Mosquito Squadron (7 page)

Ungainly on their big, robust undercarriages, lacking all grace until they entered their rightful element, the four Mosquitos of Yeoman’s section waddled round the taxi track towards the end of Burningham’s solitary runway, stopping just short of it while the pilots carried out their take-off checks. Yeoman decided to use fifteen degrees of flap and trimmed the elevators slightly nose-heavy to compensate for it; he also trimmed the rudder a little to the right to cancel out the Mosquito’s slight tendency to swing in the opposite direction. The other checks were completed in seconds.

‘All set, Happy?’

‘Ready as I ever will be,’ grunted the navigator. ‘Course after take-off as zero-seven-zero degrees, magnetic.’

The light from the caravan was showing a steady green now, indicating permission to take off. Yeoman opened the throttles and turned on to the runway, aligning the Mosquito carefully with the centreline, then opened up to 3,000 rpm and let the aircraft have her head. Acceleration was fast, as always, and a light forward pressure on the control column was sufficient to bring the tail up. Then they were airborne, nosing up through the mist.

Yeoman raised the undercarriage and flaps and kept his hand firmly on the throttle levers until the needle on the airspeed indicator reached 200 mph. A patchwork of fields, roads and waterways, partially obscured by drifting patches of grey mist, swept by under the Mosquito’s wings. Reaching forward, he turned the black knob under the altimeter until the QNH — the barometric pressure setting that indicated the aircraft’s height above sea level — showed on the millibar scale. He would stay at just under two hundred feet for the time being, well clear of any obstacles on the flat East Anglian landscape, and then drop to a hundred feet over the sea.

The compass needle was steady on 070 degrees. The mist leaped at them in swathes, streaming over the cockpit canopy, above and below the wings. The slipstream from their propellers carved tunnels through it in their wake.

There was a hazy impression of rooftops, a confluence of roads, a cathedral spire, its base lost in the greyness.

‘Norwich,’ Hardy said. ‘Coast coming up in four minutes.’

‘Okay. Any sign of the others?’

Hardy craned his neck. ‘Yeah. There’s a Mossie about a hundred yards astern. It’s Miller, I think. Can’t see the others, though. Too murky.’

Yeoman was about to make a further comment when, suddenly, the cockpit was filled with blinding light. The intensity of it after the gloom made him gasp and he quickly lowered his smoked goggles, steadying the Mosquito on course with a rapid reflex action.

Ahead of them, steel-grey and limitless, stretched the sea, the horizon awash with sunlight. Behind them, stretching in a great arc along the curve of the coastline, the mist lay in low coils, and several thousand feet above it layers of broken cloud jutted out seawards. As Yeoman glanced back he saw the other three Mosquitos speeding in his wake and throttled back slightly, allowing them to catch up with him. Miller swung into position on his starboard quarter while Saint and Telfer took up station astern. As though held together by an invisible thread, the four Mosquitos dropped down to a hundred feet and streaked out over the waves towards the dangerous sky beyond the horizon.

Now that his eyes had grown accustomed to the light, Yeoman raised his goggles once more and glanced at his watch. It was now 0605 and they were making a ground speed of 220 mph, which meant that they would reach their turning-point off the Frisian Islands in thirty minutes, somewhat later than planned. Yeoman hoped the other two sections had got away all right.

Suddenly, the pilot leaned forward in his straps, peering intently at a smudge on the horizon. It was smoke, and as the Mosquito sped on he made out the distant outline of a ship, almost dead ahead. For a moment he toyed with the idea of changing course to avoid it, but then he reasoned that the vessel’s lookouts would probably have sighted the formation already, so he decided to stick to the present heading.

There were in fact two ships, one some distance beyond the other and a mile or two astern. As they crept into sharper focus from the morning haze, Yeoman said:

‘What do you make of ’em, Happy?’

Hardy shaded his eyes. The two ships had begun a sharp turn to starboard, pointing their bows towards the oncoming aircraft. ‘Destroyers, I think,’ the navigator said.

‘Ours or theirs?’

‘Hold on. I think they — yes, they’re ours all right.’

