Dismissing thoughts of sleep, he threw aside the single sheet that covered him, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and pushed himself upright, raising his arms and stretching to his full extent on tiptoe. Naked, he crossed to the window and stuck out his head, inhaling the fresh morning air. Past the end of one of the hangars, he had a limited view eastwards over the airfield, to where the sun was rising through a thin band of mist. Its light was already powerful, and he narrowed his eyes against it.
Reaching a decision, he went to his locker, rummaged around on the bottom shelf and pulled out a folded singlet and pair of shorts, which he quickly pulled on. From under his bed he retrieved his track shoes, turning them over as he always did and inspecting them for signs of wear and tear. Shoes in hand, he left his room, paid a brief visit to the lavatory and headed along the corridor to the main door, which someone had left open during the night to admit air. Kneeling at the threshold, he donned his footwear and then stepped out into the morning, sniffing the now-familiar fragrance of the Suffolk countryside.
Rounding the front of the hangar, he walked a hundred yards to loosen his muscles and then broke into a jog, maintaining a leisurely pace for another couple of hundred yards along the edge of the airfield and then gradually speeding up until he was running comfortably at his best long-distance pace. The sun’s warmth was not yet apparent and the air felt pleasantly cool on his skin.
He felt his body opening up to the challenge of running. He had always loved this form of lone exercise, when the only opponent was himself and he could push himself as much or as little as he liked. He had always been something of a loner as far as team games were concerned, and although he didn’t mind participating in them he had never gone out of his way to cultivate them.
By the time he had completed a full circuit of the airfield he felt completely toned up and ready to face anything. He noticed that the buildings were gradually coming alive; there was a trickle of smoke from the cookhouse chimney and a couple of men in overalls were moving towards the principal hangar.
Walking the last hundred yards to cool down, he re-entered the accommodation hut and almost fell over his batman, a small cockney of indeterminate age called Smithson. Scrawny, and with close-set eyes peering past a huge hook of a nose, Smithson looked for all the world like a marabou stork. Armstrong had no idea whether the man was civilian or a serviceman. He saw that Smithson was clutching the dreaded mug of tea.
“Lor’ love yer, sir,” Smithson exclaimed, “I been lookin’ for yer all over. Tea, sir?” He extended the mug, which steamed malevolently and gave off a smell like boot polish. Armstrong smiled weakly and took it.
“Thanks, Smithson. Just the job. I’ll drink it after I’ve had a shower.” Smithson looked unconvinced, but nodded anyway. “Oh, by the way, sir,” he said as he handed over the mug, “the CO wants to see you as soon as possible.”
People are up and about early today, Armstrong thought as he took his shower, and wondered what this early summons might mean. He tipped the tea into a washbasin, whose ingrained yellowish colour indicated that others followed the same ritual, shaved carefully and went back to his room to dress. Civilian clothes were still the order of the day and he put on a light cotton shirt, blazer and flannels, selecting an appropriate-looking striped tie to go with the ensemble.
Royston was not in the mess hut, and Armstrong eventually tracked him down in the operations room, leafing through a sheaf of signals. He nodded at Armstrong as the latter entered, then plucked a large spotted handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose into it noisily. Armstrong noticed that the Wing Commander’s eyes were red.
“Hay fever,” Royston explained. “Bloody nuisance. The doc won’t let me fly when it’s bad; can’t convince him that it clears away at altitude. Ah, well.” He leaned back in his chair, arms folded, and gazed at Armstrong for a few seconds before continuing. His voice was very quiet.
“The balloon’s finally gone up, Ken. Jerry has invaded Poland.”
Armstrong had often wondered what he might feel when this moment came. Now he knew. It was an odd mixture of dread and elation. “Well, we’ve been expecting it. How long before we get involved, d’you think?”
Royston shook his head. “Don’t really know. A couple of days, I suppose. There’ll be a lot of diplomatic activity, an ultimatum of some sort, I expect. One thing I do know, though: Jerry won’t back down. We ought to have gone for their throats at Munich. Bloody politicians.” There was bitterness in his voice.
