Trial By Fire

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “Tallyho!”

  They were approaching from the enemy’s port bow and a few hundred feet above. The Dorniers flew steadily on in close formation, relying on their combined firepower to protect each other. James selected the leader of the second V as his target. The gunners in the dorsal and port beam hatches of all the bombers opened fire. Tracer bullets — and shells — always looked as though they were drifting slowly towards one, then appeared to accelerate suddenly in the last few yards. The tracer from the Do 17s came towards the Hurricanes in clearly discernible arcs of red and yellow, falling short and curving away beneath them.

  They’re jittery, thought James. Starting to shoot before we’re properly in range.

  He saw Addison open fire and his bullets strike the nose and port engine of the leading Dornier with the usual flashes. He saw Red Two and Three open up on the two port side machines in the first Vic. He adjusted his reflector sight, checked for the third time that his gun button was in the “on” position, and waited. When he judged that he was within three hundred yards, and the tracer from two of the Dorniers, the leader of the second Vic and the one immediately on its left, was coming unpleasantly close, he gave the leader’s upper gunner a short burst. The gun stopped but others were still shooting at him. At a hundred yards he fired into the cockpit, keeping his thumb hard on the button until he had to pull up to avoid a collision. He broke down to the left in a turn that would carry him out of range and enable him to come in again from the front, on the other side.

  When he had completed his turn, he saw that Addison’s target had lost a good two thousand feet. It had turned for home with smoke gushing from its dead port engine and fire nibbling its port wing. Two of the crew had already baled out: he saw their parachutes.

  He looked for his own target. At first he could not find it. Then he saw that it had plunged far below Addison’s victim: it was going rapidly earthwards in a vertical dive. He must have killed the pilot. He saw one of the crew jump out, then turned his attention back to the remaining eight. But there were no longer eight. Another of them had abandoned the fight and was streaking back towards Germany with a trail of smoke marking the angle of the dive with which it was trying to gain enough speed to out-distance any pursuing Hurricane. Another was burning and breaking up as it fell, leaving four parachutes to follow it.

  James counted the other Hurricanes while he climbed and could account for only four, until he saw one far beneath on a course for base and heard its pilot exchange brief messages with Addison: it had been hit and was losing both glycol and oil.

  James saw tracer leaping in his direction from the starboard beam gunner in the nearest Dornier, the last one on the starboard side of the leading five. He fired and watched his bullets rip along the bomber’s belly. He fired again and the bomb doors sagged open. One more burst. Tracer coming at him from a different direction...two different directions...three...A long burst, then the hiss of air and his guns were empty. But at the same moment a blinding orange glare suffused the sky and he automatically shut his eyes. A shock wave of disturbed air struck his Hurricane and he felt the port wing drop viciously. A boom like thunder numbed his ears. He opened his eyes to find himself in a great cloud of oily black smoke lit by twirling, burning pieces of the Dornier whose bombs had detonated under the last burst from his guns. He broke out of the smoke and looked, as he thought, up. Instead of sky he saw fields, woods, roads; directly below, a farm. The force of the blast from the exploding Do 17 had tossed him upside-down. He rolled out of his inverted attitude and searched the sky. Three miles to the south-west he could see the three surviving Dorniers, several thousand feet below, still presumably making for their target. Perhaps they would be intercepted again before they reached it. To the south he saw two condensation trails which might have been made by two of the other Hurricanes, but he could see none of them.

  He could hear snatches of talk on the R/T, but there were constant break-throughs from other frequencies and once he even heard a B.B.C. music programme for about twenty seconds. There were also the usual whinings and whistles, spluttering and howls which formed a constant background to listening out on high frequency radio. He called Addison and picked up a faint response. Flying what he hoped was a good course for base he found a moment to exult in his two victories. Then he thought about possible damage to his aircraft and carefully studied the port and starboard wings, but there were no bullet holes. He listened for sounds of distress in the engine, but heard none. He had memorised a few landmarks when they had flown in that morning and when they flew north on this sortie, but he could recognise none now. He checked his fuel state and felt a spasm of alarm as though he had stepped through a familiar door, and, instead of a solid floor beyond it, there was a void through which he had dropped: for a moment his mind was disoriented, shocked, incredulous. Quickly he regained control of himself. He had enough petrol left for about ten minutes’ flight. He must have been hit in one of the wing tanks from below, where he could not see the damage.

