Mosquito Squadron (5 page)

Richter, who had held his fighters on the ground until the very last moment and then once again assembled them over beacon ‘Erica’, made contact with the head of the bomber stream near the little town of Warendorf. It was pure luck that brought him to a target. Circling blindly into the darkness, a few thousand feet above the cloud layer, he suddenly sighted a broad pool of diffused light a few miles to the north and realized that he was looking at a cone of searchlights, shining on the cloud base, He headed for the spot at full throttle, and as he approached he saw flak start to come up, bursting in orange pricks of light just above the cloud. Then he saw something else: a dull red spot, crawling slowly across the sky a little to one side of the flak concentration.

Puzzled, he steered towards it, losing a few hundred feet of height until he was below the level of the curious object and skipping just above the cloud tops.

Whatever the thing was, he was overhauling it rapidly. It seemed to float towards him and he throttled back slightly. It appeared to be stationary now, which indicated that he was astern of it, and he kept pace with it for half a minute, striving to identify it.

Then, cursing himself for a fool, he realized in a flash what it was. He was looking at an aircraft, presumably an enemy bomber, with one engine on fire.

He opened the throttle again, narrowing the distance until he could see the dark shape of the other machine quite clearly. He saw, now, that the fire was in the fuselage, perhaps the bomb bay, and not an engine at all. It was a small conflagration, but it burned like a beacon in the night.

Closing in cautiously, keeping just below the other aircraft’s altitude, he made a positive identification. Twin engines mounted on long, slender wings, a deep fuselage with a single fin and rudder — characteristic recognition features of the Vickers Wellington.

At 150 metres Richter opened fire with cannon only, aiming carefully for the bomber’s port engine. He knew that the Wellington could take terrific punishment, and recalled the stories of fellow fighter pilots who had engaged this type of bomber in the early days of the war, when the British had sent Wellingtons to attack the north German ports in daylight. Wellingtons had been shot full of holes, their fuselages ripped and torn, and had still managed to get away. To make sure of a Wellington you had to shoot for the engines or the wings, where the vulnerable fuel tanks were housed.

Richter did not miss. The Messerschmitt shuddered with the recoil of its cannon and a series of bright flashes twinkled across the bomber’s wing. It immediately began to go down in a diving turn to the left as the pilot desperately tried to reach the sheltering cloud, but Richter fired again and this time his shells tore into the Wellington’s wing root. There was a vivid explosion and flames streamed back past the tail, lighting up the drab camouflage and the fuselage roundel, their glare reflected from the perspex of the rear gunner’s position.

Richter followed the stricken bomber down through the cloud, locating it again without difficulty as it twisted down in a tight spiral, burning fiercely. Searchlights locked on to it for a few seconds and the pilot saw a solitary parachute snap open and shine brightly in their beams before being swallowed up in the darkness.

The sudden burst of light was blinding; it was like being suspended in the middle of a goldfish bowl, with powerful torches shining in from all sides. Richter hastily pulled down his darkened goggles and climbed back through the cloud; it would be minutes before his night vision was restored. Anyway, there was no point in following the Wellington’s death throes; it was obviously finished.

He called up fighter control and was told that Hamm was under attack; other fighters had already reported combats over the town. Richter headed rapidly in that direction and dropped under the cloud once more; below him, the broad band of the River Lippe, which ran through the town from east to west, shone blood-red in the light of the fires already started by the British bombs.

Richter patrolled over and around Hamm for a further hour, searching in vain for another contact but, although he could see the flashes of exploding bombs from time to time, the aircraft that dropped them eluded him completely. In the end he gave up and returned to base as his fuel ran out, swearing with rage and frustration.

Most of the others were already back, including Johnny

Schumacher, who was kicking furniture around the flight hut in a fit of towering anger. Richter told him to calm down and asked him what was the matter.

‘I had a bomber,’ snarled Schumacher. ‘I had the bastard cold! I set him on fire with my first burst, but his rear gunner put out some very accurate return fire and I had to break off the first attack. He was lit up like a Christmas tree, so I had no trouble locating him again, and I was just getting nicely into position a few hundred metres astern to have another go when some son of a bitch cut across my nose and shot him down!’

‘Oh,’ said Richter. ‘Tough luck. Tell me, Johnny, did you identify the enemy aircraft?’

‘Yes. It was a Wellington.’

‘And did you identify the fighter that robbed you of your prize, so to speak?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Schumacher admitted, ‘more’s the pity, because I’d like to wring the pilot’s neck!’

