Night Raiders
Richard Townsend Bickers
© Richard Townsend Bickers 1982
Richard Townsend Bickers has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1982 by Robert Hale Ltd.
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Extract from Air Strike by Richard Townsend Bickers
Chapter One
When they heard the first of the returning bombers overhead they went outside to watch them land; and count the survivors.
The Brigadier-General led the way out of the officers’ mess, followed by Lieutenant-Colonel Quinn, who commanded the wing. Tearle, the squadron adjutant, held the door open for them. A captain on the Brigadier’s staff politely deferred to Tearle and ushered him out. Tearle could never be certain how much his limp prompted politeness of this sort; that, and the faded MC ribbon under his pilot’s wings which testified that his limp must be the result of a wound in action. He accused himself of being ungracious for allowing such deference or consideration or whatever it was to irritate him.
Their breath condensed in dense white wraiths in the raw January night. Their shoes and riding-boots — Tearle was the only one in slacks, the others wore breeches — rang on the tarmac, which was white with frost. They huddled into their greatcoats, gloved hands deep in pockets.
Quick strides took them to the shelter of the nearest hangar, where they stood in the open entrance and gazed up at the sky.
The machines had taken off at 11 p.m. The Brigadier looked at his watch for the fourth time in a quarter of an hour. He had looked at the time as soon as he first heard the DH4’s engine approaching and that was only three or four minutes ago.
The Old Man’s jumpy, thought his staff captain. And why not? DH4s were day bombers and this night raid was an experiment. All experiments which gambled with men’s lives and expensive aircraft were bold. The cross-currents of vicious political intrigue in London, where ambitious ministers and newspaper proprietors, industrialists and other venal, power-hungry or power-drunk men plotted and vied with each other, were felt here in France. The actions of every commander in the field, from a Major commanding a squadron to a General at Headquarters, were under scrutiny by unprincipled schemers (your average politician, but highly placed) who never lost a chance to blame the men who were fighting the war for any error or failure generated by one of their own number from a safe distance from the battlefield.
Three searchlights coned over the aerodrome to guide the homing pilots and their observers. The circling DH4 was caught intermittently in their rays and in the diffused light of their brilliant beams; its drab greenish-dun paint silvery as it reflected them like a mirror. Exhaust flames from the 250 h.p. liquid-cooled V12 Rolls Royce Eagle engine stabbed redly in the darkness.
Tearle had been present when the operation was planned in Lieutenant-Colonel Quinn’s office and Brigadier-General Pollard’s presence. There was no doubt about who would carry the brunt of the blame for any blunder or disaster on this one.
As he had sat in the background, taking notes, he had been thinking that the other four men in the room made interesting contrasts with one another. He did not include himself in the speculation. Tearle was not in the habit of spending much time seeing himself in a mirror, literal or metaphorical.
The Brigadier, tall, heavy-set, florid, bluff, externally the epitome of all the solid British virtues of fair-mindedness, common sense and courage, concealed a considerable intelligence behind this stereotyped presence. He was not a rollicking, hard-riding, fox-hunting cavalryman like so many senior officers in the Royal Flying Corps. Brigadier Pollard had transferred to the Corps from the Royal Artillery: and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, imposed a higher entrance examination standard on potential gunners and engineers than the Royal Military College at Sandhurst demanded from its entrants destined for infantry and cavalry.
The accompanying staff captain was an exquisite: faultlessly groomed, wearing his wings on a pale khaki tunic which bore the badges of an expensive lancer regiment, with a cheerful pink face, amazingly thin jockey’s legs fashioned by nature to grace glossy riding-boots, and an innate gift for fence-sitting.
Lieutenant-Colonel Quinn was, whichever way Tearle looked at him — and he preferred not to do so at all — able and ruthless. As tall as the Brigadier, but thin and hatchet-faced, he had hooded ice-grey eyes and a bristly red moustache that were storm warnings to anyone with more than a moron’s ability to judge character. He had come from a Guards regiment, whose tunic and badges he assiduously wore, with breeches and boots which were as beautifully fashioned as Captain Ogilvy-Smith’s. Tearle had once wondered whether there were anything at which the Wing Commander would stop short in furtherance of his career, and quickly came to the conclusion that there was not; including parricide.
Last, and most important to the discussion, the Squadron Commander, Eric Yardley: whose Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross had conspicuously not “come up with the rations” as hard-bitten sceptics (themselves omitted from the award of honours) alleged about some.
Yardley, who had started his career in the infantry, made no bones about the RFC tunic. Its high neck, he said, was warm in winter and at all seasons dispensed with the nuisance of a tie. He was rather over average height, burly, dark-haired and transparently honest. Tearle assessed his CO as the most uncomplicated person he had ever known well. Yardley’s informality, breezy friendliness and kindness misled most acquaintances into the impression that, with his manifest self-confidence and powerful physique, he took discipline lightly and was insensitive to danger because he was not bright enough to be frightened.
When alcoholic conviviality in the mess erupted into rough games, notably “tanks” played from behind upturned sofas and with soda siphons as guns, it was usually Major Yardley, DSO, MC, who was the instigator.
