Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks, so abruptly that the next man in line almost collided with him. Maisel made an urgent signal and his men took cover, crouching down behind the pine trunks.
A light wind was blowing from the north, down the slope. It bore a smell with it, a smell which Maisel also associated with his childhood but couldn’t quite place. It was an odour that mingled oil and ash and coal and smoke. All of a sudden he had it. It was the smell associated with railway engines, and the grime of stations.
He motioned to the others, wordlessly ordering them to stay where they were, and went on alone, creeping from tree to tree. After a while he halted again, peering ahead, trying to define what he was seeing. The line seemed to end in a tangle of pine branches, adding their freshly-cut resinous scent to the oily smell he had detected earlier.
Still keeping under cover of the trees, he stood up and went forward again, his sub-machine-gun at the ready, until he reached the barrier of branches. Stretching out a hand, he pulled at one and it came away to fall in the snow at his feet, bringing others down with it.
Maisel found himself staring at the rear end of a railway freight wagon.
There were others — a whole line of them, as he discovered on further investigation, coupled to an engine. He was about to climb up on to the footplate when a nearby shadow moved and an iron grip closed about his windpipe.
*
“What in the name of God are we going to do with them?” asked Captain Erling Jensen of nobody in particular, after the other six members of Maisel’s patrol had been brought in. The Germans had been taken completely by surprise, overwhelmed before they could fire a shot by men who had risen from the very earth like the trolls of Maisel’s childhood nightmares. Jensen was in command of the 30-strong party of Norwegian regular soldiers who had been assigned to guard the train and its precious cargo. Since leaving Lillehammer, their ranks had been augmented by militiamen who had been picked up here and there along the line, all of them anxious to join a unit that was making a stand against the enemy.
Jensen turned to Maisel, who like the other Germans was tied up securely. “How many more of you are there?” he rapped.
Maisel stared directly into the Norwegian’s blue eyes. Strangely, he felt completely unafraid. He sensed instinctively that the Norwegians, men of a race that had been peace-loving for centuries, were not the kind to kill in cold blood.
“There are no more,” he lied. “We are the only ones. And I demand that you release us immediately, or it will be the worse for you in the long run.”
Concealed as they were in the forest, neither Jensen nor any of his men had witnessed the parachute drop, although he was sure that there had been one, as the Ju 52 transports had been seen passing overhead. The villagers of Kvam would certainly have seen it, had they been at home, but they had taken refuge in the buildings around the sawmill, where most of their menfolk worked, for fear that their hamlet might be bombed at any moment.
It was this same fear of air attack that had prompted Jensen to conceal the train in the forest. He knew little about air power; as far as he knew, the Germans were as proficient at bombing by night as they were by day, and he had seen and heard many German bombers passing overhead during the past 48 hours. His conclusion was that it would be better to stay put until the Allies arrived, as General Ruge had indicated they would.
He knew that he would obtain no information from the captured Germans, but he was convinced that they were part of a much larger force. To find out if his suspicions were correct, he despatched a couple of men in the direction of Kvam to see what was happening. Within minutes, they returned breathlessly with the news that more than 30 heavily-armed Germans were advancing along the road.
Carefully, for he was a methodical man, Jensen weighed up the odds. With the addition of the 20 or so militiamen he had collected en route he had a force that was numerically superior to the enemy’s, but his scouts reported that the Germans were carrying mortars and machine-guns, which he did not possess. He therefore issued orders for his men to deploy quickly into defensive positions in the woods between the concealed train and the main line. If the Germans made a move towards them they would be engaged; if they went past they would be left alone. It seemed the logical course of action to take.
In considering his options, however, Jensen had overlooked one particular simple fact. It was the trail of footprints left behind in the snow by Maisel’s patrol.
