Heads in the Air
PiEcE, OF CAKE. By Geolf Taylor. (Peter Davies, 15s.) QUITE a long time ago now. Those children in cradles, that so many of us in battledress worried about, are now on National service. In these autumnal mornings, so reminiscent of the Battle of Britain, this other generation goes off to airfield, camp or ship. They are impressed, but sometimes puzzled, by the heroes of a decade ago, heroes made real to them by film, television and book. In spite of mechanisation, regimentation and democracy, the Age of the Common Man has produced a fantastic crop of heroic, almost legendary, figures. The heroes themselves, and others, have also produced an unprecedented spate of writing. There is still, apparently, an insatiable literary public for this, including the next generation in battledress, which, in my experience, takes it 4,11 With somewhat cool detachment, being quicker than most to ne bored by the pompous and trivial effusions of hack-writers, Public relations men, journalists and politicians. But they will, I think, like 'Johnnie' Johnson's book. Though Johnson in his early youth became a lively legend to those of us Who crouched in slit trenches in the Normandy orchards and
much more than that to those who zoomed across those ugly skies, Johnson, the author, tells his exciting story with objectivity, with good nature and candour and, above all, with intelligence. His opening is memorable, for it describes the sudden ending of the affair. 'I drove slowly round the perimeter track and tried to get accustomed to the rare sight of fifty-odd Spitfires squatting idly on the grass, while the sun blazed down from a blue, clean sky. . .
'Well, Johnnie, how do you like the piping days of peace?' said his group commander.
This great pilot has been wise to hold his fire more than a decade. He is now able to write candidly of fear and frustration as of success and triumph. While the book is not without exciting and racy episodes, it also contains the most level-headed and coherent account of the tactics and strategy of the Battle of Britain that I have read anywhere.
A unique aspect of the life of so many aircrew in the last war was the poignant domesticity that so often mingled with desperate operational sorties. To kill, or to be killed, between a luncheon and dinner: to fly into the German night barrage after doing the washing-up and dancing in the village hall, returning—perhaps-- to a family breakfast or to continue the unfinished letter home by a window overlooking harvest fields. Johnson writes of flying home from the battle in Europe to pace the nursing home while his wife had a baby.
No Moon Tonight, by D. E. Charlwood, an Australian, who served as a navigator in Bomber Command, is a quiet, though vivid, book, unconsciously stressing the poignancy of those who had to make these strange trips in and out of grim danger from bases that were quite properly comfortable and secure. His is a fine, thoughtful book, vividly nostalgic to those who knew the circumstances.
In content as well as style and manner, it contrasts with Piece of Cake, by Geoff Taylor, another Australian who flew with Bomber Command. Taylor's story is robustly exciting from the moment when he was shot down over Germany in 1943 till be was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
This and Against the Wind, by yet another Bomber Command navigator, Cyril Rofe, who also made a fantastic journey from an English bomber station through POW camps to Soviet Russia, reminds one again how much stranger than fiction truth has become. In this superficially well-ordered age, both these books are crammed with adventure, incident and character which would tax the inventive resources of a professional novelist. They are long books and it is only because their authors show themselves as credible human beings that one stays the course with enthusiasm, knowing that, being autobiographical, it must have a happy ending.
The War in the Air, by Gerald Bowman, is a serious survey which is by no means as exciting and stimulating as the television series from which it derives. It is useful, nevertheless, as an economically written work of reference with a splendid appendix giving brief technical details of the aircraft engaged in both world wars, and, praise be, a full index.
JOHN PUDNEY
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