The bomber pilots closed up the gaps in their ranks and the formation droned on towards their target, the docks nestling in the big, U-shaped bend of the Thames.
It was twelve-five. In the underground operations centre of Number Eleven Group, Air Vice Marshal Park looked at the status board; his last six fighter squadrons had been ordered to take off and a further five were being sent to his aid by Number Twelve Group, on the northern fringe of the battle.
Park turned to the man by his side, the most important visitor Number Eleven Group had ever entertained, except for King George VI himself. An hour earlier, on an impulse, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, accompanied by his wife, had motored over to Uxbridge from Chequers to watch the course of the battle from its nerve centre. In silence, he followed events from the raised controller’s platform, looking down into the big room with its plotting table showing the battle situation. As fresh information came in, the coloured raid plots crept closer to London. On the wall opposite, a large illuminated board showed the battle state of every British fighter squadron: which ones were in reserve, which were airborne, which were in combat.
Churchill, who had been silent until now, turned to Park and asked: ‘How many reserves have you left?’
‘None,’ the Air Vice Marshal replied bluntly. ‘They are all engaging the enemy.’
No reserves. All over south-east England, from the Channel coast to London, the sky was filled with whirling dogfights as the R.A.F.’s Spitfires and Hurricanes flung themselves on the Luftwaffe formations, breaking through the screens of escorting Messerschmitts time and again. The German fighter pilots, in fact, were having a hard time of it. Tied to the bomber groups by the invisible thread of the ‘close escort’ order, they were bounced time after time by the Spitfires and Hurricanes, attacking from a higher altitude. The British tactics were simple; they would dive down, make one quick-firing pass at a bomber, then continue the dive until they had gained sufficient speed to climb rapidly and repeat the process. Fighter Command was learning its lesson, and the German pilots, forbidden to go after the fleeing British fighters, watched helplessly as one bomber after another went down in flames.
The first two squadrons to get airborne from Tangmere, 505 and the Canadian unit, hit the first wave of the enemy as the bombers were running in towards their targets. It was some minutes before the Polish squadron, one of Eleven Group’s last five reserves, received the order to scramble. The pilots lost no time in ripping their fighters off the ground, climbing hard towards the melee that was going on over the harvest fields of Kent. The Poles were thirsting for blood, and this was their biggest chance so far.
Meanwhile, Sondergruppe 320 had begun its run-in over the capital. In the cockpit of the lead aircraft, Schindler chewed imperturbably on an unlit cigar butt, holding the aircraft on a steady course as it rode through the waves of flak that the London defences hurled at it. Behind the pilot, striving to keep his balance on the bucking metal floor, Richter winced as the dirty black tufts erupted all around, some close enough to see the flash and hear the crunch of the explosion. His legs ached, and he wished there was a spare seat.
A great ball of smoke burgeoned up into the clouds from the target area. Zimmermann had left his plotting table and now crouched in the bomb-aimer’s position, with nothing between him and England but a few millimetres of perspex. Nevertheless, his voice was absolutely calm as he directed Schindler.
‘Left two degrees.’
A shell burst under the Junkers with a wicked bang and the bomber leaped upwards on the shock wave. Schindler corrected her instantly. ‘Christ, that was close,’ he said. ‘You all right, Zimmermann?’
‘No problem, apart from discovering that adrenalin is brown,’ the navigator replied cheerfully. ‘Left another degree. You’re flying this bloody thing like a mule.’
A Junkers on the edge of the formation blew up in a great, slow explosion as a shell found its bomb-load. Appalled, Richter watched the debris cascade down towards the city, trailing streamers of fire.
‘Steady now,’ said Zimmermann, ‘hold her at that. Steady … steady.’
Richter was drenched in sweat. He felt like screaming at Zimmermann to get on with it. Christ, he thought, these fellows have to go through this hell day after day! Suddenly, he felt very small.
‘Bombs gone!’
The Junkers leaped buoyantly as the stick of bombs tumbled from its belly and fell lazily towards the docks. Richter breathed a prayer of relief as the pilot opened the throttles and put down the nose, turning away from the hellish flak and the snarling, harrying packs of fighters. The fighters, Richter thought bitterly, which fat Hermann had said no longer existed.
