Chapter IV: Part 4

It seems like hours now that we have been waiting, although it is probably only a few seconds.

Then, faintly, out of the darkness and into your muffled ears comes a human voice, yelling “fire,” and all the guns go off at once.

* * * * *

Your first experience in a gun pit is truly a shocking one.

From every side you seem to have been struck by a terrific blast of air that almost knocks you down. And somewhere around you--you don’t quite place it--there are horrifying sheets of flame, as if everything on earth had caught fire and exploded. And mingled with both these things there is certainly the loudest noise you ever heard.

The whole thing shakes you, physically and spiritually. And before you have really come back to your senses, you are following the crashing shell on its journey. The terrible blast seems to go shattering and crashing its way on up, up into the heavens, with a series of great reverberations as though the climbing shells were bursting through sheet after sheet of waxed paper stretched tight across the sky.

And then, if you wait maybe half a minute, you can hear faintly the explosion of that very shell which a minute ago you saw being loaded into the gun. Now it is flying into a thousand vicious little pieces, miles up there in the darkness.

But by now the yell, “One seven,” has come through the night, the dark shapes of boys in uniform have moved wordlessly in routine little motions there in the open-air cistern, and another shell is already tearing toward the moon.

Some people can’t stand heavy gunfire at all. And I’ll have to admit that the first four or five times the guns were fired during my night with the ack-acks I didn’t like it either. I wished I was home in bed.

But then I swear I got used to it.

Our battery fired close to a hundred rounds that night. It got so we would stop talking a few seconds before the guns went off and then go on with the conversation as soon as the noise was over.

Some of the gunners were telling me about a photographer who came up one night to take pictures. On the first blast from the guns he started running blindly away and charged right into a wire fence, which knocked him down. But it was no disgrace, for people who are like that just can’t help it.

The blast from these antiaircraft guns is almost beyond description, but I can give you some examples.

The door to one of the underground concrete rooms where the men doze during quiet periods had a brand-new steel latch. On my night with the battery, the first salvo broke that steel latch in two and blew the door open.

They use up light bulbs at a terrific rate. The concussion breaks the filament. In the soldiers’ canteen only one light bulb was left out of the original six when I went down after an hour’s firing. And in the hut where the officers on duty have their meals, the blast rocks the building, knocks dishes off the table, and puffs out the blackout curtains so that they have to be readjusted each time.

Rubber earplugs are available, but the men don’t wear them. They get used to the blast, and it doesn’t bother them.

An officer and I were standing in the dark listening to the Germans overhead.

“They sound as if they were flying along evenly,” he said, “but they aren’t. When there is a formation, they may be flying five hundred feet above and below one another. If there’s just one, he flies a zigzag course. Not only that, but he goes up and down, too, like a roller-coaster. That’s so we can’t get a good sound gauge on him.”

It always sounded to me as if there were only one plane in the sky at a time. But at the end of two hours I asked about it and the gunner officer said:

“It’s hard to say, but I’d guess that anywhere from one to three hundred had been over tonight.”

* * * * *

The value of antiaircraft guns is not measured necessarily by the number of planes they bring down--although the guns are officially credited with about 450 of the 3050 German planes shot down over Britain since the war started. Their greater value is in keeping the raiders high and keeping them jumping around, which makes accurate bombing very nearly impossible. In fact, the average height at which those 450 planes were plugged from the ground was 16,000 feet.

Searchlights are almost never used any more. Consequently, the gunners can’t see how near their shells are coming to the target. But they did have a fantastic sight a few nights ago. They were looking at the sky through binoculars when suddenly they saw, silhouetted against the moon, three German planes in formation. But before they could fire the formation was out of sight.

The boys say the Germans occasionally watch for gun flashes, then take a quick bearing and try to drop a bomb on the gun station.

Every morning the gun crews have drill. They can set the fuse, load and fire in a few seconds, but they get even better. And after the regular drills the boys practice voluntarily for hour after hour.

“Is that because they like guns,” I asked, “or is it because they want to get ahead?”

“It’s literally because they’re that determined to win this war,” the officer said.

* * * * *

This night with the antiaircraft gunners was my first glimpse into the soldiers’ side of the war. I’ll long remember one moment late in the evening when I stood between an officer and a sergeant there in the darkness with the guns roaring and bombs crunching and planes grinding overhead, and the British officer said:

“Isn’t this ridiculous--all of us trying to kill each other? And we thought it would never happen again!”

_2. MISCELLANY_

_London,
January, 1941_

The brother of a man I know has a hobby of riding around on a bicycle every morning looking for new bomb damage. He phoned this morning to report that he had a big special one. (Reports of unusual bomb damage are spread around town by mouth-to-mouth grapevine, since the newspapers aren’t permitted to mention specific locations.) So we took a bus to the scene about two miles from our hotel.

The report was correct, plenty. We learned later that the damage was caused by a German plane which crashed with its full load of bombs. They found little pieces of the plane.

