Goodbye Mickey Mouse – Len Deighton, 1982 ★★½

Chasing Cupid and Messerschmitts

The difficulty of writing historical fiction often lies in getting facts straight. For Len Deighton, a former RAF pilot as well as an avid chronicler of World War II in both fiction and non-fiction form, authenticity was not a challenge for this tale of American Army Air Force fighter pilots in England. Goodbye Mickey Mouse is solid there.

But you need more than authenticity to make a novel click. You need an engaging plot and lively characters. It’s there the novel sagged for me.

After opening forty years on at an abandoned English air field where the 220^th Fighter Group Association is having a reunion, we travel back in time to late 1943 to see the fighter group in action. Main protagonist Captain James A. Farebrother is acquainting himself with a P-51 Mustang by buzzing the control tower, making himself an instant chatter magnet among his new comrades. More fodder will come soon.

It’s a time of testing for the American pilots, flying escort duty for bombers over occupied Europe, about to get much worse as the countdown to D-Day begins in earnest. We are reminded that for the Germans, this is their Battle of Britain: “They’ll throw everything at us and they won’t count the casualties.”

Even before reaching the airfield, Farebrother gets an earful from the cheerfully louche press liaison Vincent Madigan about just what kind of psychological toll the war can have:

“You’re still on the crusade. Most of us started that way. But you get Colonel Badger chewing your ass out. You get the Limeys screwing your last dollar out of you and then spitting in your eye. You get memos telling you how the top brass are figuring new ways to get us all killed…Suddenly maybe you’ll start thinking the Krauts ain’t so bad…

“There are Swedish airfields packed wing tip to wing tip with Flying Fortresses and B-24s. There must be room there for a factory-fresh Mustang fighter plane.” He leaned back in his seat, watching Farebrother to catch the effect of his words. “Some flyers out there over the sea get a sudden hankering to make a separate peace. They steer north to the big blond girls, farm butter, and central heating.”

All this serves as both scene-setting and a bit of a misdirection ploy for Deighton. For “making a separate peace” is something we quickly learn is not in the cards for Farebrother, whose commitment to the war effort is never less than total. That’s also true for the other pilots we meet, especially the leader of Farebrother’s fighter group, a regulation-defying ace named Z. M. Morse whose nickname furnishes the novel with its title.

In Goodbye Mickey Mouse, the title character is a fighter ace aiming to be the highest-scoring American in Europe. The real deal was Francis Stanley "Gabby" Gabreski, whose 28 confirmed air kills was the U. S. record. Image from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/392094711286695858/

Others reviewing this book note antecedents like Twelve O’clock High and Catch-22 which similarly follow a group of American air warriors during World War II, albeit flying bombers rather than fighters. For me, the World War II movie this most reminded me of was From Here To Eternity, especially as war takes a backseat to a pair of dangerous romances with Englishwomen for Farebrother and Morse. The more this went on, the more I lost interest.

Farebrother meets and falls hard for the young, independent-minded Victoria Cooper, daughter of a Cambridge psychology professor and his clutching, insecure wife. Morse is smitten by Vera Hardcastle, a friend of Victoria’s who doesn’t let marriage to a British soldier deter her from love and adventure where she can find it: “Vera wears the new utility underpants, Victoria had overheard a girl say: one Yank and they’re off.” But what happens when husband Reg returns from Burma?

The culture clash between liberated Americans and repressed Brits is the sort of thing that might have gotten Deighton more flak if Goodbye Mickey Mouse was better known and Deighton not British himself. Much of the story focuses on barely-concealed hostility between the Americans and their hosts, who famously grumbled that the Yanks were “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” Deighton suggests plenty of blame to go around.

Deighton’s overall approach to the Americans is positive, celebrating their courage and their commitment to one another even while bogged down by poor operational support and red tape. Of the Mustang, a fighter often credited with helping the Western Allies win the war in the air, Deighton unfavorably compares it to a prior fighter model in wider use, the P-47 Thunderbolt, or “Jug.” Jugs could take far more punishment, but Mustangs were cheaper to produce – and as the toll of using them mounted over time – replace.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse is not a war novel as much as a story of people brought together by war. That said, when fighting is depicted, it is depicted with verve. Colonel Dan Badger, the commander of the 220^th who insists on flying with his men, watches a group of B-17 Flying Fortresses bust through a cloud of flak “pulsating red and gray like some sort of venomous seabed anemone.” One bomber is fatally struck; the colonel watches it fall:

Nine parachutes, it was always like that; the pilot never got out, he had to hold her steady while the other kids jumped. No more college proms for that trotter, he’d be pinned to the inside of the fuselage by centrifugal force, thinking whatever men do think in the final few seconds of their sweet and too short life.

