The Lost Pilots Read online

  Their jovial mood soon came to an abrupt halt: as Jessie gripped a hand pump to refuel the gas tanks, she crushed her knuckles on the side of the plane. The pain was immediate; blood flowed over her torn skin, staining the side of the Red Rose. Alarmed Italian officers hustled to locate some iodine for her wounds. They had just finished dousing the cuts when, to Jessie’s horror, an oblivious General Balbo strode over to kiss her hand in farewell. As the general raised his head, Jessie saw with dismay that his mouth was smeared with blood and iodine. For a tense moment there was only silence, and then the pointy-bearded Balbo burst out laughing at the mess. Jessie relievedly joined in.

  Their next stop was the island of Malta, where Lancaster and Jessie spent the weekend among the ancient fortresses and megalithic temples. At night they were feted by the local RAF command, as they had been at almost every previous stop. Only eight days into their journey, Jessie was already finding her lone evening gown essential. Yet at every gathering she sensed a certain coolness among the air force officers’ wives, who she felt disapproved of her nontraditional pursuits. This only served to make her value even more the companionship of her fellow pilots, not to mention Lancaster himself. A shared glance, an appreciative smile, a reassuring hand on the back—the friendly gestures of affection that she and Lancaster increasingly shared in the midst of their social whirl grew more meaningful with each passing day.

  After Malta they departed for Tripoli, but rough winds and poor visibility turned their 225-mile trek across the Mediterranean into a slog. For diversion during the dreary haul, Lancaster and Jessie swooped down low over the decks of a large steamer ship and gave the passengers onboard what Jessie felt sure was “the shock of their lives.” The weather was so poor that Lancaster and Jessie didn’t spot the Libyan coast until they were almost on top of it, but they managed nonetheless to land within two miles of their intended destination. The Italian Air Force officers at Tripoli greeted them enthusiastically, bestowing on Jessie a gigantic bouquet of flowers that nearly dwarfed her tiny frame. Then they whisked them off to an afternoon dance, where, in between breaks for tea and cake, Lancaster and Jessie gamely waltzed, tangoed, and did the Charleston to the tune of a live orchestra. The celebration continued that night with an elaborate dinner at the British Consulate.

  Climbing into the Red Rose the next morning, Jessie felt obliged to squeeze the enormous flower bouquet into her cockpit so that the officers who presented it to her wouldn’t feel insulted. Only when Tripoli was behind her did she toss the bouquet overboard.

  After a short flight the Red Rose touched down at Homs in western Syria to take on gas and oil. The night before, the air force had warned Lancaster and Jessie that Italy was skirmishing with North Africa’s Arab population, which was resisting Italian efforts to build a road from Benghazi to Tripoli. “If you have to make a forced landing anywhere along the coast,” the Italians had cautioned them, “you are in for a bad time.” They had suggested that Lancaster and Jessie tie the Union Jack onto their plane as a safety measure. At Homs, however, the aviators found the locals who greeted them to be nothing but hospitable. Perhaps the Italian officers had been overstating the region’s threat. But later that afternoon they were flying toward Benghazi when Jessie, craning her neck, noticed four puffs of smoke in the air beneath the plane. The Italians hadn’t been exaggerating after all: Bedouin tribesmen on the ground were firing at the Red Rose.

  Before Jessie could fully process this information, she heard an alarmed shout from Lancaster. Raising her head, she was stunned to see a colossal wall of sand heading straight for them, kicked up by forty-five-mile-an-hour winds. Only moments before, the sky had been pure blue; now she barely had time to jam her goggles down over her eyes before the sandstorm surrounded the plane, stinging her and Lancaster’s faces unmercifully. Lancaster dropped the plane as low to the ground as possible, but in the massive storm visibility was practically nil. Reaching Benghazi, their intended destination, would be impossible. Their only option was to follow the coastline to Sirte, a town two hundred miles closer. “The sand was terrible, and was getting worse every minute,” Jessie later recounted. “It gritted in our teeth, got into our hair and ears, and dribbled down our necks. The carburetor was choked with this loosened desert, and the machine was in a filthy condition.”

