George Washington's Ghost

It went without saying that the top brass back East were complacently under the impression that CAF Big Springs was still a potentially fully-functioning aerodrome in well-preserved state of ‘moth-balling’, rather than just a patch of West Texan desert.

Nobody ought to have been surprised.

Alex had always told him the ‘big men’ in charge during the last war had been ‘clowns’.

In any event, it had fallen to Bill and the rest of the Squadron’s advance guard to create a functioning military airfield from scratch. Everything had had to be flown, or more prosaically, trucked in from hundreds of miles away. The ‘heightened tensions’ on the Border and elsewhere had all seemed a long, long way away when Bill had finally jumped down from the back of the five-ton Bedford CAF lorry, he had hitched a lift on for the final leg of the trip to his new duty station from San Antonio.

There had been no airfield waiting for them.

Bill probably had not been alone in wondering if he and his new mates had not been dropped off at the wrong place. Understandably, there had been a few grouches, from rookies and old-timers alike; but on the reverse side of the coin there was real satisfaction in turning a patch of desert into a working CAF aerodrome ahead of the arrival of the first Goshawks.

The Goshawks had been a long time coming, arriving in ones and twos from mid-March onwards. The spares, high octane fuel and lubrication oils, and the ammunition to get them into the air and to enable them to fight had not begun to arrive in serious quantities until the beginning of April. That was when everybody knew, for certain, that the people back East thought that there really was going to be a war. Before then the CO, a veteran of the last ‘unpleasantness’ who had been running his family’s plantations near Atlanta prior to his untimely recall, had talked about ‘deterrence’ and ‘showing the Spanish that we’re serious’; suddenly, he was talking about making sure all his pilots got as much time in the air as possible before the ‘curtain went up!’

Ahead of the delivery of the first aircraft nobody on the Squadron had been warned that 4th Maryland was to be equipped with ‘modified’ Mark III Goshawks, officially designated Mark III-Gs. Effectively, the standard scout design had been ‘stripped down’ and fitted with under-wing hard points to enable the carrying of ‘external munitions’; bombs or rockets. The most striking ‘mod’ was that the armour-plating behind the pilot’s seat had been removed, the pilot’s oxygen bottles reduced in size and capacity and re-positioned beneath his legs, and the rear cockpit bulkhead, essentially, the top element of the main wing spar had been moved rearwards by about fifteen inches to ensure that the aircraft’s centre of gravity remained consistent with the reduced weight, and altered structural loading of the airframe.

The priority for the CAF was to be, henceforth, the support of the troops on the ground. The hard points under the gull wings of the Goshawk looked ugly and the pilots swore they cost them ten to fifteen miles an hour of straight-line airspeed at most heights; not that they were going to spend a lot of time above thirteen or fourteen thousand feet with only twenty minutes – rather than the original sixty-five minutes – oxygen supplies!

There was, however, a single upside to the clumsily implemented modifications to the Squadron’s Goshawks. Bill Fielding had not been the first man to recognise that there was scope – assuming one could inveigle or persuade an amenable pilot to co-operate – for a man to ‘joy-ride’ in the space behind the pilot’s seat; especially, in that honeymoon period before the old man got wise to the practice and banned it.

Personally, Bill had just got in under the wire the day before the new Squadron Standing Orders were posted. However, pilots tended to be a cussed, awkward lot and now and then one or other of the ‘scout jockeys’ cheerfully cocked a snook at the CO to take one of his ground crew men up for ‘a spin’.

Bill’s own pilot, Flying Officer Gregory Torrance, a Canuck with a more than usually casual attitude to authority even for a scout pilot – he would have got on well with Alex! – had surreptitiously taken a tart he had met in Big Springs up to ‘loop the loop’. It seemed she had objected to being ‘stuffed behind the seat’ and ridden on his lap. That had not worked out so well, the poor woman had puked up her breakfast all over the inside of the cockpit. Typically, ‘Greg’, like most men from north of the New England border he was a real gentleman, privately apologising ‘for the mess’ to Bill and ensuring that a couple of crates of beer had turned up to thank the rest of the crew for cleaning up ‘the mess’, and neglecting – at Bill’s behest – to record the incident, or the extra work it had occasioned, in the aircraft’s maintenance log.

The war had come to Big Springs without warning.