Target Tobruk: Yeoman in the Western Desert

by Robert Jackson

  Yeoman nodded and went into the tent, dropping his kit inside the flap and focusing his eyes with difficulty in the relative gloom after the stark glare of the desert. Three officers, seated on upturned crates around a large wooden packing case, looked up with mild interest as the newcomer stood silhouetted in the door. One of them, a tall flight lieutenant with a bristle of closely-cropped fair hair, rose to his feet and stuck out his hand, addressing Yeoman with a strong New Zealand twang. ‘Ar yer,’ he said. ‘Welcome to 493 Squadron, or what’s left of it. Pull up the floor and sit down. We’re a bit short on amenities. I’m Griffiths; I reckon you’re Yeoman. We’ve been hearing about you.’ He waved at the other two men, both pilot officers. ‘Jack Ritchie and Mick Bright. A word of warning right at the start: never play cards with Ritchie. If you turn him upside down and shake him, aces fall out of every crevice.’

  Ritchie pulled a face and shoved a crate towards Yeoman, who sat down and winced. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘God but my backside’s sore. My transport wasn’t exactly well sprung. Met an MP on the road, a while ago who said you’d been bombed. I didn’t see any signs of damage, though.’

  Griffiths shook his head. ‘No, they missed us completely. There’s a group of knocked-out Italian tanks and trucks about two miles south, and they clobbered them instead.’ He looked at his watch. ‘The boss should be back soon. He’s been out doing a recce west of Tobruk. Probably decided to take a shot at the odd Jerry. He’s been champing at the bit for weeks, while things were quiet out here; he just about went balmy when the Jerries got involved. Goes out several times a day, looking for trouble.’

  Davies brought in the stew and they ate, fanning away the flies with one hand. Yeoman loathed the insects, but realized that their constant presence was something he would have to learn to tolerate. Griffiths noticed his expression.

  ‘Don’t let ’em bother you,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon get used to them. You can be in the middle of nowhere, with never a fly in sight, and as soon as you sit down to eat something the little buggers are everywhere. God knows where they come from.’

  Yeoman chewed thoughtfully on a tough piece of bully and addressed Griffiths. ‘The CO sounds quite a character. Is he somebody I ought to know?’ The New Zealander looked at him in amazement. ‘You mean you really don’t know who he is? Bloody hell, he pulled all sorts of strings to get you on the team. You’re a sort of blue-eyed boy of his, it seems. Anyway, I’m not going to spoil his fun. You’ll see for yourself shortly. I just hope you’re as good as he reckons you are, because we need experienced pilots and I’ve a feeling we’ll be flying the pants off ourselves during the next few days.’

  ‘I can but try,’ said Yeoman, feeling considerably embarrassed. ‘But I can’t imagine who would want —’

  Griffiths’ upraised hand stopped him in mid-sentence. The New Zealander’s head was cocked to one side and his eyes had a faraway look. Suddenly, he jumped up and ran from the tent, shouting ‘Here the bastards come again!’

  Yeoman, Ritchie and Bright followed him, the blistering sun striking daggers of pain into their eyes. Griffiths had picked up a stone and was pounding an empty fuel drum with it, at the same time yelling ‘Air raid! Air raid! Take cover!’

  Bright grabbed Yeoman’s arm and propelled him along. In the distant background, an uneven beat of engines swelled rapidly until the ground began to tremble. It was a sound that Yeoman knew only too well.

  Bright and Yeoman fell headlong into a slit trench, closely followed by Davies, the cook. Griffiths and Ritchie dived into another trench a few yards away; the few airmen who had been working on the camouflaged Hurricanes had already disappeared below ground.

  Yeoman raised his head cautiously. Directly overhead, six Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bombers were cruising in a leisurely circle at about five thousand feet. ‘They’ve found us this time, all right,’ said Bright, ‘and we haven’t got so much as a machine-gun to shoot back at the bastards with.’