  After what felt like an eternity the Red Rose finally limped into the Italian military airport at Sirte. Lancaster and Jessie had brought with them the Italian newspapers from Rome, which featured their story splashed across the front pages. Because neither aviator spoke Italian, the newspapers afforded them an introduction they could not have made themselves. The air force commander, a bachelor, appeared pleased to see them, but he seemed at a loss as to where to house Jessie. No other women were visible in the town. At last Jessie was given quarters in the barracks, while Lancaster shared the relative luxury of the commandant’s lodgings. Jessie’s room had hard stone floors and an iron bed frame, not to mention cockroaches scampering madly all over the ground. When she walked, the cockroaches, much to her revulsion, scurried over her feet. But she put on her best brave face, and the air force officers responded by preparing her and Lancaster a wonderful meal.

  The language barrier was difficult enough to overcome that communication at dinner consisted mostly of gestures, smiles, and generic flattery. Jessie was made to understand that she was the first white woman to ever visit the town, while the commanding officer, having quite warmed up to her, gifted her with an aerial photograph of the base. After dinner the satiated group sat on the dining hall’s verandah and smoked Italian cigarettes. The wind was still blowing at high speed, and the gulf heat felt unbearable. Jessie was far from eager to return to her cockroach-infested room, but she desperately needed rest, so she turned in early. The punishing wind turned the walk back to her barracks into a feat of endurance. She stretched uncomfortably under the mosquito netting over her bed as she struggled to fall asleep in her dismal quarters.

  The Italian officers woke Lancaster and Jessie at 5 a.m., plying them with strong, sweet black coffee for the morning’s flight to Benghazi, a straight shot across the bay from Sirte. Once in the air, the aviators flew for two hours before spotting the bazaars and colored roofs of the first town on the bay’s far side. Hungry after skipping breakfast, they landed in the hopes of searching out food, but ended up settling for more coffee instead. Camels roamed freely on the town’s dusty outskirts, provoking in Jessie a sudden urge to ride one. She was always searching out new experiences, and being carried on a camel would be a first for her. But when she and Lancaster asked a local if Jessie could borrow his camel, the language barrier proved insurmountable. The man merely shrugged his shoulders at the impertinent request and led his camel away. So Lancaster and Jessie hopped back in the Red Rose and pushed onward through a strong headwind until they reached Benghazi, marveling from the air at the sparkling sea and the city’s pure white buildings of Moorish design.

  Next they flew east for the Egyptian village of Sallum, a Bedouin community and former ancient Roman port, but a hard wind fought them the whole way, and once at Sallum they couldn’t locate the airport, which was unmarked. Lancaster spiraled up above the steep cliffs on which the village was perched, barely clearing them, but he found no place to land. Even in the midst of such hair-raising circumstances, as Lancaster circled frantically while vicious winds thrashed the plane, Jessie couldn’t help but feel awed by the blue beauty of the Mediterranean below. At last a desperate Lancaster, in an imprudent attempt to mark a landing zone, tossed several smoke bombs overboard. When the bombs exploded, sending out plumes of smoke, the previously deserted landscape came alive, with panicked soldiers and villagers running from all directions in the mistaken belief they were being attacked from the air.

  When the Red Rose finally touched down, Lancaster and Jessie were greeted by Egyptian soldiers from a nearby base aiming rifles at their faces, along with an infuriated commanding officer asking them in flawless English to state th
eir business. Lancaster, attempting to defuse the tension, quickly adopted a posh British accent as he explained their situation and inquired politely whether the soldiers might be willing to spare any food. Jessie knew by now that this performance was vintage Lancaster: reckless, friendly, and intrepid all at once. At times she didn’t know whether to be livid with him or to embrace him. She only knew that the two of them were inseparable, and not just because of their physical circumstances. Thoughts of their respective spouses, in far-off England and Australia, were receding with each shared escapade, with each exhilarating or terrifying moment spent speeding above the earth in their cramped but close-set cockpits.

