Mosquito Squadron (8 page)

Yeoman pressed the bomb release, waited a fraction of a second until he heard the ‘clunk’ of the weapons falling away and then pulled hard on the stick. The Mosquito bounded skywards, clearing the hangar by feet.

The two 500-lb bombs, fitted with eleven-second delayed-action fuses, struck the hard standing just short of the hangar in a flat trajectory and bounced through the open door. One bounced again and tore its way through the far wall, continued its flight and embedded itself in the earthen wall that surrounded a communications building. The other ripped through several aircraft, lost its momentum and wedged itself between two supporting girders.

The Mosquito continued its rocketing climb, weaving clear of the flak. Yeoman suddenly realized that he was drenched in sweat.

‘Are you okay, Happy?’ he asked hoarsely. The navigator let out his breath in an explosive gasp.

‘Jesus Christ, skipper!’ he looked at his map and checked the figures he had pencilled on it earlier. ‘Course for home on two-nine-zero.’

The new heading would take them straight out across Holland and the Zuider Zee, a distance of a hundred miles, keeping well to the north of the defences of Amsterdam and away from the hornet’s nest that would now have been stirred up along their attacking route.

Yeoman pushed down the Mosquito’s nose once more. Behind them, columns of smoke rose into the morning air over Twenthe. He pressed the R/T button.

‘Red Section, acknowledge.’

Miller’s voice came back immediately. ‘Red Two, okay.’

Then, after a slight pause, came Terry Saint’s New Zealand twang, distorted over the radio: ‘Red Three, okay. Red Four’s had it.’

‘Poor old Tef,’ Hardy said quietly.

‘Are you certain, Red Three?’ Yeoman asked.

‘Yeah. Flew straight into a fuel bowser. Hell of a bang.’

Yeoman was silent for a second or two. Then he said: ‘All right. Stick together, and stay low. Shoot up anything worthwhile you see on the way out, but don’t waste ammunition. The fighters will be looking for us.’

The formation speared on at low level towards the broad band of the River Ijssel, their crews keeping a watchful eye on the sky. No fighters appeared, and Yeoman reasoned that they must be searching further to the north. He looked across at Miller’s aircraft; its paintwork was scarred with jagged holes, and he supposed that his own must look much the same. It was a miracle that nothing vital seemed to have been hit.

They drummed over the outskirts of a town — Nijverdal — and flak opened up on them from two towers beside some sort of factory. Their speed quickly took them out of the danger area. A few minutes later they passed to the south of Zwolle, and soon afterwards they were crossing the flat polder that bordered the Zuider Zee, their strong dykes keeping the sea at bay. More flak rose to meet them as they crossed the Dutch coast, but it was inaccurate.

As they headed out to sea, Saint, who was bringing up the rear, reported two enemy fighters astern, but they were a long way away and although they followed the Mosquitos for some distance they were unable to close the gap. They eventually gave up the chase and turned back towards the coast, their specks dwindling in the far distance.

The Mosquitos landed at Burningham shortly after 0800 to find that the other two sections were already back. McManners was waiting for Yeoman as the latter climbed stiffly from his aircraft, and he carried bad news. Sloane was missing, down in the sea a few miles off the Dutch coast. Everyone else had returned safely with the exception of Lorrimer’s navigator, who had collected a minor wound in his shoulder from a shell fragment. And, of course, poor Telfer.

There was more bad news to come, and it was broken by Group Captain Davison, who came out to greet the returning crews. Quietly taking Yeoman off to one side, he told him: ‘I’m afraid there’s been the most awful cock-up. The mist didn’t clear fully until half an hour ago, and the Regensburg force is only just beginning to get airborne.’ He glanced up at the cloud that still hung over East Anglia. ‘I’m prepared to bet that they’ll have problems getting their formations sorted out among that lot, too. What I’m saying is, the whole damned operation is about three hours behind schedule, and the Schweinfurt attack has been put off until this afternoon.’ Yeoman felt his heart sink. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because the Schweinfurt force, that’s the 1st Bomber Wing, is operating from bases further inland, and the mist still hasn’t cleared there yet. All the available escort fighters have been assigned to the Regensburg force, the idea being that they would keep the Luftwaffe busy while the Schweinfurt boys slipped through. Now that isn’t possible, so they’ll have to wait until the escorts get back from the first trip so that they can go along with the second as well.’

