Flames over France

by Robert Jackson

  Whatever the outcome, Armstrong told himself, there was certain to be one hell of a free-for-all over Paris this afternoon.

  They took off in their two flights of three, all that was left of them, Villeneuve leading one and Armstrong the other, and climbed hard over the sprawl of Paris. Armstrong looked across in turn at each of his wingmen, two sergeants named Duval and Morel, and waved reassuringly at them. They knew what they must do in the coming battle; all of them did. With the odds stacked against them, there was no room for textbook tactics.

  The French reporting system, without the benefit of radio direction finding, was primitive and ineffectual. RAF fighter squadrons in England, alerted by the probing rays sent out by the RDF masts on the south coast, would have been ‘mixing it’ with the enemy by now. The French, on the other hand, relied on an antiquated telephone network to report the progress of approaching aircraft, or on visual observation from the air.

  Still, Armstrong thought with awe and not a little trepidation, it would be hard to miss that lot. At 19,000 feet, strung out across the sky over the suburbs of Paris, was the biggest armada of aircraft he had ever seen. The sky was black with them. They were flying in wedges, like skeins of geese, sliding between towering thunderclouds. And above them, silvery crosses in the sunlight, their guardian Messerschmitt formations crossed over one another’s path in a steady tactical rhythm, their pilots watchful.

  Villeneuve’s dry, calm voice came over the R/T, its tone setting nerves at ease for the moment.

  “Doubtless you can see the enemy,” he said. “Do not fight amongst yourselves over which targets to choose. There are plenty. Line abreast, attack! Tally Ho!”

  Armstrong laughed out loud in the cockpit. The ‘tally ho’ was a cry Villeneuve had enthusiastically borrowed from the RAF pilot; the French did not seem to have an equivalent.

  The fighter pilots spread out, a couple of hundred yards between each aircraft, each picking a target as the two formations closed with one another at something like 500 miles per hour. It was a closing speed that left very little margin for error.

  Throwing a quick glance to either side to make sure that his two wingmen were in position, Armstrong selected a flight of Heinkels that was flying a little lower than the rest and put his Hawk into a shallow dive, building up speed. Concentrating on the centre bomber of the enemy flight, he gripped the control column with both hands, bracing his whole body as the Heinkel’s wingspan expanded rapidly in his gunsight. Smoky tendrils speared out from the Heinkel’s nose, reaching towards him. They dropped away beneath the Hawk as the German gunner, doubtless rattled by the fighter bearing down on him head-on, missed his target.

  Armstrong squeezed the triggers and the image of the Heinkel shivered in his windscreen. There was time only for a two-second burst of fire before he was compelled to shove the stick forward hard to avoid the looming bulk of the bomber. His guts rose into his chest as the Hawk plummeted down, missing the Heinkel’s underside by feet.

  He pulled back on the stick again, the force of gravity pushing him down in his seat as he zoomed up under a second formation of bombers, loosing off a burst at one of them as he hurtled past, with no visible result. The impetus of his zoom-climb carried him up a couple of thousand feet and he stall-turned the fighter, coming down astern of the bombers. Sinister black eggs were tumbling from their bellies now as they released their bomb loads; the first wave was already turning away as the bombs fell towards factories and power stations, and inevitably the houses that clustered around them, in the Parisian suburbs. Smoke trails, arrowing down towards the haze below, marked the last plunge of two aircraft; whether they were German or French it was impossible to tell.

  Armstrong came down hard on the tail of a Heinkel on the lefthand side of the rearmost formation and, bracing every fibre of his body again, held the Hawk steady as he closed in, ignoring the fire that came at him from the bomber’s dorsal gun position. He knew that with the Hawk’s poor armament, the only real chance of success was to get in really close, to punch hard with a couple of well-aimed bursts, inflicting the maximum possible damage, before quickly getting out of danger.

