A sudden flurry of shellfire caught Yeoman’s attention, a twinkling of shell-bursts flickering across the sky to the north. He opened the throttle and climbed, taking the Hurricane up to eighteen thousand feet. Behind him, a thin contrail spun its thread, catching the beams of the moon. He strained his eyes, trying to work out the pattern of the antiaircraft fire. The flashes seemed to be traversing the sky from north-west to south-east, converging on his own course.
He turned on to a heading of 045 degrees, climbing hard over the Thames. Anti-aircraft fire was coming up thick and fast now, and the black-painted Hurricane rocked as shells burst dangerously close. Searchlights stabbed upwards, probing the night. Far ahead, a silvery midge was caught in one of the beams and other searchlights converged on it, trapping it in a spider’s web of light. The midge began to twist and turn, frantically seeking an avenue of escape as shell after shell erupted around it. Then, abruptly, it fell, a glowing coal in the darkness, to be extinguished among the fires of the city below.
Yeoman continued climbing, pushing his vision to the limit in an effort to locate the elusive bombers. They must be all around him, but with the glare from the searchlights it was impossible to see a thing.
Suddenly, the Hurricane buffeted violently, shaken by some unseen agent. Instinctively, Yeoman realised that he had flown through the turbulent slipstream of a large aircraft. It must have passed very close to him. He turned steeply to left and right, searching for the other machine and cursing the searchlights. There was no sign of it. He decided to take a chance and headed for the Thames estuary, hoping that the bomber was on its way home and that he would catch sight of it when London’s glare fell behind and his full night vision returned.
A couple of minutes later, out of the corner of his eye, he had a vague impression of something fleeting across the stars. He turned, blinking to clear his eyes, careful not to look directly at the spot; it was much easier to use one’s peripheral vision to locate something elusive under conditions like these.
Excitement shot through him like a lance as two vague pinpoints of blue light appeared, a few hundred yards ahead and slightly to the left. He was looking at the exhaust flames of a twin-engined bomber, flying at the same height as himself.
He dropped a couple of hundred feet and closed in, intent on attacking the enemy from underneath. He saw, now, that the raider was dragging twin vapour trails in its wake, and was surprised that he had not seen it sooner. The vapour streamed over his cockpit as he manoeuvred into position, lining his Hurricane up carefully. He felt a terrible impulse to tear straight in to the attack, but resisted it; he knew that if he missed with his first burst, he might lose his target for good.
The bomber was recognisable now as a Dornier 17. He stalked it patiently, waiting until the range was down to a hundred yards. Then he opened fire.
It was the first time Yeoman had fired his cannon at a ‘live’ target, and he was momentarily startled by the dramatic effect as several pounds of white-hot metal punched into the Dornier’s belly, the vivid flashes of the exploding shells lighting up the long, slim fuselage with its black crosses. The bomber shuddered violently and went into a steep, right-handed spiral dive. Red streaks lanced at the pursuing Hurricane from one of the enemy’s gun positions, but the return fire was a long way wide of the mark.
Yeoman followed the bomber as it went down, the needle of the altimeter unwinding rapidly. He had no difficulty in keeping the Dornier in sight; its fuselage was glowing with some internal fire caused by his first burst.
At four thousand feet the Dornier levelled out and turned towards the coast in a desperate attempt to get away. Yeoman fired again, and saw white flames burst from the bomber’s port wing as his shells found a fuel tank. A moment later the Dornier went into a steep dive. It hit the ground in an orange mushroom of fire, scattering glowing debris. Yeoman flew low over the spot, then climbed away towards Manston. He didn’t think any of the Dornier’s crew had managed to bale out; the rear gunner had kept on firing right up to the moment of impact.
The Dornier was Yeoman’s eleventh victory, and the first kill scored by a pilot of 1303 Flight. The young pilot felt no elation. On the contrary, he felt a little sick at the thought of the lives he had just destroyed. He shook his head, pushing the feeling to the back of his mind, but it kept on nagging at him like toothache. God, he thought wearily, this whole bloody business is starting to get me down.
