Squadron Airborne by Elleston Trevor #extract #IWMWartimeClassics

 

I am delighted to feature an extract from another in the series of novels which have been re-issued by the Imperial War Museum. Squadron Airborne by Elleston Trevor is published to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. This August, I have been lucky enough to visit the Yorkshire Air Museum and to see some of the planes from that period. It was an impressive sight and being set  at the famous Elvington airfield, it captured the spirit of the time.

In the summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain rages in the skies over southern England. Nineteen-year-old Pilot Officer Peter Stuyckes arrives at RAF Westhill and is immediately put to the test.

Based on the author’s own service as an RAF Flight Engineer, Squadron Airborne takes place over one unforgettable week that summer, depicting with intensity and brilliance the work of the many ground-crew and other staff as they support the Few in their fight against the Luftwaffe.

Spitfire at Elvington c. BooksLifeandEverything

 

 “A hidden masterpiece, crackling with authenticity that gives an unforgettable taste of the life of a fighter squadron in the summer of 1940.” –Patrick Bishop

“Supposedly fiction, but these pages live and so, for a brief inspiring hour, do the young men who lived in them.” –Frederick Forsyth

At the outset of the book, young Pilot Officer Stuyckes arrives at Westhill. He is only nineteen-years- old and has not yet seen combat, but already feels ‘very old, very experienced’. Born in 1920, the author himself would only have been twenty during the events which the novel describes. As the story progresses, the reader is struck by the youth of many of the characters. Notable is the way in which Daisy Caplin (also only twenty herself) views Stuyckes on his arrival: 

Extract 

‘Mr Stuyckes came across the perimeter road, alone. She watched him, looking between the prop-blades, studying him, her heart sinking with every step he took because this one was still a boy, hardly out of school, younger even than she was, and she was only twenty.’

Squadron Leader Mason, one of the main characters and perhaps the moral compass of the book, is himself only thirty-one, again reflective of the real situation in 1940. Not all of the pilots were young, fresh-faced and university aged, but most were. They came from all over Britain and the Commonwealth, from diverse backgrounds and from countries of occupied Europe. These men in particular knew the stakes could not be higher: they had already seen their homelands – France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland – fall to the invaders, and Britain was the latest, and possibly last, place where they would make their stand against Fascism.

The RAF fighter pilot’s war was a relentless, grinding and frankly discombobulating experience – where evenings were spent in messes and pubs; on romantic liaisons and chats with friends, and days were spent battling for one’s life – and one’s country’s future – in the skies above. Squadron Airborne brilliantly captures this as the reader witnesses just how quickly things can change, from Cornelius’ romantic entanglement with Joan, to Daisy’s fears for Stuyckes’ life, to Mason’s own (rather speedy it must be said) love affair with Felicity (‘he was conscious of the need to hurry. To hurry with quite what, he was not sure. With this friendship, with the war, with his life’). The pressures of this relentless existence are summed up in the below passage of Mason’s inner thoughts:

His watch said a minute past midnight. It was today again, already the day after Bill had died, and the day after he had begun loving Felicity. Life had telescoped, the events of years becoming trapped within mere days. You could have your birthday cake at each tea-time and would be another year older by the night.

As the week depicted in the novel progresses, it is very easy to forget that all this action takes place over a few days.

Squadron Airborne also brilliantly conveys another central truth about the battle: success was thanks to a vast, collective effort. It took the strength and moral courage of a frightened and battered nation and its political leaders to ‘stay the course’. It took brilliant strategic and tactical vision by the RAF’s commanders. It took patience and methodical organisation – in the maintenance units and factories that kept the RAF supplied with its machines. As the post-war testimonies of so many pilots reveal, it took unstinting, backbreaking, round-the-clock, finger-bleeding labour by the ground crews to rearm, refuel, repair and return aircraft to the fight. It is illuminating that Elleston Trevor himself served in the RAF, and that he chose to write about the way in which these elements came together to ensure victory.