All the nearby houses had been blown down. Big stone buildings remained standing, but their office furniture was splintered and smashed into ruin. There wasn’t a window left for six blocks in any direction. And yet a policeman said only a dozen people were hurt and nobody was killed. Many bomb explosions are as freakish as that.

All the public clocks in the area were stopped, but none at the same minute. Among the half dozen that I saw there was a variance of half an hour. The answer is that the blast moved the hands.

Some London buildings now have corrugated-steel shutters that are pulled down at night over windows and doors. They don’t save the glass if a bomb hits close by, but they do prevent shattered glass from flying all around. In this particular explosion these steel shutters were bent and twisted, some of them bashed in but others ballooned out toward the street like a weak spot in an inner tube. That is another freakish thing about bomb explosions--the pull is often greater than the push.

* * * * *

I saw the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens today for the first time. I think it must be the loveliest statue in the world. There is a big bomb crater two hundred yards away, but the statue is untouched. I think they ought to remove it and bury it for the duration.

The statue of Queen Victoria at Kensington Palace has several small chips missing from the hem of the Queen’s dress, the result of a small bomb that dropped a hundred yards away.

Many bomb craters in the parks are being filled with debris hauled from bombed buildings.

Three-fourths of the windows of Buckingham Palace are blown out and boarded up. In one window a torn, ragged blind has been hanging for weeks. I’ll bet they wouldn’t fix it for ten thousand pounds, for it shows all England that their King is taking it too.

* * * * *

While the checkrooms in restaurants will check tin hats and soldiers’ rifles, they aren’t supposed to accept gas masks, the point being to make you keep your mask with you all the time, just in case.

The streets are full of soldiers on leave, but you rarely see a sailor. There are so many different uniforms that I haven’t got them all straight. But I can tell all the dominion soldiers, for they have the name of their country--Canada or Australia or New Zealand--spelled out on their shoulder tabs. And that is true also of foreign units in the British Army. You very frequently see the word Poland or Czechoslovakia or Belgium on officers’ shoulder tabs.

The Poles, incidentally, have been doing some wonderful fighting with the British, especially in the air. They are highly skilled fliers, and they fight with a terrible zeal. England looks upon the Polish airman’s uniform with deep respect.

The uniform of the Royal Air Force is a pale blue. England idolizes the R.A.F., as well it should. The uniform commands a deep-down gratitude the minute it is seen, whether on a wing commander or a corporal mechanic.

Another thing about soldiers on leave in this war--almost any place you go you can see a private and a colonel and their two girls eating together. No, it doesn’t mean that the war has brought true social democracy to England. It merely means that conscription makes officers of some aristocrats and privates of other aristocrats, and when they’re on leave they’re both still aristocrats, regardless of their uniforms.

King Zog of Albania lives at a prominent hotel, and since he doesn’t like to sleep in the hotel’s regular shelter he sleeps in the basement dining room. The waiters have to clear out all diners shortly before midnight so the King can go to bed.

* * * * *

Bombs or no bombs, you can still see plenty of movies in London. You can also go to a play, or a ballet. You can play the dog races. You can watch prize fights. You can ice-skate at public rinks. You can sit and drink intoxicating spirits.

The government has just promised that there will be no rationing of beer, and although I wouldn’t know personally, of course, my gumshoe men report that whisky is readily obtainable. Wines are getting short.

A few of London’s movie theaters have been bombed out of existence, and most of the legitimate theaters are closed, with signs saying “Due to Present Conditions....” Yet several new plays have opened in the last six weeks. Pantomimes are showing as usual. There are concerts by the London Philharmonic, and the Anglo-Polish Ballet goes on twice a day. A new idea is the “luncheon ballet,” which is becoming extremely popular. There are two of them, already. And there is also “luncheon Shakespeare.”

All this daytime stuff, of course, is the result of the nighttime blackout and the German raids at night. With three or four exceptions, the movie theaters are open only in the daytime. The movies start as early as 10 A.M., and the last showing is usually around 5:30.

“The Great Dictator” is running at three theaters. You can also see “They Knew What They Wanted,” “Northwest Mounted Police,” “Strike Up the Band,” “The Thief of Bagdad,” “All This and Heaven Too” and “The Return of Frank James.” This last one starts its last show as late as seven o’clock. I suppose that’s because Frank is a tough guy.

Despite the winter weather there are plenty of open-fronted places called sports gardens, which are packed with pinball and claw machines. There is always a crowd playing them.

You have no trouble getting enough sleep these winter nights. The Germans come over every night the weather is fit, but it gets really noisy only a couple of nights a week. Even then it seldom lasts more than two hours.

Britain manufactured millions of rubber earplugs when the raiding was so bad last September and people couldn’t sleep. But the public didn’t take to them. They’re uncomfortable, and anyhow people like to hear what’s going on. At an Air Raid Precautions post the other night they dragged out a three-gallon can full of these little plugs, which look something like golf tees. The warden wanted me to take a quart of them. I didn’t want any, but I took a handful to bring home as souvenirs.