If this first night-bombing sortie went wrong, it was he who would, in the current bitter phrase, carry the can.
Tearle, shortish, thick-set and loyal, was, at this moment, worried about the outcome of the operation. His fair hair, light eyelashes and blue eyes gave him a look of being innocent as well as innocuous; but that was not so. He had been a schoolmaster before the war and volunteered for the RFC as soon as war was declared. Three years at Cambridge had sharpened his faculties and the fact that he was not a regular enabled him to view the Service with detachment. The greatest loyalty he had ever had was to the RFC and his greatest admiration was for Eric Yardley.
Three hours ago, nine DH4s had taken off to bomb a railway junction in Germany. The main purpose of the operation was not to inflict damage on the enemy but to test the DH4 as a night bomber. It was already well proven as a day bomber and most night bombing was done by elderly FE2Bs, whose miserable top speed of 80 m.p.h. was lethal in daylight, when fighters swarmed everywhere and anti-aircraft guns had plenty of time to pick them off. The “Fee” also carried a bomb load of only 350 lb. whereas the DH4 could deliver four 112 lb. or two 230 lb. bombs. The former had a ceiling of 6,000 ft and the latter of 16,000 ft. The DH4 could fly a great deal faster than the Fee:
117 m.p.h. at 6,000 ft and 130 m.p.h. at 10,000 ft.
Yardley had said that, as they needed to find out as much as they could as quickly as possible, and the weather frequently interfered with flying in winter, they had better choose a target which would extend the DH4 to almost the limit of its 3½ hour endurance.
Lieutenant-Colonel Quinn had made an objection which both Yardley and Tearle knew was a formality, in advocacy of caution; and conceded to the Squadron Commander with little argument. The Brigadier had said that he relied on Yardley’s judgment.
The sound of aero engines was swelling and two more bombers flitted in and out of the searchlights’ glow.
Tearle shifted uneasily. His wounded leg always began to hurt more when he was worried. Enemy anti-aircraft fire was not the only hazard. Most casualties, in early 1918, were still caused by accidents; many of these occurring when landing by the poor light then available for flare paths. In the target areas there were also balloon barrages, some of these clustered tightly, with horizontal wires between their cables. An aircraft which flew into a mesh like that had small hope of avoiding a fatal drop to earth. Finally, if neither Archie nor balloons got you, the crude compasses on which aircrews relied almost totally for their navigation could send you so badly astray that you ran out of fuel while still over Germany or enemy-occupied France.
The four of them, and scores of others, squadron ground and aircrews and spectators from other squadrons, watched the first DH4 begin its approach towards the row of flaring goosenecks: cans full of oil, with long necks stuffed with ignited tow. One of the searchlights had dropped its beam so that it shone horizontally, from its position on the airfield boundary, along the ground parallel to the flare path.
The aircraft bore no distinguishable letters or numbers on the fuselage and it was impossible to recognise the helmeted and goggled head of the pilot.
It touched down and fresh snow spurted away from its wheels. It taxied quickly out of the way and the little group of officers moved out of the hangar towards the tarmac apron on which it would stop.
When the pilot stood up, Tearle saw from his bulky shoulders and familiar shape that it was Yardley. He also recognised the observer, Alec Wotton’s, lithe form as he started to climb out of his rear cockpit.
Tearle’s uneasiness was not over yet. It was good to know that Yardley was back safely, but how many others had returned with him and had they found the target, had they bombed it effectively?
Both men, swaddled in fur-lined canvas Sidcot suits and soft, fleecy thigh-boots, paused to chat for a moment to the mechanics that closed in on the aeroplane; then turned to walk stiffly towards the waiting group.
A fourth aircraft appeared in the circuit and Tearle, watching Yardley approach, wondered whether his slow pace was dictated by the soft-soled boots he wore, in which walking was uncomfortable, or by reluctance to join the Brigadier-General and the Wing Commander.
He had never known Yardley hesitant about anything; but there were still four DH4s to land: if they were coming back.
Chapter Two
When she heard the first bombs explode, Ilse woke and lay sleepily listening to the drone of aero engines, thinking she had imagined the explosions. Bombs here, so far from any big town, steel works, munition factory, aerodrome or other target of the kind the British, French and Americans usually attacked?
Bombing at night, moreover? She had heard that the British had been doing so, recently, but those attacks had been aimed at major objectives; and if a marshalling yard was bombed it was always in an industrial city.
The railway junction here at Fichtewald was busy these days, but the traffic was all troop trains taking reinforcements to the Front or bringing wounded back, and goods trains hauling stores such as boots, clothing and food to depots in France. It was a rural junction of much less importance than other places closer to France and within shorter range of Allied aeroplanes.
She doubted her ears until she heard more bombs burst and the noise of several aeroplanes in flight. They were not, as she had supposed, German machines, then. Her ears had not been mistaken.
“Ilse! Ilse!”
