The Hurricanes sped towards the sea like arrows, levelling out at a couple of hundred feet and streaking towards the Junkers formation. Yeoman selected the middle one of three Ju 52s on the extreme left of the first arrowhead and held his fighter rock-steady as the big three-engined transport swelled in his windshield, waiting until he was well within range before opening fire.
In the Junkers’ vibrating cockpit, Captain Gunter Stahel, commander of No. 3 Flight, Transport Group 107, sat transfixed, his eyes widening in disbelief as the Hurricane flashed towards him head-on, the leading edges of its wings twinkling with the flashes of its machine-guns. It can’t be true, he thought. This can’t be happening. The British have no fighters on Crete. He opened his mouth to shout a warning to his crew, at the same time raising his hand, palm outstretched, as though to blot out. the vision of the hurtling fighter. It was his last conscious act, and the warning cry never came. In that same instant, the windscreen dissolved into a thousand fragments as a burst of .303 ball ammunition punched through it and turned the upper half of Stahel’s body into bloody pulp. The impact threw him back brutally and his right hand, holding the control column, clenched reflexively and brought it back hard. The transport’s nose reared up, pointing at the sky, then the airspeed fell away sharply and the Junkers stalled, dropping like a great dead bird to the sea below. It hit the surface in a great burst of white spray. A handful of the twenty-one men on board survived the crash, only to drown, trapped like rats, as the remains of the corrugated metal fuselage sank to the sea bed.
Yeoman leap-frogged over the stricken Junkers as it started to fall and headed for another transport in the second wave. He fired at it and saw it skid wildly, but his speed was too high and there was no time to fire a second burst with any hope of accuracy. He sped through the enemy formation and pulled up in a fast climbing turn to the left, intending to make the next attack from the beam.
He almost collided with a twin-finned, twin-engined aircraft that dived past his nose, buffeting the Hurricane with its slipstream. Frantically, with an instinctive sense of danger, he craned his neck to peer over his left shoulder. It was just as well; a second Messerschmitt 110 was turning in behind him, positioning itself nicely for a killing shot.
Yeoman increased his rate of turn, watching the enemy fighter all the time. He was not unduly worried; the Hurricane could out-turn a Messerschmitt 110. Suddenly, a second aircraft entered his field of vision. It was another 110, climbing hard to head him off. Unless a miracle happened, he would shortly find himself trapped between the two. In the meantime, he could do nothing except keep on turning.
He looked back again, and felt a momentary flash of panic when he realized that he could no longer see the original 110. Then a Hurricane slid into view astern, and Fraser’s voice came over the R/T: ‘I reckoned you needed a hand there, sir!’
Yeoman acknowledged his number two briefly and flung his aircraft towards the second Messerschmitt, which was now boring in from his left. The two fighters raced towards each other head-on at a closing speed of nearly 700 mph. Both pilots opened fire at the same instant. Yeoman felt and heard a loud bang and cringed in the narrow cockpit, his guts turning to water, but he managed to hold the Hurricane steady and kept on firing. The 110 flashed overhead, a great black shadow, the wind of its passing almost slamming Yeoman’s aircraft out of control.
‘Got the bastard!’
It was Fraser again, clinging to the tail of Yeoman’s fighter like a leech. The warrant officer seemed to be having a very successful few minutes, and was showing himself to be an extremely competent pilot.
There were Messerschmitts everywhere, and they were rapidly gaining the upper hand. Jack Ritchie was the first to go. Turning to intercept a 110 which was closing in on Griffiths’ aircraft, he was himself attacked from behind. A 20-mm cannon shell exploded in the Hurricane’s cockpit, riddling his lungs with splinters. Choking in his own blood and dying, he somehow managed to keep his fighter under control, heading straight for the 110. The last thing he saw was the enemy fighter’s long cockpit and the helmeted heads of its two occupants, whirling up to meet him. Locked together, the wreckage of both aircraft spiralled down into Canea Bay.