War has given the English language some new words. At least, it has made some obscure words commonplace--for instance, “stirrup pump.” That word is as common today as automobile or cigarette.

A stirrup pump is a small hand pump with its complement of a few feet of hose and a couple of buckets of water, for putting out incendiary bombs and small fires. They are scattered all over London--thousands of them--and everybody is supposed to know how to use one.

Sand is also all over the place. Right here in the Strand there is a green sack of sand, resting on top of two bricks, leaning against every lamppost. This is so everybody will know where the sand is; if an incendiary bomb falls near you, you won’t have to run around frantically looking for sand to throw on it.

Many buildings have sandbags stacked against their bases, but not many new ones are being put up. For they don’t seem to serve much purpose. To make this early precaution look more sightly, and also to protect the bags from weathering, many places have boxed in their sandbags. So now there appears to be just a huge toolbox sitting there on the sidewalk up against the building.

* * * * *

People at home wonder about the censorship over here. Well, on the whole it is not so strict. I know some American correspondents who think it should be stricter than it is.

There are only a few general subjects that you’re forbidden to mention--such as troop movements, the location of guns, and the location of any specific bombings until after a certain amount of time has elapsed. There are also other items, such as not giving current weather conditions or the routes of ships or planes, or cabling anything about a fire until it is out. (The rules were relaxed on London’s big night of fire.)

The best thing about the press censorship here is that you always know just what is being cut out. The censor calls you on the telephone. And you can even argue with him. Of course you usually lose out, but imagine arguing with the censor in some countries!

As far as my stuff is concerned, the censors have up to now cut out a total of not more than six sentences, and these were nothing I particularly cared about.

They don’t censor opinion. If you wanted to, you could say that you think England stinks, and it would go through. I think the censorship has allowed America to get a pretty honest picture of what has happened over here.

* * * * *

There are no skyscrapers in London. Like Washington, the city has a height limit for building, something like eleven stories. But spires and belfries and cathedral domes reach to great heights.

I can’t think of a single really large modern building in London that has been wholly destroyed by bombs, unless the bombing was accompanied by fire.

I don’t believe there is an aerial bomb in existence that could knock down the Empire State Building.

_3. THE BEAVER_

_London,
January, 1941_

I always thought that a member of the peerage gave off a constant white light, like an incendiary bomb, and that if you got caught in this light you became weak all over, your tongue froze and you were sort of hypnotized. It had never occurred to me that an English lord, when you actually met one, would be a human being. But now I’ve met one, and I’m still shocked to realize that he spoke real words to me and that I spoke words back to him.

The great man in question is Lord Beaverbrook, the big newspaper owner. But right now he is much more than a newspaper owner--he’s the man who is rolling out the planes with which Britain intends eventually to win this war.

Lord Beaverbrook is Minister of Aircraft Production. There wasn’t any such ministry until last May. Airplanes weren’t coming off the line fast enough to catch up with Germany. Everybody was trying, but everybody apparently was trying in all directions at once. So Mr. Churchill put his finger on Lord Beaverbrook and said, “You’re it.”

I doubt if Lord Beaverbrook knew any more about aircraft production at that moment than I did, but he did know how to get things done. He has the American sense for ignoring tradition, and an almost inspired zeal for accomplishment. He stepped into his new job with a bang and said, “No, we won’t cut red tape; we’ll just ignore it.”

What he did, and how he did it, must still remain in the secret files, but you can draw your own conclusions--Britain has been getting very bold in the air of late. Daylight raids across the Channel have become a steady occurrence.

People close to Lord Beaverbrook have a tenacious affection and respect for him, but as a public figure he has collected his share of dead cats. The English public considers him a robber baron. The aristocracy regards him as a man in trade. Plenty of bricks are hurled at his present success. People say, “Yes, he succeeded, but he did it by ruthlessly robbing other ministries.”

I don’t know that Lord Beaverbrook ever answers these jibes, but if he wanted to he could say, “Well, you all said the production of planes was the most important thing in this war. If that’s true, then what was wrong with taking things from other departments?”

Lord Beaverbrook likes a fight, and he doesn’t especially care for applause. As one writer put it, he’d “rather be cleverly attacked than fulsomely praised.” He likes to be in there swinging against odds. And he has a vitality, both mental and physical, that exhausts the people around him.

When he jumped into this thankless job last May he became a new man. His asthma disappeared. He worked from nine in the morning till three the next morning. Like Edison, he can exist on little sleep. And he had his whole staff going at a high pitch. He loved it.

But now his asthma has come back, and he doesn’t keep the ridiculous hours he did at first. When I said to him, “I’ll bet you love your job, don’t you?” he smiled and said, “I’d like to be out of it.”

