‘Shall I get someone to run you back into town?’ Wynne-Williams asked.
Yeoman shook his head. ‘No, thanks. I’ll wait until the lads get back. I’m not leaving until three o’clock this afternoon; there’s plenty of time to pack my kit.’
The air over Eindhoven vibrated with sound again as more engines were run up on the far side of the airfield; one of the Canadian Typhoon squadrons was scheduled to take off shortly to lend support to the Allied ground forces who were still fighting hard in the Ardennes.
‘It looks like being a hectic start to 1945,’ Yeoman commented. He was to be proved right within the next few minutes, but not in the way he imagined.
*
The navigator of the Junkers 188 pathfinder aircraft, Richter thought, certainly knew his stuff. As the dawn light spread gradually behind the formation, and he began to pick out familiar landmarks, he saw that they had not strayed off course by as much as a kilometre.
The armada of Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts was over the River Maas now, just south of Nijmegen. Suddenly, the Ju 188 swung sharply to the right, rocking its wings and switching off its navigation lights, a clear indication to the following aircraft that they were on their own. It didn’t matter; with only twenty miles to run to Eindhoven, and the light getting better all the time, they were likely to experience few problems in locating their target — or rather targets, for only sixty aircraft, led by Richter, were to hit Eindhoven. The remainder were to fly on to strike at Gilze-Rijen and other RAF airfields in Holland, so meticulously pin-pointed and photographed over the previous weeks by Me 262 reconnaissance jets.
As the kilometres flickered past under his wings, Richter, out at the head of the formation, meticulously checked that everything was in order. The engine sang sweetly, his cannon and machine-guns were armed and ready to fire. Down below, everything was calm and peaceful, as it always seemed to be on a New Year’s morning, with the tiny houses and the windmills rising from the snow-covered landscape like features on a Christmas card.
For the first time in months, Richter felt completely at ease, even though the adrenalin was already pumping through his veins and all his senses were heightened by the prospect of action. He felt like singing. What a surprise the Tommies were going to get in just a few more minutes!
Suddenly, Eindhoven airfield was dead ahead.
*
Through the clear patch he had rubbed on the window of the operations trailer, Yeoman watched the Typhoons moving out of their dispersals on to the perimeter track, their wings laden with rocket projectiles. He wondered how many of them would come back; light flak, of which the enemy ground forces had plenty, took an appalling toll of the fighter-bomber squadrons.
Suddenly, the high-pitched scream of aero-engines under full power sliced through the frosty morning. Startled, Yeoman launched himself towards the door of the trailer and jumped down into the snow, transfixed for a moment by the sight that greeted him.
The streamlined shape of a ‘long-nose’ FW 190 flashed across the airfield, its nose and wings lit up by the flashes of its guns, so low that the blurring arc of its propeller seemed only inches from the ground. It was not alone; the sky was filled with German fighters, swarming over Eindhoven’s eastern boundary.
The pilot of the leading Typhoon, which had just turned on to the runway, rammed open his throttle in a desperate attempt to get airborne. His wheels had just cleared the ground when cannon shells smashed into his aircraft, slamming it back down on the runway in a pile of blazing, tangled wreckage. A second Typhoon, also racing down the runway, ploughed into the wreck of the first and blew up. A few moments later, there was a terrific explosion as the rocket warheads of both fighters went off in the flames.
The pilots of the remaining Typhoons, bunched hopelessly together at the end of the runway or on the perimeter track, with no hope now of taking off, scrambled frantically from their cockpits. Some, gunning their engines and swinging their aircraft so that their noses pointed in the direction from which the attack was coming, opened up with their cannon, spraying the eastern sky in the vain hope of hitting something.
Wynne-Williams came tumbling from the operations trainer a split second after Yeoman, just in time to see a speeding Focke-Wulf release two bombs into the airfield’s fuel dump. There was a dull crump, a great balloon of flame, and then a column of twisting black smoke climbed slowly upwards.