‘That would be a great pity,’ grinned Richter. ‘The Luftwaffe is quite short of squadron commanders of my calibre.’

Schumacher gaped at him, realization beginning to dawn slowly. Richter nodded at him solemnly.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid so, Johnny. It was me. But honestly, I didn’t see you, and in any case the Wellington was done for. I’m giving you the credit for it. I just helped it on its way to perdition, as it were.’

The part about the Wellington being finished before Richter attacked it was not strictly true, but if Schumacher had not already set it on fire it was unlikely that Richter would have ever seen it. It was only fair, therefore, that the victory should be attributed to Schumacher.

Altogether, the pilots of No. 2 Squadron, Fighter Wing 301, had destroyed four of the enemy bombers which had attacked Hamm. It was a good start to the newly-formed unit’s operational career. However, thought Richter, something would have to be done to tighten up fighter co-ordination, and stronger measures would certainly have to be taken to deal with those blasted Mosquitos.

Later that morning, Richter drove into Hamm to visit a survivor of the raid, who had parachuted from the crippled Wellington and who was in hospital with broken ankles. He was a sergeant air gunner, a boy of eighteen, who looked up white-faced and frightened as the Luftwaffe officer stood beside his bed. Richter made an attempt to talk with him, but the boy shook his head and maintained a tight-lipped silence. In the end, the pilot gave up and left.

Outside the door of the ward, he bumped into the nursing sister in charge. Her eyes were glazed with fatigue; it had been a long night.

‘See that the boy is well treated, sister,’ Richter instructed.

The nurse looked at him and made no reply. The hospital was heavy with the acrid stench of smoke from the railway yards and the streets around them, still burning from the night’s attack. Civilian casualties had been heavy.

These fools, she thought, as she stared at Richter’s retreating back. These young fools who make war in their aeroplanes and their tanks and their ships, and then shake hands with one another afterwards as though it were all some kind of monstrous game. And always, without exception, it was the civilians who suffered most of all.

Chapter Four

It was an hour before sunrise, and the air was chilly. The lone cyclist shivered as he pedalled along the narrow road that ran behind the darkened hangars and wished heartily that he was back in the warmth of his bed. Then, mentally, he chastised himself for being selfish; his task would be over in less than an hour, and there would be time for more sleep before breakfast.

He halted outside a long Nissen hut and dismounted, letting his bicycle fall on its side on the grass. He entered the building and strode purposefully along a corridor, his footsteps echoing. At the far end of the corridor, a red-and-white notice on a door warned: NO ADMITTANCE TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

He paused at the door, listening for a moment to the murmur of voices beyond it, striving hard to control the nervousness he always felt at this point. He could never understand why he felt nervous; after all, the men on the other side of the door were not very much older than the boys he had been teaching at college only three years earlier. Perhaps that was part of the reason: that they were young and he was middle-aged, forming yet another barrier behind the greatest of all; that they had wings on their breasts, and he had none. He could not deny that they treated him as an equal and with great friendliness; every one of them called him by his first name. But he could never really belong to their circle, for they faced death and he did not, and every time he faced them on occasions like this he was conscious that the orders he carried might mean the brutal execution of some or all of them.

Their jocularity, their nonchalance, had also made him nervous, once; but not any more. In his three years of RAF service (three years that had cost him his home and his wife, for she had never forgiven him for volunteering) he had learned to laugh and joke with them, not as an equal, but as a benevolent uncle. He had also learned not to become too involved, personally, with any of them. In the beginning, during his time with a heavy bomber squadron, he had often acted as a kind of father confessor to some of the young aircrew who had passed through his life, and in a school-masterish sort of way had become very attached to them. But he had seen too many empty places at the Mess tables, and the inward misery had been too great.

Taking a deep breath, he turned the handle and opened the door, stepping into the room beyond, blinking owlishly behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles. There were a dozen men in the room, seated astride chairs or lounging on trestle tables; all of them were pilots, for this was the ritual known as the captain’s briefing. The navigators were elsewhere, undergoing their own briefing session, poring over their maps and charts. Later everyone would get together for a short main briefing, during which any last-minute points would be raised and the aircrews addressed by the station commander. It was a lengthy process, but it ensured that all relevant information was passed down the line and that every individual knew precisely what was expected of him.

The newcomer’s entry into the briefing room was greeted by a chorus of yells.

‘Hey, Freddie, what’s the gen?’

‘Another short run, I hope!’

‘Yeah, that’s right, Calais or somewhere nice like that.’