It’s my guess that Lord Beaverbrook has aircraft production ironed out so well that it no longer tests him, and he is becoming bored with it. To me, that’s just as pertinent an indicator of his success as the new audacity of the R.A.F.

Lord Beaverbrook was born in Canada. Before he was thirty he had made a million dollars. Then he came to England to make his mark. He was elected to Parliament long ago, in 1910. During the first World War he was Minister of Information. He is the best-known newspaper figure in Britain. He has taken a big hand in politics, and now again he is doing a vital war job for England. And yet he still sort of considers himself a foreigner.

When I sat down across the desk from him, the first thing he said was, “Well, what do you think of them, aren’t they wonderful?” He meant the British people and the way they are taking the war.

“I’m a foreigner here, you know,” he said, “so I can see them as they can’t see themselves. They’re the greatest race on earth. Nobody else could have pulled themselves together like this. I doubt if we could have done it in Canada.”

“Could we Americans have done it?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” he said. “At least in the East they could have.”

I damned well resented that, being an old Montana cowboy myself. But then I remembered I was in Whitehall and not on the Powder River; so, like the British, I pulled myself together and carried on.

* * * * *

A little knot of half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men will emerge at the end of this war as the great leaders who pulled England through. Most of them will be men who forgot politics for the duration, men who laid aside their skittishness and slashed out and did things. They will be men who kept pace with the British national character, not those who were dragged along by it. Lord Beaverbrook, I have no doubt at all, will be one of this select group. And for that reason I want to tell you all the little things I know about him. He has already been written about a great deal in America, but it takes a lot of writing to make the public know a man, so I’ll just add my share.

He is of medium height, stocky though not heavy. His shoulders push forward, and when he sits at a table he almost seems to crouch. His face is sallow, and it leaves the impression of being square rather than round. His mouth is big, his lips pursed. His black hair is thin on top, but on the back of his head it is thick and heavy, almost down to the collar line. He was dressed in black when I talked to him.

Lord Beaverbrook doesn’t speak like an Englishman. He still speaks like a Canadian, which means like an American. He knows America intimately. His last trip over was made in October, 1939, just after the war started.

“You know my friend Dick Merrill, don’t you?” I asked.

“I certainly do,” he said. “He came down to the boat the last time I was in New York. I sent him a cable when his new baby was born. I have flown with him a lot.”

Lord Beaverbrook used to have his own airplanes. He still occasionally flies about England, visiting aircraft factories, but he goes in government planes now.

He owns three big London newspapers--the _Morning Express_, the _Evening Standard_ and the _Sunday Express_. You’ve probably heard of his modernistic black-glass Express Building in Fleet Street. Back home, every time I read about Fleet Street being bombed I wondered if Beaverbrook’s glass house had been hit. It has not, although buildings a hundred feet away have burned. In October a bomb did go through the roof of the Standard Building, however.

Since taking on the aircraft job, Lord Beaverbrook has paid almost no attention to his newspapers. At the _Standard_ they didn’t hear from him for weeks, until one day he called up and said, “What do you mean by attacking the Presbyterians in my newspaper?” His father was a Presbyterian minister and he himself knows the Bible intimately. He almost always quotes from it in his speeches.

He is very much opposed to smoking. He used to play tennis avidly but has given it up. Almost his only relaxation now is the movies. He is a movie fiend, and has a projector at his country home. He’s crazy about Marlene Dietrich. As one of his fellow workers said, Lord Beaverbrook probably thinks the greatest contribution America could make to Great Britain would be to send over more Dietrich films. They say he has seen “Destry Rides Again” nine times.

Lord Beaverbrook loves to hear people singing together. He sings himself--but, as somebody has said, he has more rhythm than tone. His favorite songs are “Little Joe” and “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.”

Around town Lord Beaverbrook is known as “The Beaver.” At the aircraft office he is spoken of as “The Minister.”

He is a great friend of Richard B. Bennett, former Prime Minister of Canada, and he has Bennett at the ministry with him.

During the week Lord Beaverbrook sleeps at night in a heavily walled room at one of his newspaper plants. Week-ends he goes to a place outside of town, but even so he drops in at his office on Sundays.

He has two sons and a daughter. Max, the elder son, is in the R.A.F.

Lord Beaverbrook’s government office is a lovely one, in contrast to the dark Victorian offices that many British statesmen occupy. It looks out across a park and down upon the Thames. The office is a large one, with rugs and deep leather chairs. On a table at Beaverbrook’s left are four telephones--three black ones and a green one. The green one is for intercabinet communication.

Outside the office is a large room where six secretaries, all men, work. The door between is always open. Secretaries and technicians have constant access to the Minister. They are in and out all the time.

It is usual for Beaverbrook to be talking to four or five people at once about different things. He is a colossal asker of questions. Before you sit down he has found out whether you smoke, drink, fight, swim or speak Esperanto. At least, that’s what everybody says. But he must have figured I didn’t know anything anyhow, for he didn’t pump me much.