  He tried the R/T again and this time he heard the voice of one of the other pilots, on duty in the Operations tent, loudly and clearly, thanks to the strength of the mobile ground transmitter. A couple of minutes later Ops. had fixed his position with the help of three mobile direction-finding stations and gave him a course for base. He was at 15000 ft. by then, a height from which he could pick out landmarks yet allow himself good time to spot an emergency landing field if he must. He had just identified the aerodrome when his engine cut. He glided in to make a dead-stick landing and came to a stop half-way across the airfield.

  L.A.C. Swallow, who had come with the advance party, was pedalling furiously toward him. Swallow was a wily old sweat, all of twenty-four years old, an ex-apprentice, a survivor and a notorious scrounger. Goodness knew where he had “won” the bicycle: from some neighbouring French household, or perhaps the working party had brought it with them. James would not be surprised if his fitter had purloined it from the cycle store at Stanswick and smuggled it aboard the Bombay. Anyway, here he came; and, as Swallow had pronounced bow legs — “couldn’t stop a pig” his friends jeered — he looked very odd indeed with his knees sticking out as his feet pumped the pedals.

  Swallow jumped off the bike, let it fall on the grass and scrambled up on the port wing, grinning from ear to ear.

  “How many did you get, Mister Fenton?”

  James raised two fingers.

  “I don’t know if you’re making rude signs to me, sir, or telling me you got two of the buggers.”

  “I got two of the buggers.”

  “Bloody marvellous show, sir. Run out of juice, did you?”

  “Got hit in a tank...”

  But Swallow did not wait to hear more. His expression of delight vanished, his face paled, he exclaimed “Bloody ‘ell!” jumped down and dived under the wing of his precious charge to look for the damage.

  Bending down to peer under the wing, James started to laugh.

  “I don’t believe you’d have shown as much concern for me if I’d come back with punctures in my skin, Swallow.”

  Swallow emerged, smiling again.

  “We’ve got twenty-two pilots, sir. Only eighteen Hurris! This isn’t much: soon have her patched up. Two more, then? That makes you top-scorer on the squadron. No one else has got three yet.”

  * * *

  On the 12th they flew patrols, in sections, to the north, north-east and north-west of their base. The remainder of the squadron arrived. More tents went up. There was a holiday feeling about this new way of life. Improvisation and lack of certain comforts made everyone determinedly cheerful. A little more work had been done on the slit trenches.

  Early in the afternoon, while only one section was airborne, the sound of aero engines reached the airfield. The Hurricanes were not due back yet. People stopped work and looked up at the sky. Then someone shouted “They’re Jerries.” Another few seconds’ listening confirmed that the rising and falling note was unlike any British
engine’s. Men scattered. Many jumped into the partly-dug slit trenches and knelt so as to fold themselves small enough to get their heads below ground level.

  Four or five Lewis guns positioned around the camp began to fire. The noise of engines swelled. The ground shook and the roar of exploding bombs rolled across the aerodrome; again and again. The stench of high explosive drifted across the field with the smoke of the bomb bursts. A tent blazed, a lorry lay on its side, belching flames and smoke.

  Nobody had been hurt. Most of the bombs had fallen outside the camp. But as soon as the raiding Heinkels had gone, every pick and shovel was in a pair of willing hands and two hours later there were enough slit trenches, four feet deep, to accommodate every officer and man on the squadron.

  In the evening, Tug Wilson led his pilots on a foray into the local town in a utility van, an Austin staff car and an elderly Hotchkiss tourer with a sporting pedigree which Ross had bought cheaply from a local resident while off duty for an hour. Ross was an enthusiastic restorer of interesting old cars to their pristine condition and had enough money to indulge his hobby. It was Leading Aircraftman Swallow who had, typically, somehow got wind of the vehicle and told him about it. The equivalent of £20 gave Ross possession of it. It was mustard-coloured and immediately, if unimaginatively, became known as the Yellow Peril.

