‘Did you hit it okay, Arthur?’
‘Right on the nose, Boss.’ There was no trace of excitement in the Canadian’s drawl. ‘Just like a cork in a bottle. It’ll take ’em a while to dig that bastard out.’
Yeoman smiled. ‘All right, we’ll go south-west for a while, towards Falaise. Keep your eyes skinned: the Luftwaffe is bound to be around somewhere.’
But the Luftwaffe was absent from the sky. The two Mosquitos roved back and forth over the area south of Caen for the best part of an hour, and never saw a single German aircraft. In the end, keeping well clear of the battle area of the Normandy beaches, they turned northwest and flew at low level up the Cherbourg Peninsula, using up their remaining ammunition in a series of devastating passes against an enemy convoy which they found moving slowly south along a congested road from Valognes. With the smoke of burning vehicles staining the sky behind them, jinking furiously to escape the glowing streams of flak that reached out vengefully towards them, they opened their throttles and slipped over the coast, unscathed except for a few small holes which Laurie had collected in his rear fuselage.
The sixteen Mosquitos of 380 Squadron went out time and again in the course of the day, some of the crews flying three sorties, and all returned with the same story: they had found plenty of ground targets, but never a sign of the Luftwaffe. Yeoman knew that the Luftwaffe squadrons in the Normandy area were far from strong, with only about three hundred fighters, bombers and fighter-bombers between them, but even so it was strange that they had not put in an appearance. His guess was that, severely outnumbered, they had pulled back to airfields in the rear as soon as the invasion had started to avoid the danger of being wiped out on the ground, but in all probability they would soon be hurled into the fray, reinforced by other units drawn from the defence of Germany.
The Spitfire boys, in particular, were practically foaming at the mouth with frustration. They had been anticipating this day for weeks, confident in their skills and prowess, eager for a chance to come to grips with the enemy as never before — and nothing had happened. Instead, they had flown their interminable patrols up and down the beaches, been shot at by the guns of their own ships — despite the striped markings on their aircraft and the ‘foolproof’ recognition signals — and, forced to remain at less than two thousand feet because of the cloud base, had risked being blown out of the sky by the heavy salvoes of the warships, whose huge shells the pilots could sometimes clearly see as they screamed inland to pulverize some distant objective.
The only truly comforting fact at the end of the day was that the Allied invasion force had succeeded in establishing a foot-hold on the continent of Europe, and it was the overwhelming weight of Allied air power which had enabled it to do so. In more than eleven thousand sorties flown by the Allied Air Forces on 6 June, not one single aircraft had been lost to the Luftwaffe.
The Luftwaffe came after dark, and the night-fighting Mosquitos of Clive Bowen’s 373 Squadron were there to meet them. At 0030 on 7 June, one Mosquito navigator after another picked up radar contacts, heading for the fires on and around the beaches, and steered the pilots towards them.
Fourteen Dornier 217 bombers of a special duties unit known as Kampfgruppe 100 — the same unit which, on a terrible night in November 1940, had led the devastating attack on the British city of Coventry — tried to break through the night fighter screen to attack the warships and supply vessels that lay offshore.
Under its wings, each bomber carried two Henschel 293 glider bombs, known to the Luftwaffe crews by the code-name of ‘Fritz-X’. After launch, they were designed to be steered to the target by radio signals, the bomb-aimer keeping track of the missile in the darkness by means of a red flare in its tail.
Two of the bombers got through and released their Fritz-Xs, one of which struck a freighter at the waterline and blew a hole in her. Two more Do 217s were shot down by the murderous flak, and seven fell to the guns of 373 Squadron and other Mosquito units operating in the area.
Clive Bowen himself shot down one of them, and his subsequent combat report told the story in laconic terms.
*
PILOT’S PERSONAL COMBAT REPORT
373 SQUADRON
83 Group/Tangmere
Date: 6/7 June 1944
A/c No. and Type: 373/P Mosquito XII 779
Captain: S/L Bowen
Navigator: F/L Wells
Planned Serrate Patrol: Patrol ‘F’ Elbeuf — Breteuil — Argentan — Vire — Caen.