Simultaneously, both men saw the White Ensign of the Royal Navy fluttering over the stem of the nearer ship in the brief moments before the destroyer’s grey, rakish lines swept past on their port side. A light winked from its bridge.

‘They’re wishing us good luck, skipper,’ the navigator said. Yeoman waggled the Mosquito’s wings in acknowledgement and then the ships were gone, dropping away astern, creaming away towards their unknown destination.

‘At least their aircraft recognition’s on the ball,’ Yeoman said wryly. ‘The last time I was anywhere near one of our ships, it nearly shot me out of the sky.’

The minutes ticked by, and they saw no more ships. From time to time, however, their shadows fleeted over the evidence of war; a patch of oil or floating wreckage, and once an upturned lifeboat. Nearly four years of conflict had turned the North Sea into a rubbish tip, the last resting place of millions of pounds’ worth of scrap iron, the rusting carcasses of ships whose crumbling hulls cradled the bones of their crews. Aircraft, too, although they would be battered to pieces by the action of the tides far sooner, their fragments scattered and lost in the clinging mud.

Yeoman tore his mind away from morbid thoughts and checked his instruments, adjusting the throttle settings slightly. The other Mosquitos were still with him, their formation impeccable.

‘Enemy coast ahead, skipper.’

There was a chill in those words that no amount of training or operational experience would remove. They produced a momentary iciness in Yeoman’s spine, just as did that other term used in flying: the point of no return. They were lonely, fearful words, conjuring up realms of the unknown that might lie beyond them.

The long, straight coastline of Holland, hard to distinguish at first, rose slowly from the sea to the right of the Mosquito’s nose. To the north of it, dark, hazy blobs, with a scattering of cloud hanging over them, resolved themselves into the islands of Texel and Vlieland.

‘Nice work, skipper. Right on course.’

‘Thanks, Happy. Keep your eyes skinned.’

The four Mosquitos drummed on, still at a hundred feet and at times even lower. Safety lay in hugging the sea; the longer they escaped detection, the better their chances of survival. Away off their starboard wingtips, the long chain of Dutch islands crawled past with interminable slowness. Apart from what looked like a few fishing smacks, the sea was empty. So far, their luck was holding.

‘We’re abeam Terschelling now,’ Hardy said, ‘and that’s Ameland coming up. Turning point in six minutes.’

‘Roger. There’s an aircraft at two o’clock, high. Can you make out what it is?’

Hardy stared out of his side of the cockpit. A long way above, over towards the coast, an aircraft crawled across the blue backdrop of the sky, heading in the opposite direction. It quickly receded into the distance.

‘Twin-engined,’ the navigator commented. ‘Might have been a Junkers 88. Hard to tell at this distance. Anyway, he’s gone. I don’t think he could have spotted us.’

Yeoman rocked his wings in the pre-arranged signal that he was about to make a course alteration. Away to starboard, Flight Sergeant Miller rocked his own wings in acknowledgement and dropped back a little, giving the leader plenty of room.

‘Stand by, skipper,’ Hardy warned. ‘Thirty seconds. New course one-six-nine magnetic. Fifteen seconds … five …
now
!’

Yeoman brought the Mosquito round in a flat turn, still keeping as low as he dared, and levelled out on the new heading. The other three aircraft followed suit, jockeying into position again as they came out of the turn. Together, they roared over the drab, featureless strip of land that formed the narrow waist of Rottumerplaat Island and the pilots opened the throttles to full combat power as the mainland swept up to meet them.

Their shadows sped beside them as they leapfrogged over the dunes. Images flickered before Yeoman’s eyes; a scattering of red-roofed cottages, a railway line, an isolated cyclist, waving frantically as he saw the roundels on their wings. Miraculously, there was no flak.

It was 0639, and they were plunging deeper into Holland at a rate of four and a half miles every minute. Seventeen minutes to the target. There was no point in keeping radio silence now. Yeoman pressed the transmit button.

‘Spanner Red aircraft from Spanner Leader. Spread out a bit. Watch out for flak to starboard.’

