The other aircraft wasn’t making any attempt to evade, making his job a great deal easier.
Herbert mashed down hard on the firing button and their guns coughed out a clipped burst that sprayed the other aircraft, the fire focussing on the undamaged Hercules engine.
The target aircraft before them sparkled and flashed in the darkness, and as fragments flew around and past B-Baker, Herbert ducked involuntarily, but nothing substantial hit them.
He thought nothing of it as the airframe juddered harder around him, but then the starboard engine flared bright and his Beaufighter began to skid out of control as Bruno’s cannon shells and bullets smacked into B-Baker.
“What the fuck? Trolley, quick, check behind us!”
“Junkers 88 on our tail boss! Jesus! I’m bleeding!” the pain in Trent’s voice terrified him.
Herbert fought with the controls, juggling with the throttles as he strove to keep the failing Beaufighter flying. “Trolley, we’re proper fucked, pal, bail out, get out! Get out now!” he gasped a breath, “GET OUT!”
Trent sounded scared and confused, “I’ve lost my pinky, boss! Bullet took the top right off it! I saw it happen! I can see the bone! I’m bleeding!”
“Bail out! Get out, you daft bastard! Now! I won’t be able to hold it for long! We’re near the coast! Try and get as close to it as possible!” Herbert roared, and the gauges shattered before him as a cannon shell ripped into his console, covering him with wickedly sharp slivers of metal, glass and plastic.
Something awful smacked against his goggles, but only cracked one lens. A second wickedly sharp splinter tore open one cheek, but he didn’t feel it. “Christ! Get out, get out, oh fuck, get out! GET OUT! GET OUT!”
The starboard engine exploded, the flames casting a searingly harsh light onto his ruined instruments, and he knew there was no time. A shattered length of propeller blade thumping jarringly into the fuselage behind him.
Remarkably, the Beaufighter was still flying, but it would not continue to do so for very long.
Herbert released himself feverishly, reaching for the handholds and yanking himself backwards to the escape hatch, hoping desperately, oh so desperately, that behind him, his wounded friend was doing the same.
Fierce elation snapped through Bruno as his fire ripped through the Beaufighter before him, the bullets and cannon shells shredding the big British night fighter into a tattered and sparking wreck.
Bruno fired his guns the same instant as the pilot of the enemy aircraft, but whilst his gunfire inflicted mortal damage on his unsuspecting victim, the Beaufighter he had been sent to protect, although hit, continued to fly eastwards.
The stricken Beaufighter before him was falling away now, streaming droplets of liquid fire and an object rolled away from it.
Rudi was bouncing in his seat with excitement, “Another one! Well done, Herr Leutnant, ooh, that’s one of them managed to escape! His parachute’s opened nicely.”
As Trent’s parachute deployed fully, Mouse glanced at it for a second, and he contemplated putting a few rounds from his MG 131 into the delicate fabric dome.
They passed through the thickening and billowing smoke cloud, and the parachute rapidly shrank behind them too fast for him to draw a bead on it.
Damn. That crewman may have been responsible for the death of good bomber crews. Killing him would surely have saved others.
And it would have felt good.
Suddenly a second parachute appeared alongside, billowing like a blossoming flower in the darkness, rapidly following the first.
Mouse smiled grimly, and tilted the machine gun at the helpless pilot of the enemy night fighter beneath the second parachute, finger eagerly tightening on the trigger.
Just a quick burst…
Which was why, most unusually for him, Mouse was completely unprepared for what happened next, when a third Beaufighter emerged from the stained darkness of the night.
And, unlike the first two, this one was behind Bruno’s victorious Junkers.
Chapter 45
The elation Rose felt as he caught sight of the bandit withered almost as soon as it flowered, and he flinched in horror as the Junkers spat out a hail of hot lead and B-Baker flared and died, twitching in agony and dying beneath the storm of withering fire from the German night fighter’s guns.
Too late, oh God, too late! Why didn’t I dive faster, steeper?
As he willed his aircraft onwards, the other British fighter shook and shivered under the merciless guns of the big German fighter.
