Wynne-Williams radioed Phelan, who was Yeoman’s deputy, and asked for permission to detach the three Tempests of Red Section to go to the Wing Commander’s assistance. Phelan granted it readily and the three Tempests at once swung away towards the north-west in a shallow dive.
Wynne-Williams got his bearings and located the remains of the first Focke-Wulf destroyed by Yeoman; a pall of dense smoke drifted slowly across the fields from the blazing fragments. A couple of miles further on the shattered wreck of a second aircraft also burned fiercely; Wynne-Williams swept low over it, fearing the worst, then saw a black cross stamped on a shattered wing and knew that Yeoman had found another victim.
But where was Yeoman? Further radio calls brought no response; it was as though the sky had swallowed up the Wing Commander’s Tempest completely. Wynne-Williams decided that there was no point in remaining in the dangerous vicinity of Bremen to carry out what might prove to be a fruitless search; if Yeoman had been hit but was still flying, he would be on his way home.
‘All right, Red Section, let’s get out of here. Steer 225 degrees and keep your eyes peeled.’
The three Tempests turned towards the south-west, following a homeward route towards the Dutch border and keeping well clear of Rheine airfield. Twenty miles further on, near Osterwick, a thread of smoke drawn across the sky led them to Yeoman’s limping aircraft.
*
Yeoman glanced back through the oil-blurred canopy and his heart leaped into his throat when he saw the three aircraft bearing down on him. His hand tightened on the stick, ready to turn and face them. If this was to be his last fight, he was determined to make it a costly one for the enemy.
An indescribable surge of relief flooded through him when he saw that the aircraft were Tempests. They formed up alongside him and somehow their presence was like a heady tonic coursing through his veins, even though he knew deep down that his crippled fighter would almost certainly never reach Eindhoven.
Wynne-Williams, formatting close to Yeoman’s port wing-tip, surveyed the other’s aircraft with considerable alarm. The metal of the rear fuselage was riddled with jagged holes of varying sizes; it was a miracle that the control cables had not been sliced through. There were holes in the wings, too, and a big one in the cockpit canopy through which Wynne-Williams could see the pilot’s head and shoulders. He was relieved when Yeoman looked across and waved reassuringly; his friend did not appear to be hurt, or at least not badly.
Suddenly, Wynne-Williams saw that Yeoman’s Tempest was losing height, slowly but surely. It was already down to three thousand feet. Moreover, the trail of smoke from its exhaust stubs was growing thicker with every passing second.
The River Maas was ahead of them. Beyond it lay a strip of enemy-held territory, some ten miles across, and then safety. But ten miles was much, much too far.
Yeoman’s labouring fighter struggled across the Maas, losing height quickly now. Wynne-Williams knew that it would never get clear of enemy territory now; he also knew that it was too low for Yeoman to have any chance of baling out. Urgently, he called up the other two Tempests.
‘He’s going down. Cover him — watch out for flak and small arms fire!’
The three Tempests went down almost to ground level, rocking their wings as they quartered the landscape, their pilots alert to any possible threat to Yeoman’s crippled aircraft. The latter, gushing smoke now, was in a flat glide towards a long field by the side of a small river. Wynne-Williams followed it down, noting that Yeoman had jettisoned his cockpit canopy.
Hammering through Wynne-Williams’ mind was the thought that a belly-landing in a Tempest was the most dangerous thing in the world. The flaps had to be lowered half-way and the tail kept well down until the moment of impact, which occurred at about 170 mph. If the nose was allowed to drop, the huge scoop of the radiator would dig into the ground and the aircraft would immediately flip over on its back, trapping the pilot in the cockpit.
‘Look out, flak!’
Red Three’s shout echoed over the radio and Wynne-Williams immediately put his aircraft in a tight turn, first to the left and then to the right, and quickly located the enemy gun position. The Germans had converted a windmill into a flak tower, and from it a stream of fiery coals converged on Red Three, who was twisting frantically away from the danger.