He seemed to me to be in complete repose. He didn’t impart any feeling that he is the slashing dynamo he really is.

In personality Lord Beaverbrook runs the scale. He probably would have been a great actor. He has one act of intimate confidence, one of savage bullying, one of grave piety, one of profound and devastating gloom. At times when he walks into a cabinet meeting, they say, you can hardly keep from crying, he looks so tragic. But the chief characteristic of Lord Beaverbrook is probably his wit. He has a brilliant but left-handed humor. People who don’t know him well are often unable to tell whether he’s serious or joking.

That wit of his can on occasion be scalding. They say he likes people who can stand up to his barrages. He’s not a man who has to be agreed with. And on the whole he doesn’t care what the public thinks or says about him. He likes to fight, that’s all.

In getting things done he is not unlike Churchill. And that is the way to win a war.

_4. SHOP TALK WITH THE R.A.F._

_An R.A.F. Bomber Station,
February, 1941_

Although I can’t tell you where it is, or give people’s names, I am spending a few days with the Royal Air Force. The place is not near London.

My pass for visiting this certain bomber station is good for two days. The weather is nice here, but bad on the Continent, so nightly flights have been called off. But I don’t care; for what I prefer, anyway, is just to sit around as I used to do at home on bad weather days and do a lot of “hangar flying”--in other words, just talk. These R.A.F. pilots had never heard the expression “hangar flying,” but they thought it very apt and have started using it, so I guess I have now given my share of American aid to Britain.

There are many pilots at this field, and I have come to know some of them very well indeed. The R.A.F. boys are just like any group of fine aviators at home. They’re the cream of the crop, and swell guys, from station commander on down.

A visitor is not permitted to describe an R.A.F. station, but I can say this: My greatest surprise was at its close resemblance to a big Army Air Corps field in the peacetime United States. I had expected to find things tense and hectic, with secret hangars and everything camouflaged to look like something else. I had expected to find the whole place rather makeshift, for quick moving; and that everybody would be in overalls and like firemen, ready to jump into their boots and go at a second’s notice. It isn’t that way.

The officers have pleasant private rooms. The enlisted men live in big permanent brick barracks. In the officers’ mess there is a great sunny lounge room with a huge fireplace. It resembles a country club more than a battle station. There is a game room, with billiard and pingpong tables and a tiger rug on the floor. There is bar service, so that the pilots can have a friendly drink at lunch and dinner time. During the day they go about their normal duties, testing and checking aircraft, practicing formation flying, attending to the countless clerical desk tasks which are necessary in running a flying field.

Only in the early afternoon, when they gather around a big map-covered table in the “briefing room” to lay out plans for that night’s flight, and again when they take off one by one on the long journey to the land of the enemy, and once more when they begin to drop down one by one out of the black skies, is there any warlike feeling about the place.

Well, there is one other thing you notice, too. As we sat around the great lounge before lunch, with many pilots in the room, I was struck by the scarred faces of some of the men. There weren’t a lot of them--half a dozen at most--but they were enough to prick the illusion that this was a peacetime flying field. Yet the boys say they have lost remarkably few bomber crews in the last bitter six months. Almost everybody shot down over Germany has managed to land by parachute and is now in a prison camp. Fatal crashes on home soil have been comparatively few.

I asked how they got weather information from the other side, and they said it was difficult but, with their own observations and certain information that does come through, they were able to forecast pretty accurately. I asked the station commander why some night, just for the hell of it, he didn’t call up Berlin on the radio-telephone and ask how the weather was over there. He laughed, and said he believed he would; but of course he won’t. I’ll bet they’d be so flabbergasted the first time that they’d tell him.

The R.A.F. boys have a high regard for the flying ability of their foes, and a healthy respect for antiaircraft fire from the ground.

They don’t worry about shell fragments hitting their bombs and exploding a whole plane in midair, for such a smack doesn’t set bombs off. In fact, occasionally they can hear shrapnel striking the bombs slung beneath their planes, and that’s a sound they are glad to hear, for it means that the thick steel walls of the bombs have kept the shrapnel from coming up through the fuselage and into the seat of the pilot’s pants.

I asked one boy whether he ever had a funny little feeling in his stomach when he sent a bomb on its way downward, and he said, no, not actually, although sometimes he did indirectly when he got to thinking about it later, back home. But any regret is overcome by the thought of what the Germans did to Britain first.

Among the rumors we occasionally get back home is that German planes are being turned out with very few and very poor instruments. The R.A.F. boys say that is nonsense. German planes shot down over England are all fully equipped with instruments, and these boys say their workmanship is superb. The lads who have to face the music don’t fool themselves, as we sometimes do at home.

An all-night flight to Germany or Italy in a bombing plane is a long and grueling task. And it’s the sort of job you can’t keep on doing night after night, as though you were going to work in a mill.

