At fifteen thousand feet Yeoman switched on his oxygen, revelling in the cool breath of the gas against his sweating cheeks. By the time he reached twenty-five thousand feet he was no longer sweating. Coldness, felt all the more keenly because of the heat he had so recently left, crept into his feet and began to move slowly up his legs. The Hurricane’s rate of climb began to fall appreciably as he approached thirty thousand feet, wavering around the four hundred feet per minute mark. The controls were growing soggy and unresponsive. To make matters worse, a layer of ice was forming on the inside of the cockpit canopy. Ice! He almost laughed out loud. What a pity he couldn’t take some back with him, into the furnace of Tobruk.
George, he told himself, you’re getting light-headed, and that’s one danger signal you know too well. He turned his oxygen on fully and his head felt clearer almost at once. He reached down. Fastened to the cockpit wall was a small can, an innovation of his own, with the handle of a paintbrush sticking out of it. The can was full of glycerine. Yeoman withdrew the brush and dabbed some of the liquid on the perspex of the cockpit hood; the ice dissolved, enabling him to regain at least part of his field of vision.
The fighter continued to claw her way valiantly upwards. She reached thirty-five thousand feet, and then, as though in weary protest, a shudder ran through her airframe and she would go no higher. Her nose dropped; Yeoman corrected the incipient stall instantly, but lost the best part of five hundred feet as the aircraft mushed back into level flight in the rarefied air.
Yeoman circled cautiously, keeping his turns as gentle as possible in order not to lose more height. The coast was a long way off. He glanced at his fuel gauge; his tanks were already half empty. He was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. Apart from the cold, which gnawed into his very bones, he was having difficulty in sucking the life-giving oxygen into his lungs. He gasped and belched continually; his head pounded, his eyes ached abominably and the low outside pressure caused his abdomen to distend. His Mae West felt tight enough to strangle him and he loosened his seat harness slightly, although it brought him no relief.
His canopy was beginning to ice over again and he dabbed on more glycerine, resuming his careful search of the horizon. He turned to circle in the opposite direction and looked down. Nearly six and a half miles beneath him the Mediterranean was a solid sheet of blue glass, dappled and stained in places with tendrils of green and with one great patch of burnished metal, painful to the eye, where the sea reflected the sun.
Yeoman looked away as the light stabbed his eyes, and then looked hurriedly back again.
Emerging from the centre of that great molten blister, crawling over its outer fringes towards the cooler blue, was the unmistakable cruciform silhouette of an aircraft.
Yeoman’s heart leaped as he made out the twin engines and twin fins of a Junkers 86, the slender, pointed wings and the bulbous pressurized nose denoting the reconnaissance version. The enemy aircraft was some four thousand feet below him, climbing steadily. As he watched, condensation trails, short at first and then lengthening, began to stream from its engines.
Contrails! He looked back in sudden alarm at the telltale white trail behind his own aircraft, caused by the freezing of water droplets in the exhaust gases of the Rolls-Royce Merlin, and felt a sudden surge of relief with the realization that the stark white glare of the sun was right behind him, sheltering him from the eyes of the German crew. In any case, he reassured himself, they would not be looking for a fighter here.
He watched the Junkers intently as it crossed his nose from left to right, still lower down. Then, manoeuvring carefully to keep the sun at his back and checking that his guns were set to ‘fire’, he dived to the attack, all the cold and discomfort forgotten.
The crew of the Junkers had seen him at last and the aircraft’s contrails became noticeably denser as the pilot opened the throttles and increased his rate of climb, pouring more hot gases into the stratosphere. Sparks floated towards the Hurricane from a 7.7-mm gun in a perspex blister on top of the Junkers’ fuselage. To hell with it! Yeoman flattened out just above the billowing vapour trails and closed in to 250 yards. The enemy gunner went on firing in long bursts and Yeoman felt a rattle like hailstones as bullets struck home. Then his thumb jabbed down on the firing-button and the Hurricane shuddered with the recoil as the Brownings spat a two-second burst of mixed armour-piercing and ball ammunition towards the enemy aircraft. Yeoman knew he had hit the Junkers, but it continued to climb with no visible damage.
