Mosquito Squadron (13 page)

Once again, Yeoman was on the receiving end of O’Grady’s pathetic, pleading look. ‘What’s going to happen to me, sir?’ the man asked again. ‘I won’t be taken off operations, will I?’

‘That’s not just for me to decide, O’Grady. However, I do know that you need a rest. I’m going to leave you now, so I want you just to lie there and take things easy for a while.’

Now that he knew O’Grady’s full story, he felt a certain compassion for him. The man had clearly been on the verge of cracking up for some time, and to carry on under those circumstances must have required a considerable amount of courage. O’Grady was no coward, and it needed someone to tell him so. Nevertheless, the man’s operational flying days were over.

‘Sir!’ O’Grady called out suddenly, as Yeoman went to the door. The squadron commander turned towards him.

‘My mother won’t have to know about this, will she? I mean, it would just about finish her. She only wanted me to do well — to make a name for myself.’

Yeoman had taken the trouble to look up O’Grady’s personal file in considerable detail, and to make discreet inquiries about the man as soon as he had realized that O’Grady was plagued by some deep-rooted internal problem. He knew that his mother was a widow, eking out a living in a little corner shop in some Liverpool back street. She must have been terribly proud of her son, a commissioned officer.

‘No,’ Yeoman said. ‘Don’t worry about that. You’ll be all right in a day or two; there’s no need for anyone to inform your next of kin.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘If that bullet had gone a quarter of an inch the other way we’d have had to, though. So don’t try anything as stupid as that again.’

O’Grady shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t. Thank you, sir. Thanks a lot.’

Yeoman closed the door behind him and leaned against it for a moment, sighing. Life as a squadron commander seemed full of complexities, hardly any of them to do with operational flying. Still, he thought philosophically, that’s what I’m paid for. He shrugged his shoulders and went in search of the MO.

Fraser looked quizzically at Yeoman as the latter entered his office.

‘Well, George,’ he said, ‘what do you think, an LMF case?’ Yeoman shook his head. Lack of moral fibre, the rather cruel expression used at the time to describe aircrew whose nervous state no longer permitted them to fly operationally, did not fit O’Grady’s particular case.

‘No, Doc, in a strange sort of way he’s got plenty of guts. He doesn’t want to be taken off operations; quite the contrary. In fact, deep down inside him the poor bugger wants to get himself killed.’ Briefly, he outlined O’Grady’s story.

Fraser sucked at the stem of his unlit pipe, nodding slowly. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll arrange for him to have the full works — psychiatric treatment, the lot. I’ll keep him here for a few days, though, before having him moved. He sounds an interesting case, and I’ve often fancied myself as something of an amateur head-shrinker. I’d like to try out a few ideas of my own on him.’

‘God help him,’ Yeoman grinned, and left. Mentally, he ticked off the things he had to do. The Station Commander was away and would not be back until tomorrow, so until then matters rested very much in Yeoman’s own hands. There would have to be an enquiry, of course, but Yeoman was confident that Group Captain Davison would share his own point of view and not allow things to get out of hand. Nothing was worse for the morale of a unit, he thought, than an incident of this kind.

Yeoman suddenly swore fluently, not so much at O’Grady as at himself, for allowing the incident to happen. He should have concentrated more on O’Grady weeks ago, should have taken greater pains to lay bare the man’s trouble, and if necessary to have him removed from the unit.

George, he told himself angrily, you might be a reasonable pilot, but you’ve still got a hell of a lot to learn about command.

Chapter Eight

A fortnight later, as the tempo of air operations increased, the O’Grady incident had been virtually forgotten. The unfortunate man had been quietly spirited away from the airfield and a new pilot, Flying Officer Collins, posted in as a replacement. The two Burningham squadrons were now given Wing status and a Wing Commander arrived to take overall command, relieving Yeoman of some of the more onerous duties. The new man’s name was Rothbury, and Yeoman learned that he had pioneered a number of long-range routes across the more inaccessible parts of the British Empire before the war, flying Vickers Wellesley monoplanes. Later, in Blenheims, he had fought the Japanese in Burma during the long retreat back to the Indian frontier. The ribbons of the DSO and the DFC were evidence of his courage.

Rothbury brought with him an infectious enthusiasm which, added to the morale-building process already started by Yeoman, soon manifested itself in a growing success rate for the Burningham squadrons. The crews of No. 373, ranging far out over darkened Europe, scored their first kills against the enemy night fighters, while No. 380 began a series of intensive dawn and dusk attacks on fighter airfields around the German defensive perimeter, from Cherbourg to Denmark. Remarkably, although some Mosquitos returned from these operations with varying degrees of damage, there were no losses during this period.

The situation, however, was not to last.

*

The pilots of Fighter Wing 301 had been waiting for just such an opportunity for a long time. Ever since the middle of August, Richter had been pressing his superiors for permission to use his small force of single-engined fighters on fast intruder operations against airfields in England. He had spent hours planning such operations with meticulous care, and had submitted one scheme after another only to have it rejected by higher authority.

