‘Good show, Tim,’ Yeoman complimented him, when he had heard the story. He tapped the Intelligence summary with his index finger.
‘I’ve just been reading up the latest developments,’ he said. ‘Shooting these things down doesn’t exactly seem to be a piece of cake.’
Sloane shook his head. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it isn’t. Some of our chaps have had one or two hair-raising moments this week. Terry Saint bagged our first bomb, and the poor sod got the shock of his life. Apparently he closed right in to fifty yards and flew slap through the middle of the explosion. It stripped the paint completely off his Mosquito and ruined two pairs of underpants!’
Yeoman grinned, then said: ‘I see by your initials on the cover that you’ve read this summary, Tim. How do you see the problem?’
Sloane shrugged. ‘Pretty much the same,’ he said. ‘The bloody things are so small and elusive that you’ve got to close right in to make certain of a hit, bearing in mind that you’ve only got a limited amount of time to play with, and then you risk being blown up along with it when it explodes. So far, everybody who has fired at one from 150 yards or less — and that includes myself — has brought back a damaged aircraft, with debris sucked into the radiators and so on. One of 373’s crews had to bale out the other night when debris smashed both propellers.’
Yeoman grunted. ‘There must be an easier way,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to think hard about this one, Tim.’
He looked at his watch, then got up and locked the Intelligence summary away in a steel cabinet, depositing the key with the duty Intelligence Officer in the next room. Then, accompanied by Sloane, he walked over to the mess for something to eat.
It was seven-thirty in the morning. Strange to think, he reflected, that twenty hours ago he had been grovelling in the ruins of the Guards Chapel, and that it was less than twelve hours since he had said goodbye to Julia.
He did not want to think about that goodbye; the memory of it was too fresh, too painful. He turned his mind sharply away from it, helped by the sight of a flight of Mosquitos returning from patrol, and by Sloane’s conversation.
‘From what you’ve seen so far, Tim, what’s the best time to catch the flying-bombs?’ he asked.
Sloane thought for a moment, then replied: ‘Dawn and dusk, I reckon. That’s when the big salvoes seem to be launched, probably because they’re trying to catch us in the transition period between the day and night fighter patrols. Except it doesn’t work like that. Clive Bowen said that he was getting nicely lined up on a bomb the other night when something went past him like a bat out of hell and shot it down; it was a Tempest that had beaten him to it, so the day fighter boys seem very reluctant to go home after dark.’
‘What sort of system have you been following?’ Yeoman wanted to know. ‘Have you been patrolling at fixed times, or as and when required?’
‘We’ve been working very closely with the Mosquito squadrons of 140 Wing at Gravesend,’ his companion answered, ‘taking turn-and-turn-about with them, so the times have varied a bit, but in general it’s been dawn and dusk when we’ve been most active. We’ve worked out a system whereby each aircraft patrols its own sector of the French coast at about eight thousand feet, keeping just clear of the coastal flak, and when one of us sees a salvo starting to come up he gives a yell and we all come piling in.’
‘Taking yet another leaf out of nature’s book,’ Yeoman grinned. ‘Vultures follow more or less the same principle, or so I understand. They string themselves out over hundreds of square miles of sky, and when one goes down on its prey its neighbours see it descending and go down too, starting a kind of chain reaction.’
Yeoman returned a salute of an airman who was passing, then said:
‘Anyway, Tim, you seem to have got things pretty well organized in my absence, and I certainly don’t propose to change anything. I’ll fly this evening, and look at things for myself.’
*
They crossed the coast as the sun was setting, the last fragment of its glowing disc nothing more than a sliver of molten gold on the western horizon. Ahead of the Mosquito’s nose, dusk had already fallen on the continent of Europe.
Beside Yeoman, Mardy was fiddling with the controls of his AI radar set and swearing quietly to himself. All of 380 Squadron’s Mosquitos except two had now been fitted with airborne interception radar, but not with other refinements such as the Serrate equipment in Clive Bowen’s night-fighting aircraft, and navigators who were not already qualified in its use had been sent off on the appropriate course two at a time. The AI was going to come in useful in determining the range of the elusive flying-bombs; looking further ahead, when the squadron returned to its task of supporting the Allied ground forces in France, it would also extend the Mosquitos’ ‘confound and destroy’ capability immeasurably, for the Luftwaffe was now operating almost exclusively under cover of darkness.
