England Expects el-1

by Charles S. Jackson

  “Pugachev can kiss my ass!” Thorne muttered in soft elation as he watched the destruction of Hawk-2, the remark in reference to Chief Pilot Designer of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, Victor Pugachev, after whom the manoeuvre was often named. He then turned his attention to the second target and activated the cannon in the pod below the F-35’s belly.

  “Get out! Get out!” Hawk-1’s pilot pleaded softly, alternating his gaze frantically between his wingman’s ruined aircraft and a search for the enemy he’d suddenly lost sight of in the confusion. Finally, as he executed a bank to port he hoped would bring the enemy in sight once more, he saw Hawk-2’s canopy fragment and fly away. The remainder of the wreck was shattered and torn apart as the pilot and weapons officer were fired from the cockpit in sequence by the rocket motors of their ejection seats.

  “Hawk-One to Sentry… Hawk-One to Sentry… target sighted and engaged.” In those desperate seconds, an instinctive part of the commander’s subconscious recognised it was vital he report what was happening back to HQ. “Bogie identified as Lockheed Martin Foxtrot-Three-Five-Bee model.” The fleeting glimpse he’d caught so far hadn’t been clear enough to pick out the F-35E’s non-standard twin-cockpit and the pilot therefore identified the aircraft from its short take off and vectoring nozzles, incorrectly thinking it to be the single-seat ‘-B’ model. “Repeat — currently engaged in combat with F-35B Joint Strike Fighter.”

  Hawk-1’s pilot wasn’t long searching for the Lightning, although it was far too late to do anything by the time it was located. Threat warning systems blared in his ears as enemy radar systems easily obtained lock on his own jet. A little more than a thousand metres away and now a similar distance higher in altitude, Thorne pushed the nose of his own jet down into a shallow dive and brought his gunsight to bear as the rotary cannon mounted in a stealthy pod beneath the F-35E’s belly let loose with a stream of 25mm tracer.

  Bright detonations rippled across the fuselage and rear of the Sukhoi as its pilot realised far too late what was happening. Thorne ceased firing and dragged his stick back, climbing up and away and loath to get any closer as some of those impacts penetrated the skin of the aircraft’s forward fuselage fuel tank. Though mostly filled only with vapour, the subsequent explosion was still powerful enough to tear the aircraft completely in two just behind the cockpit. There was a second, much larger explosion a split-second later as the remaining fuel in its other tanks went up and the Flanker — what was left of it — disintegrated, wreckage and debris flying in all directions. No one had time to eject, and Sentry’s desperate radio replies went unheard.

  Thorne quickly put some distance between the Lightning and the battle area as he climbed to 8,000 metres. He completed two wide 360-degree circuits with his radar in search mode and determined that there were no aircraft approaching he need be concerned about before shutting down his active systems once more and leaving them off. For a second time, the fleeting burst of emissions was detected by Sentry, now flying high over Germany, before disappearing into stealthy oblivion once more. Nevertheless, it left the Luftwaffe controllers in no doubt as to the outcome of the engagement.

  “That was amazing…!” Trumbull breathed softly as he recovered himself and his voice. “Absolutely incredible…!” His sharp but confused mind had suddenly realised the whole of that wild aerial engagement, from first sighting to the destruction of the second Sukhoi, had probably taken less than thirty seconds of actual time.

  “Fuckin’ lucky…!” Thorne observed honestly, adrenalin still coursing through his system and making him feel excitement and elation. “If we’d been in the air when they showed up, their missiles would’ve blown us to buggery!” Despite thousands of hours of training and flying fighter aircraft in earlier years, those two jets had been his first real combat kills.

  “Can this aircraft fly as fast as those… things?”

  “Not quite,” Thorne shook his head, smiling at the thought. “Most this can manage on a good day is about a thousand miles an hour. Those bastards — ‘Flanker’ is their nickname — are good for another four hundred or so more at altitude.”

  Fourteen hundred miles an hour, Trumbull thought silently, and there was a pause as the squadron leader chewed that piece of information over in his mind.

