Mosquito Squadron (4 page)

‘If that is so,’ he went on, ‘the consequences may be very serious indeed. The present joint Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive is vital to the success of any future invasion of enemy-held territory, yet we cannot continue to suffer prohibitive losses. The Americans are being hurt badly, too, in their daylight operations over Germany; in one week last month they lost eighty-eight aircraft.’

‘Never did agree with daylight operations,’ muttered Davison. ‘Sheer bloody suicide.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, Hector,’ said Sampson wryly, and Davison flushed in sudden embarrassment.

‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said gruffly. ‘I forgot you know more about daylight bomber ops than most of us.’

‘Well,’ Sampson went on, ‘the point is the Americans think they can get away with it, and with strong fighter escort they probably can. Unfortunately, no fighter exists that can escort them all the way to the target and back, although there’s talk of one coming along in a few months’ time; meanwhile, their Thunderbolts and Lightnings can escort the bombers as far as the German border and our Spitfires can meet them on the way home, but that’s about all we can do.’

Oh, my God, thought Yeoman, he’s going to suggest that we use our Mosquitos as escort fighters.

He was wrong, and his eyes must have betrayed his thoughts, because Sampson smiled faintly and said: ‘Don’t worry, Yeoman, we’re not going to ask you to fly top cover for the Fortresses all the way to Berlin and back. Your task will be to provide bomber support of a different kind.’

He shifted his position and moved forward a few steps, standing with his hands clasped behind his back and looking down at the younger man.

‘Within the next few days,’ hs said, ‘No. 380 will be joined here at Burningham by a second Mosquito squadron. It has recently converted from Beaufighters and is now operating modified Mk VIs, equipped with the latest airborne interception radar.

‘Although still technically under the control of No. 2 Group, the two squadrons of the Burningham Wing will have a considerable degree of autonomy and will operate as intruders by day and night, ranging deep into enemy territory. Their targets, above all, will be the German Fighter Command and its principal airfields.’

The group captain looked long and hard at Yeoman, and was inwardly pleased by the enthusiasm which the pilot made no attempt to hide.

‘It will be dangerous and exacting work,’ he continued, ‘and now perhaps you have an inkling of why you were chosen for this job. We needed someone with a thorough knowledge of German fighter procedures and tactics; someone who had fought the enemy in every theatre. That someone was you. For the time being, you will be in overall command of the Wing.

‘I may as well tell you that a new Group is soon to be formed for the specific task of bomber support; that is to say intruder and countermeasures work against the enemy air defences. The Burningham Wing will pioneer the techniques which, we hope, will form the basis of a highly efficient and elite force — a force whose aim will be to confound and destroy.’

He stopped and looked at Group Captain Davison. ‘You know, Hector,’ he smiled, ‘that could be quite a nice motto for the new Group. I must put up the idea to someone. Yes, the words have a fine ring. “Confound and Destroy”.’

He turned back to Yeoman and said: ‘Well, that’s about it. Do you have any questions?’

Yeoman stood up, picking up his cap from the chair arm. ‘Just one, sir,’ he said. ‘When do we start?’

Chapter Three

‘Well, sir, how does it feel to be back in harness?’

Joachim Richter lowered the magazine he had been reading and looked up, startled by the sudden question, from his chair in a corner of the flight hut. He removed his smoked glasses, which all pilots on readiness for night operations wore, and massaged his eyes carefully with the tips of his fingers. He’d been getting headaches lately, possibly caused by eyestrain. He ought to do something about that.

He smiled at the speaker, Lieutenant Johnny Schumacher, who had fought alongside him over Malta a year earlier. Although glad to be away from the operations room at Stade, Richter’s posting to a completely strange unit instead of his old and familiar Fighter Wing 66 had come as a bitter disappointment, so it had been a welcome surprise when Schumacher had also turned up.

‘It feels good, Johnny. Very good indeed. I know a lot of you types don’t like this idea of flying single-engined fighters at night, but personally I don’t give a damn. Just give me a Gustav and some cannon and I’ll shoot Tommies off the moon, if I have to.’

Schumacher laughed. ‘As bloodthirsty as ever! Seriously, though, do you think this scheme is going to work?’

The scheme to which he referred had been dreamed up a couple of weeks earlier by a Major Hajo Hermann, a Luftwaffe lecturer in fighter tactics who was also a pilot of considerable repute. Lecturing during the day, as soon as evening arrived he would drive furiously to a nearby airfield and jump into the cockpit of a Focke-Wulfe 190, which was specially fitted with a 400-litre auxiliary tank to extend its endurance to two and a half hours. When an alert sounded and the probable target of the RAF night bombers was known, he would take off and roam the sky looking for trouble at heights of up to 30,000 feet, far above the bomber stream. He reasoned that wherever searchlights and flak appeared there must also be enemy bombers, and although his Focke-Wulf had no radar aids at all Hermann used his sharp eyesight to pick out his targets, silhouetted in the glare of Germany’s burning cities.

After a handful of pilots using the same tactics had shot down a dozen RAF heavy bombers during one of the raids on Hamburg, the Luftwaffe High Command had fallen in love with the idea and authorized night operations by single-engined day fighters on a large scale. The code-name for these operations was ‘Wild Boar’.

