There were scores of crashed aircraft, German, Italian and British. Some stood with their noses buried in the sand, some were skeletons, burned-out airframes with neither canvas nor metal covering them. The commonest sight was a Ju 87 Stuka with its snout stuck deep into the sand where its bombing dive had ended in a death plunge.
Even after three weeks of flying over the desert and its recent battlefields, Christopher still felt staggered by the signs of large-scale wastage of life and of the supplies it had cost other lives to ship out here. It gave him a quite different feeling from flying over the sea. In a battle with enemy ships, shot-down aircraft disappeared instantly from sight; sunken or damaged vessels left oil and wreckage which quickly dispersed or sank. To return to the same area of water was to find it empty and cleared of all signs of death and destruction. The permanent reminders he was seeing every day now gave him a sense of futility and depressed even his ebullient spirits.
Wheel tracks in the sand attracted his attention. There were a dozen or more, abreast, and it was clear that each marked the passage of a whole file of trucks. The imprints were deep and wide. The vehicles which followed their leaders could not drive precisely behind each other. The pattern of tyre marks was a confused criss-crossing of grooves that snaked across the sand.
Tasker turned to follow the tracks and Christopher had the quick sharp electrical spasm up and down his spine that always preceded action.
“Don’t forget I’ve got a gun,” Malahide reminded him.
It was a standing joke, now that at last the navigators could shoot at something. They were all delighted. Instead of being mere ammunition loaders for their pilots, heaving heavy 60-round drums into place, until drums had been replaced by belt-fed ammunition, they could now join in the fun. Moreover, whereas the earlier long-range variants of the Beaufighter had been fitted with extra fuel tanks internally, the later ones carried these in the outer wing sections. This modification deprived them of their six machine-guns — four in the starboard wing; only two, because the landing lights were located there, in the port wing —and they were left with just the four 20 mm cannon in the nose.
What Malahide was asking was that Christopher would bank and climb enough to allow him to strafe the ground with his Vickers GO, although its real purpose was for protection against stern attack from enemy fighters.
“You save your ammo for the One-o-nines.”
“Aw, come on, sport. Give a bloke a chance. I want to send a few of these bloody lorries up in flames too, you know.”
“We’ll see.”
It was their usual exchange of banter before the serious work began. To date, there had been little chance for the navigator to try his marksmanship. They had encountered no enemy fighters and on only two occasions had Christopher been able to give him a shot at a ground target.
The desert here was ridged by a succession of high dunes running north to south. The rising sun threw deep long shadows to the west. The Beaufighters had flown from east to west and turned south. To their left ran successive ranges of sand dunes, more or less parallel to one another. When they looked in that direction, the low-angled sun dazzled them. There were more rows of dunes to the right, but although the sun was not in their eyes when they looked that way, the Beaufighter crews could not discern anything in their shadow.
With no warning at all, bright specks of yellow light flashed in the air to the east of them, above the ground but lower than the Beaufighter’s altitude.
Tracer streaked towards them.
“Jumped...ambushed” Christopher spoke casually. “Damn.”
What had happened was clear. The enemy, knowing that their vehicles’ tracks would attract attention, had put up a dawn patrol of Me 109s to flit up and down in the shadow of the range of dunes immediately to the east of the place where they had laagered their lorries; and perhaps armoured cars among them.
Most bombers were most vulnerable when attacked from below and astern. Only the rear gunner could shoot an attacker, whereas in a high pass the dorsal and waist gunners could also do so. The Beaufighter was as vulnerable as any bomber to a belly attack.
But the Beau was a fighter and Tasker turned at once into the attack.
The yellow flashes at the Messerschmitts’ gun ports were in four separate clusters. The usual two pairs. They were no more than 20 feet above the ground when they opened fire and they were not climbing steeply. The long lines of tracer raked the air space around the Beaus.
There were no vehicles in sight yet. The enemy intended to shoot the intruders down or drive them away before they saw the lager. There was one benefit: no ground gunners to shoot at them.
