It was fearsomely cold in the cockpit, despite the array of clothing Armstrong was wearing. He couldn’t help smiling to himself as he mentally checked off his clothing inventory. On his feet he wore a pair of ladies’ silk stockings (Phyllis would no doubt have laughed if she had known the use he was making of her little parting keepsake), a pair of football stockings, a pair of oiled Scandinavian ski socks and RAF-issue fur-lined boots. On his hands were two pairs of RAF silk gloves and some special fur-backed and fur-lined gauntlets which he had purchased himself; he had cut off the fingertips, for it was essential to retain some fingertip control, particularly for the camera control box. He wore his normal RAF uniform with a thick vest, roll-neck sweater and a thing called a Tropal lining which was stuffed with a kind of kapok. All this, he thought, was what the well-dressed photo-recce pilot was compelled to wear in early February, 1940.
The black crags of the Norwegian coast were far away to starboard. He was approaching the limit of the Spitfire’s combat radius, and so far he had seen precious little to justify this sortie; just a few fishing boats and some friendly destroyers, which had opened fire on him in a most unfriendly fashion.
He pondered on what to do. To the north-west lay Iceland and the Denmark Strait, the route taken to and from the Atlantic by enemy ships; there was nothing visible in that direction, and so he turned east, towards Norway. He checked his position by dead reckoning, and realized with a sudden shock that he must be poised almost directly over the Arctic Circle. A momentary twinge of fear went through him with the knowledge that he had flown farther north than he had ever been before, an irrational dread that the freezing sea and sky would swallow him up. It passed in moments, and he never experienced such a feeling again.
He altered course again, south-eastwards this time, scanning the surface of the sea ahead and below. His brief was to photograph any vessel that might be identified as a tanker. Why, he had no idea.
He held his course for 40 minutes, converging slowly on the Norwegian coastline. He was close enough now to pick out definite landmarks, and a glance at his map told him that the islands he could see ahead were those sheltering the approaches to Trondheimsfjord.
In the open sea north-west of the islands, something moved. It was a large ship, trailing a herringbone wake. Keeping his eyes on the vessel all the time — it was still no more than a dot — Armstrong began to lose height, switching on the camera equipment as he did so and turning the time interval between exposures down to the bare minimum. If the vessel was a tanker — and it was certainly beginning to look like one — he wanted to get as many frames as possible in a single run overhead.
His mind registered the details of the ship as he sped towards it from astern. It was a tanker all right, with its long foredeck and a single funnel aft.
He roared over it at a height of only a few hundred feet, cameras in action, and caught a glimpse of some seamen on the deck, looking up at him. The ship was well inside Norwegian territorial waters and appeared to be heading directly for Trondheim.
He pulled up, gained height in a climbing turn and decided to make a second run from the beam. He passed over the ship in a flash, but there was time to make out the name in large white letters on her stern: Altmark.
So that was what it was all about, Armstrong thought as he climbed away over the sea, conscious that he had just about enough fuel left to get back to his base. Altmark: the supply tanker for the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee, hounded by British warships to take refuge in Montevideo harbour and then scuttled by her captain, Langsdorff, last December.
Well, he had found the tanker, and he felt a deep inner satisfaction; but he had no idea why the Admiralty should have set such store in locating her. As far as he was aware — according to rumour at least — half of Coastal Command and the Home Fleet had been out in search of the elusive vessel ever since word had come in that she had left her South Atlantic station and was heading home to Germany. Why all the effort, when there were major German warships to be tracked down and destroyed?
It was a couple of weeks more before he knew. He was seated at the breakfast table one morning when one of the Coastal Command Anson pilots, a flight lieutenant called Terry Layton, plonked himself down on the chair opposite, a broad grin on his face. He brandished a copy of one of the morning newspapers.
“Seen this?” he asked. Armstrong shook his head, chewing on a mouthful of egg. Layton folded the paper in half and pushed it across the table, turning it so that Armstrong could read it. Frowning, Armstrong peered over his plate at the news item Layton was indicating with his finger. The piece was dated a couple of days earlier.