  Lancaster and Jessie arrived in Cairo, their next major destination, on October 29. Landing at RAF Heliopolis, on the city’s outskirts, they were given a fulsome welcome by a group of Lancaster’s former RAF mates. Equally uplifting was their visit to the great pyramid at Giza; Jessie’s heart raced as she climbed the small, worn steps of the ancient tomb. As they spent the weekend in the city carousing with Lancaster’s old friends, the story of their journey also began to attract greater media interest. A two-week flight from England to Cairo was not remarkable in itself, but the route had never before been attempted with a passenger, nor had a light airplane been utilized in this particular manner. The aviation world, too, was waking up to the fact that Lancaster and Jessie were serious, and that their journey was far more than a gimmick. Boosted by this new attention and forty-eight hours of carefree socializing, they prepared for their next flight. The route would be their toughest yet, taking them over nearly landmark-free desert as they made their way to Baghdad. Because the Red Rose was too small to carry any emergency water or food, the RAF commander at Heliopolis insisted they be guided by a British biplane troop carrier.

  Just after dawn, Lancaster and Jessie again took to the air, the troop carrier in front of them. As they flew over densely cultivated lands, the delta of the Nile resembled a collection of tiny silver lakes to the north. “The sails of the strange craft on the river looked like little bits of paper blown by the breeze,” Jessie wrote, “and spread beneath us was a living picture of the maps we carried in the cockpit.” They soared over the Suez Canal—in Jessie’s words, a “tinsel ribbon shining in the sunlight”—and the Dead Sea, which, though it looked small from the air, took them a significant time to cross. They kept slamming into air pockets, low-pressure regions that forced the Red Rose abruptly downward. At one point the plane plunged a heart-stopping five hundred feet.

  Finally they landed, along with the troop carrier, at the small Wahhabi village of Ziza, east of the Dead Sea, to refuel. Because of strong headwinds, the RAF decided the group should spend the night in Ziza. Jessie found the setting dismal, but she gamely shared the rations of the men stationed at the bare-bones air depot. Rusted tin lids served as plates, and an old tin mug served as a community cup, but the dinner, a stew of tinned corned beef and onions, proved surprisingly tasty. The RAF squadron leader, a cheery sort, lightened the mood by playing songs on his ukulele, which he pulled from under a box of salted fish in the troop carrier’s fuselage. There was little water for washing up later, however—everyone had to rinse from the same small dishful. The meager beds Lancaster and Jessie slept in were practically open to the desert.

  They departed early, and for the first time on their trip Lancaster and Jessie grasped the true vastness of the desert. “There is no glitter about the unending spread of sand early in the morning,” Jessie wrote, “and instead of the gilded beauty which comes with the sun it seems to reflect the blue of the sky, measuring distance with it.” They flew for hours without spotting any villages or palm-ringed oases or desert nomads in long robes. “The sun became a scorcher, and whatever breeze there was came from some blast furnace,” Jessie reported. “We opened our shirts at the throats in order to gain a little respite.” Black hills flanked the flat surfaces below; massive basalt boulders rose from the mountainous valleys.

  As they flew over the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, Lancaster passed Jessie a note: “What are you doing with your feet? Are you thumping them on the floor?” Jessie responded that she was doing no such thing. “Well, something is happening!” Lancaster replied. Then Jessie smelled fire, and she began to imagine the worst. For a pulse-quickening twenty minutes the burning smell continued as Lancaster and Jessie waited for the Red Rose to burst into flames. They decided, in their petrified state, to make an emergency landing at Rutbah Wells, which for the past three years had served as a rest stop for Imperial Airways. As they descended, they could see nomadic tribes’ black goatskin tents dotting the town; in the distance, a group of rugged hills floated above the otherwise flat expanse. The town’s immense old fort, an ungainly gray building, had been transformed into a rest house for the airline.

  Upon landing, Lancaster and Jessie discovered that one of the generators in the Red Rose’s ignition system had sheared, and was smoldering away. They spent the afternoon devising a temporary fix, before joining the RAF’s Armoured Car Company for an open-air dinner. The group ate in the desert beside a roaring campfire, with kerosene cans serving as chairs, saucepan lids substituting for plates, and two mugs of tea shared communally. As wild animals stalked outside the fire’s perimeter, Lancaster and Jessie feasted on stewed gazelle.