Underpinning all of this was loyalty and comradeship. If the RAF was a team, the squadron was the epitome of that teamwork. It is no coincidence that the word has so much resonance – and forms part of evocative title of the book. This novel is not simply about the pilots:

At the Flight, the crews watched. Someone was yelling at them to take cover; but they watched, one or two of them bending and rising at the knees, swinging their arms up, picking the whole squadron up from the field and throwing it into the air; and almost it seemed as if they were doing that, as the machines lifted towards the far boundary [...] for these few moments there was no difference between the men in the aircraft and those on the ground, for they had worked this little miracle together with one man’s bare hands and sweat as honest as another’s. The squadron was airborne.

***

It would nonetheless be remiss to introduce Squadron Airborne without a mention of the combat scenes, the real dramatic climaxes of which are fast-paced and engaging, depicting how quickly and easily the men are killed, and the peril which they face:

The great wing wheeled, tilting over against the blank white sun and sliding downwards towards the host of enemy as the Messerschmitts saw them coming and broke off at the fringe to curve upwards and blunt the edge of the first attack. The sun, catching the undersides of the Spitfires, turned them into a line of bright gold crosses [...]

Brewer felt sick as his machine dived with the pack. White braced his controls, his bright eyes fixed on the gun-sights, his spine slightly arched, his whole posture in readiness to spring. Mason framed the black pattern of the bombers with his windscreen, and moved the safety- catch. Stuyckes took the oxygen deeply in, touched for the first time with the final quality that he must have, if he would fight well; the capacity to be afraid. Spencer held his dive, still amused, with the amusement turning in one second to irony, in two seconds to contempt. Then zero came, drummed in by Mason’s guns.

As men are lost, the author does not flinch from describing their final moments: ‘Then the slipstream dragged him backwards and in the last few seconds he was bombarded with a stream of images, many of them nothing to do with his machine or his dying’.

Yet this is no tale of derring-do, and the book also features a number of more emotive vignettes in which the emotional and psychological toll of the conflict are explored. Notable is Daisy Caplin’s belief that the young pilot Stuyckes has died, and how deeply this affects her:

It was the sun, more than anything, that helped her to live through these few minutes without being ill, or crying, or making any fuss. It was not possible to look into the sunshine and visualise death. It was possible to think of Peter Stuyckes, and remember how he had looked, talked, smiled; possible to be reminded that he was dead; but death, with its coldness and loneliness; could not be thought about. She could see him only as he had been.

About the Author

Elleston Trevor (Trevor Dudley-Smith) was a prolific author who wrote under several pseudonyms, publishing over 100 books in his lifetime. He is perhaps best known for his Quiller series of spy novels and his 1964 novel The Flight of the Phoenix, which has been adapted into two Hollywood films.

 

 

About the Imperial War Museums Wartime Classics series

 
In September 2019, to coincide with the 80th Anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, the IWM published the first four titles in a fiction series - the Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics. Patrol is the next in the series.

Alan Jeffreys, (Senior Curator, Second World War, Imperial War Museums) has written an introduction to each book that sets them in context and gives the wider historical background.  He says, ‘researching the Wartime Classics has been one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on in my years at IWM.   It’s been

very exciting rediscovering these fantastic novels and helping to bring them to the wider readership they so deserve’. 

IWM  IWM (Imperial War Museums) tells the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War.

Our unique collections, made up of the everyday and the exceptional, reveal stories of people, places, ideas and events. Using these, we tell vivid personal stories and create powerful physical experiences across our five museums that reflect the realities of war as both a destructive and creative force. We challenge people to look at conflict from different perspectives, enriching their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war and its impact on people’s lives.

IWM’s five branches which attract over 2.5 million visitors each year are IWM London, IWM’s flagship branch that recently transformed with new, permanent and free First World War Galleries alongside new displays across the iconic Atrium to mark the Centenary of the First World War; IWM North, housed in an iconic award-winning building designed by Daniel Libeskind; IWM Duxford, a world renowned aviation museum and Britain's best preserved wartime airfield; Churchill War Rooms, housed in Churchill’s secret headquarters below Whitehall; and the Second World War cruiser HMS Belfast. 

You can read an extract of From the City, From the Plough here , read an extract from Trial by Battle here , read a review on Plenty Under the Counter here and a guest post on Eight Hours from England here and a review from Patrol here.

Book link: 

  Squadron Airborne by Elleston Trevor is published by IWM and can be ordered here: www.iwmshop.org.uk at the online IWM shop.’ 

 

Thanks to  the Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the extract and a place on the tour.

Check out the rest of the tour