THE ROYAL NAVY’S NELSON TOUCH! the headline proclaimed. DARING RESCUE BY BRITISH WARSHIPS.
The Admiralty announced today that 300 Merchant Navy sailors, taken prisoner by the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, have been rescued from captivity aboard the infamous prison ship Altmark in a bold operation by destroyers of the Royal Navy.
The Altmark, homeward bound for Germany, had taken refuge in a Norwegian fjord in contravention of all the rules of Norwegian neutrality. She was pursued there by destroyers of the Home Fleet, whose crews released all the captives after a short fight in which several Germans are reported to have been killed and wounded. There were no British casualties, and all our warships withdrew safely from Norwegian waters. We hope to publish a more detailed report in tomorrow’s edition.
Armstrong leaned back in his chair and scratched his head. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed. “So that’s what it was all about. I can’t help feeling rather pleased,” he added, smiling at the man opposite.
“I’ll bet old Adolf isn’t,” Layton said. “It’s a fair old smack in the eye for him. The last straw, I shouldn’t wonder.”
It was a prophetic remark, although neither of them realized it at the time.
Chapter Ten
FUHRER HEADQUARTERS,
1 MARCH 1940
MOST SECRET
DIRECTIVE FOR OPERATION
“WESER EXERCISE”
The development of the situation in Scandinavia requires the making of all preparations for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. This operation should prevent British encroachment on Scandinavia and the Baltic. Further it should guarantee our ore base in Sweden and give our Navy and the Air Force a wider starting line against Britain. In view of our military and political power in comparison with that of the Scandinavian States, the force to be employed in WESER EXERCISE will be kept as small as possible. The numerical weakness will be balanced by daring actions and surprise execution.
On principle, we will do our utmost to make the operation appear as a peaceful occupation the object of which is the military protection of the neutrality of the Scandinavian States.
Corresponding demands will be transmitted to the Governments at the beginning of the occupation. If necessary, demonstrations by the Navy and Air Force will provide the necessary emphasis. If in spite of this, resistance should be met, all military means will be used to crush it. The crossing of the Danish border and the landings in Norway must take place simultaneously.
It is most important that the Scandinavian States as well as the Western opponents should be taken by surprise. The troops may be acquainted with the actual objectives only after putting to sea.
Adolf Hitler.
“He’s good at taking people by surprise,” General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst remarked mildly as he glanced at the directive. “He certainly took me by surprise.”
It was less than two weeks since Falkenhorst, quite out of the blue, had been appointed to mastermind the forthcoming invasion of Scandinavia. Before that, he had been leading a fairly quiet life as commander of an Army Group on the Western Front. The appointment had come, he knew, because of his successful conduct of operations in Finland back in 1918, at the very end of the Great War.
Falkenhorst’s aide, a grey-haired colonel who had served under him in that half-forgotten campaign, smiled
as he poured his superior a cup of coffee. The general’s first act after his appointment, he recalled, had been to go out and buy a Baedeker travel guide so that he could find out what Norway was like. From this, he had worked out a plan whereby one division would occupy each of Norway’s five main harbours, Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. The plan was sketchy at best, but it had been enough to satisfy Hitler. Falkenhorst had been sworn to secrecy, then simply told to get on with it.
He and his staff had put in a great deal of work in the past couple of weeks, assembling the forces necessary for the invasion. The task had not been without its arguments; the Army High Command was not happy about having several divisions stripped from other areas, and the fat Field Marshal Goering, the Luftwaffe C-in-C, was known to be furious because he had not been consulted beforehand.
Despite all the problems, the WESER EXERCISE plan was pretty well complete. All it needed now was a date — and above all, a motive. What worried Falkenhorst most of all was that if the Germans didn’t make a surprise move quickly against Norway, the British might beat them to it. He wondered how much they already knew, or suspected, of Germany’s intentions.
