Target Tobruk: Yeoman in the Western Desert

by Robert Jackson

  Yeoman counted off the seconds, willing himself not to cheat. He had to time his move as precisely as possible. Five … four … three … two … one … now! He pushed the left rudder pedal hard and pulled the stick over into his left thigh. The Hurricane stood on her wingtip and came round in a hard turn. It was a manoeuvre that Yeoman had used with success on several occasions, and this time was no exception. The enemy pilot was taken completely by surprise and overshot, presenting his aircraft to Yeoman in stark detail as he skidded past.

  It was a Fiat G50, the first Italian fighter Yeoman had seen. A dumpy, low-wing monoplane with a radial engine, it bore tawny, desert-brown camouflage, sprinkled with darker blotches. There was a white band round the rear fuselage, and a large white cross on the tail. For a second Yeoman glimpsed the enemy pilot, hunched forward in the open cockpit.

  Yeoman curved in behind the Fiat and clung doggedly to its tail, closing in steadily as the enemy pilot threw his aircraft around the sky. At two hundred yards Yeoman fired a short burst with no visible effect, and waited until the range was down to a hundred yards before firing again. This time, two small puffs of smoke spurted from the Fiat’s starboard wing root, and although there was no further smoke or flame the fighter slowed down considerably. Now I’ve got him cold, thought Yeoman, and sighted carefully on a point just behind the Fiat’s cockpit. His thumb caressed the firing button, then pressed down firmly.

  There was no sound except the dry, empty rattle of breech blocks. Yeoman swore and pressed the button again, with the same result. There was no more ammunition; he had used it all up in his strafing attacks on the enemy vehicles. The Fiat was turning west in a wide circle; it was as if the Italian pilot realized Yeoman’s problem and was trying to tempt him deeper into hostile territory.

  It was clear that the Fiat had suffered sufficient damage to prevent its pilot from offering further combat, thought Yeoman, otherwise he would have exploited the position by this time. It was also clear that Yeoman could not go on following the enemy fighter to observe its fate; Maddalena was over a hundred miles away across the desert, and he just about had enough fuel to make it if he set course now. He turned away reluctantly, casting a final look back at the dwindling Fiat. The last he saw of it, it was losing height but still flying steadily.

  The flight back to Maddalena was uneventful, although there was one moment of alarm when Yeoman spotted a low dust cloud hanging over the airfield as it came into view over the horizon. At first he thought the strip was under attack, but as he drew nearer he saw that the dust was being raised by the propellers of taxi-ing aircraft. There were seven or eight machines in the circuit, with wheels and flaps down, and since he was very low on fuel and this was no time for niceties Yeoman slotted his fighter into the middle of them, sticking up a mental two fingers as a red Very light soared up from the control truck. He touched down safely and a sweating airman waved him into position between two protective piles of sandbags.

  As he climbed from the cockpit, he saw that the newcomers were a mixture of twin-engined Blenheim bombers and single-engined Curtiss Tomahawk fighters. Later, after making his report, he saw Kendal and Ritchie talking to a group of aircrew and wandered over to join them. Kendal saw him coming and Yeoman quickened his pace as the squadron leader beckoned.

  ‘Yeoman,’ Kendal said, ‘I want you to meet Commandant Combette of the Fighting French.’ A small, wrinkled man with a dark crew cut and a cigarette dangling from the comer of his mouth grinned at the young pilot and shook hands briefly. ‘Commandant Combette,’ Kendal went on, ‘is leading the Blenheim squadron. Now then, I seem to remember that you got on famously chatting away in French to our Polish friends a few months ago, so I’d like you to liaise with the commandant while he’s here and straighten out any problems. None of his chaps speak much English. How does that suit you?’

  Yeoman grinned. ‘I don’t seem to have a lot of choice,’ he answered.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Kendal. ‘Now, I suggest you go off and have a chat. There’s a briefing for all pilots in one hour.’

  Yeoman and Combette sat down in the shade of a tent, gratefully sipping tin mugs of hot tea. The young pilot had already discovered that in the desert a whole mug of tea was something of a luxury; on the last couple of mornings, he had drunk one half and shaved in the other.

