Chapman looked dubiously at him. ‘I think you’re bloody mad,’ he said. ‘Fifteen miles through an area crawling with Jerries might just as well be fifteen hundred. Still, since you’re quite obviously in a determined mood, I’m prepared to give you all the help I can.’
He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then turned and spoke in Dutch to Henrik. The young man listened gravely, then nodded.
‘Henrik has agreed to go with you as far as Boxmeer,’ Chapman told the pilot. The latter opened his mouth to protest, but was cut short by a wave of the army officer’s hand.
‘No buts, old boy. Henrik will take you to Boxmeer, which is about seven or eight miles from here. We’ve a contact there, you see, who is hiding some of our chaps. He’ll put you up for the night and set you on your way again the next day. Now, let’s get down to the finer details.’
For the next couple of hours the men went over Yeoman’s plan in detail. Vrouw van Oosten gave Yeoman a disapproving look when she learned of his intentions, but nevertheless she made up a bundle of food from her meagre supply and pressed it on him. She also gave him a cloth cap and an overcoat which had once belonged to her husband; the coat was ragged, but it would serve as extra protection against the winter weather, and Yeoman was glad of it.
The pilot and Henrik waited until it was ten o’clock, then slipped quietly out of the house after making their whispered farewells. Chapman gripped Yeoman’s hand tightly and said, with a trace of wistfulness in his voice:
‘Goodbye, old chap. Now that you’re leaving, I wish I were coming with you. But I’d better stay here, I suppose, and make sure the others are organized when the time comes.’
Yeoman gripped the other’s shoulder. ‘So long, Mike. I’ll make sure our people know all about you, when I get back. It won’t be long before you’re out of here. In the meantime, keep your head down.’
The two men did not look back as they moved stealthily away from the house into the foggy darkness. Yeoman followed Henrik blindly, trusting the young man implicitly as he led him up dark alleys and along paths that wound their way through gardens. Once, they froze into immobility as something moved in the swirling vapour ahead of them; but it was only a dog, and with a low growl it scurried away into the night.
The thin layer of snow that covered the ground was frozen hard, and their feet made scarcely any impression as they walked on. Henrik, who knew exactly where he was, kept up a fast pace, and despite the intense cold Yeoman was soon perspiring. It was a relief when, after moving across country for some two miles, they reached the railway line and began to walk along it.
Yeoman knew that trains no longer moved along this stretch of track, for the twenty-five miles of line between Venlo and Nijmegen had long since been blasted out of recognition by Allied bombs and the Germans had given up their attempts at repairing it. In places, the two men found the going very hard, for they were compelled to skirt or clamber over great mounds of frozen earth that still surrounded old bomb craters. On two occasions, they were forced to clamber up the embankment and move in open country for a while, for the line was completely blocked for hundreds of yards where Allied fighter-bombers had destroyed rolling stock.
They reached the outskirts of Boxmeer at four o’clock in the morning, and Henrik made the pilot understand that they now had to move with extreme caution, for there were many Germans in the village. Yet, thankfully, there was not a soul in sight as they crept through the cobbled streets, moving silently from wall to sheltering wall like wraiths in the all-embracing fog; not a sound stirred the stillness except the rasp of their own breathing and the beating of their adrenalin-boosted hearts.
They turned a corner and Henrik stopped suddenly, laying a hand on Yeoman’s arm and pointing. On the other side of a little square, just visible in the murk, was a church, and the pilot gathered that one of the houses close to it was their destination.
They sidled round the edge of the square and climbed a low wall at the far side, jumping down into a graveyard. Henrik paused for a moment to get his bearings, then led the pilot past a clump of bushes to a path that meandered through the tombstones, ending at a lych-gate. They passed through the latter, wincing as the metal hinges creaked alarmingly, climbed another wall on the other side of a narrow alley, and at last found themselves in the back yard of a house.