  “Comms: music — play AC/DC…!” Within a second of Thorne uttering that unintelligible command, the raucous, screeching riffs of an electric guitar issued from the headphones within Trumbull’s helmet. It was a sound he’d never heard the like of in his entire life and could say unequivocally in that moment that he didn’t care for it either, although at the very least the volume was low enough for it to not be completely unbearable. His curiosity regarding the nature of the aircraft he was sitting in and the pilot controlling it wasn’t in any way assuaged as the opening bars of AC/DC’s Back in Black were joined by Brian Johnson’s unmistakeable vocals.

  “I think I can hardly wait for this ‘explanation’…” he muttered, wincing, and Thorne wasn’t altogether certain Trumbull had intended him to hear over the music playing.

  No shit! He thought dryly with a wry, unseen grin at the truth of that statement, although Trumbull could never have seen the irony of it.

  3. Seeds of Doubt

  Near the airfield at St. Omer

  Northern France

  Saturday

  June 29, 1940

  At the same time that discussion continuing in the skies above England, Antoine and Michelle were sleeping soundly in their beds in the farmhouse across the fields opposite the airstrip near St. Omer. Both slept together soundly in a large feather bed while their youngest sibling, a baby boy of no more than eight months, slept in a crib by the empty bed in the next room.

  In the kitchen, their mother, a waif-like woman in her late thirties with long blond hair and narrow features opened the back door to a tall, brooding man of similar age whose thinning dark hair was already greying at the temples. The man was Charles, her brother-in-law.

  “You’re late,” she scolded gently, concern on her face.

  “The children…?” The man quickly moved inside, taking a bottle of brandy and two glasses from a kitchen cupboard as she locked the door behind him.

  “Asleep, of course,” she replied. “Did you make contact?”

  “Hercule got a look inside Ritter’s office…” he said as he sat at the kitchen table and poured them both a drink, shaking his head in displeasure over the situation rather than as any kind of answer to that specific question. “He was almost caught…the guards are really tightening up security. They’ve received orders from Fliegerkorps that the unit’s to stand down — they’re to be transferred through one of the training groups for conversion to a new type of aircraft.”

  “Another new aircraft…?” The appearance of new aircraft types with the Luftwaffe was becoming almost commonplace over the last few months.

  “A new fighter-bomber of some kind; a Messerschmitt ‘Lion’, they’re calling it. It’s nothing we’ve heard of before: Control will want to know about it…we’ll have to radio this one in.”

  “What about the ‘Journalist’…?” She queried softly. “He’s due in within the hour — can it not wait until after he’s gone?”

  “Not for this one, sister dear…too important…if we miss the time window we’ll have to wait until tomorrow night.”

  “There it is again!” The SS corporal observed, one hand resting on the earpiece of his headset. He activated the radio unit’s external speaker and all in the vehicle were suddenly able to hear the erratic bleating of Morse code. “It’s that same coded signal we heard Wednesday night.”

  “Can you lock it down this time?” The ranking NCO inquired intently, leaning over the man’s shoulder and watching the dials on the radio direction-finding equipment.

  “Let’s see about that shall we, sergeant?” The man began rotating a cogwheel by the RDF unit. This in turn altered the axis of a directional antenna mounted atop a metre-high pole above the armoured car’s
rear hull. At first the signal faded out, then returned with greater strength and clarity. “It’s to the west,” he decided. “South-south-west…!”

  “Let’s not call this in just yet…” the car commander decided, “…they may be monitoring our signals, which might explain why they always seem to disappear before we can track properly.” He turned his attention to the driver. “Crank this thing up and take us east past the airfield. Let’s see if we can vector in on it.”

  There was a loud cough, followed by low growling as the eight-wheeled armoured car’s six-cylinder diesel clattered to life in a cloud of acrid exhaust. Parked near an army checkpoint across the Rue de la Rocade, just a thousand metres or so west of Saint-Martin-au-Laërt (near St. Omer), the vehicle carried the ‘death’s head’ insignia of the 3rd SS Shock Division over a standard grey Wehrmacht paint scheme that was so dark it seemed almost black, particularly at night. The evening itself was similarly lacking in illumination, with low scrub and hedges lining the road on either side, beyond which lay just featureless fields stretching away into the darkness with just the occasional light from farmhouse windows in the distance shining like single stars against the black background.