It was a perfect night, with almost limitless visibility. As he climbed out over the Channel, still a long way from his designated patrol area off Boulogne, Yeoman gave a sudden exclamation, causing Hardy to look up from his radar screen.
Emerging from the spreading darkness over France, like stars which had come down to earth, came a cluster of twinkling lights, moving slowly over the horizon.
‘What do you make of them, Happy?’ asked Yeoman of his navigator, who had already flown a number of Diver patrols with other pilots during the squadron commander’s absence on leave.
‘They’re chuff bombs all right,’ Hardy announced confidently, using the name that was generally coming into use among the defending fighter squadrons to describe the V-1s.
‘They’re too far up the coast, though,’ he observed. ‘We wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching them.’
Yeoman stared at the red, pulsating lights. For the first time, he appreciated the problem other pilots had found in assessing the range between fighters and flying-bombs; the lights might have been two miles away, or a dozen.
The fighters in that particular sector were on to them, though, because a few moments later the R/T was jammed with chatter, clinical and punctilious at first, then becoming more excited as the pilots closed in for the kill.
‘One nine, engaging contact to starboard, low.’
‘Two two, three more launches observed, heading about three one zero.’
‘One nine, attacking.’
‘Piss off, he’s mine!’ The last a frantic yell from someone to someone else who had got in his way at the last moment.
‘Put your bloody nav lights on, then!’
‘Dingbat leader to all Dingbat aircraft. Switch on your navigation lights before attacking. And cut the chatter.’
Yeoman grinned as he recognized the Welsh lilt of Clive Bowen’s voice. It had a temporary effect on the volume of noise coming over the radio. Then someone said, his voice full of triumph:
‘Got the bastard!’
A vivid flash in the northern sky marked the end of one of the flying-bombs.
Suddenly, another cluster of fiery little comets came into view over the French coast. They seemed much closer this time and Yeoman selected the brightest, opening the throttles and purring the Mosquito into a long dive. The note of the Merlins rose to a strident howl as the speed built up.
Over the intercom, Yeoman said: ‘Have you got this one on radar, Happy?’
The navigator hesitated for a moment, then replied, ‘No…not yet. Lots of sea echoes on the tube…hang on… Yes! There he is blinking in from the right…nicely centred now, range four thousand feet.’
The Mosquito trembled as Yeoman began to level out, slowly overhauling the target and turning in behind it. Face glued to the rubber surround of his cathode ray tube, Hardy chanted out the closing range.
‘Two thousand five hundred feet…two thousand feet…one thousand five hundred…’
Yeoman suddenly remembered to switch on his navigation lights as a warning to other fighters in the vicinity. As he did so, a disgusted voic
e came clearly over the radio.
‘Oh, shit!’
Somebody else had obviously been chasing the same target, but Yeoman was going to get there first.
‘One thousand feet, skipper.’ An anxious note was creeping into Hardy’s voice as the distance between the Mosquito and the V-1 continued to narrow. The red glare of the bomb’s exhaust was centred squarely in the luminous diamonds of Yeoman’s reflector sight.
There was no sense in pushing his luck on this first attempt. At three hundred yards range he opened fire, loosing off a short burst with both cannon and machine-guns. Tracer, like glowing, multi-coloured pearls, streaked out into the night and converged on the dark outline of the flying-bomb, clearly visible now against the faint streak of light that still shimmered over the far horizon.
Nothing happened. The V-1 continued steadily on its course. Yeoman took a deep breath and closed the range still further. Hardy had lifted his gaze from the radar set and was now staring through the windscreen, as if paralysed, at the stubwinged, explosive-laden object in front of him.
Yeoman’s thumb jabbed down on the firing-button. The bark of the cannon sounded unnaturally loud, like giant hammers beating on a metal drum. The whole cockpit shuddered with the recoil; the breeches of the 20-mms were directly under the floor and the thudding explosions as the shells pumped out transmitted themselves through the thin metal into the feet of the men, making their ankles ache.