‘What it all boils down to,’ Yeoman said tiredly, ‘is that the Jerries on the airfields we’ve just attacked will have had time to sweep up the pieces and get their fighters airborne to meet the Regensburg force.’ He looked around at the battle-scarred Mosquitos, at the empty dispersals where Sloane’s and Telfer’s aircraft should have been standing, and a wave of utter dejection swept over him.

‘What a bloody rotten waste!’

Chapter Five

‘Herr major. Herr major! please wake up, sir!’

Richter groaned and turned over in bed, opening one bleary eye. The round, bespectacled face of his orderly, Corporal Singer, swam into focus.

‘What’s the matter?’ Richter asked, his voice heavy with sleep. ‘What time is it?’

‘Six o’clock, sir.’

‘In the morning?’

‘In the morning.’

Richter struggled into a sitting position, rubbing a hand over his eyes.

‘Damnation, Singer,’ he snapped, ‘I’ve only just got to bed. What the hell is going on?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the corporal apologized. ‘All I know is that all pilots are to report to operations as soon as possible. Even those who have been night flying. I’ve brought you some coffee, sir, and there’s plenty of hot water.’

Richter nodded and swung his legs out of bed, reaching out for the mug of steaming black liquid. A few gulps cleared away some of the tiredness, and five minutes under a hot shower restored him to his normal self.

He dressed quickly, had a snack in the mess, thought briefly about calling a car to take him to the operations block, and then decided to walk. It was a fine morning, and he felt in need of some fresh air. The night’s operations had been hectic and fruitless; the Tommies had sent over fast intruder aircraft in small numbers and Richter had been airborne twice, but neither he nor his pilots had made any contact.

Mosquitos, he thought, as he walked down the long avenue that led towards the airfield from the officers’ mess, bordered with sweet-smelling pine trees. Always those infernal Mosquitos!

It was a week now since No. 2 Squadron, Fighter Wing 301, had moved from its primitive airstrip near Munster to Rheine-Hopsten, a well established airfield further to the north. Situated twenty miles from the Dutch border, Rheine possessed excellent facilities and a first-class organization under the command of Colonel Johann Sommer, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Sommer was a friendly man, always ready with a smile and a word of encouragement, but when it came to inefficiency he could be merciless.

Richter had taken an instant liking to him; the base commander reminded him of Werner Mölders, to whom Richter owed a great debt of gratitude; in the summer of 1940, at the start of the campaign in France, Richter — then a young and inexperienced pilot — had made a serious and humiliating mistake on his first operation, and it had been Mölders who had given him the strength to carry on. Richter felt a twinge of sadness when he remembered that Mölders was dead, killed in an air crash on his way back from the Russian Front; he had been the Luftwaffe’s top-scoring fighter pilot at the time. It had seemed a senseless waste, for Mölders to die as a passenger in an aircraft flown by someone else; so much better if he had met his death cleanly, in air combat high above the earth.

He reached the operations block, exchanged salutes with the armed sentry at the entrance, and made straight for Sommer’s office. He found the colonel seated at his desk in conference with three other officers, the commanders of the squadrons that shared Rheine with 2/JG 301.

‘Good morning, Richter,’ Sommer greeted him. ‘My apologies for disturbing your sleep, but it looks as though we’re going to need everyone we can lay our hands on today. Take a seat.’

Sommer placed his feet squarely on the desk top, leaned back and lit a long black cheroot. Through a cloud of smoke, he said: ‘Our intelligence people have had a whisper that the Americans are planning something big — a simultaneous attack on different targets by two or even three waves of bombers, perhaps.’ He got up suddenly and crossed over to a wall map, slapping it with a flourish. One of Sommer’s very few failings was a slight tendency, at times, to be theatrical.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ he went on, ‘we know that the enemy are giving considerable priority to attacks on our aircraft factories — in the past few weeks the Heinkel works at Rostock, the Fieseler plant at Kassel, the Focke-Wulf enterprises at Bremen and several others. One major aircraft production complex, however, has so far escaped unscathed, mainly because it lies deep in the Fatherland. I refer, gentlemen, to the Messerschmitt factories here, at Regensburg, Intelligence has indicated that the Americans have been planning an attack on this target for some time. I believe that it will take place today.’

