Mosquito: Menacing the Reich: Combat Action in the Twin-engine Wooden Wonder of World War II (45 page)

Les Bulmer reported:

The scene over France, had changed completely. Whereas before D-Day there had been almost total darkness, now there were lights everywhere and most of the Normandy towns burned for several nights. Navigation was much easier; you just flew from one fire to the next.

On 14/15 June Mosquitoes wreaked havoc on the continent and 2nd TAF Mosquito crews shot down eight enemy aircraft. On the night of 22/23 June Flight Lieutenant Mike Benn
DFC
was killed. He took off on his 31st Mosquito operation with his navigator, Flying Officer W.A. Roe, on a Night Ranger from Thorney Island in FB.VI G-George. On becoming airborne he found that his ASI (airspeed indicator) was not working and so he radioed Control that he had problems and was returning to base. Another Mosquito crew was able to formate with G-George and led them into the approach to ensure that they were at the right speed but Benn’s approach was such that he touched down too far down the runway. He overran the end of the runway and the Mosquito went over the low sea wall at the airfield boundary and bounced on the shingle strip. The undercarriage and wheels were torn off as they hit the barbed-wire fence entanglement beyond the shingle and the tail dropped when it hit the mud flat. The fuselage snapped completely off near the tail fin and the aircraft’s nose dropped and dug into the mud bringing the aircraft to a halt about 30 yards from the sea wall. Bill Roe survived but the sudden stop caused the armour plate behind the pilot’s seat to hurl itself forward and this broke Mike Benn’s back. They were in shallow water and Roe managed to keep Benn’s head above water and carried him some way back to the airfield before the ambulance finally found them. Benn died the following day in St Richard’s hospital, Chichester. The Squadron records stated, ‘Michael was a favourite of the Squadron and his death is a great shock to us all’.
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The 2nd TAF and Air Defence Great Britain (ADGB) destroyed at least 230 aircraft at night over the Channel, France, the Low Countries and Germany, June 1944–April 1945. Until suitable airstrips could be made ready, the Mosquito wings flew operations from Thorney Island and Lasham. Some spectacular pinpoint daylight operations against specific buildings were flown. On 14 July, Bastille Day, the Mosquitoes of 2nd TAF carried out a daylight low-level attack on a special target at Bonneuil Matours, near Poitiers. Crews were told that the raid was on a Gestapo barracks and was to punish those responsible for the murder of some British prisoners of war who had been clubbed to death with rifle butts in a nearby village square.
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The Mosquitoes’ target was a collection of six buildings inside a rectangle just 170 x 100ft, close to the village, which had to be avoided. The Mosquitoes took off in the late afternoon to hit the target at dusk, when the occupants of the barracks would be having dinner. There were eighteen aircraft with crews from 21, 464 and 487 Squadrons led by Group Captain Peter Wykeham-Barnes
DSO DFC
* and Flying Officer Chaplin. Wing Commander ‘Reggie’ W. Reynolds
DSO
*
DFC
led the four FB.VIs of 487 Squadron in shallow dives and dropped 9 tons of bombs on the barracks while the Germans were eating dinner. On 30 July the SAS learned that 2,000-3,000 Germans were massing for an anti-Maquis/SAS sweep and the majority were billeted in the Caserne des Dunes barracks at Poitiers. This resulted in a raid by twenty-four FB.VIs of 487 and 21 Squadrons escorted by Mustangs on 1 August. Meanwhile, the SAS learned that the survivors of the 158th Regiment were now in the Chateau de Fou, an SS police HQ south of Châtellerault. This and Chateau Maulny, a saboteur school was attacked by twenty-three FB.VIs of 107 and 305 Squadrons on Sunday 2 August. It is estimated that 80 per cent of the regiment were killed, so that unit paid dearly for its actions. That same day, 613 Squadron attacked a chateau in Normandy, which was used as a rest home for German submariners. It appeared that Sunday was chosen because on Saturday nights the Germans had a dance, which went on rather late. The FB.VIs attacked early in the morning, with rather devastating results. AVM Embry under the alias ‘Wing Commander Smith’ and the Station Commander, Group Captain Bower, took part.

