‘One thousand feet, skipper,’ Hardy announced calmly.
Yeoman opened fire, aiming for the Heinkel’s starboard wing, away from the highly-explosive V-1. His first burst produced a brief red glow, which went out at once. The bomber began to weave gently from side to side and tracers floated towards him from the turret on top of its fuselage, zipping like meteorites over the top of the Mosquito’s cockpit.
He opened the throttles slightly to reduce the range and fired again. This time, the flash of exploding cannon shells lit up the white-edged cross on the bomber’s fuselage.
‘Don’t get too close, skipper,’ Hardy warned. Yeoman ignored him and reduced the range still further. At 150 feet he gave the bomber a two-second burst with both cannon and machine-guns; more flashes appeared, this time at the wingroot, and suddenly a garish yellow flame shot back, licking past the Heinkel’s tail, growing until it enveloped the whole of the bomber’s rear fuselage.
The Heinkel’s nose went down and it dived into the sea. There was no explosion. The Mosquito sped over the spot and Yeoman pulled up in a climbing turn, looking down; a patch of foam, whitely phosphorescent in the night, marked the bomber’s grave.
Between them, the Mosquitos of Nos 380 and 373 Squadrons destroyed six Heinkels on that August night, all of them before they could launch their flying-bombs. It seemed, at last, that the solution had been found. But Terry Saint and his navigator would not be coming back.
Chapter Nine
It was the first day of September 1944, and each night, with the approach of autumn, an earlier darkness crept perceptibly over the land.
Five years to the day after German tanks had stormed into Poland and precipitated the greatest and bloodiest conflict in the history of the world, the darkness was already closing in fast on the Thousand-Year Reich.
In July, during the weeks following the invasion, there had been virtual stalemate on the western front; but the Allies had steadily consolidated their foothold on the soil of France and poured fresh divisions and supplies into the beachhead. When the breakout finally came, in August, it came with shattering speed that spelt the end of the German cause in Normandy.
On 12 August, in a desperate attempt to save their divisions from annihilation by the Anglo-Canadian forces in the east and the Americans in the west, the Germans had begun to fall back through the Argentan-Falaise Gap. Three days later, nearly a quarter of a million men were in chaotic retreat along a corridor forty miles long and eleven miles wide, battered on three flanks and subjected to a merciless round-the-clock onslaught from the air.
Twenty-two squadrons of Typhoons and Spitfires of the 2nd Tactical Air Force turned the Falaise Gap into a killing ground. The Typhoons would go in first, sealing off the front and rear of an enemy column with accurate bombing, and then make rocket and cannon attacks on the rest. As soon as the Typhoons departed, their place would be taken by Spitfires, making low-level strafing attacks on trucks and lightly armoured vehicles of all kinds.
The Luftwaffe was absent from the sky, and the fighter-bombers turned the retreat into a rout.
By 20 August, when the Allied armies finally sealed the gap in a huge pincer movement, the German Seventh Army had virtually ceased to exist. Eight infantry and two panzer divisions had been wiped out by the awful effectiveness of the air attacks; fifty thousand dazed and bewildered prisoners marched off to captivity, and among the forty-mile swath of smashed and burning vehicles lay ten thousand corpses. Field Marshal Montgomery’s strategy had succeeded; there would be no bitter step-by-step slogging match across France, for the prospect of a German fighting retreat had been destroyed forever in Normandy.
In the south, too, the German forces — stripped of men and material in a belated attempt to reinforce those in Normandy — were in full retreat, pursued up the valley of the Rhone by the US Seventh Army and units of the Fighting French, who had landed on the Riviera on 15 August. Eventually, the push from the south would link up with the American drive from the west, while the British and Canadians thrust up the northern flank into Belgium and Holland.
On the eastern front, too, the German military structure was falling apart. The Russian armies were in Romania, and Germany’s former allies were collapsing or changing sides; in the north, the Finns were already suing for peace.
In August alone, the RAF and USAAF had dropped 140,000 tons of bombs between them, aiming mainly for the destruction of Germany’s dwindling centres of oil production. No modern war machine could function without oil, and in the latter half of 1944 the Allied air attacks, coupled with the loss of the Romanian oilfields, meant that the Germans were growing desperately short of this vital commodity.
