still a sight faster than anything Billy had flown in before, half as quick again as a Harvard. The extra speed was one thing that didn't bother him, but, that said, he made a bad start. The very first time he went up in a Hurricane, a tire burst as he touched down again at the end of the flight. “One of the boys told me it was very bad luck,” Rose said. “Which didn't faze me at all. It never entered my head that anything would happen to Billy.” He seemed, she said, “like a knight in shining armor, fighting for a cause he believed in. And if that was true, how could any harm come to him?” He had spent his entire adult life learning the skills he needed now, from those very first runs behind the wheel of a bobsled, through his days racing the Bentley Blower around the narrow dirt roads in the south of France, to his races on the Cresta. He had honed his understanding of how to handle a vehicle under g-forces, sharpened his decision-making at speed until it had become instinctive, and had learned to do it all under the pressure of knowing that even a single mistake could cost him his life. A week's practice was more than he needed. “Of one thing I am sure,” wrote Archie Hope. “Fiske was an outstandingly good pilot. He took to the Hurricane when he joined the squadron like a duck to water. He was a natural fighter pilot.” Another 601 pilot, Jack Riddle, remembered that Billy's “flying reactions were extraordinary, it was as though he was part of the plane.”

There was more to him than that, said Riddle. “He was aware and caring,
sensitive to those who maybe seemed unhappy. And he was usually the fastest to the club at nearby Bosham, with its brilliant wine cellar, which we made the squadron's HQ.” Deputy Chief of Air Staff Sholto Douglas described 601 as “flamboyant and gay and indeed reckless, as harum-scarum in some ways as the service has ever known. They were a happy band of playboys; but when the heat was on, they became in the most effortless fashion one of the most gallant and courageous of our fighter squadrons.” Billy was a natural fit.

By July, the flying, and fighting, was all over the Channel. The pilots were up, sometimes, for five hours in the mornings alone. They were tired; “sometimes dizzy from lack of sleep, limbs aching from long hours in tiny cockpits, they took off, flew, fought and landed almost automatically,” notes Tom Moulson in the official history of 601. And yet, “among the pilots there was an indigenous optimism, a light-hearted and natural love of life, an unspoken philosophy of death.” Their high spirits were soon taxed. Hope led one formation of five planes out of Tangmere and returned alone, as the other four had been forced down. Another member, Peter Robinson, had been shot down and then strafed on the ground, and was seriously wounded. As that incident showed, the conflict was getting uglier, and the gentlemanly code of conduct 601's pilots had lived by was becoming increasingly obsolete. On July 14, just two days after Billy's arrival, orders were issued that fighters should now start shooting at German seaplanes even if they were marked with the Red Cross, unless they were “directly engaged in a rescue operation.” Ostensibly, those same seaplanes worked search and rescue, but the British suspected they were also performing covert reconnaissance on shipping in the Channel.

On July 20, Billy finally made his first sortie. The squadron was up three times that day. The first two patrols were uneventful. On the third, 601's Green and Blue flights had to fly out over the Channel to escort a convoy. One of the pilots spotted a white seaplane, ten miles off from the convoy. It was a Heinkel 59, complete with Red Cross markings. The pilots radioed back to the ground controller at Tangmere and were told to shoot it down if it was hostile. They decided, instead, to try to shepherd it back to Britain and force it to land, figuring the Germans would prefer that to the prospect of being shot down. So they swooped down on it, making several menacing passes without actually firing on it. The German pilots saw sense and turned toward Britain. But as they approached the coast, the pilot changed his mind and switched course back out to sea. At which point one of Billy's squadron shot it down. It was flying so low that although all four members of the crew bailed out, none of them had time to open
their parachutes. It was an ugly act, and an awful sight—an induction to combat that dispelled what few romantic notions Billy had left about the war. When the RAF started to target the Red Cross planes, Hitler announced that they were “cold blooded murderers.” And the German pilots, outraged, responded by machine-gunning RAF pilots who had come down at sea. Both sides had begun to target parachutists, too, as they escaped from their burning planes.

These were long, exhausting days. “Beneath the blazing hot summer sky time ticked inexorably away,” wrote RAF pilot Wilf Nicoll. “The atmosphere at dispersals became electric and the tension tangible . . . It only required the resonant click of the microphone switch through the ‘Tannoy' loudspeakers or the jangling of the telephone bell to send someone hurrying behind a hut or tent or the tail of an aircraft to retch and heave helplessly until he was rendered breathless, even if only the most innocuous messages followed.” Supposedly, the pilots worked two days on and had the third off, though in these weeks they were up so often that their rest days were far more infrequent than that. Billy got two, which he spent with Rose, one in the last week of July and another the first week of August. Otherwise they were tethered to their planes, and idling, always, in one of four gears. The first was “Released,” which meant they were off duty. “Readiness” meant they were at dispersal, a short sprint away from the plane and five minutes from the air. “Standby” meant that they were strapped into their aircraft, two minutes from takeoff. It was an ordeal, being strapped into that metal box underneath a noontime sun while the engine temperature rose and its fumes streamed past the open cockpit. But it was the last gear that they hated the most: “Available.” It meant that they had to be ready to be in the air in fifteen minutes—too little time to undress, relax, or stray far away from the plane. The pilots felt caught between being on duty and off duty, and would most likely end up spending hours on duty with nothing to do to dispel the tension, uncertainty, and fear. Sometimes they would sneak off. Archie Hope once went for a bath, having checked in with Station Operations to make sure there was “nothing brewing.” He was waist-deep in water with a loofah in his hand when the “Scramble” call came through. He made it up in fourteen minutes and thirty seconds.