Flames over France (14 page)

The rest of the group, and most of the Polish Caudrons, were scattered on airfields all over the Paris region. Those that had survived.

Duval came to meet him as he climbed from the cockpit and dropped off the wing, flexing his arms and legs. The sergeant’s face was drawn.

“Where’s Morel?” Armstrong queried anxiously.

“I’m afraid he’s gone, sir,” Duval said quietly. “I saw him collide head-on with a Heinkel. There was no chance that he might have got out.”

“Poor devil.” Armstrong did not know what else to say; he was aware that Duval and Morel had been close friends. He fished in his tunic pocket for his pipe, which he had filled before take-off, and lit it, exhaling a cloud of pungent French
Jean
Bart
tobacco. “What’s happened to the colonel?”

“He is in the flight hut, sir, trying to find out what has become of the other pilots. He shot down two bombers. I also got one, by the way. A Dornier. Did you have any luck?”

Armstrong smiled and clapped the NCO on the shoulder. “Well done!” he said warmly, knowing that it was Duval’s first victory. “Yes, I got a couple too, a Heinkel and a 109. We would have knocked down more of them, too, if only we had received orders to take off in time. And perhaps poor Morel would still have been with us.”

Duval nodded, reddening, and turned away to hide the emotions that had clearly welled up inside him. Armstrong patted his shoulder again and left him to seek out Villeneuve. He found the colonel where Duval had said he would be, sitting beside a telephone. Villeneuve’s face brightened as Armstrong came in.

“You are like the cat with its nine lives, my friend. I was certain that this time, you had used them all up.” He gestured towards a chair and leaned back in his own, lighting a cigarette. “You know we have lost Sergeant Morel?” Armstrong nodded. “A great pity,” Villeneuve said. “A good pilot, and one with much potential. He failed to break off his attack in time. A split second of misjudgement, and
pouf
-gone. Extinguished like the flame of this match.”

“What about the others?” Armstrong asked.

“Fortunately, all safe. They either called up over the radio to say that they were landing elsewhere, or telephoned straight away. They know how I concern myself about them,” he added, smiling.

The smile did nothing to hide the weariness on Villeneuve’s face. He had aged ten years in less than a month.

“Have you heard anything of the Poles?” Armstrong wanted to know. Villeneuve nodded. “Ah, yes, the Poles. They took a look at the damage here and went off to land at Dreux and Brétigny. Very wise. Your friend Kalinski telephoned to say that they destroyed two Messerschmitt 109s for no loss to themselves. I told him to keep his aircraft and pilots where they were. It is possible that we may have to evacuate Le Bourget shortly.”

As the afternoon wore on, and reports of the day’s lighting came in, it became apparent that the Le Bourget squadrons had been lucky, possibly because the few lighter groups that had received the order to take off had absorbed the first shock of the enemy raid on Paris, which the Germans had code-named Operation Paula.

Among the units that had received the alert was
Groupe
de
Chasse
I/III, whose seventeen Dewoitine D.520s had been among the first to take off from their airfield at Meaux, a few miles from the capital. As they attacked a formation of enemy bombers, the French pilots were heavily engaged by the enemy fighter escort, and were soon fighting for their lives. In the space of five minutes two of them were shot down and killed and three more wounded, in return for which they could claim only one Me 109 destroyed and three bombers damaged.

Nevertheless, the arrival of the D.520s had averted another tragedy. A few minutes ahead of them, nine Morane 406s had taken off from Coulommiers with a formation of bombers already in sight. The fighter pilots made a head-on attack in the course of which they destroyed a Junkers 88 and an Me 109, but when they went after the formation for a second attack they found that their weary Moranes could not match the bombers’ speed. Then the Messerschmitts were upon them, and all the Morane pilots could do was to keep turning as tightly as possible and wait for an opportunity to disengage. It came when the German fighters broke off to deal with I/III’s D.520s.

