Mosquito: Menacing the Reich: Combat Action in the Twin-engine Wooden Wonder of World War II (35 page)

Jim Hoyle continues:

On 22 August Harold Corbin and Maurice Webb arrived back at Portreath where they had a remarkable story to tell. After Maurice and Harold had baled out in turn, separately, they were taken into safe custody by the French Resistance movement and within 24 hours they had a joyful reunion. They were soon passed over to members of the American Army, who by this time were advancing rapidly through Western France after breaking through the Falaise Gap. So, 8 days after being shot down, they were able to rejoin their squadron where they were quickly sent off on a well-deserved leave. Later Harold Corbin was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, a very rare honour, whilst Maurice Webb was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Medal.
¹⁹⁴

It took Bob Gennoe and ‘Benny’ Goodman a few weeks longer to get back and by this time 248 Squadron had moved up to Banff. Bob told me that after Doug and I had departed from the scene, he and Benny were able to paddle their dinghy out to a deserted lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde. Once they had managed to get inside, they found beds and blankets and as they were soaked to the skin they stripped off and went to bed for the night. The following morning some German soldiers arrived and took them back to a camp near Bordeaux as prisoners of war. After about a fortnight they, along with other prisoners, set off under escort and were told that they were to be taken to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. They had only marched a short distance however when they realised that their German guards had disappeared and that they had been left to their own devices. Within a few days they were picked up by the advancing American troops. I told Bob that I had been able to identify him when he stood on the wing waving to us. “Waving be buggered,” he responded, “We were telling you to get the hell out of it before you also got shot down. Your plane was surrounded by flak bursts.

As the Americans continued their advance in western France our days in Cornwall were numbered and on 17 September 1944 all the crews were transferred up to Banff on the Moray Firth coast in Northern Scotland. Portreath had been our home for seven eventful months and it was with a feeling of sadness that we set off on the long flight north. For the residents if Portreath it must have seemed that peace had finally arrived, once our planes had departed but I am sure that the landlord at ‘The Tap’ at least would have been sorry to witness our departure. We were now to be in at the start of another adventure, this time as members of the Banff Strike Wing.

In September, enemy activity in the Bay of Biscay had decreased to such an extent that Coastal Command felt secure enough to post its two Mosquito squadrons north to Scotland. Four Mosquitoes of 248 Squadron flew the final sorties on 7 September in poor visibility near Gironde, while searching for U-boats. Then 235 and 248 Squadrons landed at Banff to form the Dallachy Wing together with 333 (Norwegian) Squadron. The Wing’s Mosquitoes and Beaufighters were used in attacks throughout the remainder of the war on targets in Norwegian waters.
¹⁹⁵
The first Banff Wing anti-shipping operation to Norway took place on 14 September when twenty-nine Mosquitoes and nineteen Beaufighters attacked shipping between Egero and Stors Toreungen Light. A flak ship and a merchantman were sunk. On the 17th they hunted U-boats. On 18 September Harold Corbin
CGM
and Maurice Webb
DFM
of 248 Squadron went on U-boat hunt and sighted U-867 on the surface near Bergen. Corbin strafed it with 20mm cannon and straddled it with his two depth charges to claim it as sunk. This was one of the few times that the crew returned from an op without sustaining any damage to their Mosquito but Corbin noted in his diary, ‘I hope this is kept out of the newspapers’. (This was because his wife and parents had had so much worry with him being reported missing a month earlier).

On 21 September six Mosquitoes and twenty-one Beaufighters sought shipping in Kristiansund. The Dallachy Wing brought the month to a closing peak on 30 September with a Rover involving seventeen Mosquitoes and a dozen Beaufighters. On 28 September, the Banff Wing Mosquitoes were at last modified to carry eight rocket-projectiles (RP) on Mk.IIIA projector rails beneath their wings just like the Beaufighters.

On 19 October the flak alarm was raised by lookouts on three vessels at anchor at Askvoy at 13.30 hours as nineteen Mosquitoes streaked towards them. Flashes erupted from the nose of each Mosquito and spouts of water erupted in a line towards V-5116. Rounds struck the bridge and more triggered a fire, which the Tsetses fanned with their 57mm shells. Seven crew were injured. One said later that an aircraft carrying a big gun, emitting a long flame had attacked them. One 235 Squadron Mosquito was lost. With the departure of the two Beaufighter squadrons on 22 October to Dallachy to form a wing with 455 and 489 Squadrons from Langham, 143 Beaufighter Squadron at North Coates moved north to join the Banff Strike Wing and convert to the Mosquito Mk.VI. On 24 October two Mosquitoes of 235 Squadron attacked three enemy aircraft, the first seen by the strike wing. Warrant Officer Cogswell destroyed one Bf 110 while Flight Lieutenant Jacques finished off the second Bf 110 hit by Cogswell who had set an engine on fire. Jacques then destroyed the third aircraft, a Ju 88G. By the end of the month, five strikes had been made.

