Len Deighton - Goodbye Mickey Mouse

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1982

Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1982

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009

The author and publisher would like to thank The Big 3 Music Ltd and United Artists Music Co. Inc. for kind permission to quote from ‘For All We Know’ by Sam M. Lewis and J. Fred Coots (© 1934 Leo Feist Inc.), and Famous Chappell and Chappell Music Canada Ltd for kind permission to quote from ‘That Old Black Magic’, from the film Star Spangled Rhythm , music by Harold Arlen and words by Johnny Mercer (© 1942 Famous Music Corp.)

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EBook Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007347735

Version: 2017-08-10

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Mickey Mouse, US Military Slang. Anything that is unnecessary or unimportant. (Named for the Walt Disney animated cartoon character, in allusion to its childish appeal, its simplicity, triviality, etc.)

The Barnhart Dictionary of New English

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction

Prologue

1 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen

2 Captain James A. Farebrother

3 Staff Sergeant Harold E. Boyer

4 Lieutenant Z. M. Morse

5 Captain Charles B. Stigg

6 Captain James A. Farebrother

7 Victoria Cooper

8 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen

9 Captain James A. Farebrother

10 Colonel Daniel A. Badger

11 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen

12 Captain James A. Farebrother

13 Dr Bernard Cooper

14 Captain Vincent H. Madigan

15 Captain James A. Farebrother

16 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll

17 Victoria Cooper

18 Lieutenant Stefan ‘Fix’ Madjicka

19 Henry Scrimshaw

20 Vera Hardcastle

21 Major Spurrier Tucker Jr

22 Captain Vincent H. Madigan

23 Dr Bernard Cooper

24 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll

25 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen

26 Captain James A. Farebrother

27 Colonel Daniel A. Badger

28 Major Spurrier Tucker Jr

29 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll

30 Captain Vincent H. Madigan

31 Victoria Cooper

32 Captain Milton B. Goldman

33 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

‘Never before; never since and never again,’ said a US Eighth Army Air Force veteran when I was researching this book.

He was describing one particular moment in the final months of the war. RAF Bomber Command was operating in the daytime, and flying in loose formations of squadrons instead of in the ‘stream’ it had used previously in night bombing. The RAF heavy bombers were returning across the English Channel at the same time as seemingly endless squadrons of American air force bombers were setting out in tight formations. ‘The sun glinted on them,’ said the American flyer. ‘There must have been a thousand of those RAF heavies. I was in the turret; we were leading the low squadron. All around me and behind and ahead there were over a thousand of our ships. Everywhere I looked, the sky was filled with planes.’

Perhaps he was exaggerating but other flyers remarked upon such awesome sights. The missions of ‘Big Week’ frequently comprised 800 aircraft and this short period of intense air activity was one of the most decisive battles of the war. Certainly there were times when two thousand British and American four-engined bombers shared the sky, and the men who saw these vast, futuristic fleets of aircraft never forgot. Neither did the people—British and German—who with pride and apprehension watched them from the ground.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse was rooted in a failure. I had abandoned a half-completed story about the air fighting in Vietnam when the fighting there ended. To prepare for that Vietnam book I had spent several weeks on a US Air Force base. They gave me a chair in the ready room, a physical exam with jabs, a flight suit with all the paraphernalia and a bed; and let me join the day-to-day life of the aircrew on the base. I ate with the flyers, drank with them, went to their barbecues and flew backseat in the F-4 Phantom. We dropped bombs, flew in formation and did air-to-air refueling. My assigned pilot was Captain Johnny Jumper, a young Vietnam veteran who not only became a life-long friend but also became a General and eventually the US Air Force Chief of Staff.

Writers hate waste. My vivid experience with the US Air Force nagged me and eventually became a starting point for reconstructing the 1944 US Army Air Force base in England where Goodbye Mickey Mouse takes place. Malcolm Bates, a resolute amateur historian in Porlock, persuaded me to look again at the war fought by the US air forces in Europe. Malcolm had read my book, Bomber , and wanted me to write about the American side of the air war. He sent me long letters, carefully chosen books and useful pictures. His enthusiasm fired me. I had visited American bases in England in 1944 and the structure I envisaged for the book came into my mind easily. I had always been intrigued by the degree of self-sufficiency that military bases achieved. Metal-working shops and pharmacies, libraries and prison cells, dental surgeries and chapels, ice cream parlours, movie theatres and tailor shops. There was no need to go anywhere for anything. American bases were more all-inclusive than the RAF ones I had visited, for there was a prevailing order that the British economy should not be taxed with American demands for food and supplies.

When, in the postwar world, the air force veterans of the 91st Bombardment Group returned to their old base at Bassingbourn to revive memories and exchange yarns, I was infiltrated into the party by one of the organizers: Wing Commander ‘Beau’ Carr. I spent an inspiring week with these remarkable men. ‘That was my bed,’ one elderly ex-navigator told his wife as he slapped its blanket in a barrack room now occupied by young soldiers. He looked around the room, turning his head slowly: ‘And this was my home.’

To emphasize this ‘little town’ concept I decided to allot one character to each chapter so the story was told through the eyes of technical specialists, clerks and tradesmen as well as the flyers. I had tried this before in a very simple way. In Only When I Larf chapters were provided for the first person narrative of three different people. One of them was a woman. Such a construction requires unrelenting attention to dialogue and detail. Every sentence, in fact every word, must be scrutinized carefully to establish, distinguish and maintain the integrity of the separate characters. And for that book the accounts varied according to the memory and motives of each person.