  To his surprise, he found no difficulty in conversing with the Frenchman, who turned out to be something of a character. Combette had helped to pioneer Air France’s overseas mail routes before the war, and knew North Africa like the back of his hand. He lit a foul-smelling cigarette and reminisced.

  ‘Ah, those were great days, mon vieux. You will never know a spirit such as we had. We had to be mechanics as well as pilots; I myself have landed in the desert several times and fixed my own engine. I remember once, in the middle of the Sahara, a colleague and I worked all night …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Yeoman interrupted, always fascinated by any tales of the pioneer days of flying, ‘but would you mind if I make a few notes? You see, I have always wanted to be a writer, and any story that is interesting —’

  Combette waved his hand airily. ‘Please carry on, my boy. You must forgive an old hand for his nostaglia. But when I recall those flights we made, all those years ago, it sometimes makes this present business seem like a picnic. And we were all friends then, French, English, Italians and Germans alike. Only the sky was our enemy, that bitch who would never forgive any mistake.’

  Yeoman fished in his shirt pocket, producing a pencil and a scrap of paper as the Frenchman went on with his story.

  ‘It was in 1931, and we were opening up a mail route from France to Nigeria directly across the Sahara via Fort Lamy. Two of us set out from Le Bourget, flying Potez 36s with 100-hp Renault engines. It took us five days to get across France into Spain; the weather was bad all the way, with low cloud and drizzle. Things were a little better on the flight over Spain, but when we set out for Oran we ran into torrential rain half-way across the Mediterranean and we had a pretty rough passage. Anyway, we made it all right, and on 3 December we arrived at Colomb-Béchar, where we checked our engines before risking the Sahara crossing.

  ‘We had a pretty long hop to make across the desert from Reggan to Gao, and since we couldn’t make it in one go we had to stop and refuel somewhere. As luck would have it, there was a desert outpost called Bidon V close to the middle of our route; it belonged to the Trans-Sahara Company, and there was a fuel tank there which was used by their vehicles. My colleague, Jean Valentin, obtained a key to the petrol pump from the company manager at Reggan and set off first in his Potez; I followed half an hour later.

  ‘Well, I reached Bidon V all right, but there was no sign at all of Valentin, and since he had the key to the pump and I had only five litres of fuel left in my tank this presented me with something of a problem. I waited for half an hour, and when he still didn’t turn up I knew he must have run out of juice and come down, probably close by, so I decided to risk taking off with my remaining five litres to see if I could spot him.

  ‘I climbed up to about a thousand feet and, unbelievably, I saw him down in the desert some six kilometres away. I turned towards him and a few seconds later my own fuel ran out, but I had enough height to glide in and land close by.

  ‘I learned that he had suffered engine failure. Fortunately his machine was undamaged and would fly again once the engine was fixed, so we decided to take it to pieces on the spot and sort out the trouble. We began at three o’clock in the afternoon and worked all through the night in brilliant moonlight until six in the morning, when we finally had the engine working again.

  ‘The trouble was that neither of us had any fuel, so we had to take a couple of empty cans apiece and tramp back to Bidon V. I tell you, mon vieux, that twelve-kilometre trudge across the desert, half the distance struggling with heavy fuel cans, was not funny. But we put enough juice in our tanks to get us back to Bidon V, where we filled up. By that time we were both completely
worn out and it was just too hot to carry on that day, so we spent a second night under the moon and continued our journey the following morning. In all, the desert crossing took us three days.’

  ‘That’s an amazing story,’ Yeoman exclaimed. ‘I’d like to hear more, sometime. Tell me, though, how do you come to be here in the desert? Were you in North Africa at the time of France’s armistice?’

  Combette pulled a face and ground his cigarette butt into the sand. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was one of the lucky ones. I was in France flying Leo 45 bombers when the end came, and I managed to get away across the Channel in a fishing boat. All our aircraft were wrecked. If I had flown to Algeria, as many of my comrades did who were in the south, I would have been under the thumb of those Vichy scum. As things were, we formed our squadron at Odiham in England last September, and until recently we were fighting the Italians in Abyssinia. We are the first of the fighting French squadrons to reach the desert; others will follow.’

  There was a kind of savage pride in Combette’s face. Yeoman had seen the same expression before, among the Poles with whom he and Kendal had flown just a few months earlier.