Yeoman almost fell over Henrik as the Dutchman bent down suddenly, groping for something in the darkness. A moment later, after some effort, a trapdoor swung open and Henrik indicated that the pilot was to climb down through it. Yeoman did so, lowering himself carefully over the edge and moving his feet about experimentally until they encountered the rungs of a ladder. He scrambled quickly down, followed by Henrik, who closed the trapdoor over their heads, and stood motionless in the inky blackness, wondering what was coming next.
He heard the rattle of matches, then blinked as a sudden flare of light split the darkness. Shielding the flame in his cupped hand, the Dutchman went over to an oil lamp that was hanging from the ceiling and lit it. Then he reached out and pulled a thin, rusty chain that disappeared into a hole in the wall. Distantly, a bell tinkled.
In the lamp’s glow, Yeoman saw that they were standing in a fairly large cellar. From its smell, he guessed that it had once been used for storing malt, although it was now empty. He looked at Henrik and raised a questioning eyebrow, but the Dutchman just smiled and motioned with his thumb towards a heavy wooden door that was let into one of the cellar walls at the head of a small flight of worn steps.
Several minutes passed, and then the pilot tensed as he heard soft footfalls somewhere beyond the closed door. Gently, an unseen hand rapped on it; two knocks, then three, then two more. Crossing to the door, Henrik answered with a different code.
Instantly, there was the sound of heavy bolts being drawn, and the door swung open to admit a gigantic figure of a man. He wore corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved vest under which huge muscles bulged, and in one great ham of a fist he carried a Sten sub-machine-gun. His face, under a stubble of closely-cropped yellow hair, was amiable, and it split into a huge grin as he came down the cellar steps towards Henrik.
The two Dutchmen held a brief and rapid conversation, and then the giant turned to Yeoman and said in surprisingly good English:
‘Welcome to my home, Wing Commander. My young friend Henrik tells me that you are planning to cross the front line. It is a dangerous thing to try and do. There are many German positions, many minefields. But come, we will talk in more comfortable surroundings.’
He led the way out of the cellar up a long flight of stone steps that ended in a kitchen. They passed straight through it, walked along a short passage and entered a small oak-panelled room. The giant ushered them inside, then, setting down the lantern he had brought from the cellar with him, he picked up some wood from the hearth and tossed it on the embers of the fire. Sparks showered up the chimney and tiny flames began to lick at the kindling.
The giant straightened up again, smiling.
‘Please sit down.’ His voice was like the muted rumbling of a volcano. ‘You must be cold after your long walk. Let me offer you something to drink. Brandy, perhaps?’
Yeoman, in fact, had not realized how cold he was until he entered the warm room and felt his face and hands begin to tingle uncomfortably. He accepted the drink gratefully, looking round the room with his habitual curiosity as he sipped it. Apart from the leather settee on which Yeoman and Henrik now sat, and a big easy chair into which the giant eased his huge body, the furniture consisted solely of bookshelves. They lined every wall, leaving room only for a great painting of the Madonna and Child that hung over the fireplace. Beneath the picture, a flame burned in a holder of red glass.
Yeoman gestured towards the bookshelves. ‘May I?’ he asked.
The giant smiled and nodded. ‘By all means, although I fear you will find them of little interest.’
The pilot roamed around the room, inspecting the book titles closely in the lamplight. He disc
overed that most of the books were religious works in many different languages, some of them very old.
‘The tools of my trade,’ smiled the giant. ‘Or rather they used to be. You see, I was once a Roman Catholic priest. I was, shall we say, compelled to resign. There was some trouble over a woman. It was all a very long time ago.’
‘What do you do now?’ Yeoman asked, attempting to avert a conversation which, he felt, might prove embarrassing to the ex-priest. The smile faded from the latter’s face and a sudden transformation came over him, as though he had switched from one personality to another. His eyes became hooded, and Yeoman all at once had the impression that his great body, as well as possessing enormous strength, could move with the speed of a striking cobra.
‘I kill Germans,’ the former priest said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. Yeoman felt his scalp crawl.