The enemy fire crept round in an arc towards Wynne-Williams as the latter sped like a bullet across the mile or so of ground that separated him from the flak post. His thumb jabbed down on the gun button and he kept it there, seeing his shells churn up great fountains of mud near the windmill’s base. A slight backward pressure on the control column, and the shells ‘walked’ up the side of the windmill in a trail of flying bricks to explode on the gun itself. Wynne-Williams had a glimpse of dark figures hurling themselves in terror from the parapet and then he was thundering overhead, turning back hard to where Yeoman had come down.
The Wing Commander’s Tempest was a crumpled heap, lying two-thirds of the way into the field at the end of a long scar of churned-up earth. One wing had been torn off completely; the engine cowling was partly buried in the mud and the fuselage was broken aft of the cockpit.
Wynne-Williams roared low overhead, looking down. There was no sign of the pilot. But half a mile away, German soldiers in an extended line were running hard across the fields towards the wreck. The other Tempest pilots had seen them too, and without waiting for instructions they dived down to make a strafing run, unleashing a devastating fury of cannon fire at the enemy.
Wynne-Williams circled Yeoman’s shattered aircraft, quartering the area around it, reasoning that the pilot could not be far away. He spotted him suddenly, crouching in the shelter of a railway embankment. Yeoman waved as Wynne-Williams cruised slowly past, then gesticulated several times towards the wrecked Tempest.
His number two got his meaning almost at once. Every Tempest was fitted with demolition charges, so that the pilot could destroy the aircraft in the event of a forced landing in enemy territory, but it was clear that Yeoman had not been able to activate them for some reason — and the Wing Commander’s aircraft was one of four in the Eindhoven Wing that had been fitted with a brand new type of ‘Identification Friend or Foe’ radio transponder which enabled a friendly controller not only to distinguish between Allied and enemy formations, but also to tell one Allied formation from another by means of coloured blips on his radar tube.
The equipment, Wynne-Williams knew, must not be allowed to fall intact into enemy hands. Bringing the Tempest round in a tight S-turn, a few feet above the ground, he lined up with Yeoman’s aircraft and opened fire. The effect was instantaneous and dramatic. The impact of his incendiary shells produced a vivid flash, followed by an expanding ball of flame as what was left of the fuel in the wreck’s tanks exploded.
He flew over the remains, making sure that the destruction was as complete as possible, then climbed to a thousand feet and looked around to get his bearings. He knew that the town he could see a few miles to the south was Venlo; a quick consultation with his map told him that the villages he could see immediately to north and south of the spot where Yeoman had crash-landed must be Venraij and Horst. The Allied lines were only ten miles away, with Eindhoven a similar distance beyond them.
The other Tempests were still snarling backwards and forwards at hedge-top height. The enemy troops had obviously gone to ground, and for good measure the Tempest pilots shot up a couple of trucks, which were now burning on a nearby road.
There was nothing more they could do to help Yeoman. Wynne-Williams pointed the nose of his aircraft towards the west, called up the others and told them to go home. Behind them, in response to shouted commands, the German troops emerged from their cover and once more resumed their cautious advance towards the funeral pyre of Yeoman’s Tempest.
Chapter Six
YEOMAN CROUCHED IN THE NARROW CULVERT AND, despite his wet, miserable and muddy state, counted himself one of the luckiest men alive.
&nbs
p; The culvert lay in the middle of a small wood and he suspected that it had long been forgotten. Once, the track through the wood must have been a well-used road, perhaps one trodden by local country folk taking their wares to market, but it was now badly overgrown and the stones of the culvert that channelled the waters of a stream under it were old and rough, covered by a deep layer of slimy moss.