Only three miles to their right lay Groningen, and beyond it was Eelde, which McManners’ section was scheduled to hit in a few minutes’ time. They would pass very close to the railway junction to the south of Groningen, where there were known to be anti-aircraft defences. Yet still there was nothing; no vicious strings of fire racing up to meet them, no steel bursting across the sky in their path. It was as if the whole of Holland was asleep, but they knew it could not last.

They streaked over the placid, sun-dappled waters of a broad lake. There was a solitary boat in the middle of it, and as they flashed past Yeoman had a clear impression of its occupant raising what looked like a shotgun to his shoulder, and of the puff of smoke as he fired.

‘Must be one of the enemy,’ he said, voicing his thoughts aloud over the intercom with a chuckle.

‘What?’ asked Hardy, who had not seen the incident.

‘Some bloke in a boat, blazing away at us with a shotgun.’

‘Cheeky bastard,’ the navigator grunted. ‘I hope he fell in.’

Strangely, Yeoman felt completely relaxed. If it had not been for the terrain, they might easily have been on a low-level training flight over England. His right hand, gripping the control column, was firm but not tense; his left rested lightly on the throttle levers. The Mosquito was handling like a dream.

Beside him, Hardy was map-reading calmly, checking off the landmarks as they came up in front of the nose. At length, he announced:

‘That’s Emmen up ahead, skipper. Stand by to turn on to one-eight-five. Ten minutes to target.’

They had been flying a dog-leg course to give the impression that they were heading into Germany. Their new heading would actually take them past Nieuw Amsterdam and across the spit of German territory that jutted into northern Holland for ten miles or so; once clear of it they would be in sight of Twenthe, perfectly placed for a straight-in, low-level attack from the north.

For the last few minutes they had been flying over wooded terrain, dotted here and there with small villages. Now, as they made their brief incursion into Germany, the landscape changed subtly, becoming bare and marshy. Groups of workmen, cutting peat, scattered in all directions as the Mosquitos howled a few feet above their heads.

Hardy consulted his map. ‘We’re coming back into Holland,’ he said. ‘That’s Ootmarsum, dead ahead. Ten miles to run.’

Quickly, Yeoman pulled the lever that opened the bomb doors and flicked the bomb selector switches on the instrument panel. The cannon and machine-guns were already armed. He pushed the throttles forward to combat rpm once more. A rapid glance around assured him that the other Mosquitos were properly positioned. He still couldn’t see the target, but he knew it must be there, a couple of miles past the railway line that crossed his track from right to left.

He eased the stick back slightly to clear a copse of tall trees, and in that same instant Twenthe airfield burst into his vision; the stark outlines of the hangars on the far side, a cluster of buildings adjacent to them, a pattern of runways. For a split second of time the whole tableau seemed to hang there, frozen in the windscreen; then it dissolved in a blur of light and speed as the Mosquito bore down upon it.

Yeoman was barely conscious of the storm of fire that came at them from all sides, of the web of multicoloured lights, the strings of glowing shells from the quadruple 20- mm anti-aircraft guns, that interlaced over the surface of the airfield in their path. He was only vaguely aware of several terrific flashes close to the cockpit, of the rattle of splinters against the Mosquito’s fuselage.

He held the aircraft straight and level, flying so low that the tips of the racing propellers almost clipped the grass, and headed straight towards one of the hangars. An aircraft, a Focke-Wulf 190, suddenly appeared in front of him, its tail up as it sped down the runway. He fifed, cannon and machine-guns together, and the 190 exploded in a gush of blazing fuel.

The Mosquito sped across the runway intersection, through the spreading ball of smoke and flame and debris, and Yeoman kept his thumb jammed down hard on the gun button. Ahead of the nose, the shells and bullets formed an avenue of exploding dust and earth.

A group of three Focke-Wulfs and a Junkers 88 stood outside the hangar. The shells danced over them; fragments whirled into the air and the Ju 88 collapsed on its belly.

The hangar loomed up hugely, its doors gaping wide. Beside Yeoman, Hardy pressed himself back into his seat, his face a frozen mask.