In July Squadron Leader David F. Dennis
DSO DFC
became the CO of 21 Squadron. He had rejoined the squadron when the build-up to D-Day was in progress and on 29 July he flew his first operational night-sortie of his third tour. Having carried out an interdiction sortie in Southern Germany with his navigator Flying Officer Grantham his Mosquito was hit by flak, which put one engine out of action. The propeller refused to feather and only by maintaining full power on the other engine could he maintain flight, albeit in a slight descent. Arriving in darkness at the recently recaptured area around Caen in northern France he found an emergency landing strip and put the aircraft down without injury to himself or the navigator but the Mosquito was a write off. The next night he was back at Thorney Island carrying out night-flying training and at that time it was not unusual to carry out two 2 hour 30 minute operational sorties in one night.

No. 140 Squadron provided photo coverage throughout the winter of 1944-45, moving to France in September to keep in touch with the action.
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Flying Officer Arthur T. Kirk, a pilot in 140 Squadron, recalls:

At the end of July 1944, Sergeant Mike Pedder my navigator and I set off on our first trip over France. Our target was a stretch of country between Grand Courronne and Hautor. The excitement got to Mike a bit and he kept looking round behind. I said, “Look Mike, I’ve been on night-fighters and it’s no good you looking round behind. If there’s anything up our rear end, we’ll know about it soon enough!” It did the trick and we settled into the task. On our second op we photographed the road between Thury-Harcourt and Caen, as our troops were bogged down and needed information about opposing forces. The third trip was to the Falaise area, which was soon to be a scene of bloody carnage as German armour was caught and savaged by rocket-firing Typhoons and other fighter-bombers. We returned to find our cameras had obtained only three photographs instead of the dozen expected from each camera. It appeared that this had occurred on all of our sorties so far as, somehow, we had got the camera programming sequence wrong. After a sort-out, we did a lot better.

In August, sixty-seven of 140 Squadron’s long-range mapping sorties were at night. We carried out three night operations, two of them along the River Orne and another from Barentin to Pavilly, when we saw Rouen under the shellfire. Mike navigated using Gee, sometimes Rebecca, or even Oboe. We carried twelve flashes in the belly of the Mossie and as they were released, they exploded at the set height, operating the camera shutters by photo-electric cells. On a good op we got twenty-four pictures of troops, trucks, trains and armoured columns. Sometimes we’d be sent to photograph river crossings supposedly in use by the Wehrmacht and anything the Army wanted to know about movement in the area, or was considered important to the overall strategy, we photographed. We plotted our track to enter France unnoticed if possible, with Fecamp, on the coast, being a favourite landfall. The ‘natives’ didn’t seem to be too unfriendly there! Occasionally, jamming or on-board malfunctions would frustrate us and we had to rely on more basic techniques: dead reckoning, or map-reading, if conditions allowed. We were not the only aircraft inhabiting the night sky. Sometimes we would see Bomber Command unloading their deadly cargoes, from the target indicators, splashes of vivid reds, greens or yellows saturating the aiming points, followed by exploding bombs, flak and searchlights probing until they lit one or more of the bombers like a moth in a candle-glow. Once or twice we saw them pounced on all and sundry and, amid the flashing streams of tracer and billowing smoke, catching fire. We always looked for parachutes and hoped they all got out. On night reconnaissance we didn’t lose a crew, or have one injured, while I was with the unit, although aircraft did suffer damage through flak. The Mosquito was an elusive bird, even more so at night!
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In August seventy-seven enemy aircraft were destroyed in the air by the seven night-fighter and  fighter-bomber squadrons of 2nd TAF. On 18 August Fifteen FB.VI crews of 613 Squadron at Lasham led by Squadron Leader Charles Newman, carried out a daring low level attack on a school building at Egletons, 50 miles south-east of Limoges, believed to be in use as an SS troops barracks. Fourteen of the Mosquitoes located and bombed the target, scoring at least twenty direct hits and the target was almost completely destroyed. One Mosquito crewed by Flight Lieutenant House and Flying Officer Savill was hit in the starboard engine over the target area and failed to return but the crew survived and returned to the squadron just five days later.