In his own way, Major Hahn had been faced with a dilemma that was every bit as great as the Norwegian’s. When Maisel had still not returned after an hour’s absence, he had begun to feel the first twinges of worry. After another half-hour, he had decided to act. Convinced that some ill had befallen the seven-man patrol, he had decided to set out in search of it with the whole of his force except for two men, one of them the paratrooper nursing the sprained ankle, who had been left behind in the village with a machine-gun. And the trail of footprints, veering away into the forest, led him straight into trouble.
It was lucky that the first volley of Norwegian rifle fire only felled two of his men. The rest went to ground among the trees and began firing into the shadows — not haphazardly, for they were too well trained for that, but whenever they thought they detected a sign of movement. Pine branches, severed by bursts of gunfire, fell to the ground, showering the men beneath with snow.
Hahn realized that the Norwegians had planned their defensive positions skilfully. They commanded the higher ground and their flanks were well protected. Moreover, they appeared to be crack shots. He could use his mortars on them, but he had only a limited amount of mortar ammunition and he did not want to waste it. If British reinforcements came down the line, as he was certain they would, he would need every round.
He beckoned to his senior NCO, an experienced Feldwebel who had seen action in Poland and, before that, with the German Kondor Legion in the Spanish Civil War. The man, whose name was Baumer, crawled over and lay beside the officer, keeping his head well down.
“I’m going to divide my force,” Hahn told him. “I want you to stay here with a dozen men and keep the Norwegians pinned down. I’ll leave an MG with you. By the sound of things they only have rifles, so you should be able to beat them off easily if they try to attack you. I’m going back to the village with the rest. I’ve a feeling it won’t be long before the Tommies turn up. I don’t know if they will use the railway or motor transport, but either way you will be able to see them from here.”
Baumer nodded. The road and adjacent railway line were both visible through the cut in the trees that accommodated the spur line.
“When they do turn up,” Hahn went on, “don’t make a move until you hear my men in the village open fire. Then disengage here and make for the village through the trees. By the time you get there the Tommies will be in the process of deploying their forces. Attack them from the rear — try to cause as much confusion as possible. If you can’t break through to join me, act on your own initiative. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how to inflict the maximum possible damage, Baumer.”
The NCO grinned. “All clear, sir,” was all he said.
Quietly, Hahn and 20 or so of his men began to slip away from the scene, taking care to stay hidden from the Norwegians. They reached the road and began to make their way back towards Kvam. The sun had risen above the tops of the mountains now, casting the shadows of the men into sharp relief.
It was the shadows that Armstrong saw first, bobbing along the road ahead of him as he rounded a curve in the valley. He was flying at only 150 feet, with flaps lowered to reduce his speed, alert for any sign of movement. Suddenly, the shadows vanished as the men in the road threw themselves flat and became invisible.
Armstrong roared overhead, tilting a wing so that he could look down. There was no doubt about it; the bundles in the road were men, wearing white camouflage outfits.
He raised the flaps and opened the throttle, climbing and turning before descending
into the valley from the opposite direction. As he flew past Kvam, a line of red dots rose towards him: tracer bullets. Whoever was in the village, they were unfriendly. Either that, or they didn’t recognize a Spitfire. It was possible.
Then he saw the spur line. He had not noticed it earlier, having been distracted by the men in the road. He circled the spot, but could see nothing among the trees; but there was a clearing, with some buildings in it, and as he circled again he saw some people emerge from them, their upturned faces white as they gazed up at him. One or two of them waved, and he guessed that someone must have made out the RAF roundels under the Spitfire’s wings.
Armstrong made another pass over the clearing, followed by a second run over the main railway line, but the white-smocked figures had disappeared. The trouble was that the Spitfire’s high speed made it impossible to carry out an accurate visual reconnaissance in the few seconds available. Maybe Kalinski would learn more when he made a follow-up recce in the much slower Mureaux.
