On his third morning in command he led a formation of twelve in a sweep over Holland. The ground crews had worked until the small hours to service the aircraft. There was scattered high cloud over eastern England. The Meteorological forecast from Group H.Q. suggested that the clouds over Holland would be denser. James wanted a sky clear enough to tempt the enemy up to fight, but with some clouds in which the Spitfires could shelter if hard pressed.
He did not say much by way of briefing, but emphasised the importance of pairs staying together in a battle with enemy fighters. The leaders’ job was to destroy, the Number Twos’ was to protect their leaders. Without bombers in the formation, the enemy might be reluctant to waste fuel and engine hours on a climb and combat. If so, James would lead his squadron down to strafe ground targets. He had marked three airfields on his map, his favourite ground objectives, and the situation of various locks, damage to whose gates would cause flooding. Roads and railway lines should provide secondary targets, military vehicles and trains.
He hoped that they would find combat in the air. That was the fighter pilot’s real purpose. Ground strafing was only a substitute; and of little use in helping him to assess the quality of his men. The good ones would have the chance to show their determination, aggression and courage; but what he wanted also to test was their skill and marksmanship against another aircraft.
During the past thirty-six hours he had frozen his normal emotions. Usually he reacted at once to new acquaintances, but among these twenty-one pilots he had formed no likes or dislikes, made no assessments. They all had an equal chance of impressing him favourably or unfavourably. Even about the three of whom the doctor had spoken he had no particular reservations. He knew that not only did every commander look at his men in ways which differed, even if they were varying gradations of the same scale of values, but that men also behaved differently in response to each individual leader. His style was different from his predecessors’. What mattered to him was how his pilots flew and shot when he led them, not so much what they had done in the past.
Making the usual approach to a hostile shore, they crossed the North Sea very low over the water to escape radar detection. There was little wind to ruffle its surface and give them a reference point. Low flying was always dangerous, not only because there was no time to recover if something happened that made you suddenly lose altitude, but also because flying close to featureless land or water had a hypnotic effect. Pilots frequently dived into the ground or the sea from inattention and a false impression of their height, whatever their altimeters might be indicating. James wondered whether he would lose anyone in this way this morning and he did so with neither compassion nor anxiety. That was something else about him which nearly three years of fighting had changed.
He had chosen a course that would take them over the Dutch coast where there were no flak batteries close enough to bother with them. When they crossed the shoreline he lifted the formation to a hundred feet to avoid windmills and farm buildings. People waved to them and he rocked his wings now and again in return. Five miles inland he led the way up in a steep climb to ten thousand feet and he was above to level out and turn towards one of the air-fields when he saw, ahead, slightly to starboard, and some three thousand feet above, a cluster of small dark shapes wheeling towards him.
When he warned the squadron he used his call sign because he assumed that they did not yet know his voice well enough to recognise it. Again, this gave him a feeling of detachment from them which he hoped would soon change; but for the time being it was what he wanted, it would let him view them objectively. There was no voice among them which would stir him to any personal pity if he heard it scream as he had heard men scream when they were going down in flames or with a badly damaged aircraft and a jammed cockpit canopy, or when he heard it say calmly, as he had also heard so many times, “I’ve had it”.
“Red One to Cresta...Bandits one-o’clock, range three...high...coming this way...twelve...sixteen of them.”
Nobody answered for a moment, then he heard Henderson.
“One-nineties.”
He had already identified them as Focke-Wulf 190s. He had waited to see who said it first; and if his voice gave anything away. Henderson, to his perceptive ears, sounded edgy. His very striving for calmness betrayed him, his voice unnaturally high.
The enemy had the advantage. James knew that they could not possibly have taken off because they knew the Spitfires were approaching Holland. They must be on some exercise or perhaps on their way to a rendezvous with a bomber force for a raid on England. Good fortune had put them high above the Spitfires and slightly up-sun. They were more than 30 m.p.h. faster than the Spitfires, and armed with two machine-guns and four cannons. The squadron’s Spitfire VBs had two cannons and four machine-guns. The FW190s had a better rate of climb.
These were the aeroplanes which had created such havoc among this squadron that it had been sent north from Kent for a rest.
James took his three sections round in a curving climb to port, so as not to allow the separation between the two to close too rapidly. He needed time to make more height and he watched the enemy over his right shoulder. Both were in the same formation, the finger four which the R.A.F. had copied from the Germans; who had evolved it during the Spanish Civil War, in which the Luftwaffe had fought for Franco.
Prudence warned James to avoid a fight. The Spitfires were outnumbered by, and worse positioned than, the faster Focke-Wulfs. He had no knowledge of any of his pilots’ performance in action. Their flying the day before in simulated combat did not tell him all that he needed to know. In fairness to them he ought to test them in more favourable conditions. But this plunge in at the deep end would reveal the essence of each of them. However, he owed it to them, who had to obey him, to give them every possible chance of survival.
He would manoeuvre to outwit the enemy and reverse the advantage; if he could.
He heard the carrier wave of a transmitter, then an intermittent voice.
“Red One...Yellow Two...Do you...”
“Yellow Two...Red One, reading you strength three, distorted.”
