Others had seen the tragedy, too, and figures ran towards the Morris truck that stood outside the operations hut, bent on getting over there as quickly as possible to give what help they could. Yeoman was the first to reach the vehicle, and jumped into the driving seat. Half a dozen airmen climbed into the back. The passenger door opened and the squadron adjutant, Flight-Lieutenant King, scrambled in with difficulty. A much-decorated First World War pilot, he had an artificial leg, yet despite the handicap, he could move with surprising agility.
The others clung on grimly as Yeoman sent the truck bouncing at speed round the perimeter, heading for a gap in the hedge that bordered the Marck road. It took him less than five minutes to reach the hamlet. A heap of fallen rubble barred the vehicle’s path as it came to the outskirts, forcing Yeoman to pull up by the roadside.
They jumped down and clawed their way over the shattered masonry, coughing in the clouds of dust that still hung in the air. On the other side, the dust and smoke pall was so dense that it was difficult to see anything at all.
The RAF men moved slowly forward into the murk, King limping along a few yards in the rear. Suddenly, they stopped dead.
Ahead of them, a figure emerged from the smoke. It was an elderly woman. Her clothing hung in rags and blood streamed down her face from a dozen cuts. She stumbled past the horrified airmen, her eyes glazed and stunned. Yeoman stretched out a hand to her, but he might just as well not have existed. The woman blundered into a fragment of wall and stopped dead, feeling the rough stone with her bloodstained hands. Then she sank down at its foot, an inert and pathetic bundle. King limped over to her, unfastening the first-aid pack he carried. Yeoman and the others turned and plunged into the acrid smoke.
The stick of bombs appeared to have fallen diagonally across the hamlet.
The whole place was in ruins. Some of the inhabitants, dazed with shock and horror, were clawing at shattered stonework and beams where picturesque houses had once stood.
A young man stood beside a pile of rubble, tears washing rivulets through the grime that caked his distraught face. ‘Aidez-moi!’ he cried, as the airmen ran towards him. ‘Pour l’amour de Dieu, aidez-moi! Ma femme … mes enfants …’ he broke off and buried his face in his hands, weeping. Yeoman shook him roughly by the shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he yelled, ‘dig! Get to work!’
They tore their hands bloody, burrowing a pathway into the wrecked cottage. Yeoman lost all count of time as he worked, coughing frequently to clear the dust from his clogged throat.
His hand touched something soft, and he recoiled instinctively. Carefully, he brushed away a layer of dust and grit, exposing a woman’s face. Her forehead was crushed and she was clearly dead. The Frenchman screamed and hurled himself forward, clutching at the debris that pinned down the body. Yeoman tried to pull him away. The man, crazed with horror and grief, picked up a piece of stone and rounded on the pilot, his arm raised to strike. Yeoman took a deep breath and hit him on the point of the jaw, as hard as he could. The man subsided.
‘Poor bastard,’ one of the airmen muttered.
Yeoman held up his hand for silence. A thin wail, like that of a kitten in distress, came from the midst of the rubble. They listened intently, and heard it again. This time, there was no mistaking the whimper of a terrified child.
They worked on, joined now by some villagers, lifting away blocks of stone. The woman’s body was removed and covered with a blanket. Yeoman, lying on his stomach in a tunnel of fallen beams, urged himself on relentlessly as the child’s cry came once more, closer now. His way was barred by a large block of stone. He managed to get his hands round it, and shouted to the helpers to pull him out by the legs. They dragged him from the tunnel inch by inch, block and all, pieces of sharp stone and splintered glass tearing his uniform to shreds and lacerating his skin.
At last he was free. He shoved the stone block to one side, took a few gulps of air and plunged back into the tunnel again, worming his way towards the cavity where the big stone had been. He found himself looking into the remains of what had apparently been a kitchen. Gradually, as his eyes got accustomed to the gloom, he began to pick out details; smashed furniture, broken pots, scattered pans — and, in the centre, a large table, like an island amid the sea of devastation.
Underneath it, like wild animals in a cave, two small boys cowered in terror, their faces pale in the semidarkness. They were perhaps eight or nine years old, and looked like twins. The pilot spoke to them, and they cowered back even farther into their cavern.