  At thirteen tonnes, the P-7A Puma was substantially heavier even than the P-1 Wiesel (Weasel) light tank, although the P-1 mounted a heavier automatic cannon in its turret by comparison. Unlike the tank however, the armoured car could also carry as many as six troopers in its rear along with the three crewmen that normally operated the vehicle. A total of six men sat inside the hull that evening, that particular vehicle having been converted into a mobile detection unit specifically designed to detect and track down enemy radio transmissions. There’d been numerous radio signals detected in the St. Omer area over the last few weeks and the local military command suspected French Resistance agents were passing information to enemy intelligence services in England. Three of the crew inside the Puma that night were specially-trained signals experts from divisional HQ tasked with locating the source of the transmissions and putting a permanent halt to them.

  Following directions from the men in rear hull, the driver engaged the transmission and the armoured car cruised slowly away toward the airfield along the narrow, country lane without just the barest glow from its covered, ‘slitted’ headlights. The Rue de la Rocade intersected with the Route de Boulogne to the south-west, skirting the western boundaries of the St. Omer airfield as it did so. Originally a relatively small installation, plans to install the new 3,000-metre concrete runway that was currently under construction had necessitated the requisition of a great deal of pastoral land in the area between St. Omer, Tatinghem and Wisques, and had also required the permanent closure of the Route de Wisques as it headed north-east between Wisques and Longueness below St. Omer.

  The closure hadn’t been well-received by locals already incensed by the eviction of numerous farming families from their land in the interest of the airfield’s expansion, none of which of course had been of any particular interest to Luftwaffe command or the Wehrmacht military units who’d been ordered to force the inhabitants away from their properties, at gunpoint if necessary. On either side of the base’s perimeter fences, Route de Wisques now terminated at guarded gates that allowed access to the western end of the installation for construction and maintenance crews as required.

  As a result, St. Omer airfield now consumed a large area of the relatively flat country to the south-west of the town. On the northern perimeter, the Rue de Milou began at the Route de Boulogne to the west-north-west and ran approximately 1,300m before joining the newly-closed Route de Wisques quite close to the guarded gates on that side. On the opposite side of the terminated road, a well-used and hard-packed earthen track ran along the north-west perimeter fence for another 700 metres or so before linking up with the Chemin de Plateau des Bruyères for the rest of its journey east, skirting the southern edges of Longueness before intersecting with Route des Bruyères not too far south of the Longueness cemetery.

  A side road branching off the south side of the Chemin de Plateau des Bruyères travelled just a dozen metres or so before reaching the base’s main gates and the large buildings of the main vehicle park directly beyond. To the immediate left heading through the base grounds through those guarded gates were the security barracks and brig with the base infirmary behind them. To the right were a pair of two-storey wooden structures with large windows that were the headquarters and administration offices. Further along on the left were the officer’s mess and quarters, and then two larger buildings housing the NCOs’ and OR’s messes and the main barracks. Beyond them were two wide, tall constructions of galvanised iron that were the main hangars and workshops for ZG26.

  On the other side of that main road, ZG26’s 600m grass airstrip ran due east, and parallel with it on its northern side, construction was continuing on the massive new runway that when completed would stretch far off into the distance to the west-north-west; a flat, paved expanse of hardened, reinforced concrete cut through a landscape that had once been French farms. Near the HQ and Admin buildings and between the two runways rose the control tower, standing four storeys high on a thick wooden framework. A pair of newly-constructed circular concrete patches were embedded in the ground nearby with a large, yellow ‘H’ painted at the centre of each.

  Beyond the main hangars toward the south-western end of the perimeter was the guarded side gate opening onto the southern section of the Route de Wisques — the very same manned checkpoint Ritter had used earlier — and close to the nearby fence, a collection of tents lay clustered around a fire in a large oil drum on a flattened, grassy. Four P-3C medium panzers sat empty and motionless to one side of those tents, no more than silhouettes in the darkness of late evening and already almost invisible in the failing light because of their dark paintwork.