  ‘I am glad to be here,’ Combette went on, looking directly at Yeoman. ‘It is for France. Do you understand?’ Yeoman nodded, sensing that Combette wished to unburden himself and willing him to go on. There was no reticence, no formality, even thought the Frenchman’s rank was technically two steps higher than Yeoman’s.

  Combette lit another cigarette and spat into the sunbaked ground. ‘It makes me sick in my heart,’ he said quietly, ‘to think what we might have achieved if only we had all, with one purpose, chosen to carry on the fight here in Africa. Do you know how many operational squadrons the Vichy forces possessed over here at the beginning of this year? Thirty-five!’ His tone was bitter. ‘If they had joined the fight, the Germans would never have been able to cross the Mediterranean and the Italians would have been eliminated. Our fleet, too, was powerful, with modern warships. What happened was a tragedy. Now those Vichy traitors have only the name of Mers-el-Kebir in their mouths.’

  He referred to the lamentable action of July 1940, when the Royal Navy had attacked French warships in the North African bases of Mers-el-Kebir, Dakar and Oran, inflicting considerable damage on them in an attempt to stop them being used by the enemy. Over a thousand French sailors had died.

  ‘Come on, chaps, briefing’s been brought forward!’

  Yeoman looked up, startled by the sudden call, and saw Griffiths waving to them. He rose, together with Combette, who grinned and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. ‘We shall talk again, young man,’ the Frenchman said. ‘It is good to talk.’ His face suddenly grew serious. ‘You are a strange kind of Englishman,’ he continued. ‘Often, they do not understand, or pretend not to. They become embarrassed when one speaks of patriotism and make any excuse to escape. It is not so with you.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Indeed, you are a strange breed of people, you islanders. Such a mixture.’

  Combette went off to join his bomber crews, who were holding their own briefing. The fighter pilots were gathering around a large board which had been erected near the mess tent; a map was pinned to it, depicting the North African coastline from Sollum to Benghazi and extending southwards into the Libyan desert.

  Apart from the pilots of 493 Squadron, all the rest were South Africans, belonging to the Tomahawk squadron which, Yeoman discovered, had only recently arrived in the desert. Yeoman made a few attempts at conversation with them while waiting for the briefing to start, and was surprised to find them somewhat aloof and uncommunicative. One of them, a captain with a face like teak, glared at the Englishman.

  ‘Are you the young bastard who made me overshoot a while ago?’ he asked.

  Yeoman admitted he was, and apologized. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, ‘but I was out on a recce and I got a bit involved with the opposition. Just about ran out of fuel.’

  The South African grunted and relaxed. Suddenly, his face twisted in an unexpected grin and he held out his hand. ‘Okay, boy,’ he said. ‘The name’s Paul van den Heever. We’re all a bit on edge. It’s these bloody Tomahawks. We’ve had a fair number of accidents, especially on landing, and we’ve been sitting on our backsides in Alexandria for weeks while the workshops fitted new armament, modified the cooling system, fitted carburettor filters, oxygen, new gunsights and God knows what else. Now at last we’ve a chance to have a go at Jerry, and we’re just hoping everything works all right.’

  The conversation died away as Squadron Leader Kendal stepped in front of the group of pilots and held up his hand for silence. With him was the army intelligence major Yeoman had seen earlier that day.

  ‘Right, lads,’ said Kendal. ‘First of all, Major Soames here is going to bring us up to date on what’s happened so far. Major, it’s all yours.’

  The major moved in front of the map and cleared his throat. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he began, ‘the position is this. Early this morning, the enemy launched a heavy attack on our defences at Tobruk. It was repulsed, but we may expect more. The latest reconnaissance this morning showed strong groups of enemy armour apparently heading for Tobruk along the road from Gazala. Elsewhere —’ he paused and tapped a finger on the map ‘— a German armoured column has taken Bardia, Fort Capuzzo and Sollum’

  Yeoman looked at Griffiths and raised an eyebrow. The capture of Sollum meant that Rommel’s forces were already inside Egyptian territory.

  ‘However,’ Major Soames went on, ‘the enemy has been held to the west of Halfaya Pass, here, and we believe that he has overstretched himself for the moment.’