  “You’re a clot,” James told him. “It’s too damn conspicuous. If you leave it outside any disreputable premises, everyone will know.”

  “If by ‘everyone’ you mean the rest of the squadron, I don’t see how that can matter. Any places of ill repute will be bound to be crowded with the squadron anyway!”

  They dined well at the small town’s principal hotel, where they joined a group of six or seven Armee de l’Air pilots who, afterwards, introduced them to one of those places. As two of the Frenchmen said, they had been to England and nowhere had they come across such an essential social amenity; whereas in France, even the smallest town had its maisons tolerees. The purpose of this visit, however, was to look at the goods rather than to maul them. Madame gave the gallant aviators a special discount on the many bottles of champagne they drank. The girls were giggly, admiring and attentive. Some harmless if stimulating contact was made when Madame had a rug removed from the well polished parquet and invited them to dance to the gramophone. Everyone complimented James on the competence of his French. A brunette almost inevitably called Fifi whispered seductively in his ear.

  He recalled an escapade he and Christopher had shared in a similar establishment in Cherbourg, two summers before the war, with a couple of girls called Fifi and Zizi who greatly resembled the present enchantress. Cherbourg was a short bus journey from St. Pol and their parents were sleeping ashore at the Girards’. It had been his young brother’s first experience and his second. He felt nostalgic for a moment about those distant days and once again Nicole Girard came to his mind. He thought how insulted she would be if she could know what had led his thoughts to her.

  The British pilots departed in good order and unblemished: mostly because none of them was willing to succumb to his natural inclinations in front of the others. They left the girls convinced that every-thing they had heard about the cold-bloodedness of the British was all too lamentably true; despite Fifi’s extraction of a promise from James that he would return alone soon. The French pilots stayed to complete the evening’s expected galanterie. As one of them explained to James in an aside, Madame would not be so welcoming again if it were otherwise; and they were doing this as much for the honour of their British comrades as from their own sense of propriety.

  “I must revise my definition of propriety,” the squadron commander remarked when James told him.

  * * *

  On 13th May, German armour broke through the French defences at Sedan and crossed the Meuse.

  Squadron Leader Wilson, on his way back from dawn patrol, made a forced landing at an airfield occupied by No. 1 Squadron, which has been based in France since the first week of the war, scored the first British fighter victory of the war, and been steadily adding to its laurels ever since. He spent an hour there, while mechanics worked on his aircraft, in discussion with the squadron commander, a Cranwell contemporary of his, and the other pilots.

  He stumped into his own squadron’s crew tent with a gleam in his eye which the pilots all recognised. Tug Wilson was renowned for his pithily expressed views and sudden enthusiasms.

  “I’ve had a most useful talk with the chaps on One Squadron. No wonder we haven’t been shooting down as many Huns as we should for all the ammunition we’ve been blazing off.” This, as usual when the C.O. had a point to make, was a somewhat distorted version of the facts, but the pilots awaited his newest notion with interest. “Harmonising the guns at four hundred yards is a bloody waste of time and ammo. All the squadrons which have been out here since the beginning have found that out. They’re harmonised at two hundred and fifty. Walter, get the armourers cracking on reharmonising your flight’s guns straight away. B Flight can have theirs done as soon as yours have been corrected.”

  James, mimicking the gormless voice of Pluto, the dog in the Walt Disney cartoon films, said “Aw, shucks; to think I could have had six down.”

  Nobody said anything, but two of his friends leaped up and tipped him out of his chair.

  “There’s another sensible change they’ve made,” Wilson went on when the mild commotion and laughter had stopped. “Painting the undersides duck egg blue. We’ll get cracking on that straight away, too.”

  The Germans had been using this colour on the lower surfaces of their aeroplanes from the beginning, to make them more difficult to see against the sky.

  Addison remarked “Damn good idea. Having black and white undersides hasn’t stopped the Navy or the Army from taking pot shots at us. With a bit of luck, with sky-blue instead, the idiots won’t be able to see us at all.”

