Mosquito Squadron (14 page)

Cautiously, they raised their heads. The Mosquito towards which Yeoman had been running was shattered and smoking. An instant later, flames burgeoned from it. Behind them, the little Morgan lay on its side, its silver metal torn by cannon shells.

They picked themselves up shakily as the snarl of engines receded in the distance.

‘Christ, boss,’ McManners gasped. ‘That was too bloody close for comfort!’

Yeoman fought to regain his breath. A waft of oily smoke caught at his throat, making him retch.

‘Thanks, Mac,’ he said. ‘I reckon you saved my skin.’ He looked around at the burning aircraft, ducking as ammunition began to explode with a series of vicious cracks. ‘Lord, what an awful bloody mess! It looks as though the Huns got clean away, too.’

McManners pointed towards the centre of the airfield, past the wrecked Mosquitos. ‘There’s one bastard that didn’t,’ he said. Shielding his eyes against the glare of the flames, Yeoman made out the shattered wreck of an aircraft some distance away. There was not much left except an angular tail fin, jutting up from a mound of twisted metal, but it was enough to identify the crashed machine as an FW 190.

‘Come on,’ said Yeoman, raising his voice above the crackling of the flames and the shrilling of bells as fire engines and ambulances converged on the scene of carnage, ‘let’s take a closer look at the damage. It looks as if we’ve taken some casualties, too.’

They made their way to where some airmen were clustered around an inert form on the ground, close to one of the wrecked Mosquitos. Two medical orderlies ran up with a stretcher, bent over the casualty and then lifted him gently.

Yeoman pushed his way through the group of airmen. ‘Come on, you lot,’ he snapped, ‘get weaving! There’s a lot to be done.’ Their faces were shocked, but his curt words had the desired effect and they dispersed quickly. Yeoman went forward and bent over the stretcher, felt his stomach turn sickeningly as he recognized the injured man. He glanced enquiringly at one of the orderlies, who shook his head slowly.

Warrant Officer Len Thomas opened his eyes, focused on Yeoman and smiled weakly. His lips moved, and the pilot bent forward to catch what he was trying to say.

‘Just … just like France, sir.’ He coughed, then suddenly stretched out a hand and clutched Yeoman’s arm with surprising strength. ‘My engines, sir,’ he pleaded. ‘Make them look after my engines.’ His voice trailed away. He made a last effort to say something else, then blood came from his mouth and the light went from his eyes.

Yeoman stood up, dully watching the orderlies take the stretcher away. Then he turned and strode off into the lurid night, towards the heart of the chaos, hoping that no one would notice the tears glistening in his eyes.

*

The cost had been high. Five of no. 380 Squadron’s Mosquitos had been totally destroyed — almost half the unit’s complement — and so had three of No. 373’s machines. In terms of human life, the cost had been six airmen killed and four wounded, one of them seriously. All of them were ground crew, who had been working on the aircraft at the time of the attack. The Germans had lost two Focke-Wulfs, one of which had crashed on the airfield and the other — intercepted purely by chance by one of the two 373 Squadron Mosquitos which had been in the air at the time — into the sea off Lowestoft. The remainder had got clean away.

Wing Commander Rothbury sat in his office and stared at a square of torn aluminium, salvaged from the crashed Focke-Wulf. There was a painted badge on it, partly blackened by fire, but still recognizable as a pair of slanting cat’s eyes, yellow against a dark blue background.

Rothbury looked in turn at Yeoman and Bowen, then at the Intelligence Officer, Flight Lieutenant Freddie Barnes. It was four days since the raid, and the three officers were still subdued from attending the funerals of Warrant Officer Thomas and the airmen who had died. They lay together now, side by side, in the cemetery of the little village church down the road, with the body of the dead Focke-Wulf pilot close by.

‘So, Freddie,’ said Rothbury.’

‘You believe you’ve got something?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Barnes gave his habitual nervous cough, blinking furiously behind his glasses.

‘The information came through from Air Ministry just a while ago. It’s believed that the insignia’ — he nodded towards the cat’s eyes — ‘belongs to a new special duties Luftwaffe fighter unit, Jagdgeschwader 301. We don’t have much on it, but we think it was formed last July or August for sort of freelance fighter operations. It moves about quite a lot, depending on where the action is.’

‘Hm.’ Rothbury removed his pipe. ‘That doesn’t tell us a lot, does it?’

