A couple of minutes after starting his run-in to the target, Yeoman felt much better. Picking a large concrete building, which was surrounded by a high fence, he sent his rockets hissing from their underwing rails and saw them speed ahead of his aircraft, their smoke trails disappearing into the building’s walls. Then he was breaking hard right, narrowly missing a second Venom which had also just fired its rockets, to escape the effects of blast and flying debris as the building erupted with a terrific explosion; it must have been crammed with ammunition.
Smoke burgeoned up from all sides as the Venoms roved over the area, their pilots selecting whatever target they considered worthwhile. One of them fired his missiles into what looked like a huge metal pyramid; it was composed of fuel drums, and they went up in a great burst of flame, a massive fireball that rose hundreds of feet into the air. The unfortunate pilot flew slap through the middle of it and emerged from the other side half roasted, with most of the camouflage paint burnt off his aircraft.
After they had completed their rocket attacks, the pilots switched to their cannon armament and systematically worked over the airfield, shooting up the parked aircraft. Yeoman felt a twinge of regret as he lined up his sights on a large four-engined machine: it was an Avro Lancaster bomber, one of a handful that had been supplied to the Egyptians by the RAF at the end of the war. Somehow, it seemed a churlish act to destroy the venerable aircraft, but he opened fire just the same and the Lancaster collapsed drunkenly as Yeoman’s shells chewed into it, shattering an undercarriage leg. A few wisps of smoke rose from the wreck as he flashed overhead.
Belatedly, some small-arms fire started to come up at the attackers; one of the pilots reported that his aircraft had been hit, although not seriously. Still, there was no point in risking further damage. As a target, Abu Sueir was finished.
On Yeoman’s orders the Venoms climbed away, heading north towards the Mediterranean. As they flew out to sea, they saw the long grey shapes of two aircraft carriers — the French Navy’s Lafayette and Arromanches — steaming into wind, and made out the little specks that were their attack aircraft, flying low over the sea towards Port Said. The one-sided war was only just beginning.
Chapter Three
The Royal Air Force Base At Akrotiri, Cyprus, resembled something out of a nightmare in that first week of November. It had not always been so. In fact, Akrotiri — so named after the nearest village — was a new airfield, having become operational only a year before, and was still in the throes of development when the Suez Crisis turned it into one of the world’s busiest places, busier than any civil airport, with an aircraft taking off every minute.
In addition to the two squadrons of the Venom fighter-bomber wing, Akrotiri also provided a home for a squadron of Meteor night-fighters, one of Canberra bombers, a detachment of photo-reconnaissance Valiants, and two squadrons of French Air Force F-84F Thunderstreaks. The latter had flown in during mid-October, at about the same time as Yeoman’s Venoms, and their arrival had brought about a pleasant reunion, for the French air commander and Yeoman were old acquaintances.
Colonel Pierre Combette and George Yeoman had last met in the spring of 1941, on an arid landing-ground in the Libyan Desert at the time of Rommel’s offensive against Tobruk. Yeoman had been a young flying officer then, an operational pilot for only a year; Combette, on the other hand, was a highly experienced pilot who had helped to pioneer France’s overseas mail routes before the war. He had had a rough time in North Africa, commanding a squadron of Blenheim bombers of the Free French Air Force, but he had survived and, at the war’s end, had left the forces to become editor of an aviation magazine in Paris.
Now he was back, a full colonel in the Air Force Reserve, recalled to active duty for the duration of Operation Musketeer.
‘I have seen more active service since the war than I did during it,’ he told Yeoman laughingly and not altogether truthfully one evening as they swapped reminiscences. ‘They called me up for service in Indo-China, and later in Algeria, and now this. Unfortunately’ — he spread his hands wide — ‘I appear to be an air commander in name only. My subordinate, who is a regular officer, really runs things from the operational point of view, while I sit behind a desk and shout at people over the phone. I sometimes think that they are afraid to let me loose in an F-84.’
‘But you do fly them,’ Yeoman pointed out, somewhat enviously, for the American-built fighter-bomber, with its sharply-swept wings and top speed of nearly 700 mph, was several streets ahead of the Venom. Moreover, with maximum external fuel it had a range of two thousand miles, nearly twice as much as the British aircraft’s.
