Frederick Forsyth: Avenger

The two men found them under a wet and smelly tarpaulin. There were six of them, small, cringing, terrified, aged about ten down to four. Four little boys and two girls, the oldest apparently the surrogate mother and leader of the group. Seeing the two men staring at them, they were frozen with fear. Fadil began to talk softly. After a while the girl replied.

"They come from Gorica, a small hamlet about four miles from here along the mountain. I used to know it."

"What happened?"

Fadil talked some more in the local lingo. The girl answered, then burst into tears.

"Men came, Serbs, paramilitaries."

"When?"

"Last night."

"What happened?"

Fadil sighed. "It was a very small hamlet. Four families, twenty adults, maybe twelve children. Gone now, all dead. When the firing started, their parents shouted that they should run away. They escaped in the darkness."

"Orphans? All of them?"

"All of them."

"We must get them into the truck, down to the valley," said the American.

They led the children, each clinging to the hand of the next eldest up the chain, out of the barn into the bright spring sunshine.

At the edge of the trees they saw the men. There were ten of them and two Russian GAZ off-roads in army camouflage. The men were also in cammo-and heavily armed.

Three weeks later, scouring the mailbox but facing yet another day with no card, Mrs. Annie Colenso rang a number in Windsor, Ontario. It answered on the second ring. She recognised the voice of her father's private secretary.

"Hi, Jean. It's Annie. Is my dad there?"

"He surely is, Mrs. Colenso. I'll put you right through."

There were ten young pilots in ÔAÕ Flight crew hut and another eight next door in ÔBÕ Flight. Outside on the bright green grass of the airfield, two or three Hurricanes crouched with that distinctive hunchbacked look caused by the bulge behind the cockpit. They were not new, and fabric patches revealed where they had taken combat scars high above France over the previous two weeks.

Inside the huts the mood could not have been in greater contrast to the warm summer sunshine of June 25, 1940, at Coltishall Field, Norfolk, England. The mood of the men of 242 Squadron, Royal Air Force, known simply as the Canadian squadron, was about as low as it had ever been, and with good cause.

Two Four Two had been in combat almost since the first shot was fired on the western front. They had fought the losing battle for France from the eastern border back to the Channel coast. As Hitler's great blitzkrieg machine rolled on, flicking the French army to one side, the pilots trying to stem the flood would find their bases evacuated and moved farther back even while they were airborne. They had to scavenge for food, lodgings, spare parts, and fuel. Anyone who has ever been part of a retreating army will know that the overriding adjective is that of chaos.

Back across the Channel in England, they had fought the second battle, above the sands of Dunkirk, as beneath them the British army sought to save what it could from the rout, grabbing anything that would float to paddle back to England, whose white cliffs were enticingly visible across the flat, calm sea.

By the time the last Tommy was evacuated from that awful beach and the last defenders of the perimeter passed into German captivity for five years, the Canadians were exhausted. They had taken a terrible beating: nine killed, three wounded, three shot down and taken prisoner.

Three weeks later they were still grounded at Coltishall, without spares or tools, all abandoned in France. Their CO, Squadron Leader "Papa" Gobiel, was ill, had been for weeks, and would not return to command. Still, the Brits had promised them a new commander, who was expected any time.

A small open-topped sports car emerged from between the hangars and parked near the two timber crew huts. A man climbed out, with some difficulty. No one went out to greet him. He stumped awkwardly toward ÔAÕ Flight. A few minutes later he was out of there and heading for ÔBÕ hut. The Canadian pilots watched him through the windows, puzzled by the rolling walk with feet apart. The door opened and he appeared in the aperture. His shoulders revealed his rank of squadron leader. No one stood up.

"Who's in charge here?" he demanded angrily.

A chunky Canuck hauled himself upright a few feet from where Steve Edmond sprawled in a chair and surveyed the newcomer through a blue haze. "I guess I am," said Stan Turner.

It was early days. Stan Turner already had two confirmed kills to his credit but would go on to score a total of fourteen and a hatful of medals.

The British officer with the angry blue eyes turned on his heel and lurched away toward a parked Hurricane. The Canadians drifted out of their huts to observe.

"I do not believe what I am watching," muttered Johnny Latta to Steve Edmond. "The bastards have sent us a CO with no bloody legs."

It was true. The newcomer was stumping around on two prosthetics. He hauled himself into the cockpit of the Hurricane, punched the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into life, turned into the wind, and took off. For half an hour he threw the fighter into every known acrobatic manoeuvre in the textbook and a few that were not yet there.

He was good in part because he had been an acrobatic ace before losing both legs in a crash long before the war and partly just because he had no legs. When a fighter pilot makes a tight turn or pulls out of a power dive, both ploys being vital in air combat, he puts heavy G forces on his own body. The effect is to drive blood from the upper body downward, until blackout occurs. Because this pilot had no legs, the blood had to stay in the upper body, nearer the brain, and his squadron would learn that he could pull tighter turns than they could. Eventually he landed the Hurricane, climbed out, and stumped toward the silent Canucks.

"My name is Douglas Bader," he told them, "and we are going to become the best bloody squadron in the whole bloody air force."

He was as good as his word. With the Battle of France lost and the battle of the Dunkirk beaches a damn close-run thing, the big one was coming; Hitler had been promised by his Luftwaffe chief Goering mastery of the skies to enable the invasion of Britain to succeed. The Battle of Britain was the struggle for those skies. By the time it was over, the Canadians of 242, always led into combat by their legless CO, had established the best kill-to-loss ratio of all.

By late autumn, the German Luftwaffe had had enough and withdrew back into France. Hitler snapped his anger at Goering and turned his attention east to Russia.

In three battles, France, Dunkirk, and Britain, spread over only six months of the summer of '40, the Canadians had racked up eighty-eight confirmed kills, sixty-seven in the Battle of Britain alone. But they had lost seventeen pilots, and all but three were Canucks.

Fifty-five years later Steve Edmond rose from his office desk and crossed once again, as he had done so many times down the years, to the photo on the wall. It did not contain all the men he had flown with; some had been dead before others arrived. But it showed the seventeen Canadians at Duxford one hot and cloudless day in late August at the height of the battle.

Almost all gone. Most of them KIA during the war. The faces of boys from nineteen to twenty-two stared out, vital, cheerful, expectant, on the threshold of life, yet mostly never destined to see it.

He peered closer. Benzie, flying on his wingtip, shot down and killed over the Thames estuary, September 7th, two weeks after the photo. Solanders, the boy from Newfoundland, dead the next day.

Johnny Latta and Willie McKnight, standing side by side, would die wingtip to wingtip somewhere over the Bay of Biscay in January 1941.