He knows more than that, Richter thought. He has more information than we know about. Sommer was not the kind of man to make predictions lightly, without a sound basis of fact. The espionage network in Britain must have been working overtime lately; Richter guessed that certain information about the operational plans of the US 8th Bomber Command had leaked out and that the decision had been to pass it down the line to senior Luftwaffe commanders once it had been processed in Berlin.

Sommer saw the look in Richter’s eye and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘we know they are coming, and that Regensburg is likely to be the target. Or at least one of the targets. We do not, as yet, know the identities of any others; nor do we know when the attacks will take place.’

The colonel took a long pull at his cheroot and spat out a shred of tobacco. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘when they do come we shall be waiting for them. The whole of Fighter Command on the Western Front is on the alert, and with any luck we’ll hit the Amis so hard that they won’t stick their noses into Germany for a long time.’

He was interrupted by the clamour of the telephone on his desk. He lifted the receiver, listened for a few moments and then spoke in brief acknowledgement before replacing the instrument.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘that was Divisional Headquarters. A few minutes ago, a small force of RAF Mosquitos carried out a low-level attack on the airfields of Twenthe, Hoogeveen and Eelde, in Holland. They inflicted considerable damage. Divisional HQ is of the opinion that the attack was designed to create maximum confusion among our Fighter defences in the north-west — to smash a hole through the wall, in other words. We might not have much time. I suggest that you bring your squadrons to immediate readiness.’

The four squadron commanders snapped to attention, saluted and left Sommer’s office, heading for their various dispersals. Richter looked up at the sky, dappled here and there with high cloud. It was a beautiful morning, too beautiful for young men to die. But die many of them inevitably would, on both sides, before the sun reached its zenith.

*

The great formation of B-17 Flying Fortresses droned over the coast of Holland, glittering metallic insects sailing through clusters of flak. The time was ten o’clock, and the bombers were now almost four hours behind schedule. There were 147 of them, flying in seven tight boxes of twenty-one aircraft, stepped up between 17,000 and 19,000 feet. Any fighter seeking to penetrate any one of those boxes would have to run the gauntlet of up to 168 .5-in calibre machine-guns, for each Fortress was formidably armed with eight such weapons. There were no significant blind spots.

Above and ahead of the leading Fortress groups flew their fighter escorts, tubby P-47 Thunderbolts which would shepherd them as far as the German border — but no further, for that was the limit of the Thunderbolt’s radius of action even with auxiliary fuel. There should have been another group of P-47s, watching over the rearmost Fortress elements, but it had failed to make rendezvous because of a timing error. And it was the rearmost Fortress groups which were most vulnerable to attack.

To make matters worse, the rear groups began to trail badly as the formation flew deeper into Holland, until there were fifteen miles between them and the leading elements.

At 1017 the first enemy fighters were sighted. They were the Focke-Wulf 190s of No. 1 Fighter Wing and they shadowed the trailing Fortress groups at a respectable distance, making no move to attack. They had plenty of time. In just a few more minutes the Thunderbolt escorts would have to turn for home, and that would be the moment for the fighters to pounce.

The bomber crews sweated, and waited. Every few seconds, nervous gunners checked and re-checked their turrets and gun mechanisms, the long belts of ammunition that festooned the interior of the Fortresses like bronze snakes.

The leading Fortress groups changed course, heading southeastwards now as they approached the German border. Like a shoal of silvery fish, the Thunderbolts swung away from them on a heading that would take them back to their English bases, pushing down their noses to gather speed. Even if they were attacked, they would be hard pressed to defend themselves, for their margin of fuel was hardly sufficient for combat manoeuvres.

