Free Moon Squadron by Jerrard Tickell Page B

new officer turned up at Tempsford. He wandered into the mess, looking puzzled and finally came over and sat beside me. 'Pretty dead-end beat, this,' he said, 'what goes on?'”
    I felt fairly smug. Sleepy because I'd been flying all night but smug because I'd been let in on Tempsford. I answered his question with all the candour of a deliberate lie.
    “’I haven't a clue,' I said. Been here myself for three weeks and I simply haven't a clue. Seen this month's "Men Only?"
     
    There was no traceable breach of security from Tempsford. But two apparently unrelated incidents might possibly be related to show that the Germans had developed an ardent curiosity about what might or might not go on in these somnolent acres in Bedfordshire. The existence of the Moon Squadron was well known in Berlin. Neutral Dublin was a sounding board for the Axis and it is possible that the hint came from there. No one will ever know. But its activity had become a thorn under the finger-nail of Hitler himself and it was his dominant wish to find and destroy what he called, with an original turn of phrase, “this nest of vipers." The competing talents of the many competing Nazi Intelligence Services were bent to the task. To isolate this secret airfield would be a sure passport to the Fuhrer's indulgence, to fail to do so would produce yet another of those hysterical and irresponsible outbursts, the sadistic result of which nobody knew. His Chiefs of Staff went fearfully to his conferences, aware of the flaying to come. Only pin-point the place and the legions of the Luftwaffe would be massed to blot it out-at no matter what cost. Were his officers dolts? Were they worthy of him? Towards the end of 1942, the first of these two incidents occurred which indicated that the Germans, in their sharp-edged game of ‘Hunt the thimble’ might be ‘getting warm’. After the second, they searched unsuccessfully elsewhere.
    One night a solitary aircraft came in over England from the North Sea. It droned steadily over the eastern counties, making, it seemed, deliberately for Tempsford. Not one of the Moon Squadron's aircraft was flying that night and, as the warning was telephoned from observation post to observation post, a score of guns was trained on the marauder. Over the seemingly deserted farmland, it slowly and leisurely circled. Then, neatly and with precision, it dropped a line of flares along the main runway. The night was misty and the gunners could not be absolutely certain of a kill - so, like Brer Rabbit, they lay low and said nuffin. Had the guns spoken and missed, the secret of Tempsford would have been revealed. For minutes on end the German circled while fingers itched on triggers below. There could be no question but that this was an airfield. But the flares that had illuminated grassland and fields of roots and the dim shapes of farm-buildings were dying. Their long shadows slanted on empty countryside. The German clearly decided that what had once been an airfield was now derelict. He wheeled over the Gannocks and flew away to the east. For reasons only known to himself, he bombed an orchard several miles away. The sound of the distant, harmless thumping was as music in the ears of Tempsford's defenders. Restraint had kept their secret.

 
    Chapter Eight
    YVONNE
     
    LOOKING back from the cushioned comfort of air travel in the nineteen fifties, it is difficult to recapture a sense of the urgency, danger and discomfort that attended every voyage made through the sky in those distant, strenuous days. We have almost forgo tten the grim splendour of take-off and the dread probabilities of landing. We accept, with¬ out any twinge of reminiscence, the present-day delights offered us. A host of air-lines competes to outdo each other in the matter of foam-soft seats, in the subtlety of cooking, in the beauty, wit and charm of air-hostesses. Aircraft have been described as "flying restaurants" where Lucullan meals are served by slender