  Both men hurled themselves into the soft sand at the bottom of the trench as a Stuka broke the circle and plummeted down, black and menacing, its underwing sirens screaming. The wave of sound buffeted them, tearing their brains apart. Yeoman clasped his hands over his ears and clenched his teeth. The black shadow of the dive-bomber fleeted over the sand as it pulled out of its dive, the deadly egg of its 500-pound bomb whistling down to explode with a terrific concussion a few yards beyond the mess tent where Yeoman and the others had been sitting just a few minutes earlier. The tent vanished in a cloud of sand and smoke. A shock wave rippled through the ground and a deluge of sand fell into the slit trench on top of the dazed men, half smothering them.

  Yeoman clawed sand from,his eyes and pushed himself to his knees, looking up. The Stuka which had just bombed was climbing lazily to rejoin its colleagues, who were still circling as though their pilots were taking the utmost care in selecting their targets. It was a new sound, however, which had intervened to attract Yeoman’s attention and brought him up from the comparative sanctuary of the trench floor. He raised his right hand and peered through his spread fingers against the sun’s glare, searching for the source of the noise: the high-pitched wail of a single-engined fighter, diving under power … He spotted it at last and tapped Bright on the shoulder, pointing upwards through the haze of dust.

  Out of the brazen vault of the sky a lone Hurricane fell like a hawk on the circling dive-bombers. Its guns chattered briefly and a Stuka faltered and dropped, turning over and over, slowly at first and then with horrifying speed until it hit the desert and was obliterated by the explosion of its own bomb.

  The Hurricane continued its dive and then began to level out. It must have been doing over 400 mph and Yeoman clenched his hands involuntarily, half expecting the fighter’s wings to tear away. Instead, the Hurricane pulled up and hurtled skywards again, coming up beneath a second Stuka. The German pilot was weaving to left and right but the fighter was in his blind spot and he never stood a chance. Once again the Hurricane’s guns rattled; white flames streamed from the Stuka’s belly and its bomb dropped away as the pilot desperately strove to lighten the crippled aircraft, but it was useless. The nose went down and the dive-bomber broke up as it fell. By the time it struck the desert it was a rolling ball of fire, its grave marked by a mushroom of oily smoke.

  The Hurricane pilot had not finished yet. Stall-turning at the top of his climb and diving to gather speed again he went after the four surviving Stukas, which had jettisoned their bombs and were heading west in a loose, straggling formation. He closed right in on the tail of one of them and Yeoman waited for him to open fire, but nothing happened. The Hurricane pilot clung to the enemy aircraft for half a minute and then turned away sharply, losing height.

  Everyone had emerged from cover to follow the course of the air battle, and now they watched as the Hurricane slanted down to land on the rough strip that had been flattened out of the desert a hundred yards away. There were clear signs of frustration in the way the pilot flew the fighter on to the ground and taxied in with short, angry bursts of throttle, kicking up a cloud of sand in his wake.

  The Hurricane came to a stop, the shimmering disc of its propeller breaking up as the pilot shut down the engine. The perspex canopy was already open and the occupant levered himself out of the cockpit. He jumped down from the wing, ripping off his helmet and stamping towards the small group of pilots.

  Yeoman chuckled. There was no mistaking the bony frame and hawk-like features of Squadron Leader Mervyn Kendal, or the furious monologue that issued from him as he approached.

  ‘Bloody sodding guns jammed. I’d have had that bastard. It’s the flaming ammo again. Oh, God!’ He rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘Bloody store-bashers! They never change. I swear to Christ I’m going to drop a note to the Jerries one of these days and ask ‘em if they’ll do a swap. Hello, young Yeoman, it’s about time you got here. Where’s that bloody Lysander?’ The Lysander, Yeoman learned, was the aircraft the army sent up from Sollum to pic
k up the ciné film taken by the reconnaissance Hurricanes.

  The last time Yeoman had seen Kendal was more than six months earlier, when the angular ex-Merchant Navy officer had commanded one of the first Polish fighter squadrons to take part in the Battle of Britain. Kendal had at least twenty-three victories to his credit that Yeoman knew about, and although he was in his thirties — a good ten years older than the average fighter pilot — his performance of just a few minutes ago showed that his expertise was undiminished. Yeoman had learned a lot from Kendal during his short time with the Polish squadron, and felt immensely gratified that the squadron leader had requested him as part of his team.