“What now, sir? As far as we are concerned?”
“There’s a plan afoot to pool our resources, such as they are, with those of a rather peculiar outfit at Heston,” Royston told him. Heston, Armstrong knew, was the commercial airfield in Middlesex from where many airlines operated services to the continent.
“What sort of outfit?” Armstrong wanted to know, as the Wing Commander paused to light a cigarette. Royston exhaled, coughed, and surveyed the cigarette with an expression akin to disgust. “I’m going to pack this in,” he said, not altogether convincingly, and motioned to Armstrong to sit down in a chair opposite.
“Let me start at the beginning,” he said. “There’s a remarkable chap called Sidney Cotton. He’s an Australian, and he was a pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service during the last war. He’s been involved in all sorts of business ventures, most of which have combined flying and photography. He set up an air mail service in Newfoundland, did aerial survey work and started a commercial colour film company.” Royston grinned suddenly. “Perhaps most important of all, at least for types like us, he invented the Sidcot flying suit.”
Armstrong, like Royston, had used the warm, high-altitude suit on several occasions. “So that’s where the name came from,” he said. “I often wondered.”
Royston nodded. “Yes. Well, early this year Cotton founded a little company in London called Aeronautical Research and Sales. Its backing came from the Air Ministry — unofficially, of course. It has an office in St James’s Square and Cotton is its president and chief sales representative. He operates a Lockheed 12A — you know, the little American twin-engined airliner — out of Heston.”
Armstrong, listening intently, wondered where all this was leading. The puzzlement must have shown on his face.
“I’m coming round to the important bit,” Royston smiled. “The point is that for the past few months, Cotton has been flying all over Europe — including Germany and Italy — in the Lockheed, which incidentally is painted duck-egg green, on visits to aviation-related business concerns. He’s even taken some of the German top brass for trips — including the air force boss, Hermann Goering, or so rumour has it.”
Royston chortled, then blew his nose again. “Can you picture it? Old fatty Goering himself, enjoying a flight with the affable Sidney Cotton and never dreaming that right under his feet, cleverly concealed from prying eyes by extremely tight-fitting port covers, were three F.24 cameras with five-inch lenses, positioned so that they could take left — and right-hand obliques and a vertical at the same time. They allow Cotton to photograph a strip of terrain eleven and a half miles wide from 20,000 feet, and there’s a clever system whereby hot air is channelled over them to stop them from freezing at high altitude. The Lockheed has extra fuel tanks that increase its range to 1600 miles, and there’s even method in the colour scheme; it makes the aircraft practically invisible from the ground.”
Armstrong was full of admiration. “I’ll be damned. Has he managed to get a fair amount of coverage?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve seen some of it. But here’s the silly part: because we’re run by the Admiralty, and Cotton’s show is run by the Air Ministry, neither of us knew that the other existed until a few weeks ago. We’ve even been photographing the same bloody targets, including Wilhelmshaven. Still, I’ve had a few meetings with him since then, and our respective lords and masters think that we should pool our expertise, if that’s the right word to use. Cotton thinks that stripped-down Spitfires are th
e answer too, by the way. With the Admiralty and Air Ministry apparently thinking along the same lines at long last, we might just get ’em a bit sooner.
“I hope so,” he added thoughtfully, stubbing out his partly-smoked cigarette. “With what we’ve got, I’ve a feeling that our days are just about numbered.”
He shrugged and stood up, stretching. “To hell with it. Sufficient unto the day, and all that. Let’s go and grab some breakfast.”
Chapter Four
For two weeks now, the German Fleet had been heading for the open sea. First the U-boats: 19 of them, slipping out from Wilhelmshaven to take up their war stations in the North Atlantic and North Sea, awaiting the inevitable.
Then the battleships: first the mighty Admiral Graf Spee, Captain Langsdorff’s command, leaving Wilhelmshaven towards evening and using darkness to cover her passage through the North Sea so that she might slip into the Atlantic unobserved, there to join with her supply ship Altmark in readiness to fall on enemy shipping. Three days later her sister ship the Deutschland made a similar undetected passage, making for an Atlantic rendezvous with her own supply vessel, the Westerwald.
