Piece of Cake

"I read this book as soon as it came out. It was the first of a number of revisionist takes on the RAF’s performance in the early years of the war. It’s set in the period between 1939 and 1940, and the Phoney War (French: drôle de guerre). We were sorely unprepared for it. Above all, the RAF was sorely unprepared for it. The novel casts a fairly jaundiced eye upon what happened to the men in Hornet Squadron. They’ve been shipped out to northern France. In the book’s opening pages, Squadron Leader Ramsey lands his Hurricane after a trial flight in broad daylight and ends up nose down in the slit-trench. He tries to get out of the cockpit, falls, breaks his neck, and dies. He’s replaced by a New Zealander called Squadron Leader ‘Fanny’ Barton. Within a couple of weeks, he shoots down what he takes to be a two-engine enemy aircraft and realises rather late in the day that it’s a Blenheim, one of our own. Yet another commander arrives in the form of Squadron Leader Rex, who’s upper-class. Now the squadron is living in luxury: great food, lovely views, clean sheets, and four-poster beds in a French chateau near the airfield. The rest of the book takes us into the business of trying to stay alive. When you lack experience, the right kind of aircraft, and you are at the mercy of the world’s best air force, the Luftwaffe, terrible things happen. Often there’s a degree of black humour in it. One of the things that sent me to the book was reading an early review in the Times. The reviewer was outraged because this was a book that said, ‘Hang on. This isn’t a story of the few and the brave, of heroism and so forth. It pertains to real life.’ Again, the key word is authenticity. Derek Robinson hadn’t been in the war, but he did a lot of research. He’s also a bloody good writer. I love this book. I think it’s great. If you’re dealing with real people, and Mountbatten is a very good example, then you owe it to them to try and climb inside their heads and their hearts, and figure out every detail. Often I start with body language. You can get a lot of this from the wartime black and white film archive, particularly the German archive, because they’ve got lots of it and it’s of good quality. You can get a fix on people like Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and so on. Mountbatten was the first time I dealt with anyone with his connections. I read a couple of books about him. When I worked in television, I shared an office with a relative of his, so I knew the world he came from. I wouldn’t dream of putting the first paragraph down until I’ve read at least forty books and highlighted the bits that matter and stripped out those half-line references that I can sprinkle over the narrative to give it authenticity—the smell and taste of that period. All that takes a long time. I got to grips with how and why the 1942 raid took shape. It served all kinds of purposes, not least of which was fending off the Russians forever saying, ‘You’ve got to get into Europe. You’ve got to open the second front.’ There was a big Second Front Now movement, with vast rallies across the country from 1942 onwards, but we didn’t have the manpower or the boats. We couldn’t mount D-Day overnight. We had to keep the Russians quiet, and it was Mountbatten’s job to do that. I also came across Noël Coward, and In Which We Serve , and there are passages about that in the book. Over the eight books that comprise the Spoils of War collection, I love pushing the narrative on, through passages of dialogue, meetings, and encounters (often under pressure) between real people and my fictional characters. As I keep saying, you’ve got to get the real people right. In this book, I’m dealing with the Germans, the French (obliquely) and, above all, the Brits in London. I realised at the end that this raid should never have happened. The Germans knew about it. It had been discovered in its former incarnation (not as Operation Jubilee but as Operation Rutter) by the Luftwaffe. They’d spotted the invasion fleet off the Isle of Wight, bombed the key ferries, and gone home. There was only one tidal chance left the following month. They thought that even the Brits wouldn’t be silly enough to have a second go. What they’d underestimated was the command chain. Churchill had left the country and was en route to Moscow for his first meeting with Stalin. Montgomery, who had been associated with the Dieppe raid, had gone to the Middle East to replace Auchinleck. There was no one in charge and it was Mountbatten who took the decision to remount the expedition, in the belief that split-second timing would land those 6,000 Canadians on the beach at the right time to storm the defences, kill lots of Germans, create havoc inland, and then stage a dignified and successful retreat. None of that happened, for the reasons you’ll discover if you read the book. What was equally shocking was the cover-up afterwards. The strapline that goes with the publicity for the novel is: ‘A catastrophe no headline dared admit.’ And that’s true. History was rewritten. The government—above all, Churchill—took steps to recast what had been a disaster. Other people’s blood, Canadian blood, was spilt on a recce-in-force, a rehearsal, for a coming moment when, on a much larger scale, we would set foot on a different set of invasion beaches—which turned out to be in Normandy—and set in motion the set of events that would end the war."