Despite, then, his knowledge that Rohnspeece and Fedge and Laspooney and Null and Blitz and the others — if, in fact, they were still alive — had probably heard him, AFR being the only English-speaking radio they could pick up in most of the places where they could be, Dick had no hope that he had changed their opinion of him. He had the brute’s ear, but the brute was probably laughing. The brute may even have been pissing into the speaker cone or firing bullets at it or whipping someone’s ass with the aerial. He was a celebrity for the first time in his life—Stars and Stripes had interviewed him — but it had never seemed less important. In his interview with Stars and Stripes the one remark he had really wanted them to print— “Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose are much more effective. As a radio man I envy them both”—had been omitted, and he had sounded as bland as ever he had on the radio.
The show was recorded on Tuesday nights in Broadcasting House, the BBC facility in London. Busy during the day, a few of its studios had been set aside for the use of the Americans late at night. One Tuesday, shortly after the appearance of his interview in Stars and Stripes, Dick was making an electrical transcription of Songbook when he saw the flashing red light that indicated an air-raid warning. He had been through other air raids in London, though one had never occurred when he was broadcasting. Seeing the light, he gathered together the pages of his script, switched off his microphone and rose to go the shelter. He was almost out of the studio when his engineer and director, a first lieutenant named Collins, called to him over the loudspeaker from the control room.
“Sit still, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “There’s no telling when they’ll sound the all clear. I’m tired. The damn BBC won’t give us the goddamn building at a decent hour. We’re soundproofed, so I don’t think we’ll pick up the noise of the bombers in here. Hell, we can’t even hear the blasted sirens. Why don’t we just go ahead and finish the broadcast?”
Sergeant Gibson looked nervously toward the signal light, which had now gone into a new pattern — a series of four short flashes followed by three long, indicating that the bombers were over the city. Except for the lights they would have had no hint that the bombers were overhead; in their windowless studio they might not have heard even a direct hit, and would have known that they were dying only when the flames had begun to lick at them.
“Damn it, Sarge, sit back down,” the lieutenant ordered. “We’ll be okay. Watch the On the Air sign. When the sign comes on you cue in again after ‘Wing and a Prayer.’”
Dick returned sullenly to the microphone and the lieutenant put the song on the turntable. The signal lights and the insane bravery of the music made Dick more nervous than ever. He wondered if men had ever gone into battle burdened by such themes. It was impossible, and he had a certain knowledge of the impossibility and inanity of comfort, suddenly realizing what must be the enormous irritation to the dying of all brave counsel and all fair words. Such must forever have tampered patience and ruined death.
When the record finished the On the Air sign beamed on. In the brief moment before he began talking Dick strained to hear the bombers. He thought he could detect a buzz or hum, but it might have been only the electric engines in the studio. The lieutenant rapped on the glass with his graduation ring and pointed furiously to the sign. Shaken, Dick lost his place, then found it again. “Fellas, that was ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’ as sung by the Mello-Tones.” He heard the alarm in his voice and longed to be in the bomb shelter, where he could hear the bombs when they exploded and feel the slight fleshly shift in the sand bags. He looked toward the booth but the lieutenant had leaned down to pick up the next recording and he could not see him. For all he knew he may have been the only person left in the building. His hand rattled the pages of his script and he lost his place again. “‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’” he repeated, stalling. Again he found his place and introduced the next song. It was “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World,” and as he listened to the lyrics (“Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again”) he became furious. If he’d had a pistol he might have taken aim and shot the lieutenant right then. Why, he thought, surprised and not displeased, that’s how the brutes think, the ones who treasure their grudge and then, on patrol, calmly shoot their lieutenant in the back. Was he a brute? Good! So be it!
He felt himself swell with power, a savage surge. “Bullshit!” he roared into his open microphone over the lyrics of the song. “Bullshit!”
The lieutenant’s face appeared white and enormous behind the control room window. He seemed not angry, nor even astonished; he looked as bland and mild as a ship’s captain just relieved of command by his men. Dick saw his mouth move and his lips form words, but no sound came out; he had forgotten to depress the speaker button in the control room. Dick felt a triumphant flush of heroism, Horatio at the bridge, the Dutchman at the dike, the man in the radio room sending out his S.O.S.’s as the others lowered the lifeboats and leaped into them, all men covering all other men’s retreats — the guerrilla achievement. “Ah boys,” he cried, exultant, ”we’re the ones who pay. It’s us who bleed, buddies.”
The lieutenant’s eyes widened. He was livid now, his face contorted with the bitter, contrary exercises of grief and grudge. Gibson knew he had to hurry. Ignoring the officer, he grasped the microphone still more tightly and drew it closer to him, as if the only way Collins could stop him would be to pull the equipment out of his hands. “We’re meat, we’re meat,” he cried passionately. (He saw his listeners come alive, one soldier beckoning the other to approach the radio, crawling out of foxholes in the jungle, gathering together around the Lister bag. He saw snipers leaning down from the trees to which they were tied. Thinking of the bombers that were even now zeroing in on Broadcasting House, fixing its roof between the crosshairs of their bombsights, he began to chatter ferociously, not calling as he might have to a panicky audience falling all over itself to escape a burning theater, “Calm down, calm down,” but a sub-articulate commiseration that cut through the traps of language, dispensed with hope and went abruptly into mourning. “Ah,” he said. “Oh my. Gee. Hmn. Yuh. Ah. Oh. Tch tch. Whew. Hmph. Boy.”
Behind the glass in the control booth the lieutenant was leaning so far forward that his nose was blunted by the glass. “Tag,” Dick said. “We’re it. Boom boom.”
“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to permit any of this stuff to get by,” Lieutenant Collins’s voice boomed out over the speaker. “What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? Not a syllable of this will ever be broadcast! I’m stopping the transcription!”
“They’re moving in,” Dick Gibson said, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I’m by myself. The bombs are falling.”