The giant questioned him about his intentions, and Yeoman showed him the sketch map he had made. The ex-priest gave a grunt, went over to one of the bookshelves and took down a large-scale map of the area, which he unfolded and spread out on the floor under the lamplight. He knelt beside it, and gestured to Yeoman to do the same. Then, as thoroughly as a military commander at a briefing, he outlined the course of action the pilot would have to take if he was to have any hope of getting across the front line to safety.
Yeoman learned that over the past few days, the German forces still in the narrow salient west of the River Maas had been considerably reinforced. The most likely explanation, he felt, was that their purpose was to thwart any sudden attack by the British Second Army in an attempt to take some of the pressure off the Americans further to the south, in Belgium. Whatever the reason, the whole of the Deurne Canal line was now more strongly fortified than ever before; the only possible way through it was by way of the wooded area to the south of Nijmegen.
There, a narrow tributary of the Maas joined that river with the canal, flowing through the town of Grave. On the other side of the tributary — which, the ex-priest said, the pilot should be able to negotiate — lay Allied territory. The snag was that the whole area was stiff with minefields and pillboxes, and even if he got through them, Yeoman would have to cross a mile and a half of no man’s land before he reached safety. And, the ex-priest warned him, the ground was covered with snow; if the fog cleared, a solitary person trying to cross it, by day or night, would be easily seen by the enemy outposts and picked off.
The sound of gentle snoring interrupted their conversation. They both turned, startled, and laughed to see that Henrik had stretched himself out of the settee and was now fast asleep.
‘That seems like an excellent idea,’ Yeoman said. ‘I’m feeling pretty tired myself, and I’d completely forgotten that we had dragged you out of your bed.’
‘You can sleep here, in front of the fire,’ the ex-priest told him. ‘I will bring some blankets, and a pillow.’ He heaped some more wood on the fire, then said:
‘Rest for as long as you like. My housekeeper comes in before noon, but she is completely loyal and will not trouble you. Henrik, I think, will be gone by the time you wake. It will be noticed if he is absent from Venraij for too long, and that would not be a good thing.’
‘Well,’ the pilot said, ‘I hope I’m awake to see him off. I owe him a great deal.’
In fact, the pilot woke much sooner than he had expected. Not long after daybreak, the thunder of massed aero-engines dragged him from his sleep.
Henrik was awake too, and after hesitating for a moment he risked a cautious peep through the heavy curtains that covered the room’s solitary window. An instant later, he gave a gasp of astonishment and stepped aside to let Yeoman look out too.
The morning was brilliantly clear. There was no trace of the fog that had clung obstinately to the earth during the preceding days, and the snow on the roof-tops sparkled brightly in the rising sun.
The sun also caught the broad streaks of hundreds of vapour trails, turning them a rosy pink. As Yeoman watched in fascination the tiny metallic dots that were the great heavy bombers curved slowly towards the south-east, heading for the busy marshalling yards and the supply depots of the Ruhr that were feeding and sustaining the German offensive in the Ardennes.
The enemy’s last ally, the weather, had deserted him at last, and now the Allied air commanders had turned the tigers loose. As he watched that great phalanx of Flying Fortresses spearing into Germany, Yeoman knew that the enemy’s last great push had been doomed to failure even before it had begun.
Chapter Eight
SATURDAY, 23 DECEMBER, MARKED THE TURNING POINT OF the Ardennes battle. As the rays of the rising sun lit up dazzling white fields of fresh snow, airfields stretching in a great arc from England to Holland echoed to the thunder of engines as wave after wave of aircraft — transports, bombers, fighter-bombers and escort fighters — took off on their first mission for days.
In Bastogne, the haggard defenders greeted the brilliant dawn with apprehension. They had been bombed during the night and, their supplies of food and ammunition all but exhausted, they knew that this day might be their last. All that morning, as they managed to beat off enemy attacks around the perimeter, they waited for the big German onslaught which they knew they could not possibly withstand.