The altimeter needle was creeping towards the 32,000- feet mark, and Yeoman knew that he had to down the Junkers quickly or it would outclimb him. He closed the range still further, taking more bullets from the 7.7 in his port wing, and fired again. This time, small fragments broke away from the enemy aircraft’s wing root, but the Junkers went on climbing stubbornly.
Yeoman began to fall behind. His throttle was hard against the stops, but the Hurricane, its flying qualities impaired by the damage it had sustained, mushed towards a stall. As the airspeed fell away, Yeoman fired the remainder of his ammunition in a last, long, despairing gesture. The Hurricane’s nose went down and he recovered with difficulty, swearing aloud in rage and frustration. He screamed at the top of his voice, an effort that made him gasp and choke:
‘Fall, you bastard! Why don’t you fall!’
The Junkers climbed steadily on. By this time Yeoman was almost utterly exhausted, his mind numbed by the cold, the effects of altitude and the deep sense of miserable failure.
And then, unbelievably, a cloud of white vapour burst from the Junkers’ starboard wing as a fuel tank ruptured. As yet, there was no sign of fire; but Yeoman knew that the aircraft was finished, its doom written in the petrol that streamed into the thin air. Slowly, very slowly, its nose went down, and Yeoman imagined the German pilot seated at his controls, praying that fire would not break out, that he would have enough fuel left to get back to base, that the British fighter would not come arc-ing down out of the sun to give him the coup de grâce.
Still under control, the Junkers turned and went into a shallow dive towards the Jebel Akhdar. As it nosed down into the richer layers of atmosphere, oxygen mingled in growing quantities with the lethal combination of exhaust gases and petrol vapour that the aircraft dragged in its wake.
The explosion, when it came, startled Yeoman with its suddenness and intensity. There was a vivid flash and a solid sheet of white flame immediately streamed back from the trailing edges of the Junkers’ wings, enveloping the rear fuselage and tail. The aircraft’s dive became steeper until it was plummeting vertically, pouring black and white smoke. Several thousand feet lower down it came apart, its wings tearing away as the flames ate through the main spar, and the fuselage, spinning wildly, falling like a bomb towards the Mediterranean.
Yeoman watched the dwindling smoke trail, with the tiny metal coffin that was the Junkers’ remains at its tip, until it merged with the sea in a minute splash. There had been no parachutes.
He felt no elation; just an overwhelming lassitude and desire to sleep. A glance at the altimeter told him that he was at twenty-five thousand feet; he had lost a considerable amount of height in observing the death throes of the Junkers. Wearily, he turned towards Tobruk. The fight had carried him close to the coast and some miles east of the perimeter. As he flew on, descending all the time, he began to sense an odd vibration, transmitted to his hand through the control column. The vibration got no worse and he dismissed it as nothing important; perhaps it was resonance, caused by airflow passing through the bullet holes in his wings.
He crossed the coast at fifteen thousand feet and turned west, descending toward Tobruk. He was warmer now, and beginning to relax. He turned off his oxygen and undipped his face mask, massaging the red ridges where the tight rubber had bitten into his skin.
Uncertain of his exact position, he moved the stick to the left and dropped a wing. He could pick out little surface detail, but Tobruk was clearly visible ahead of him and he
continued his descent. He had no wish to approach the perimeter at too low an altitude, in case he became a target for the enemy’s light flak.
He moved the stick to the right, to regain level flight. Nothing happened. The port wing continued to drop. Startled and alarmed, he applied more pressure. The relentless roll to the left continued.
The port aileron broke away and whirled off in the slipstream. Yeoman let go of everything and reached up to pull back the cockpit canopy. It moved six inches, then stuck fast. A blast of air entered the cockpit, buffeting his face. The Hurricane turned over on its back. Forcing himself not to panic, Yeoman pulled on the canopy again. To his immense relief it moved back jerkily, a few inches at a time.