Yeoman went on talking, trying to keep his voice soft and finding it hard because of the grit that caked his throat. The children clearly didn’t understand a word he said, but he kept on talking, using the tones he would have used to soothe a fearful, quivering pup. He could not squeeze into what was left of the kitchen, because the hole was too narrow and any attempt to move more rubble might cause the whole lot to collapse. The children would have to come to him.
After a while, his voice seemed to have the desired effect. Slowly, one of the children crawled out from under the table and came towards him. Yeoman reached out and took the child’s hand in his, squeezing it reassuringly. He pulled the child towards him and managed to get a firm grip under his armpits. Then, hoarsely, he called to the helpers to pull them both out.
A few minutes later both boys were weeping in their father’s arms, one of the airmen having gone in to retrieve the second child. The Frenchman was calmer now, and pathetically grateful that his children were safe.
Help had arrived quickly from Marck, and by this time rescue teams were at work among the other shattered houses, lifting the dead and the half-dead from the rubble. Ten civilians had died, half of them children.
There was nothing more for the airmen to do. They went back to their truck and returned to the airfield. King took the wheel; the flesh of Yeoman’s palms was badly torn, turning both hands into savage pools of pain.
The Hurricanes were back. They had shot down two of the Heinkels and damaged a third. Flight-Lieutenant Rogerson had been slightly wounded in the leg by a 7.7-mm bullet. Yeoman went off to see the MO, who cleaned up his hands, smeared them with ointment and bandaged them. Yeoman flexed his fingers painfully; at least, he thought, he would still be able to handle the controls of his fighter.
Some time later, a Dornier reconnaissance aircraft flew high over the area. Luftwaffe intelligence officers pored over the photographs it brought back to base, and made their report.
‘Raid 112, 14.10 hours, 19 May 1940. Target: Calais. Bombing altitude: 3500 metres. Visibility: good. Photographic results: good.
‘Observation: Some damage caused to the port installations and Fort Lapin. One substantial fire still burning in the port area, time 16.00 hours. One stick of bombs plotted running NE/SW across Calais-Marck airfield. No significant damage. Second stick of bombs plotted running NE/SW just outside airfield perimeter. Apparent damage to group of buildings, which may or may not have military significance.’
*
The German bombers returned to Calais early that evening, and this time the Hurricanes of 505 Squadron were ready for them. The squadron had managed to put up two and a half sections — in other words eight Hurricanes. They were stepped up over the port between fifteen and twenty thousand feet, with Hillier’s Red Section at the lowest level. Next came Yellow Section, led by Rogerson, and right on top were the two fighters of Blue Section — Yeoman and Wynne-Williams. Yeoman’s hands smarted like hell and, deep down, he would have welcomed the chance to stay on the ground, but there had been no reserve pilot — and, he reflected, if Rogerson could put up with his injured leg, he, Yeoman, could tolerate a few scratches.
The Germans came out of the east, heading arrow-straight for Calais like menacing birds of prey. There were twenty-four of them; Junkers 87 Stukas, flying in three beautiful echelons at twelve thousand feet.
The Hurricane pilots searched the sky carefully. There appeared to be no fighter escort. It was too good to be
true. The British pilots had all the advantages, including height and sun.
Hillier’s voice crackled over the radio. ‘Squadron, Sections astern, attack!’ Yeoman saw Red and Yellow Sections go into a long, shallow dive towards the enemy, who were still some five miles away from Calais. A moment later he and Wynne-Williams followed suit, heading for the rearmost of the German echelons.
The three Hurricanes of Red Section fanned out, the pilots selecting their individual targets and attacking head-on. Yeoman saw Hillier open fire and a Stuka blow up with a terrific explosion, scattering burning wreckage. Another Stuka on its right faltered and dropped out of formation, crippled by the blast. Then there was no time to see anything else except his own target, the Stuka on the extreme left of the third echelon.
The pain in his hands was forgotten and a savage exultation welled up inside him as the Junkers leaped to meet him. The German’s yellow-painted spinner crept into his sight and his thumb jabbed down on the firing-button, loosing off a two-second burst that raked the enemy aircraft from nose to tail. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the long glasshouse cockpit shattering into fragments, and then he was streaking over the Stuka like a flash of lightning.
