The Cloud Walkers (The Bomber War Book 3), page 1
James Philip
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The Cloud Walkers
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The Bomber War – BOOK THREE
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2017. All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
THE BOMBER WAR SERIES
Book 1: Until the Night
Book 2: The Painter
Book 3: The Cloud Walkers
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Book 1 is also available as a series of five novellas in the ‘Until the Night’ Series:
Part 1: Main Force Country – September 1943
Part 2: The Road to Berlin – October 1943
Part 3: The Big City – November 1943
Part 4: When Winter Comes – December 1943
Part 5: After Midnight – January 1944
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Author’s End Note
Other Books by James Philip
The Cloud Walkers
[The Bomber War – BOOK THREE]
Another popular fallacy is to suppose that flying machines could be used to drop dynamite on an enemy in time of war.
William H. Pickering,
Aeronautics, 1908.
My Luftwaffe is invincible…and so now we turn to England. How long will this one last: two, three weeks?
Hermann Goering,
June 1940.
The best defence of the country is the fear of the fighter. If we are strong in fighters we should probably never be attacked in force. If we are moderately strong we shall probably be attacked and the attacks will gradually be bought to a standstill… If we are weak in fighter strength, the attacks will not be bought to a standstill and the productive capacity of the country will be virtually destroyed.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding
Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, RAF Fighter Command
Prologue
Monday 20th May 1940
Air Ministry, Adastral House, Kingsway, London
In the last fortnight the government had changed, a third Secretary of State for Air in less than two months had entered the building, and the war situation had taken a disastrously unforeseen turn for the worse.
Not that anybody would have noticed much of a difference within the walls of the nine-floor Air Ministry Building. In fact, like the rest of London its denizens seemed – most of the time – to be oddly disconnected from the looming catastrophe in France.
During Professor Charles Merry’s normal commute into Central London from his home in Hampstead, what snippets of conversation he had troubled to overhear had had little to do with the war. Electing to get off the crowded omnibus at Holborn he had walked down Kingsway in the morning sunshine uncomfortably aware that the public perception of imminent danger had scarcely altered since the outbreak of hostilities the previous September. The ‘phoney war’ might be over but even after the calamities in Norway and the ever-worsening reports from the continent there was still no widespread sense of alarm. In one way it spoke to the stoicism of the British people; in another it suggested that a great deal of fiddling was going on while, metaphorically, Rome burned.
The country had blundered into a war it was unready to fight on 3rd September 1939. The belated rearmament drive – only reluctantly begun in earnest in 1937 – had hardly begun to address the damage the best part of two decades of complacent wastage had wrought on the mighty military machine of Empire which had won the Great War.
Last September the Army had only been able to put half-a-dozen divisions in the field, each superbly equipped with 1914-18 weaponry and grievously unmechanised.
The Navy was still waiting – and would be for a year to eighteen months - for the ships authorised under the first major pre-war re-armament programs.
As for the RAF many of the fighter squadrons vital for the defence of the British Isles were presently being hurried to France where, it seemed, they were being consumed piecemeal in the developing rout.
The Germans had smashed through in the Ardennes and at Sedan, bypassing the northern end of the Maginot line by striking through neutral Belgium, and unknown to the British public most of the RAF’s aircraft in France on the day of the invasion – just ten dreadful days ago – had been destroyed on the ground. The situation was so dire that as of yesterday evening emergency plans were being put in effect to rush every available Hawker Hurricane squadron across the Channel. It was madness, if the whole French Army – over a hundred divisions strong - had broken and was, in places, in headlong retreat no amount of aerial support for the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force of around two hundred thousand, out-flanked and fleeing men was going to make much difference.
Notwithstanding, it was the small things that irked the most. Professor Merry was vexed that he had – again - got in to his sixth-floor office before his secretary, Miss Peters, a middle-aged spinster who was hopelessly stuck in her pre-hostilities mindset. He had asked several times for somebody brighter, younger, and more obviously ‘keen’ to replace her but as yet the Air Ministry Personnel Secretariat had not responded to his terse minutes on the subject.
Miss Peters insisted on keeping ‘peacetime hours’ and worked at an irritatingly pedestrian ‘pre-hostilities pace’. She was self-evidently not very interested in any of the sensitive, troubling and pressing material that passed daily through his office, and she was incapable, or unwilling to prioritise appropriate files and papers as they came across her desk. He was fed up to the back teeth with having to go hunting for documents that she ought to have brought to him hours, days or in one recent particularly inexcusable case, several weeks ago.
Miss Peters, in attitude and lassitude, might have been an apt analogue for the languor which still afflicted much of Whitehall; unfortunately, it was going to need a very, very sharp shock to jolt the sclerotic government machine out of its lethargy. Problematically, what was going on in France at the moment was in his opinion, as likely to kill as to cure the patient.