Planned Serrate Route: Base — Cap de la Hève — Patrol — Pointe de Barfleur — Base.
When 5 miles SE of Caen at 0045 hrs at 9,000 ft, a Serrate contact was obtained dead ahead. We followed on our approximate course, losing height for 14 mins at 260 IAS. Radar contact was then obtained left and below and agreed with Serrate (maximum range). Mosquito continued to lose height to 5,000 ft, and at this height visual was obtained at 1,500 ft range. Great difficulty was experienced in identifying enemy aircraft on account of dark night and also as enemy aircraft was now climbing. We followed on A1 with occasional switch to Serrate, and after further visual the enemy aircraft’s identity was finally established as a Dornier 217. All this time the enemy aircraft was taking no evasive action.
Fire was opened at 200 ft and strikes were seen between fuselage and starboard engine, which burst into flames. Enemy aircraft turned port and then went down in a spiral dive to starboard, burning all the time. Mosquito followed enemy aircraft as it fell and saw an explosion on the ground as it hit.
Position: 49 14N 00 55W at 0110 at 8.000ft.
Rounds Fired: 80 x 20-mm. No stoppages.
Camera Exposed.
NB Navigator had several other Serrate contacts at the same time as initial one and selected the strongest. All the others were right on top of scale (about 510 m/cs.) Enemy aircraft appeared to carry some form of large bombs or fuel tanks under wings, jettisoned as soon as we opened fire.
Signed: C. F. Bowen
Captain of Aircraft
*
The combination of airborne interception radar and ‘Serrate’, the device that enabled the Mosquitos to home on to radar transmissions from enemy aircraft, had long since proved to be deadly, and the crews of 373 Squadron were understandably jubilant over this big success on the first night of the invasion. The other Tangmere squadrons added their congratulations, but it was galling for them to have flown so many patrols and to have seen nothing.
The Luftwaffe, it seemed, was being very cautious, carefully husbanding its reserves of combat aircraft by sending them against the beachheads only under cover of darkness. In view of the swarms of Allied fighters patrolling the coast, it was an understandable precaution.
Nevertheless, a few enemy aircraft did venture into the invasion area by day; not many of them survived. Shortly before noon on 7 June, for example, a wing of Spitfires from Manston pounced on a dozen Junkers 88s which dropped out of the clouds over Arromanches and promptly shot half of them down in flames; the remainder hastily jettisoned their bombs and escaped into the overcast again.
Fittingly, it was Yves Romilly who scored 380 Squadron’s first victory after D-Day. It happened as the sun was setting on 7 June.
Romilly was patrolling the area to the south of Caen, watching the bloated blood-red sun sinking through the smoke of the battle area and thinking of turning for home after what had so far been a fruitless sortie, when his navigator gave a sudden excited shout over the intercom.
‘There’s an aircraft at two o’clock, low! No, two aircraft, I think… I can’t make it out.’ The man’s voice was bewildered.
Romilly dropped the Mosquito’s starboard wing, and saw why. Cruising along at about two thousand feet, heading in the general direction of the American sector of the invasion front, was the weirdest contraption he had ever seen in the air.
He could readily appreciate his navigator’s confusion, for at first sight it looked like two aircraft flying in an impossibly close formation, one on top o
f the other. Then the thing went into a turn, and he saw that the two aircraft — the top one now identified as a Focke-Wulf 190 and the one underneath as a Junkers 88 — were in fact joined together.
‘Good Lord,’ the navigator said in astonishment. ‘Now what are the bastards up to?’
‘Let’s go down and find out,’ muttered Romilly, and pushed forward the stick, taking the Mosquito in a long dive towards the target.
The Fw 190/Ju 88 combination cruised on serenely; there was no indication that the Mosquito had been sighted. Romilly closed in steadily to a hundred yards, his thumb caressing the firing button.
At that moment, the two aircraft in his sights abruptly parted company. The Junkers 88 flew straight on, while the Focke-Wulf began a sharp climbing turn to port. Romilly raised the nose a little, put on some left rudder and gave the 190 a two-second burst with his cannon.