  The Heinkel suddenly went into a steep turn to the left. Armstrong followed it, firing a burst into its starboard engine. The effect was startling. Large fragments broke away, whirling back in the slipstream. The Heinkel skidded violently out of its turn and a cloud of white smoke burst from the stricken engine. The bomber’s starboard undercarriage leg dropped from its raised position in the engine nacelle and hung in the slipstream. The smoke thickened, shot with flame now, and the Heinkel went into a spiral dive. Armstrong pulled up above it and steep-turned, looking down on the bomber’s death agony. It left a corkscrew of smoke in the sky as it spiralled down towards the haze that was growing thicker over Paris with every passing minute. Two black dots tumbled from it, trailing bright yellow streamers that blossomed into parachutes. They drifted down behind the bomber as the haze enveloped it.

  Armstrong weaved his fighter from side to side, looking round. Only now did he become conscious that the radio was filled with chatter. Drifting clouds of spent anti-aircraft bursts filled the sky, adding to the murk hanging like a veil over the French capital; through it, the broad ribbon of the Seine shone dully.

  Armstrong was suddenly frightened. He had been quite calm while engaging the enemy, and surprisingly had experienced no elation at shooting down the Heinkel. Now, as though a giant hand had wiped the sky clear, it was suddenly empty of aircraft. He was isolated, and felt utterly alone and exposed. He found himself shivering in the cockpit. It was as though some sixth sense were prodding at his nervous system. A sixth sense. Frantically, he looked behind.

  Jesus! Two aircraft were sitting on his tail, still several hundred yards away but closing rapidly. Short, square-cut wings. Messerschmitt 109s.

  Armstrong knew instinctively that if he tried to turn and face them head-on at this range one of them would almost certainly nail him as he turned. The 109s were well spaced out, with a quarter of a mile between them, and were in a position to box him in without difficulty. His only hope was to try to shake them off in the thickening haze, which was becoming really dense a few thousand feet below.

  He put the Hawk into a dive and opened the throttle wide, his heart in his mouth. A glance in his rear-view mirror showed that the 109s were following and keeping pace with him. One of the enemy fighters had drawn some distance ahead of its companion. Yellow flashes of gunfire twinkled on its nose.

  There was a hollow thud somewhere in the Hawk’s fuselage, followed instantly by a metallic clatter of shrapnel on the armour plating behind Armstrong’s seat. He risked a glance to the rear again, and saw with relief that the outlines of the pursuing fighters were becoming blurred. They must be having real difficulty in seeing him now.

  Armstrong held the fighter in its drive, knowing that he still had about 8,000 feet of height in hand before he made a hole in the middle of Paris. At 4,000 feet he gently began to pull back on the stick, using both hands because the controls were stiff with the speed of the dive and praying that nothing vital had been damaged by the Messerschmitt’s fire. The Hawk shuddered but responded magnificently.

  Armstrong maintained the backward pressure and pulled the fighter up into the beginning of a loop, hoping that the German fighter pilots had logical Teutonic minds. They would not be expecting him to do that. The logical thing to do in his circumstances would be to level out just above the rooftops of Paris and head flat out for home, hoping the enemy fighters would be drawn into the flak barrage. Instead, Armstrong half-rolled off the top of the loop and headed in the opposite direction, climbing at full throttle. A couple of minutes later he popped out of the layer of haze and drifting smoke, which the wind at altitude had flattened out until it was like the surface of a lake, with stirred-up whorls and eddies breaking it up here and there.

  He was just in time to see the two Messerschmitts turning towards the north, half a mile away, flying almost wi
ngtip to wingtip just above the hazy layer. They were not hurrying, and he quickly realised that their pilots had not spotted him. Every nerve tense, Armstrong stalked them, gradually overhauling them. Odd buffeting noises were coming from somewhere in the rear of the Hawk, but he did his best to ignore them.

  He was within two hundred yards of the left-hand Messerschmitt. It went into a gentle turn to the right, following its leader; it was now some distance behind the other aircraft. Its pilot must surely see him. Hang on, he told himself. Closer, closer still. At less than a hundred yards he opened fire.

  The grey outline of the Messerschmitt wobbled and the shining arc of its propeller broke up, its blades windmilling. Bullet strikes danced and sparkled along the 109’s length from nose to wingtip. Dense white smoke belched back over its wings and it started to go down.

