The Polish Officer

activity continued; trucks, visible even with taped headlights, moving invasion materiel to be loaded onto barges. By 1:30, de Milja began to worry. What if the British had taken too many losses and decided to halt operations for the night? No, it wasn’t possible.

It wasn’t. At 1:50, the air-raid sirens began to wail, all along the wharf and from the city of Calais. De Milja smiled at the watchman, and pointed at the sky. The man nodded, returned the smile, tight and conciliatory. He understood fighting very well, he understood that de Milja was in the act of fighting; a sort of noble privilege. He just wasn’t all that pleased to have been drawn into it—no insult intended, sir.

Poor Charles Grahame, not much success in life. Still young, but the pattern was set. Public school with a name that made people say “Where?” A year at the University of Edinburgh, a year at the Scottish Widows Assurance Society in the City of London. Then, war on the way, an attempt to join the RAF. Well, yes, of course, what they needed just then were meteorologists.

So he joined the Royal Navy, and with grit and determination worked his way into the naval aviator school. He got through it, assigned to the aircraft carrier HMS Avenger.

Not to fly fighter-bombers, oh no, not Charley. Tall and gangly, curly hair that wouldn’t stay, ears like jug handles, freckles everywhere, and a silly grin. The headmaster of his school used to say that God didn’t quite get around to finishing Charles.

The Royal Navy assigned him to fly the Swordfish torpedo plane.

The Swordfish was a biplane—top and bottom wing and a fixed wheel—that looked like a refugee from World War I. It carried a single torpedo, slung beneath the cockpit. “Quite serviceable, though,” the flight instructor said. Its airspeed was 150 miles an hour. “But it will get you there, eventually,” the flight instructor said. Saying to himself immediately thereafter now whether or not it will get you home is entirely another matter.

Not much talent as a pilot. Charles’s method of achievement was to learn the rules and follow them to the letter. Do this, then do this, then do that. A different age might have found this approach greatly to its liking but, bad luck, Charles lived at a moment when spontaneity, the daring solution, and the flash of genius were particularly in fashion.

The carrier HMS Avenger was steaming in circles in Aldeburgh Bay in the first hours of 17 September, just after midnight. Charles Grahame climbed into the open cockpit beneath the top wing and his gunner/torpedo-man, Sublieutenant Higbee, sat in the gunner’s cockpit behind him. They took off, then turned south, in a formation of six Swordfish assigned to attack Calais harbor.

The formation hugged the coastline, protected by coastal antiaircraft defenses. A single ME-109 might have done for all of them, so hiding, down at six thousand feet, was their best—in fact their only— defense. The night was warm and still, moonlight turned the clouds to silver and sparkled on the water below the planes. They flew past navigation beams at Shoeburyness and Sheerness, then turned east at Herne Bay, headed for Margate.

At Margate, a rendezvous with a flight of Hurricanes, well above them somewhere, godlike, lords of the high cloud. The Hurricane squadron leader came on his radio moments later. “Hullo Hector, hullo Hector. This is Jupiter, we’re above you right now, and we’re going to keep you company on the way to destination. Radio silence from here on, but we did want to wish you good hunting. Roger and out.”

Charles Grahame knew that voice, it had a mustache and it drove a Morgan and its friends called it Tony and it got the girl and, really, worst of all, it knew it. Oh well, he told himself. Just get on with it. Not everybody could be lord of the manor.

Coming into the Strait of Dover, the Germans started shooting at them. Puffs of antiaircraft burst that hung in the air like painted smoke. Something tossed the Swordfish’s port-side wings in the air, and something else flicked the plane’s tail. Charles worked the controls to see if they still responded, and they did, as much as they ever did.