The bombers droned away and an uncanny silence fell over London, broken only by the long wail of the ‘all clear’. As ambulances and rescue workers struggled among the debris, the city’s people emerged from cellars, basements and the deep shelter of the Underground and headed for the nearest pub or restaurant to snatch a hasty lunch. High overhead, vapour trails spread out into feathers of white, drifting on the wind.
The Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons which had first engaged the enemy, their guns red-hot, out of fuel, riddled with holes, their pilots exhausted, struggled back to their airfields to be feverishly rearmed and refuelled by the overworked ground crews in readiness for a fresh onslaught. For the retreating bombers, however, there was to be no respite. The reserve squadrons of Eleven and Twelve Groups caught them as they fled for the coast, their formations already dislocated, and clung to them all the way, harrying them without mercy.
The Polish squadron sighted the Germans ten miles west of Folkestone. Kendal brought his Hurricanes round in a wide curve, climbing above the enemy formation and manoeuvring to cut it off. Yeoman, leading Yellow Section, made his habitual search of the sky before diving to the attack; there was no sign of enemy fighters. The Messerschmitts, low on fuel, must already be well out over the Channel on their way home. He ordered Sznapka and Turek to pick their own targets and dived head-on towards the Junkers 88s.
For a split second, Richter thought the Hurricane was going to hit them. Before he had time to draw breath it grew from a tiny dot to a black, menacing shape that filled the windscreen. Then it was gone, zipping a few inches above the cockpit.
There was a loud bang, a flash of flame and an icy blast of air screamed into the aircraft. Hot liquid spurted over Richter’s face, blinding him. Panic churned at his stomach and he raised his hands instinctively, covering his eyes. It was a long second before he realised that he had not been hit. He staggered, clutching at the back of Schindler’s seat to steady himself. With a sickening surge of horror, he realised that he was drenched in blood. In front of him, Schindler was slumped in his straps, his headless corpse pumping blood over the instrument panel and the remains of the windscreen. Desperately, fighting down his nausea, Richter clawed his way forward and tore at the dead pilot’s harness with one hand, grabbing the control column with the other as the Junkers threatened to fall away in a spiral dive. Someone was shouting incoherently in his ear, tugging at Schindler’s body. It was Zimmermann, his face white with fear.
Between them they managed to drag the pilot’s body clear. Richter hurled himself into the vacant seat, planting his feet firmly in the rudder pedals and grasping the control column with both hands. The Junkers had gone into a gentle, left-handed dive; she came out sluggishly as Richter applied opposite wheel and rudder, bringing her back to level flight once more.
Half a mile astern, Yeoman stood his Hurricane on a wingtip, pulling the fighter round in a tight turn on the 88’s tail. The bomber went into a shallow dive to the right, gaining speed, and Yeoman tightened his turn still more, firing as the dark, twin-engined silhouette entered his sight. His bullets danced over the port engine cowling and he saw them punch holes in the fuselage, just behind the rear gun position.
The hammer-blows of gunfire jarred Richter’s teeth. A series of staccato bangs shook the aircraft and a chunk of me
tal whirled away from the port engine cowling, followed by a thin streamer of smoke. Zimmermann reached over and punched the fire-extinguisher button; the smoke trail turned white and then died away. The engine continued to run, although the oil pressure gauge climbed rapidly towards the red danger mark.
The Hurricane flashed overhead and turned in again for a beam attack. Richter turned the control wheel and applied hard right rudder, swinging the bomber round to afford his gunners a good field of fire.
He looked over his shoulder, seeing the fighter come slanting in, tensing in anticipation of the bark of the Junkers’ machine-guns. It never came. Instead, the Junkers shook again to the impact of bullets as the Hurricane opened fire, closing in unopposed.
Zimmermann screamed and fell on his knees, clutching his stomach. Blood welled through his fingers. He tried to struggle upright, turning his contorted face towards Richter, then his wide-open eyes lost their light and he collapsed sideways against the pilot. Instinctively, Richter pushed him away and the navigator’s body crumpled in a heap beside him.