Combette had snorted at that, referring to the Thunderstreaks contemptuously as ‘stovepipes’. Flying such an aircraft, he claimed, was not flying at all; it was being propelled through the air by brute force, with little control over one’s destiny. Nevertheless, Yeoman could see that his friend was proud of the aircraft, and of the expert way in which his men handled them.
On the afternoon of the second day of air strikes, Combette and his Thunderstreaks suddenly disappeared in a flurry of activity. No one knew where they were going, or why, but Yeoman and one or two of his fellow pilots who watched them take off, noted that they carried no bombs or rockets and that they set course towards the south-east. They must be heading for Israel, thought Yeoman — and he was right.
The Frenchmen came thundering back to Akrotiri two days later, sweeping fast overhead and breaking off into the landing pattern with a crispness which made the spectators feel that their colleagues were returning from a highly successful mission. As the Thunderstreaks taxied in, Yeoman, who was watching them from his office in the Venom Wing’s dispersal building, raised a speculative eyebrow; the French aircraft bore the six-pointed Star of David insignia of the Israeli Air Force, hurriedly painted over their normal blue, white and red roundels. Almost as soon as the fighter-bombers had shut down their engines, an army of ground crews descended on them and started removing the false markings.
Yeoman went over to the French dispersal and found Combette, who told him frankly what he and his men had been up to. The whole affair, Yeoman learned, had been the result of close co-operation between the RAF and the French Air Force.
‘It was a result of your intelligence report about what you found — or rather, failed to find — at Cairo West the other day,’ the Frenchman explained. ‘Our Joint Intelligence Staff knew that the Ilyushin bombers must have gone somewhere, so that same night Canberra reconnaissance aircraft of the RAF set out to look for them.’
Combette produced a map and pointed to an encircled spot far up the Nile. The name next to it, Luxor, was straight out of ancient history. Across the Nile lay Thebes, where the pharaohs of a long-dead Egypt had lived and died.
‘The Egyptians have quite a sizeable airfield here,’ Combette explained. ‘They have expanded it recently, presumably to protect the approaches to their new Aswan Dam, further up the Nile, here. Anyway, the RAF recce photos showed a dozen or so MiGs and no fewer than twenty Ilyushins there — presumably those which had vanished from Cairo West, George.’
He lit one of his reeking Gauloises, and coughed. ‘The presence of the Ilyushins at Luxor presented something of a problem,’ he continued. ‘That airfield is right in the middle of an area of great historic interest, so you may imagine the reaction, especially from the United States, if we or the British had suddenly launched an attack on it! The Israeli Air Force, however, would have had no qualms about it; the trouble was that they have no aircraft with sufficient range to have done the job. The solution, therefore, was to do it ourselves and pretend that we were Israelis.’
‘Didn’t the Israelis object?’ Yeoman wanted to know. Combette shook his head and chuckled.
‘Not at all. We’ve had a squadron of Mystere IVA interceptors based at Haifa since the end of October at the request of the Israelis, just in case the Syrians tried to help out their Egyptian friends and attack Tel Aviv, and we’ve had ground crew
s standing by at Lydda. That was where we went the other day. A quick briefing, some paintwork, then off we went with a full load of fuel and rockets. We flew straight across Sinai, then over the southern part of the Gulf of Suez, dropping down to low level as we crossed the Egyptian Red Sea coast … ’ His finger traced the Thunderstreaks’ progress on the map. ‘We attacked in three waves, with rockets first of all, and I think we knocked out all the Ilyushins on our first pass. At any rate, the airfield was in a hell of a mess when we came in for our second run; there seemed to be burning aircraft everywhere. We made one more pass over the field, using our cannon on the MiGs; they were all drawn up in a neat row, and we made mincemeat out of them. There was no sign of anyone trying to take off; we had taken the Egyptians completely by surprise. In fact, I don’t remember seeing any anti-aircraft fire during the entire attack.’