Oh God, no!
B-Baker was losing height now, the battered shape now falling rather than flying, and the port wing outboard of the Bristol engine suddenly broke off and whirled away, and the stricken Beaufighter lurched horribly.
No!
Worse still, yet another aeroplane with a very familiar shape (Another Beaufighter? What’s going on?) was, even now, fleeing from the pursuing Junkers.
Anger pulsed liquid hot through his body, and he closed the distance even as the burning and broken remnants of B-Baker spun away out of control down towards the cold waters below, wreathing the victorious Junkers for an instant in acrid smoke.
Relief spilled through the molten fury like iced water as a parachute emerged from the smoke, luckily well clear of his line of flight.
At least one of the RAF crew had managed to get out of their doomed fighter.
And then, another parachute materialised as if by magic and whipped past to one side of the Junkers.
Two parachutes! That was both of the RAF flyers, and they had survived the destruction of their Beaufighter.
Thank God.
And Rose could wait no longer. He caressed the button hungrily, raging with an incandescent flame from within after seeing the death of the other British fighter, but striving to control his fury and despair.
He considered the angles, shoot before and a little to one side to allow for deflection, play the stream of cannon shells, armour piercing incendiary rounds and high explosive incendiaries over that shadowed shape.
They were just over four hundred yards behind the Junkers now.
At last, they were close enough to destroy the enemy; they must be close enough, “Chalky, keep an eye on him in case I lose him in the smoke and darkness, stand by, firing…” and at last he pressed the firing button.
D-Dog shuddered and shook as the cannon and machine guns within her hammered out a powerful two second stream of devastation at the German night fighter, the image of the Junkers shuddering in his windscreen.
Just as he was about to fire his machine gun at the second parachute, Mouse’s instincts sensed the presence of death, and his eyes opened wide in shock and his blood turned to ice as the avenging shape of the third Beaufighter soared out at them like some predatory beast of the night.
In that awful moment the veteran German gunner felt an awful helplessness wash over him, and he knew his war was about to end.
Time slowed and dragged as Mouse desperately dragged his gun away from the parachutist and onto the bearing of the RAF night fighter.
But in his desperate haste, as he swung the machine gun onto the new bearing, the barrel hit the traverse check aerial post directly behind the glasshouse cockpit.
Desperately he tried again, wasting precious seconds as he fought to raise the barrel vertically over the post.
“Fucking hell, night fighter! Herr Leutnant...!”
And then the nose of the Beaufighter lit blindingly, and for a split second Mouse, wrestling with a gun that he once thought of as a dear friend, yet which now which fought him, saw bright silver skewers bursting out from it and lancing unerringly towards them.
D-Dog’s first burst slammed blisteringly into the Junkers 88, tearing into the port wing and engine, and suddenly Bruno was fighting with the controls as devastation ripped into the port-side Jumo 211, stitching brutally through the crank case, destroying the crank shaft, pistons, con rods, bearings, cylinder liners and other delicat
e components, the beautifully crafted aero-engine instantly transformed into twisted, useless, ruined wreckage.
A choking cloud of pitch-black smoke billowed from beneath the cowling of the port radial engine, followed by a thin stream of light-coloured glycol, then replaced by blackest smoke once more, before a jet of searing white flame swept out and backwards towards D-Dog.
With the port motor junked and only his starboard engine now remaining functional, Bruno found the Junkers wanting to roll and yaw to the right, and he frantically struggled with the rudder, trim and ailerons to find that magic balance that might yet save them and keep the battered Junkers in the air.
The next one-second burst from D-Dog’s guns passed uselessly just inches over the Junkers’ cockpit, but the third entered it.
Mouse was still trying to train his sights on the shape behind them, unable to see anything clearly yet, his night vision wrecked by the bright flare of Rose’s first burst, and he jerked at the trigger, hoping for a lucky hit or at least to put the enemy pilot off his aim with return fire.
And even as his last despairing burst spat out, he knew that he was too late.