The Swordfish flight attacked in a three-and-three configuration, Charles the wingman on the left in the first wave. Higbee yelled “Good luck, Charley,” above the singing of the wind in the struts, his voice at nineteen a high tenor. Then all hell broke loose—somebody down there took Charley Grahame pretty damn seriously after all because they tried to kill him. Tracer streamed past the cockpit, flak burst everywhere, a bullet hit the fuselage with an awful tinny rattle. “Easy does it,” Charles said to himself. Now he concentrated on doing what he’d been taught. Step One, the approach. Well, they’d managed that well enough. Step Two, acquire the target. By now Higbee should be ready to fire. But Charles couldn’t see a thing. Not a bloody thing. He was whipping along, three hundred feet above the water, below him, theoretically, the harbor at Calais. But what he could see was a dark, confused blur, the moon lit up water here and there, but it meant nothing to Charles. He’d been instructed to attack a troop transport, or, almost as good, a tugboat. A barge, which could carry eight hundred tons of supplies, was a very desirable third choice. But Charles couldn’t find a harbor, a city, or indeed anything at all. Probably it was France, probably . . .

Good heavens!

Right in the middle of the torpedo run, somewhere over on his left, a ship had lit up like a Christmas tree; cabin lights, searchlights, docking lights, navigation lights—and in the muddy darkness of the blacked-out coast it looked, somehow, celestial. Higbee and Charles both gasped. “Hold fire!” Charles yelled and threw the Swordfish into a tight left bank that made the plane shudder. Higbee had, just at that moment, been about to fire, a shot that would have sent a torpedo on its way to harrowing a mighty groove in the Protestant cemetery of Calais.

“Is it a trick?” Higbee’s voice was dangerously close to soprano now but Charles never noticed. A trick! No, damn it, it wasn’t a trick. That was a ship and he’d been reliably informed that this was Calais and his job was to shoot a ship in Calais and now that was exactly what he meant to do. To which end, he traversed the city of Calais, drawing the fire of every antiaircraft gun in the place but, somehow, the Swordfish was too big and slow to hit.

Charles did it right—one-two-three right. Got enough distance away from the target before circling back, and adjusting his altitude to one hundred feet. The ship grew, bigger and bigger as they plunged toward it, its lights twinkled, then glared brightly. At the end it seemed enormous, a vast, glowing city. “Torpedo away!” Higbee screamed, his voice wobbly with excitement. The plane bucked, then, freed of weight, accelerated. Charles pulled back on the stick, his training calling out climb, climb.

Emerging from a blizzard of lights and tracer and cannon fire, the clumsy Swordfish worked its way upward through the thin night air. Then, suddenly, Charles felt the plane quiver and he was, for an instant, blinded. A flash, so intense and white it lit the clouds, and seemed to flicker, like lightning. Now you’re shot, he thought. But he was wrong. The plane had been hammered, not by a shell but by a concussive blast.

Higbee had actually hit something.

He had hit the Malacca Princess, in its final moments a shining beacon in the harbor at Calais. The torpedo had done what it was supposed to do—run straight through the water, found its target, penetrated the rusty old plate amidships and, there, detonated. Causing the explosion, almost simultaneously, of the Malacca Princess’s cargo: a hundred thousand gallons of volatile naphtha.

Now you could see Calais.

The Malacca Princess burned to the waterline in a half-hour— actually it melted— burned like a dazzling white Roman candle, burned so bright it lit up every troop transport and tugboat and barge in the harbor.

25 October 1940.

Only one couple at the auberge by the sea at Cayeux. They used to come up here from Paris in the autumn, the secret couples, park their cars so the license plates couldn’t be seen from the road, register as Monsieur and Madame Duval.

But, with the war, only one couple this year. They didn’t seem to mind the barbed wire, and they didn’t try to walk on the cliffs—where the German sentries would have chased them away. This couple apparently didn’t care. They stayed in the room—though that quite often happened at the auberge at Cayeux—and what with all that staying in the room, they brought sharp appetites to the dinner table in the evening, and enough ration coupons so that no awkward explanations had to be made.

They made love, they ate dinner at the table in the bow window, they watched the sea, they paid cash. It made the owner feel sentimental. How nice life used to be, he thought.