  From that day the war became a different experience. Early in the afternoon A Flight went up to patrol near Metz. They had been climbing for some eight minutes and attained about 15000 ft. when they saw the enemy six or eight miles away. It was their first sight of bombers escorted by fighters. At that distance it was not possible even for James, with his remarkable eyesight, to count them accurately. The bombers were not in the familiar V formation or any permutation of three or five aeroplanes in Vs. They were in two lines abreast, one behind the other; two long lines. Covering them, stepped up at intervals of 2000 ft, was a mass of fighters: at least two for each bomber, it seemed on first sight. They were in fours, one aircraft slightly ahead of the other three, which were stationed one to starboard and two on the port side of each leader.

  The distance between the Hurricanes and the enemy closed fast. James saw that there were five sets of four fighters at each stepped-up altitude. They were easily recognisable as Messerschmitt 110s. Counting them was not difficult now. There were five lots, one above the other. One hundred Me 110s, then. The first twenty were directly above the leading rank of bombers. The next twenty were not only 2000 ft above those but also about five hundred yards behind: and so on successively, each rank of twenty Me 110s above and astern of the one in front of it. The bombers had formidable protection and so, all but the topmost stack, had the fighters. James made a rough calculation that the bombers numbered at least forty altogether. Once again they were, he thought, Dornier 17s. They were in fact Do 215s, which looked the same but had more powerful engines which bestowed a maximum speed of 280 m.p.h. The more important fact was that they had exactly the same defensive armament of six machine guns as the Do 17, and similarly positioned.

  The twin-engined Me 110 was, on paper, an awesome opponent. It could fly at 349 m.p.h., whereas the Hurricane I, with its two-bladed wooden propeller, achieved 316 m.p.h. It had two twenty-millimetre cannon and four 7.9 mm machine-guns in the nose. Back-to-back with the pilot, an air gunner covered its rear with another 7.9 mm machine-gun.

  A brief order from the flight commander. “Go for t
he bombers.”

  There were too few Hurricanes to divide the force. The bombers could each drop 2200 lb of bombs on whatever targets had been given them: most probably airfields; Hitler had conquered Poland and crippled Dutch and Belgian resistance by destroying most of their air forces’ aircraft before they could even leave the ground. Obviously, as many of these damnable Dorniers as possible had to be prevented from reaching their objectives. The Me 110s were of little account in comparison.

  As soon as the German pilots in the fighters closest to the bombers divined the British pilots’ intention they also went into the attack, turning to bring their cannons to bear on the Hurricanes. These were effective at twice the range of the R.A.F.’s machine-guns.

  James saw two 110s whip round and curve down towards him. Flames flickered at the muzzles of their cannons. He snaked to left and right in a skidding S, keeping his attention on one of the Dorniers. He was not going to waste any ammunition on fighters. He had just under fifteen seconds’ worth and if he used all the skill at his command and had some luck, he could bring down two Dorniers. Maybe three, if he hit them all in the right places.

  He found himself in a maelstrom of gunfire. Cannon shells and tracer bullets from Rhinemetall MG 15 and MG 17 machine-guns twinkled and darted all around him. Small tongues of flame licked out of the noses of the 110s and the beam hatches of the Do 215s. He could spare no bullets today to kill enemy air gunners. He remembered the last time and dived towards the front of the target he had chosen. As he did so he made one quick bank to the right and then to the left to avoid the streams of shells and bullets that were being fired at him.

  He levelled his wings, holding his dive, and fired a two-second burst at the pilot, whom he could clearly see. His bullets hit the fuselage just in front of the pilot. He snapped off another quick burst, as he flashed past, and saw strikes on the side window of the cockpit. Then he was diving beneath the Dornier immediately on the right of the one at which he had been shooting, and for a few seconds there was no tracer coming at him. He pulled up with a third Do 215 in his sights and sprayed the port wing and engine with bullets: a burst of a good four seconds. Smoke coiled out of the engine and a fire rippled along the wing.