On 26 October, the Mosquitoes used rocket projectiles for the first time. During October 143 Squadron, Coastal Command, which was equipped with Beaufighters at North Coates, shed its virtual OTU status and moved to Banff to convert to the Mosquito as part of the Banff Strike Wing. The station commander was Group Captain Max Aitken
DSO DFC
, the son of Lord Beaverbrook. Aitken liked flying the Mosquito too. Legend has it that when informed by Group that ‘station commanders do NOT fly on operations’ he sent a two-worded message back, the second being ‘…. you!’ Only a few isolated vessels were found and sunk in early October because the enemy operated at night in the knowledge that the strike wing could not fly in tight formation in the dark. On 9 October the Banff Wing tried out a system that had been tried at North Coates during early August 1944. A Warwick laden with flame floats and markers took off at 04.15 and 2 hours later, dropped them to form a circle 119ft in diameter 100 yards from Stavanger. Half an hour later, eight Mosquitoes of 235 Squadron followed by eighteen Beaufighters of 144 Squadron, traced the same course. At 06.20 the first aircraft arrived and began to circle. As dawn appeared, the formation set off heading for Egrsund. Led by Wing Commander Tony Gadd of 144 Squadron, at

07.10 they sank a German merchantman and a submarine chaser, while a Norwegian vessel was badly damaged. When they had recovered from the surprise the enemy gunners put up a fierce flak barrage but this was smothered by cannon fire. Three aircraft were damaged but all returned. On 28 September, while on anti-U-Boat patrol off Sondersund, Flying Officer Wallace Woodcock attacked a torpedo-boat and, despite accurate return fire from Christiansand, scored nine hits with the Tsetse and saw it sink.

George Lord, a Mosquito pilot who had been credited with sinking a U-boat, one probably sunk and one seriously damaged during a first tour of operations on Hudsons in North Africa in 1942, has vivid recollections of Mosquito shipping strikes:

We took off usually in the dark to arrive over our targets soon after first light when possible. We flew in a loose formation, usually without navigation lights, at a nominal 50ft above the North Sea. We had a primitive low-level altimeter with a tolerance of about +/- 17ft when set at 50ft. Not much of a margin, flying in the dark on instruments, no autopilot and occasionally hitting the slipstream of someone ahead, unseen. The altimeter had three lights: red, green and amber. Green was a datum, red if you went below; amber if you went above. With the long rollers of the North Sea the three lights usually flashed continually in sequence all the way across, so that our actual height above the sea must have varied down to something like 30-35 ft, all at some 220 knots cruising speed! Not much room for error!

We remained at low-level until either in sight of the Norwegian coast or if we knew enemy radar or aircraft had detected us. It was worse when we had to fly with a gaggle of Beaufighters (including some Beaufighters with torpedoes; these aircraft were called Torbeaus), whose cruising speed was 180 knots. The Mossie with a full war load was staggering a bit then and rather unpleasant in turbulence or someone’s slipstream when you couldn’t see the chap in front.

We flew the FB.VI with two Merlin 25s. It had four 20mm cannon and four .303-inch Brownings in the nose, with four rocket rails and drop tanks under each wing. Initially, the rocket heads were 60lb semi-armourpiercing explosive heads, used in the desert for tank busting. It was found these exploded on contact with ships and did only superficial damage. Moreover, if there was a ‘hang-up’, the rule was not to attempt a landing back at base but to bale out, because the slightest jolt once the rocket was armed would cause the head to explode, with disastrous consequences for the aircraft and crew. We went over to the 23-pounder armour-piercing rocket, which we delivered at 260 knots in a shallow dive. The rails had to be set so that they were parallel with the airflow at correct diving speed, otherwise the RPs would weathercock and either under- or overshoot the target. They would also miss if the pilot dived at the wrong airspeed. When making an attack on shipping, the Mosquitoes normally commenced their dive of approximately 45° at about 2,000ft and then opened up with machine gun fire at 1,500-1,000ft before using the cannons and lastly, at about 500ft, the RPs. The RPs were arranged to form a pattern spread on impact, so that if fired at the correct range and airspeed and angle of dive, four would hit the ship above the waterline and the other four would undershoot slightly to hit below the waterline. In the Norwegian fjords pilots usually had one chance, so they fired all eight rockets at once. After entering the ship’s hull each would punch an 18-inch hole in the far side of the hull for the sea to flood in, while the remains of the cordite motor burned inside the hull to ignite fuel and ammunition in the ship.

