Hurricane Squadron

by Robert Jackson

  The engine of Yeoman’s aircraft was running roughly and he had some difficulty in keeping station behind and to the left of Wynne-Williams. He played with the throttle, trying to find the best setting, and was relieved when the vibration stopped and the roar of the Merlin steadied.

  They climbed to eight thousand feet, still holding a north-easterly heading. They crossed the broad, swift-flowing Meuse to the north of Verdun, that everlasting symbol of France’s gallantry and sacrifice in a bygone war, and Wynne-Williams’s voice came over the radio, crackling and distorted: ‘All right, spread out and keep your eyes peeled. George, watch out for the Battles, they’ll be low and ahead of us. Jim, watch that cloud cover to starboard.’

  Yeoman realized with a sudden shock that this was his first operational flight. He had only a confused idea of what he might have expected, but it wasn’t this — not an aircraft to be seen apart from the Hurricanes, no swarms of Messerschmitts, no flames of war, nothing except the rolling, wooded foothills of the Ardennes, intersected by glittering rivers.

  They flew on for ten more minutes. The city of Luxembourg, nestling like a spider in its web of converging roads and railways, was ahead and to the right, six or seven miles away. On the far horizon, the pilots could now see a cluster of what looked like slender black fingers, pointing skywards and joining at the top in a flat, indistinct layer. They were columns of smoke. Over there, beneath them, men were fighting and dying.

  There was still no sign of the returning Battles. Yeoman, who had been straining his eyes in his search for the bombers — which would be hard to spot against the greens and browns of the terrain — looked up and blinked sharply as what seemed to be a shaft of mirrored sunlight struck his retina. A few moments later he saw it again, and this time knew it for what it was: the glitter of an aircraft’s wing.

  His hand moved towards the R/T transmitter switch, but Wynne-Williams had seen the aircraft too and it was his warning that came crackling first over the air. On his orders the three Hurricanes began a climbing turn to port, towards the other machines.

  They were clearly visible now, half a dozen silvery crosses skimming through the tufts of cumulus like a shoal of fish. They were heading west, and the Hurricanes had the sun behind them as they climbed.

  Yeoman switched on his reflector sight, checking range and wingspan indicators. The note of the Merlin altered slightly as he adjusted the propeller pitch. A quick scan of the instruments told him that the oil temperature was a little on the high side, but apart from that everything seemed all right. He moved the gun-button to ‘fire’.

  The Hurricanes climbed flat out in line abreast, the pilots’ eyes glued on the other aircraft. Yeoman’s stomach lurched and a hot wave of mingled fear and excitement swept over him as he made positive identification. Short, square-cut wings, tail-planes set high on the fins, slender, shark-like fuselages — there was no mistaking the angular outlines of the Messerschmitt 109.

  The 109s were flying in pairs, well spaced out and in echelon to starboard. They seemed to be in no hurry, and the hard-climbing British fighters had little trouble in overhauling them. They were a couple of thousand feet above the enemy now, still in line abreast, curving to the attack with the sun behind them. The German formation cruised on steadily, seemingly oblivious to the danger.

  Wynne-Williams’s voice was as calm as if he were taking part in a training flight. ‘All right, spread out. We’ll attack in line abreast. I’ll take the centre pair. George, you take the two on the left. No heroics. One pass, then get the hell out of it. Get stuck in!’

  A strange feeling descended on Yeoman as he opened the throttle. His heart pounded, yet he felt no fear. All that mattered was the target in front of him. The details stood out clearly now; the blotchy grey camouflage, the stark black crosses. Out of the comer of his eye he saw the other two Hurricanes, matching him in the dive.

  The Messerschmitt on the extreme left hung squarely in his sight. Two hundred yards … a hundred and fifty. Get in close, like they did in the old days. Sweat was pouring into his eyes. Never mind, to hell with it.

  One hundred yards. Now! His thumb punched the firing-button. The Hurricane shuddered frighteningly. Grey smoke trails streamed towards the Messerschmitt. Everything was suspended in slow motion. The grey trails arrowed past the enemy’s port wing. Christ, missed! Right rudder, fire again on the skid. The Messerschmitt broke hard, to the left, and the smoky lines disappeared into the fuselage behind the cockpit.