In the Pacific, the Americans were rolling back across the islands and preparing to invade the Philippines, while huge B-29 Superfortresses, operating from bases in China, had begun to attack the Japanese Home Islands, heralding the devastating fire-raids that were to follow.
For the enemy, there would be no concessions, no armistice. The only terms would be unconditional surrender. But that was a matter for the politicians; for the men fighting the war on land, at sea and in the air the end was still a long way off, and life was still measured only from one day to the next.
*
‘If only I could be there,’ said Yves Romilly wistfully. ‘If only I could be there now! Imagine the scenes, the rejoicing, the wine and the women…ah, mon Dieu, that I should miss such a moment of history!’ He gave a deep sigh, and took a long drink.
Paris had been liberated exactly a week earlier, and Romilly had talked of little else since. It was understandable, for the Frenchman had not seen his home capital since 1939, and he had relatives there about whose fate he knew nothing.
Yeoman smiled at him. ‘Cheer up, Yves,’ he said, ‘I’ve told you, you’ll have your chance soon enough. You’ll see Paris at the right time, after all the fuss has died down. There’s no use going there now; you’re wearing the wrong uniform. I’ve a feeling the Americans will have the pick of everything, just at the moment.’
Romilly squared his shoulders and glared at his commanding officer.
‘Americans?’ He waved his arms excitedly. ‘Americans — bah! It was General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division, the Fighting French, that liberated Paris!’
‘Only because the Americans allowed them to,’ Yeoman retorted. ‘And if you don’t stop waving your arms about, you’re likely to spill your beer. Come on, drink up and let’s have another.’
On this Friday evening, all the officers of the two Burningham squadrons had been invited across to the sergeants’ mess, where a party of appalling proportions was developing. It had started off as a ‘Happy Hour’, which was supposed to have lasted from 1730 to 1830, but it was now eight o’clock and things were livelier than ever.
The squadrons deserved to let their hair down, thought Yeoman, looking round at the sea of laughing, high-spirited young men. They had done well over the past weeks, chalking up a combined score of eighteen Heinkels, all of them V-1 carriers and all of them at night. In the end, the enemy bombers had ceased to venture out over the North Sea; the Mosquitos had won their battle.
A few flying-bombs, launched from sites in France, still purred over London, but the total was diminishing daily, and as the Allies pushed up the coast towards Belgium the V-1 offensive was slowly petering out. It was a tribute to the defences that, of nearly eleven thousand flying-bombs launched, only 2,400 had got through to their targets; but these had killed 6,200 people and seriously injured 18,000 more, ninety per cent of them in London.
Once again, Londoners had shown that they could take it; but in a strange way, the robot bombs had come closer to destroying morale than the great Blitz of 1940. The deprivations of five years of war had taken their toll, both physically and mentally.
For 380 Squadron, the fight against the flying-bombs was over. Clive Bowen and his 373 Squadron were to remain at Burningham as an insurance against possible further attacks by bomb-launching H
einkels, but Yeoman’s Mosquitos had been ordered to move back to 83 Group.
Their new base was to be Carpiquet, on the outskirts of Caen. They were to be one of the first Mosquito squadrons to operate from French territory, and they were to resume their original role of ‘search and destroy’, carrying out low-level precision attacks on Luftwaffe airfields or on selected targets held to be of particular importance by Intelligence. After weeks of constant patrolling in the dark, far from the focus of the battle in France, all the aircrew were anticipating the move with more than the usual eagerness.
Freddie Barnes pushed his way unsteadily through the throng of blue uniforms, his eyes slightly more glazed than usual behind his spectacle lenses and the tip of his nose a bright red. He beamed at Yeoman and Romilly and stood there without saying anything, swaying slightly and periodically slopping little cascades of beer down the front of his uniform.
‘Freddie,’ Yeoman said, eyeing the Intelligence Officer with mock severity, ‘you are drunk.’
‘Sir,’ Barnes replied, peering at Yeoman over the top of his glasses, ‘so are you. And you, sir’ — he addressed Romilly— ‘have got two pairs of eyes. In fact, you have two pairs of everything. Very dangerous medical condition. Should see the MO, if I were you.’