*
“The fact is,” Wing Commander Royston said, “that we have no clear idea of what the Huns are up to. We can bring back all the photographs that are asked of us; what they don’t tell our Intelligence people is when or where the Germans might attack. I’m sure of one thing, though,” he added grimly, “when they do attack, be it on the Western Front or Scandinavia, they will do it hard and fast. There’ll be little or no warning.”
Royston had spent the last few weeks at an airfield in France, together with another photo-reconnaissance pilot. The PR flight now had three Spitfires and four pilots and was once again concentrated on Deanland, although Armstrong had a feeling that it would not be for long.
“There’s a rumour going around in France that the Huns had actually planned an offensive in the west for last January,” Royston continued, “but that it came unstuck when one of their communications aircraft strayed across the Belgian frontier and made a forced landing. There was a staff officer in it, and he was carrying the German war plan, or so the story goes. I don’t know how true it is.”
In fact, it was completely true. On the morning of 10 January 1940, Major Hellmuth Reinberger, a German paratroop officer, had been en route from Loddenheide to Cologne in a Messerschmitt 108 when the pilot, Erich Hoenmanns, encountered deteriorating weather. Before long, with the visibility decreasing all the time, Hoenmanns realized that he was hopelessly lost and that without knowing it he had probably been driven across the Rhine, miles off track, by a strong easterly wind.
The pilot at once changed course, heading east in the hope of sighting the river. A minute later the engine began to misfire; the carburettor was icing up. Hoenmanns juggled with the engine controls, but it was no use. Soon the engine cut out altogether, and he was left with no alternative but to make a forced landing.
Selecting a large, snow-covered field, he turned into wind and began his approach. At the last moment the pilot spotted a line of poplars in his path. It was too late to avoid them; all he could do was kick the rudder frantically and steer for what looked like a sizeable gap. A second later the aircraft shook violently as the trees whipped off both its wingtips; then it was down, lurching over the snow and coming to rest just short of the far hedge.
The two men scrambled from the cockpit with no worse injury than a severe shaking. After consulting their map, they decided that they had landed near Mechelen, in Belgian territory. Reinberger immediately took shelter behind the hedge and set about trying to burn the contents of his briefcase — no less a document than CASE YELLOW, the operational order for the invasion of France and the Low Countries. His lighter failed to work, and he had almost given up in despair when a Belgian peasant came up and obligingly offered him a match, with the aid of which he soon had a small fire going.
He was feeding the papers into it, sheet by sheet, when he heard shouts. Coming towards the crippled aircraft across the field were some Belgian soldiers. Hoenmanns, hoping to buy enough time to enable Reinberger to finish his task, went to meet them halfway with his hands up in an attempt to convince them that he had been alone in the aircraft. However, a keen-eyed Belgian soon spotted the ribbon of smoke rising from behind the hedge, and a minute later Reinberger had been captured too — together with the documents, most of which were still intact.
The two men were taken to a nearby police post, where they were interrogated by a Belgian intelligence officer. During the proceedings, Reinberger saw that the documents were lying on a table nearby. He seized them and tried to thrust them into a stove, but they were rescued — scorched but still legible — by the Belgian officer.
Copies of the documents were quickly passed on to the Dutch and French governments. The latter at once placed its armies in a state of alert, and the French First Army Group, moving through fearful conditions of snow and ice, closed up to the Belgian frontier, having been advised by the Belgian High Command that the necessary authority would be given for Allied forces to enter Belgian territory. This order, however, was immediately countermanded by Belgium’s King Leopold, and the French had no alternative but to pull back once more.
Meanwhile, Hitler had been informed of the incident on the morning of 11 January. He at once flew into one of his characteristic rages, threatening the death sentence for both Hoenmanns and Reinberger. Within 48 hours reports were reaching the German High Command of Belgian and Dutch mobilization, together with large-scale movements by the French Army. That same day, with the weather once again deteriorating, Hitler gave orders for the indefinite postponement of CASE YELLOW.
