Eagles Over Britain (The After Dunkirk Series Book 2) Page 16

  Jeremy studied Fiske with enormous respect. “And your citizenship?”

  “The US will come around, and all will be forgiven.” He laughed. “If not, maybe Britain can find it in its heart to make a place for me here.”

  They arrived at Fiske’s house, a grand manor near Boxgrove surrounded by well-manicured English gardens trading their summer colors for the russet hues of autumn. Several expensive sports cars were parked along the driveway.

  “Some of our squadron mates have arrived. I’ll introduce you around. First you must meet Rose.”

  Jeremy gulped. Rose Fiske, the Countess of Warwick, was famous in her own right for being a Hollywood actress who had left her first husband with a one-year-old child to pursue her career. Born into the wealthy Bingham family, she was known internationally for her beauty. Her father had been killed in action in 1914 serving with the Coldstream Guards. The Fiskes’ wedding had occurred recently and was reported widely in newspapers around the world. Jeremy had missed the articles, but Claire had not, and she had gushed about the event.

  Rose met them at the door, gracious and lively, with warm, bright eyes that shone above her finely sculpted nose and ready smile. Her face was framed by short, dark hair, coiffed in the tight curls of the times. She dressed simply in a floor-length gown that complemented her figure.

  “I’m so pleased to meet you. Billy told me many good things about you. Your courage is remarkable, and I’m so glad you saved that little boy.”

  “My pleasure,” Jeremy replied, reminding himself that “Billy” was the nickname by which Fiske’s millions of fans knew him.

  Rose took Jeremy’s hand in both of her own and, with Fiske trailing behind, led him into a parlor where other pilots had gathered. Fiske stepped ahead of them.

  “Gentlemen,” he called, “I’m pleased to present our newest member of 601 Squadron, Flight Lieutenant Jeremy Littlefield, and let me tell you, I flew with him today. He is one hell of a pilot.”

  So down-to-earth was Fiske’s demeanor that Jeremy had forgotten that the bobsledding champion himself had descended from British aristocracy and his father was a wealthy international banker. What became clear to Jeremy was that this squadron was made up of the sons of aristocrats, as Red had said. Amidst a bewildering round of greetings, drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and a three-course meal, he found himself both the subject of and entering into flurries of conversation.

  “You’re the chap who saved the toddler, aren’t you?”

  “Were you really left onshore at Dunkirk? That’s shameful. Why doesn’t the public know more about that?”

  “How did you ever make it home after the shipwreck—and with a child?”

  “You’re flying with us now? Splendid!”

  “If Billy says you’re good, you’re good.”

  “Is your brother really a POW? I hope he’s all right.”

  Jeremy did his best to converse and answer questions without opening controversy, but after a day of flying, the effort was wearing. By the end of the evening, he was ready to collapse into his bunk.

  “I’ll see you at first light,” Fiske called after him at the end of the evening as Jeremy walked out to a different sports car. He would ride back to the billets with two other pilots Jeremy knew only by their nicknames, Brody and Sandy.

  “Does Billy never tire,” Jeremy asked.

  Brody chuckled. “He never does. If you could bottle his source of energy, you could sell it and make a mint.”

  21

  August 12, 1940

  London, England

  While glancing at his watch, Lieutenant Paul Littlefield entered Director Menzies’ office within MI-6 headquarters at 54 Broadway with some trepidation. The director had sent for him on short notice with no specified subject, and he was to meet Claire for lunch in little more than an hour.

  This would be his first face-to-face meeting with the director since an encounter that had not gone well. Menzies had squashed Paul’s notion of transferring to the Royal Air Force and joining one of the fighter squadrons. Menzies said that Paul knew more than he was supposed to know about Claire’s classified work.

  Paul would not be allowed to fly or even leave the country, the director told him, because the risk was too great of being shot down, captured, and tortured to the point of divulging what the director believed to be MI-6’s greatest asset and Great Britain’s most closely guarded wartime secret: Bletchley Park and the codebreaking that went on there. Since the facility at Bletchley belonged to MI-6, in effect, both Paul and Claire worked in Menzies’ organization.

  Paul had not been cleared to know Bletchley’s secrets, but as an inquisitive intelligence officer, he had pieced together bits of information that led to the inescapable conclusion that England possessed Germany’s military codes and could break almost any and all of their messages aside from naval ones, and the decoders did so regularly at that facility.

  As an accomplished pianist at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Claire had been recruited to work at Bletchley as a decipherer along with hundreds of other young ladies, many from British aristocracy. Most had been selected for two reasons: their high levels of education, and because Commander Alastair Denniston, as deputy head of GCH, had foreseen that a hot war would strip the country of its young men, leaving young women to fill these vital roles. Claire and other musicians were particularly desirable as codebreakers because of their discipline and powers of concentration.

  Paul’s deductions and conclusions about Bletchley surfaced when Claire approached him after Jeremy had evaded capture and made his way back to England. Their youngest brother had been aided in his arduous trek across France by Amélie Boulier and her family, whose patriarch had established a network to help anyone fleeing German capture.