He weaved away in the direction of the piano and was seized by a group of pilots, who placed him without ceremony on the stool. Warrant Officer Arthur Laurie’s bellow silenced the babble of conversation.
‘Hey, you guys, knock it off! Freddie’s going to hit the keys!’
In the temporary hush, Barnes waved his arms dramatically and said:
‘It just so happens that I have penned a little ditty to mark this aus-aus-auspicious occasion.’
‘What’s horse piss got to do with it?’ someone yelled. Barnes turned on the offender and glared at him.
‘Silence, peasant, lest the earth rise up and smite thee,’ he quoted biblically. ‘Now, here goes. Join in the chorus.’
His fingers caressed the keys and, in a rich and surprisingly tuneful baritone, he began to sing:
‘From the far north to the Channel,
They have heard our plaintive cry
In the boozers of this land we love so well;
As we drunken sods assemble with our glasses raised on high,
And the murmur of our voices raising hell…’
Amid roars of approval Barnes launched into the rest of his repertoire, abruptly changing the tune and the song.
‘Oh, Three-Eighty Squadron’s a pretty good place
But the organization’s a bloody disgrace!
There’s pilots and navs and there’s engineers too
With their hands in their pockets and sod all to do!’
Suddenly, in the short pause between verses, a new voice intervened. The tune was the same, but the words were different. Yeoman craned his neck, peering through the haze of tobacco smoke in an effort to locate the singer.
‘They say in the Air Force a landing’s okay
If the pilot can get out and still walk away;
But in the Fleet Air Arm the prospects are grim
If the landing’s piss-poor and the pilot can’t swim!’
A bearded naval officer stood in the doorway, grinning hugely. On the sleeves of his tunic was the gold braid of a lieutenant-commander. Yeoman recognized him immediately and let out a yell.
‘Russ! Russell Kemp! Over here!’
The newcomer saw Yeoman’s upraised hand and pushed his way through the crowd, Shaking Yeoman by the hand, he said matter-of-factly:
‘Hello, George. It’s nice to see you.’
‘You too, Russ. It’s been a long time. By the way, this is Yves Romilly. Russ Kemp and I,’ he said by way of explanation to the Frenchman, ‘served together in North Africa and Crete back in forty-one.’
Romilly looked from one to the other and shook his head slowly.
‘You British,’ he said, ‘never cease to astonish me. Good friends who have not seen one another for years meet again, and they greet each other as though they travel to work on the same train every morning.’
‘Well,’ grinned Yeoman, ‘you might fancy being kissed on both cheeks by a bearded wonder, but I don’t.’ He waved to attract the barman’s attention, then said to Kemp:
‘Seriously, Russ, this is one hell of a surprise. What brings you here?’
‘I’m on my way from Hatston, in the Orkneys, to Boscombe Down,’ Kemp replied. ‘I heard you were here, so I thought I’d stop off and find out how life was treating you. There’s an RAF type in flying control at Hatston who knows you, a chap called O’Rourke, or O’Grady, or something like that. Bit of a weird type, if you ask me. Do you remember him?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Yeoman, ‘I remember him all right. I had him taken off operations last year. O’Grady’s the name. He had the “twitch” rather badly and tried to do away with himself. A thorough bloody nuisance.’ Yeoman took a pint of beer from the barman and handed it to Kemp, who swallowed half of it thirstily. Romilly, realizing that the two men wished to reminisce, went off to talk to Tim Sloane, who had just joined the group around the piano.
‘Your pianist seems to be in good form,’ Kemp smiled. His companion nodded
‘That, believe it or not, is our Intelligence Officer, Freddie Barnes. I didn’t know he had it in him.’
By this time, the singers had worked their way through ‘Cats on the Rooftops’ and were now launching into ‘There Was an Old Monk of Great Renown’. The noise was fearsome, and Yeoman shouted into Kemp’s ear:
‘Come on, let’s escape for a few minutes. We’ll take our beer into the anteroom.’