The ships of Germany’s merchant fleet that were still on the high seas, in turn, were scurrying for their home ports or the harbours of neutral countries before the great grey warships of the Royal Navy had a chance to seize them on the declaration of war. For that was the aim of the British Government with the onset of war: the total blockade of Germany, enforced by the most powerful fleet in the world. And that meant, if possible, keeping the German warships that had not yet succeeded in slipping away to sea penned up in their harbours, where they could be attacked by RAF Bomber Command.
There was a problem. As the sun rose on this morning of Sunday, the third day of September 1939, the British Admiralty had no real idea how many German warships had put to sea, and how many remained in harbour. An open declaration of war on Germany might still be hours away, and a lot might happen in that time. When war came, RAF reconnaissance aircraft would legitimately be able to rove over the territory of the Reich; but the Admiralty needed vital intelligence now, intelligence that would enable the Navy’s warships and the torpedo-bombers of the Fleet Air Arm and RAF Coastal Command to strike hard at the enemy’s commerce raiders before they could inflict serious damage on Britain’s ocean lifelines. And there was only one means of gathering that intelligence.
All this had been explained to Royston and Armstrong by a grim-faced Naval commodore when the two pilots had attended an Admiralty briefing on Saturday morning. And that was why Armstrong, a dawn later, was at 27,000 feet over the North Sea, flying the Heinkel 70 on what would almost certainly be its last clandestine mission, trying to avoid looking at the sun that rose bright and blood-red over the eastern horizon.
It was his first trip since the Nazis had invaded Poland, although Royston, still suffering cruelly from hay fever, had done one a couple of days ago — a sea search of the German Bight, looking for German battleships outward bound. He had not found any, because the battleships had already departed. Now Armstrong, his commanding officer grounded on doctor’s orders, was on his way to make a final reconnaissance of Wilhelmshaven and its approaches — a mission which, he thought with misgivings, could only be described as extremely dangerous under the prevailing circumstances. He had an unpleasant gut feeling that this time the Germans would be waiting for him.
A few thousand feet below him clumps of fleecy fair-weather cumulus clouds drifted slowly by, casting their shadows on a dappled sea. They would provide welcome cover, should he need it.
He had worked out his flight plan carefully, in accordance with the briefing he had been given. The Admiralty wanted a great deal this time: not only pictures of Wilhelmshaven, but also of the Elbe Estuary, Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, the airfield at Jever and the island of Wangerooge, where some curious installations had been spotted earlier.
His survival, he knew, depended on speed and surprise, particularly the latter. He planned to make landfall on the island of Sylt, off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, then turn due south for the Elbe. He would turn over the bay, taking his photographs, then head in a direct south-westerly line for Wilhelmshaven, passing over Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven en route. A northerly turn over Wilhelmshaven would again take him in a straight line across Jever and Wangerooge and out to sea, his speed boosted by a forecast 30-knot southerly wind. Even if he was sighted, it was unlikely that the Germans would be suspicious of an aircraft flying along the coast in a westerly direction; but there was every chance that he would not be sighted, for the Heinkel had undergone a transformation. Taking a leaf out of Sidney Cotton’s book, Royston had ordered it to be sprayed a uniform duck-egg green all over, so that it was virtually invisible at high altitude. The aircraft carried no national markings of any kind.
Despite the thick flying clothing he was wearing, including fleece-lined gloves and boots, Armstrong’s hands and feet were numb. The sky five miles above the earth was a cold, inhospitable place; there would be some relief in the warmth of the sun as it climbed higher, but not much. The oxygen he was breathing was cold on his face, too; it came as a continuous supply through a crude, leaky cloth mask, and once the oxygen was turned on at 10,000 feet it continued flowing no matter whether the pilot was breathing in or out. It was a wasteful system, and Armstrong had already decided to make some recommendations so that the “boffins” could design a new and more efficient one.