Flames gushed from the muzzles of Tasker’s cannon. Christopher opened fire a few seconds later, making sure that he had a 109 steady in his sights. They were shooting at each other head-on. No need to work out deflection. Tracer burned past the cockpit and over the Beau’s wings.
“Two more, dead astern, high, Chris.”
“Damn them.”
In the interval between firing his cannon Christopher heard the rattle of Malahide’s Vickers. Cordite seeped into the cockpit. The distance separating the Beaufighters and the Messerschmitts melted to nothing in seconds. The air boiled as they rushed and thundered past each other, both formations breaking and beginning to turn at the same time when less than a hundred yards apart.
Christopher whirled round on a wingtip. He could see a Messerschmitt burning on the ground.
“One down, Harry.”
“Yeah. Cross-fire from the three of us.” Himself and the two other navigators.
“Good show. Broken your duck.’’
“One of ‘em coming in astern, three hundred yards...same height.”
They were banking too steeply for Malahide to be able to fire.
But the German pilot could shoot at them.
The Beaufighter could not turn inside the 109.
“Hold tight, Harry.”
The only way out of the dilemma was to astonish the enemy. Christopher had turned to the left and was almost perpendicular on his port wing tip. He brought the control column back to raise the Beau’s nose and to the right to bring the port wing up; and over into a barrel roll.
“Stone the crows.” Malahide sounded indignant.
The 109 tore past and Christopher had a glimpse of its baffled pilot jerking his head up to look at him. When he whipped out of the barrel roll the 109 was two hundred yards ahead and receding fast. He fired a burst of cannon. Another no-deflection shot. He saw vivid blue and yellow flashes where his cannon shells were ploughing into the 109. It was useless to fire at the cockpit from astern. The pilot was protected by armour plating at his back. At the angle of the two aircraft relative to one another the engine offered only a few visible square inches.
Christopher aimed at the fuselage at its weakest point, just in front of the tail unit, and at the fin and tail planes.
The fuselage split, the tail unit snapped off. The rudderless and destabilised aircraft began to dive steeply. Christopher just saw it crash onto the sand and explode before he had to whip around in another tight turn to avoid a stream of tracer that was sparkling across his bows from another attacker on his starboard side.
The Beaufighter had not been designed for dog fighting, but it was wonderfully acrobatic. The section’s task was not to shoot down Me 109s but to find and attack the enemy vehicles. The hard break brought heavy G forces to bear and neither Christopher nor Malahide could turn his head until the aircraft eased out of it.
Christopher reduced the steepness and tightness of his turn and searched around. The two big engines obstructed much of his view to either side. In the area which he could scan there was nothing to see.
“See anything, Harry?”
“Three of the bastards are down. The rest have pissed off. So have Tusker and Lamb.”
“And I know where they’ve gone. Take a shufti at ten-o’clock. Looks as if Jerry’s a bit cross.”
Torrents of
tracer from large-calibre machine-guns and from light flak were going up from an indiscernible source some two miles away on the port bow. They could see the two other Beaufighters diving. One disappeared from sight.
“Looks like someone’s come a gutzer, Chris.” Malahide had hardly spoken when the Beau soared into view again.
“Hooly-dooly! Must be a blood mirage.”
“No mirage. Jerry must be down in a wadi.”
At 300 m.p.h. they reached the site of the violent display of ground fire in 20 seconds. When they were still within six or eight seconds of it, Christopher saw that he had been right. There was no sign of guns or vehicles, but a shadowed gash lay across the desert, where there was a shallow valley between two ridges running east and west.
Both the other Beaufighters had withdrawn to circle below the angle at which the enemy could shoot at them.
“Red Three from Red One. Watch it. There are about fifty veekles down there and almost as many M.Gs and thirty-seven mil.”
“O.K. I’ll go in from the west.”
“Roight. We’ll sty this soide.”