The same Messerschmitt that had shot down Ritchie now bore down on Griffiths. The latter had eyes only for his intended victim, a Ju 52, and the German pilot’s aim was good. The Hurricane went into a steep climb, burning furiously, but Griffiths managed to bale out. He landed heavily near Canea, breaking an ankle, right in the middle of a group of startled German paratroops. They gave him some schnapps and a cigarette and, incredibly, informed him that they were far too busy to make him their prisoner. They left him sitting in the middle of an olive grove, nursing his injury, while they got on with their war.
It was to be three years before the Germans finally caught up with Griffiths. He remained in his olive grove until after dark, with sounds of fighting going on all around, and when the noises moved away he crawled a mile to a peasant’s house in search of help. The Cretans kept him in hiding until his ankle had mended, by which time the Battle of Crete was over and the Germans were occupying the island. Griffiths eventually teamed up with, and later led, a large band of guerrillas operating in the island’s White Mountains region. For nearly two years they struck hard at the enemy, ranging far and wide through Crete, murdering patrols and dislocating communications.
The end came suddenly in January 1944, when Griffiths, suffering from a severe bout of influenza, was being sheltered in a mountain village. A peasant woman, tortured by the agony of seeing her three children close to starvation, betrayed him to the Germans. He was arrested, dragged outside into the snow and shot, together with the family who had sheltered him. The Germans paid the woman two million drachmae, but she never lived to enjoy it. Before she could flee the area, she was captured and tried by a partisan ‘court’. She was hanged, and her body thrown into a river. The two million drachmae were distributed among the dependants of those killed by the enemy, and the woman’s children starved.
Such was the brief span of life that stretched ahead of Griffiths as he lay in the shelter of the stunted olive trees, with the setting sun at his back, amid the sounds of conflict.
Away to the west, streams of transport aircraft were still converging on Maleme, covered by relays of guardian Messerschmitts. The four surviving Hurricanes, unable to cope with overwhelming odds, had made their escape eastwards. They had not been pursued, for the Messerschmitt squadrons had clear orders to protect the transports, and these orders did not extend beyond driving off any RAF fighters that put in an appearance.
Every now and then, groups of Messerschmitts dived down to strafe the New Zealanders’ positions in the hills, from which intense fire was still pouring down on the airstrip. One Junkers after another was hit as it touched down on the single runway, and the ground on either side was littered with the shattered wrecks of nearly a hundred of the three-engined machines. Paratroops spewed from blazing fuselages, seeking cover among the wrecks or in shell craters. Of all the Ju 52s that flew into Maleme that afternoon, one-third never returned to their bases in Greece. The crews who did manage to get away, whitefaced and shaken, reported that the approach to Maleme was like descending into hell.
Yet, despite fearsome losses, the paratroops established a firmer foothold with every passing hour, and prepared to meet the allied counter-attack which must surely come with the dark. If they could hold Maleme for another twenty-four hours, the battle for Crete would have been won.
Chapter Eight
The sun had not yet risen, but the golden-red glow that preceded it already suffused the sky over the Aegean. In the waxing light, the squadron and flight commanders of Fighter Wing 66 stood in a semicircle before Colonel Becker. It was five o’clock on the morning of 22 May.
The briefing was informal, and the pilots were holding mugs of coffee and smoking. They were finding it hard to hear what Becker was saying, because in the background mechanics were warming up t
he engines of their Mes-serschmitts. The fighters stood in stark black silhouette against the sunrise, blue flames darting from their exhausts.
JG 66’s commander recognized their difficulty and raised his voice a little.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘let us come straight to the heart of the matter. Since the early hours of this morning, our reconnaissance aircraft have reported growing numbers of British warships, mainly cruisers and destroyers, operating in the areas north and west of Crete. They have, in fact, already made some attempt to disrupt our seaborne reinforcements to the island.’
Becker made no attempt to elaborate, and Richter, listening intently with the others, wondered exactly what had happened. It would be a long time before he found out the truth — that the British warships had intercepted a convoy of five coastal steamers and about twenty Greek caiques shortly after midnight. The vessels carried nearly 2,500 troops, as well as heavy weapons, lorries and tanks. In a wild, running fight lasting two and a half hours the warships had completely shattered the convoy, and although all but three hundred of the German troops were subsequently rescued, the Royal Navy had succeeded in its task of preventing the reinforcements from reaching Crete.