These attacks were all at low-level, ending almost at ship-level. It was easy almost to overdo it by concentrating on aiming at the target and firing at the right moment. On one occasion, my navigator yelled “Pull up” and we just missed hitting the ship’s masts! When there was a formation attack one sometimes suddenly saw another aircraft shoot across our line of fire, attacking from a different angle. When a number of our aircraft were involved the usual practice was to split into three sections of say three aircraft each. One would be top cover to watch out for any fighters; one would be anti-flak (the most dangerous, going in first to silence the antiaircraft guns hopefully!); the third was the section making the actual attack; also pretty dicey. The idea was to rotate the order to give everyone a fair chance of survival (we had a rate of about one in five) and obviously the favourite was to be top cover and the worst to be anti-flak. An unusual hazard flying low-level along the Norwegian coast and into the fjords was shore-based artillery firing at us and the first one knew of it was when a huge plume of water rose up in front of us! If we had flown into it, it would have meant almost certain death. For our attacks, we would fly out in the dark and aim to arrive at first light. We had one of the earliest radio altimeters, which could be set for a given height to be flown say, say 50ft. It had three lights: amber in that case meant above 50ft, green was 50ft, red was below 50ft. With the long North Sea swells, you could see them recorded by the lights. When we heard the enemy jamming our radios, we knew we had been detected. Then we climbed up and went into the fjord in close battle formation. One scheme proposed was for a Warwick aircraft (a modified Wellington) to be out there in the dark, waiting for us to arrive and laying a circle of flares on the sea, perhaps a mile in diameter. We had to keep radio silence, we were dispersed and it was dark; but we were supposed to identify each other by the light of the flares. That was telling the enemy! Must have been thought up by a chap deep underground.

On 15 October, what was planned was an operation involving both Mosquitoes with rockets and Torbeaus. Just south of Christiansand, going west from Germany, was a ship of some importance, for it was escorted by flak-ships, balloon-ships and ships with parachute-and-cable devices. We reckoned we hit her on the stern with a 500lb bomb, but I think a torpedo caused the destruction. One minute the ship was there, then there was just an expanding cloud of smoke, a ring of fire over the sea, and in there were human beings with not a hope of surviving. Normally, one felt detached. This was one of the few occasions when I felt differently. It was probably a munitions ship or tanker. We had two Norwegian naval aircrews with us, familiar with the coastline, who had escaped and who carried out reconnaissance with us. Some of our information came from transmitters in Norway. The operators would put them on a bike, openly, knowing what would happen if they were caught, and push the bikes up into the mountains, often deep in snow; we heard that people would save their rations to give to the men who pushed the bikes. The German ships used to creep down the Norwegian coast in the dark and in daylight moor under sheer rock faces in a fjord. Our recce Mosquitoes would radio back a coded signal reporting the targets they had spotted and we would go out to attack. We would split into two or three sections as mentioned above for anti-flak, target attacking and top cover. As the ships were moored under the sheer rock faces, we had to make a very steep turn away after firing. Then we would scoot up the fjord hell-for-leather and then up the mountainside. Often there were little farms at the top and I have seen people come out, waving flags. The Focke Wulf 190s waited until the attack was over and the Mossies were coming out. Damaged Mosquitoes were slower and more liable to be caught. One trick the Germans used against us was to sling cables across the fjord. You couldn’t see them.

George Lord flew an armed recce on 3 November and another on the 4th. Low cloud prevented bombing and he attacked a motor vessel alongside the quay at Floro with cannon and machine guns. Flak was intense and his mainplane and tailplane were holed. On 7 November 143 Squadron entered the fray for the first time since relinquishing its Beaufighters when two Mosquitoes carried out a search for enemy aircraft between Obrestad and Lindesnes. Frequent snow and hail were a feature of operations on 8 and 9 November when the Mosquitoes looked for shipping off Ytterîene, Marstein and Askvoll. The Banff Wing now began to operate in increasingly larger formations, including for the first time, on 13 November, a combined operation with the Dallachy Wing. The largest strike so far occurred on 21 November. New Zealand Wing Commander Bill Sise
DSO DFC
, who had taken over 248 Squadron on the death of Wing Commander Phillips, led a formation of thirty-three Mosquitoes, accompanied by forty-two Beaufighters and twelve Mustang III fighter escorts, in a shipping strike at Ålesund. Off Lista on 29 November a 248 Squadron Tsetse flown by Flying Officer Wallace G. Woodcock scored two hits on a U-boat, which he attacked with 20mm cannon and eight 57mm shells, while other XVIIIs attacked with depth charges and cannon. Woodcock recalls, ‘This, at the time, was supposedly the nearest a Mossie had got to sinking one. I did hear a rumour that Halifaxes got it later when it had to surface, but this was never confirmed.’