Operation Diver

by Robert Jackson

  The two men launched into a friendly argument on the merits, or otherwise, of English beer. Suddenly, Yeoman started as a loud shout cut through the hubbub of voices in the bar.

  ‘George! George Yeoman!’

  The bellow brought a momentary silence. Yeoman swung round, his back to the bar, and his face lit up in a huge grin as he immediately recognized the tall, lanky figure making his way towards him through the crowd of American pilots, who parted respectfully to let him pass.

  A moment later, Yeoman’s hand was being pumped vigorously and he was subjected to a series of rib-shaking slaps on the back. Disentangling himself, he said weakly to Phelan:

  ‘Tim, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine. We were in France together. Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Callender.’

  The big American and the Irishman shook hands, then Callender turned to the other Americans, most of whom were pilots in the fighter group he commanded.

  ‘Listen, you guys,’ he roared, ‘you’re all going to have a drink on me! This here’s my old buddy, Squadron Leader George Yeoman, and we were kicking shit out of the Krauts while you were still in nappies.’

  He turned back to Yeoman, who was feeling faintly embarrassed, and lowered his voice.

  ‘Hey, it’s really good to see you, George. I often think about the old days. We had some really good times, then. You know, I pulled every possible string to try and stay with the RAF, but nothing worked.’

  Like Yeoman. Jim Callender had flown and fought with 505 Squadron in the early months of the war, having made his way to England via Canada. Later, he had risen to command an ‘Eagle’ squadron, composed of American volunteers who had enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Britain’s hour of greatest peril, long before the entry of Russia and the United States into the war, when the island stood alone against the seemingly invincible might of the Axis.

  As the American war effort got under way in the summer of 1942, those responsible for building up the 8th United States Army Air Force in Britain had not been slow to realize Callender’s worth as a fighter leader, and had formerly requested his transfer. After a lengthy battle, the USAAF had won and Callender had changed uniforms, although he still proudly wore his RAF pilot’s brevet on his tunic opposite the silver wings of the Army Air Force.

  ‘The last I heard of you, you were flying Thunderbolts,’ Yeoman said. ‘How do you like the Mustang?’

  ‘She’s a real honey, George,’ Callender enthused. ‘She’ll do over four hundred miles per hour at 25,000 feet, and she’s got a maximum range of two thousand miles. That’s the important bit. It means that wherever the bombers go, we can go too. The Hun fighters don’t have it all their own way any more, believe me.’

  ‘I believe you, all right’ Yeoman said. ‘As you know, I was always sceptical about the chances of daylight bombing, but if you can go all the way to the target with the bombers then that’s a different story.’

  Callender nodded, then grinned his old infectious grin. ‘It just so happens that we’re the top-scoring Mustang group in the 8th Air Force,’ he said. ‘I’ve got six Huns myself since we re-equipped with the little beauties, and that brings my own score up to nineteen. How about you?’

  ‘Twenty-four,’ Yeoman answered modestly.

  ‘Jeez!’ The comment came from a young American lieutenant, one of a number of pilots who had gradually drifted over and had been listening to the conversation between Yeoman and Callender with interest.

  ‘That’s more than our top guys have got,’ the lieutenant said.

  ‘Well,’ smiled Yeoman, ‘you’ve got to remember that I’ve been in the war a bit longer!’

  The lieutenant continued to gaze at Yeoman in awe, as though he were a creature from another planet. Yeoman was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable, like an exhibit in a zoo, when the American’s face suddenly crumpled in a frown.

  ‘Say,’ he said, ‘with all those kills, how come you’ve only got three medals?’

  ‘Well,’ Yeoman replied rather lamely, ‘that’s just the way we do things in the RAF.’