Another Morane 406 unit was not so lucky. At 1315 a wave of Dornier 17s swept at low altitude over its airfield at Plessis, followed a few seconds later by another wave bombing from medium level. The four Moranes on readiness were knocked out even before they had begun to taxi; four more managed to take off among the exploding bombs and exchange a few ineffectual bursts of fire with a flight of Messerschmitts that raced across the field on a strafing run, but the Messerschmitts vanished in the haze and the Moranes, with no hope of catching them, landed again on their cratered base.

Everywhere, it was the same story of disaster. At 1320, while Villeneuve and the Poles were fighting over Paris, twenty-two Marcel Bloch MB 152 radial-engined fighters took off in the face of a wave of approaching bombers and climbed furiously to meet them in two waves, one of fourteen and one of eight, trying to manoeuvre into a suitable position to attack. But the German fighters were everywhere. Fifteen Me 109s trapped a flight of Blochs and shot all three of them down in as many minutes; only one pilot managed to bale out, badly burned. Two more MB 152s went down in flames shortly afterwards, destroyed in turn after shooting down an Me 109 near Senlis. Then the Messerschmitts pounced on the second wave of climbing fighters and destroyed three of them; again, only one pilot succeeded in baling out.

At about the same time a third Bloch group took off from Bretigny. The pilots had not even had time to strap themselves in. Now, hanging on their propellers, the nine fighters climbed flat out towards the wave of bombers and Messerschmitts strung out across the sky 12,000 feet higher up. Still climbing, they attacked a formation of thirty Heinkel bombers and shot down two of them before the German fighter escort intervened. One MB 152 pilot baled out of his blazing aircraft and two more had to make forced landings.

On the southern outskirts of Paris, a dozen Moranes tangled with a formation of bombers after taking off from their base in ones and twos and climbing through a terrific barrage of French anti-aircraft fire. They destroyed a Heinkel and three Me 110s, but three French pilots were shot down and killed.

At 1340, twenty-one Curtiss Hawks of GC I/5 took off from Saint-Dizier and quickly located a formation of Dornier 17s, heading north-east. The
Groupe
was just positioning itself for a stern attack when it was heavily engaged by fifty Me 109s and 110s. During a hectic fifteen-minute dogfight the French pilots destroyed one Do 17, two Me 109s and two Me 110s for the loss of one of their own number. A second Hawk pilot, wounded in the legs, made a forced landing.

The last of the German bombers and their escorts vanished into the thickening mist; the battle of Paris was over. In the course of the afternoon the French fighters had flown 243 sorties and destroyed twenty-six enemy aircraft. Seventeen French aircraft had been lost, with twelve pilots killed.

For the Germans, the results of Operation Paula had been disappointing. The concentrated attacks on thirteen airfields in the Paris area had resulted in the destruction of only sixteen aircraft on the ground, with a further seven damaged. Six runways had been temporarily put out of action, twenty-one vehicles destroyed and thirty-two personnel killed. All the bases attacked were serviceable again within forty-eight hours. The bombers had also attacked twenty-two railway stations and junctions; here, too, repairs were completed by dawn on 4 June. Fifteen factories were hit, but only three suffered more than minor damage.

But the bombs had taken their toll of civilian lives. Two hundred and fifty-four people had been killed, and over six hundred injured. The citizens of Paris screamed for reprisals. Why, they demanded to know, were French bombs not falling on Berlin?

In fact, plans were already being made for an attack on the German capital using the one and only French aircraft that was capable of getting there.

*

INTERLUDE: THE FLIGHT OFTHE
JULES
VERNE
, 7 JUNE 1940

Amid all the chaos and misery of almost continual retreat, there shone deeds of courage and dedication that were to be an inspiration to those who followed in later years, as individual Frenchmen fought their own battle against the floodtide that burst across their land. One such was
Commandant
Daillière, the central figure of one of the most astonishing air dramas of the war.