In the heavy days of the spring of 1940 bomber pilots were making as many as five trips a week, but now the average is less. When they have made a certain number of trips they are “posted” for other duties--which means a rest. It usually involves transfer to a training station as an instructor.

Although the boys are all disappointed when bad weather washes out any one night’s operations, still I believe they are a little glad to have the rest when it comes. It takes some months to work up the number of trips necessary before a man is given a rest. This station has only one man so far who is back on night bombing duty after having been posted. He came back in less than the scheduled time--because at the training station he talked so much about his experiences he drove his fellow pilots almost crazy!

The funniest incident I have heard about at this station is about one of their bombers that got lost and finally landed in Germany, just after daylight. The fliers asked some German farmers where they were, and the farmers told them. They got back in the plane and flew safely home.

But they rarely get lost, for they are thoroughly skilled at instrument flying when they arrive for duty.

I have a friend--the best one I’ve made, and whom I’m going to see again in another part of the world--who was telling me about a crash he’d been in. We were riding in a car as he talked about it--he and I in the front seat. I asked him if this was his only accident. He said “Yes,” and then reached around and said, “Where’s some wood to knock on?” Three other pilots were riding in the back seat, and they yelled as if they had caught somebody stealing jam: “Jimmy’s shooting a line! Jimmy’s shooting a line! He must be, if he’s looking for wood to knock on.”

You hear that term, “shooting a line,” more than any other expression around an R.A.F. field. The boys razz each other with it. They don’t spare anybody, no matter what he’s been through. Anyone who talks about anything he has done is accused of shooting a line. And since everybody talks, everybody is eventually accused. It’s all good-natured.

They had one pilot, now transferred, who was a colossal line-shooter. He would come back from every trip with the most fantastic tales of his adventures. He never repeated himself, and he never had a dull story. The boys felt lonesome for weeks after he left.

At home we have only a few sergeant pilots in the Air Corps, but Britain has many of them. It is not unusual for a great British bomber to be captained by a sergeant, who all during the trip is in command over the commissioned officers who make up his crew.

The greatest discomfort the bomber crews have is the cold. They almost freeze to death. The planes are heated by hot air from the engines, yet so much cold wind gets in that they really suffer. They’re now getting electrically heated boots and gloves, which will solve the problem.

Unlike our airline transports, a bomber has only one set of controls. The captain and the second pilot have to trade seats when they relieve each other. One of the boys told me how one night over northern Italy, when he was second pilot but was flying the plane at the time, the motors suddenly went dead. So he nosed the plane over into a dive, and while they were diving straight downward he and the captain changed seats. The motors caught again at 3000 feet and they came home safely.

And incidentally, you know how worried we get on an airplane when one motor goes out? Well, it is not unusual at all for these bombers to come all the way from Berlin on one engine.

* * * * *

These young fellows admit that they do get scared sometimes. Scared--yet on the whole they take it just as a matter of course.

Usually they circle over the objective for an hour or so, dodging antiaircraft fire and getting a good sight on the target. One officer told me that once when he was flying as a second pilot, and not at the controls, he actually went to sleep right over Berlin--slept in his seat for half an hour and didn’t wake up till the captain yelled at him to work out a course for home.

I asked if they ever saw German night fighters in the air. Not often, they said, but they’ve all had instances. One of my pilot friends says he has ordered his tail-gunner never to fire if he sees a German plane flashing past in the night, for there is always a chance the German didn’t see them. This friend has had half a dozen cases where a German fighter whizzed past so close there was almost a collision, but the enemy never saw them at all.

The five men who go out in a bomber take a lunch of chocolate, cakes and fruit and a thermos bottle of hot tea or coffee. One pilot said he opened his hot tea one night and found that it was frozen solid. Most of them aren’t interested in lunch while flying. What they really look forward to is that hot breakfast when they get home, just before daylight. One officer whom I know, a tail-gunner, doesn’t care much for sweets and he always brings his bar of chocolate back with him from Germany for his five-year-old daughter.

A pilot flies the same plane every trip. And he tries to keep the same flying and ground crews. On days when he is not scheduled to go out that night, he hangs around the plane getting it all fixed up just the way he wants it. He comes to think of that plane as almost belonging to him.

A man bent on a mission of death finds time to appreciate beauty, too. One of the boys said the most beautiful sight he had ever seen was the Alps on a clear moonlit night. He had never seen them before. They were covered with snow, and their dark-shadowed sides gave the effect of a ghostly etching.

Another pilot looked down one night on his way home and there were stars right beneath him. He thought sure he had got bottom-side up, but it turned out he was seeing a reflection from the sky in the English Channel below.

Pilots have various slang terms for things. An automatic pilot is known as George. An airplane is a kite. And of course the Germans are always referred to as Jerry. It happens that I have a very close friend back in America named Jerry. I hope when I get home she doesn’t try to bomb me. If she does, I suppose I’ll just have to shoot her down.

