The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  ​“Hello Goodwood, this is Haystack leader, can you slow down a bit, my engine’s packed up.”

  ​It was ironic to have the call sign ‘Haystack Leader’. Just yesterday he had been a lowly sub-lieutenant, one of the junior pilots in 843 Squadron of the Royal Navy Air Arm. Now he is the senior officer in a unit that has only two surviving aircraft, but even as he forms the thought another comes to mock it ‘Perhaps only one if you cock this up.’

  ​As the slanting sunlight comes clear and brilliant through the low clouds, he sees the pitching deck of the ship and the white water foaming behind the hull. It is somehow beautiful, but there is no time to appreciate it now. He looks quickly at his watch – almost midnight, though at this time of year, in this northern latitude, the sun is still above the horizon. His wingman is landing on; the aircraft is almost stationary above the round down, poised like a sparrow over a bird table, then he sees it bounce and roll to a stop.

  ​His hands move around the cockpit automatically. The prospect of a dead stick landing on a carrier in a rough sea is a frightening one, but he is too tired to be afraid. His body aches and his eyes feel sore and gritty. This, for him, is the second day of the war.

  *

  That morning Sub Lieutenant John Leighton had risen at 5:00 and gone to the hanger deck. The air had a dead, flat taste and the machine smell of oil and petrol clung to every surface. The artificers were readying his aircraft for flight. They had worked through the night, repairing damage it had sustained in the actions of the day before. The thin, red-eyed crew chief, Petty Officer Dent, was nursing a mug of coffee and a cheese sandwich.

  “How’s your breakfast Dent?”

  ​“Tastes like feet sir.”

  ​“Excellent. What’s for lunch?”

  ​“Mutton again sir.”

  ​“Nothing wrong with a bit of mutton Dent.”

  ​“That’s what that bloke on the Rodney said, sir.”

  ​“Which one?”

  ​“The sheep shagger.”

  ​Leighton smiled and looked at his aircraft. “Is this contraption going to get me home?”

  “You’ve made a will have you sir?”

  ​“I’ve left everything to you chief.”

  ​“Will I be rich, sir?”

  ​“It’ll buy you a couple of pints and a packet of fags, if you’re careful.” They were still so new to war that they could joke about death. Dent paused for a moment chewing thoughtfully, then he said;

  ​“I expect you’ll be going after that German aircraft carrier again will you, sir?”

  ​“Yes I expect so. Perhaps I’m the one who better be careful.”

  ​He walked around the aircraft slowly, checking it carefully, noting the patches over the bullet holes, squeezing his body through the narrow spaces between it and the other aeroplanes in the hanger. It was a Hawker Sea Hurricane, a single seat shipboard fighter with the code letter ‘R’ painted on the fuselage. Once he was done, the aircraft had gone up to the flight deck on the lift. He had taken off and climbed into formation with the five other fighters that had survived the previous day’s encounters with the Germans. It was an absolutely clear day and the sea below them was a sheet of glass. As they reached fifteen thousand feet he fancied he could see the uneven shapes of the Lofoten Islands silhouetted against the sun’s glare as it traversed the eastern horizon.

  ​A thousand feet below and a mile ahead of them was the strike they were escorting. Six Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers and four Blackburn Skua dive bombers. These sixteen aircraft were all that remained of Courageous’ air group, she had set sail with forty eight – twelve Albacores, twelve Skuas and twenty four Sea Hurricanes. The reconstruction she had just finished had equipped her to carry sixty, but the FAA was expanding less quickly than aircraft carriers were being commissioned. The situation was so grave that they were being deployed with half air groups and sometimes less.

  ​His squadron had received their orders the day before the ship had sailed. They had landed on her for the first time as she left the Firth of Forth with two escorting destroyers. Both the Albacore and the Sea Hurricane were new aircraft, untested in combat and inclined to produce unwelcome surprises, but there was no time for the leisurely training of peace. The Sea Hurricane in particular had been rushed into service. It lacked the usual naval equipment, being unable to use either the ship’s catapults to take off or its arrester wires to land. It didn’t even have folding wings for stowage, but in the air it was a huge leap forward in capability from the Hawker Nimrod biplanes the squadron had flown before.

