JET LAG! (28 page)

All of the other five pilots checked in and the improvised attack commenced.

The three pairs armed their missiles and guns, closed on the Nazi bombers at the rear of the formation and ripped them to pieces, launching AIM-9s and strafing at will.

Ten Do-17s were destroyed by AIM-9 missiles and a further eight shot down with guns.

Calls of ‘Fox-One’ and ‘Fox-Two’ came thick and fast as the German aircraft scattered and turned for home. It was a superb victory and probably saved a defenceless airfield from a severe battering. The Tornado pairs climbed away after each attack and broke cloud at around ten thousand feet. The lead ADVs were into the clear blue skies first and turned north for Middle Fleckney. The second pair appeared about a minute later and joined up with the aircraft ahead.

Unfortunately, it was not straightforward for the third pair. Unbeknownst to any of the Tornados, the German bombers had had top-cover in the form of a pair of Me 262s. They had been unable to pierce the cloud cover for a controlled descent, so had remained at ten thousand feet, skimming the top of the thick nimbostratus, waiting for an opportunity to join the fight. They were running short of fuel and were about to turn for home.

The Tornado pilot, Moose Davies and his navigator, Hoppy Harris didn’t even see the German jet. It was an incredible piece of devastatingly bad luck. As the Tornado climbed through the cloud and broke out into the clear air it flew straight into one of the Me 262s. The Tornado cockpit smashed into the fuselage of the other aircraft and both exploded in a vast ball of  flame. All three aircrew died instantly.

As the flaming wreckage tumbled in a thousand shattered pieces through the cloud and into the sea below, two very surprised and alarmed surviving crews - one German and one British - scanned and searched the skies for potential threats, and spotted each other simultaneously - about one thousand metres apart.

Luckily for both, neither wanted a fight and as the Me 262 turned east and dove into the cloud, the Tornado engaged reheat and zoomed to thirty thousand feet, calling the lead ADV with the shattering news.

‘Roger, Purple Four, return to base on your own. See you on the ground.’

Purple Four acknowledged and the surviving five Tornados made their sorry way home.

Todd, who was in Purple One, was horrified. This was now the third crew he'd lost and including the German colleague he'd been forced to shoot, there had been seven aircrew fatalities.

It also meant that yet another aircraft would not be returning to 1992.

***

As the aircraft recovered to Middle Fleckney, the landings didn’t go completely unnoticed. Of course, the military guard force saw the arrival of five weird looking aircraft – but this was so commonplace now, that they hardly gave them a second glance. They had been told that their short tour of duty in Norfolk would be over on the eighth of September, so most of them were just biding their time until they could go on leave and visit their families. They had little interest in the futuristic jets flying in and out on a daily basis. As far as they were concerned it was just another wartime development.

However, other prying eyes were lurking in the undergrowth around two miles due west of the landing strip. Admiral Canaris had deployed his spies to try and confirm the strange reports he had received, and on this morning their patience was rewarded.

The two people – a young man and woman – were lying under a thick bush in a small copse. Their cover story, should they be discovered, was that they were a courting couple meeting in secret for illicit sex. So they had been engaged in some mild hanky-panky, and as the five Tornados swept over them to land they gained the confirmation that their masters in Berlin required. They daren’t risk a photo, but were able to sketch a fair representation of the aeroplanes when they checked in with their controller.

Within ten minutes, they had readjusted their clothing and were cycling down a lane towards Downham Market. Later that evening the girl had returned to her lodgings, and the man was at home transmitting in code to German Abwehr HQ.

Admiral Canaris had his corroboration, but continued to withhold the intelligence from Goering. He would give it a few more days and perhaps, with any luck, the Luftwaffe attacks on Britain would falter and the invasion be delayed – or even cancelled – which, in his opinion, would be the best outcome for both sides in this stupid war.

47

High over the Baltic

13 August 1940

The 1992 force had been in sombre mood since they learned of the demise of Moose and Hoppy. They were two young first tourists and had been popular amongst groundcrew and aircrew alike. A short service was held that evening and everyone present shed a tear or two.

However, there was still a job to be done, so the following morning, one of the Recce Canberras launched and climbed to nearly fifty-thousand feet en-route to the Baltic States of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. All were occupied by the Nazis, and British sympathisers had passed information back to London concerning a number of small, very fast aircraft which had been observed in Lithuania, near the coast.

This intrigued the intelligence bods searching for the home base and/or the construction factory for the Me 262. Therefore, a Canberra mission was authorised and it was now cruising well above any German threat, and would be virtually invisible to the naked eye from the ground.

Their route took them over Copenhagen and Malmo as they headed for Vilnius in Lithuania. A map with photo runs had been drawn up in advance with twenty stretches of one hundred and fifty mile strips. However, this would require two sorties to complete the task, since the transit time each way was around an hour. The Canberra would have only two hours or so on station for the photography.

The first sortie went smoothly enough and the Canberra PR9 took vertical overlapping photographs of northern Lithuania from forty-thousand feet – this would allow for the PIs to create a series of stereo images, which would help to positively identify the target. They were actually observed from the ground, but there was nothing anyone could do about it, so the Recce jet headed west untroubled towards base, and landed at noon. The film was removed and new cassettes reloaded whilst the crew had lunch. At 1400 the Canberra took off for the afternoon sortie after it had been refuelled and serviced.