  The drone of an engine reached them. The expected Lysander came muttering in from the east, flying low over the desert. Two airmen were already at work on Kendal’s Hurricane, removing the can of exposed film from the forward-facing camera installation.

  Kendal addressed the pilots. ‘Right, get your toothbrushes packed. We’re moving out to Sollum. There’s a Jerry armoured column heading this way, fast. Yeoman, get a lift on the Lysander. Sorry I can’t give you a Hurricane, but there aren’t enough to go round and at the moment you’re first reserve, anyway.’

  He turned away and surveyed the ruins of the mess tent, feet apart and hands on hips. Davies’s field kitchen stood like a forlorn monument, half buried in the sand thrown up by the German bomb. ‘So much for my bloody lunch,’ he muttered, and walked sadly away. Yeoman grinned and scrabbled around in the sand for his kit, which he retrieved intact. Then he ran over to the Lysander, clambering aboard just before the aircraft began to move out for take-off.

  Suddenly, the prospect of operations over the desert seemed a lot rosier.

  Chapter Two

  Every pilot has a preference for a certain type of flying. Some enjoy the sheer precision of perfect circuits and bumps; others find a heady delight in pushing an aircraft to the limit of its ceiling, to a vantage point miles in the sky from which they can look down on the far horizons, curving away on the edge of a world so remote as to be unreal. For Yeoman, however, nothing would ever beat flying fast and low for sheer exhilaration. It needed all one’s concentration, especially over terrain such as this, where the rock and sand of the desert merged into a hazy, ill-defined horizon and ghostly ripples of heat shimmered and danced, tempting the unwary eye like will-o’-the-wisps.

  A wadi, a dried-up river bed, flashed beneath the Hurricane’s wings and Yeoman checked his watch and the aircraft’s compass. All around him was the eternal flatness of sand and rock; behind him, and to the right, the clear colours of a fresh desert sunrise. Away off the fighter’s starboard wingtip, invisible from this height of only five hundred feet, was Tobruk and the sea.

  The Hurricanes of 493 Squadron had been at Sollum for less than twenty-four hours when they had received orders to move forty miles south into the desert to a remote spot on the map known as Landing Ground 124, west of the old Italian strongpoint of Fort Maddalena. From there they were to range as far as Benghazi, gathering information on the movements of the enemy columns that were pushing on steadily through Cyrenaica towards the Egyptian frontier.

  Like all 493 Squadron’s Hurricanes, the aircraft Yeoman was flying was a Tac R Mk. 1, fitted with a ciné camera in the port wing. The fighter carried six machine-guns instead of eight, to save weight and permit an increase in range. The Hurricane was one of a batch that had reached the desert by way of Takoradi, on the Gold Coast in West Africa; throughout the desert war this was to remain a major supply centre for combat aircraft, particularly short-range fighters. The machines arrived in crates and were assembled at Takoradi, eventually reaching the aircraft depots in Egypt after a 4,000-mile flight across the African continent, refuelling at a dozen staging posts en route. Bomber aircraft, on the other hand, had sufficient range to fly direct from Gibraltar to Egypt; that was how Yeoman had arrived, half frozen in the draughty fuselage of a Wellington after a long night run over the Mediterranean.

  At the pre-dawn briefing, delivered by a grim-faced army intelligence major who had flown into LG 124 aboard the faithful Lysander during the night, Yeoman and his fellow pilots had learned just how serious the situation in North Africa was becoming. Tobruk was completely surrounded, although the defensive perimeter around the port was intact and the garrison could hold out for a long time, if need be. A far more serious and immediate threat was an enemy armoured column which had pushed through the desert south of the coast road; its spearheads had already reached Bardia and Fort Capuzzo, and from there it was only a short stride across the Egyptian border to Sollum.

  The desert outpost of Bir Hacheim, with its confluence of desert tracks, appeared out of the haze on Yeoman’s left. He altered course slightly, adopting a heading that would bring him to a point on the coast road some ten miles west of Tobruk. The desert appeared empty and lifeless in the contrasting light and shadow of the sunrise, but as he flew on Yeoman saw plenty of evidence of man’s recent presence. South of El Adem, the whole surface of the desert was churned by a maze of tracks, twisting and circling and apparently going nowhere, as though some mad ploughman had been at work. There were vehicles, too, dotted here and there, some with blackened areas around them which betrayed the scorching heat that had destroyed them.