  A sudden puff of smoke. A sheet of metal, tearing away and whirling back, barely missing Yeoman’s cockpit. Close. Christ, too close! He was going to hit the 109. He was going to die. A moment of blind panic. A great black shadow, gone in an instant, as the 109, on its back now, flashed over the Hurricane with feet to spare.

  In that instant, braced in the cockpit to meet the awful impact that never came, his head flung back, Yeoman saw the face of his enemy.

  Like a single frame from a movie film it flickered before him and vanished. The face of a man, white beneath a black helmet, mouth gaping in fear and, perhaps, pain.

  A glance back. The 109 spinning, staining the sky with a question-mark of smoke. Something moving into his field of vision, astern and from the right. Swivel the head the other way, fast. Oh God, another 109 almost on his tail, firing already in short bursts, tracers flickering past. Turn. Turn. Fight away the fear that comes back to turn your guts to water and keep turning. The Hurricane can out-turn a 109. You know it can, so keep turning, tighter all the time. Forget about everything except the pressure on the rudder and the stick in your stomach, keeping the glittering disc of the propeller on the horizon. Tighten the turn even further, wings almost perpendicular, the brute force of it pushing your backside into the seat A glance in the mirror. The 109 still there, but off to the right, trying and failing to turn inside you. More tracer, falling away towards the patchwork fields far below.

  The Hurricane shuddered, battered by a series of staccato bangs. Oil sprayed back, smothering the windscreen with a black film. The roar of the tortured Merlin stopped abruptly and the fighter’s nose dropped as she fell out of the turn, flicking into a spin.

  In that split second, Yeoman knew he had not been hit. It was the engine. The bloody engine. A glance at the altimeter: ten thousand feet. Let her spin; it was his only chance now of shaking off the bastard on his tail. Let the German think he’d bought it.

  Eight thousand feet. Dust and bits of paper whirled around the cockpit. The earth gyrated in a crazy blur in front of his eyes. Check everything. Fuel. Mixture. Throttle. Get ready. No time to look back, just concentrate on spin recovery.

  Five thousand feet. Now for it. Full opposite rudder, ease the pressure off the stick a little to unstall the wings. The Hurricane went on spinning, with no apparent slowing of the rate of rotation. An illusion. Give her time. Hold on full rudder.

  The ground beneath him slowed and then stood still. Gently, he pulled back the stick, nursing the fighter out of its dive, taking care not to make his control movements too abrupt. With a dead engine, it would be all too easy to enter another spin — and if that happened, with the altimeter now showing less than three thousand feet, the odds were that he would come out of it at about the same time as he hit the ground.

  He flattened out, trimming the Hurricane for the glide, looking over his shoulder as he did so. There was no sign of the Messerschmitt. His main problem now was to get his aircraft down in one piece. It would not be easy; the terrain that crawled underneath him was hilly and wooded. He briefly considered the possibility of baling out, then rejected it. He was too low.

  He turned downwind to stretch his glide a little, frantically searching ahead for somewhere to land. A few hundred yards off to the left, a hillside sloped down towards a river. It seemed to be relatively clear of trees and other obstacles and he turned towards it. He would use his last few hundred feet of height to gain some speed, then flatten out and land up the slope. It would be tricky and dangerous, but th
ere was no alternative.

  Everything was still switched on. He reached for the fuel cock, but his hand never touched it.

  Suddenly, miraculously, the Hurricane’s propeller kicked over a couple of times. Instinctively, Yeoman seized the throttle lever and pumped it. The propeller turned a few more times, gratingly, sending shivers through the airframe. Then the Merlin picked up with a coughing roar and the propeller blades dissolved in a blur. It was the most beautiful sight Yeoman had ever seen.

  The ground was dangerously close. Trees were drifting up to meet him and he opened the throttle wide in a fluid movement, resisting the temptation to slam it open. Slowly, painfully, the Hurricane began to climb. Not fast enough. A line of trees at the top of the slope filled his vision.