  Callender laughed and addressed the lieutenant. ‘The squadron leader had to work pretty hard to earn those medals, son,’ he pointed out. ‘Look, see that one? That’s the Distinguished Flying Medal, which they gave him for leading the retreat to Dunkirk. The next one’s the Distinguished Flying Cross, which he was awarded for having the biggest harem in Cairo when he was out in the desert. Actually, the little rosette in the middle means that he was awarded it twice, which accounts for his haggard appearance. And this third one here, which is a Polish medal, he won’t talk about, but I can tell you that he came back from his attachment to a Polish squadron smelling of cheap perfume.’ He closed one eye in a slow-motion wink.

  Yeoman chuckled, grateful to Callender for neatly averting what might have been a tricky situation. The profusion of American medals was a source of constant amusement to RAF aircrew; the story went that USAAF personnel were awarded a medal as soon as they set foot on overseas territory. Well, thought Yeoman, that was their affair, and he could see no reason to get worked up over it. But he knew that some RAF types did get annoyed when they walked into a bar and saw Americans who had yet to undergo their baptism of fire sporting a chestful of medal ribbons.

  Yeoman and Callender fell to reminiscing for a while, then followed the general drift towards the dining-room, where the mess staff were desperately trying to cope with the unexpected influx of extra mouths. Lunch consisted of sausages and mashed potatoes, which caused most of the Americans to pull faces and push their plates to one side. Callender smiled.

  ‘I guess they’re all a bit mollycoddled,’ he said. ‘Our rations are first class. After two years of eating steak and ice cream, I don’t think I’d be able to get into a Spitfire’s cockpit any more.’

  Just as they were finishing their lunch, one of the American officers came in and told Callender that the Mustangs were refuelled and ready to go. He nodded and rose from the table.

  ‘Well George, I guess that’s it. We’ll be on our way.’ He grinned. ‘If my pilots aren’t too pissed to fly, that is.’

  Yeoman got up too. ‘I’ll come down to the field with you,’ he said. ‘One of my chaps is coming to pick me up in half an hour, anyway, so I might as well have a cup of tea down at 505 Squadron dispersal while I’m waiting. Are you coming too, Tim?’

  Phelan shook his head. ‘No, I’ve got a bloody great mound of paperwork about three feet high to get through this afternoon, and the sooner I get started on it the better. So I’ll say cheerio to the pair of you, and I’ll hope to see you again.’ He shook hands with them both, and left.

  Yeoman walked to the airfield with Callender, mingling with other American pilots who were heading in the same direction. They stopped by the hangars, for Yeoman wanted to go one way and Callender the other, out to where his Mustang was waiting.

  ‘George,’ said Callender suddenly, ‘I’ve been thinking. What are you going to do when all this is over? It can’t be long now. Will you stay in the Air Force?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know, Jim,’ the other replied. ‘I stopped thinking about the future a long time ago. As for staying in the Air Force, I don’t know about that… I might go back to journalism, try my hand at writing a book, maybe. Did you have any particular reason for asking?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I think that when this war is over, countries all over the world which haven’t bothered much about military aviation are going to be in a mad scramble to build up modern air forces. They’ll need experienced pilots to train them, like you and me.’

  He looked at Yeoman for a moment, then went on: ‘I intend to be right there out front, George. Now why don’t you give it some thought, too? We were a great team once; we could be again. Just think about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Okay, Jim, I will. But a lot can happen in the next few months.’

  Callender got the drift of Yeoman’s thoughts and laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry, George. Remember what
you said to me once, when we were being bombed to hell in France? “Only the good die young.” So I reckon we don’t qualify. We’re born survivors, you and I. Be seeing you.’

  Yeoman watched him go, knowing that Jim Callender was the best friend he had ever had, hoping fervently that the American’s parting remark was a prophetic one.

  Chapter Four

  The tiny village of Blackshiels, six miles south of the ancient town of Hawick in the Scottish county of Roxburgh, had once been one of the remotest places in Britain. Its inhabitants had changed little in a thousand years; they had tended their sheep and minded their own business, and when, as sometimes happened, they had been threatened by marauding Scots or English armies, they had simply taken to the hills with their flocks and waited until the fuss had died down before returning to rebuild their ruined homes and picking up the threads of their life again.