Some of the shells found their mark, exploding in a series of twinkling flashes near the flying-bomb’s tail. Yeoman and the petrified Hardy tensed, waiting for the bang as the bomb’s warhead went off.
It never came. Instead, the glare of the V-1’s jet exhaust was suddenly extinguished and the flying-bomb went into wild gyrations, toppling over on a wing-tip and spinning down towards the Channel. Its warhead exploded as it hit the water; there was a brilliant burst of white light, and then the darkness closed in once more.
Hardy wiped the sweat from his forehead and returned to the dancing images on his radar screen.
‘Contacts all over the place, skipper. Most of them our fighters. It’s getting pretty crowded around here.’
Yeoman gave a non-committal grunt and brought the Mosquito round in a wide turn, searching the sky. A set of navigation lights flashed past on the left, dangerously close, and more slid by a few hundred feet below, heading in the opposite direction.
‘You need to have eyes in your arse in the middle of this lot,’ Yeoman commented. By the sound of the radio chatter the fighters were having a pretty good time; one after the other, pilots reported the destruction of flying-bombs. But the success was not without its cost; on one occasion, Yeoman heard someone put out a Mayday distress call. Somewhere out there, a Mosquito — thankfully not from his own squadron or Bowen’s — was gliding down to a watery landing in the Channel, damaged by debris or explosion.
‘Turn on to two-seven-zero and fly straight and level for a minute, skipper, will you?’
Yeoman obediently did as he was told, and a moment later Hardy said:
‘Yes. there’s a small contact at seven o’clock, range about two miles. Can you see anything?’
The pilot turned his head, peering back over his left shoulder in the direction indicated by Hardy. Almost at once, he spotted another cornet-like red glow from a flying-bomb’s exhaust. The V-1 was flying parallel to them, and Yeoman marvelled yet again at Hardy’s astuteness. As soon as he picked up the contact, the navigator’s first act had been to turn the Mosquito on to a similar heading so that they could keep pace with it. Their previous chase had brought them quite close to the English coast, and if Hardy had steered the pilot straight towards the V-1 they might not have had time to turn in astern and attack it before it reached the gun belt.
‘I’ve got it, Happy,’ Yeoman affirmed. ‘It’s a chuff bomb, all right. Let’s hope that some bastard doesn’t beat us to it.’
Yeoman fed power to the overworked Merlin engines once more and took the Mosquito racing on a course to intercept the enemy missile. As he came round to position himself for the attack, he misjudged his approach slightly and turned too tightly, with the result that he found himself immediately above the V-1. Swearing at his own error, he weaved from side to side in order to keep the flying-bomb in sight and reduced speed very slightly, waiting for it to pull ahead. The Mosquito was about a thousand feet higher than the V-1, which was flying at fifteen hundred feet, so if it pulled too far ahead he could close the range with a dive.
Yeoman dipped the Mosquito’s starboard wing, and Hardy craned his neck in an effort to see the bomb through the side window.
‘It’s starting to draw ahead now,’ he announced, and immediately went back to his radar.
‘Tell me when it’s nine hundred feet ahead,’ the pilot ordered.
The shape of the flying-bomb crept slowly in front of the Mosquito’s nose, and for the first time Yeoman was able to study the details of the V-1 almost at leisure. The sleek, shark-like lines of the missile were lit up by the ruddy glow of its own jet exhaust; he was impressed by the brutal simplicity of it, and had to work hard to fight down a sudden irrational feeling that at any moment the thing was going to turn on the Mosquito and attack it with savage, destructive mindlessness. A shiver ran down his spine as he found himself staring into the burning, pulsing cauldron of the jet; it was rather like having a glimpse of hell through a keyhole.
Cautiously, he lost height until the Mosquito was flying in the V-1s trail of hot exhaust gases. The fighter rocked in the turbulence and Yeoman gripped the stick harder, lining up the flying-bomb in his sights. Both the V-1 and its pursuer were travelling at over 350 mph.