On 25/26 August 138 Wing took part in all-out attacks on troop concentrations and vehicles in the Rouen area which were attempting to retreat across the Seine. Attacks continued on the night of 30 August against railways in the Saarbourg and Strassburg areas. Les Bulmer wrote:

August was a very busy month for 21 Squadron, we were out nearly every night and there was no time for Night Flying Tests. It was just a case of flying and sleeping when we could. This was the period of the breakout from the beachhead and encircling the Germans at Falaise. At night it was awe-inspiring to see the huge circle of gun flashes pouring fire into the Falaise Gap. Those that got out were caught by the Typhoons by day and us by night. We had a field day attacking transports. We harried the Germans in retreat. Sometimes it was sheer slaughter as we found roads jammed with enemy transport just waiting to be set on fire. Ed and I flew eighteen sorties that month, sometimes two in one night. On the 18th we took off at 00.10 for our thirty-ninth op and patrolled the Seine crossing and bridges over the River Risle. We bombed on the western approach of the bridge at Brionne and made two attacks with cannon. We were back at Thorney Island by 01.45. We refuelled and rearmed and were off again at 03.50 to patrol roads in the Lisi-Evreux area. We dropped a flare on the road northeast of Bernay but nothing was seen. We dropped another flare on the road south of Orbec and we could see transports burning but we did not attack. We bombed and strafed transport in the southern outskirts of Obec underneath someone else’s flare and landed again at 05.30. After debriefing and a meal, we snatched a few hours sleep before attending briefing for the next night’s raids. We were off at 23.10 that night and back at 01.10 on the 19th. Once again we refuelled and rearmed and were off at 04.15, returning at 05.50. So in less than thirty hours we had carried out four operations. Coming back over the Channel on the last one I must have dozed off because I awoke with a start when the aircraft gave a violent lurch. Ed had also fallen asleep and woke just in time to stop us spiralling into the sea.

On 26 August, the day after Paris was liberated; Les Bulmer and Ed McQuarrie had a change from beating up transport, as Bulmer explains:

By late August the main effort was concentrated in trying to stop the Germans retreating across the Seine. A lot of the crossing points had been knocked out but there still remained the railway bridge in Rouen the ‘heavies’ could have blanketed it with bombs but this would have caused many French casualties so 2 Group were called in to try a pinpoint attack. It had to be at night because the enemy was desperate to keep it open and it was well defended. Four aircraft, working in pairs, were allotted to the task. One of the pair would fly in at around 3,000ft and drop three flares using Gee for the other one, which would be waiting underneath. Meanwhile the other aircraft would stooge around at low level waiting for the bridge to be illuminated and then nip in and bomb it. Then the two would reverse roles. Mac and Flight Lieutenant Winder tossed for who should be the first to drop the flares and we won (or lost, depending on your point of view). Since we were carrying flares in the bomb bay, we could only carry two bombs each under the wings. Flight Lieutenant Swaine and another crew took off first. We, together with our partner Flight Lieutenant Winder, left at 22.35, thirty minutes or so later. On the way over to France Swaine called up on the R/T to say that it was pretty hot in the target area and that he’d been hit. He recommended that we abort. Ed and Winder had a brief conversation and decided to give it a whirl. I was more than happy to call it a day but I wasn’t consulted.

We went in at about 3,000ft. The enemy took a dislike to us at Cap d’Antifer as we crossed the coast, then we settled down for a straight run in to Rouen. I had my head stuck in the Gee set following a Gee line that should take us over the bridge from the north-west. Ed was concentrating on following my instructions to stay on the line and waiting for me to give him the order to drop the flares. Thus neither of us was aware of what was going on around us. This was just as well, because afterwards Winder said that he could see exactly where we were above him because of the flak that was following us in. Ignorance is a wonderful thing at times. You can’t weave when you are following a Gee line. The usual glow appeared beneath us as we let the flares go. But by the time we’d turned to check that we’d dropped them in the right place, two of them had been shot out and the third had its parachute damaged and was burning on the east bank of the river. We saw Winder go in to attack and since the flare was still illuminating the scene, we saw his bombs burst on the south-west end of the bridge. Mac stuck the nose down and we dived on the bridge before the flare burned itself out. We let go the bombs just as the flare went out so I couldn’t see the results. We then called up Winder to tell him that he needn’t bother to drop his flares. I think he was as relieved as we were to get the hell out of it as soon as possible. We never heard if we’d had any success. I rather doubt it. Dive bombing at night is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Still, I expect that the powers-that-be thought it worth a try and we were more or less expendable.

On 31 August, a huge petrol dump at Nomency near Nancy was destroyed by Mosquito fighter-bombers and twelve FB.VIs of 464 Squadron attacked a dozen petrol trains near Chagney from between 20 and 200ft and caused widespread destruction.