  The Panzer Model III, known by the military designation of P-3, was a relatively light ‘medium’ tank of around 26 tonnes and was armed with a 75mm main gun of moderate power and two machine guns: one 7.92mm mounted co-axially in the turret and one 13mm heavy weapon mounted above the turret for anti-aircraft use. The intermittent illumination of the oil-drum fire was enough to occasionally highlight the Balkankreuz national markings painted on their hulls and the three-figure yellow unit numbers — 321, 322, 323 and 324 — on the sides of their turrets. Also visible ahead of the unit numbers on each turret were the white ‘deaths head’ skull and crossbones insignia of the 3rd SS Shock Division ‘Totenkopf’ to which all belonged. Not visible in that darkness were the large red rectangles painted on each tank’s rear decking above the engine, each sporting the ubiquitous black swastika in a white circle.

  Although the Luftwaffe had invariably held air superiority throughout the Polish and Western Campaigns, their own pilots could sometimes make mistakes. It was rare, but SS Lieutenant Berndt Schmidt, the troop’s commander, had lost two personal friends to air attack during his tour in Poland, both times from over-enthusiastic Stukas. ‘Friendly fire’ was a rather terminally ironic term in Schmidt’s opinion, and an apology really wasn’t going to help much once a 250-kilogram bomb had landed on your turret roof. It never hurt to give the Luftwaffe a little help with regard to identification in his opinion.

  “You know what the real problem is, Milo,” Schmidt observed out of the blue as usual, lecturing his favourite corporal in his favourite ‘worldly’ but kindly tone. “Our glorious leaders at Headquarters have been too long away from the front lines!”

  “Of course, Herr Obersturmführer…” Corporal Milo Wisch replied dutifully, not as awestruck as he affected to appear to the junior officer but nevertheless listening attentively to what Schmidt had to say despite the barely-concealed wry smile on his face.

  Both men were dark-haired and of medium height and although Schmidt — in his late-twenties — wasn’t that much older than Wisch, he was career military and carried with him a wealth of useful knowledge and information as a result — information that was likely to keep other
s alive if they listened and took note. While he was no Nazi and had never displayed any of the fanaticism many usually associated with the Waffen-SS, Schmidt had been with the service since its inception. The troop commander could waffle on a bit here and there — particularly after a few hard-earned beers — but he also often had something of value to say as well and he possessed a wealth of experience gleaned from his service in Spain with the Condor Legion. Milo had only left recruit training six months ago and although the capability was definitely within him to be an excellent soldier, there was still much he had to learn — something he himself was quite openly aware of.

  Schmidt’s command — the 2nd Troop of 3rd Company — had been detached from the main body of the 3rd SS Division following the fall of Dunkirk and the cessation of hostilities in France thereafter. His troop of four tanks had been assigned to provide armoured support for the airfield and SS mechanised infantry units stationed at St. Omer, which had up until that point been an uneventful duty considered positively luxurious in comparison to the combat they were more accustomed to. They weren’t on duty that evening however and half of the unit’s sixteen men were off in town somewhere seeking entertainment of one type or another.

  Schmidt, whose wife and three year old daughter were at home in Berlin, had no desire to be out carousing the local bars or chasing skirts. He’d had just one or two beers with his good friend and gunner, Milo Wisch, before heading back to the tent cluster that comprised their billets at the airfield. They might have found more comfortable quarters within the main airfield barracks, but most preferred to be close to their vehicles. There was also a vague disdain of the Luftwaffe that ran throughout the armoured units, due in no small part to those same occasional occurrences of ‘friendly fire’. For each of the few times that death or injury had been caused by a Stuka’s bombs or a fighter’s cannon, there’d also been a myriad of lesser incidents such as machine gun strafings that despite doing no actual harm to the tanks or their crews, nevertheless left the tankers unnerved and shaken.