He pulled up hard and stall-turned, arrowing down to attack from astern. His Stuka, its pilot probably dead at the controls, was fluttering earthwards like a falling leaf. A second dive-bomber, Wynne-Williams’s victim, was also plunging down, spewing white flames.
Yeoman selected another target, a Stuka that was steep-turning ahead of him. He followed it in the turn, ignoring the tracer that arc’d towards him from its rear gunner. For the first time in air combat, with a shock that was naked and physical, he felt a burning, murderous anger against the men he was going to kill. He wanted to kill them, to strew their charred fragments over the French countryside. Bastards, he thought, and pressed the gun-button again, literally chopping the Stuka to pieces from a range of a hundred yards. Fire. For Chantal and little Etienne, lying bloodstained on a dusty French road. Fire. For Celine, the little girl who no longer had a mother. Fire. For the young man in the village who no longer had a wife. Bastards!
The rear gunner was dead, a bloodstained bundle sprawled over his gun. The Stuka was in shreds. Flames licked back from its engine. The front section of its canopy flew off and whirled away in the slipstream. The dive-bomber lost speed. Yeoman saw the pilot trying to struggle clear.
Yeoman throttled back. He raised the Hurricane’s nose a little. Then, quite deliberately, he blew the enemy pilot apart with a short, savage burst of fire.
The doomed Stuka curved over on its back and went down. Yeoman pulled away. He was sweating and trembling. The pain came back into his hands. Blood was soaking through the bandages.
He looked around. There seemed to be Hurricanes everywhere, buzzing like angry wasps on a window pane. Columns of smoke, like tombstones, marked the graves of a dozen Stukas. The remainder had dropped their bombs and fled, harried by more fighters. Yeoman was puzzled for a moment; there weren’t that many Hurricanes. Then he saw that the fighters were French Moranes, which had come up from the south at the last moment and hurled themselves into the fray.
It had been a massacre. When the pilots of 505 Squadron landed and counted the score, they found that they had destroyed eleven Stukas for certain. The French pilots had accounted for four more. No bombs had fallen on Calais. It was the last time that the hated dive-bombers would venture into defended air-space without strong fighter cover.
It was also 505 Squadron’s last combat while flying from the soil of France. That night, the pilots received orders to pack everything they could and fly their surviving Hurricanes to Manston the following morning. A Bristol Bombay transport arrived to ferry out the rest. The news was received with mixed feelings, which Callender summed up: ‘Why? Now when we feel we’re getting the upper hand? Why the hell don’t they send us more fighters? We can beat hell out of the Luftwaffe, we all know we can. If only we had more Hurricanes!’
There was one bright spot in the atmosphere of general gloom. Just after dark Henry turned up, still driving the Fordson tender. It was riddled with holes; he had been strafed for most of the way from Châlons. Henry was unscathed, but the signals corporal with him had a nasty shoulder wound and kept passing out. He was whipped off to hospital in Calais.
The squadron took off for Manston on schedule, leaving Calais-Marck deserted apart from a demolition team. They were to blow up the installations and fuel dump before embarking at the port.
That same day, General Guderian’s Panzer Corps reached the Channel coast at Abbeville and raced on for a further twenty miles up the coast, slicing through a British infantry brigade, before poising for an all-out assault on Boulogne and Calais. Farther north, in Flanders, the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force, its position no longer tenable, was already beginning its gallant fighting retreat towards the port of Dunkirk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The thing that Yeoman would always remember best about the squadron’s return to England was the cleanliness: the luxury of a hot bath, the crispness of clean sheets, the shedding of clothing which he had worn almost continuously for ten days. He slept for the best part of twenty-four hours; they all did, and they all awoke feeling terrible. It would take more than a few hours’ sleep, induced with the help of pills, to remove the tautness from their overstretched nerves.
Some of the AASF’s Hurricane squadrons, they learned, had remained in France, operating for as long as they could from bases south of the Somme, pitifully lacking in spare parts and replacement aircraft. From now on, cover for the retreating Allied forces would be provided exclusively by the home-based squadrons of RAF Fighter Command.