Charles Merry fumbled for his keys.
The door to his room was always locked overnight.
His eye fell over the familiar sign: ‘C.H.C. Merry’ above the bracketed title ‘Principle Senior Scientific Officer’.
Beyond the door the atmosphere in the office was a little musty and he immediately went to open the window behind his desk, before he dropped his scuffed and battered attaché case by his chair and went to hang up his coat.
He had an appointment with the new Secretary of State for Air at eleven o’clock that morning. It seemed that Bomber Command had come forward with an ambitious, in his view somewhat overly optimistic new scheme to bomb the Ruhr which he suspected was not going to go down very well with the new man. He doubted Sir Archibald Sinclair would entertain any plan which involved risking damage to ‘private property’ with anything but undiluted righteous scorn.
Sinclair had succeeded his grandfather as fourth Baronet, of Ulbster (a remote hamlet in Caithness) at the age of twenty-one in 1912. Eton and Sandhurst educated he had been commissioned into the Life Guards in 1910, serving in Flanders during the Great War as second-in-command of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in the Ploegsteert Wood sector, where he had formed a lasting personal and political friendship with the then commanding officer of that battalion, a certain Winston Spencer Churchill. Between 1919 and 1921 Sinclair was Churchill’s Personal Military Secretary at the War Office, and later his Private Secretary at the Colonial Office. Elected as the Liberal Member of Parliament for Caithness and Sutherland in 1922, Sinclair had subsequently been appointed Secretary of State for Scotland in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government.
Having become the leader of the Liberal Party in 1935, Sinclair had worked hand in glove with his old friend, Winston Churchill – during that period shunned and derided within the Conservative Party in the Commons – to alert the nation to the dangers of the rise of Nazism in Germany; and nobody had been unduly surprised that, in the formation of his new coalition administration Churchill upon Neville Chamberlain’s resignation, had installed Sinclair in one of, if not the key ministry of state at this time of mounting national crisis.
Charles Merry did not know his new master very well, other than by reputation. However, while he guessed Sinclair might not be over-enthused by fantastical and possibly technically impractical notions of ‘bombing the Ruhr’, he had already detected hopeful signs that the latest Secretary of Sta
‘Stuffy’ Dowding, the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command had already made his trenchant discontent about the plundering of the ‘home defences’ known to Sinclair.
The trouble was things on the other side of the English Channel were so confused that there was a chronic lack of reliable evidence upon which to make an informed judgement on whether or not, sending more Hurricanes to France was a good or a bad thing. Intuitively, Merry feared it was a very bad thing but it was apparent that at present neither Sinclair nor Dowding was likely to easily dissuade the Prime Minister from sending every available aircraft to join the fight.
Not at least, without very good reasons and to date, nothing that had come across Charles Merry’s desk made an unambiguous case for husbanding Fighter Command’s dwindling ‘home defence’ force.
Merry recovered the papers he had been working on until midnight last night from the locked top drawer of his desk and turned his mind away from considerations of grand strategy.
He ‘advised’, his masters ‘decided’.
Grand strategy would have to wait awhile; he had preoccupations of his own. Foremost among these he had not yet made up his mind about the outcome of the latest meeting of the ‘Oil Committee’.
There had been a lot of – frankly uncritical – discussion about the ‘BAM 100’ situation, and as was not uncommon in the Air Ministry, thus far maddeningly little action. The subject had been under discussion from before the war, had become more pressing with the outbreak of hostilities and was now potentially of the utmost importance. Yet things crawled along at a snail’s pace!
BAM 100 was ‘in house’ Air Ministry vocabulary for the ‘100-Octane Project’. It was an acronym for ‘British Air Ministry 100-Octane Fuel’.
Until the last year or so every British, and so far as anybody understood, all German, Italian, French and American aero-engine designs had proceeded on the basis that the standard fuel of choice would be 87-Octane petroleum. That is, engines would run with a basic, or standard, ‘mixture’ of 87-Octane fuel. Obviously, in modern engines selecting a higher ‘boost’ or ‘pressure’ settings effectively increased that octane rating; but the actual fuel would remain 87-Octane. However, everybody had always understood that if one could increase the ‘standard’ mix to 100-Octane, the ‘normal’ performance of an engine – that is, its optimum performance without over-stressing its components – would be significantly enhanced and any aircraft so modified would be able to fly faster, higher and so forth.
Trials had begun with 100-Octane fuel on the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines which now powered both the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane as long ago as the spring of 1938. Serendipitously, it had quickly been established that while minor modifications were required to the original production Merlins, that later variants, including the Mark XII now standard on all Mark II Spitfires seemed to be fully compatible with 100-Octane fuel. Moreover, flight tests had shown that although the higher-Octane fuel made a relatively marginal difference to the Spitfire or the Hurricane’s maximum straight and level speed at higher altitudes, it markedly increased both aircraft’s performance in the climb.