*
The pilots of 1303 Flight were clustered round a table in the draughty Nissen hut that served as the flight’s dispersal point. It was just after eight o’clock in the evening, and Christmas was only a few days away. The cold December wind blew in through the ill-fitting door, and a cylindrical stove in the centre of the room belched smoke intermittently as though in protest at the intrusion.
Number 1303 Flight’s commander, Squadron Leader Christopher Payne, surveyed his pilots and felt an inner glow of satisfaction. They were all good men, and had performed well since young Yeoman had brought down the flight’s first Hun a month earlier. The score now stood at six enemy aircraft destroyed, and the problems with the Hurricane’s 20-millimetre cannon, although not yet completely overcome, were no longer serious. Moreover, the flight had just received three brand-new Hurricane IIs fitted experimentally with long-range tanks, considerably improving their time on patrol.
Payne’s small group of pilots looked at him expectantly. Yeoman’s eyes betrayed his wariness, a sharp contrast to the nonchalant air of the Dutchman, Piet Doorn, who stood next to him, puffing unconcernedly at his pipe. Payne grinned. He had known Doorn for years; they had both been airline captains, Doorn with K.L.M. and Payne with Imperial Airways.
The squadron leader straightened up. ‘All right, down to business.’ He turned and indicated the two men who sat nearby; one was a wing commander, the other a balding civilian with piercing eyes which seemed to Yeoman to look right through you.
‘This is Wing Commander Rolands,’ Payne went on. ‘The other gentleman you can call Mr Smith; that’s as good as anything.’ Mr Smith permitted himself a frosty smile.
Payne motioned towards the civilian. ‘I’m going to give Mr Smith the floor first of all,’ he said, ‘He’s going to tell you what this is all about — or some of it, at any rate. If you please, Mr Smith.’
Smith got to his feet and cleared his throat. Yeoman had been expecting a dry, thin voice; but when the man spoke his tones were deep and resonant. He began without any preamble.
‘On the night of 14 November, a large force of enemy bombers attacked Coventry. They destroyed almost the whole of the city centre, and they bombed through cloud. Since then, several other targets throughout southern England and the Midlands have been attacked, all of them with considerable accuracy and some of them through cloud.’ He paused, and peered at the men over the top of his halfmoon glasses. ‘Not unnaturally, this new prowess on the part of the enemy has been giving some concern to my department in the Air Ministry.’
Smith gave no indication as to which department he worked for. That information was highly classified. In fact, he was a very senior official in the Department of Scientific Intelligence, although he had a feeling that if he had mentioned the title to the men in front of him, it would have conveyed little or nothing to them. They fought a totally different kind of war from the department’s clandestine activities, but the latter were just as vital — sometimes more so — to the nation’s survival.
‘After a lot of work,’ he went on, ‘we have begun to come up with some answers. We now know that the enemy are guiding their bombers by radio beam — or, to be more precise, two radio beams, which intersect over the target and give the German crews the signal to drop their bombs. I won’t bore you with the scientific details, but the whole idea is very simple and by no means new. Now, to cut a long story short, radio beams can be jammed, but to do that we need to know two things: their frequency, and the location of their transmitters, And that is where Wing Commander Rolands comes in.�
�
He bowed slightly towards Rolands, who rose and stubbed out the cigarette he had just lit.
‘I don’t doubt,’ the Wing Commander said, ‘that some of you have noticed the occasional odd-looking Wellington dropping into Manston recently.’ They all had; the Wellingtons were festooned with mysterious radio aerials. They usually landed at dawn and were tucked away on the far side of the airfield, never more than two aircraft at a time, to disappear just as unobtrusively at nightfall.
‘These aircraft belong to a special flight which I command,’ Rolands went on, ‘and its task is to operate in accordance with the requirements of Mr Smith’s department. Needless to say, our main preoccupation over the past weeks has been to ferret out as much information as possible concerning the enemy radio beams.’