‘Come on!’ Yeoman screamed, and hurled himself towards the nearer of the two Tempests which stood a few yards away in the readiness dispersal. As he ran, shedding his greatcoat, he saw out of the corner of his eye a series of vivid explosions over to the right, where 449 Squadron’s Spitfires were dispersed. Then he was clawing his way desperately into the Tempest’s cockpit, with only one thought in his mind; to get off the ground and fight.
Simon Wynne-Williams clambered into the second Tempest, narrowly beating the other readiness pilot, whose aircraft Yeoman had commandeered. Without bothering to fasten their seat harnesses, Yeoman and Wynne-Williams frantically cranked up their engines; both started after two or three tries with the usual bang and puff of oily smoke.
Looking across the airfield towards the columns of flame-shot smoke that rose from the burning Typhoons, Yeoman quickly assessed the situation. Running at an angle across the main runway, which was now completely blocked, was a much smaller subsidiary runway which was normally used only by communications aircraft. The Tempests would have to use it now, if they were to have any hope of getting off the ground.
The two Tempests taxied forward, Yeoman signalling his intentions by hand to Wynne-Williams. The wing commander wore no flying helmet, so radio communication was impossible. The aircraft moved as rapidly as possible, zig-zagging furiously to present as difficult a target as possible, and Yeoman found himself cursing as he strove to prevent his heavy fighter from skidding off the perimeter track.
The two aircraft should have been easy meat as they waddled across the airfield, but to some extent they were screened from the marauding Focke-Wulfs by the drifting smoke and both reached the short runway without suffering any damage. All around them, parked aircraft and airfield installations continued to erupt in smoke and flame as the Focke-Wulfs made one strafing run after another, as yet unmolested by anti-aircraft fire of any kind.
It was now or never. Yeoman, followed closely by Wynne-Williams, pushed the throttle wide open and raised the tail as the speed built up. The main wheels bounced several times and he literally tore the Tempest off the ground, yanking up the undercarriage. He knew that his only chance was to try and get above the melee, so he held the fighter low down until he was doing close on 400 mph and then pulled back the stick, rocketing up in a near-vertical climb.
Still closely followed by Wynne-Williams, he came out of the climb at three thousand feet, just below the cloud base, and turned back towards Eindhoven, seeking targets against the snow-covered backdrop. They were not hard to find; the black outlines of the Focke-Wulfs stood out starkly as they zoomed and dived through the spreading pall of smoke, adding to the carnage all the time.
From Yeoman’s vantage point the devastation wrought by the German fighters on Eindhoven seemed appalling — as indeed it was. The attack had lasted barely five minutes, and already almost every RAF fighter and fighter-bomber on the airfield was in flames, blazing furiously amid the crash of exploding bombs and the bark of the raiders’ cannon. The lifeless bodies of airmen, mown down by shells and bullets, sprawled like broken dolls in the bloody snow.
Yeoman caught sight of two long-nosed Focke-Wulfs slipping low over the airfield boundary and went after them in a long dive, with Wynne-Williams on his left. The German fighters, made confident by the total absence of flak, were flying quite slowly, waggling their wings as they searched for likely targets, and the Tempests overhauled them easily.
There was no mistake. Yeoman fired, and the Focke-Wulf in his sights reared up sharply in front of his nose. Some fragments and several puffs of black smoke burst
from it, then it turned over on its back, described a short parabola over the field and crashed near the blazing Typhoons.
The second Focke-Wulf, hit by Wynne-Williams, struck the ground the right way up in a great flurry of snow and slid over the frozen earth for a couple of hundred yards, shedding fragments of wing in all directions, before coming to rest with its nose buried in the side of one of 449 Squadron’s dispersal huts. The pilot, white-faced and shaken to the bone, scrambled painfully from the cockpit and was promptly laid out by a right hook to the jaw delivered by an irate Canadian Spitfire pilot, who made the German his prisoner.
The two Tempests, meanwhile, flew slap through the middle of a group of Focke-Wulfs which were heading in the opposite direction and then climbed hard again, their pilots intending to repeat the previous manoeuvre. In this they were forestalled by Joachim Richter, who, having used up most of his ammunition, had been circling the airfield and guiding his pilots towards the few targets that were as yet untouched. He spotted the two Tempests, climbing like arrows towards the clouds, and detached half a dozen Focke-Wulfs to deal with them.