“Red One, Red One from Yellow Two...My R/T seems U/S...and...losing...oil pressure.”
“Red One to Yellow Two. Go home, then.”
James saw the further of the two aircraft on his right bank steeply and turn away from the rest of the formation, then begin climbing towards the nearest cloud.
The pilot was one of those whom he privately called “the weaker brethren”: and the M.O. had mentioned his name when he had brought up the subject of L.M.F. He had a momentary sensation of contempt and anger, but there was no time to spare for emotion if he were to. extract his charges from the predicament into which he had led them.
“All Cresta aircraft from Red One. We’re going to fox them. We’ll wheel starboard around that small cloud at twelve-o’clock and come in behind them. Come in closer now...tighten it up.”
There was no need to be more specific. He had told them yesterday what he expected when they flew in finger fours: a loose formation at all times, well spaced. Tightening it up still meant what, if they were in the old fashioned Vs of three, or line astern, would be a very loose formation. Some of them were going to have to fly through the small cloud ahead, not around it, and he wanted no risk of collision.
The F.Ws were gaining, but they were having to lose some of their height advantage in order to do so quickly. James, absorbed in his work, was happy; the skilled craftsman back at his trade. This was what he had been missing for six months.
He had also been missing the comradeship of squadron life: but life on his new squadron did not much resemble the life he had known on his old one.
“Yellow One...Cross to my port side as Number Three.”
“Crossing now.”
Old habits clung. James made a note to make some confirmatory changes in the squadron’s radio-telephone procedure. Now that the United States was in the war, the old phonetic alphabet — Ack, Beer, Cork, D
on, Eddy etc. had been changed and become Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog...James could not remember any more. Information was now supposed to be acknowledged by “Roger”, the phonetic term for “R”, which, in turn, stood for “Received”. Orders were now correctly acknowledged by “Wilco”, for “Will comply”: which is what the pilot whom he had just ordered to change position should have replied. It was all a damn nuisance, and why couldn’t the Yanks, who had taken two years and three months to make up their minds to fight — and then only because the Japs pushed them into it — adopt the R.A.F’s usage?
The F.Ws were only about two thousand feet above by this time, and had closed the range to a mile.
The strategem was not going to work, because the F.Ws were too fast, they had ample height in hand and the radius of turn for a gaggle of eleven Spitfires would not bring the Spits in close enough to the enemy’s quarter, at the present closing speed.
“Cresta from Red One...They’re too close. We’ll dive at that cloud at ten-o’clock, two thousand below. They’ll think we’re chickening out. We’ll pull up through it and give them a surprise. Let’s go.” James put his aircraft’s nose down steeply. “Watch it in cloud. Anyone who collides goes straight into close arrest when we get home!”
He looked to right the left and a hand came up from both his wing men. He hoped they were grinning into their oxygen masks. He had tried to sound as light-hearted as he could. Nobody who collided in cloud would live to return to base. He hoped he had given them confidence: by his cheerfulness and by showing his own confidence in their ability to negotiate the cloud safely.
He must have accumulated hundreds of hours of flying actually in cloud, or at least a hundred, anyway, for one didn’t spend long in cloud at any time if one were a fighter pilot. But it still .gave him an uneasy feeling to be surrounded by impenetrable grey murk. He had never had a misadventure in cloud, but he knew all too many people who had and even more stories about others. If he ever stayed in cloud for more than five minutes, time seemed to accelerate and made him think that he had been flying blind for an hour. It caused him to start doubting the accuracy of his instruments and to imagine that he had, without knowing it was happening, rolled upside down.
As soon as he had plunged into this cloud he gave another order. “Red One to Cresta. Levelling off at angels eleven point two.” Eleven thousand two hundred feet in the Fighter Command code. Angels were only for own height. The enemy’s was expressed normally. One of the many means of avoiding confusion, misreading of messages. Speed was always given in whole numbers; course, code-named “Vector”, in separate digits. Whole numbers for height, also: hence the well-known film in which Jack Hawkins pretended to be a group captain, which was entitled “Angels One Five”, was all balls and should have been “Angels Fifteen”. James wondered why some R.A.F. adviser had not put the matter right. Probably because nobody had been employed, and paid, to do so, he concluded. The war had made him cynical. He supposed he was destined to become much more so before it was over.
He allowed fifteen seconds while these thoughts flitted through his mind.
“Red Leader to Cresta. Anyone not at angels eleven point two?”
“Blue One to Red One. I’m at eleven one.”
“Green Two to Red One. At ten point nine.” James gave them another few seconds.
“All Cresta from Red One. Hold it until we’re out of the clag.”
They burst through half a minute later.
“Turning port and climbing, Cresta.”
His rear-view mirror told him that they had not straggled much and were keeping pace with him in the climb. He wheeled tightly, watching the wing men in each section make their cross-overs. The sun slid further round on their left hand side. They rounded the western edge of the cloud through which they had just flown.
The sixteen Focke-Wulf 190s were flying westward, a thousand yards south of the cloud’s eastern edge. They were eight hundred feet lower than the Spitfires and six hundred yards ahead; thanks to James’s quick and flexible thinking, his tactical adaptability.