Richter sighed and flexed his arms. In common with the other eight or nine pilots in the room, he was wearing full flying kit and he felt hot and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he had just rebuked one young pilot for removing his flying-jacket; items of flying clothing could easily be mislaid in the commotion following an alert, and precious seconds wasted in searching for them.

‘I don’t know, Johnny,’ he said, in response to Schumacher’s question. ‘All I do know is that anything is worth a try. The bombers aren’t invincible, but we need more fighters.’

He lowered his voice a little, so that only Schumacher could hear. ‘I’ve heard there’s talk of turning a lot of our aircraft production over to building a new reprisal bomber, something so fast that the Tommies won’t be able to catch it, and then there’s all this talk about secret weapons. To my mind, it’s all bloody nonsense. We’ve got to concentrate all our resources on shooting down so many Tommies and Amis that they’ll think twice about venturing over the Fatherland in strength, by day or night.’

He got up suddenly. ‘I’m off outside for a breath of fresh air,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’

He made his way to the door, pausing to kick a stool from under the feet of a leather-jacketed pilot who was draped across an armchair, snoring gently. ‘Wake up, Lodz, you lazy sod,’ he snapped. ‘Stick your head out of the door and yell if anything happens.’

He went outside, followed by Schumacher, and stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing moodily into the dusk. A short distance away, darkly aggressive and silent, stood the fighters, a mixed bag of fifteen Messerschmitt 109Gs and Focke-Wulf 190s, the latter ungainly on their long, stalky undercarriages. They comprised the equipment of No. 2 Squadron, Fighter Wing 301, which Richter now commanded. Six of them were unserviceable, despite the trojan efforts of the squadron’s mechanics; they were patched-up, worn-out machines drawn from other units, and those units seemed to have been only too glad to get rid of them. Just a couple of hours earlier, Richter had been approached by Flight Sergeant Handke, the squadron’s senior engine fitter, who had told him despairingly that three of the aircraft would never be fit to fly. God only knew, Handke had said, how they got here in the first place without falling apart.

Although he had only known Handke for a few days, Richter had sensed at once that he was a good and experienced NCO who knew what he was talking about, so he had ordered him to ground the three suspect fighters and use them for spare parts. Such a move really needed the signature of a senior technical officer, but there wasn’t one, and anyway as far as Richter was concerned the proper channels could go to hell. Until replacement aircraft could be found, the cannibalized machines would help to keep the others airworthy.

‘Any more news on when we can expect the other squadrons to move in, sir?’ Schumacher asked. Two more ‘Wild Boar’ units had been scheduled to arrive at the airfield, a hastily-prepared strip a few miles from Munster, three days ago, but there had been a hold-up somewhere along the line. Richter shook his head.

‘No, thank heaven. When they do arrive it will be absolute chaos. Can you imagine it — a complete group operating out of this dump? Christ, they haven’t even finished digging the latrines yet.’

Schumacher grinned. ‘Yes, even Sicily was more civilized.’ His face suddenly became serious. ‘I’ll bet it isn’t now, though. That’s one battle we seem to have lost. The Yanks and Tommies will be in Italy in no time.’

Richter looked at him sharply. ‘Careful, Johnny. That would be called defeatist talk in most circles.’ He drew his forefinger across his throat in a meaningful gesture. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘I know what you mean. I think, however, that our opponents will find Italy a tough nut to crack. I hope they get bogged down in those damned mountains forever, and have to divert all their bombers there.’

He peered at his watch, and then at the sky. There was a high overcast against which it would be relatively easy to spot enemy aircraft. ‘If they come, that is,’ he remarked absentmindedly. ‘Well, we should know in another hour or so.’

He was right. Exactly seventy minutes later, the telephone in the flight hut — the direct line to Fighter Control — began its clamour and the pilots raced for their aircraft across the dew-heavy grass. Richter hurled himself into the cockpit and a mechanic did up his straps while he began the starting-up procedure. The big three-bladed propeller turned a few times and then the Daimler-Benz 605 engine burst into harsh life, causing the aircraft to throb with sudden vitality.

As he taxied towards the dimly-lit flarepath, Richter felt a sudden urge to sing. The Messerschmitt 109G-6 was the latest version of that famous fighter, and he was sitting behind more power than he had ever known. The DB-605D engine had a powerful supercharger and a methanol-water injection system which, when mixed with 100-octane fuel, boosted output to 1,800 hp. Flat out, the ‘Gustav-Six’ could do over 400 mph. It could also climb to nearly 42,000 feet, giving it plenty of room for manoeuvre in combat against American day bombers that sometimes operated at heights of 30,000 feet and more. Messerschmitt’s designers, by providing a longer tailwheel assembly and a slightly taller fin and rudder, had also managed to eliminate a tendency to swing savagely on take-off — a failing in earlier models of the 109 that had brought many an experienced pilot to grief.

