Once More the Hawks Read Online Free PDF

it.’
    ‘From now on,’ Orr said, ‘I suppose everybody had better wear steel helmets.’
    Two minutes later, getting into his car to view his outposts, his helmet hit the roof with a clang and he fell back as if pole-axed.
    ‘God damn!’ he said. ‘The first British casualty of the war!’
    They had all expected the fighting to start at once but, apart from a little skirmishing along the Franco-German frontier, nothing happened and the British Expeditionary Force landed on the Continent without difficulty and moved to positions along the frontier. Poland vanished beneath the German attack, Udet’s Stukas proved to be all he had claimed, and a new word, Blitzkrieg , entered everyone’s vocabulary.
    England didn’t change much, however. Nobody seemed to be doing any fighting or, for that matter, making any preparations for doing any fighting. The Government was refusing to allow the RAF to drop bombs anywhere near German civilians, which meant that targets were severely restricted, and a suggestion that they set the Black Forest on fire with incendiaries was turned down indignantly with the fatuous comment that it was private property. They were trying to fight the war with one hand tied behind their backs.
    Shawbury was far enough away from the coast to be even less involved and the major interest there was the complaints of the older of the old soldiers recruited for ground defence. They were billeted in sergeants’ quarters, two to a room, each with its little stove, and when coal was delivered to them and dumped between the huts, the older men were shoved aside by the younger of their comrades and got nothing, so that they were having to endure the increasing cold without any means of keeping warm.
    The signals job didn’t last long. Because there had been no real fighting yet, nobody was taking the war very seriously and communications were still amateurish. Radar stations had been built ten to fifteen miles apart along the south coast of England which, with posts of the Royal Observer Corps, were linked with the filter room and Observer Corps Plotting Room at Fighter Command Headquarters at Stanmore. Still plagued by his 1914 radio certificate, it became Dicken’s job to make the communications function properly.
    It was a harsh winter with RAF stations snowed up and, heading towards Norfolk over a road covered with icy slush, his car skidded into a ditch full of muddy water. A breakdown truck hauled it back on to the road but, because he was wet through, Dicken was given a lift to a nearby operational training unit to spend the night there. The commanding officer turned out to be Tom Howarth, who had flown with him in Italy in 1918, and the signals officer turned out to be Babington, beaming and already resplendent in a brand new pilot’s officer’s uniform. Howarth lent him a tunic and trousers and Babington a mackintosh and a cap which sat on his head like a tit on a mountain.
    ‘Fancy seeing what happens here, sir?’ Babington asked. ‘They do circuits and bumps through the hours of darkness to get them used to night flying.’
    Collected from the operations room by a wireless operator who had just finished his course and was awaiting a posting to a squadron, Dicken immediately found himself the subject of condescension by the trainee, a fresh-faced young man by the name of Fisher with a large moustache and Volunteer Reserve badges on his shoulders. At first it didn’t occur to Dicken why, then he remembered that on all training stations there were large numbers of teachers of physics and chemistry of his own age who had been given commissions to teach radio and electricity to the masses of volunteers and conscripts who were pouring into the service and, because they were desperately needed, their basic training had been rushed and they still had hands full of thumbs and were uncertain how or when to salute, still civilians despite their uniforms and regarded with a measure of contempt by the young