The Dog Who Could Fly (34 page)

There were around twenty aircraft in 311 Squadron at any one time, and with six aircrew per warplane it meant an entire squadron had been wiped out in one year of operations. Averaged out, they had lost one airman every two days.

Operations at RAF Tain were to prove markedly different from those at East Wretham. It was the same squadron all right, but it was tasked with very different duties. The sorties flown in the Wellingtons from East Wretham had been against very specific targets—the mission being to fly to a destination, identify and bomb the target, and fly home. With Bomber Command the average duration of a flight was six hours: here at Tain with Coastal Command it was to be more like twelve.

The Liberators were designed as long-range bombers, and they were the most common heavy bombers built by the Americans during the war. But the RAF had found the Liberators unsuitable for combat over Europe, for their fuel tanks were nonself-sealing—crucial when flying missions into a storm of shrapnel. The Liberators were also deemed to have too few defensive guns to ward off enemy fighters in the battle-torn skies over Europe. But their ability to remain airborne for extended periods of time gave them great range, and that coupled with a heavy bombing capability made them ideal sea-patrol aircraft.

To Robert, the streamlined, four-engine aircraft with its twin vertical tail planes looked like a fantastic warplane to fly, after the redoubtable but outdated Wellingtons. More to the point, this was an aircraft well armed for its purpose. Their chief role being antisubmarine warfare, the Liberators had undergone extensive modifications so as to be able to hunt and kill their prey. This included fitting each with an Air-to-Surface Vessel radar (ASV), four forward-firing
20mm Hispano cannons slung under the bomb bay, plus eight sixty-pound rockets fitted on stub wings attached to the fuselage. The Liberators also carried good old dependable depth charges in their bomb bays.

The theory of U-boat hunting was fairly simple. The diesel-electric U-boat had to “snort” for long periods, cruising on or near the surface to suck in fresh air and to vent fumes from the interior of the submarine. Via the naked eye or the ASV radar, a U-boat would be detected by a patrolling Liberator. Of course, as soon as the U-boat had spotted the British aircraft she would attempt an emergency dive, so it was a race against time to try to sink her.

At range, the Liberator’s rockets could engage the vessel. Closer in, the Hispano cannons could be used to rake her hull with armor-piercing rounds. If the U-boat survived both rocket and cannon attacks and managed to dive, the Liberator would thunder in over the spot where she had disappeared and drop depth charges, in an effort to finally sink her.

Mostly the missions flown from Tain involved spending long hours scouring a gray, sleet- and rain-swept sea for elusive enemy vessels. Patrols pushed far up into the arctic regions and could last for over thirteen hours. More often than not the weather at Tain itself—exposed as it was to bitter east winds blowing off the North Sea—was abysmal, making landing and takeoff a more than hazardous affair . . . as events were about to prove.

Shortly after Robert and Antis’s arrival at Tain, Liberator Y-949 took off from the airfield at around ten o’clock for a night patrol. The aircraft flew north, but crashed some thirty minutes later at Rora Head, in Orkney, killing all of its crew. The weather was dreadful, and for long stretches at a time no flying was possible. At other times patrols would go out, only to be recalled due to deteriorating conditions.

But the work of 311 Squadron—frustrating and plagued by dangers
though it was—was a vital part of the war effort. The U-boat threat to Great Britain was still one that might turn the fortunes of the war. After D-Day and the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachheads, the U-boats had lost their French coastal bases, from where they had plagued shipping in the Atlantic. Many had switched to Norway, using the deep fjords from which to prowl the sea. It was to counter this threat that the Liberator patrols were setting out from RAF Tain.

Robert understood well the dangers of what he was about to undertake: it didn’t lessen his hunger to get into the air and into action. But for Antis there was to be no flying—at least for now. The former CO of 311 Squadron, Wing Commander Ocelka—the one man in the RAF who had done so much to safeguard the flying dog of war—had been lost in action, as had so many others. Under 311’s new CO and under Coastal Command, rules were rigorously enforced. There would be no turning a blind eye to a dog joining a Liberator crew on an antisubmarine patrol.