Yeoman came arrowing down for a third attack, lining his fighter up carefully. There was no return fire; his last burst must have killed or wounded the enemy gunners. He closed in to fifty yards and jabbed his thumb down savagely on the gun-button, aiming for the starboard engine.
Nothing happened. He pressed the button until his thumb hurt, yelling and swearing with frustration. The Junkers 88 steadied on a south-easterly heading, droning out of the Channel. It was as though the pilot knew that his pursuer was impotent.
Richter, in fact, had already resigned himself to the fact that he was going to die. He felt utterly calm and detached, as though observing himself from the outside. He felt a vague sense of amazement. The shuddering, vibrating bomber, the howl of the slipstream through the remains of the canopy, the blood-spattered floor — all were part of a dream. None of this was happening to him. In a second, his batman’s hand would shake him and he would wake up in the warmth of his room.
Then reality sliced at him brutally, like a knife, ripping away the curtain of illusion. Stark terror replaced it, clawing at his guts. Trembling and shivering in a bath of cold sweat, he looked round frantically, searching for the Hurricane.
A dark shadow fell across his face, startling him. The British fighter was sitting a few yards off his starboard wing-tip, slightly higher up, in hazy silhouette against the sun. For an instant Richter had a wild, crazy impulse to haul the 88 round in a last, tight turn, obliterating the Hurricane and himself in a final blaze of anger and revenge. Then the mood left him as part of his brain told him not to be a fool; the Tommy could have finished him easily by this time, and the fact that he had not done so must mean that the Hurricane was out of ammunition.
He was going to live. Almost sick with relief, he closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. When he opened them again, the fighter was gone.
Richter took a deep breath and looked at his instruments. Both engines were still running, although the port one was overheating badly. Richter had no idea how well a Junkers 88 would fly on one engine, and decided to risk the damaged motor bursting into flames. Every mile of Channel that flashed beneath his wings meant a mile further from England, and if the worst came to the worst and he had to ditch he would at least stand a reasonable chance of being picked up by the German air-sea rescue. He took a firm grip on the control column, his heart leaping into his mouth every time the damaged engine missed a beat, and pointed the Junkers’ nose towards the spot where the promontory of Cap Gris Nez lay hidden behind the shallow curtain of haze that hung over the French coast.
*
Between the Kentish coast and London, the harvest fields were strewn with the burning beacons of crashed aircraft, shattered mounds of aluminium eaten by petrol-fed fires. Here, in a wood, the torn branches concealed the compressed remains of a Spitfire, the pulped body of its pilot still strapped in the bloody cockpit; there, in a huge crater, a few shards of smoking metal were all that remained of a Dornier, which had dived straight in from a height of three miles, the explosion of its bomb-load scattering the chalky soil over several fields.
There was no time, yet, to count the cost. The defenders licked their wounds and toiled feverishly to prepare themselves for the next round, their eyes on the southern sky. Dazed pilots threw themselves full length on the sun-baked ground and slept, the stink of oil and cordite heavy in their nostrils; others crept quietly away, their stomachs knotted with reaction, not wishing their friends to see their bodies quivering with nausea at the thought of having to face the packs of Messerschmitts again, yet knowing that they would fly and fight as often as they had to, each time until the last.
And beneath her pall of smoke London shook herself like an angry old dog and waited, tensing against the expected wail of sirens that would herald a fresh onslaught, as the sun began its long fall towards the western horizon.
*
A young gunner on the clifftops near Gris Nez stood up abruptly in his emplacement, pointing out over the Channel. ‘Look,’ he cried, ‘there’s another one!’
The grizzled sergeant at his elbow took a bite out of a thick slice of sausage. ‘All right,’ he muttered, peering seawards, ‘no need to get excited.’
The returning bombers had been droning in over the coast for the past hour, many of them with signs of battle damage. This one, flying low over the water, seemed to be in real trouble. It was a Junkers 88, and one of its engines was streaming flame. It headed straight for the cliffs half a mile up the coast, pulling up at the last moment and clearing the tops with only a couple of metres to spare.
An instant later, the burning engine blew up and the bomber went into a diving turn, shedding blazing fragments. Incredibly, it righted itself and hung poised for an endless second, tail down, before striking the ground with a concussion that the men in the emplacement felt clearly. The young gunner winced as the wings tore away, as if in slow motion, and bounced across the ground in a trail of fire. The fuselage, like a torpedo, rebounded into the air briefly and vanished behind a line of trees.