  Yeoman tensed suddenly, becoming fully alert as he sighted a dust-cloud ahead of him. Half a dozen small dots at its base quickly resolved themselves into trucks, travelling in rough line abreast formation. They looked like toys against the immensity of the desert. Yeoman was unable to identify them, but in this location they could only be German or Italian. His mission was to reconnoitre the Tobruk-Gazala road and the desert immediately to the south of it and he had orders to avoid all other contact with the enemy if possible, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. He lined up the Hurricane carefully, dropping to a hundred feet. The men in the trucks had seen him coming and the vehicles started to scatter, but it was too late. Yeoman opened fire at five hundred yards and his bullets hurled up a miniature sandstorm around the nearest truck. Tiny figures tumbled over the tailboard and lay motionless. He yawed the aircraft slightly, spraying the remaining vehicles, and kept on firing until the last moment. The trucks flashed beneath him and he went into a shallow climb, looking back. Smoke was rising from two of the vehicles, which appeared to have collided. As he took a last glance, the scene dissolved in a mighty eruption of smoke and sand. That, thought the pilot with satisfaction, was one load of ammunition that wouldn’t get to Rommel.

  A range of hills, extending east and west for about twenty miles and rising to more than five hundred feet from the desert floor, appeared directly ahead of the speeding fighter. Beyond the high ground lay the coast road along which enemy troops and equipment were flowing in a steady stream towards besieged Tobruk and the Egyptian frontier beyond it. Yeoman made for the extreme right-hand edge of the hills, flying round it in a steady curve until he picked up the road.

  Thirty seconds later, he saw the first group of enemy tanks. There were about thirty of them, a mixture of German Mark IVs and smaller Italian M13s. They were stopped by the side of the road, but their crews were clearly taking no chances. As Yeoman raced towards them, his camera whirring, smoky lines of tracer converged on the Hurricane as at least a dozen machine-guns opened up. He hunched his body into a ball in the cockpit, fighting the temptation to fling the aircraft away from the danger and forcing himself to hold it steady for the camera run, a difficult enough task because of the eddies of turbulence that came rippling across the road from the hills on the left.

  The Hurricane shuddered as bullets struck home, but the engine maintained its healthy roar and the controls stayed firm. Yeoman kept low, flashing past the tanks so close that he had a vivid impression of the stark black crosses on their flanks and the dusty figures of the machine-gunners, crouched behind their weapons on the turrets of the armoured monsters. Then the danger was behind him and he gave a sudden gasp, surprised to find that he had been holding his br
eath. Some miles further on he encountered more tanks and a convoy of open trucks, but their crews were clustered in small groups some distance away from the vehicles and appeared to be having breakfast. Yeoman ran some more film, then gave the convoy a lengthy squirt with his Brownings, for good measure. There was no answering fire.

  At Gazala he turned sharply to port, flying southwards along a pass that cut like a knife-gash through the high ridge. The roar of the Merlin engine reverberated from the walls on either side, dislodging small avalanches of stones. Beyond the pass lay the open desert once more, and the road that led to Bir Hacheim. On a sudden impulse he pushed the throttle wide open and pulled back the stick, taking the fighter up in a fast, steep climb. The Hurricane leaped out of the pass as though hurled from a catapult. Yeoman was momentarily dazzled as the fighter emerged into the full glare of the switfly-rising sun. He blinked several times, turning his head away from the intense light, and pulled down his tinted goggles. Then he glanced at his rear-view mirror as he levelled out, and blinked again.

  Positioned squarely in the centre of the mirror, dark and menacing, was the head-on silhouette of a single-engined aircraft. And it was close, too close for comfort.

  As always happened to him in situations such as this, Yeoman’s brain suddenly became icily cool. He calculated that he had several more seconds before the enemy aircraft, if indeed it was an enemy, came within firing range. He wriggled in his straps, craning his neck in an attempt to get a better view, careful not to make any sudden control movement: he must not let the other pilot know that he had seen him.