Becker adopted his characteristic stance, feet apart and hands on hips. ‘We must do everything in our power to enable further seaborne reinforcements to get through,’ he continued, ‘otherwise our situation on Crete might become precarious. For that reason, the whole of our effort today will be devoted to attacks on the British Fleet.’
A triumphant note crept into Becker’s voice. ‘We cannot fail to find the warships, gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Our reconnaissance patrols report strong enemy battle groups approaching the Antikithira channel and only forty miles south of Milos! With full daylight, they will be ours!’
He paused for breath, then went on: ‘Today, we have the honour of escorting our comrades of Stuka-Geschwader 2, Colonel Dinort’s “Immelmann” Wing. The Stukas will take off from Molai at five-thirty and we will rendezvous with them over their airfield. So now, to your aircraft! And good hunting!’
A stiff wind off the sea made take-off conditions bumpy, and Richter considered himself fortunate to be flying one of the handful of new Messerschmitt 109F-1 fighters so far allocated to the Wing. Its rounded wingtips and other aerodynamic refinements provided a greater measure of control and overall stability at low speeds than was the case with the earlier 109E model. A lot of pilots didn’t like the ‘F’ because it carried a reduced armament of two MG-17 machine-guns and a single 20-mm cannon, and it was said that the rear fuselage was weak — in fact, he’d heard rumours that the entire tail unit had broken away in one or two cases as the aircraft pulled out of a high-speed dive — but it was pleasant to fly, its top speed was 370 mph, it could climb to thirty-eight thousand feet and he was generally very happy with it.
By five-twenty, all twenty-four Messerschmitt 109s detailed for JG 66’s first mission of the day were airborne, just as the great red ball of the sun began to spread its glow over Argos. A few minutes later they were at ten thousand feet over Molai, looking down on a scene that closely resembled a stirred-up hornets’ nest. Section after section of Stukas were taking off in clouds of dust, circling and climbing and joining up with the rest of the swarm over the airfield. Richter, dipping a wing from time to time — downward visibility from the 109’s cockpit being very poor — counted seventy dive-bombers.
The whole armada continued climbing until it was only a couple of thousand feet below the Messerschmitt formation. Then, abruptly, it wheeled and turned south towards the island of Kithira, clearly visible on the horizon. On Becker’s orders, the 109 formation split into three, a squadron taking up position on either flank of the bombers and the third, led by Richter, remaining overhead.
Richter disliked bomber escort missions; he’d had a bellyful of them over southern England the year before. They were restrictive and hampered a pilot’s freedom of action. Still, there was one consolation. Today, there was very little prospect of interference from RAF fighters, so once the bombers had completed their task Becker had authorized his men to dive down and shoot up any worthwhile targets — at the same time forbidding them to take undue risks with enemy flak.
Over Kithira the Stuka leader altered course, leading his formation on a south-easterly heading. Looking ahead, Richter felt his pulse begin to race as he detected what the Stuka leader’s practised eye had already seen: several dark smudges of smoke on the horizon. Very soon, Richter was able to make out the outlines of four ships, two large and two somewhat smaller, steaming at speed some twenty-five miles off the north coast of Crete. They were the cruisers Gloucester and Fiji and the destroyers Greyhound and Griffin, although Richter, completely unschooled in the art of warship recognition, was unable to identify them. He thought they made an impressive sight, with their long, brilliant white wakes cutting through the deep blue of the sea.
The Stukas circled to make their attack out of the sun, and as the first squadron began its dive the scene below suddenly lost its beauty. Vivid flashes danced and sparkled over the grey outlines of the warships as they opened fire with their main and secondary armaments. Dense, rolling clouds of smoke obscured the sea, and the glittering wakes were broken as the vessels began to take evasive action.