The transit was uneventful and the aeroplane was on station by 1515. At the same time the Photographic Interpreters were studying the morning film and some startling discoveries were being made.

At around 1730, the PR9 navigator switched off the vertical camera after the last run was complete, and the pilot began his slow climb to fifty-thousand feet for the journey home. Both men were very tired by now, having been awake for more than twelve hours. Normally, crews are not allowed to exceed strict criteria set for ‘crew duty times.’ However, bearing in mind the unique situation and the urgency of the task – the rules had gone out of the window in the past few weeks.

This was particularly disastrous for Al Norman and Steve Hicks. The other Recce Canberra was employed on similar duties over France and Germany, so there had been no chance of sparing both crews an exceedingly long and fatiguing day.

As the Canberra climbed through forty-five thousand feet, the starboard engine flamed out. One engine was more than enough to keep the aircraft flying and they could nurse it home if they followed the drills. However, a unique problem with the Canberra concerned the position of its engines on the wings. They were several feet outboard of the fuselage and when an engine failed, the aircraft tended to roll towards the dead side.

The standard drill, frequently practiced by crews, was to apply full opposite rudder to compensate for the roll, and thus keep the plane straight and level. There had been several incidents in the nineteen seventies of pilots allegedly applying the ‘wrong’ rudder, and causing the aircraft to roll violently and into a fatal spin. This had happened at RAF Wyton in 1976 and the Canberra spiralled in from one thousand feet and plummeted into a local housing estate – and the crew was killed.

Maybe it was because Al Norman was just tired, or even bored by the monotony of ten hours in the cockpit, that he made the same deadly mistake.

The aircraft went into an instantaneous and unrecoverable spin, and careered towards the ground at a very high rate of knots. The aircraft was about sixty miles north east of Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) – and still over the land. Even if he'd thought about it, there was absolutely no chance to steer the uncontrollable aircraft over the sea to avoid any wreckage falling into enemy hands.

As the aircraft plunged through twenty thousand feet, Al Norman called for his navigator to eject. Steve Hicks reached down and pulled the ejection seat handle. In a controlled and calm ejection he would have normally firstly blown the MDC – miniature detonation cord – which blew a hole in the aircraft skin above his seat in the nose. However, today he had no time for preparation and just pulled the bottom handle as hard as he could. Because the ejection control was set to front, he ejected first, but went crashing through the hatch. No-one has ever survived a PR9 front seat ejection – and Steve was no different. His neck was broken as he thrust through the hatch. His arms were shredded by the metal on both sides of the escape hole, and the pencils in his flying suit pockets were plunged deep into both of his arms.

None of this mattered to him as he floated serenely to the ground, where his body was subsequently recovered by local German peasants and immediately handed over to the local authorities, who could make little sense of his uniform and especially his 1992 identity tags. News filtered through to Berlin and eventually the body was transported to the capital for further examination. The discarded ejection seat was a complete mystery!

Al Norman suffered a similar fate. He survived the ejection reasonably well, crashing upwards through the gap in the canopy created by the automatic MDC. He drifted down towards the ground and to his horror, realised that he was going to land in the water to the north of Konigsberg. There was nothing he could do to prevent the inevitable and splashed heavily into the icy water – which was about five degrees centigrade.

The wind caught his parachute and began to drag him violently across the surface of the salty water. He tried to unclip the chute by turning the quick-release-handle, but he just didn’t have the strength. He was fifty years old and wasn’t wearing an immersion suit which would normally have been de rigeur over such cold waters. But because they had left 1992 Britain in summery July, cold weather clothing was not issued or worn.

Consequently, freezing cold water streamed into his mouth causing him to cough and choke. His fingers were quickly frozen by the cold Baltic water and he couldn’t muster the strength or dexterity to release the parachute. After about three hundred metres of skimming across the surface, Al passed out with exhaustion and span onto his stomach. That was the final cause of his death. He simply drowned.

When the local German Navy patrol boat recovered his body several hours later – he was frozen stiff.

His body was also transferred to Berlin and the Abwehr eventually worked out that they had a pilot and navigator from an unknown source. Admiral Canaris guessed who they might be and initiated a massive search for the aircraft involved. Konigsberg was ordered to mount a vast search operation, but to no avail. No-one had seen it crash or land and after three weeks of unsuccessful hunting, it was assumed that the mystery plane had crashed into the sea and was lost forever.

***

              In 1946, when Konigsberg and the surrounding area was gifted to the Soviets, huge numbers of Soviet citizens were re-located to the area in an attempt to Russian-ise the new district. The Russian language replaced German and much new housing was built to accommodate the incoming inhabitants. Most of the native German residents ended up in Siberia.

In 1949, whilst felling a pine forest to clear land for a factory, the wreck of an old wartime aeroplane was found. The local political officer investigated, and being an ex-pilot himself noticed the unfamiliar features of a remarkably well preserved aircraft.

Building work was immediately stopped, strict security mounted, and the Canberra PR9 was carefully excavated and transported to Moscow for forensic examination.

***

Todd Morrissey waited up all night for the overdue PR9 to arrive back at Middle Fleckney. At midnight he was forced to give up any remote hope that it might return.