Instead, winging out of the western sky, came a huge armada of C-47 transport planes, with a screen of Lockheed Lightning fighters weaving protectively overhead. At a height of only a few hundred feet the transports flew straight and level towards their dropping zones, braving the intense flak that rose to meet them from the German positions. Some were hit and plunged helplessly to earth; the others forged on and their vital cargoes spilled from their bellies to float down under multi-coloured parachutes.
As each wave of transports turned for home, its mission completed, its escorting fighters swept down to strafe the enemy positions with rockets, fragmentation bombs and napalm, completing their attacks with machine-gun fire. The German troops cringed in their foxholes or under whatever cover they could find and cursed in terror; Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe C-in-C, had promised them the support of two thousand aircraft as soon as the weather improved, but on this Saturday morning it was the Allied fighter-bombers — the hated and feared ‘Jabos’, as the Germans had nicknamed them — which ruled the air over Bastogne and, indeed, over the whole of the Ardennes.
It was not so further to the north, where both the Luftwaffe and the RAF’S 2nd Tactical Air Force took advantage of the unexpected clear weather to resume intensive air operations. From first light onwards, the Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts of Joachim Richter’s Jagdgeschwader 66 and two other wings carried out large-scale offensive patrols over Holland, seeking to catch and destroy the British fighter-bombers which were once more harassing the German ground forces in the area to the north of Nijmegen. On the first sortie of the day, Richter had an unexpected stroke of luck when, leading twenty FW 190s, he encountered a dozen Typhoons on their way home from a ground attack mission; in a fierce ten-minute battle his pilots destroyed six of them, he himself claiming one.
The Tempests of the Eindhoven Wing were not involved in the air fighting over Holland on this occasion. Because of their longer range, they were detailed to assist the Americans by operating in sections of four over the northern fringe of the Ardennes battle area. It was a task that was to bring an unexpected success to No. 505 Squadron.
At 1030 on the morning of 23 December, Tim Phelan — who was commanding the Wing in Yeoman’s absence — was leading a section of Tempests consisting of Simon Wynne-Williams and two Sergeant Pilots named West and Renfrew; the four Tempests flew over the snow-shrouded, hilly countryside at four thousand feet, keeping above the enemy’s light flak, and entered their patrol area a few miles south-east of Verviers. High above them, the cold blue sky was criss-crossed with the vapour trails of American heavy bombers, en route to their objectives inside Germany. While West and Renfrew kept a continual lookout behind, above and to either quarter, Phelan and Wynne-William
s searched the featureless snowscape for signs of enemy movement and for Luftwaffe fighter-bombers. They also had to keep a close eye on the section’s navigation, for they had been assigned a clearly-defined patrol sector and to stray out of it was to risk being fired on by American anti-aircraft guns or fighters.
Wynne-Williams, intent on peering at the ground — a task that made his eyes ache — suddenly realized that the last time he had flown in this area was four and a half years ago. German armoured columns had been thrusting through the Ardennes then, too, and the Hurricanes of No. 505 Squadron had formed part of the tiny RAF fighter force that had battled alongside the French and the Belgians against the might of the Luftwaffe. Over there, a few miles to the south, was Luxembourg, over which Jim Callender — an American serving with the RAF, who had since transferred to the USAAF — and George Yeoman had taken on a formation of Messerschmitts on that very first day of the German offensive in the west. Wynne-Williams had been shot down during that engagement, but after several adventures had succeeded in making his way across the River Meuse to friendly territory. He had fought on with his squadron until that terrible day, three months later, when he had fallen like a human torch from the cockpit of his blazing fighter over southern England.
The thought flashed through his mind that George Yeoman might be walking home at that very moment. A dark cloud had hung over Eindhoven since the Wing Commander had been lost in enemy territory a week earlier; there had been no news of him since, but everyone hoped that he was safe and that he had somehow evaded capture. If he could hole up somewhere, Wynne-Williams thought, he could maybe sit tight and wait until the army arrived.
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