He’d fucked up, and now there would be a terrible reckoning.
Perspex, plastics and metal erupted in a whirling storm of terror, shocking in its suddenness, shattering as the cannon shells and bullets from Rose’s guns smashed their way into the glasshouse cockpit and its delicate contents.
The bullet hit Mouse on the outer upper edge of his goggles, the impact with the edge of the eyepiece causing the course of the piece of speeding metal to turn inwards rather than outwards, such that it slammed (closely accompanied by fragments of glass, plastic and metal) into his left eye, ripping a ragged, pin-wheeling path through his eyeball, breaking the rear of the eye socket and cribriform plate in an expanding wave of shattering destruction that pulverised his brain, before blowing a very large hole out through the back of his head.
Mouse was dead before he even realised he’d been hit, and his corpse jerked fitfully, the triggers tightened by dead fingers sending a flailing stream of bullets arcing uselessly away into the dark emptiness.
Of his last burst, nothing came even remotely close to the pursuing Beaufighter, spraying away harmlessly into the emptiness of the cold and uncaring night.
Bruno and Rudi were showered with a high velocity stream of fragmented blood, bone and brains, the wet, fast moving mess mixed with bullets and shards of the Junkers.
The slowing fragments of metal which had obliterated Mouse’s brain now sliced past Rudi’s neck and opened a shallow laceration which, together with the maelstorm of D-Dog’s blasting broadside made his bladder loosen, and he wet himself as he ducked down in terror, cowering with his eyes tight shut behind the armoured seat back.
In the left hand seat, stunned into terrified immobility by the sudden onslaught, Bruno recoiled with shock and pain as a bullet sliced across the top of his left shoulder, whilst a second pierced his side, despite the armoured seat in which he sat. Brains and shrapnel spattered him.
Reeling in pain and sucking oxygen desperately through his mask, Bruno hauled back on the on the control yoke, the wounded Junkers reared up, and as the speed bled off, it hung suspended for a long moment, before falling away towards the freezing waters below.
Fierce elation coursed powerfully through him as his fire seemed to pin the Junkers against the backdrop of night like a bug on a piece of card, and the enemy fighter seemed to reel as if in pain, one engine torn and disintegrating, rear-facing machinegun flopping uselessly after that one useless, hopeless line of tracer.
As it pulled upwards, Rose smiled grimly as he lined up the enemy aircraft in his sight for a final devastating burst, and as he prepared his last blow, White suddenly cried out.
“Break! Break! BREAK!”
Trained to react instantly to such a cry, Rose pulled back on the control column instinctively, kicking the rudder and slewing the Beaufighter.
Meanwhile, Bruno’s wounded Junkers 88 disappeared downwards into the darkness, losing height as Bruno fought to keep the mortally damaged fighter flying.
Just a year earlier, Granny Smith, that most magnificent and yet scruffiest of characters in the whole of the RAF, and also the finest fighter pilot Rose had ever met, taught the younger Rose how to really dogfight in a packed week culminating in live firing exercises.
Knowing now the shortcomings of manoeuvrability in his current mount after the superb Hurricane, and fearing the capabilities of an unknown foe behind them, Rose made his aeroplane ‘crab’ across the sky, turning and climbing, nose pointing one way, the direction of the Beaufighter’s flight another.
With a bit of luck with D-Dog pointing one way but moving another they would confuse their attacker.
“Chalky?” He panted, muscles complaining at the effort, vision blurring and dimming, bloody hell, “Chalky?”
A lightning-fast stream of flaming red balls shot past beneath and to one side of their port wing, the balls seeming to coalesce to a point as they sped away from the D-Dog, growing smaller and arcing downwards towards the black water below.
His throat as dry as death, Rose dragged the Beaufighter quickly over to the left, and a second line of tracer flared past to starboard, closely followed by a dark shape, frantically climbing upwards as it tried desperately to avoid them, and D-Dog faltered as the turbulent disturbance of their attacker’s slipstream caught at them.
He did not feel the burning in his muscles or the tightness in his throat as he hauled desperately on he controls.