In October 1939, a month after the outbreak of hostilities, several French naval officers were summoned urgently to Paris to be briefed for a special mission. They had only been in uniform for a few weeks, having been called up with France’s reserve forces when war with Germany seemed inevitable. All had one thing in common: in peacetime, they had formed the crews of the giant Farman and Latecoere transport aircraft which plied the intercontinental air routes between France and her colonies.

In Paris, the officers learned that the French Admiralty had requisitioned a pair of Farman transports belonging to Air France, and that they were to fly these machines on long-range maritime patrol duties over the South Atlantic. Their primary mission was to locate and track the German warships
Admiral
Graf
Spec
and
Admiral
Scheer
, which were threatening the Allied trade routes. For this purpose, the aircraft were to be based in Brazil.

The two machines took off from Bordeaux on 8 October 1939 and headed south. After a non-stop flight of sixteen hours they reached Dakar in West Africa, where they refuelled in readiness for the next leg: the crossing of the Atlantic. Arriving in Brazil late on the eleventh, after fourteen and a half hours over the ocean, they began their operational task almost at once, ranging far out over the sea on search of the elusive warships. Since Brazil was neutral, the aircraft — which were still in Air France colours — carried out their reconnaissance flights under the guise of weather research. Their efforts, however, were in vain, and they were recalled to France in November. One of them skidded off the runway at Dakar and was completely wrecked, although the crew escaped unhurt.

Meanwhile, the French Admiralty had requisitioned three more Air France transports: new Farmans, all factory fresh and named after celebrated French science writers of the nineteenth century
Jules
Verne
,
Camille
Flammarion
and
Leverrier
. They were fitted with machine-guns, and in theory at least they could carry three tons of bombs over a range of 3,000 miles. The three aircraft were placed under the command of
Commandant
Daillière, an experienced long-range pilot who had led the transatlantic detachment, and various schemes were put forward for their use during the winter of 1939-40. One such was to employ them in laying magnetic mines in the Gulf of Bothnia, between Finland and Sweden, through which a high proportion of Germany’s vital iron ore traffic passed. In the event this scheme came to nothing, although the
Jules
Verne
was modified to carry bombs or mines on racks under the wings, the interior of the fuselage being almost entirely taken up by fuel tanks, with only a narrow catwalk from nose to tail. Neither of the other machines was modified in this way, and
Jules
Verne
consequently became the only Farman to carry out offensive operations.

Early in 1940, Daillière strongly advocated using the
Jules
Verne
to bomb targets in Germany, Berlin being at the top of his list. The French Admiralty, however, refused to agree to such a plan, not only because the bombing of enemy territory was not yet Allied policy, but because Daillière, with his vast experience, was considered too valuable a person to risk his life on a mission of this kind.

Nevertheless, Daillière and his crew carried out many practice bombing missions in the spring of 1940, and on 11 May, the day after the start of the German offensive in the west, they were briefed to carry out their first offensive sortie. At dusk, the
Jules
Verne
took off from its base at Lanveoc-Poulmic, on the Cherbourg peninsula, and flew to Aachen, where it dropped a few bombs in the vicinity of the railway station. On the way home it bombed the bridges at Maastricht, over which the German armoured divisions were pouring into the Low Countries. The damage caused in both attacks was negligible. The next mission, on the night of 14 May, was against road junctions on the island of Walcheren, where units of the French Seventh Army — which had advanced deep into Holland — were cut off and isolated.

The third and fourth missions, on 16 and 20 May, were once again flown against rail targets in Aachen. The second of these sorties was particularly exacting for the crew, for the night was brilliantly clear and the German defences were fully alerted. The
Jules
Verne
was flying at only 1,200 feet, following the main railway line that led towards its objective, Aachen station, when suddenly the aircraft was caught in a web of searchlights. The big machine was still uncamouflaged and her silver paintwork glittered in the intense light, making her a sitting target.