Above all, Richter liked the G-6’s armament. There were two 20-mm cannon slung in underwing gondolas, two 13-mm machine-guns mounted in the nose — and, finally, firing through the centre of the airscrew spinner, a massive 30-mm Mk 108 cannon that could virtually tear the wing off a bomber with a single shell.

Richter pressed the radio transmit button on his control column and called up the airfield controller.

‘Starling, this is Elbe One. Taking off.’

‘Victor, Elbe One, when airborne change to Thrush on channel two.’

Richter acknowledged curtly and opened the throttle. A slight forward pressure on the stick brought the tail up as the Messerschmitt gathered speed. The lights of the fiarepath streamed by in a continuous blur and then he was airborne, bringing up his undercarriage and climbing hard into the darkness. Behind him, invisibly, the other Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs followed.

Richter changed the frequency selector on his VHF radio to channel two and contacted the fighter controller, code-named ‘Thrush’ in this particular sector.

‘Thrush, this is Elbe One. Do you have trade?’

The response came back instantly. ‘Victor, Elbe One, couriers now in Gertrud-Gertrud, Roland three-seven, orbit Erika, altitude Hanni two-nine.’

The controller was telling Richter that enemy aircraft were crossing the coast near Emden at 22,000 feet, and that he was instructed to circle at 25,000 feet over a radio beacon ten miles south of Lingen. Doing a rapid bit of mental calculation, the pilot reasoned that unless they changed course in the next few minutes, the enemy must be heading for Essen or one of its neighbouring towns in the Ruhr Valley.

At 18,000 feet Richter popped up through the cloud layer and found himself under a clear, velvet sky, spangled with brilliant stars. The moon had set, but the starlight alone was sufficient to illuminate the clouds; they stretched beneath him like a continuous white blanket, with a small peak jutting up here and there like the tip of a hidden mountain.

Richter continued to climb, levelling out at 25,000 feet, homing towards the radar beacon by the steady pulse of dots and dashes in his headphones. The cloud crawled slowly beneath him; he had a strange sense of being suspended in time and space.

When the tone in his headphones became continuous, telling him that he was directly over the beacon, he brought the Messerschmitt round in a wide circle and radioed the fighter controller again, asking if there was any further information. He was told that the incoming aircraft were now in sector Gertrud-Lore, course one-nine-zero, holding their height of 22,000 feet.

Richter frowned. Unless the controller had made a mistake, the raiders had come a long way in the last few minutes. They must be doing close on 300 mph — much too fast for Lancasters or Halifaxes.

Suddenly, Richter knew with grim certainty what was happening. Calling up the fighter controller once more, he asked for an estimate of the size of the raid. The reply came back straightaway:

‘Elbe One, this is Thrush. Am unable to comply. Radar is being jammed.’

Richter wasted no time. Switching to the common fighter frequency, to which the pilots remained tuned when not actually in contact with one or other of the control stations, he shouted:

‘All aircraft, all aircraft, this is Elbe One. Watch out for Mosquitos. I repeat, watch out for Mosquitos!’

In God’s name, he swore, why hadn’t the controllers woken up to what was happening? The speed of the targets should have alerted them. Those bloody infernal Mosquitos! There would be no more than a dozen of them, dashing across the north German coast at widely-spaced intervals, dropping their tinfoil bundles and creating as much confusion as possible.

Shooting down a Mosquito was a rare achievement, even in daylight, and by night Richter knew that it would be virtually impossible, with no radar aids to guide him to a likely target. It took him only a split second to reach a decision. Pressing the transmit button again, he called:

‘All Elbe aircraft, this is Elbe One. Return to base. I repeat, return to base.’

Swinging the Messerschmitt round fiercely, he pointed its nose down through the cloud and set course for the airfield. Visual navigation was not easy, for the blackout was complete and waterways showed up only faintly in the featureless dark, but when he judged that he was close to home he radioed the aerodrome controller and told him to light the flarepath. He picked it out moments later, a tiny cluster of pearls in the blackness ahead and slightly off to the left.

Richter touched down, followed by other fighters at short intervals, and taxied towards the flight hut, switching off his engine. Flight Sergeant Handke came running out and the pilot issued rapid orders, telling him to have the aircrafts’ fuel tanks topped up immediately. Then Richter sprinted into the hut and rang the duty controller, cutting short the beginning of a protest about the squadron’s early return to base.

‘To hell with that! You’ve got fighters stooging around up there, chasing a few blasted Mosquitos. Damn it, man, can’t you see what the Tommies are up to? There’s an attack on the way in, and they’ve timed it so that most of our aircraft will be on the ground refuelling when they arrive. For God’s sake, get somebody to recall them, now! Otherwise it’ll be too late.’

For most of them, it was. During the next hour, several more Mosquitos sped over German territory keeping the defences in a state of constant alert. Richter, and one or two other enterprising squadron commanders, kept their units on the ground, but many more fighters took off in a fruitless search for the elusive British intruders.

When the heavy bombers finally did come, there were more than two hundred of them, and their target was the important railway marshalling yards at Hamm. The bombers crossed the Dutch coast near the island of Ameland and then made a long feint into Germany, penetrating deeply in the direction of Bielefeld before swinging south-westwards towards their real target.