Christopher swung round and approached the wadi entrance with his propeller tips only inches from the sand. He saw lorries and armoured cars in two files, one on each side of the wadi. The Germans had heard him and shafts of tracer, trembling in the haze created by smoke, sand and sun glare, slanted towards him. He dived to the bottom of the valley and began firing in long bursts. Lorries were already on fire and he saw more erupt as his shells struck them. He saw an armoured car burst into flames. Spandaus sited on both sides of the wadi wove a thick web of racing, sparkling red, yellow and green slashes above, below and on both sides of him.
He made a hard skidding turn to starboard and streaked up over the southern edge of the wadi with bullets plugging into the wings. Petrol began to pour from holes where flak shells had gashed the self-sealing fuel tanks.
“You O.K., Harry?”
“Didn’t get a chance to shoot at ‘em.”
“You’ve done enough shooting for this morning.”
“Red Three from Red One. All Ow Ky?”
“Losing fuel, Red One.”
“Can yew myke it back?”
“Don’t think so.”
“We’ll sty with yew.”
Half way back to base both engines died and Christopher had only a few seconds in which to choose a patch of sand that looked firm and even. He did not risk putting his wheels down. They might dig into the sand and slam the Beau onto its nose and over into a somersault that would kill him and Malahide.
An hour later a three-ton lorry picked them up and took them back to the airstrip while a salvage team made the Beaufighter ready to hump away on another vehicle.
The sergeant in charge of the party stood looking at the aircraft for a moment, then clicked his tongue. “You were lucky, sir. Flying Officer Black and Sergeant Grey bought it.”
They, respectively, had been Tasker’s and Lamb’s navigators.
During the next couple of days Christopher saw the new Grant tanks which had just arrived in Egypt from America — 400 of them — being transported to the Gazala Line. These, with a 75 mm gun and 57 mm of armour, were both better armed and better protected than the Panzer III(J) Special, with its 50 mm gun and 50 mm of armour. One hundred and seventy Grants were sent to the Front to add to the Matildas, which had 78 mm of armour and the Valentines, which were protected by 65 mm.
He watched the 1st South African Division prepare for battle on the right of the line and the British 50th Division on its left. He saw General Norrie’s 30 Corps take up positions from which it could cover the southern flank of the Gazala Line; and the 7th Armoured Division, which comprised only one armoured brigade, stretched thinly along a wide front, to support the French who held Bir Hacheim.
The squadron’s constant topic was the imminent offensive. June 1st would shake Jerry to the core, everyone agreed. They would have grandstand seats and a fine sweeping view of the whole battlefront; of Jerry in retreat.
On the night after he was shot down, Christopher was roused by the sound of Bofors guns around the air strip. He could hear the drone of German bombers.
Getting up, he went to look outside, shivering in the cold air. A few searchlight beams poked up at the sky, skeins of tracer flicked up to disappear in the darkness. There was no crash of bursting bombs nor did the earth tremble. He went back to sleep.
When he and Malahide went out to join the other crews as the sun was coming up, he saw lines of men walking slowly around the aircraft and along the strip of sand down which they would be taking off.
Wing Commander King, a beefy Australian who commanded the squadron and was rumoured to sleep in his slouch hat — he took it off with obvious reluctance when entering the mess tent — was talking to Squadron Leader Tasker and the other flight commander. He waved them towards him.
“Come on, blokes, fingers out. Get cracking with the rest.”
“What’s up, sir?”
“This is up, Christopher.”
The wing commander showed him a small pyramidical piece of metal with sharp hooks at the corners. It was painted to match the desert sand.
“This is what bloody Jerry unloaded on us last night. These little bastards will slash any tyre to ribbons. Everyone’s got to give a hand clearing them up. If we don’t find ‘em now, we won’t see them when the sun gets higher. When the sun’s low, they cast a shadow. Go and join that line of blokes over there. They’ll show you how to spot the little bastards.”
It was tiring work, bending low as they moved slowly forward, eyes shifting constantly from side to side, seeking the small patch of shadow that would betray one of the booby traps. Even this operation stimulated Malahide’s insatiable Aussie enthusiasm for gambling.