A fire tender and ambulance raced off up the road, followed by a detachment of motor-cycle troops. The sergeant spat over the cliff top. ‘Christ,’ he grunted, ‘what’s all the hurry?’
Some time later the ambulance returned, travelling at high speed towards Boulogne. The other rescuers came back more slowly, the motor-cycle detachment halting not far from the gun emplacement. Its leader, a corporal, dismounted and came over, removing his goggles and coughing dust from his throat,
‘Got anything to drink?’ he asked. The young gunner poured him some coffee. ‘Bloody awful mess back there,’ the corporal said, sipping the hot liquid gratefully. ‘Bodies all over the place.’
‘Was anyone alive?’ the young gunner wanted to know, with a kind of morbid fascination. The corporal nodded. ‘Yes, we got the pilot out, but he’s in a pretty bad way. The cockpit broke up, and I guess that’s what saved him. He’s got some burns and both his legs are broken, but I suppose he’ll live.’
The man’s brow suddenly wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘Funny, though,’ he murmured, half to himself, ‘he kept on muttering about having to report back to his fighter squadron. Now what the hell would a fighter pilot be doing flying a Junkers 88?’
*
It was three-thirty, and the fighter squadrons of Eleven Group were once more at ‘readiness’. The defenders could hardly believe their good fortune. They had been expecting a non-stop onslaught after the first major attack, and yet it was a good two hours since the first wave of enemy bombers had droned away. Now the Spitfires and Hurricanes were once more armed and ready for action.
Yeoman sat on the wing of his Hurricane, munching an apple. The Polish squadron had claimed six victories that morning, for the loss of only one of its own pilots, and the other squadrons of the Tangmere Wing bad fared equally well. Jim Callender had bagged two Dorniers, making him the wing’s top-scoring pilot with twenty-one victories; the only
casualty suffered by 505 Squadron during the morning’s operations had been Honeywell, who had collected several splinters of cannon shell in his backside. The wound was more painful than serious, and Honeywell had been the target of much ribald comment before the ambulance carted him off to sick quarters.
‘Squadron scramble! Dungeness, Angels eighteen!’
Here we go again, thought Yeoman, tossing aside his apple core and swinging a leg into the cockpit in the familiar drill that was fast becoming more routine than climbing into bed. All around him, Merlins were crackling into life.
The Polish squadron was first off this time, climbing parallel with the coast towards the layer of cloud that had spread over the sky during the early afternoon. They burst through it a few minutes later and emerged into bright sunshine at twelve thousand feet.
Ahead of them, clusters of black dots hung over the coast, creeping apparently slowly towards London. Smaller dots weaved among the bomber formations, leaving short white trails in the summer sky.
Kendal led his squadron flat out for the bombers, ignoring a bunch of Messerschmitts that came diving down to cut them off. He had already spotted a formation of Spitfires flying across the 109s’ path; they would keep the enemy fighters busy while the Hurricanes concentrated on the bombers, which were now identified as Dorniers.
Once again, it was a case of every man for himself. Yeoman made for a bomber, only to be frustrated by a Spitfire which shot across his nose. He saw grey trails stream back from the fighter’s wings as the pilot opened fire; the Dornier faltered and turned away towards the coast, dragging ribbons of white smoke from both engines.
Yeoman picked another target and closed in fast, opening fire at 250 yards. The bomber’s rear gunner was on the ball; Yeoman felt a series of small hammer-blows as a burst of 7.7-millimetre punched holes in his port wing. He fired again, and what looked like a red light suddenly appeared in the gunner’s position. Then, as he got closer, Yeoman realised that he was looking past the enemy gunner into the main cockpit; the red light was a fierce blaze, possibly caused by flares which his gunfire had ignited. He shuddered inwardly, imagining the nightmare inside the Dornier, the crew’s blind panic as they tried to beat at the flames with their bare hands. An instant later the flames burst through the thin metal of the fuselage and the bomber started to go down, its framework aft of the cockpit shrouded in smoke.
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