‘Well, Pierre,’ Yeoman congratulated him, ‘that’s one worry out of the way, at least. I hate to think what would have happened if we had been subjected to an air attack. While you were away, there was a practice air-raid alert in Famagusta; the trouble was that the Cypriots thought it was the real thing, and there was panic and stampeding in the docks area. The poor bloody troops who were trying to close the dock gates as part of the drill were almost trampled to death.’
His face suddenly took on a thoughtful expression. ‘Nevertheless, there’s more yet. You haven’t had time to catch up with the latest, but it seems that the Egyptians have managed to evacuate a lot of their first-line combat aircraft. Apparently the MiG-15s and some II-28S that were based on Kabrit have been flown out to Syria via Saudi Arabia, and we can’t get at them there. In case they try to have a go at Cyprus we’ve got the Hunters and a squadron of Meteors on full readiness during the hours of daylight, and I don’t think we need worry about the Egyptians attacking at night.’
Combette looked puzzled. ‘But why not?’ he queried.
Yeoman laughed. ‘Well, not long ago I was talking to a couple of chaps who came out of Egypt recently; they were both civilians, and they’d been employed as instructors with the Egyptian Air Force. They’d seen the whole build-up of Russian jets during the past few months, and they weren’t impressed by the way the Egyptians handled them. They reckoned that very few Egyptians were qualified to fly the MiGs and Ilyushins; most were scared stiff of them. If they had trouble in getting down on a runway, their solution was to make the runway longer, and if that didn’t work they made it longer still. They didn’t like flying in the dark, either; in fact, the instructor chaps couldn’t remember a single time when an Egyptian took off at night in a MiG or an Ilyushin, and they wouldn’t fly at all if the weather was even slightly unfavourable.’
Their conversation was interrupted at regular intervals by the roar of jets taking off; the air strikes were still in progress. In fact, they had been going on almost without pause for four days now, with the naval aircraft bearing the brunt. During the most intense periods, the British and French carriers had been launching strike waves at the rate of one every twenty minutes, the attack aircraft climbing to twenty thousand feet and then approaching their objectives in a long run out of the sun.
Inevitably, there had been losses. An RAF Venom — not from one of Yeoman’s squadrons — had failed to pull out of its dive during a strafing run over the Port Said-Cairo railway line, while four Fleet Air Arm and two French Navy aircraft had been shot down by ground fire, with the loss of three pilots. One of the Royal Navy pilots had had a lucky escape; baling out of his crippled Wyvern just off the coast, he had spent an uncomfortable half-hour in his dinghy, with shells from the Port Said batteries falling all around him, before a rescue helicopter had picked him up.
Yeoman’s Venom wing had carried out several attacks on targets around Port Said and Cairo, where Egyptian forces withdrawn from the Sinai battles were regrouping, but he had taken no personal part in these, having been summoned to Expeditionary Force HQ in Nicosia for a series of briefings on the next phase of the operation. Fortunately, all his pilots had returned safely from their operations, although some of the Venoms had suffered damage from small arms and light antiaircraft fire. The returning pilots reported that the enemy fire was become more accurate; the Egyptian gunners were growing used to shooting at aircraft hurtling through the sky at speeds of over 400 mph.
Yeoman’s chance to get back into action came in the evening of Sunday, 4 October, when an urgent call came from Operations. Air reconnaissance had reported four Egyptian motor torpedo boats heading out to sea from Alexandria; their course indicated that they might be heading to intercept units of the Allied task force, including troopships, which were then south of Crete.
There was little doubt that if the MTBS got within range, their torpedoes could cause severe damage, especially if they hit the crowded troop carriers. The Fleet Air Arm, which would normally have handled the problem, was unable to help, as one of its carriers, HMS Eagle, had withdrawn to replenish at sea and repair one of her catapults; the other carrier on station, HMS Albion, was fully committed to attacks on enemy lines of communication.
The sun was sinking fast as Yeoman led eight Venoms out of Akrotiri and set course south-westwards, making for the MTBS’ last known position. It had been accurately reported; after flying for twenty minutes the British pilots sighted the enemy craft dead ahead, creaming through the sea at high speed.
A naval intelligence officer had told Yeoman what to expect. The MTBS were Russian-built P-6S, a dozen of which had been delivered to Egypt a few months earlier as part of the arms deal.