Even as he fought to regain control in the madly turning, shaking fighter, that split second view of their pursuer was enough for Rose to recognise the lines of a second Junkers 88, the droning sound of its Jumos audible for a moment above the sound of their own Hercules.
As D-Dog settled, Rose breathed a sigh of relief, blinking his stinging eyes, already searching for the enemy aircraft in the empty darkness.
His entire body ached but there was no time to allow himself to feel it. “Thanks, Chalky, you just saved us. Are you OK, chum?”
“Fucking hell! Thought we were dead then for sure, Flash!” White’s voice wheezed.
“You saved us with that call, Chalky.” Rose repeated. Over the intercom there came something that sounded suspiciously like a sob.
Thank God Chalky was OK. He gripped the little bear in his pocket, the desire to weep overwhelming.
Lady Luck had not abandoned them yet.
He turned his head achingly, his neck muscles complaining. He couldn’t see where the second Junkers had gone. Of the one they’d just blasted, there was no sign. “Chalky? Can you see where it went?”
“He’s right ahead, can’t you see him?” White exclaimed in surprise, voice still unsteady and laboured.
There was a pause, and then, again, “Can’t you see him? I thought you were chasing him!”
Rose blinked rapidly and squinted, and immediately he could see it, twin blue exhausts there, flying straight and level, a hundred feet or so above them, the Junkers was weaving gently from side to side.
Relief washed through him like a cold tide rising. The damned thing was clearly visible, how could he have missed it?
“Thanks, Chalky, I’ve got him now, hold on to your hat, pal.”
“Make ‘em count, Flash, I haven’t been able to rearm the cannon. You’ll not have more than a couple of seconds worth, I reckon.”
Sighting carefully, Rose remembered how close they’d come to getting shot down in flames, if it hadn’t been for White…
Thank God.
“Watch our backside, matey, stand by, firing…”
One more time Rose pushed down hard on the worn button, and D-Dog barked a second’s worth of cannon shells before the whirring magazines ran dry, and Rose sat in disbelief as their cannon fire ceased.
The machine guns in the wings, however, continued to chatter.
That handful of shells was enough. The crew of the second Junker
s, squadron-mates of Bruno, were totally unprepared in the switch from hunter to hunted, and the shells penetrated the port inner fuel tank sited just behind the crew cabin, igniting just under eighty gallons of 87 octane gasoline in a catastrophic explosion that spread in a millisecond to the other fuselage fuel tanks.
One moment the Junkers was before him, wreathed in a sparkling cloud of impacts, and the next it disappeared in a blinding flash of searing light, exploding devastatingly and flinging fragments of itself outwards, leaving Rose so stunned by the abruptness that he flew through the billowing oily fireball.
Unknown things scraped and skittered alarmingly across the Beaufighter’s skin, and the aircraft juddered and wallowed its way through the glowing and expanding field of what remained of the blasted Junkers.
A blob of oil splotched onto his windscreen, making him jump and streaking dirtily across an already smoke soiled surface.
But luckily for them, none of the pieces through which they flew were large enough to damage them, just big enough to scare them both.
A sickly burning odour of metals and plastics and of something else assailed his nostrils, and he choked involuntarily on the hot, cloying bitterness.
For what seemed like an endless moment, Rose could see nothing, and his heart clenched painfully.
It had taken his eyes weeks to recover from the bright flash of his Hurricane being blown apart the previous year.
How would he land the Beaufighter if he were unable to see?
Had he killed Chalky and himself in his eagerness to destroy the second Junkers?
Had he forgotten the hard-earned lessons of last year by being too close? He kicked himself mentally. Idiot.
Rose gripped the control column warily. What if his eyes never recovered? They filled with tears, and he lifted his goggles and cuffed away the wetness.
Oh God! What if he never saw Molly again? This time he was unable to stop them, and they spilled unchecked down his face and onto his oxygen mask.
He sniffed, and the intake of breath involuntarily hitched in his throat.
Beaufighter Blitz Page 41