The sky between the warships and the plummeting Stukas erupted in a holocaust of fire and steel. It was as though the dive-bombers were racing down a wall of black shell-bursts. Richter had never seen such a concentrated barrage; it seemed incredible that anything could survive, and yet he saw the first three Stukas flatten out at less than a thousand feet and race away from the inferno, jinking wildly to avoid the streams of Bofors shells that pursued them. Their bombs raised great cascades of water near the ships, but Richter saw no direct hits.
A cluster of heavy shells burst less than a hundred metres away from the Messerschmitts in a soundless explosion of dirty yellow smoke. Becker’s voice came over the radio, as laconic as ever.
‘Stay clear of the flak.’
Richter breathed a heartfelt prayer of thanks that he had qualified as a fighter pilot. To have to plunge into that sort of murderous cauldron, day after day, must require a special kind of courage and self-discipline. He resolved to buy the next Stuka pilot he met several large drinks.
He brought his section round in a wide turn, watching the Stukas all the while. To confuse the enemy defences, Colonel Dinort had ordered his Wing to attack from several directions. In the next few minutes, Richter saw large flashes as bombs struck one of the cruisers and a destroyer, but the warships held their course and there was no slackening in their speed. He thought that the hits must have been registered by small missiles, perhaps 50-kg fragmentation weapons. They would have made little impression against tough armour plating.
The attack went on for forty-five minutes. As each flight of Stukas released its bombs, the aircraft sped low over the sea and headed for their home bases, their purpose fulfilled. The Messerschmitts continued to cruise high above, their pilots watching the unfolding drama.
The last Stukas made their dives, and once more fountains of water erupted close to the gunwales of the two cruisers. As before, the warships steamed on unchecked. Richter found himself cursing, willing the bombs to find their mark, but the vessels seemed to bear charmed lives. A Stuka was hit in mid-dive. An orange ball of fire, trailing smoke, it fell into the sea in the ships’ wake. The remainder, still pursued by the flak, formed up and set course northwards.
Richter felt a cold fury. He longed to dive on the warships, to spray their decks with gunfire. He was about to give the order to his section when Becker’s voice cut in, coldly logical:
‘Do not attack. I repeat, do not attack the ships! Form up and go home.’
Richter found that he had been holding his breath and sweating in the anticipation of action. Becker’s voice in his earphones came like a cold douche. The colonel, of course, was right. It was senseless to throw away one’s life needlessly. A fe
w bullets would make no impression on those armoured monsters. Still, it would have been good to make the gesture, however futile …
There was little talk when the pilots landed back at Argos. Each one felt a deep sense of frustration. It was as though all the myths surrounding the invincibility of the Royal Navy had suddenly come true. Time and again, the fighter pilots asked themselves how a small force of warships could sail through such a concentrated attack and emerge relatively unscathed.
They were still dispirited when, shortly before noon, they received orders to take off on a second mission. On this occasion the squadrons were to operate in relays over the Straits of Antikithira, providing top cover for the bombers that were attacking another force of British warships.
The squadron led by Richter was the first to take off, and he led the Messerschmitts to fifteen thousand feet over the Straits. It was impossible to miss the warships, for two British battle groups had now joined forces and the pilots found themselves looking down on an impressive array of two battleships, nine cruisers and fifteen destroyers. When the Messerschmitts arrived overhead the force was already under heavy attack by a beehive of aircraft; Richter identified Stukas, Junkers 88s, Heinkel 111s and Dornier 17s, all making their bombing runs through severe flak. Bomb-carrying Messerschmitt 109s and 110s darted in and out of the melee like hornets, making fast low-level attacks. The sea was a confusion of ships’ wakes and the white circles of bomb-bursts.
There was no sign of enemy fighters, and Richter’s pilots had a grandstand view of the drama unfolding far below them. Richter winced involuntarily as he saw a destroyer take two direct hits, imagining the carnage as smoke and flames burgeoned from her superstructure between the funnels. She lost way rapidly and was soon hidden by a pall of smoke, punctuated by more flashes as explosions ripped through her. The smoke drifted slowly away, leaving nothing but a great patch of oil and debris.
Target Tobruk: Yeoman in the Western Desert Page 12