  He reached down and jerked the flap lever. The flaps came down with a thump and the fighter bounded fifty feet into the air as the precious extra lift took effect. One hand held the throttle hard against the stop, the other pulled back the stick. Yeoman shut his eyes in an instinctive reflex as the treetops sped to meet him, then forced them open again. There was nothing but clear sky in his windscreen. He looked round. Part of a tree branch trailed from his starboard wingtip. He hadn’t felt the jolt.

  He climbed away, trying to work out where he was. He was finding the Hurricane hard to control, and realized with a sudden shock that the trembling of his hands was to blame. He became conscious of acute physical discomfort His arms and legs ached from the strain of throwing the Hurricane around the sky; he could feel sweat trickling down the inside of his legs, turning his socks into sodden pulp. He was very thirsty, and his eyes felt raw.

  He took the Hurricane up to six thousand feet and settled down on a heading of 260 degrees. He had little trouble in picking up landmarks, and landed at Châlons fifteen minutes later.

  As he taxied in, another Hurricane touched down. He looked for the code letters; it was Jim Callender’s aircraft, its rear fuselage in shreds where enemy bullets had tom it.

  Wynne-Williams was missing. Callender had seen him go down into a wood. There had been no parachute.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joachim Richter sat on the edge of his bed and stared moodily at the framed document on the wall. It read: ‘In the Name of the Führer! I appoint Senior Flight Cadet Joachim Richter to the rank of Lieutenant, effective 30 March 1940.

  ‘I confirm this appointment in full expectation that through conscientious performance of his duty as an officer in accordance with his oath of service and loyalty, the confidence shown by the award of this Commission to the above-named will be justified. He on his part may call upon the special protection of the Führer.

  ‘Dated at Berlin, this 15th Day of April 1940. Signed: Goering, Reich Minister for Aviation and Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force.’

  It had been his proudest possession. He had worked hard for it ever since the day, eighteen months earlier, when he had reported as a raw recruit to the basic flying school at Schönewalde.

  Any illusion that he was going to jump straight into an aircraft’s cockpit had been quickly swept aside. Life over the next four months had been one hard slog, alternating between the parade ground and the lecture room. The drill sessions had been a nightmare: especially the obligatory parade marches, the ceremonial ‘goose-stepping’ that had transformed leg muscles into searing knots of agony and toes into bruised, bloody pulp. He had hated the drill instructors; brutal, bullying men who screamed, never speaking in normal tones. The hatred had seen him through. They hadn’t made him as tough as Krupp’s steel — their favourite expression — but they had nurtured in him a deep determination never to be beaten. Perhaps, on reflection, that was what their job was all about.

  The lecture periods had come as a tremendous relief, a time of leisure almost, when he had been able to submerge himself in the mysteries of aerodynamics and navigation. Then had come the day of his first flying lesson, in a Focke-Wulf FW 44 biplane, and suddenly all the square-bashing, all the crawling through mud in full field kit, had seemed worthwhile.

  He had sailed through his primary flying course, gaining his pilot’s certificate just after the outbreak of war. Two weeks later, exalting in the rank of corporal, he had reported for operational training at a fighter school. He counted himself exceptionally lucky; most of his friends had been posted to dive-bombers.

  His first fighter type had been something of a disappointment. It was a high-wing Arado Ar 68 monoplane, a mid-1930s aircraft which the Luftwaffe used for fighter conversion. All in all, it wasn’t a great deal different from the Focke-Wulfs and Gothas he had been used to. Top speed was a hard-earned 195 miles per hour, and the machine’s low-speed handling characteristics were appalling.

  After the Ar 68, he had graduated on to the Messerschmitt 109 — and that was altogether a different kettle of fish. He was not unduly tall, but he had found the 109’s cockpit cramped and claustrophobic until he got used to it. The little beast’s handling left no room for error, either, especially on landing. The approach speed had to be just right, or else you either overshot hopelessly or spun in and killed yourself. A few of his friends had ended their careers abruptly that way.

  By the time he left fighter school he had fallen in love with the 109, despite her vices. She was like a temperamental woman, terribly unforgiving of any rough treatment. Caress her, and she wouldn’t let you down. Maltreat her, and she would kick back hard.