The result was spectacular. His shells struck the Focke-Wulf’s wing root and a fraction of a second later the whole wing tore away. The remainder of the 190 flicked into a series of incredibly fast rolls and twisted earthwards, dragging a plume of smoke. It slammed into the ground a few moments later, narrowly missing some farm buildings.
Without waiting to observe the Focke-Wulf’s fate Romilly hauled the Mosquito round and went after the Ju 88, which was flying straight and level half a mile away. He missed with his first burst, misjudged his speed badly and overshot the target, swearing fluently in a mixture of French and English.
As he turned to make a second attack, his navigator said quietly, in a voice that registered disbelief:
‘Yves, there’s nobody in the 88’s cockpit.’
Romilly, stifling his urge to shoot the Junkers out of the sky immediately, decided to take a close look at the enemy aircraft; there might be something of interest here for the Intelligence people.
His navigator was right. Formatting right alongside the Junkers, he looked across into the ‘glasshouse’ cockpit. There was no one at the controls, or at the rear gun position. In fact, there was no rear gun at all, although just aft of where it ought to have been there were some funny-looking radio aerials.
He shot some film at close range, to give the experts back home something to work on. Then, since they were now dangerously close to the invasion area, he dropped back a little and opened fire on the Junkers. His shells blew off part of the 88’s tail and the aircraft swung into a ponderous spiral dive. After a quick glance round to make sure that the sky above and behind was empty he followed it down and saw it impact on the edge of a field.
A huge explosion rippled across the ground. The shock wave hit the Mosquito a second later, tossing it up like a leaf and almost turning it over on its back. A badly shaken Romilly managed to regain control and found to his relief that everything still seemed to be working all right. Putting the aircraft into a climbing turn, he looked down: in the field where the Junkers had crashed there was a massive crater, surrounded by a great spread of scattered earth. A mushroom of smoke hung over it.
‘It must have been packed to the gunwales with explosive,’ said Romilly’s navigator, wiping the sweat from his forehead as they headed out to sea. ‘Radio-controlled, probably. Very ingenious.’
Ingenious it certainly was, and the Fw 190/Ju 88 combination might have proved deadly too, had the enemy used it in sufficient numbers against the Allied invasion fleet. The German name for it was ‘Mistel’ — Mistletoe — and, as Yves Romilly and his navigator had discovered, it involved a Junkers 88 whose fuselage had been converted into a big 4,000-lb hollow-charge bomb, guided to its target by a FW 190 mounted on its back. During the flight, the engines of the Ju 88 provided the motive power; the pilot of the Focke-Wulf switched on his engine just before release, dropped the Junkers, which he steered to its target by radio, and then did a smart about-turn back to base.
As it was, the few Mistels that did attempt to approach the invasion area were soon shot out of the sky, the lumbering combinations proving easy prey for the Allied fighters. Nevertheless, their use indicated that the Luftwaffe still had a few tricks up its sleeve, and the Allied pilots could not help wondering what alien weapons they would encounter next.
They were not kept guessing for long.
Chapter Six
Yeoman and Julia Connors strolled arm-in-arm down the long, straight slope of Constitution Hill, past the high wall that surrounded Buckingham Palace Gardens, surmounted by blackened strands of savage-looking barbed wire.
They were allowing themselves the luxury of going nowhere in particular. It was a sunny Sunday morning, and after a short ride on the underground from Earls Court, where Julia shared an apartment with two other girls (both of whom had fortunately been absent for the past few days) they had emerged at Hyde Park Corner and wandered off in the general direction of the Victoria Embankment.
Julia looked sideways at Yeoman and gave his arm a little squeeze.
‘You still don’t look well, love,’ she said, with mild concern in her voice.
Yeoman smiled. ‘It’s nothing more than good, healthy exhaustion,’ he joked. ‘After all, you haven’t been letting me get much sleep… Seriously, I feel fine. Stop fussing, woman, or I shall smack your pretty bottom. Again.’ He turned a wolfish grin on her and she fell silent, happily drinking in the sights and sounds around them, humming a little nondescript tune to herself.