  ​The ship too was unfamiliar; it was so large and so complex that he was often lost. It seemed full of cold, echoing metal corridors that smelled of potatoes or fuel oil and rang with the shrill of boatswain’s pipes. So complete had been her re-construction that even men who had been on her before found her baffling.

  ​Their task was to cover the evacuation of allied troops from Norway. On the morning of 2nd June they had rendezvoused with the French battleships Martel and Charlemagne and the cruiser Algerie. The mood on Courageous was cheerful, resolute and tense. Glorious, another British carrier, was already patrolling fifty nautical miles to the south. They ate their meals in a hurry, tensely waiting for the call to action. He had found it hard to sit quietly in the stuffy ready room, harder still to listen to the chaplain who came and gave them communion as it was Sunday. By 08:00 the tension had driven him from the chair and he had gone for a walk on the flight deck.

  ​Lieutenant Commander Higgins, the ship’s Commander (Flying) and Surgeon Commander O’Rourke, the ship’s senior physician, stood near the port aft guns. They watched three biplanes flying quite slowly towards them over the water. The aircraft were about two miles away to the north. As Leighton walked over to them Higgins was saying; “They must be Albacores, but from where? Glorious is south of us…”

  O’Rourke interrupted him, “They look remarkably Germanic to me, I think they’re Fiesler 167 torpedo bombers.”

  ​“No, No.” replied Higgins, “Those are definitely Albacores – there’s been no alarm.”

  ​“I don’t think so…”

  ​“My dear chap, there is no doubt about it, those are…” but his words were drowned by the sudden crash of the destroyer Icarus’ guns. She had been keeping station on Courageous’ port side; now she leaped forward, spray exploding from her pitching bows as they bit deep into the sea and across the water the sound of her Klaxon rang out as she opened fire. The black shapes of torpedoes fell from beneath the approaching aircraft and machine guns in their wings opened up to send bullets ricocheting across Courageous’ flight deck in showers of sparks. The three men threw themselves flat. There was a thunderous explosion, then another and the aircraft roared above them, so close Leighton was afraid to lift his head though he saw the black crosses painted on the light blue of their wings. As he leapt to his feet and ran for the catwalk around the flight deck he saw the shattered Icarus falling behind the stern of the carrier. She was staggering beneath two towering columns of water that slowly fell back onto her decks and her hull was breaking in two. Her bow was listing hard to starboard and turning into Courageous’ wake, but her engines were still racing, driving the stern forward, jack–knifing the hull as the ship broke in half at the ragged hole where the torpedoes had gutted her. Leighton winced at the horrible shriek of tearing metal and he realised that had Icarus not taken those two torpedoes they would have struck Courageous.

  ​As he jumped down off the flight deck and on to the catwalk, he landed next to Higgins and O’Rourke, Higgins was shaking his head in disbelief. Quietly O’Rourke said;

  ​“Albacores?”

  *

  “Haystack leader, this is Goodwood, we are slowing to twelve knots, you’ve got about forty-five knots wind speed coming over the flight deck, do you want to ditch?”

  ​“No thanks Goodwood I’ll bring her in. Tell the deck crew to take cover; oh, and tell the gunners not to shoot at me wou
ld you.”

  ​“Roger Haystack Leader and good luck.”

  ​He blinks and shakes his head to banish the weariness that seems to want to pull him down to the cockpit floor. As he pushes back the canopy the roar and buffet of the slipstream fills his senses. He is close now and changes the trim again, adjusting for the reduction in the carrier’s pace. He lets the nose of the aircraft drop a little to gain momentum and pushes the goggles down onto his face.

  *

  They had launched two fighters, but the Fiesler 167s had made a clean getaway. The other destroyer stopped to pick up Icarus’ survivors while Courageous was suddenly abuzz with frantic activity as they readied their first strike. The German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin had somehow slipped through the allied ships and was operating to their north. By 09:30 they had launched eleven Albacores (one went unserviceable as she warmed up), all twelve of the Skuas and the twelve Sea Hurricanes of 843 Squadron.