‘Come on, Freddie, give us the gen. What’s the target?’ Flight Lieutenant Freddie Barnes, No. 380 Squadron’s Intelligence officer, smiled faintly and crossed the room to the big wall map of western Europe that dominated the raised platform. Taking a coloured, round-headed pin from his pocket, he stuck it precisely in the middle of the formidable anti-aircraft defences of Berlin.

For a moment there was complete silence, then a roar of derision went up.

‘Sod off, Freddie! It’s too early in the morning for that sort of joke. Let’s have it straight — where are we really going?’

Barnes turned back to the map, removed the pin from Berlin and stuck in three more, all of them at locations in Holland close to the German border. Using lengths of red tape, wound around other strategically-placed pins, he traced the route the Mosquitos would take from Burningham to their objectives and back again. With considerable relief, the pilots saw that most of it was over the sea; the deepest penetration they would have to make into enemy territory was about seventy miles.

‘What sort of targets are they, Freddie?’ The speaker, who had a mild Scots accent, was a tall, lean flight lieutenant with thinning red hair. His name was Rory McManners, and he was one of 380 Squadron’s flight commanders. The other, a dark-haired and much younger Londoner named Tim Sloane, sat next to him. Both men had already completed two tours of operations, one on Blenheims and the other on Beaufighters.

‘Airfields,’ Barnes said. ‘They’re all airfields.’

‘
Merde
!’ The French oath cut sharply across the room, and Barnes peered at its source, a swarthy man with jet-black hair parted severely down the middle and glittering coals of eyes. He wore the dark blue uniform, with gold rank braid, of the Free French Air Force. Lieutenant Yves Romilly had flown Blenheims in North Africa, and had several times seen his squadron decimated in airfield attacks. He closed his eyes, rested his chin on his hands, and said no more.

More questions were hurled at Barnes, who held up both hands.

‘Now then, chaps,’ he protested, ‘you know I can’t tell you any more until the CO and the specialist officers arrive. You’ll just have to be patient.’

‘Oh, all right, Freddie,’ said Sloane. ‘However, I should point out to you, before anyone else comes in, that you are improperly dressed.’

Barnes, a fussy man when it came to appearance, instinctively felt to see if the knot in his tie and his tunic buttons were fastened properly. They were. Then, looking down, he flushed with sudden embarrassment. He had forgotten to remove his cycle clips.

‘Never mind, Freddie,’ Sloane grinned, ‘it might have been worse. Your flies might have been undone.’

During the next five minutes, the pilots and Barnes were joined by the various specialists — the meteorological, engineering, armaments and air traffic control officers — all of whom would have something to say in the course of the briefing. Everyone took a seat, and an air of expectancy settled over the briefing room as the hands of the wall clock moved towards 0400. Barnes noted with some surprise that, on this occasion, everyone had arrived early; normally, two or three aircrew burst into the room at the very last moment, panting and out of breath.

A few seconds before four o’clock, the door opened again and Group Captain Davison entered the room, followed by Yeoman. Everyone stood up, then sat down with a scraping of chairs as the Group Captain motioned to them to do so. He himself took a seat behind the assembled pilots, where he would remain an inconspicuous onlooker until the main briefing.

Yeoman stepped up on to the platform, placed his hat on a table and then stood facing the assembly, his hands behind his back, surveying the pilots for a second or two while he marshalled his thoughts.

‘Good morning, gentlemen. I am aware that you are all champing at the bit because of the lack of activity over the past few days.’

There were a few murmurs of assent. Since the squadron had carried out its first long-range operational mission early in August, dropping ‘Window’ in support of a night attack on Hamm by Bomber Command, operations had been badly disrupted by the weather. A few sorties had been flown by single aircraft, but these had involved patrols over the Channel or very short forays into enemy territory, the Mosquitos dropping down through low cloud and drizzle to shoot up targets of opportunity. So far, there had been no losses.

‘Well,’ Yeoman continued, ‘today is the one we’ve all been waiting for. This morning, we shall be carrying out our first big operation by daylight — an attack on three enemy fighter airfields in Holland.’

He picked up a billiard cue that served as a pointer and moved over to the wall map, indicating the target airfields one by one.

‘The first of them, and the one closest to the coast, is Eelde, five miles due south of Groningen. This will be attacked by McManners, Reed, Romilly and Olafsson. Further south, about forty miles inland’ — the pointer moved down the map — ‘is Hoogeveen, which will be attacked by Sloane, O’Grady, Keen and Lorrimer. It’s a fairly small grass field, right on the north-east outskirts of the neighbouring town, so you’ll have to be careful not to endanger any Dutch lives.’