‘Well, sir,’ Barnes continued, ‘there’s a little more. We think we know who the commanding officer is.’ He opened a folder and took out a photostat copy of a page from the Swiss aviation magazine
lnteravia
, handing it across the desk to the wing commander.

Rothbury looked down at the photograph of the enemy pilot, who wore an impressive number of decorations, and read the details out loud. The cutting was several months old.

‘Captain Joachim Richter. Well, he’s presumably had a bit of promotion since then. “Fighter hero returns from Sicily,”’ he read. ‘“Captain Joachim Richter, veteran of the campaigns in France, the Balkans and Russia, has been awarded the Knight’s Cross with Swords and Diamonds on his return to Germany after successfully completing a tour of operations in Sicily. According to the Luftwaffe High Command, Captain Richter has seventy-three victories to his credit, most of them scored on the Eastern Front. Captain Richter was reported to be a close friend of the legendary Major Werner Mölders, who was killed in an air accident in the winter of 1941.”’

Rothbury handed the cutting to Yeoman. ‘That’s all there is,’ he said, ‘but it’s enough. This chap sounds a pretty big fish, and one who knows his business. If he’s organizing a strong force of intruders for operations against our airfields, then we might well have a serious problem on our hands. What do you think, George?’

Yeoman made no reply. He was studying Richter’s photograph, totally absorbed. In a strange way, he had the uncanny feeling that he was looking into a mirror, that he was staring at a reflection of himself, in different uniform. Then the feeling passed as he took note of the obvious facial differences, and he handed the cutting on to Bowen.

Nevertheless, he could not shake off an odd sense of
déjà
vu
, as though somewhere, sometime, he had met this man face to face. But that, of course, was impossible.

‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that we ought to give Herr Richter, and Jagdgeschwader 301, a good deal of our time.’

Chapter Nine

The lone Mosquito droned high over northern france, heading deeper into enemy territory. Far below it stretched an unbroken sea of stratus, blotting out the darkened land.

‘We’re entering the patrol area now, skipper.’

At the controls, Clive Bowen smiled to himself. The tone of his navigator’s voice was decisive; Alan Wells was never in any doubt, even when navigating by dead reckoning with never a sight of the ground. The Rhine would be below their nose now, with their objective, Spayer airfield, on its west bank.

Bowen throttled back and took the mosquito down to five thousand feet, following the series of courses given to him by Wells, quartering the sky around the hidden aerodrome. Once, briefly, the clouds parted to reveal a beacon, flashing morse, and they caught a glimpse of approach lights before the dark curtain rolled together once more.

They had been on patrol for ten minutes when Wells’ crisp voice came over the intercom again. The navigator was glued to the dancing images on his cathode ray tubes, and now he tensed as a firm, clear echo manifested itself above the shimmering ground clutter.

‘Contact dead ahead, crossing port to starboard, two and a half miles.’

Bowen opened the throttles and increased speed to 280 mph, swinging the Mosquito round on to a heading of zero-eight-zero degrees, slowly narrowing the distance as Wells continued to issue instructions. The target, still invisible to the naked eye, lost height until it was just above the cloud tops and began to circle, its pilot obviously seeking a way down through the murk.

‘Target is heading north and climbing, skipper. Range half a mile. Steer three-three-zero.’

The enemy pilot had given up his attempt to land at Spayer and was now flying off in search of an alternative airfield. He kept on varying his height, sometimes dropping down to three thousand feet and then shooting up to six thousand.

‘He’s an inconsistent bastard, isn’t he?’ Bowen commented mildly.

‘He’s dead ahead now,’ Wells said. ‘Six hundred yards.’

Bowen peered through the windshield into the darkness. ‘Can’t see the bugger,’ he muttered, his voice exasperated.

‘Still at six hundred yards, dead ahead.’

Bowen took the Mosquito down a couple of hundred feet. The target was now only three hundred yards away, above and slightly to port. The pilot made a conscious effort to relax, to let his eyes rove across the patch of sky ahead without staring.

Then, suddenly, he had it. It was nothing more than a darker patch against the night sky, but to Bowen’s trained eye it was unmistakably an aircraft. He would not lose it now. He opened the throttles slightly to close the range still further, and pressed the R/T button.

‘Bogey, bogey, waggle your wings.’ He made the call continuously as the distance between the two aircraft decreased. The radio was tuned to a frequency known as Command Guard; in theory, Bowen’s call should be picked up by any RAF aircraft within radio range. As an aid to identification, and as an insurance against being shot down by a friendly fighter, they would rock their wings several times.