In any case, Robert was no longer a gunner isolated in the rear turret of a Wellington—a position in which a dog crew member couldn’t exactly get in anyone’s way. As the radio and radar operator, Robert formed an integral part of the cockpit team, and there was simply no room for the big German shepherd, even if the rules could have been bent enough to allow him to fly. As Robert took to the skies again, Antis would have to sit out the sorties on the ground.

The first mission undertaken by Robert in his Liberator GR1—the designation given to the antisubmarine version of the aircraft—would involve taking off and landing in the dark, for the hours of winter daylight were short this far north. As Robert loaded up in his cold weather kit and flying gear, it was clear that Antis expected to be accompanying him at least to the flight line, if not into the air. But it was a bitterly cold winter in the far north of Scotland, and the last
thing Robert wanted was for his dog to spend a twelve-hour vigil in the freezing chill.

“Stay here, old boy,” Robert tried to convince him, gesturing to the warm and snug room they shared. “It’s too cold for you out on the airfield. Stay here.”

Antis was clearly not amused. Whimpering softly, he gazed up at Robert with a clear message in his eyes.
If you’re going, so am I—at least as far as they’ll let me. We’re partners, remember—on the ground and in the air.

Shrugging in resignation, Robert grabbed Antis’s blanket and they headed for the runway. He knew that if he locked Antis in the room, his howls would wake the entire barracks, and there were pilots to left and right sleeping off night patrols. Just as soon as Antis heard the Liberator take off he’d put two and two together and start crying for his master. There were no two ways about it: his dog would have to wait for his master on the flight line.

Robert comforted himself with the thought that he could trust Adamek absolutely to care for his dog, as he had at East Wretham. Here at Tain it was so bitterly cold that the ground crew was served hot meals out in the crew tents. Adamek could be trusted to ensure that Antis got his serving too. And as long as he waited out his vigil in the shelter of the crew tent, wrapped in his blanket, he should be okay.

That first sortie in the Liberator—as with many that followed—involved long periods spent scrutinizing a gray and empty sea. By the end of twelve hours staring out of the cockpit window—or in Robert’s case, into the radar screen—the crew of the Liberator felt as if they were going stir-crazy. But there were matters that kept the mind occupied even on such a flight: as none of the engines consumed fuel at exactly the same rate, it had to be pumped from one tank to another to equalize the aircraft’s weight, or she would become unbalanced. And if it was drama that Robert craved, he would get quite enough of that upon touching down at RAF Tain.

Antis was if nothing else a dog of unbreakable habit. Once Robert had taken to the skies in the sleek bomber painted the dark grays and greens of sea camouflage, his dog had assumed a position almost identical to the one he had adopted at East Wretham. In spite of Adamek’s coaxing he refused to take shelter. Instead, he sat out in the dispersal area—the last point at which he had seen Robert climb into his aircraft and go. And that was where he had stayed for the twelve hours that his master was away.

To make matters worse, he had reverted to his old habit of refusing to eat when his master was airborne. Antis had had a hot meal with the aircrew, the one that they always ate directly after the final mission briefing, but during the twelve hours that followed he refused Adamek’s every offer of food. It was as if he knew full well the danger his master was flying into, and his belly was so knotted with tension and worry that he couldn’t stomach any food.

Such behavior might have been endurable in the sunnier climes of East Wretham, when his master was flying six-hour sorties over Europe. Here at Tain the ice-laden wind howled off the open expanse of the sea, blowing all the way from the frozen wastes of the Arctic. Yet Antis had had to last double the time—and many times the exposure—before his master returned.

By the time Robert touched down his dog was frozen stiff with the cold. So debilitating had Antis’s long and lonely vigil proven that he found it all but impossible to do his traditional welcome home—his war dance for joy. It was immediately clear to Robert—as it was to Adamek—that Antis wouldn’t last the long and punishing winter months ahead if he continued to keep his lonely vigils.

He was no longer the one-year-old that had waited for his master at East Wretham. He was pushing four years old, and he’d survived more injuries in his few short years than most dogs would in a lifetime: he’d been wounded twice in action over Germany, shot by an irate Welsh farmer and peppered with lead, and he’d been impaled on
metal railings at RAF Evanton, which had almost proved the death of him. There was only one thing to do: Robert would have to ban him from the flight line.