The pointer moved still further down the map, stopping at the third pin which Barnes had inserted a few minutes earlier.

‘This is Twenthe, near Hengelo, and it’s the closest of the lot to the German border. I’ll look after that one, together with Miller, Saint and Telfer. It’s seventy miles inland.’

‘Thanks, boss,’ said a rueful voice from the audience. There was a ripple of laughter; the speaker was Pilot Officer Terry Saint, a slightly-built New Zealander who was one of the squadron’s chief comedians. Yeoman grinned at him.

‘All right, Terry, I’ve no doubt you’ll be taking a spare pair of underpants with you. Now, before we get down to technicalities, let’s have a word about what we are likely to expect. Over to you, Freddie.’

Barnes rose and cleared his throat self-consciously, consulting a report he held in his hand.

‘The last reconnaissance of this area,’ he said, ‘was carried out yesterday afternoon by a PRU Spitfire, so it’s as up to date as we can make it. The indications are, first of all, that there are now four squadrons of Messerschmitt 109s at Eelde, with two more at Hoogeveen, and that there are three squadrons of Focke-Wulf 190s at Twenthe. Now here’s the flak situation.’

He pinned up three large target photographs, one for each airfield, and pointed out the known anti-aircraft emplacements. Hoogeveen seemed to be relatively poorly defended, but the perimeters of the other two airfields were stiff with quadruple 20-mm quick-firing cannon, and these would trouble the low-flying Mosquitos far more than the heavier-calibre 37-mm weapons sited here and there. Yeoman noted, too, that the Germans had sited light-calibre flak batteries along the approaches to the runways, to protect their aircraft as they were coming in to land.

Barnes went on to give more information about the opposition the Mosquitos were likely to expect, then Yeoman resumed his briefing.

‘Our call-sign will be Spanner,’ he said. ‘My section will be Spanner Red, McManners’ Spanner Blue, and Sloane’s Spanner Green. We shall be taking off at five-minute intervals, starting at 0530: Spanner Red first, then Green, then Blue, and we shall set course independently. In this way, we should all arrive over our targets at about the same time.

‘It will be low-level all the way, and we shall fly parallel with the Frisian Islands until we are abeam Rottumerplaat, when we shall turn in over the Dutch coast. Absolute radio silence is essential, I need hardly tell you. If anyone has a problem, he should waggle his wings and return to base, still at low level, and switch to D Frequency, but for Christ’s sake don’t use it unless you are in really serious trouble.’

In front of him, the pilots were busily scribbling down relevant information on scraps of paper or the backs of their hands. The room was beginning to fill with cigarette smoke.

‘And remember this,’ Yeoman continued, ‘let’s have no heroics. There’ll be time for one run over the target, and no more. Try to begin your attack on the side of the airfield away from the hangars and installations, giving yourselves plenty of time to shoot up anything you see before dropping the two 500-pounders you’ll be carrying among the buildings. I’ll leave it to the individual section leaders to work out the finer points with their chaps once they’ve had a good look at the target photos, but I would recommend detouring slightly to the east in order to attack out of the sun, wherever possible.

‘If you are attacked, don’t stay to fight; open the taps and piss off as fast as you can out to sea.’

Yeoman concluded his briefing with more advice and information, then turned over the platform to the specialist officers. For once, the weather forecast was optimistic; there was mist over East Anglia, but it was expected to clear at about 0500 and there should be no complications on either the outward or return flights. Cloud over western Europe would be four-tenths cumulus at eight thousand feet, and was not expected to increase or lower until late afternoon.

Yeoman listened absently to the specialist briefings, since he already knew the details, and took the opportunity to observe the pilots covertly, noting their reactions. There was no sign of any apprehension on any of their faces, not even on that of Flying Officer O’Grady, the one pilot about whom Yeoman had harboured certain reservations. O’Grady was a shy, retiring man of twenty-three who came from Liverpool, and Yeoman had never seen him take part in any of the spontaneous mess parties that sprang up from time to time; walking and reading seemed to be his main pastimes. That was his affair, but nevertheless Yeoman liked to see his pilots involved with one another socially; he knew from experience that it made for better teamwork in the air. However, he could find no fault with O’Grady’s operational record; he had come to Mosquitos after a tour of operations on Westland Whirlwinds — fast, superb and highly manoeuvrable fighters cursed with twin Rolls-Royce Peregrine engines which had produced an incessant spate of troubles — and was the only pilot on the squadron who had flown long-range daylight escort missions over occupied Europe, before the RAF’s two Whirlwind squadrons had gone over to ground attack.