Rose Under Fire

‘Anti-aircraft guns are good for shooting down flying bombs,’ Felicyta said. ‘But you know the Royal Air Force Tempest squadron takes down as many flying bombs in the air as the gunners do on the ground, and Celia was in a Tempest –’

‘She didn’t have any guns,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t armed.’ Holy smoke, she didn’t even have a radio. She couldn’t even tell the radio room what was wrong as she was coming in to land.

‘You do not need guns,’ Felicyta insisted passionately, her eyes blazing. ‘The mechanic says if you fly fast enough you can ram a pilotless plane with your wing tip.’

We all leaned our heads in together over the tiny decorated squares of toast, talking in low tones like conspirators.

‘I’ve heard the lads talk about that,’ Maddie said. ‘Doodlebug tipping.’

‘In Polish we call it taran – aerial ramming. A Polish pilot rammed a German plane over Warsaw on the first day of the war! The Soviet pilots do it too – same word in Russian. Taran. It is the best way to stop a pilotless plane in the air,’ Felicyta said. ‘Before it reaches a target, when it is still over sea or open country, not over London or Southampton. That is what 56 Squadron 150 Wing does with their Tempests.’

‘But they’re armed!’ I insisted.

‘You do not need to be armed for taran,’ Felicyta said. ‘You do not need guns to ram another aircraft.’

‘She’s right,’ Maddie said. ‘When our lads come up behind a flying bomb and fire at it, they have to fly into the explosion. Absolutely no fun. But if you tip the bomb with your wing before it’s over London, it just dives into a field and there’s no mess.’

I just couldn’t believe Celia would try such a trick, her first time in a Tempest. But as we all kept saying, we didn’t really know her.

‘Would you do it, Maddie?’ I asked.

She shook her head slowly. It was more of an I don’t know than a no. Maddie’s a very careful pilot and probably has more hours than the rest of us put together. She is the only one of us who is a First Officer. But I realised, just then, that I don’t really know Maddie, either.

‘Felicyta would do it,’ Maddie said, avoiding an answer. ‘Wouldn’t you, Fliss? You see a flying bomb in the sky ahead of you, and you’re flying a Tempest. Would you make a 180 degree turn and run the other way? Or try to tip it out of the sky?’

‘You know what I would do,’ Felicyta said, her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t you believe a woman could make a taran as well as a man? You know what I would do, Maddie Brodatt. But I have never met a flying bomb in the air. Have you?’

‘Yes,’ Maddie said quietly.

We all stared at her with wide eyes. I am sure my mouth hung open.

‘It was back in June,’ Maddie said. ‘The week after the flying bombs started. I was delivering a Spitfire and I saw it coming towards me, only a couple of hundred feet below. I thought it was another plane. It looked like another plane. But when I waggled my wings it just stayed on course, and then it passed below me – terribly close – and I realised it was a doodlebug. They aren’t very big. Horrible things, eyeless, just a bomb with wings.’

Pilotless, I thought. Ugh. ‘Weren’t you scared?’

‘Not really – you know how you don’t worry about a near miss until later, when you think about it afterwards? It was before I’d heard about anybody tipping a doodlebug, and anyway I hadn’t a hope of catching it. By the time I’d realised what it was, it was just a speck in the distance, still heading for London. I didn’t see it fall.’

I haven’t seen one fall, either, but I’ve heard them. You can hear them THIRTY MILES away, rattling along. Southampton doesn’t get fired on as relentlessly as London and Kent, but we get the miserable things often enough that the noise terrifies me. Like being in the next field over to a big John Deere corn picker, clackety clackety clackety. Then the timer counts down, the engine stops, and for a few seconds you don’t hear anything as the bomb falls. And then you hear the explosion.

I hate to admit this, but I am so scared of the flying bombs that if I’d known about them ahead of time I would not have come. Even after Uncle Roger’s behind-the-scenes scrambling to get the paperwork done for me.

I’ve read the mechanic’s letter now myself. He thinks Celia damaged her wing in a separate incident – separate from the crash, ‘possibly the result of a deliberate brush with another aircraft’. He didn’t actually mention flying bombs. But you could tell the idea was in his head.

Now I am upset all over again, remembering the crash. It took me by surprise, watching – I knew something was wrong, of course, but I never expected her to lose control like that, so close to the ground. It happened so suddenly. I’d been waiting for her so we could come back to Hamble together.

I want to talk to Nick about it. He left a message for me – sweet of him, worrying about me having to go to Celia’s funeral. It’s after nine now, but it’s still light out. They have two hours of Daylight Saving in the summer here – they call it Double Summer Time. So I’ll walk down to the phone box in the village and hope Nick’s not away on some mission. And that I don’t get told off by his landlady for calling so late.