It is by such chance happenings, on the turn of a card or the throw of the dice, that the course of history is dictated. The attack in the West would wait until the summer; Hitler’s first objectives now would be Denmark and Norway.
Royston and Armstrong were sitting in the former’s office, chatting about the war situation in general. On the Continent of Europe the opposing armies still eyed one another from behind their respective fortifications and did nothing, but in the air it was a different story. There, the war was for real, and the reconnaissance aircraft of both sides were having a particularly hard time, as Royston explained.
“It’s the French who are suffering the most,” he told Armstrong. “Their main recce type is a twin-engined bird called a Potez 63; it’s badly underarmed and the 109s have been knocking them down like flies. There’s a squadron of them at Seclin, where we were, and crew morale is at rock bottom. They’re taking the same kind of knocks that our recce Blenheims took earlier on, only worse. They would give anything to have something like the Spitfire.”
“What are the French fighters like?” Armstrong wanted to know. His companion grimaced.
“Pretty poor. Their main type is the Morane 406, and it’s no match for the Me 109. Just before we left Seclin, 11 Moranes from a squadron based up the road were bounced by 109s over the frontier and five of them were shot down. The best French fighter is actually American — the Curtiss Hawk, a nippy little radial-engined machine. They don’t have many of them, though.”
He gazed thoughtfully out of the window. It was the first week of April, and the weather was dreadful. The rain was lashing down under a leaden sky and the windsock on the airfield boundary stuck out stiffly from its pole as strong gusts of wind battered at it.
“Our Hurricanes are the best fighter asset over there,” Royston continued, “but there are only four squadrons of them — two with the Air Component and two with the AASF.” The Air Component’s task was to defend the British Expeditionary Force in France, while the AASF, the Advanced Air Striking Force, was equipped mainly with Fairey Battle light bombers. The two AASF Hurricane squadrons, Nos 1 and 73, were to provide top cover for the Battles if and when the latter were required to go into action.
“That New Zealand chap’s with one of the AASF Hurrica
ne squadrons, isn’t he? You know, the one who’s been in the news lately.”
Royston nodded in response to Armstrong’s comment. “That’s right. Cobber Kain. He’s building up quite a reputation for himself. He’s got 11 or 12 Huns to his credit so far. As a matter of fact, I’ve met him. I dropped into 73 Squadron’s base at Rouvres a couple of weeks ago. He’d just had a pretty narrow squeak. He didn’t mention it himself, but his squadron commander told me about it.”
“What happened?”
“Well, Kain and a sergeant pilot were patrolling the front line at 20,000 feet — they’d been escorting a Potez on a recce mission — when they sighted some anti-aircraft bursts over Thionville and flew towards them. A minute later Kain spotted seven Heinkels about 5000 feet higher up and went after them, leaving his number two behind in the process. As he gained on the Heinkels, he heard his number two shout a warning that half a dozen Me 109s were coming down on them. Kain looked around just in time to see a 109 blazing away at him; he broke away, but not before he’d taken some cannon shells through his rear fuselage. Then he was attacked by a second 109, which also hit him, but it overshot and he clobbered it as it went past.
“By this time Kain was miles inside Germany, so he started a turn towards our lines — at which point he was attacked by a third Messerschmitt. His engine stopped with a loud bang and smoke filled the cockpit. He couldn’t see his compass, so he pointed his aircraft in what he hoped was the direction of Metz and trimmed her for a long glide, turning his oxygen full on so that he could breathe. By the time he crossed the front line flames were starting to break through into the cockpit, but he managed to make an emergency landing on a French airfield.”
“Somebody was obviously on his side,” Armstrong said. He knew that it must have needed exceptional nerve to stay with an aircraft that was on fire. He gave an involuntary shudder; one of his private nightmares involved being trapped in a Spitfire that was burning, particularly a photo-recce Spitfire, with its extra fuel tanks. He had worked out that he would have about seven seconds in which to unfasten his seat harness, unplug his R/T and oxygen leads, slide back the canopy and get out before the cockpit became a raging inferno.
Flames Over Norway Page 9