  The cockpit canopy flew off and a moment later the dark shape of the pilot emerged, arms and legs spreadeagled, seemingly attached to the falling aircraft. Then the airflow caught him and he fell clear, disappearing under Armstrong’s wing, falling towards the city below.

  Armstrong did not look to see whether the German’s parachute had opened. He went after the leading 109, which was flying steadily on, its pilot apparently unaware of what had happened. Armstrong suddenly realised that it was gaining on him, and a quick look at his instruments told him that his fuel state was dangerously low. He also knew that he must be almost out of ammunition. Reluctantly he let the German go and turned away, descending through the haze to get his bearings. A few minutes later he located Le Bourget and circled the airfield before making his approach to land.

  The bombers had been there. There were craters everywhere, the hangars were in ruins and the airfield was littered with wrecked aircraft, mostly trainers and transports which had not been involved in the fighting. Armstrong touched down on a patch of undamaged earth and taxied in, threading his way between the craters to a spot near one of the hangars where he could see a couple more Hawks. One of them was Villeneuve’s; the other belonged to his wingman, Duval.

  The rest of the group, and most of the Polish Caudrons, were scattered on airfields all over the Paris region. Those that had survived.

  Duval came to meet him as he climbed from the cockpit and dropped off the wing, flexing his arms and legs. The sergeant’s face was drawn.

  “Where’s Morel?” Armstrong queried anxiously.

  “I’m afraid he’s gone, sir,” Duval said quietly. “I saw him collide head-on with a Heinkel. There was no chance that he might have got out.”

  “Poor devil.” Armstrong did not know what else to say; he was aware that Duval and Morel had been close friends. He fished in his tunic pocket for his pipe, which he had filled before take-off, and lit it, exhaling a cloud of pungent French Jean Bart tobacco. “What’s happened to the colonel?”

  “He is in the flight hut, sir, trying to find out what has become of the other pilots. He shot down two bombers. I also got one, by the way. A Dornier. Did you have any luck?”

  Armstrong smiled and clapped the NCO on the shoulder. “Well done!” he said warmly, knowing that it was Duval’s first victory. “Yes, I got a couple too, a Heinkel and a 109. We would have knocked down more of them, too, if only we had received orders to take off in time. And perhaps poor Morel would still have been with us.”

  Duval nodded, reddening, and turned away to hide the emotions that had clearly welled up inside him. Armstrong patted his shoulder again and left him to seek out Villeneuve. He found the colonel where Duval had said he would be, sitting beside a telephone. Villeneuve’s face brightened as Armstrong came in.

  “You are like the cat with its nine lives, my friend. I was certain that this time, you had used them all up.” He gestured towards a chair and leaned back in his own, lighting a cigarette. “You know we have lost Sergeant Morel?” Armstrong nodded. “A great pity,” Villeneuve said. “A good pilot, and one with much potential. He failed to break off his attack in time. A split second of misjudgement, and pouf-gone. Extinguished like the flame of this match.”

  “What about the others?” Armstrong asked.

  “Fortunately, all safe. They either called up over the radio to say that they were landing elsewhere, or telephoned straight away. They know how I concern myself about them,” he added, smiling.

  The smile did nothing to hide the weariness on Villeneuve’s face. He had aged ten years in less than a month.

  “Have you heard anything of the Poles?” Armstrong wanted to know. Villeneuve nodded. “Ah, yes, the Poles. They took a look at the damage here and went off to land at Dreux and Brétigny. Very wise. Your friend Kalinski telephoned to say that they destroyed two Messerschmitt 109s for no loss to themselves. I told him to keep his aircraft and pilots where they were. It is possible that we may have to evacuate Le Bourget shortly.”

  As the afternoon wore on, and reports of the day’s lighting came in, it became apparent that the Le Bourget squadrons had been lucky, possibly because the few lighter groups that had received the order to take off had absorbed the first shock of the enemy raid on Paris, which the Germans had code-named Operation Paula.

  Among the units that had received the alert was Groupe de Chasse I/III, whose seventeen Dewoitine D.520s had been among the first to take off from their airfield at Meaux, a few miles from the capital. As they attacked a formation of enemy bombers, the French pilots were heavily engaged by the enemy fighter escort, and were soon fighting for their lives. In the space of five minutes two of them were shot down and killed and three more wounded, in return for which they could claim only one Me 109 destroyed and three bombers damaged.