Horrible war. So much more horrible here than back in the States. Every few weeks someone’s mother or brother or another friend is killed. And already I am fed up with the shortages, never any butter and never enough sleep. The combination of working so hard, and the constant fear, and just the general blahness of everything – I wasn’t prepared for it. But how could I possibly, possibly have been prepared for it? They’ve been living with it for five years. All the time I’ve been swimming at the lake, playing varsity girls’ basketball and building a tree house for Karl and Kurt like a good big sister, crop dusting with Daddy and helping Mother make applesauce, Maddie’s been delivering fighter planes. When her best friend was killed by a bomb or whatever it was eight months ago, I was probably sitting in Mr Wagner’s creative writing class working out rhyme schemes.

It’s so strange to be here at last, and so different from what I expected.

I have put my accident report into verse after all. (I think I am trying to trick myself into writing this darn accident report.) I wish I’d written this poem earlier. It would have been nice to read at Celia’s service. I will send a copy to her parents.

For Celia Forester

(by Rose Justice)

The storm will swallow

the brave girl there

who fights destruction

with wings and air –

life and chaos

hover in flight

wing tip to wing tip

until the slight

triumphant moment

when their wings caress

and her crippled Tempest

flies pilotless.

Now that I am an ATA pilot at last, I wish I were a fighter pilot.

August 5, 1944

Hamble, Southampton

And that was the first thing I said to Nick when I got him on the phone. I did get him at last. He wasn’t at home so I rang the airfield, and they said he was on his way, but hadn’t got there yet, AND he was ‘busy’ tonight so he might not be able to call back. I was so desperate I waited in the phone box for three-quarters of an hour till he got in, and we talked for exactly as long as my cigarette tin of pennies held out. In three weeks he will be off to France and I will not.

‘Hello, Rose darling.’

‘I want to fly Tempests,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I want to be operational. I want to be in the Royal Air Force, 56 Squadron 150 Wing, blasting flying bombs to smithereens.’

There was a good penny’s worth of silence down the wire before Nick answered. Maybe that’s where the saying comes from, penny for your thoughts. Speak up or the operator will cut you off.

Finally Nick said sympathetically, ‘What’s made you so bloodthirsty?’

‘I’m not bloodthirsty. There’s no blood in a pilotless plane, is there! I’m a good pilot, I’ve probably been flying five years longer than half the boys in 150 Wing. I flew with Daddy from coast to coast across America when I was fifteen, and I did all the navigation. You’ve never flown a Tempest, or a Mustang, or a Mark 14 Spitfire – I’ve flown them all, dozens of times. They’re wasting me, just because I’m a girl! They won’t even let us fly to France – they’re prepping men for supply and taxi to the front lines, guys with hundreds’ fewer hours than me, but they’re just passing over the women pilots. It isn’t fair.’

I stopped to breathe. Nick said evenly, ‘And there’s me worrying you’d be upset by your friend’s funeral. Instead you’re after shooting down doodlebugs. What’s going on, Rose?’

‘How do you topple a doodlebug?’ I asked. ‘The girls say you can do it with your wing tip.’

Nick laughed. Then he paused. I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was thinking. ‘You couldn’t,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, I’ve heard that too, but you need to be flying something fast, not a taxi Anson or a Spitfire with only enough fuel to get you to the maintenance airfield. An ATA pilot couldn’t topple a V-1 flying bomb.’

‘Celia did. She tried to anyway. We think that’s why she crashed. How do they do it? Do you just bash it with your wing tip? The Polish pilots have a word for it. Taran. Aerial ramming.’

Another longish pause. I had stuffed in the entire contents of the cigarette tin right away, more than two shillings’ worth – after feeding thirty of those gigantic pennies into the telephone, I felt like I’d just thrown away a pirate’s treasure hoard. At any rate it added up to more than ten minutes. I didn’t want to be cut off.

And, of course, the operator was probably listening in. Nick’s job is very secret. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, for God’s sake don’t try that, Rose, you’ll kill yourself. Is that what Celia did? Good God almighty. The idea is not to touch them at all. The doodlebug’s a bloody brilliant bomb, but it’s not a brilliant aircraft. It’s unstable, and if you get your wing tip just beneath the bomb’s wing, half a foot or so away from it, you can upset the airflow around it and make it stall. But you have to fly fast enough to keep up with it, and it’ll still go off when it hits the ground. Promise me you won’t try?’

My turn to be silent. Because I couldn’t make that promise. I guess I’ll never get the chance anyway, but if I did – well, I’m a better pilot than Celia was.

‘Rose, darling?’ Nick had to prompt me. ‘I’m not a fighter pilot either. They also serve who only stand and wait.’

Show-off, quoting Milton. He knows I like poetry.

‘That’s garbage, Nick, and you know it,’ I said hotly. ‘You’re not standing and waiting. You’re dropping off –’ I choked back what I was going to say, thinking of the operator listening in. I’m not supposed to know what he’s doing, and I don’t know much about it, but Maddie’s boyfriend is in the same squadron – that’s how I met Nick – and you figure a little bit out after a while. They’ve been flying spies and saboteurs and plastic explosive and machine guns in and out of France for the past two years – secret supplies for the D-Day invasion.