  World War I had changed everything. Far away in Whitehall, which most of the villagers had never heard of, a nameless general on the War Office staff had picked Blackshiels as a likely site for a new ammunition dump. There were two reasons for this. The first was that a mile to the east of the village there was a large hill, in the eastern slopes of which there were several deep caves connected by natural passages which, with the minimum of engineering problems, could be turned into secure underground bunkers; and the second was that the hill lay some three miles to the west of the railway line that ran southwards from Hawick through Liddesdale to Carlisle, far enough away to make any military transport movements inconspicuous to travellers, but close enough to build a spur line to the hill with comparative ease.

  So, for three years, the British Army had become part of the bewildered villagers’ existence. Troops had been billeted in the rough houses, had eaten at the family tables, and one or two had married local girls, who were renowned less for their beauty than for their capacity for hard work.

  Then, in 1918, had come the Armistice, and the following year the ammunition depot had been closed. The troops had departed, the sheep had returned to the natural shelter of the caves, and only the spur line — soon overgrown with grass — and two or three broken flat cars remained to show that they had ever been. That, and the occasional letter from India or Egypt, written by one of the homesick daughters of the village to her ageing parents.

  So, by degrees, things returned to normal, and remained so for a quarter of a century — until one day in April 1944.

  A shepherd and his son, searching for errant lambs, toiled slowly up the eastern slopes of the hill that overshadowed the village. Here and there, patches of snow still lay in folds, for winter departed reluctantly from these parts.

  The drone of aero-engines came to them suddenly, borne on the wind. The older man did not look up, being intent on his search, but his son scanned the sky carefully.

  At first, he saw nothing, although the noise of the engines was growing louder with every second. It was not until he lowered his gaze that he located the aeroplane, and brought a sudden shout from him.

  The twin-engined aircraft was racing at high speed along the old spur line, its wing-tips almost touching the embankments on either side, heading straight for the hill. The man and his son stood frozen, unable to take their eyes from it as it rushed headlong towards them, lower than the ridge on which they stood.

  At the very last moment it pulled up in a steep climb, passing a few feet over their heads in a thunderclap of sound. Both flung themselves down in the coarse grass as the slipstream buffeted them.

  The shepherd struggled to his knees and shook his fist at the aircraft, which was turning steeply, and roared out a string of curses which cast grave doubts on the pilot’s parentage. The pilot, however, had not finished yet. Three times more he came thundering up the line, climbing sharply at the end of each run. To the watching men, it seemed almost as if he were trying to fly straight into the mouth of the big cave into which the old line disappeared.

  At last, the aircraft gained height and flew away to the south, rapidly dwindling to a speck. The men watched it go, their ears ringing with the crescendo of its engines; then, as silence fell once more over the hillside, they turned back to their search for the lost lamb.

  *

  Three days later, the troops returned to the village. There were over a hundred of them, and in a matter of hours the villagers found themselves virtually cut off from the outside world.

  A great deal of interest appeared to focus on the hill; all sheep and lambs were rounded up from the area on and around it by the protesting villagers, acting on orders from the military commander, and penned securely a safe distance away, close to the village itself. The villagers continued to protest, both individually and collectively, only to be told curtly that there was a war on and that, for a few days, an air exercise was to be held in the vicinity. The military commander apologized on behalf of the War Office for any inconvenience the villagers might suffer, and they were assured that they would be adequately compensated for any damage to their property or livestock. With that, they had to be content.

  Yeoman had chosen the site well. Armed with large-scale maps of England, Scotland and Wales, he had shut himself away in his office for the best part of a day, searching for a combination of tunnel and railway line that closely approximated the tunnels by the River Oise which were used by the enemy as storage depots for their secret weapons.

  Three principal enemy tunnels had so far been located, all running into a limestone hill not far from the town of St Leu. Feeding each tunnel, a spur line ran arrow-straight from the main Compiègne–St Quentin line and was about two miles long, flanked in places — although not everywhere — by high embankments. At intervals along the latter, and on the hill itself, the Germans had positioned quadruple 20-mm flak guns.