  Nevertheless, the arrival of the D.520s had averted another tragedy. A few minutes ahead of them, nine Morane 406s had taken off from Coulommiers with a formation of bombers already in sight. The fighter pilots made a head-on attack in the course of which they destroyed a Junkers 88 and an Me 109, but when they went after the formation for a second attack they found that their weary Moranes could not match the bombers’ speed. Then the Messerschmitts were upon them, and all the Morane pilots could do was to keep turning as tightly as possible and wait for an opportunity to disengage. It came when the German fighters broke off to deal with I/III’s D.520s.

  Another Morane 406 unit was not so lucky. At 1315 a wave of Dornier 17s swept at low altitude over its airfield at Plessis, followed a few seconds later by another wave bombing from medium level. The four Moranes on readiness were knocked out even before they had begun to taxi; four more managed to take off among the exploding bombs and exchange a few ineffectual bursts of fire with a flight of Messerschmitts that raced across the field on a strafing run, but the Messerschmitts vanished in the haze and the Moranes, with no hope of catching them, landed again on their cratered base.

  Everywhere, it was the same story of disaster. At 1320, while Villeneuve and the Poles were fighting over Paris, twenty-two Marcel Bloch MB 152 radial-engined fighters took off in the face of a wave of approaching bombers and climbed furiously to meet them in two waves, one of fourteen and one of eight, trying to manoeuvre into a suitable position to attack. But the German fighters were everywhere. Fifteen Me 109s trapped a flight of Blochs and shot all three of them down in as many minutes; only one pilot managed to bale out, badly burned. Two more MB 152s went down in flames shortly afterwards, destroyed in turn after shooting down an Me 109 near Senlis. Then the Messerschmitts pounced on the second wave of climbing fighters and destroyed three of them; again, only one pilot succeeded in baling out.

  At about the same time a third Bloch group took off from Bretigny. The pilots had not even had time to strap themselves in. Now, hanging on their propellers, the nine fighters climbed flat out towards the wave of bombers and Messerschmitts strung out across the sky 12,000 feet higher up. Still climbing, they attacked a formation of thirty Heinkel bombers and shot down two of them before the German fighter escort intervened. One MB 152 pilot baled out of his blazing aircraft and two more had to make forced landings.


  On the southern outskirts of Paris, a dozen Moranes tangled with a formation of bombers after taking off from their base in ones and twos and climbing through a terrific barrage of French anti-aircraft fire. They destroyed a Heinkel and three Me 110s, but three French pilots were shot down and killed.

  At 1340, twenty-one Curtiss Hawks of GC I/5 took off from Saint-Dizier and quickly located a formation of Dornier 17s, heading north-east. The Groupe was just positioning itself for a stern attack when it was heavily engaged by fifty Me 109s and 110s. During a hectic fifteen-minute dogfight the French pilots destroyed one Do 17, two Me 109s and two Me 110s for the loss of one of their own number. A second Hawk pilot, wounded in the legs, made a forced landing.

  The last of the German bombers and their escorts vanished into the thickening mist; the battle of Paris was over. In the course of the afternoon the French fighters had flown 243 sorties and destroyed twenty-six enemy aircraft. Seventeen French aircraft had been lost, with twelve pilots killed.

  For the Germans, the results of Operation Paula had been disappointing. The concentrated attacks on thirteen airfields in the Paris area had resulted in the destruction of only sixteen aircraft on the ground, with a further seven damaged. Six runways had been temporarily put out of action, twenty-one vehicles destroyed and thirty-two personnel killed. All the bases attacked were serviceable again within forty-eight hours. The bombers had also attacked twenty-two railway stations and junctions; here, too, repairs were completed by dawn on 4 June. Fifteen factories were hit, but only three suffered more than minor damage.

  But the bombs had taken their toll of civilian lives. Two hundred and fifty-four people had been killed, and over six hundred injured. The citizens of Paris screamed for reprisals. Why, they demanded to know, were French bombs not falling on Berlin?