Their twin diesel engines could drive the fifty-ton boats through the water at a speed of 45 knots; each vessel was armed with a pair of 21-inch torpedo tubes and two twin 25-mm antiaircraft guns, mounted fore and aft of the superstructure.
The Venoms swept across the MTBS’ bows at low level, about three miles ahead, and turned through 180 degrees in order to attack out of the low sun, two Venoms to each boat. The fighter-bombers carried their full underwing armament of eight rockets — the equivalent of a broadside from a six-inch gun cruiser.
Yeoman and his wingman, Flying Officer Mike Alliss, turned towards the leading MTB, its hull lit by wicked red flashes as it opened fire. The Egyptian gunners — if indeed they were Egyptian, and not Russian — had got the range nicely, and Yeoman felt himself crouching lower in the cockpit as the sky ahead of his speeding jet burst apart in sudden stabs of flame and smoke.
The MTB was poised in his sight, shrouded in the smoke of its own gunfire, and he pressed the button on the control column. The rockets whooshed away, their grey trails converging on a spot immediately ahead of the boat as it churned along, its bow well clear of the water, great white plumes lifting on either side.
The Venom plunged on towards it, through the spatter of dark shell bursts. The MTB was crossing Yeoman’s nose from right to left. At any moment, the rockets and its bow section would meet, and that would be that.
Suddenly, the P-6 turned hard to port, so violently that Yeoman clearly saw its hull bounce clear of the water several times. It came round towards him in a tight circle, its port gunwale scraping the sea. Swearing, a couple of seconds before he flashed overhead, Yeoman saw his salvo of rockets explode harmlessly in the sea, on the exact spot where the MTB would have been if its commander had not taken violent evasive action.
Yeoman pulled the Venom up in a hard climbing turn, feeling grudging admiration for the MTB commander, whoever he was. The man had timed his evasion beautifully; if he had acted any sooner, Yeoman would have had time to correct his aim.
Yeoman continued his climb, looking down to assess what was happening and, if necessary, issue instructions to his pilots. His advice, however, was not needed. Two of the MTBS had already been reduced to shattered wreckage, floating in spreading pools of blazing fuel oil, and he was just in time to see a third take a Venom’s eight rockets amidships. One instant the boat was there, speeding through the water; the next it had vanished in a great geyser of smoke an
d flame out of which burning debris cascaded. The boat’s wake was still there, arrow-straight in the sea, chasing something that was now a ghost.
Only the leading boat, which Yeoman had missed, was left now, zig-zagging through the water. Once again, Yeoman felt admiration for the man on the bridge; hopeless though the odds were against him, he showed no inclination to turn and run back towards the comparative safety of Alexandria’s anti-aircraft defences. Instead, even though his evasive manoeuvres appeared wild, there was a definite pattern to them; every time he rolled out of a turn, the bow of his craft was still pointing towards Crete.
Yeoman pressed the R/T button and called his number two, Alliss.
‘Mike, have you still got your rockets?’
‘Affirmative, leader. That bastard’s turn threw me off. I saw you miss him.’
‘Okay, then. Get in there and finish him off. The rest of you, stand by for cannon attacks if Mike misses too.’
The other Venoms climbed, circling, keeping clear of the anti-aircraft fire that still lashed out determinedly from the MTB. Yeoman watched Alliss’s aircraft curve down and level out over the sea, a mile from the target, and streak towards it as steady as a rock. Mike was taking his time, making sure that there would be no mistake.
The MTB straightened out of a turn, and Yeoman knew that its skipper was steadying the craft to give his gunners a chance. He put his own aircraft into a dive, hurtling down astern of the boat in the hope of drawing some of the fire, but the gunners refused to be put off. The shells from their four 25-mm weapons ploughed up a furrow across the sea, forming a lane of foam along which Alliss’s Venom streaked, apparently unscathed.
Suddenly, a dense trail of white smoke burst from the Venom’s jet pipe. Yeoman saw the aircraft waver, then regain its steady course. The smoke trail it dragged in its wake was now shot with streamers of vivid white flame.
Venom Squadron Page 3