The wings of the aircraft ahead, now clearly visible, stayed level. Wells, abandoning his radar set for the moment, had seen it too, and was checking off its characteristics out loud.

‘Monoplane … twin engines … single fin and rudder He exploded in sudden fury. ‘Oh, shit, skipper! It’s another Mossie!’

Bowen was afraid that his navigator was right, but he wanted to make absolutely certain. The range narrowed to less than one hundred yards, and what he saw tended only to confirm his navigator’s suspicions. The target aircraft’s engines were set well forward, their spinners protruding some distance ahead of a fairly short nose, just like a Mosquito’s.

Brilliant flashes split the darkness, and twin trails of tracer lanced towards him. Frantically, he kicked the rudder and shoved the stick over to one side. The Mossie swerved violently and the glowing tracers streaked past its starboard wingtip.

No Mosquito had rearward-firing guns.

‘Okay, skipper, I’ve still got him. Left, ten degrees off the nose, descending.’

Bowen pulled the Mosquito round and quickly picked up the other aircraft again. It was in a shallow dive, heading for the cloud cover. More tracer spat at him; he ignored it and pressed the gun button as the shadowy target came into his sights. The Mosquito’s four cannon opened up with a terrific roar, their recoil pounding up through the cockpit floor and making the crew’s feet ache. Bowen kept his thumb on the button and saw his shells strike home, sparkling on the target’s dark silhouette.

Flames streamed back from both its engines, lighting up the black cross on the fuselage. Flaming debris whirled back past the Mosquito’s cockpit. The enemy aircraft plummeted into the cloud, and a few moments later Bowen and Wells caught sight of a flash below them, bright enough to penetrate the murk.

Bowen glanced at his fuel gauges, and asked Wells to give him a course for home.

‘That sod nearly had us fooled, Alan,’ he said. ‘We’d better make a point of telling the lads to brush up on their aircraft recognition.’

‘What was it?’ Wells asked.

‘Messerschmitt 410. The bastards have two machine-guns in rearward-firing barbettes on the fuselage sides as well as four cannon in the nose. That one might easily have had us nailed, instead of the other way round.’

They landed at Burningham an hour later and, after shedding their flying clothing and making out their combat reports, made straight for the mess bar. It was packed with officers from both squadrons, and a silence fell as they walked in. They stopped, puzzled, and looked around.

‘What’s going on?’ Bowen asked.

George Yeoman came forward from the crowd at the bar, grinning. He had a bottle of whiskey in each hand.

‘Congratulations, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’ve been saving these for a special occasion, and this is it. As of two hours ago, the Burningham Wing is now officially part of No. 100 Group, and you’ve just scored our first victory.’

The crowd had formed a tight ring around the two men, and Bowen sensed that some fun and games were in the offing. A spontaneous party was brewing up, and it was just what they all needed, for the disaster of three weeks earlier was still fresh in their minds.

‘Freddie,’ Yeoman said to the Intelligence Officer, ‘a tankard, if you please.’ Barnes produced one, and Yeoman filled it with the spirit. He handed it to Bowen.

‘But I don’t drink whiskey,’ Bowen complained. Yeoman grinned at him evilly.

‘Oh, you will, dear boy,’ he said. ‘You will.’

*

No. 100 Group, RAF, came into being on 8 November 1943. Its motto was ‘Confound and Destroy’, which admirably summed up its role of bomber support. From now on, every big bombing attack on Germany would be accompanied by four-engined aircraft of 100 Group — Halifaxes, Stirlings or Flying Fortresses, a small number of which had been acquired from the Americans — fitted with electronic jamming equipment designed to sow confusion among the enemy radars.

At the same time, Mosquito night fighters would range far and wide over occupied Europe, guarding the flanks of the bomber streams and loitering in the vicinity of the radio beacons over which the enemy fighters assembled. Operating singly, they would also strike hard and fast at the Luftwaffe’s airfields, howling down out of the darkness like banshees. The attentions of the prowling Mosquitos made enemy night fighter operations a nightmare, for no airfield in Germany or the occupied territories was safe from these sudden lightning attacks.