The Führer, it seemed, had a long-standing aversion to intruder operations, and in fact had forbidden them altogether as long ago as the end of 1941. It had taken him eighteen months to relent, and even then intruder operations over the British Isles were mere pinpricks, reduced for the most part to sorties by single aircraft, usually Junkers 88s or Dornier 217s. Losses had been high of late, for the British were using new and improved airborne detection equipment, fitted to their latest Mosquito night fighters.

The solution, Richter was convinced, was to strike hard with a large force of intruders, say thirty or forty aircraft, at sunset. The force would be split into three waves: the first to attack a selected USAAF bomber base, the second an RAF heavy bomber airfield, and the third to strike at the nerve-centre of the RAF’S own intruder operations.

The latter was now known to Luftwaffe Intelligence. It was the airfield at Burningham, in Norfolk, and whatever happened, Richter was determined to lead an attack on it in person. At the beginning of October, therefore, Richter had submitted a revised plan to the Luftwaffe High Command via his immediate superiors, envisaging a strike against Burningham by Focke-Wulf l90s fitted with long-range tanks and probably operating from an advanced airfield in Holland. The choice of sunset for all three strikes was dictated by the need to catch as many British and American aircraft as possible on the ground; ideally, it would take place in the wake of an American daylight raid, which was almost certain to be followed by an RAF night attack. The prospect of catching a couple of squadrons of Lancasters or Halifaxes as they prepared to take off, with full loads of fuel and bombs, was a juicy one indeed.

To Richter’s astonishment, the plan had finally been returned with an ‘approved’ stamp on it, and he had lost no time in setting about organizing the operation. Obtaining approval for the temporary withdrawal of Fighter Wing 301 from defensive operations had proved another obstacle, but he had surmounted it in the end and had obtained authority to station the Wing’s three squadrons at Gilze Rijen, in Holland, to await a suitable moment.

It came on 14 October, at the end of a hectic week during which the Americans had attacked Bremen, Marienburg, Danzig and Münster. Now, on the fourteenth, they once again made the long haul to Schweinfurt with 280 bombers, and suffered appalling losses.

For Richter’s pilots, it was galling to have to remain on the ground, their fighters in specially-prepared camouflaged revetments round the airfield perimeter as an insurance against strafing Allied fighters, while other Luftwaffe units joined the battle all along the bombers’ route. Once again, as they would learn later, sixty heavy bombers fell to the fighters and the flak.

At last, just before five o’clock in the afternoon, Richter and twenty-six other pilots climbed into the cockpits of the Focke-Wulfs. A few minutes later, while half a dozen Messerschmitt 109s circled the airfield as a precaution against marauding enemy fighters, they roared down the runway in sections of three and raced at low level towards the Dutch coast, forming up into three compact groups of nine aircraft as they did so.

Ahead of them, the sun was an outsize red ball on the western horizon, cut in half by a thin line of cloud. They pointed their noses directly towards it. On either side, the chill autumnal sky, criss-crossed by the drifting remnants of a few vapour trails, merged with a steel-grey sea. Although the FW 190’s cockpit was warm and the big BMW 801 radial engine roared smoothly, Richter gave an involuntary shudder, a product of the single-engine fighter pilot’s inbred dislike of flying over long stretches of water.

The other 190s were packed around him like a shoal of blunt-nosed predatory fish. Richter noted with satisfaction that the fighters’ mottled grey-blue upper surfaces blended in nicely with the sea; it would take a keen-eyed enemy pilot to spot them from higher up.

Richter rocked his wings as the Norfolk coastline appeared ahead and the three groups of fighters spread out, ready to break off towards their assigned targets. Richter had deliberately picked three that were grouped fairly closely together, so that the Focke-Wulfs would be able to support each other, if necessary, on the way out. They carried no bombs, but their built-in armament of four 20-mm cannon and two 13-mm machine-guns should be sufficient to cause considerable damage to soft-skinned targets, and it was aircraft they sought rather than airfield installations.

They thundered over the coast between Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth, and immediately afterwards the nine aircraft led by Johnny Schumacher curved away to the south, following the railway line that would lead them to their objective, the American bomber base of Mulling worth, just inside Suffolk. Ninety seconds later the second group also broke away; their target was the RAF station at South Metterton and its adjacent satellite aerodrome, where three squadrons of Halifaxes were based.

Richter led his nine Focke-Wulfs straight on, spearing over roads, railways and water courses. He had studied maps of this area for so long that he knew the terrain by heart; his group of fighters was no more than half a mile off their intended track, and Burningham was less than three minutes away.

The three waves of fighters hit their respective targets with only seconds to spare between them. Johnny Schumacher’s formation was the first to attack, bearing down on Mullingworth at full throttle. Mullingworth was the home of two groups of B-24 Liberators, and as they swept down on the airfield the jubilant German pilots saw that several of the huge bombers were still in the circuit, orbiting the field like great dark crows in the gathering dusk, wheels down and navigation lights blazing as they awaited their turn to land.