_VI. THE CAVE DWELLERS_

_1. ALL I COULD BEAR_

_London,
February, 1941_

This war has driven millions of people to burrow underground like moles. On an average, one-fourth of London’s population has slept underground in the past six months.

On nights when the raids are bad, about half of London is below the surface. And in certain sections, such as the Borough of Stepney in the poor East End, with its population of a quarter of a million, they say that on bad nights ninety-nine per cent of the people are down below. It is a sorry life.

I have been in shelters night after night after night. I’ve been in about fifty of them in all, from the lowliest to the most luxurious, from vast stockyards of places that hold 14,000 people, on down to refined little underground homes buttressed like Gibraltar.

It is going to be hard to describe a shelter so that you can picture it; just as it would be hard to describe a ship to somebody who had never seen one. For there must be as many kinds of shelters under London as there are kinds of ships on the sea. But in general, sheltering falls into four classifications: (1) the tubes, which is to say the subways; (2) private shelters, under hotels and apartment houses; (3) vast public shelters in the basements of thousands of strong buildings, and (4) Anderson shelters--the artificial cave that the home owner builds in the backyard for his family alone.

I suppose that back home we have read more about life in the tubes than in any of the other shelters. Possibly that is because it is forbidden to name other big shelters, for fear of directing German bombs to them. Yet fewer people sleep in the tubes than in any of the three other types of shelter.

Here are some figures to show just how much of London can get under shelter at night, how much of it actually takes shelter, and where:

(The last column of figures comes from a shelter census taken throughout Greater London on a recent quiet night.)

Capacity Census
Tubes 178,000 96,000
Private group shelters 930,000 209,000
Public Shelters 1,323,000 368,000
Anderson shelters 3,418,000 1,271,000
---------- ----------
Total 5,849,000 1,944,000

Taking into account the evacuation, on which there are no definite figures, let us assume that the population of Greater London today is eight million. Then these figures mean that there are shelter accommodations for nearly three-fourths of the people, and that on quiet nights only one-fourth of the population uses them. On bad nights this figure doubles.

When I say that only a fourth of London is burrowing in these winter nights, don’t get the idea that the other three-fourths are out around the town. Only a few thousand are. The rest are at home, behind their blackout curtains.

In the past few weeks bad weather has disrupted the raiders, and they have been over London on an average only four nights a week. And only about one night a week has there been really heavy raiding. People grow nonchalant about it, possibly too nonchalant. But just let London get two bad nights in a row and see what happens. You would see well over half of London diving for the basements.

Today, after six months of hiding from bombs, the shelter population has become pretty well settled. The same people go to the same shelters each night. They sleep in the same spots, either in bunks or on the floor. The Ministry of Health is installing bunks so fast there are now some 350,000, and before spring the number will probably pass a million.

There are all kinds of opinion about the people who live in shelters. Social workers think they’re wonderful. Some people consider them cowards. As far as I can see, they have the same strengths and weaknesses that people in the mass have everywhere, in war or out. They are just people doing the best they can with a situation that is pretty bad.

The shelters do harbor some conscription dodgers and petty thieves, and a horde of young men who refuse to act as fire watchers or do much of anything else. They are weak characters. At home they would be drugstore cowboys; here they’re called “tube Cuthberts.”

When life has simmered down to the point where you have to choose between being bombed and living like swine on the floor of a dungeon, then life has indeed become pretty bleak. And this isn’t just in London. All over England people are burrowing in shelters at night. Millions of them are living through these sixteen-hour winter nights like that--just down there waiting in a tube or a basement or a dugout.

There is no denying that it’s better than being dead, but it’s a hell of a way to live.

I got my first view of an underground shelter crowd at the big Liverpool Street tube station.

It was around eight o’clock on a raidless night. A policeman in the upper vestibule told us just to go down the escalator and take a look--as though it were a zoo. So we did.

Somehow I must have thought that there’d be nobody down there that night, or that if there were they’d be invisible or something, because I wasn’t emotionally ready at all to see people lying around by the thousands on cold concrete.

In my first days in England I had seen terrible bomb damage. I had seen multitudinous preparations for war. I had talked with wounded soldiers. I had gone through London’s great night of fire-bombing. I had listened for hours to the crack of guns and the crunch of bombs. And although I didn’t especially know it at the time, none of these things went clear down deep inside and made me hurt.

It was not until I went down seventy feet into the bowels of the Liverpool Street tube and saw humanity sprawled there in childlike helplessness that my heart first jumped and my throat caught. I know I must have stopped suddenly and drawn back. I know I must have said to myself, “Oh my God!”

We hunted up the shelter marshal, and talked to him for a long time. He was immensely proud of his shelter, and I suppose he had a right to be, for they say it is paradise now compared to what it was in the beginning. He told us to take a walk through the shelter and then meet him at the back entrance.