The Hurricane went on rolling uncontrollably. Mingled with the roar of the engine and the howl of the slipstream, there came a shrill sound of rending metal as the skin of the port wing began to peel away. The fighter’s nose went down sharply and the inrush of air glued Yeoman to the back of his seat. He clawed at the locking pin of his Sutton harness and pulled it loose with difficulty, for his fingers were still numb. Then, his body like lead, he placed both hands on the cockpit rail and pushed with all his strength, fighting against the forces of gravity that were pulling him relentlessly down to be smashed to pulp with the remains of his aircraft somewhere in the desert.
Suddenly, the roaring and rending sounds were cut off and he was floating, spreadeagled on a cushion of air. After the death throes of the Hurricane, the new sensation was so peaceful that he almost found himself revelling in it. He was falling on his back and the airflow plucked at his clothing. The air was warm, like that of a late March gale back home on his Yorkshire moors. He moved an arm vaguely and his body rolled over gently until he was falling face down.
The desert was expanding to meet him, the horizon rising on all sides to enfold him.
Jerked brutally back to reality, he gripped the D-ring of his parachute and pulled it hard. The drogue streamed from his parachute pack, pulling out the main canopy. It was not the first time he had baled out of a stricken aircraft, but he still experienced the usual heart-stopping moments of uncertainty before the canopy deployed over his head with a sharp crack.
For an instant, he thought his body had been cut in half. He screamed out loud in agony as the straps bit deeply into his crotch, sending white-hot flames of pain — the worst a man can know — lancing through his body.
For a time, he lost consciousness.
When he came to, only seconds later, the pain was duller, with spaces of blissful relief between the waves that still shuddered through him. Dimly, he realized that he had failed to tighten his parachute harness properly, a penalty he had paid for his haste in leaving the ground. He wondered, in a sudden flash of panic, whether he had damaged himself permanently. His eyes would not focus properly and he saw everything through a strange, drifting redness. For crucial moments, he could not remember where he was. Then he slammed into something hard, the breath went from his body and he blacked out once more.
There was sand in his mouth and something soft and suffocating all around him. It felt as though his body were cocooned in a spider’s web and for long moments he panicked irrationally, clawing out blindly and gasping for breath as he tried to struggle to his knees. His searching hands encountered parachute silk and he almost wept with relief as he realized that his waking nightmare was nothing more than the canopy. No breeze stirred the desert air and the silk had collapsed around him like a shroud.
He pushed the clinging folds aside cautiously and looked around him. He thought, although he was still not yet certain, that he had landed outside the Tobruk perimeter, and was convinced that the enemy must have seen his descent. His gaze, however, encountered only sand and scrub and the remains of a solitary truck, lying on its side about a hundred yards away.
He felt his limbs carefully for broken bone9, but apart from a few bruises he seemed to be uninjured. He stood up, wincing with the pain in his groin; it throbbed and nagged at him like toothache, stabbing harder whenever he took a step, and he knew that he would not be able to walk far. The sensible thing, he told himself, would be to lie up until nightfall; perhaps the pain would have gone by then.
He gathered up his parachute and limped over to the truck. It was German, an Opel, and he walked slowly round it, inspecting it curiously. The cab was in ruins and seemed to have taken a direct hit from a tank shell; he looked inside and recoiled in disgust as the unmistakable stench of decaying blood and scraps of flesh assailed his nostrils. Moving quickly away, he draped his parachute canopy over the upturned side of the truck, securing the material on some jagged strips of metal, then pulled the remaining folds of silk outwards and downwards, placing stones on top of the surplus where it touched the ground. Breathing hard with the effort, he crawled inside his makeshift tent, which would afford at least some protection from the high-intensity sunlight, and took stock of his situation.