On 21 May, having turned over their surviving Hurricanes to the aircraft pool at Manston, the personnel of 505 Squadron entrained for Church Fenton, in Yorkshire, to rest and reform. A week later, up to full strength once more, they were on their way back to Kent, and the war. It had been a hectic seven days, and any hope Yeoman had entertained of visiting his father had been quickly dashed. He had managed to write, though, almost every night before he collapsed dog-tired into bed; at least the old man knew that he was safe.
During that week, events across the Channel moved inexorably towards their momentous climax. On 25 May Boulogne fell, and the next day the haggard defenders of Calais, starved of ammunition and supplies, bombed incessantly by Stukas, surrendered to the 10th Panzer Division and marched into captivity.
This time, the Stukas had come with an umbrella of Messerschmitts. Fighter Wing 66 was there, and for Joachim Richter the morning of 26 May was a memorable occasion; his first encounter with Spitfires. It had not been a pleasant experience.
It happened at nine o’clock, as wave after wave of dive-bombers pounded the Citadel Fortress, the last bastion in Calais. Sixty Messerschmitts were escorting them, stepped up to twenty thousand feet, glittering in the morning sun.
The 109s circled watchfully over the port as the Stukas peeled off, flight after flight plunging down towards their objective. Within minutes, a great pall of dust and smoke hung over the Citadel and the harbour. Underneath the holocaust, Allied ships continued their work of evacuation, trailing their arrow-heads of foam out to the sanctuary of the sea. From his vantage point high above, Richter saw a flight of Stukas dive on them, spearing down through the black blotches of the antiaircraft fire. A Junkers was hit and dissolved in an orange ball of flame, rolling slowly over and over until it was extinguished by the waves. The remainder pressed home their attack and a warship, probably a destroyer, disintegrated in a great, slow explosion. Richter watched in horrified fascination as a boiling mushroom of flame and smoke billowed upwards. Debris cascaded into the water in a spreading circle of white foam. When the smoke cleared, Richter saw that the warship had turned turtle. A moment later, it slid beneath the surface.
Suddenly, shouts of alarm echoed over the radio. Enemy fighters were coming in, speeding like arrows across the Channel. Richter’s f
light swung out over the coast, and a few moments later the young pilot spotted the enemy, flying at about fifteen thousand feet. As he watched, six of them broke away and streaked towards the dive-bombers; the other six climbed hard to take on the escorting Messerschmitts.
Richter had time to marvel at the courage of the British pilots, taking on such overwhelming odds without hesitation, before his flight went diving to meet the Spitfires head-on.
The Spitfires were fast, faster than either the Hurricanes or the Moranes he had encountered in action so far. Within seconds, they had swelled from tiny dots to full-size aircraft, converging on the Messerschmitts at a closing speed of over six hundred miles per hour, firing as they came. Richter flinched as a Spitfire loomed in his windshield, the leading edges of its wings lit up by the flashes of its eight machine-guns. He held his course grimly, returning the fire. There was a sudden almighty bang and the top left-hand corner of his armoured windscreen starred as a .303 bullet struck it.
Both pilots lost their nerve at the same instant and broke hard, fortunately in opposite directions. Richter kept on turning, craning his neck and swearing as he lost sight of the other aircraft. Another Spitfire flashed overhead, the roundels on its wings glaring like eyes. Yet another fleeted across his nose and he fired, missing hopelessly.
An aircraft fell past, staining the sky with a twisting spiral of smoke. Impossible to tell whether it was friend or foe.
He turned in the opposite direction and looked around. Suddenly, there was a flash and a bang as bullets hammered into the Emil’s port wing. The fighter shuddered. Before Richter had time to react, a shadow blotted out the sun. He looked up, startled, his heart lurching. A few feet above his face was the pale blue belly of a Spitfire, streaked with oil and grime. His attacker had made a critical mistake, misjudging the Messerschmitt’s speed and overshooting. Richter jerked up the nose of his fighter, loosing off a burst as the Spitfire passed him. He saw a flash as one of his shells found its mark in the enemy’s rear fuselage.
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