Since altitude was to a fighter pilot what the lee gauge was to a captain in the age of sail; it seemed axiomatic to Charles Merry that 100-Octane ought to be made available to all Fighter Command aircraft as soon as possible.
And yet...
Somebody had raised the matter of a paper which suggested that the Merlin XIIs – which powered all Mark II Spitfires - suffered a ‘documented’ higher failure rate when operated at 12 pounds of boost – pretty much absolute maximum power - while running with 100-Octane.
The statistics were flimsy and Charles Merry seriously doubted if front line fighter pilots gave a dam about such things. What did it matter to a young man in the cockpit of a Spitfire or a Hurricane whether there was statistically a one or two percent greater chance of a Merlin suffering some kind of mechanical mishap, if the alternative was to surrender the high ground to the enemy before battle was even joined?
In any event it seemed things might eventually be moving in the right direction. Moreover, it might just be that there was an unintended silver lining to this particular dark cloud of delay and indecision. While Air Ministry mandarins and Air Marshalls had debated priorities and delved into engineering minutiae, despite ongoing ‘international difficulties’, strategic stockpiles of BAM 100 had been steadily accumulating.
This was ironic because initially, the discussion about the wholesale employment of the new fuel had been as much about arcane engine compatibility issues as it had been about the ‘supply problem’; specifically, the United States of America’s convoluted ‘Neutrality Laws’.
Prior to September 1939 this had not been an issue.
After the 3rd of that month it had suddenly threatened to become an insuperable obstacle. Apart from the fact German U-boats were likely to attempt to torpedo tankers crossing the North Atlantic bringing all of the nation’s oil to its shores, the US Congress had reacted to the invasion of Poland by arbitrarily barring the sale of war stores and munitions to all of the hostile parties.
Since in September 1939 practically every single drop of the 100-Octane petrol that was immediately available to the British Isles was produced at the Lago Standard Oil of New Jersey (ESSO) refinery on the island of Aruba in the Caribbean, the invidious ‘Neutrality Laws’ had seemingly stymied all future deliveries.
ESSO had built and developed the Aruba refinery during the 1930s to avoid punitive domestic US tax regulation, but once war broke out in Europe the Neutrality Acts peremptorily invalidated the British Government’s 1938 contract with ESSO for the supply of BAM 100. Had it not been for two factors: firstly, President Roosevelt’s public and privately stated scorn for Congress treating Fascist dictatorships (Germany and Italy) in the same way as it treated democracies (Britain and France); and secondly, the shameless behind the scenes lobbying of British diplomats and ESSO agents, that might have been that. However, in the way of these things after much undignified haggling Congress had been prevailed upon to amend the Neutrality Laws and the flow of 100-Octane from Aruba had resumed, albeit on a strict ‘cash on the barrel’ basis.
It was this last caveat which had caused so much bad feeling within Whitehall, and inevitably, clouded the broader debate. So much so that the Imperial Chemical Industries Refinery at Billingham had been given a contract to produce a ‘trial’ 35,000-ton batch of BAM 100; even though ICI’s price per ton was so much higher than that of the Aruba ‘product’ that the members of the Oil Committee had been moved to give vent to a collective wince of anguish.
It was Charles Merry’s fervent hope that the shenanigans in Washington DC, the harsh industrial realities at home and the sudden military reversals in France would, at last, concentrate the minds of the men with whom he sat on the Oil Committee.
The war was no respecter of Air Ministry protocols and timescales. The options open to the Oil Committee were contracting daily. For example, given that the Wehrmacht had now rolled across Holland it seemed unrealistic to consider the development of new refining facilities in the Dutch East Indies, and while there remained the jewel in the Imperial Crown, Abadan – the largest refinery complex on the planet, it was as yet untapped for BAM 100 production - in the Persian Gulf, Abadan was an awfully long way away if anything happened to the Suez Canal...
The Italians might still be neutral but they had over a quarter of a million men in Libya and Abyssinia poised to execute a likely pincer assault on Egypt...
Charles Merry scowled thoughtfully at the thick file lying open on his desk as he dropped into his chair. Any progress was good progress, he mused. At times like these a wise man accentuated the positive and tried to put his fears to one side.
Fighter Command was projecting its monthly 100-Octane requirement at significantly less than 10,000 tons, a figure which equated to less than ten percent of the existing ‘ready’ stocks held in the United Kingdom; which made it all the more infuriating that Merry’s old friend ‘Stuffy’ Dowding had not already gone over the heads of the Air Staff and given the unilateral go ahead for his squadrons to use the damned stuff!