  ​The strike searched to the north for three hours but found nothing but empty sea. When they returned, feeling let-down, they could see the disappointment on the faces of the deck crew as they landed with the tape still covering their gun ports.

  ​Clouds came up during the afternoon, the sea grew bigger and the ship drove through sudden squalls and patches of rain. They were right in the middle of one when the alarm sounded. Courageous had turned away from the rest of the squadron and into the wind to launch her aircraft when the squall engulfed them. As Leighton ran from the ready room in the base of the island superstructure across the wet slippery deck, he could see the French ships in clear weather three miles away on their port quarter. Water spouts reared up as bombs burst around them, he could see the tiny shapes of aircraft above them and the sudden glint of sunlight on wings.

  ​He leaped into one of the six Sea Hurricanes ranged on deck, their engines kept warm by being run every twenty minutes thundered in to life. The first two took off straight into the teeth of the gale, then the next two, one after the other. Now it was his turn and the wind was so fierce that the tail came up as soon as he opened the throttle and she was clear of the flight deck and climbing before he had time to realise that he could barely see through the rain lashed windscreen.

  ​He pulled the aircraft into an ascending starboard turn that bought him back across Courageous’ wake. The radio was dead and the other Sea Hurricanes nowhere in sight, but suddenly he was in sunlight and the slipstream was blowing the water droplets off the cockpit canopy. Ahead and below him, two of the French ships were heeling in circles while the third was stopped and down by the bows in a spreading patch of oil.

  ​Even as he realised that the damaged ship was the Algerie, he heard a sound like a handful of stones thrown hard against a tin roof and felt the tug as bullets hit his aircraft’s wings and tail. He winced, as instinctively he pulled the stick back and to the left and his head snapped around to look astern.

  ​So close it seemed as if he could almost touch it, a Messerschmitt 109T fighter was right on his tail, following him into the turn, gun flashes rippling from wings and fuselage. As he fought down the tide of panic that clutched at his throat his mind groped for what the intelligence officer had told them about the 109T. ‘Don’t try and turn with her. Those extended wingtips will make her a good turner at all attitudes, but they will also make her a poor roller.’

  ​He snap rolled the Sea Hurricane onto its back and sent it into an inverted dive. The ‘109 tried to follow, but wasn’t quick enough and as the Sea Hurricane corkscrewed away the German pilot half rolled back in the opposite direction and started to climb. As Leighton came out of the roll he saw why. Two Sea Hurricanes were on the ‘109s tail, but there was no time to see the results of their attack. He was at a thousand feet and Ack-Ack was bursting around him. He felt a sudden annoyance. Why were they shooting at him? He noticed that two of the French ships seemed to be stopped now and as he started to climb he saw the scuttling shapes of two Fiesler 167s low off his port wingtip heading in the opposite direction. He turned into them, hoping to attack from their port quarter but he didn’t have enough speed and found himself closing from astern. Their rear guns sparkled and tracer arched towards him. He selected one of them, fired a long burst and the water ahead of his target churned with bullet splashes but he saw no hits.

  He pulled the aircraft into a climbing turn to renew the attack, but the Fieslers were climbing too and disappeared into low clouds. He gained altitude and looked around. Two of the French ships were definitely in trouble. Algerie had lost her bows from forward of ‘A’ turret and was stopped and wallowing. One of the battleships was also stopped and had developed a list to starboard, a destroyer was closing, but he could not concentrate on the scene below him. His eyes swept the sky in every direction and he was suddenly conscious of his racing heartbeat and his hands clammy inside his gloves. He was flying alone in the empty air. He climbed to five thousand feet and the ships were like toys below him, one of them looked squarer than the rest – Courageous.

