‘What happened?’
Fadil sighed.
‘It was a very small hamlet. Four families, twenty adults, maybe twelve children. Gone now, all dead. Their parents shouted that they should run away, when the firing started. They escaped in the darkness.’
‘Orphans? All of them?’
‘All of them.’
‘Dear God, what a country. We must get them into the truck, down to the valley,’ said the American.
They led the children, each clinging to the hand of the next eldest up the chain, out of the barn into the bright spring sunshine. Birds sang. It was a beautiful valley.
At the edge of the trees they saw the men. There were ten of them and two Russian GAZ jeeps in army camouflage. The men were also in camo. And heavily armed.
Three weeks later, scouring the mailbox but facing yet another day with no card, Mrs Annie Colenso rang a number in Windsor, Ontario. It answered at the second ring. She recognized the voice of her father’s private secretary.
‘Hi, Jean. It’s Annie. Is my dad there?’
‘He surely is, Mrs Colenso. I’ll put you right through.’
CHAPTER THREE
The Magnate
There were ten young pilots in ‘A’ flight crew hut and another eight next door in ‘B’ Flight. Outside on the bright green grass of the airfield two or three Hurricanes crouched with that distinctive hunchbacked look caused by the bulge behind the cockpit. They were not new and fabric patches revealed where they had taken combat wounds high above France over the previous fortnight.
Inside the huts the mood could not have been in greater contrast to the warm summer sunshine of 25 June 1940 at Coltishall field, Norfolk, England. The mood of the men of No. 242 Squadron, Royal Air Force, known simply as the Canadian squadron, was about as low as it had ever been, and with good cause.
Two Four Two had been in combat almost since the first shot was fired on the Western Front. They had fought the losing battle for France from the eastern border back to the Channel coast. As Hitler’s great blitzkrieg machine rolled on, flicking the French army to one side, the pilots trying to stem the flood would find their bases evacuated and moved further back even while they were airborne. They had to scavenge for food, lodgings, spare parts and fuel. Anyone who has ever been part of a retreating army will know the overriding adjective is ‘chaotic’.
Back across the Channel in England, they had fought the second battle above the sands of Dunkirk as beneath them the British army sought to save what it could from the rout, grabbing anything that would float to paddle back to England, whose white cliffs were enticingly visible across the flat calm sea.
By the time the last Tommy was evacuated from that awful beach and the last defenders of the perimeter passed into German captivity for five years, the Canadians were exhausted. They had taken a terrible beating: nine killed, three wounded, three shot down and taken prisoner.
Three weeks later they were still grounded at Coltishall, without spares or tools, all abandoned in France. Their CO, Squadron Leader ‘Papa’ Gobiel, was ill, had been for weeks, and would not return to command. Still, the Brits had promised them a new commander, who was expected any time.
A small open-topped sports car emerged from between the hangars and parked near the two timber crew huts. A man climbed out, with some difficulty. No one came out to greet him. He stumped awkwardly towards ‘A’ Flight. A few minutes later he was out of there and heading for ‘B’ hut. The Canadian pilots watched him through the windows, puzzled by the rolling walk with feet apart. The door opened and he appeared in the aperture. His shoulders revealed his rank of squadron leader. No one stood up.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded angrily.
A chunky Canuck hauled himself upright, a few feet from where Steve Edmond sprawled in a chair and surveyed the newcomer through a blue haze.
‘I guess I am,’ said Stan Turner. It was early days. Stan Turner already had two confirmed kills to his credit but would go on to score a total of fourteen and a hatful of medals.
The British officer with the angry blue eyes turned on his heel and lurched away towards a parked Hurricane. The Canadians drifted out of their huts to observe.
‘I do not believe what I am watching,’ muttered Johnny Latta to Steve Edmond. ‘The bastards have sent us a CO with no bloody legs.’
It was true. The newcomer was stumping around on two prosthetics. He hauled himself into the cockpit of the Hurricane, punched the Rolls Royce Merlin engine into life, turned into the wind and took off. For half an hour he threw the fighter into every known aerobatic manoeuvre in the textbook and a few that were not yet there.
He was good in part because he had been an aerobatic ace before losing both legs in a crash long before the war, and in part just because he had no legs. When a fighter pilot makes a tight turn or pulls out of a power dive, both ploys being vital in air combat, he pulls heavy G-forces on his own body. The effect is to drive blood from the upper body downwards, until blackout occurs. Because this pilot had no legs, the blood had to stay in the upper body, nearer the brain, and his squadron would learn that he could pull tighter turns than they could. Eventually he landed the Hurricane, climbed out and stumped towards the silent Canucks.
‘My name is Douglas Bader,’ he told them, ‘and we are going to become the best bloody squadron in the whole bloody Air Force.’
He was as good as his word. With the Battle of France lost and the battle of the Dunkirk beaches a damn close-run thing, the big one was coming: Hitler had been promised by his air-force chief Goering mastery of the skies to enable the invasion of Britain to succeed. The Battle of Britain was the struggle for those skies. By the time it was over, the Canadians of 242, always led into combat by their legless CO, had established the best kill-to-loss ratio of all.
By late autumn, the German Luftwaffe had had enough and withdrew back into France. Hitler snapped his anger at Goering and turned his attention east to Russia.