  Because she and her siblings also understood and spoke German fluently—a part of their education insisted upon by their mother—unbeknownst to Claire’s supervisors, she had not only decoded the messages but also understood the meaning of the deciphered German text. She had gone to Paul with great anxiety because she had read communications indicating that an SS officer, Hauptman Bergmann, had mounted a manhunt for the Boulier family. The German was closing in, and if nothing was done, he would soon not only capture the father, but also destroy his network.

  Paul and Claire, recognizing that they might have broken protocol with potentially severe penalties for even discussing the matter between themselves, nevertheless alerted their respective chains of authority, both formal and informal. The result was that Menzies called for a meeting attended by other high officials of British intelligence. There, both siblings had been severely chastised for their breach of security.

  During that meeting, Menzies killed Paul’s notions of flying in a fighter squadron and forbade him from leaving the country for the duration of the war. Nonetheless, a mission was rapidly organized to save the Boulier network, which amounted to a backhanded compliment to Paul and Claire for their initiative. No further action was taken against either of them.

  However, Menzies had bluntly educated Paul on the importance of Bletchley. “We allow attacks to go against our ships full of men that then sink when we could have alerted and saved them,” he had said. “Are we playing God? Yes, and I make no apologies. What do you think the Germans will do, if they learn that we can break their codes?”

  “I-I suppose they’d change them,” Paul had stammered.

  “Exactly, and we’d lose our advantage.” In stark terms, he laid out the benefits gained by protecting Bletchley’s secrets. “How do you think we recognized a window to evacuate Dunkirk? We brought nearly half a million soldiers back home to England. Without them, we were defenseless.” He scowled. “Our country would have disappeared into history.”

  Paul had left that meeting with an odd sense of having been extremely chastised while recognizing that he and Claire had succeeded—the Boulier mission went forward. However, in the days following, the notion of knowing that MI-6 could give warning and
chose not to left him cold. I would rather not have known that.

  “Sit down,” Menzies said without looking up from a document on his desk. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  Paul took a seat in a leather-bound chair and watched the top of the director’s balding head as he worked through the papers. The setting reminded him of being brought before the school principal as a child when he had been caught in mischief. An image formed in his mind of a small boy wearing short pants, sitting in a big chair, and swinging his legs. He shifted his own.

  Menzies looked up, his emotionless eyes peering at Paul over a trimmed mustache and a robust build. “So,” he said with a sphinxlike expression, “we need to keep you gainfully employed during this bloody conflagration, and you’ve limited our options. Do you have any suggestions?”

  Paul’s sinking heart drained color from his face. “I suppose I could continue with my current duties, analyzing intelligence.”

  Menzies grunted. “Yes. Well, given that you sought other options, I assume you can’t be too enamored with that.”

  “Sir, I—”

  Menzies silenced him with a hand.

  Paul persisted. “Sir, I wanted to go where I could do the most good. Britain is critically short of pilots, and we are in a fight for our very existence. I read the reports. I know the casualties we’re taking.”

  Menzies stared at him. If he was annoyed, Paul could not discern.

  “That’s all easy enough to say, but since you mucked it up, we must find something else that, perhaps, you can do well.”

  Paul fought down anger and humiliation. The back of his neck burned, and his face flushed scarlet.

  Appearing not to notice, Menzies continued. “I need to understand better our air defensive system—this so-called ‘Dowding system.’ For all practical intents, what Air Marshal Dowding is doing is gathering information and executing action plans based on it. I need a detailed document of the whole setup. It should show where the vulnerabilities of our radar towers are, how the information flows from them to Fighter Command headquarters, how the information is analyzed and disbursed to the pilots, and what their attitudes are toward the controllers.

  “I’m sending you out to meet the air marshal at his HQ, and he’ll delegate the appropriate people to work with. You’ve got three weeks, and then I want the report on my desk. Any questions? Try not to muck this one up.”

  Taken aback, Paul took a moment to think. “From the sounds of things, I’ll need to travel to each tower and as many airfields as I possibly can in that time.”

  “That sounds like a start, although I shouldn’t think you’ll need to go to each facility. There are twenty-two radar stations and hundreds of airfields, and I need that report in three weeks. If you’re thorough with one, that should do it, particularly if you spend time in the Fighter Command bunker. This is a survey to gain understanding, not a census or an inventory.

  “Try not to get hit by a Stuka or a Messerschmitt, will you?” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Get on with it, then, and if you have any more questions, route them through my secretary. You’ll meet Air Marshal Dowding at three p.m. Good day.”

  “Menzies gave me some busywork to do,” Paul told Claire, looking glum when he met her for their weekly lunch. “He didn’t say it was classified, so I can tell you about it, but the finished product will be secret, that’s obvious.”

  Claire regarded her brother with compassion and squeezed his shoulder. “You’re too good an analyst to waste. I’m sure he wouldn’t assign this to you if it were not a significant project.”

  “Maybe my way out of the doghouse,” Paul replied, tossing his head dismissively.