But the Focke-Wulfs were not interested in the Thunderbolts. As the latter turned for home, the German fighter leader issued curt orders over the radio and the 190s broke away in pairs, plummeting down towards the rear Fortress groups. They attacked head-on, concentrating on the lowest squadron, and the American gunners had only a fraction of a second in which to bring their sights to bear as the Focke-Wulfs flashed through the formation at 400 mph.

The bombers shuddered to the recoil of their machine-guns. Spent cartridge cases sprayed across the floors and the air inside the vibrating fuselages was thick with cordite fumes.

Intercoms were choked with excited, high-pitched voices as the gunners called out the positions of the fighters, now coming in from all round the clock.

A Fortress dropped slowly out of formation, its fuselage shattered by cannon shells, its controls shot away. It went over on its back and fell earthwards in a ponderous spin, shedding fragments of wing. Two parachutes broke clear, to vanish almost instantly in a great burst of smoke and flame as the bomber exploded.

Two more Fortresses dropped away within seconds of each other, both streaming flames from their wings. Long columns of black smoke marked their final plunge.

The fighters made three savage, high-speed attacks and then were suddenly gone, dwindling against the drab earth as they headed back to their bases to refuel and re-arm. Two of them had been shot down by the Fortress gunners; it was impossible to fly through that storm of fire and emerge completely unscathed.

Away to the right of the American formation, higher up and well clear of the guns, flew a lone Junkers 88, This was the Fighter Director, whose task was to report any sudden changes of course and also observe any weak spots which the Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts might exploit. Already, dozens more were climbing hard to join the battle.

The time was 1032, and the Fortresses were now entering Germany.

*

Joachim Richter was sprawled in a deckchair, dozing fitfully in the warm sunshine within easy sprinting distance of his Messerschmitt, when the alarm klaxon sounded. Instantly wide awake, it took him only seconds to cover the intervening yards of ground and swing himself into the cockpit, before the Gustav’s big three-bladed propeller spun into life,

Rheine airfield was a confusion of taxi-ing aircraft. There must have been at least forty of them, Focke-Wulf 190s, Messerschmitt 109s and a few twin-engined Messerschmitt 110s — the latter with 21-cm rockets mounted in underwing tubes — all jockeying for position. There was no time for the niceties of an orderly take-off, flight by flight, squadron by squadron; the thing was to get off the ground as quickly as possible and climb like hell in order to get above the incoming Fortresses, the fighters sorting themselves out into combat formations on the way up.

The latest report was that the Americans had made a series of course alterations, taking them well to the south of their expected route. They were now in the vicinity of München-Gladbach. Richter made a quick mental calculation and ordered his squadron on to a heading that should permit them to intercept the bombers some distance to the south of Cologne.

They caught up with the rear groups of Fortresses at 1055. Still climbing, Richter brought his squadron round in a wide curve, passing right over the top of the American formation to place his Messerschmitts ahead of it and several thousand feet higher up.

Dropping one wing briefly, he looked down and, from his vantage point, gained a clear impression of the havoc already wrought on the Fortresses by the non-stop fighter attacks. It was easy to pick out the great gaps in the Americans’ ranks, particularly among the lower squadrons, and he could see smoke trailing from the engines of at least two other B-17s.

Even as he watched, he saw a Messerschmitt 110 make a beam attack on three Fortresses, its pilot flying straight and level through meshes of tracer. Plumes of smoke burst from behind the 110’s wings and for an instant he thought it had been hit, but then he realized that it had launched its salvo of rockets. The missiles’ white smoke trails, clearly visible, bridged the gap between the fighter and one of the Fortresses with incredible speed and disappeared into the bomber’s bowels.

There was a blinding flash, followed by a rolling ball of flame as the B-17’s bomb load exploded. The accompanying smoke cloud reached out to engulf the neighbouring Fortresses, which sheered wildly away from it. Richter saw the Fortress’s four engines fall from the cloud and drop like stones, each trailing its own ribbon of smoke. The tail section fluttered down, turning over and over, its silver surfaces reflecting the sun.

By this time the Messerschmitts were well ahead of the enemy formation.

‘Attention,’ he called over the radio, ‘Elbe Leader to Elbe Squadron, execute frontal diving attack in pairs. Concentrate on low groups. Go!’