“Bet you a quid I find more then you, Christopher. Are you in it?”
“My eyes aren’t fully open yet. But I’ll take you on.”
“You’re in it, you mean.”
“Yes, I’m in it.”
It lent some interest to the chore and after an hour’s toil Christopher parted with a pound to the derision of his navigator and the three other Aussies on the squadron; including their C.O.
“If you could navigate as well as you can scavenge, Harry...”
“Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for later, cobber. When did I ever lose you? Tell me that.”
“I won’t say anything in public. I don’t want you to lose face with these other boss.”
“Hooly-dooly, a Pom who’s actually trying to learn the bloody language.”
If Western Desert Air Force pounded the enemy all day, the Luftwaffe was no less active. Airfields came in for daily attention: Gambut, where there were 12 miles of perimeter track, Fuka, Daba, Maaten Bagush. The railheads at Capuzzo, near Gazala, and at Misheifa were bombed time and again.
Large formations of Me 109s began to appear, sweeping the skies just as the Spitfire wings were doing from England across the Channel over France.
The hunt for the vicious little barbed triangles of steel had distracted Christopher temporarily from the irritation of the desert sores which a poor diet had caused to break out on his arms and chest: small, angry pimples that itched and oozed disgustingly. Malahide, like many others, had boils on his neck and one arm. These afflictions made the heat and constant sweat more difficult to bear and shortened tempers.
They also lowered morale, like any sign of ill-health. It was a relief to get into the air and have something else to think about.
Six Beaufighters took off, A Flight in full strength led by Squadron Leader Tasker. Once again Sergeant Lamb flew on his starboard and Christopher on his port. Tasker and Lamb each had a new navigator, experienced men taken from other pilots. Their predecessors had been buried with little ceremony, wrapped in blankets, under the sand the previous morning within two hours of their pilots’ return to base. Now it was as though the squadron had never known them.
They set course towards the
southern flank of the Gazala Line to strafe the enemy wherever they found him in the area of Bir Hacheim. Fifteen thousand feet overhead they could see the trails of a squadron of Hurricanes. Higher, and further west, more condensation trails hung in the cloudless sky, slowly disintegrating, where Messerschmitts had passed.
They rounded the left flank of the Line and headed for the enemy’s forward positions. An untidy cluster of black tents made of goats’ hair spread over a few hundred square yards of hard sand along the edge of a low escarpment. Christopher looked for tethered or seated camels, for goats, for signs of human presence. Instead he caught a flash of hard light, a metallic sheen, through a chink in one of the tents. Then another.
The flight commander, evidently, had seen the same. “Red One to Bovril Red and Yellow. Thaose are veekles or tanks daown there. Gaoing daown naow.” He led them in a gentle diving curve that would bring them in from south-east with the sun at their backs. Before he could signal an attack by firing his own guns, the sides of some of the tents came down to reveal sandbagged pits and light flak guns. The streams of coloured tracer from the 37 millimetre cannon, to which the R.A.F. referred with wry stoicism as Dingleberries, lanced in their direction.
Tasker fired his guns. The Beaufighters’ cannon had been loaded with a mixture of ball, armour-piercing and incendiary rounds. There was no tracer. Tasker did not bother with the flak gunners, he aimed where he had seen the sun reflected from a tank or armoured car. His shells tore away the sides and top from one of the concealing tents and revealed a Panzer III(J) Special against which his incendiaries were sending off sparks and little licks of flame. A gush of smoke poured upwards from the tank.
The Beaufighters spread out and rushed at the dummy Arab encampment with only a foot or two to spare between their airscrews and the ground. Sand rose and danced in tall plumes and whorls. Heavy machine-guns opened up with tracer. Fires spread from tent to tent. One after another armoured cars and tanks, lorries and scout cars caught fire. Some exploded, hurling chunks of burning metal, canvas and men among the attacking aircraft.
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 61