‘Nine hundred feet,’ Hardy announced.
His last word was abruptly drowned by the crash of the cannon as Yeoman opened fire. The first burst was right on target.
A searing splash of orange light expanded across the sky in the Mosquito’s path. There was no time to take evasive action, or even to feel fear. At 350 mph — 450 feet per second — they raced into the heart of the fiery storm.
A terrific thud shook the Mosquito and part of the windscreen became opaque. Superheated air and an acrid stench of smoke and burnt metal swept into the cockpit through the ventilator. Glowing fragments, like a blazing snowstorm — if such a thing had been possible — surrounded the fighter for a fraction of a second and then whirled away rearwards, spinning and fading to extinction in the darkness.
Then they were through, virtually blinded by the flash, but still flying. Gradually, their night vision returned.
Hardy let out a sudden yell of alarm that pierced Yeoman’s eardrums.
‘The nose, skipper! The bloody nose has gone!’
It was an exaggeration, but nevertheless the damage was bad enough. Although it was difficult to ascertain precise details because of the darkness, it looked as though there was a gaping hole in the top of the nose. Fragments of wood broke away and pinged against the cockpit canopy. The Mosquito shuddered violently and Yeoman hastily throttled back, reducing the airspeed to 150 mph and lowering ten degrees of flap. This had the effect of raising the nose a little, reducing the volume of air that was buffeting into the damaged section.
‘Radar’s packed in, skipper,’ Hardy announced. ‘Scanner must have taken a hell of a bang.’
‘So has the radio,’ Yeoman said. ‘Aerials torn away by debris, probably. Everything else seems to be all right, though. Still, we’d better get down somewhere as soon as we can. What’s the nearest airfield, Happy?’
The navigator checked his map in the dim blue glow of his light. ‘Lympne,’ he said a moment later, naming an airfield near Folkestone. ‘Steer three-five-five.’
Yeoman peered out of the cockpit. The coast of Kent was on his left; flying-bombs must still be crossing it en route to London, for the anti-aircraft guns were putting up a fearsome barrage and the sky was lurid with searchlight beams. Some miles ahead of the Mosquito’s nose, the vague dark outline of a broad spit of land
jutted out into the Channel.
‘I can see Dungeness,’ Yeoman said. ‘That’s the beginning of one of the fighter entry lanes, isn’t it?’
The fighter entry lanes were narrow ‘corridors’ leading through the anti-aircraft belt. Any Allied aircraft coming into south-east England at any other point while an alert was on risked being blown out of the sky, especially if it was flying fast and at low level.
‘Yes,’ agreed Hardy. ‘Hold your present heading for the time being and turn in when I tell you.’
‘You’d better get ready to fire some recognition signals, just in case,’ Yeoman told the navigator. ‘What are the colours of the day?’
‘Red-white-red,’ Hardy said, and reached up for the signal pistol, which was located on the roof behind the pilot’s head, The signal cartridges were clipped to the front of the navigator’s own seat.
‘All right, skipper, turn in now. Two-eight-zero degrees. And start praying. If somebody down there gets trigger-happy, they aren’t likely to miss us at this altitude.’
Yeoman glanced at the altimeter; the Mosquito was down to a thousand feet. The navigator reached out a hand and flicked on the air recognition lights switch, on the starboard side of the cockpit. Lit up like a Christmas tree, the Mosquito turned in towards the coast.
After a minute Hardy said: ‘That’s Dymchurch below. We’re okay. Keep going until you see the Ashford–Folkestone railway-line, then turn right on to one-one-zero degrees. Should bring us nicely into the circuit.’
A searchlight probed up towards them, followed by another, and Yeoman raised a hand to shield his eyes from the intense blue-white glare.
‘Better shoot off some flares, Happy,’ he instructed.
Hardy repositioned the flare pistol in its aperture and fired off the recognition signals in quick succession. The searchlights wavered, then flicked out.
‘That’s better,’ Hardy muttered, passing a hand over his eyes. ‘Can’t see a bloody thing now, though.’
Operation Diver Page 9