The only squadron within the expanding framework of No. 100 Group which was not earmarked for night operations was No. 380. Instead, beginning early in November, the squadron — once again up to full strength after the disaster of 14 October — embarked on a series of fast low-level operations, known as Day Rangers, against targets in France and the Low Countries. None of these sorties were flown east of the Rhine, but the targets attacked were often heavily defended and two Mosquitos were lost in the space of a fortnight. The first casualty was Sergeant Keen, who was trapped by Messerschmitt 109s during a sortie along the west bank of the Rhine in search of likely targets and shot down; he and his navigator were both killed. Then, a few days later, Flying Officer Collins, O’Grady’s replacement, apparently blew himself up in the explosion of his own bombs during an attack on a radar station at Vannes. The theory was that the bombs’ delayed-action fuses had failed to work.

The sortie rate was high, but Yeoman sensed a growing air of discontent among his crews. It was understandable, for they had reached a high level of efficiency in their primary role of bomber support and now they were being frittered away, wastefully it seemed, in pin-prick attacks that could just as easily have been carried out by the tactical Mosquitos of No. 2 Group.

The view was shared by Yeoman himself, although he remained silent and, by his own example, tried to encourage his men to get on with the job without question. Privately, he could not help but question the wisdom of his superiors.

Yeoman, however, was not in possession of all the facts. Had the Squadron been employed in long-range attacks against enemy airfields during this period, its loss rate would undoubtedly have been far higher, and this was something the planners in a certain and very secret section of the Air Ministry wished to avoid. Unknown to Yeoman and his crews, events in the air war over Europe were about to take a dramatic new turn — one which might throw the growing Allied air superiority into serious jeopardy. No. 380 Squadron was, in fact, being held in reserve for a very special operation — one whose outcome might mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of British and American airmen.

*

‘I cannot emphasize too strongly, gentlemen, that what you are about to see has the highest security classification. No word of it must ever be uttered outside this room.’

Yeoman and Rothbury nodded. They were seated in an underground room in Whitehall, faced by a civilian whose name, they did not know. Apart from the chairs on which they sat, a film projector and a small screen, the green-walled room was completely barren.

The civilian took position behind the Bell and Howell projector and switched it on, at the same time reaching out with his other hand to turn off the room’s solitary electric bulb. The projector began to whirr loudly and the three men fixed their eyes on the screen as the first frames danced over it.

They were looking out over an airfield, along the length of a runway. A sleek, twin-engined aircraft raced towards them and pulled up over the camera, leaving twin trails of black smoke. The camera followed it as it dwindled to a distant speck, then it turned and came for a low run across the field, a streak of fluid movement that set Yeoman’s pulses racing with excitement. Beside him, Rothbury gave a startled exclamation, and with good reason.

The mysterious aircraft had no propellers.

It was coming in to land now, and Yeoman saw that it had a nosewheel undercarriage, similar to the American Lockheed Lightning. It touched down effortlessly and the two RAF men got a good look at it as it taxied clear of the runway. The fuselage was long and slender, terminating in a single fin with the tailplane set high upon it. The two engine nacelles were sleek, too, although to the eyes of Yeoman and Rothbury they looked somewhat bizarre because of the total absence of spinners and propeller blades. The machine, which appeared to be a single-seater — Yeoman noted professionally that the cockpit was set well forward on the nose, giving good visibility — was camouflaged and bore RAF markings, with the letter ‘P’ inside a circle on the rear fuselage.

The brief film came to an end and a series of numbers flashed across the screen. The civilian turned on the light again. He was a relatively young man, dapper and upright, with a crispness of voice that betrayed a military background. He also appeared to know what he was talking about scientifically.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘there you have it. The prototype of Britain’s first operational reaction fighter.’

‘A jet aircraft,’ Yeoman commented, his pulse still racing with the excitement of what he had just seen.

The civilian gave a little smile. That’s the popular name for the concept,’ he said, ‘but personally I don’t think it will ever catch on. Reaction aircraft sounds so much more proper, don’t you think? Anyhow, the aircraft has been designed by Gloster’s and represents a considerable advance over any fighter we have in service at the moment. It has been allocated the provisional name of “Meteor”.’

‘When will it be in squadron service?’ The question came from Wing Commander Rothbury.

The civilian frowned. ‘Not much before the middle of 1944,’ he said, ‘and that is assuming that the flight test programme runs to schedule. That’s the trouble, you see; although we were the first to develop successful reaction engines, we think that the Germans have stolen a march on us in the development of operational aircraft. Would you be good enough to come with me?’

He led the way into an adjoining room. This one was much better furnished, with the rows of leather seats facing a large built-in screen. There were maps around the walls, some of them covered by drapes. Another projector stood in the middle of the room, just behind the seats. ‘Please sit down again, gentlemen,’ the civilian instructed them. ‘I am going to show you some photographs.’