Inwardly, Yeoman felt far from well, although considerably better than he had done five days earlier when the Station Medical Officer at Tangmere, after subjecting him to a thorough examination, had immediately sent him packing on a week’s leave.
Yeoman had not realized, until that moment, how much his physical health had deteriorated. He was a stone below his normal weight, he suffered from frequent eyestrain and dizzy spells, and he found it increasingly difficult to make speedy, balanced decisions.
Squadron Leader George Yeoman, in short, was suffering from the cumulative effects of four years of operational flying — air combat duty, as the Americans would call it — with only relatively short rests in between. He was almost completely worn out.
The SMO had fortunately recognized the symptoms in time. He knew of too many pilots who had become the victims of their own frayed nerves and battered reflexes. The first sign of impending disaster was when they started to ‘push their luck’ — making two or three strafing runs over an enemy airfield, for example, when everyone else made only one. After that, disintegration was often rapid, with reactions slowing down to the point where they were no longer adequate even for the task of flying a high-performance aircraft, let alone engaging in combat. So Yeoman, protesting, had been bundled off to London for the rest; but his protests had ceased when he had learned that Julia, too, could manage a few days off duty.
Despite Julia’s closeness, however, Yeoman had found his mind turning again and again to thoughts of the Squadron, and he had to fight hard to resist frequent impulses to ring Tim Sloane, his deputy, to find out how things were going. Such an act, he knew, would not be fair to Sloane, for it would imply a lack of trust in the efficiency of the flight lieutenant, and with Sloane in line for a squadron of his own he wished to do nothing that might undermine the man’s confidence.
Nevertheless, he was sorry that his enforced leave had come at a time when the tempo of air operations was at a peak, when the Allies were consolidating their foothold in Normandy and preparing to break out of the bridgehead.
Then, with the Allied Air Forces stretched to the utmost in support of operations on the ground, a new and terrible menace had reared its head to tax their resources and skill even further.
Yeoman had left Tangmere for London in the evening of Monday, 12 June. A few hours later, the Germans had fired the first salvoes of what they called ‘Operation Rumpelkammer’, launching four V-1 flying-bombs across the Channel. The first of them had exploded at Swanscombe, in Kent, at exactly 0418 hours on the thirteenth.
Four bombs hardly constituted the massed assault envisaged by Hitler; the at
tentions of the Allied Air Forces had destroyed all chances of that. Nevertheless, the threat posed by these deadly, impersonal projectiles was serious enough, and — coming as it did at this stage in the war, just as victory was beginning to creep into sight — it had a vicious effect on the morale of Londoners who had already weathered the agony of one Blitz. Moreover, the V-1s came as a complete surprise to the civilian population; although the government had been expecting the attack to start for some time, it had remained a well-kept secret.
The V-1s, trailing red flame from their tails, their engines making a noise like a two-stroke motor cycle, had been plunging to earth in and around London at intervals throughout the week; almost everyone in the city and on the approaches to it had seen and heard them, and with characteristic humour had nicknamed them ‘Doodlebugs’. Nevertheless, it was not until 16 June that the Minister of Home Security, Herbert Morrison, had officially told the public what was happening.
Yeoman had read it in the Daily Mail on Saturday morning, and had allowed himself a sardonic smile. Among other things, the Minister had said: ‘The enemy’s aim is clearly, in view of the difficulty of his military situation, to try to upset our morale and interfere with our work. It is essential that there should be the least possible interruption in all work vital to the country’s needs at this time, and the Government’s counsel is that everyone should get on with his or her job in the ordinary way and take cover only when danger is imminent.’
Fine, thought Yeoman. Except that the interval between a V-1’s motor cutting out and the missile hitting the ground was about fifteen seconds, which didn’t leave a lot of time for diving into the nearest shelter.
They walked around the north side of Memorial Gardens, crossed the Mall and entered St James’s Park. They encountered a few strollers, some in uniform and some not, but not as many as Yeoman had expected; then, glancing at his watch, he realized that the more devout — and their numbers had grown substantially over the past few years, as though religion had become a kind of insurance policy against the worst that war could throw at them — would be at church.
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