Armstrong climbed out of the valley again and set course for Lesjaskog, his mind working overtime. He knew that the missing train had passed various points on the line between Kvam and Lillehammer, because stationmasters along the route had confirmed it by telephone, but his reconnaissance of the line between Kvam and Aandalsnes had revealed no sign of it. Short of having driven itself into the river, it could only be concealed on the spur line he had just spotted; there was no other such line marked on his map of the route — a current Norwegian Army military map which was a couple of years more up to date than the one Hahn carried.
And if the men in the white smocks were Germans, and not Norwegians who had mistaken his Spitfire for a German aircraft, it might mean that the train had been captured.
He was still turning over the possibilities in his mind as he touched down on Lake Lesjaskog, noting as he taxied towards his dispersal that the thaw seemed to be setting in rapidly; even the packed snow piled on either side of the makeshift runway was beginning to melt. He turned the Spitfire tail-on to the clearing with a final burst of power and a shove on the rudder pedals, then switched off the engine and climbed from the cockpit, looking around for his ground crew, who were nowhere to be seen.
Kalinski, who as usual was fussing over the aircraft, provided an explanation.
“They didn’t expect you back so soon,” he said. “They have gone off for a sandwich. We can give you a hand to push the aircraft into the clearing, if you wish.” He waved at his observer, a man with a completely unpronounceable name who spoke no English. He abandoned his task of feeding bullets into the ammunition belt that served the Mureaux’ rear machine-gun and started to walk towards them.
Suddenly he stopped, his head cocked on one side, and shouted something in Polish. Kalinski answered him, then began to search the sky for the source of the faint droning they could all now hear. The visibility was good, with only a few streaks of high cirrus cloud — a sure sign that bad weather was on its way — to mar a pale blue sky. They saw the aircraft almost at once, silhouetted against the wispy cloud as they crawled high above the southern mountains. Armstrong counted 18 of them, flying in close formation, as though clinging to one another for security. They were close enough now for the men on the ground to see that they had twin engines. They were flying fairly high, at about 12,000 feet. After a few more moments, there was no longer any doubt as to their identity — even though at first Armstrong had thought that they looked like Blenheims.
“They’re Junkers 88s!” he said urgently. “Come on — get under cover, fast!”
They dashed for the tree-line and threw themselves down, burrowing into the snow at the fringe of the pines. Armstrong looked up in time to see the leading Junkers break formation and enter a long dive, heading straight towards him, or so it seemed. The drone of its engines swelled to a howl.
In the cockpit of the leading bomber, the pilot centred his bomb-sight on the airstrip that ran part of the way across the frozen lake. The strip of cleared ice showed up dark grey against the surrounding snow, and had been easy to pick out from the height at which he had started his dive. With dive-brakes fully extended the Junkers screamed towards the ground at an angle of 60 degrees. The pilot found himself mentally ticking off the seconds; it took the Ju 88 around 20 seconds to dive from 13000 feet to its release height of 3200 ft. But all he had to do was hold the bomber steady and keep the target squarely in his sight; everything else was worked out for him automatically. The mental ticking-off of time was merely a habit.
He had counted 16 seconds when a harsh warning horn sounded. Four seconds later it ceased, and the pilot jabbed a button on the control column. The elevator tail-trimmer, which had been set for the dive, now returned to neutral and the Junkers began to pull itself out of the headlong rush towards the earth.
The button also activated the bomb release mechanism. A few seconds later, the four 1000 pound bombs carried on racks under the Junkers’ wings dropped away automatically. The pull of gravity forced the bomber’s four crew members down into their seats as the aircraft approached level flight, roaring across the lake. The pilot pulled it up into a steep climbing turn and looked back over his shoulder to see if his bombs had found their mark.
From the tenuous sanctuary of the pines, Armstrong, Kalinski and the latter’s observer watched, hypnotized, as the four black projectiles hurtled towards the surface of the lake. An instant before the bombs impacted, the men clasped their hands over their ears and pushed their faces into the snow. The four bombs exploded in a single, shattering detonation, sending columns of water and great chunks of ice hurtling skywards. The air vibrated with the concussion, although the water damped down the effects of the shock wave before it reached the shore.