He knew that he had come down somewhere to the east of Tobruk, in the area between the Tobruk-Bardia road and the sea. He made some rough calculations and judged that he was, perhaps, four or five miles from the perimeter. There must be enemy patrols ahead of him, and to move by day would risk almost certain detection, quite apart from the fact that he had no water and was in a semi-exhausted state. His careful search of the horizon had revealed no smoke, which led him to hope that his crashed Hurricane had not burned and drawn the enemy out to search for him. He resolved to strike out westwards as soon as dusk fell, placing himself in the hands of Providence and taking the chance of stumbling into a minefield, being caught by the enemy or, worse, shot by friendly troops if he stumbled unaware on an outpost in the darkness.
He glanced at his watch; nightfall was over seven hours away, and he knew he was in for a long and uncomfortable wait. He was already parched, and as the afternoon dragged on thirst became a torment … From time to time he caught the thud of gunfire, a long way away, and occasionally aircraft passed overhead, all of them German and all heading south-west. They appeared to be descending, and he took them to be making for the airfield at El Adem. Once, he heard the distant roar of what sounded like tank engines, but after a few minutes the noise receded and he was able to relax again, as much as his thirst and general discomfort would let him.
In an effort to take his mind off his immediate problem he thought of his girl, Julia Connors, and tried to recall every detail of her face and figure, her tiniest mannerisms, the way she spoke and moved. To his horror he found that the finer aspects of her face were blurred in his mind; he could not even remember the exact colour of her eyes. It was months since he had last seen her; she had been summoned back to the principal office of her newspaper in New York some time in January, and only a couple of letters had reached him since then. In the last one, she had mentioned the possibility that she might be sent on assignment to Burma, where American volunteer fighter pilots were preparing to aid China in her struggle against the invading Japanese. The prospect of Julia in Burma was one that alarmed Yeoman slightly. He didn’t give a damn about the Japanese, but she was a very beautiful girl and fighter pilots of any nationality were young, healthy and normally lascivious. He knew she could take care of herself, but deep down he wished she wasn’t going.
Thinking of Julia made him long for her desperately, and he made a deliberate effort to force his mind away from her. He went back over his childhood among the woods and fields around Richmond, his home town in north Yorkshire, and racked his brain to remember poems he had learned at school, reciting them carefully, line by line. He was surprised how much his memory had stored away, even the stuff he had sworn to forget, like Latin verse. Yeoman had never been interested in Latin, except as a grounding for modern languages, which he loved. He had always found it ponderous and dry.
Dry: the very word made him conscious once more of his thirst, which by now, in the late afternoon, was becoming unbearable. He placed a small pebble under his tongue It was supposed to increase the flow of
saliva; it didn’t. It felt like a boulder and he spat it out with some difficulty, for his dehydrated tongue had begun to swell.
He must have dozed for a while, or at any rate lapsed into a kind of stupor. It seemed like only moments, but when he snapped fully awake again the air inside his parachute tent was not quite so suffocating and the shadows had lengthened. He crawled out into the open, under a sky aflame with one of the most glorious desert sunsets he had seen. Tired and tormented though he was, the sight took his breath away. The lower edge of an enormous red sun kissed the western horizon, and above it, like a crown, tiny flecks of cloud, high in the stratosphere, caught the rays and shone like drops of molten gold. From one end of the horizon to the other the sky glowed with all the colours of the spectrum, a fantastic backdrop to the dark, undulating line of the dunes.
Yeoman shivered. The temperature had already dropped noticeably, and he decided that he had better get moving. Night comes quickly in the desert, and the cold would soon be intense. The extra clothing he had put on for the high-altitude mission would come in handy now. He hesitated briefly, wondering whether to bury his parachute, and then decided not to bother. Even if an enemy patrol found it, he would be well on his way and the chances of a lone man on foot being caught in the darkness were slender.
He placed another small pebble under his tongue, and this time, to his surprise and relief, he felt the inside of his mouth moisten slightly. Perhaps, he thought, it was something to do with the temperature drop. He set off walking at a slow, steady pace, resisting the temptation to hurry ‘and tire himself out. Thankfully, the pain in his groin had been reduced to a nagging stiffness, which grew less troublesome as he went on.
Target Tobruk: Yeoman in the Western Desert Page 8