Yeoman had stumbled on the little culvert quite by accident. The stream, along which he had waded in the hope of throwing any tracker dogs off the scent, had led him from the railway embankment in whose lee he had sheltered after running from his wrecked Tempest directly to the cover of the wood; plunging deeper into it, still following the stream, he had been surprised to find that the latter went underground. A rapid investigation had soon revealed the old culvert, running under the grass-grown mound of the track, its entrance and exit both screened by a tangle of thorns and roots.
Crawling inside, he had managed to find a slab of rock that rose just above water level and had squatted down on it, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible. He had spent all day in the wet half-darkness, clutching his service revolver, listening apprehensively for sounds of pursuit.
But there had been no pursuit — or at least none that came near his hiding-place. As the hours went by he had begun to relax a little, to take stock of his situation and to make plans.
He had bathed his cuts with icy water from the stream, dabbed on his face with a clean handkerchief. Apart from a large bruise on his forehead where he had hit the Tempest’s gunsight a glancing blow during the crash-landing, they were his only hurts. Shuddering, he recalled how close the fighter had come to turning over on its back during the long slide across the field; at one point it had stood almost on the end of its nose and he had hung there helplessly in his straps for what had seemed an age, staring at the earth, before the Tempest had slammed down on its belly again with a bone-jarring crunch.
The light began to fade steadily outside his man-made cave, and for the first time he felt a pang of hunger. He took a chocolate bar from the pocket of his battledress and ate half of it, savouring each morsel; there was no telling when he might eat again.
He was frozen to the marrow, but he had no intention of leaving his hiding place until nightfall. The temperature was dropping all the time, and he knew that his first and most urgent priority was to find drier, warmer shelter; He longed for a smoke, but convinced himself that it was too risky; the scent of tobacco could carry a very long way on frosty air. Instead, he sucked the stem of his unlit pipe and tried chewing a little tobacco, but this made him feel sick and he spat it out in disgust, washing out his mouth with a cupped handful of clear water from the stream.
At last, the glimmer of daylight that penetrated the culvert faded and then died altogether. Carefully, wincing with the pain of limbs that had been too long in a cramped position, he wormed his way through the thorns at the culvert’s entrance and then knelt there in almost childlike wonder as he surveyed the transformed scene around him.
It must have been snowing all day, the big flakes falling calmly and unhurriedly as he crouched in his cavern. The snowfall lay two or three inches thick underfoot and the flakes were still floating down through the branches of the trees, brushing softly against Yeoman’s face as he stood up and stretched gratefully. Somehow, it seemed warmer outside, out of the culvert’s clammy darkness, and Yeoman knew that as long as it went on snowing his chances of evading capture would increase. Feeling his spirits rise, he ate a little more chocolate and then set off to walk through the wood, keeping a westerly direction with the help of a tiny, luminous escape compass which had been sewn into the lining of his battledress blouse.
His footfalls were noiseless on the carpet of snow. Although the flakes melted on his outer clothing and made it wet, he felt no undue discomfort; now that he was on the move his long woollen underclothing and thick sweater kept him reasonably warm, while his head was adequately covered by a woollen balaclava helmet which he always carried with him on operations.
As he walked, Yeoman found that he could see quite well. Probably because of the snow, the night — or rather the early evening, for his watch told him that it was only six o’clock — seemed to hold a kind of luminosity, and although he blundered into low-lying undergrowth on several occasions he had no difficulty in tracing a path among the trees, their trunks jutting up like tall sentinels amid the swirling whiteness.
As yet, Yeoman had not formed a clear idea about where he was going. It must, he surmised, be only a question of time until the enemy realized that his charred body did not lie in the remains of his Tempest, and resumed their search for him with the return of daylight; it was vital, therefore, that he covered as much ground as possible before daybreak, and since he knew that the British lines lay several miles to the west of his present position, it seemed logical to head in that direction. When daylight came, he would hole up again somewhere; beyond that, he had no other plan at present.