The air was filled with the scream of engines and more concussions as the other Ju 88s released their bombs in turn. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack was over.
Armstrong and his companions sat up, their ears ringing, brushing snow from themselves. They stood up, rather groggily, and looked out over the lake. Kalinski looked at Armstrong, who was pale-faced.
“The first time you have been bombed?” he asked. Armstrong nodded.
“The first time is always the worst,” the Pole told him. “My God, what a mess!”
He was referring to the lake. Where the airstrip had been, chunks of ice stood jaggedly on edge under an acrid smoke pall. Smoke was also rising from the trees at the edge of the lake some distance away, where the fighter squadron’s Gladiators — those that were not out on patrol — were dispersed. Armstrong could see flames, and heard a crackle of exploding ammunition. Figures were running to and fro, trying ineffectually to extinguish the fires.
In the west, even at this distance, columns of smoke could be seen rising from Aandalsnes. Armstrong could see tiny dots that were aircraft twisting and turning in the sky between the lake and the town. A pencil-line of smoke appeared as if by magic, a dark streak against the blue. It grew and lengthened, probing down towards the earth, a series of bright flashes punctuating the smoke. An aircraft was plunging to its destruction, its fall marked by a holocaust of exploding fuel tanks. They watched it in fascination until Armstrong broke the spell.
“The Spitfire! Come on — let’s get her under cover!”
Armstrong’s aircraft was still intact, and so, for the time being, was the patch of ice on which it stood. They ran towards it, Kalinski’s observer in the lead.
The next instant Armstrong was flat on his face on the ice, the wind thumped out of him as Kalinski brought him down with a tackle. There was a confused sensation of cannon fire mixed with a thunderous noise of engines, a series of rapid explosions, and a scream that was abruptly cut off. Dazedly, not comprehending what had happened, Armstrong raised his head.
A few yards away the Spitfire lay collapsed and crumpled on one wing, shattered by cannon shells. Nearby, the Polish observer lay spreadeagled on his back, a pool of blood already spreading and freezing around his body.
&
nbsp; The Messerschmitt 110, which must have formed part of the Junkers’ fighter escort and which no-one had seen, was already climbing away into the southern sky.
Chapter Sixteen
Armstrong and Kalinski climbed down from the Mureaux and looked around. Four Gladiators had also landed at the muddy airstrip just outside Aandalsnes; they had been engaged in the air battle to the east of the town and had escaped the destruction of the frozen lake base. The Poles assigned to the defence of Lesjaskog were also making for Aandalsnes by road, together with the RAF ground crews.
Armstrong still shuddered as he recalled the hair-raising take-off from Lesjaskog, the ice breaking up under the wheels of Kalinski’s aircraft even as it lurched into the air with seconds to spare. Fie was full of admiration for the Pole, who certainly knew what he was about. The two of them now trudged along the road that led into the town, ankle-deep in slush, and sought out Brigade Headquarters.
The German air attack had inflicted substantial damage on the little harbour; the smoke they had seen earlier came from a freighter offshore, which was well ablaze and listing. Work parties were busily clearing paths through the wreckage so that the flow of supplies to the troops onshore might continue. The streets were congested with transport, much of it comprising requisitioned Norwegian lorries.
The two pilots eventually located Brigade HQ in a school. It was crammed with personnel, and the newcomers hovered uncertainly for a minute or two until they spotted Colonel Gough, in earnest conversation with a Norwegian officer. They pushed their way through the throng and waited until the Army officer noticed them. The anxiety on his face was obvious.
“I’m glad you got away all right,” he said. “What about your aircraft?”
“The Spitfire’s a write-off,” Armstrong told him, “but the Mureaux is in one piece. Captain Kalinski’s observer was killed in the attack, so I hitched a lift with him. We got off by the skin of our teeth. The aircraft is out at the strip.”
Flames Over Norway Page 14