The only occupant in the sergeants’ mess anteroom was the station warrant officer, who looked up as Yeoman and Kemp came in.
‘Good evening, Mr Wallace,’ Yeoman said. ‘Do you mind if we share your little oasis of peace and quiet for a while?’
The SWO, an elderly and much decorated veteran with a quarter of a century of RAF service behind him, smiled.
‘Not at all, gentlemen. Make yourselves at home. I’m getting a bit too old for parties, myself.’ He buried himself behind his newspaper once more.
Kemp and Yeoman settled themselves in two armchairs at the far end of the room; the naval officer looked round appreciatively.
‘Very cosy,’ he said. ‘Better than your officers’ mess, in fact. It’s as dead as a doornail over there; I was just about reconciled to an evening of lonely drinking when one of the stewards said you were all over here.’
‘Well, Russ, you arrived just in time, because we’re leaving for France tomorrow,’ Yeoman told him. He looked at Kemp in curiosity, and asked: ‘What exactly are you up to at the moment?’
‘At the moment,’ Kemp said, ‘I’m taking a Barracuda down to the Armament Experimental Establishment for trials with a new kind of torpedo. Actually, I’ve got nothing to do with that side of it; I’m starting a few’ days’ leave, so I said I’d deliver the thing. It seemed the quickest way to get near the London fleshpots,’ he grinned.
‘Are you on a Barracuda squadron now?’ Yeoman wanted to know. Kemp looked at him, aghast.
‘Good God, no,’ he said. ‘The Barracuda’s a horrible bloody thing — an absolute bag of nails. No, George, I’m still a fighter boy — my squadron has just re-equipped with the Fairey Firefly. A nice piece of work, with an elliptical wing like the Spitfire, a big Griffon engine and four cannon. We used ’em during the attack on the Tirpitz last July.’
Yeoman’s interest was awakened. ‘You were on the Tirpitz show, were you? That must have been pretty hairy.’ The pocket battleship Tirpitz had been lurking in various Norwegian fjords since the autumn of 1943, and as she presented a serious threat to the Allied convoys to Russia several attempts were made to destroy her.
‘You can say that again,’ Kemp agreed. ‘We’ve been attacking that bloody battleship since last April, and we’ve still got nowhere. We caused a bit of damage to her superstructure, but the t
rouble is that the bombs are too small — the heaviest the Barracuda can carry is 1,600 lbs, and they make no impression at all on the ship’s heavy armour. We didn’t hit her at all in the July attacks, because the Huns knew we were coming and put up a smokescreen around her.
‘The only thing that would knock her out,’ he went on thoughtfully, ‘would be these new “earthquake” bombs the RAF have been dropping on U-boat pens and so on. Yes, that would do the trick all right.’
He paused and looked at Yeoman, giving a small and rather weary smile.
‘Sorry, George,’ he apologized, ‘I seem to be doing nothing but talk about myself. What about you? Did you ever hear from that girl — you know, the one you were always talking about?’
Yeoman laughed. ‘Oh, you mean Julia. Yes, we saw each other just a few weeks ago. As a matter of fact, we’re thinking about getting married. She’s out of the country at the moment on some sort of assignment — I think I may have told you that she’s a newspaper correspondent — but she’ll be back early in October and we’ve arranged to meet in London on the seventh, which is her birthday, come hell or high water. I’ll be tour-expired by then, anyway, with some leave due to me.’
‘So it sounds as though 7 October could be decision time for my old mate George Yeoman,’ Kemp smiled. ‘I never thought I’d see the day when you were trapped by a female. It’ll put an awful curb on your drinking habits, you know.’
‘Well, that might not be a bad thing,’ Yeoman replied. ‘I take it you’re still single?’
Kemp nodded. ‘Oh, yes. There is a girl in Devon, but…well, I don’t feel like committing myself while there’s still a war on. Later, maybe. In the meantime, I shall adhere strictly to the tradition of the Navy.’
‘What’s that?’ Yeoman asked.
‘Rum, bum and dominoes!’
‘I’d like to bet Nelson didn’t invent that one,’ laughed Yeoman. ‘Anyway, what’s in store for you now — more attacks on the Tirpitz?’
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