Yeoman and Wynne-Williams both saw them coming, and knew that they were going to have to fight for their lives. They also knew that they were going to have to rely entirely on their own wits to survive, since they had no radio contact with one another.
Resolutely, they turned to face the enemy.
*
Seventy miles south-east of Eindhoven, leading his formation of Tempests, Tim Phelan was puzzled. A few minutes earlier, listening to Group Central Control’s frequency, he had picked up a frantic call from what, by the call sign it was using, sounded like an Auster army-cooperation aircraft. The message was fragmentary and disjointed, but to Phelan it seemed charged with menace.
‘Large formation enemy ... fifteen miles ... Nijmegen ... heading two-four-zero ... unable to —’
The message ended there. Three times, Phelan tried to contact GCC, but because of the low altitude at which the Tempests were flying did not succeed in doing so.
For several minutes the Tempest formation continued to quarter the ground to the south-west of Cologne, searching for elusive trains, and then Phelan, his unease persisting, reached a decision. Pressing the R/T button, he told the others that he intended to take them to the north-west and patrol a line midway between Eindhoven and Rheine. The decision to ignore his operational orders and adopt another course of action was his alone; he prayed fervently that it was the right one.
*
He was falling, slowly and timelessly, like a wind-borne autumn leaf from the uppermost branches of a tall tree. There was no pain, no fear, no regret; just a profound sense that this moment was the fulfilment of everything.
Suddenly, in these last seconds, he saw everything with absolute clarity. There were no images of his past life, as they said there were supposed to be; but there were voices, some forgotten until this moment, of the people he had once held dear. And there was a question, the answer to which no longer really mattered: how had this happened to him? There had been no smashing of bullets, no explosion or flash of flame. Just some flying debris, a great pause in time as though earth and sky had stood still for an instant, and then the plunge.
He supposed that he must have collided with something, but it didn’t matter now. There was no way out, for he had no parachute. There had been no time, in the frantic rush to take off.
A dark patch on the snow, like a splash of spilled ink, rose in front of his eyes. It filled his entire vision beyond the windscreen. For a fleeting moment he wished that his last sight of the earth had been of something prettier and more colourful; of the spreading branches of a tree, perhaps, or a bed of flowers.
Then, suddenly, there were no more wishes; just a last great question that burst like a blinding light across the dwindling vestiges of his consciousness and refused to leave him, as though driving something of his lost self onward and upward in search of the ultimate answer ...
*
Over the pall of smoke that shrouded Eindhoven a lone Tempest circled, its wings and fuselage scarred and torn by bullets and shell splinters. Through eyes half-blinded by unashamed tears, the pilot peered down in search of a place to land.
The Focke-Wulfs had gone, their work of destruction complete, speeding away into the mist that covered the eastern horizon. By now the Allied anti-aircraft gunners were wide awake, and a storm of flak traced their path as they sped back towards the Rhine, knocking several of them from the sky. The remainder, sighing with relief as they entered their own territory, allowed themselves to relax a little, and to anticipate the luxury of a few hours’ sleep between warm blankets.
It was a dangerous mistake. Phelan’s Tempests, their cannon still unfired, caught the fleeing enemy north of Bocholt, and in a brief one-sided running battle — for few of the German pilots had any ammunition left — destroyed ten of them for no loss before being compelled to turn for home, short of fuel.
It was only now, as they entered Dutch territory, that the Tempest pilots began to have an idea of what had happened. They stared in horror at the huge columns of smoke that rose over their airfield and flew overhead, rocking their wings uncertainly as they wondered whether they would be able to land or not. In the end, Phelan made a low reconnaissance of a stretch of runway that seemed reasonably intact, and led his pilots down.
As they taxied in, they passed a huge smoking crater beside the edge of the runway. They had no idea, yet, that it contained the charred and mangled remains of a Tempest.