Schumacher closed in behind the great bulk of a B-24 which was approaching the runway and opened fire from point-blank range, seeing his shells burst with vivid flashes on the wings and fuselage. The bomber started to bum almost immediately, and a moment later it dived into the ground just short of the runway and exploded in gouts of blazing fuel. Schumacher swept over the wreck, ruddering to left and right as he sprayed the airfield with fire, then pulled up in a steep climb and looked back for another target.

Below him, two more Liberators were in flames as the other pilots made their attacks. In less than half a minute, the whole airfield was lit up by the bombers’ funeral pyres. Another Liberator, harassed by a Focke-Wulf, managed to get down on the runway, but burst into flames as soon as its wheels touched and slewed on to the grass, spewing debris as its undercarriage collapsed.

The airfield defences were now adding to the confusion, spewing multicoloured tracers in all directions. As he circled the field, Schumacher noted with satisfaction one bomber, pulverized by American shells, plunging into the runway intersection. Arrowing down at high speed through the lurid smoke, he lined up with the squat control tower and fired a long burst into it, seeing two dark figures hurl themselves from the balcony as he swept past.

The ground fire was growing in intensity. He drew off to one side, counting the other Focke-Wulfs as they popped up out of the drifting smoke at the end of their second strafing run; they were all there, looking like orange bullets as their wings reflected the spreading fires below. He ordered them to set course for home and they sped away to the east, leaving behind the blazing wrecks of six Liberators.

The second wave of fighters, bearing down on South Metterton, enjoyed less good fortune, for the airfield was deserted. Unknown to the Germans, the Halifaxes had moved to northern Scotland that very morning to take part in an attack on enemy installations in Norway. Only two Halifaxes remained, together with a Lancaster which had landed there earlier in the day with engine trouble; all three were quickly knocked out, but one of the German pilots misjudged his strafing run in the dusk and flew straight into the ground, scattering pieces of himself and his aircraft in a long trail beside the main runway.

It was a different story at Burningham. Here, all but two of the Mosquitos — both of them 373 Squadron aircraft — were on the ground. All of 373’s crews with the exception of the missing pair — who had been scrambled only minutes earlier to intercept an unidentified aircraft to the north — were in the main briefing room, preparing for the night’s operations, while those of 380 Squadron were in their messes, tucking into bacon and eggs after a day of intensive flying. In the morning, at the request of Coastal Command, who were tied up elsewhere, they had attacked two big flak ships off the Schelde Estuary, a dangerous and hair-raising task which had been accomplished without loss, although Romilly had brought his aircraft back on one engine, and in the afternoon they had once again carried out daylight bomber support operations over Belgium. There had been a short dogfight in which Reed had destroyed a Messerschmitt 110, together with another probably destroyed, and two other pilots had each claimed a Messerschmitt 109 damaged.

Yeoman arrived late in the mess dining room and smiled at the pretty young WAAF who appeared at his elbow, bearing a tray of food. She picked up a plate and was about to set it down in front of him when there was a sudden snarl of aero-engines and the windows rattled to the bark of cannon-fire. The girl screamed and dropped the bacon and eggs in Yeoman’s lap. Swearing, he jumped to his feet, brushed her aside and made for the door, closely followed by the others.

Belatedly, the airfield sirens began to wail.

‘Quick,’ Yeoman yelled at McManners, who was pounding along at his elbow. ‘The car!’

They flung themselves into Yeoman’s Morgan and roared off down the winding road towards the hangars. Personnel were streaming towards the airfield from all sides, on foot or on whatever transport they could grab. There was no thought of taking to the air-raid shelters.

The unmistakable square-cut silhouette of a Focke-Wulf 190 flashed overhead, so low that they could make out the big black crosses under its wings, even in the dusk. It disappeared behind one of the hangars and they heard the hammering of its guns. A second Focke-Wulf appeared, rocketing up towards the sky, dodging tracer. A series of terrific thumps shook the airfield and a dark cloud of smoke billowed up, its source as yet invisible.

Yeoman kept his foot on the accelerator and careered round the corner of a hangar, dodging groups of running airmen as he headed straight for the dispersals. The noise was terrific, the Bofors guns that were sited round the field adding their clamour to the scream of the Focke-Wulfs’ engines and the clatter of their cannon. Shell splinters rattled on the hangar roofs and bounced lethally from the road surface.

Yeoman’s only thought was to try and reach his Mosquitos, to make a desperate effort to get at least some of them into the air before they were wiped out, and confront Burningham’s attackers. Then, as he rounded the hangars, the full enormity of the disaster hit him with stunning force.

At least four of 380 Squadron’s Mosquitos were total wrecks, with greedy flames eating into their wooden structures. From the lakes of fuel that surrounded them, dense columns of acrid smoke rose into the evening sky. Smoke also rose from the far side of the field, where 373 Squadron’s aircraft were parked.

The Morgan screeched to a stop and Yeoman leaped out, running like a madman towards his own aircraft, which still appeared to be undamaged. An instant later, McManners brought him down with a Rugby tackle that knocked all the wind from his body. He struggled to rise, but the flight commander held him down firmly.

The sound of thudding explosions was loud in his ears. There was a staccato cracking noise, all around, and the thunderclap roar of an engine. A Focke-Wulf swept over the two prone men, its slipstream plucking at them.