  ​After landing, he learned that all three of the French ships had sustained damage and would have to withdraw. Martel could only make ten knots, Algerie barely seven. She had taken two torpedoes almost simultaneously; they had struck in the same place as well, blowing off her bows. The ship should survive, but her speed and ability to manoeuvre were gone. Martel had taken three torpedoes all on the starboard side. Her list had been corrected by counter flooding, but she was low in the water and would have to be repaired before she could re-join the fight. All three of the French ships had suffered bomb hits but none of the bombs had been armour piercing so they were largely ineffective. However, Charlemagne had been struck by one on the bridge at the base of her main director and the blast had rendered it useless.

  ​As the French ships limped westward at their best speed, Courageous took up station to their north, zigzagging to throw off submarine attack. Twice more that day they sent out strikes. The first in late afternoon failed to make contact, the second in the evening went without 843 Squadron who were tasked with standing patrols above the damaged ships. It was nearly 11:00 when they returned. Leighton was dozing in his flying gear in the ready room when the thud of the first aircraft landing on woke him. He ran out onto the flight deck as the crew pushed the Albacore forward to clear it for the next.

  ​This time they had found the Graf Zeppelin, had hit her with at least two bombs and a torpedo and were certain that she must be sinking; they reckoned they might have sunk her escorting destroyer as well. The air crews were euphoric, though their losses to the German ack-ack and fighters had been heavy. Their jubilation was infectious, he had gone to bed elated and risen in a mood that bordered on the joyful.

  ​Sending all sixteen of Courageous’ surviving aircraft out on the strike was a risk, but Vice Admiral Slatter, who was in command of the British ships, was prepared to believe that Graf Zeppelin might be too heavily damaged to launch a strike of her own. They searched until their fuel ran low but found nothing and wondered if the German carrier had sunk already.

  When they returned to their own ship they were greeted by ack-ack fire from the nervous gunners and were horrified to see the black scars of two bomb hits on her deck. Each time one of them tried to land, the ship fired on them. When Commander Higgins finally managed to get his Albacore down on the fourth attempt, he jumped out almost before it came to rest, stormed across to one of the midships pom–pom gun mountings, grabbed the Lieutenant in charge by the throat and almost throttled him.

  ​The ship had been attacked by six Junkers 87C ‘Stukas’ from the German carrier. Neither of the hits had penetrated Courageous’ new armoured deck. Again, the bombs had not been armour piercing, so they had only left dents, scorched paintwork and a severed arrestor wire. Two of the Stukas had been seen to crash.

  ​As soon as they landed, the flight deck crew began the task of refuelling the aircraft. They were going straight back out. In the night they had been joined by the cruiser Bristol and she had launch
ed one of her Walrus spotter planes to chase after the retreating Stukas. The Walrus hadn’t been able to keep up, but had carried on the same course and had found the German carrier to the east between them and the Norwegian coast. She was hurrying southwards in a bold attempt to slip home unnoticed. The pilot of the Walrus had signalled that he was under attack, then they had lost contact and could only assume that he had been shot down, but he had given a position that put the Graf Zeppelin a hundred and seventy miles to the south east of them.

  ​They took off and flew below heavy cloud that had rolled in from the north. They found the German carrier moving slowly on the dark ocean, launching her fighters, while a single escorting destroyer kept station ahead of her. The Albacores manoeuvred into position as the Skua dive bombers attacked. One of their bombs hit her, blowing the aft lift bodily into the air and sending a taxiing ‘109 careening over the side. Four of the German fighters had managed to launch and were clawing for altitude when Leighton heard ‘Tally Ho!’ over the radio and the Sea Hurricanes peeled off one by one as each pilot rammed the throttle forward and dived into the attack.

  ​His speed was touching three hundred and fifty knots as he singled out a German fighter and fired a long burst from eight hundred yards. The whole aircraft juddered with the recoil of the guns, but he missed and the Messerschmitt jinked to port and rolled into a shallow dive. Leighton pulled the nose of his aircraft up sharply, his vision turning to grey at the edges as the G forces pushed him down into his seat, but he still had so much momentum that he was easily overhauling the ‘109. He fired again, this time from four hundred yards, but the German anticipated his shot and side slipped.