Carefully avoiding mounds of shattered aluminium that had once been aircraft, they taxied past the lakes of burning fuel, coughing as the acrid smoke penetrated their cockpits. One by one, they shut down their engines and climbed down into the churned-up slush, looking wordlessly at the devastation all around them.
Across the airfield Yeoman wandered aimlessly, bareheaded, his tunic flapping open despite the cold, ignoring the smoke that swirled around him. On his cheeks, dried tears formed pale tracks through the grime. He passed the torn wreckage of a Focke-Wulf and wandered on until he stood beside the crater that smouldered by the edge of the runway. A stench of burnt rubber and molten metal floated from its depths.
He stood there for a long time, brooding; then, like a dog shaking itself, he straightened his shoulders and began the long trek back towards the dispersal huts.
Later, a bulldozer would come along and shovel Dutch earth into the hole that mercifully concealed the mortal remains of Simon Wynne-Williams.
Chapter Eleven
AS THE SMOKE CLOUDS GRADUALLY THINNED OUT AND dispersed over the shattered airfields, the Allies began to count the cost of the German attack. It was bad enough. When the total was added up, it was found that 223 RAF and USAAF fighters and bombers had been reduced to scrap metal; thirty-five more non-operational types such as transport and communications aircraft had also been knocked out.
Eindhoven, attacked by Richter’s excellently led Jagdgeschwader 66, had been one of the worst-hit targets. As well as the sixteen Typhoons which had been waiting to take off, the low-flying Focke-Wulfs had destroyed twenty-four other aircraft, including the twelve Spitfires of 449 Squadron. It was sheer good fortune that the Tempests had escaped.
The airfields near Brussels were also badly hit. At Evere, in addition to four squadrons of Spitfires, there were dozens of other types ranging from Austers to Dakotas, all of them without camouflage netting, while at another field further up the road some sixty bombers were parked in straight lines, wing-tip to wing-tip.
Normally, a Spitfire patrol was flown from Evere at first light, but on this occasion there was some delay while the icy surface of the runway was sprinkled with grit. At 0900 the runway was judged safe for operations and two Spitfires took off to make a weather check, while twelve more taxied round the perimeter track. The first of these had just turned on to the runway when the first enemy fighters howled across the airfield.
What followed was utter chaos. Only on
e Spitfire managed to get airborne, and its gallant pilot, fighting against hopeless odds, destroyed a Messerschmitt before he in turn was shot down and killed. The remaining pilots scrambled for cover and watched helplessly as their aircraft were pulverized. Here, as at Eindhoven, there were no heavy anti-aircraft guns, and the few light ack-ack weapons that did open up soon ceased firing; they simply ran out of ammunition.
Everywhere, in the British and American sectors alike, it was the same story. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the damage would have been much more extensive if all the German pilots had been of the same calibre as those belonging to Richter’s Jagdgeschwader 66. As it was, many of the attackers flew erratically, became tangled up with their colleagues and showed extremely poor marksmanship, all of which tended to blunt the full fury of the attack. There were several instances of head-on collisions, and one of the airfield targets, in the American sector, was missed altogether.
Devastating though the blow had been to the Allied air forces, the Germans had suffered heavily too. The attack formations tended to straggle badly as they flew home, and one wave strayed over the formidable anti-aircraft defences covering the Scheldt Estuary, losing several of their number.
Allied fighters accounted for ninety-seven of the enemy. In addition to those claimed by the Tempests of the Eindhoven Wing, several were accounted for by the Tempests of No. 122 Wing, which had also been on patrol over the Ardennes from their forward base at Volkel — one of the few airfields ignored by the attackers — and more were destroyed over the Reichswald by the Spitfires of 126 Wing. The Spits of No. 131 Wing, returning from a dawn sweep, also intercepted fifty of the raiders over their base at St Denis-Westram and destroyed eighteen of them for no loss to themselves.
Anti-aircraft fire claimed a further 129 enemy fighter-bombers, bringing the total Luftwaffe loss for the operation to 226 aircraft, roughly a quarter of the attacking force. It was a loss that the Luftwaffe could scarcely afford, especially as most of the pilots who survived came down in Allied territory and were taken prisoner.
Tempest Squadron Page 14