  “That could be,” Claire allowed, her forehead furrowed. “With the state of this war, we can’t afford to sideline anyone, much less proven talent. We both had our heads handed to us in that meeting, but remember that he approved the mission. He might have been angry with us, but he saw the merit.”

  Paul sighed. “That’s nice to think, but I have my doubts.”

  “Tell me what he wants you to do.”

  Paul did. When he was finished, Claire’s eyes shone. “Paul, that’s wonderful. You’ll get out of the office and out of London for a while. And that’s not an unimportant task. Menzies wouldn’t send just anyone to meet with the Chief Air Marshal.”

  “I don’t know,” Paul replied doubtfully. “He’s always so cross with me.”

  “And everyone else.” Claire laughed. “That’s his way, and everybody knows it.”

  “That’s easier to know when you’re not on the receiving end of his displeasure.” He shook his head. “Time will tell. It’s just—” He left his sentence unfinished.

  “What, Paul? What is it?”

  He squirmed. She prodded again.

  “You know what it is,” he groused. “I feel useless in this war.”

  “Not that again,” Claire chided. “You’re not being fair to yourself.” She studied his deliberately deadpan face, knowing it masked deep frustration. Nudging his arm, she added, “Despite Menzies’ terse way, he listens to you. That’s what saved the Boulier network.”

  Receiving no response, she reached across and jabbed his shoulder. “Buck up, big brother. The country needs you.”

  22

  August 13, 1940

  Bentley Priory

  Captain Joel Peters rubbed his weary eyes, gulped down some tepid black coffee, and then read and re-read the intelligence report he had just received from his superior. Coming into the bunker at Fighter Command headquarters at 0300 hours should have become monotonous, but the rapid increase of German fighter and bomber attacks since the 10th of last month had turned each day into unpredictable hours of inactivity followed by minutes to hours of lethal action. They played out in the skies over the British countryside and were represented in near-actual time on a large-scale map displayed on a table in the filter room below him, visible through a plexiglass window.

  As aircraft appeared in the sky, plotters, mostly young members of Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or WAAFS, moved around the table and placed multi-colored and multi-shaped markers representing the aircraft singly or in formations large and small, advancing, retreating, dogfighting, destroying opposing aircraft, plummeting to the ground, plunging into the sea, or returning safely home. All too often, their removal from the map meant that men had died in furious aerial combat.

  The information revealed in the report Joel read seemed too inconceivable to be true, yet two independent sources had reported it. For some time, they had delivered intelligence regarding Adlertag, the German codeword for “Eagle Day,” when Marshal Göring intended to cast his mighty and undefeated Luftwaffe against Great Britain. His objective: to seize air superiority, imperative to the success of Operation Sea Lion, Hitler’s intended invasion of the United Kingdom.

  According to intelligence, fast-moving barges had been positioned in Antwerp, Calais, and Cherbourg with vast armies stationed along the French coast waiting for the fury of the Luftwaffe to decimate the Royal Air Force. Then, the Wehrmacht would cross the Channel and subjugate the island kingdom in one more blitzkrieg as it had done to Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France…

  Hitler’s difficulty lay in the invasion needing to be completed before the end of September. After that, as the seasons dissolved from summer to autumn and prepared for winter, the rough seas of the North Atlantic would take a hard turn to extreme, pounding waves even in open water, and preclude a safe crossing of German armies to British shores. Adlertag had been postponed four times during the summer because of prohibitively rough weather.

  From reading reports, Joel had gleaned that the headquarters for planning the invasion resided in Dinard, commanded by Field Marshal Reichenau. The level of detail caused him to suspect that British intelligence had succeeded in placing a spy in the headquarters, but the recency and frequency of information from the second source pointed in another intelligence collectio
n method, although how that could happen, he had no clue. He was certain that digging in to find out would land him in more trouble than he wished to voluntarily accept.

  The two pieces of information he had now were that Adlertag would go forward today, and that Göring had assured Adolf Hitler that British fighter strength could not be more than three hundred fighter aircraft, and that furthermore, the RAF would be destroyed within days, most of it on the first day of Eagle Operations.

  Joel looked through the plexiglass wall to the table map of Britain and western France in the filter room below. It was huge, and around it, the WAAFs, besides moving markers around, also communicated directly with radar operators at the Chain Home radar sites along the coast, gathering the information on aircraft positions. Others called down filtered information to similarly organized control rooms in bunkers at each of four subordinate headquarters.

  On further reflection, Joel could accept that Göring severely underestimated British fighter strength, although that egregious of an intelligence blunder should have been unacceptable in any military organization. But Churchill had taken steps to increase fighter production and pilot training beyond German anticipation, and British intelligence had demonstrated itself to be almost airtight.

  Regardless, Joel was sure that the German air marshal had no inkling of Britain’s air defense system, the so-called Dowding system, an intricate arrangement of technology and procedures for early detection, reporting, and deployment of fighting forces. Together, they multiplied the RAF’s ability to respond to and eliminate threats. The system had only recently been extensively tested under combat conditions, but it had been tried to the nth degree in conditions as close to combat as could be simulated, including approaching the island in both large and small formations of the RAF’s own fighters and bombers.