He peered ahead through the early morning haze, checking his watch and gave a smile of satisfaction as the long strip of land that was Sylt appeared ahead, right on time. He held his course for another 30 seconds and then turned south, skirting the islands of Fohr, Pellworm and Nordstrand that flanked the coast of Schleswig. As he completed his turn, he looked back and was thankful to see that there was no white trail of vapour in his wake to betray his presence. Those trails, observed only recently as aircraft had regularly begun to fly above 25,000 feet, were still something of a mystery; some pilots thought that they were produced by the tips of the propellor blades, others — of whom he was one — that they were created as the hot gases from the engine froze in the upper atmosphere.
There was no time for speculation about that now. The Elbe Estuary was dead ahead and he flicked two switches, one to open the port that concealed his F24 camera and the other to set the film rolling. The magazine held 120 exposures, so with 6 targets to cover that meant 20 shots per target, at 15 second intervals. A counter near the camera switch told him how much film had been used up, so that he knew when to stop and restart the process.
Visibility was good, and there was no frosting on the cockpit canopy, inside or out. As he flew on, holding his course, he automatically rolled his head from side to side, scanning the sky on each quarter and occasionally checking below to make sure that there was no threat coming up from the danger area beneath the tail.
It was time to turn. He switched off the camera and swung the Heinkel’s nose westwards, looking for the smoky sprawl of Cuxhaven, starting the camera again as the dark patch that was the port disappeared under his aircraft’s long nose. After a five-minute run he altered course again, southwards this time, to take in Bremerhaven before curving to the west once more to cross Jade Bay and Wilhelmshaven. He found that he was breathing hard and sweating, despite the cold, as he calculated how much longer remained before he would be clear of these dangerous skies. The combination of cold and stress was producing an urge to urinate, but he had no means of relieving himself. Through experience, he knew that the pain would eventually give way to a dull ache, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen his present discomfort.
He was over Wilhelmshaven now, his camera working again as he flew north towards Jever. He was unable to locate the airfield’s exact position, but he knew with fair accuracy where it ought to be and headed in that direction, trusting that the camera would register the necessary detail. All the while, he kept up his ceaseless quartering of the sky. There seemed to be no danger, b
ut one could never tell, and he was at his most vulnerable while carrying out his dead-straight photographic runs.
He was almost over the coast now, with safety on the horizon, and he allowed himself to relax a little. It was a mistake. At that precise moment, his engine cut out.
For an instant, his ears having become attuned to the steady roar of the motor, his brain did not register the sudden silence. Then he saw the silver disc of the propeller break up into its component blades, windmilling slowly in the airflow, and a surge of panic hit him.
It did not last long. His mind, conditioned by thorough training, automatically took command and forced his hands and eyes into action, checking fuel, engine instruments and the mixture control that regulated the mix of petrol and air at altitude. Everything seemed to be in order; his tanks were still showing half full, there was no apparent loss of oil or coolant, and the mixture control was set correctly. There was nothing wrong at all — except that the engine had inexplicably ceased to function.
He trimmed the Heinkel for gliding at the best angle possible while he tried every trick in the book to restart the engine. Despite the aircraft’s excellent gliding qualities he found that he was losing height rapidly as he crossed the coast. By the time he was over Wangerooge island he was down to 15,000 feet. Although there no longer seemed much point in photographing this final objective he reactivated the camera anyway, more as an instinctive gesture than anything else.
The altimeter showed 10,000 feet, and there was nothing ahead of him but open sea. There was no question of turning back towards Wangerooge in order to attempt a landing; the best he could hope for was to ditch the aircraft out to sea and trust that the water was too deep for the Germans to recover the camera and its incriminating film, assuming that they saw him go down. He knew that his own chances of survival were minimal; he had no lifejacket — just the inner tube of a car tyre, stowed away behind his seat. He was a mediocre swimmer; there was a faint possibility that the tide might cast him up on one of the islands off the Schleswig coast, in which case he might be able to reach Denmark, but he knew in his heart of hearts that the notion was little more than fantasy.
Flames Over Norway Page 3