He walked slowly and cautiously, his .38 revolver gripped firmly in his right hand, alert for any strange sound around him; but total silence hung over the wood. Presently, the trees began to thin out, and when there were no longer any dark shapes in front of him he knew that he must be standing at the woodside. It was difficult to see anything now in the falling snow, but he thought that the ground sloped away quite sharply.
Well, he thought, I can’t hang around here. There’s only one way to go, and that’s forward.
He took a single stride, and at that moment something cold and hard jabbed into the back of his neck. His mouth dropped open in astonishment as a voice whispered swiftly in his ear in perfect English:
‘All right, old boy. Hold it there. This is a shotgun, and if you don’t do exactly as I tell you I’ll blow your head off. We’ll take your peashooter.’
A hand reached out from the darkness and relieved Yeoman of his revolver. The pilot’s mind was in total confusion. ‘We’, the man with the shotgun had said. That meant more than one. But who were they? Friends or enemies? In a strangled voice, flinching away slightly from the cold menace of the shotgun at his neck, he started to voice his questions, only to be cut short by a curt command from behind.
‘Not now, old boy. Just do as I say, and everything’ll be all right. Now start walking — not too fast, mind. Keep going a little to the left. That’s it. There’s a path here somewhere, leading down the hillside. We won’t find it in this snow, of course, but if we follow the general direction we won’t fall over the rocks and things.’
The fellow’s almost conversational, Yeoman thought bemusedly, and did as he was told, urged on by the shotgun. Once or twice he toyed with the idea of making a break for it, although he knew he would not get very far. Besides, not daring to turn his head, he had no means of knowing how many men had taken him prisoner, or whether they were all armed. They had his revolver, he thought ruefully, as well as the shotgun.
They went on down the hillside. Several times, at a hissed command from the man with the shotgun, they stopped for a minute, and Yeoman guessed that his captors were listening intently. That, at least, was a good sign; if they were afraid of being detected by the Germans, the latter were obviously not friends of theirs. Nevertheless, being driven into the unknown at gunpoint like this was an unnerving experience, and he was thankful when, a few minutes later, they came to the village.
*
Vrouw Hetta van Oosten was preparing the evening meal, such as it was, and indulging in one of the daydreams that were becoming more and more frequent in these frugal times. She was dreaming of the day when, God willing, she would once more be reunited with her eldest son, Paul.
A merchant seaman, Paul had been in Java when, in 1942, the Japanese had swept across the Dutch East Indies. There had been a long period of heartbreak when she had been convinced that he was dead; then, only a few months ago, had come the news that he was in an internment camp.
She sighed deeply and looked down at the porridge
she had been stirring over the fire. It was not much, but in these times when German-occupied Holland was starving it was enough to fill the bellies of herself and her younger son. And, she thought with a sudden smile, the bellies of those others who happened to pass her way from time to time ...
She glanced up at the photograph of her two sons, standing next to that of her dead husband on the mantelpiece. Her husband had been gone from her these ten years now, carried away swiftly and silently by a tumour on the brain, and in a way it was just as well. Far better that than slavery under the Germans.
Suddenly, above the crackling of the fire, she heard a new sound: a gentle tapping at the window. Startled, she turned away from the fire, listening. A moment later the sound came again, a little more insistently this time.
Quickly, Vrouw van Oosten turned down the lamp so that the room was lit only by the flickering fire, and crossed over to the door. Lifting the heavy curtain that covered it, she turned the key and opened the door an inch or two until it stuck against its safety chain. An urgent voice whispered from the darkness.
‘Quickly, mother. It’s me!’
‘Henrik! Thank God! I thought something must have happened.’
She opened the door to admit her younger son and the two men who were with him, then quickly replaced the chain, turned the key in the lock again and re-adjusted the curtain. Then, turning up the lamp once more, she scrutinized the man who was a stranger to her house.
‘So,’ she murmured, ‘what have we here? Another flyer, by the look of it. Ah, your poor face! I shall tend to that in a moment. But first of all, you must have something to eat.’
Tempest Squadron Page 8