The fighter pilots are of course not only spectators but participants in the carnage; Deighton portrays some of the dogfights, too; not as protracted affairs but sudden bursts of incredible violence interrupting long patches of unnerving calm. After returning home, the survivors are left to deal with the repercussions.

Farebrother finds himself suddenly vomiting after one mission, not knowing why. His wingman, a farmboy named Earl, explains:

“It’s yesterday’s combat,” he said. “It leaves you knotted up inside. You hold on, laughing and joking and drinking, you hold on and hold on. Then suddenly, for no reason you can figure, something happens to trigger it. Your brain tells your body it doesn’t have to hold on anymore, and you puke, or you cry, or you shout at someone…or you get shipped home on a Section Eight.”

Farebrother’s situation is unusually complicated. We learn early on that he is the son of an Air Force general who takes a special interest in the boy’s welfare. Because the general, Alexander J. Bohnen, has a different last name, the family connection is hidden from view, though Bohnen’s persistent queries to Colonel Dan eventually help him put two and two together.

Like the romances, the father-son angle doesn’t do enough to merit the attention Deighton pays it here. Bohnen is portrayed by Deighton as a hard-driven businessman in civilian life transformed by the military into a ruthless efficiency expert where dealing death is now his trade. At one point, he declares that the 220^th count airplanes shot down on the ground as kills, hoping to entice the pilots (including Farebrother!) to risk their lives by venturing deeper into the flak. Colonel Dan objects:

“You’re not ordering these kids to attack enemy airfields. What you’re doing to them is worse – you’re going to use the very spirit that brought them here to make them send themselves out to get killed.”

“Correction,” said Bohnen. “You’re going to use it.”

While we see this directive lead to one pilot’s demise, it doesn’t figure heavily in the overall narrative. Bohnen isn’t the heavy in this story, in fact there really isn’t one. Deighton presents his characters not as fully-realized individuals but not as neat narrative devices, either. Both Bohnen and a by-the-book executive officer named Tucker seem introduced to be points of conflict, yet neither come off as bad guys.

Author Len Deighton. Best known for spy thrillers like The Ipcress File, he carved out another well-regarded niche for himself as a teller of war stories both real and fictional. Image from http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/feature_view.aspx?FEATURE_ID=20.  

 Most of the story takes place at fictional Steeple Thaxted, an airbase in East Anglia. Here Deighton is in his element. The dialogue is sometimes halting, and the many storylines often wind up dead ends, but while you are reading you are immersed in endless detail. For an author known for adventure stories, the adventure here is more in the day-to-day life of the characters, and the toll their work takes on them.

One of the fighter pilots in Farebrother’s unit is Jewish and filled with anger at what the Nazis are doing to his people. Another is of a German immigrant family and asks out of a mission to support bombers hitting his ancestral home. In one scene, after the Jew shoots down a German rescue plane, the two square off. Will they resolve their differences? Apparently so; they are next seen sharing some hooch and the episode is never revisited.

Morse meanwhile is on a mission to score the most kills of any American pilot. But will his romance with Vera lead to his grounding after a reporter threatens to go public with an exclusive on Mickey Mouse’s non-combat exploits? It’s not a believable situation – it’s hard to imagine the press trumpeting such a thing in that era – but it winds up sucking up a lot of pages before becoming a non-issue by the novel’s end, when the events of “Bad Monday,” the final mission depicted here, render it moot.

I felt at times like it was not a novel, but rather a miniature train set, everything laid out with panache. You can’t help but be impressed by Deighton’s dedication to the subject matter even as you wish a story, any story, would come into stronger focus. Instead, you watch the toy train goes round and round, seeing all its pretty pieces move back and forth while none of it seems to matter. Was that the point?

I really enjoyed a review by Simon at the terrific Boots & Books blog that systematically and entertainingly lays out the good and bad of Goodbye Mickey Mouse. Definitely worth a read.