“Help yourselves, chaps. Tallyho.”
It was four seconds before the enemy saw them and broke.
James opened fire at one of the 190s in the leading four. An almost perfect curve of pursuit had brought him in on its starboard quarter. He was positioning himself to shoot from dead astern, which, like a head-on shot, was the easiest because it needed no judgment of deflection. When the target turned, it presented him with a beam shot. Judging ninety degrees, or full, deflection was next easiest after a no-deflection shot. He caught it in the fraction of a second when it was broadside-on to him. It flew into his first burst of cannon and machine-gun fire and blew up.
The aircraft directly astern of it banked hard to turn away from the smoke and burning debris. This presented it in plain view to one of the other Spitfire pilots, who poured shells and bullets into it. It caught fire.
James’s headphones crepitated with terse messages, the familiar accompaniment to the physical sensations of G forces tugging at, or crushing down on, him from every direction as he banked, turned, skidded, dived or climbed abruptly, half-rolled, winged over and pulled all the attacking and evasive movements of fighter-to-fighter combat.
“Break right, Blue One.”
“Behind you, Mac.”
“That was mine, Sam, damn you.”
“Christ! Pete, you nearly pranged me.” This in complaint as someone going like a bat out of hell narrowly missed colliding with a friend.
“Two on your port quarter, Green Two, diving.”
“No panic, I see them.”
“One coming up on your starboard, Nunc, below at four-o’clock.”
“O.K. Tell me when to break.”
“Break starboard now.”
“That bastard won’t eat any more ersatz sausage.”
“Jesus, will ya see that guy burn.”
The accents were Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Rhodesian, English, Scots, Welsh.
James registered them, part of his mind taking notice of every shade of calmness, panic, confidence or fear, automatically trying to put a face to each voice.
An ideal fighter interception ended in a quick dive onto the enemy from astern or abeam, a short burst or two of fire, and then a rapid break to pull away from the victim to see if there were another chance of a similar attack on another target. This engagement had started that way but developed into a sprawling, brawling tangle. Ultimately the F.Ws would have the advantage again because of their superior speed and their proximity to base, which gave them greater endurance than the Spitfires had.
James was satisfied.
“Red One to all Cresta...Pancake, pancake. Down to the deck and vector for Sardine. Join up if you can.” Pancake meant return to base, refuel and rearm.
They all knew exactly what to do. Sardine was the code name for a small town on the Dutch coast. At briefing he had ensured that everyone knew the course from there to base. They had a few minutes’ fuel in hand for orbiting it two or three times so that complete pairs or anyone who had been split up could find company for the trip home. He had told them to avoid flying across water unaccompanied if possible.
At low level, twenty feet above the ground, following the contours and nipping up a few feet over buildings, they offered an unattractive target to enemy fighters: which would have difficulty in seeing their camouflaged upper surfaces against the terrain and would also risk diving into the ground when they broke after an attack.
Some light flak and heavy machine-gun fire sparkled around the Spitfires; but so low to the ground and travelling so fast they were only in anyone’s sight for too brief a time for accurate aiming.
James could see two Spitfires ahead of him, one a few hundred yards on his starboard and two on his port, another astern.
“Red One to Cresta...I’m going up to two hundred feet...I’ll waggle my wings...and put on my nav lights. Formate on me at fifty feet over Sardine.”
When h
e levelled out at two hundred feet, sporadic anti-aircraft fire intensified around him. One flak battery brought its fearsome 88 millimetre guns to bear on him. The shells burst unpleasantly close, although he kept weaving, with their characteristic double thud that sound like “bok-bok”. They were all around him. Bok-bokbok-bokbok-bok. Blasts of disturbed air smote his aircraft, chucking it up or slamming it fifty feet down, shoving it into a violent yawing motion, tipping up a wing.
He did not relish it but he knew he had to stay there and set an example of coolness and nerve. To embellish it, he called each pilot in turn. Of the ten who had gone into the attack with him, nine answered. Five of them had been damaged, but none seriously.
Ten miles off the English coast, Henderson broke R/T silence.
“Red One from Yellow One. I’m over-heating. Guess I have a glycol leak.”
“Can you make it?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Climb to a thousand if you can...any safe height...bale out if you have to...I’ll climb with you...the rest of you go home.”
“O.K.”
“I’ll climb above you. If you have to bale out, I’ll transmit for fix.”
“Yeah, O.K.”
With a good fix, which needed five thousand feet of altitude at least, at their present range from their direction-finding stations, an air sea rescue boat or seaplane should soon pick Henderson up.
James had barely enough fuel himself with which to reach base. He hoped Henderson would be quick about it if he was going to jump.
He kept pace with the other aircraft while it made height. At 750 feet Henderson said “That’s it. I have to get out now.” His engine seized. James saw the aircraft roll onto its back and start to descend in a steep glide. Henderson dropped clear.
James, transmitting as he went, saw the canopy open.
“Cresta Red One transmitting for fix. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. One, two, three, four, five. Out.” Before the W.A.A.F. began radio-telephone duties, it had been customary to recite obscene verses. Not now.
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 57