On his very next mission—a night patrol—Robert closed his mind and his ears to Antis’s pleading and left him in the care of some fellow airmen. But all that long night Antis refused to be comforted. He howled and whined the entire time, and only regained his composure when Robert returned. The airmen who’d agreed to keep him had gotten barely a wink of sleep, and there was no way that this offered any kind of a solution.

The following day Robert took Antis to RAF Tain’s tailors. He had a new idea how this problem might be solved. Once Robert had explained his predicament, the men seemed more than keen to help. They measured Antis up, and from some sheepskin they began to fashion for the dog a fleecy coat—one designed to keep out the very worst of the weather that northern Scotland could throw at man or dog.

The coat made a real hit with Antis. If nothing else, he loved the shared ritual. As Robert grabbed his flight gear in preparation for a patrol, so Antis was able to grab his sheepskin coat for his equally vital duty. He’d carry it over to Robert, as if to say,
Get this on me!
Once he was strapped into it, Antis would step toward the door as if to signal his readiness, and to emphasize that there was no excuse anymore for refusing him his role in the coming mission.

One biting January night, Robert’s Liberator took off during the hours of darkness for a patrol that was scheduled to see them return to base just after dawn. The weather was fine and clear, if unbelievably cold. The moon was almost full and the conditions were excellent for spotting any U-boats that might be drifting through the seas, sucking in some much-needed fresh air.

But hours into the patrol, conditions worsened. A thick bank of freezing fog rolled in from the sea, blanking out the moon and stars.
Antis remained seated in the dispersal area, patiently awaiting the Liberator’s return. By now he knew the engine note of his particular warplane, and only when he detected that she was inbound did he start to relax a little, in anticipation of the reunion.

Though he was wrapped in his sheepskin coat, the freezing fog chilled him to the bone. Worse, his master’s aircraft was just about to be diverted, even as a bitter storm blew in off the North Sea to engulf RAF Tain.

And Antis, the ever-faithful, immovable dog of war, was planted right in its path.

Twenty-four

S
leet began to spiral out of the fogbound darkness, growing thicker by the second. Adamek did all he could to persuade the dog to come in to the shelter of their tent, but Antis refused. At one point he tried tugging on the dog’s thick collar, but Antis seemed to have turned himself into a statue. A low throaty growl warned the Czech ground crewman to stop his tugging and leave the dog to do his self-appointed duty.

A radio message came through from the Liberator that they were diverting to the Shetland Islands, the nearest airbase where there was good enough visibility to chance a landing. Everyone on the base who needed to know this was aware of it, apart from Antis, who refused absolutely to leave his station.

The driving sleet soaked into his heavy coat until it was wet through. As the cold worsened, the sleet turned to thick flurries of snow, and Antis’s sodden coat became frozen to his body. Yet still he remained like a tree rooted to the earth, as the wind howled and the snow gusted all around him, isolated and alone on the edge of the frozen runway. Antis’s whiskers stood out like icicles from his snow-flecked muzzle, but still he wouldn’t abandon the wait—faithful, loyal, resolute—for his master’s return.

Finally, with the dog sitting like a frozen statue in the midst of the snowstorm, Adamek decided that he had to force Antis to take shelter before he died of exposure. He recruited the help of two fellow airmen, both close friends of Robert’s. Together they approached the dog with a blanket in which to wrap him and a jeep with which to speed him back to the warmth and shelter of his and Robert’s room. They were only just in time. Frozen to the core and numbed to exhaustion, Antis was unable to put up any resistance.

Sensing perhaps how close he had come to death, Antis allowed them to load his frozen form onto the blanket, and using it like a stretcher they carried him to the waiting vehicle. In the warmth of the hut they stripped off the dog’s coat and rubbed him all over with dry towels in an effort to thaw him out. Finally, he seemed to revive. But his terrible vigil had clearly taken everything out of him. He stretched out in front of the roaring stove in the room and fell fast asleep.

•  •  •

The following day the weather cleared enough for Robert’s Liberator to fly in from Shetland and land. Robert’s immediate thoughts were for his dog. He went and found Adamek and asked him what had happened.