  He couldn’t remember a better time than those weeks at fighter school. The airfield had been only a few miles from Berlin, so there had been plenty of distractions to fill his off-duty hours and compensate for the intensive training programme. The capital had been teeming with night-life and gaiety; the German people, even those who covertly doubted the wisdom of Hitler’s war, were riding high on a wave of optimism. A uniform, especially a Luftwaffe uniform, had attracted the girls like a magnet.

  His posting to Fighter Wing 66, just in time to take part in the opening phase of Plan Yellow — the attack in the west — had been the fulfilment of a dream. Formed on the Western Front in 1917, the wing had carved out a reputation second only to Richthofen’s unit. It had been reformed in 1934, and the pilots who now led it had fought in both the Spanish Civil War and Poland. It was an honour to be assigned to it; an honour that fell, as everyone knew, to only the most promising of Goering’s ‘young eagles’.

  The wing had moved up to Bitburg on 8 May, and had been held in reserve during the dawn air strikes forty-eight hours later. It was not until noon that Richter had taken off on his first operational sortie — an offensive patrol over Luxembourg.

  He slammed his fist hard against the bed-rail as a mixture of black fury and self-pity overwhelmed him. His first combat trip — and he had made an unholy mess of it. Splashed a great black blot over his copybook that would take months to eradicate. And it hadn’t been all his fault; that was the worst of it. But no matter whose fault it had been, nothing was going to bring back Schindler, Klaus and Reinecke.

  A tap on the door brought him back to his immediate surroundings. He stood up, reluctantly, to face the man who entered.

  The newcomer wore the insignia of a captain and decorations that betokened active service in Spain and Poland. He was a small man, with a rather ugly face and black hair, brushed straight back and parted in the middle. His smile, however, was friendly, and Richter took an instinctive liking to him. The man was a stranger; probably one of the pilots of Fighter Wing 53, a detachment of which had arrived at Bitburg that morning.

  The man made no move to introduce himself. Instead, he strolled casually across the room and draped himself over an armchair. He looked at Richter and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I hear you had a spot of bother,’ he said. Richter sat down on the bed again and nodded miserably.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  The young pilot sighed. Maybe it would do him good to get the whole thing off his chest. He lit a cigarette, drew on it heavily, then looked at it distastefully and crushed it
out.

  ‘Tastes like sawdust,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a pipe for me from now on.’ He ran his hand through his hair and began to tell his story, hesitantly at first, then with more confidence as the man in the armchair nodded encouragement.

  ‘We were patrolling over Luxembourg at four thousand metres — a flight of six. I was flying wingman in number two section. Anyway, we got hit by three Hurricanes. The Tommies came right down out of the bit of sky I was supposed to be watching. I never even saw them. The first I knew about it was when my number one blew up. One second he was there — the next there was nothing but a cloud of smoke with bits falling out of it.

  ‘I didn’t see the Tommy who got him. I broke hard left and swung under the rest of the formation, just in time to see another Tommy hit Reinecke in number three section. I got on the Hurricane’s tail and we turned round one another for a few minutes. I managed to get in a few bursts, but I don’t know whether I hit him or not. I might have done, because he suddenly flicked into a spin. I don’t know what happened to him. I had my work cut out with another Hurricane, but he skipped off after a while.’

  The stranger scratched his nose. ‘So what’s your problem?’ he asked.

  ‘The problem,’ Richter replied, ‘is that I’m being held responsible for what happened. We lost three pilots, and I’m to blame. I didn’t keep a good lookout.’

  He shuddered inwardly, recalling what had happened after he had landed. His squadron commander, Major Hartwig, had assembled all his pilots together in the ante-room of the mess and then forced Richter to stand on a table in the middle. All right, so one of the dead pilots — Reinecke — had been Hartwig’s closest friend, but that had not justified the humiliation to which he, Richter, had been subjected. His ears still burned from the dressing-down Hartwig had given him, in front of the embarrassed assembly. He had stood there, miserable and red-faced, as close to tears as he had been since he was a child, for what seemed an eternity before Hartwig had allowed him to flee to the sanctuary of his room.