  Later that night, as Jessie tried vainly to sleep, a fierce windstorm blew in. Worried that the Red Rose might flip over, she stumbled through the dark, the sand whipping against her face, to check how well it was secured. At one point she heard a man’s voice calling out to her in Arabic, but because she didn’t speak the language, she pressed on. Suddenly she came up short—the man, a guard, was standing directly before her, pointing a rifle at her nose. Jessie realized with a start that he must have been yelling “Halt!” Despite the heavy wind, she eventually managed to light a match, and in the dim glow of the flame identified herself as one of the fliers. The apologetic guard escorted her to the plane and helped her tie it down. But hardly had it been secured when a torrential rain began pelting the desert, accompanied by even more lashing winds, forcing Jessie, with Lancaster’s help, to fold the Red Rose’s wings vertically and wheel the airplane into the fort, where they were spending the night. The moment was historic: never before had an airplane been small enough to fit into the premises. Photographs were excitedly snapped in the morning to mark the occasion.

  Despite a rainstorm so intense that no other planes were flying, Lancaster and Jessie, freezing and exhausted, made it to Baghdad one day later. The Tigris River, Jessie wrote, “squirmed over the countryside like an angry snake.” As the main British base in Iraq, RAF Hinaidi, just outside the city, featured all the necessary amenities: wide barracks, a modern hospital, recreational areas, maintenance and communication units, and massive hangars. But in the fearsome storm, Baghdad itself resembled a faded tapestry, its ancient glories seemingly past.

  The rainstorm flooded the airport, forcing Lancaster and Jessie to remain at the base for the next four days. Though frustrated by the wait, Lancaster used the opportunity to add an extra fuel tank to the Red Rose, boosting its flying time to approximately ten hours. Jessie purchased a pair of shorts from the base’s Iraqi tailor, as her flying outfit was proving intolerable in the suffocating heat. When the aviators visited Baghdad, exploring narrow streets that wound haphazardly through miles of flat roofs, the city’s poverty shocked them. With their blinkered mentality, they had naively expected to find a gleaming gold city straight out of One Thousand and One Nights. For the disillusioned Jessie, the high point of her five days in Baghdad came when an RAF officer gifted her with a gold-lined ring made of elephant hair for good luck. It was a ring she would wear for the rest of her life.

  At last the Red Rose escaped Baghdad for the port city of Basra, one of the rumored locations of the historic Garden of Eden. Lancaster and Jessie flew over vast expanses of marshland and swamp stippled by small villages and intersected by the muddy wanderings of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. After
such desolate landscape, they found Basra to be a hive of activity, its teeming canals populated by thousands of small boats. The Shatt al-Arab river was lined with thick groupings of date palm trees that provided the city’s main export of sweet fruit. Tight streets wove through rows of tumble-down mud huts, their passageways navigated by camel caravans bearing sellable goods. Brutal tragedy marked the scene as well: an outbreak of cholera had recently killed over a thousand people, and Jessie witnessed the dead stacked like cordwood on barges in the river, waiting for inspection by the local British medical officer.

  Because they were waiting for a replacement engine part to be delivered from England, Lancaster and Jessie’s journey ground to a halt. Their frustration over the delay was compounded by a cholera outbreak at the base, which forced them into seven days of quarantine. Jessie was given a room at the British Consulate, while Lancaster stayed at the RAF officers’ mess. After weeks of frenetic movement, enduring such stasis proved wholly unwelcome, and once their quarantine was complete, they happily became nightly dinner guests on the HMS Enterprise, a Royal Navy light cruiser that had arrived in the city to quell a pro-German revolt. The ritual, by this point in their journey, was familiar: formal meals in evening wear, heavy drinking, boisterous dancing, and ceaseless socializing with local British dignitaries. In Basra, the two aviators were enlivened by the routine.