Jim Bailey - The Sky Suspended: A Fighter Pilots Story

Copyright 1964 by Jim Bailey

First published in Great Britain 1990
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc,
50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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eISBN 978-1-4088-4275-1

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Dear Jim,

Your telephone call, after all these twenty-three years that we have neither seen nor spoken to one another, made me very happy. You have asked me to write a foreword to your book and this has sent me groping back into the past, trying to discover some impression which would touch off a train of thought.

The coincidence is apt, for you write from South Africa and this concerns the Wildebeest, not that ugly brute of the Kruger Park, but one of my favourite aeroplanes, an ancient, square-rigged biplane, full of loyalty and character. In its cockpit was a notice, long-winded by jet standards, but what did it matter then, we were in no hurry. It said, very firmly, This aircraft is not to be flown at a speed in excess of 140 mph.

At that time I was twenty-one and though I had five years advance on you we both belonged, as concerns flying, to the bird-age, in time to be superseded by the jet-age. We were known as birdmen, sometimes even intrepid birdmen. But our pleasure did not lie in this kind of hollow flattery. It lay, as you have so beautifully depicted in your book at least for those whose senses were alive in the joy brought to us by naked contact with the air, our natural element, with the brutal buffeting of the slipstream, with the passionate feel of speed; feel, I say, for in an open cockpit at 100 mph, as on the back of a galloping horse, speed, clean and breath-taking, is realistic, not motionless and pressurised, as in a Boeing. I remember how reluctant we were, when we relinquished our trim little pre-war Furies for the all-powerful Hurricanes and Spitfires, to close the hood and shut ourselves off from the element to which we belonged. At least we were able to re-open them but the age of the hermetically-sealed jet was not far off.

This transitional period was the one in which we came to know one another, you a wandering scholar, I a professional airman, a regular with an irregularity of conduct and character which doomed me already for high office. There happened to be a war on (as they used to say airily) and this gave intense drama to the decor: the obligation to face up squarely to death; the hope one nurtured, but dared not openly express, of survival. The terror of others, who were naive enough not to hide it, believing you were less terrified than they. But there were compensations in which much beauty lay, though some of it was gashed with hideous high-lights.

There were those dawn patrols when we pierced the low-lying mist to meet the rising sun; there was the exquisite solitude of those patrols miles high in the black of night, when only reasons domination over unreason prevented an occasional urge to end it all with a deliberate insane plunge into the dark chasm, miles deep, below. There was the fearful, sweating apprehension of having to fly into the massed cohorts of the enemy, happily allayed at ones first encounter by the realisation that they could not all round on you and devour you at once. Quite the contrary, it was us, the nimble, fleet-footed fighters who usually had the advantage. But only on condition that we never, for a moment, relaxed our guard, nor made a fatal error. I remember that evening when the high haze was infused with the crimson of the setting sun: we were jumped by three Messerschmitt 109s. I can still see the square wing-tips and black crosses of the one that should have got me as it flashed across just above. I had already whipped into a turn on the warning cry from the tail look-out it was the Ace. But a few wing-spans to starboard Hamiltons aircraft was rolling over, wrapped in flame and dipping towards the earth five miles below.

His was a swifter end than the slow death of Gordon of which you were a sad and helpless witness. You think that the swift deaths were easier than the ugly, drawn-out ones. It is not a point I should care to argue, but on the two occasions when I had to bale out I remember above all the extraordinary calm which possessed me when the issue, life or death, still remained to be decided. The first time I found time for a brief but homely chat with ground control; the second time, when an Me no made a proper mess of my aircraft and me, I heard myself mutter, Christ but in a hushed voice, so that the ladies would not hear, as if I had spilled some tea on the drawing-room carpet. I believe it to be true, I pray so anyway, that some unseen peace, given from a source beyond us, possesses us, be we saint or criminal, when we face a head-on encounter with death.

Let us be honest we felt satisfaction in the destruction of an enemy. More often than not there was a rare, dramatic beauty in the sight of an aircraft, even one of ours, on its last, headlong swoop towards earth, or a watery tomb. There was the thrill of the chase, more gloriously stimulating, lets admit, than any notion of defending the last barriers of the free world. Finally there was the simple contentment that any professional feels in a job well done.

All this seemed mundane enough, but terrible reactions, which we even managed to hold in check long after they made themselves felt, were building up in our minds and bodies. Sooner or later came the moment when we, the surviving witnesses of this gay, sporting carnage, had had our fill; and fatigue, with its by-products fear and revolt, blunted or destroyed our natural (or should we say professional?) impulses. And we became infected instead with a morbid terror of dying, filled with the same of killing, saddened with the endless departure of friends to their lone home, repulsed by the futile, boasting claims of the wiping-out, the annihilation of the enemy. Lauded as heroes, hung with medals, we only longed to withdraw into the mountains or the marshes there to forget yesterday and tomorrow.

Luckily for you and me, and others of our ilk, we were still living in the romantic age of flying, and were thus deeply affected by the influences, supernatural at times, sensual at others, of our chosen element, the air. (The bourgeois jet-age has insulated airmen from their element, though I think no less of them, for the host of convenient miracles they perform.)

Which brings me to the point in your thinking, a point upon which we have a common homing no matter from where we start in time or space. It is now twenty-three years after, but I sensed it at the time: you had plumbed the depths, you had comprehended that flying was more than just a profession. It was an art, a super-terrestrial desire, a seventh heaven. I could never have become a pilot had I not felt a veritable passion, at the tender age of fourteen, for flying. (That you were originally seduced by the gastronomic possibilities of the Oxford Squadron is just as valid, in view of the use you made of them.)