Rolands turned to a map, pinned to a blackboard behind him, and indicated two points on the French coast, one near the Somme estuary and the other much further south-west, on the Cherbourg Peninsula. ‘After a good deal of work,’ he continued, ‘we have managed to pinpoint the locations of their two main transmitters. The first, up here not far from Abbeville, was bombed last night — we believe with some success. The master station, however, presents the real problem. This transmits the beam the enemy bombers actually follow, and the snag is that the enemy have very cleverly situated it right in the middle of a small town, which makes a full-scale bombing attack out of the question. We thought about trying a pin-point daylight attack with a couple of Blenheims, but there are two German fighter wings in the area and the Blenheims wouldn’t stand a chance, and anyway we can’t risk bombs going off target and killing French civilians. We’ve got quite enough problems with the French, as it is. So we had to think of something else, and I’m afraid you’re it. Squadron Leader Payne.’
Payne rose, smiling thinly. ‘That just about sums it up,’ he said quietly. ‘They want us to have a crack at the transmitter, or rather the transmitter building, with our cannon. The people who’ve looked at the recce photos, which you will see later have worked out that we can probably do a fair amount of damage.’
‘Enough, at any rate, to keep the transmitter off the air for a while, until we come up with a means of jamming it,’ Smith interjected. ‘You see, we think the Germans don’t yet have many of these transmitters, and if you can wreck this one it will be quite some time before they can install more equipment — long enough to enable us to pull something out of the hat, or so we hope.’
‘If we succeed,’ Payne went on, ‘it will be the equivalent of shooting down an awful lot of Huns. I don’t want to pretend it will be easy. There’s a lot of light flak around the target, not to mention the fighters, and of course we shall have to attack in daylight. But with surprise on our side, we should be able to get away with it. Now, before we get down to more details, are there any questions or comments from anyone?’
There were no questions, and Piet Doorn supplied the only comment. It was unprintable.
*
The three long-range Hurricanes headed out over the Channel at two thousand feet. They had spent the night at Tangmere, the nearest R.A.F. airfield to their objective, and had taken off with full tanks. Now, with the dawn over on their left, they were following a heading of 200 degrees towards the Cherbourg Peninsula, the grey and angry sea speeding under their wings.
Payne himself was leading the small formation, with Doorn as his number two and Yeoman in number three position. Yeoman looked at the cold, red light that was slowly creeping over the eastern horizon, and shivered. Tt was a friendless morning, and the sight of the wave crests made his flesh creep. A pilot would not last long in that December sea, despite the fact that the Hurricanes carried one-man rubber dinghies. These were a recent innovation; hitherto, pilots had had to rely solely on their Mae West lifejackets for survival.
For the hundredth time, Yeoman ran over the attack plan in his mind. They had all studied the photographs brought back by low-flying reconnaissance Spitfires — at considerable risk — until the layout of the target was as familiar as the backs of their hands. The transmitter — a spidery circle of tall masts with the building housing its equipment in the middle, like a spider in its web — stood in a small park on the outskirts of Isigny-sur-Mer, which lay on the Bayeux-Carentan road a couple of miles east of the estuary of the river Vire. There were houses all around the park, and poplars on three sides; the only clear approach lane was from the west, which meant that the pilots would have the rising sun in their eyes. There would be no time for a preliminary run over the target; the photographs had revealed 20-milli-metre flak emplacements and machine-gun nests all around, and if the element of surprise was lost the attackers would be cut to pieces. They had to get it right first time. There was one consolation: Spitfires of the Tangmere Wing would be providing cover on the way out over the Channel.
The Hurricanes flew on between the sea and a layer of broken cloud several thousand feet above. The dawn was heavy with the threat of snow, and a few flakes had already fallen. Yeoman peered ahead; the enemy coast should be visible at any moment.
There it was — a dark grey line, extending like a wedge into the sea. Payne took the Hurricanes down to a thousand feet and headed straight for the north-east tip of the peninsula. A few boats flashed under their wings. The coastline was clearly visible now, with spray dancing among the black rocks that fringed it.
The Hurricanes turned left a few degrees, following the peninsula’s eastern shore. Ahead of them, the coast fell away in a deep indentation, as though the sea had taken a great bite out of it; this was the Vire estuary and its twin. They were right on course.