  At the end of the day, a bleary-eyed Yeoman had emerged from his office, triumphantly waving an Ordnance Survey map of the Hawick area, on which he had drawn a large red circle around the village of Blackshiels, its nearby hill and the old disused railway line. On paper it looked first-rate, the contours of the surrounding land matching those of the St Leu area in many respects, and by an extraordinary coincidence the old railway was identical in straightness, length and width between the embankments to those that led to the St Leu tunnels.

  All that remained was to work out the details. Yeoman was determined to simulate the actual raid in every respect, and so, for the duration of the intensive training period, he arranged for the squadron to fly north to Wymeswold in Leicestershire — which was then occupied by an Operational Training Unit — because this airfield was almost exactly as far from Blackshiels as St Leu was from Tangmere, the Sussex airfield from which the mission would be flown. The fuel and weapons loads to be carried, and the timing, would be duplicated as exactly as prevailing conditions allowed.

  Yeoman and the officer commanding the military detachment, a lieutenant-colonel, went into close consultation over part of the secret target dossier — the part showing only aerial photographs of the objectives, for the lieutenant-colonel was not cleared by Security to know the exact nature of the mission. In the days that followed he and his men reproduced, as faithfully as possible, the positions of enemy flak batteries, setting up dummy guns on the hill overlooking Blackshiels and along the old railway embankment. In this task they were aided by German thoroughness, for the flak guns were sited at equal intervals around each of the three tunnels.

  At last, on the morning of 11 April, everything was ready. The sixteen Mosquitos of 380 Squadron took off from Wymeswold and set course northwards, flying straight up the spine of England, the Pennine Hills. A couple of times they ran through a shower of sleet, but it quickly passed and the weather was generally fine, with good visibility.

  Each Mosquito carried two dummy 500-lb bombs in its belly. The pilots had been briefed to carry out a first run against the target with bomb-doors closed, to get the lie of the land, and to release their weapons into the mouth of the large cave on the second run. The a
ircraft were to run-in individually, in line astern. On this first practice mission, the emphasis was on the accuracy of the bomb delivery.

  Yeoman, who had carried out a first-hand reconnaissance of the area at low level some days earlier — and, unknown to him, been roundly cursed by the shepherd in the process — led the simulated attack. After all the Mosquitos had made their initial runs, each one came in low along the railway cutting with bomb-doors open, maintaining a steady 250 mph — the best speed for weapon release as the aircraft pulled up steeply at a range of 150 yards, lobbing its bombs in an arc towards the mouth of the cave, or so the experts thought.

  After releasing his own bombs, Yeoman climbed to two thousand feet and circled to observe results. He was in radio contact with an observer on the ground, who told him that one of his bombs had hit the target and who continued to call out the scores as the other Mosquitos made their runs.

  They were disappointing. Sixty per cent of the practice bombs found the cave mouth, but it was not enough. The Mosquito crews flew back to Wymeswold for a post-mortem and to prepare for another attempt that afternoon.

  It was Rory McManners who came up with a theory to account for their partial failure.

  ‘I think we’re too slow,’ he said, as the pilots clustered round in one of Wymeswold’s briefing-rooms.

  ‘Between the release point and the cave mouth, I think the bombs tend to go unstable in their trajectory and wobble off course — if we release at 250 mph, that is. Why don’t we try a shallow dive instead of a long, straight run, say at 300 mph, pull out and release the bombs just as the nose comes up, then climb away up the hillside in a sort of continuous parabola, if you see what I mean? I think the extra fifty miles per hour initial velocity will make all the difference to the bombs’ stability, and I’m sure someone can work out the optimum release point.’

  Yeoman agreed. ‘All right, Rory, we’ll give it a try. Attacking on the dive isn’t going to be healthy when it comes to the real thing, but if it helps us to place both our bombs accurately, it will be worth it.’