This is a new section of the tunnel, not yet used by trains. The tube is narrower than most of New York’s subway excavations, and it is elliptical in shape. It is walled with steel casing.

We walked to the far end, about an eighth of a mile, through one tube, and then back in the parallel tube. On benches on each side, as though sitting and lying on a long street-car seat, were the people, hundreds of them. And as we walked on they stretched into thousands. In addition, there was a row of sleeping forms on the wooden floor of the tube, stretched crosswise. Their bodies took up the whole space, so we had to watch closely when we put our feet down between the sleepers.

Many of these people were old--wretched and worn old people, people who had never known many of the good things of life and who were now winding up their days on this earth in desperate discomfort. They were the bundled-up, patched-up people with lined faces that we have seen sitting dumbly in waiting lines at our own relief offices at home.

There were children too, some asleep and some playing. There were youngsters in groups, laughing and talking and even singing. There were smart-alecks and there were quiet ones. There were hard-working people of middle age who had to rise at five o’clock and go to work. Some people sat knitting or playing cards or talking. But mostly they just sat. And though it was only eight o’clock, many of the old people were already asleep.

It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself traveling at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back against a curved steel wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny--every night, every night from now on.

People looked up as we came along in our good clothes and our obviously American hats. I had a terrible feeling of guilt as I walked through there--the same feeling that I have had when going through penitentiaries, staring at the prisoners. I couldn’t look people in the face; consequently I didn’t see very much of the human visage that night, for I looked mostly at the floor. But I saw all I could bear. I saw enough.

Since that first night I have seen so much of it I no longer feel that way about the shelterers in mass. Repetition makes the unusual become commonplace. Enough of anything dulls the emotions. But I still think my first impression was a valid one. I still think it speaks the frightening poverty of character in this world more forcibly than do the bombs that cause it.

A bombed building looks like something you have seen before--it looks as though a hurricane had struck. But the sight of thousands of poor, opportunityless people lying in weird positions against cold steel, with all their clothes on, hunched up in blankets, lights shining in their eyes, breathing fetid air--lying there far underground like rabbits, not fighting, not even angry; just helpless, scourged, weakly waiting for the release of another dawn--that, I tell you, is life without redemption.

_2. DOUBLE-X_

_London,
February, 1941_

I went into an East End shelter, beneath a railroad track, with a friend who supervises repair work on shelter buildings.

This railroad runs through the city on a high grade, the top of which is heavily arched over with stone. At the street level, under the tracks, are large rooms. And here underneath the rumbling trains people sleep at night.

It was about 11 P.M. when we went into one of the rooms. It was dungeonlike and gloomy, with only a faint light, and very cold. About twenty people lay on the floor on mattresses, covered with quilts. Everyone was asleep, or so we thought.

My friend looked at the ceiling to see if recent work aimed at stopping the seepage of water had been finished. We didn’t say anything, but suddenly from among the recumbent forms came a woman’s voice:

“When are we going to get bunks--after the war’s over?”

The voice was old, but it wasn’t a complaining voice, or a bitter one. There was even a note of gaiety in it.

The remark opened up other sleepers, and many of them put in an oar. They lay on their backs and talked up to my friend about the discomforts of this miserable place.

There were old men and women with lined faces. There were middle-aged men who said nothing. There were children. And side by side lay two girls--beautiful girls in their twenties--with nets on their hair and cold cream on their faces. At Ohio State they would be popular coeds. Here they lay on their backs on concrete floors, looking up as we stood and talked for some fifteen minutes.

And then in the midst of this conversation I heard--if you’ll excuse me--what seemed to be someone using the toilet. The room grew silent for a moment, and the sound was magnified.

I didn’t believe it could be true--here in public before children and elders and two lovely modern girls you’d have been proud to take to the Ritz for dinner. It seemed impossible among civilized people. But it was true. The only toilet in that room was a public bucket.

Nobody laughed or blushed. This vulgar intimacy had become accepted as a way of life under the whip of war.

As we left, the old voice with the gaiety in it called to me and my friend: “We’ll all be dead before you get this place fixed up, so you’d better leave a deposit on a wreath for me.”

They were all laughing as we left.

* * * * *

Shelter Double-X is in the East End. I call it Double-X because I can’t give its real name.

People feel sentimental about Double-X, they have been there so long. Some ten thousand people live there every night. It is one of the biggest shelters in London. It is so big it is like a state fair. It takes you hours to go through it.

Openings have been walled up, and shock walls have been built a few feet in front of the entrances. The great vaultlike space is divided into bays, each holding more than a hundred persons. Each bay is numbered, and each one has its own submarshals, selected by the people themselves.

At first, ten thousand people slept on the floor. But now bunks are going in.

Double-X has two big first-aid rooms, with Red Cross nurses in charge. It has canteens. It has a wagon refreshment stand, run by a Negro. It has one vast long promenade devoted to nothing but milling up and down on parade, just like the boardwalk at Atlantic City, except under cover.