  Soames paused again, removing his hat and fanning a cloud of enormous black flies away from his face. ‘Tobruk,’ he said, ‘is the real key to success or failure. If we can maintain a strong garrison there, and reinforce it with the help of the Royal Navy, we may very well be able to adopt an offensive posture and strike at the enemy’s flanks when he least expects it. Tobruk, in short, is to be a perpetual thorn in the enemy’s side.’

  Soames turned to Kendal, who faced the assembled pilots and stood with feet slightly apart, his hands clasped behind his back.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I can tell you this much. During the next few days, the bomber boys will be doing everything possible to dislocate the enemy’s lines of communication between Benghazi and Tobruk. A lot of the work will have to be done in daylight, and those of us who were in France last year will remember all too well that Jerry brings an awful lot of light flak along with his armoured columns. Life will be tough enough for the Blenheims without them having to worry about fighter opposition, and that’s where we come in.

  ‘Now then, we know that Jerry has a wing of Messerschmitt 109s at Tripoli, and there’s every likelihood that at least some of them will be moving up to Gazala, from which location they can provide air cover for their bombers attacking Tobruk, so I daresay we shall have to mix it with them. As far as we are aware, they are an outfit that saw a lot of action over France and southern England, so they’ll be good.

  ‘At all costs, we have to stop them getting through to the bombers. We are going to need every available fighter, and for this reason 493 Squadron will be operating in the bomber escort role until further notice. The first operation is scheduled for 1600 hours today, and it will be in the nature of a test case to see just what kind of opposition we can expect.’

  Kendal cleared his throat and surveyed the pilots thoughtfully for a few moments. ‘I believe I’m right in thinking,’ he went on, ‘that only Griffiths, Yeoman and myself have seen action against the Germans. For that reason, I propose placing 493’s Hurricanes as top cover, with the Tomahawks flying close escort. If Jerry’s tactics run true to form, he’ll be hanging around upstairs, biding his time until he’s in a good position to engage. Then he’ll come down fast, in pairs, and make one firing pass before climbing back up again. If the Hurricanes can dislocate his attacks before they have a chance to develop properly, the Tomahawks shoul
d be able to take care of things lower down without too much trouble.’

  Kendal went on to talk further about enemy tactics, and Yeoman took the opportunity to make a covert appraisal of the South Africans. They seemed alert and keen enough, but the young pilot had an uneasy feeling that some of them appeared just a little too nonchalant and cocksure, as though confident that they could handle things without advice. If that were so, they were due for a profound shock. He just hoped that it would not prove fatal.

  Tension spread visibly across the airstrip as the afternoon wore on. Kendal, seemingly oblivious to the burning sun and the flies, kept pacing up and down, turning an eye every so often towards the north-west. Yeoman could read his thoughts. The previous evening, just after 493 Squadron had arrived at Maddalena, a high-flying aircraft had spun its vapour trail in a wide arc over the strip before heading east into Egyptian territory. ‘Jerry reconnaissance kite,’ Kendal had pronounced. ‘Probably a Junkers 86P. No point in going after him; the bastards fly at anything up to forty thousand feet. One of them comes over two or three times a week. They’ve probably got all our bases pinpointed by this time, together with everything on them.’ Now it was clear that Kendal was worried about the possibility of a sudden, lightning air attack, especially as Landing Ground 124’s sole anti-aircraft defences consisted of two elderly Lewis guns and a handful of Brens.

  The relief came like a spray of cooling water when, at 1545, the crews of the eight French Blenheims climbed aboard their aircraft and started up. The bombers took off one by one, with Combette in the lead, and formed up overhead in two boxes of four before setting course. Yeoman, about to climb into the cockpit of his Hurricane, watched them go. He wished he could shake off the sense of foreboding that had descended on him like a stifling shroud.

  The four Hurricanes of 493 Squadron took off five minutes later, followed by the eight South African Tomahawks. They quickly overhauled the bombers and Kendal took the Hurricanes in a steady climb up to fifteen thousand feet, leaving the Tomahawks to shepherd the Blenheims as they lumbered along seven thousand feet lower down. Yeoman was flying as Kendal’s number two, with Griffiths and Ritchie forming the second pair of fighters.