The Hurricanes hurtled inland over the flat Normandy landscape, with its earthen banks and tall hedgerows. A straight road loomed up in front, with a town over on the right; that must be Carentan. Payne stood his Hurricane on a wingtip and turned east, followed by his wingmen. They fell into line astern and dropped to fifty feet, the roar of their engines hammering at the whitewashed walls of toy houses and bringing the inhabitants tumbling out of doors in panic.
They flashed over a river and were streaking across the western outskirts of Isigny almost before they knew it. Yeoman had a confused impression of blurred rooftops; only the two fighters ahead of him seemed real. But the spidery masts were real enough, looming up in the distance.
Payne was already opening fire, grey trails streaming from his wings and shell cases cascading in his wake. Yeoman saw puffs of smoke dancing round the transmitter building. Then Payne was climbing away, and Piet Doorn was attacking.
Doorn’s aircraft leaped upwards as the pilot completed his run. Behind him, Yeoman took a deep breath, corrected his aim with a little left rudder, and pressed the gun-button. The Hurricane shook with the recoil as his shells pumped out, creeping across the ground towards the building. Chunks of masonry and fragments of wood flew into the air and then he was pulling back hard on the stick, leapfrogging the masts which threatened to ensnare him.
Flak started to come up, a few tufts at first and then whole strings of it as the quadruple 20-millimetre batteries around the transmitter poured shells after the speeding fighters. As though in a nightmare, Yeoman heard Payne’s voice over the R/T: ‘We’re going in again to make sure. You first, Piet, then George. I’ll try and take care of the flak.’
Doorn and Yeoman, keeping low, brought their Hurricanes round in a tight circle, levelling out to make a second run. The grey, freezing sky was lurid with strings of glowing shells. Yeoman, a quarter of a mile behind Doorn, saw a trail of fire lance straight through the Dutchman’s aircraft. The Hurricane turned over on its back and hit the ground, showering burning debris over a row of houses.
Horrified, Yeoman hunched low in the cockpit and sped over the wreckage, opening fire at extreme range and keeping his thumb pressed on the button until the last moment. A series of hammer-blows told him that he had been hit, but he held his course, resisting the temptation to shut his eyes. Then, mercifully, he was over the masts and climbing har
d, away from the meshes of the flak.
He turned, looking back. Payne’s Hurricane was circling over the park, trailing smoke. As Yeoman watched it went into a shallow dive. Burning fiercely now, it levelled out a few feet above the ground and ripped through the circle of masts, snapping a couple of them like matchsticks. A fraction of a second later it plunged headlong into the transmitter building and exploded.
Sick at heart, Yeoman headed for the Channel, the flak baying after him. Behind him, a tall column of smoke rose over Isigny.
Yeoman’s Hurricane refused to climb above three thousand feet, and the pilot knew he had a problem. A scan of the instrument panel revealed the temperature and pressure gauges climbing off the clock, and fumes were beginning to seep into the cockpit. He turned his oxygen full on and strove to maintain height, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the enemy coast.
Ten miles out to sea, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. The overheated engine was juddering alarmingly; it could only be a matter of moments before it seized or burst into flames, or both. It was a time for rapid decision, and Yeoman made it. With his altimeter still showing a hard-earned three thousand feet, he reached up and slid the cockpit hood open. Then, wincing as an icy blast of air plucked at him, he unfastened his seat harness and shoved the stick hard over.
The Hurricane rolled on its back and the pilot fell clear, pulling the D-ring as soon as he left the doomed aircraft. He missed the tail by inches, and a few seconds later the breath was knocked out of him as his parachute opened with a crack.
The cold, churning waters of the Channel rushed up at him and he hit the surface with an impact that stunned him. His parachute canopy collapsed around him and he clawed his way from its folds, banging his release box. The parachute harness fell away and he clung grimly to his dinghy pack with one hand, treading water while he inflated his Mae West. It had to be done by mouth; an exhausting business, for freezing waves crashed over him continually, blinding and choking him.
Squadron Scramble (1978) Page 13