Her mother’s call brought her bolt upright and wide awake. She saw the dim light of a candle in her parents’ bedroom, reflected on the cream-coloured wallpaper of the landing. Her mother and she slept with their doors open on nights when her father was on duty in his signalbox. A blackout was in force, but her mother liked to sleep with the curtains partly open. A candle, shaded by the hand, gave no offence. In any event, there were no electric bedside lights. The only light in each room hung from the centre of the ceiling.
Ilse quickly got out of bed and went to her mother.
Frau Nauroth was sitting up, holding the candlestick with one hand and cupping the other around the flame. Her wan face was creased with pain and fatigue, her eyes were on the door, watching anxiously for her daughter.
“Don’t be frightened, Mutti.” The young woman drew the curtains closed.
Her mother took her hand away from shielding the candle and set it back on the table by the bed.
“I am worried about Vati.”
“A signalbox is very small. There are hectares of railway line. The bombs won’t fall on Vati’s signalbox and anyway the enemy are not interested in that; it is too easily repaired. They bomb the lines. So don’t worry.”
Frau Nauroth made agitated movements.
“How can they see what they are hitting in the dark? And from so high up?”
Ilse had seen, while she was at the window, the Holt parachute flares which the DH4s had dropped before they began to release their bombs.
“The brutes can see what they’re doing, all right. They are lighting the place up for themselves.”
“You are only saying that to stop me worrying about your father.”
Ilse drew the curtains wide.
“See for yourself, Mutti. If you lean to the right you will be able to see. Blow out the candle.”
With the room in darkness, but lit now by the white glare of phosphorus burning in the sky and drifting slowly earthward, Frau Nauroth leaned far over and propped herself on an elbow.
“You don’t really need to make so much effort,” her daughter said. “They are dropping so many and they are so close to the ground before they go out, that they are lighting this room almost like day.”
The house was a kilometre from the railway, but shook from the concussion of bursting bombs.
Frau Nauroth exclaimed in fear and said, “Close the curtains, my child, close them quickly.”
Ilse heard her strike a match and saw the candle alight as she turned back towards the bed. She walked over and sat down on it, and took her mother’s thin hand. Her mother was trembling.
“Don’t worry, Mutti, don’t be frightened. Vati will be all right. Why, you can hear for yourself how bad their aim is. Those last two bombs fell nearer to the house than to the railway. He will be perfectly safe.”
“Why do the pigdogs molest a quiet little place like this? And so far for them to come.”
“Better that they come here, and bomb inaccurately, than go somewhere more important and do real damage.”
“If they come once, they will come again.”
Tears appeared in Frau Nauroth’s eyes.
“Then more guns will be sent, and barrage balloons. We shall be quite safe,” Ilse said.
They could hear the thud of flak batteries and searchlight beams showed through the curtains dimly.
A sudden roar of sound filled the room and made the house shudder again. A strong light filtered through the curtains. Ilse ran to open them a crack and peer out. She closed them and turned excitedly to her mother.
“The guns have brought one of them down! It’s burning and ammunition is exploding, going off in all directions; like fireworks. That loud noise must have been bombs and petrol detonating.”
“One! Out of how many? Oh, Ilse, I’m so worried about your father.”
“Now, Mother
, don’t upset yourself. Look at the clock: it’s half an hour past midnight. Would you like me to bring you some hot milk, to help you sleep?”
“I’ll come down to the kitchen with you, dear. I’m too restless to be on my own. I hadn’t been asleep long, and to be awakened like this...”
“I’ll bring your milk up for you.”
Frau Nauroth had the stubbornness of one who had been long invalided after an active life. Multiple sclerosis had begun to cripple her six years ago, when she was 41 and her daughter 16. Now she was forced to spend half her waking hours in a chair or a bed.
Ilse helped her up and into a dressing-gown and slippers. Old-fashioned wood-burning stoves kept the small house warm and the double-windows and shutters of the region insulated it well.
With the curtains and shutters closed in the rest of the house, Ilse switched lights on and helped her mother downstairs and into a comfortable chair in the kitchen.
The guns had ceased fire. The noise of aircraft engines had faded away; damped, in any event, by the double-windows and shutters. If her mother’s window had not been open, Ilse would probably have slept through the first few explosions. She would not have heard the aeroplane engines at first. She went to bed tired and sleepy, after a long day of work in the house and the vegetable garden and looking after the chickens and pigs.
“A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be hampered by an invalid,” her mother constantly bewailed. “You should be going out and enjoying yourself. You should be married, or at least promised to some fine, handsome young man.”
“I am perfectly happy,” Ilse always said, with little truth. And, with more reason, “anyway, all the fine, handsome young men are in France.”
“They come home on leave.”
“And after a little while they stop coming home at all, Mutti. You wouldn’t want me to be married for a few days and then be a widow, would you?”
“God forbid. The war cannot go on much longer. The young men will be home for good, then, and you can live a real life. I am a burden to both you and your father, but when the war is over and prosperity returns, please God we shall be able to afford some help in the house. Even if we could afford it now, there is no one willing to do domestic work. All the women think of nowadays is getting a job in a factory. All of them, whether they are sixteen or sixty.”
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