Flames in the Sky: Epic stories of WWII air war heroism from the author of The Big Show (Pierre Clostermann's Air War Collection Book 2)

by Pierre Clostermann

  FLAMES IN THE SKY

  Pierre Clostermann

  D.S.O., D.F.C.

  Translated by OLIVER BERTHOUD

  SILVERTAIL BOOKS ♦ London

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  DEDICATION

  To my comrades in the air who died to wipe out past mistakes – mistakes which were not theirs. To those who may yet have to pay for new, and yet still the same mistakes by the Great who refuse to believe the lessons of the past.

  PREFACE

  In 1946 I began to realise a project which I had set my heart on as early as 1940, the History of the War in the Air. I have worked through hundreds and thousands of documents from the archives of the Luftwaffe, the Air Ministry and the United States Navy and Army Air Forces. I have read roughly speaking all the translations of Japanese documents collected together by the Pentagon in Washington, all the books published in America, France, England, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. Already the fruits of five years of patient research have accumulated, and in a few months, if events permit, the book will be ready.

  It is now, nearly at the end of this task, that I have suddenly become aware of the very grave danger to which the historian of this war is exposed by the very nature of the vast documentation at his disposal. When everything had been digested, classified, annotated, drafted, I realised that out of that sum total of individual exploits, acts of courage, often anonymous, sacrifices by men of every race and creed, nothing is left in the end but a mass of papers, maps, photos, figures and statistics.

  The human lessons are hidden by the strategic lessons. The skill of human hands and the bravery of human hearts disappear in the cold-blooded study of materials and technique. Heroism is masked behind the communiqués and the operational reports. And yet what stories of sublime courage and energy the historian discovers as he pores over the columns of figures in the frightening balance-sheet of modern air war.

  Debit . . . credit . . . aircraft lost . . . tons of bombs . . . enemy destroyed . . . ships sunk . . . killed . . . wounded . . . missing . . . total . . . year . . . Is nothing to emerge from the gigantic drama of the 1939-45 war but blue-prints and reports on industrial organisation? Such an idea is revolting. Are we to forget that under the tons of debris in the devastated towns, homes were crushed by the bombs? Are we to forget that under the charred and twisted wreckage of aircraft it was human flesh burnt?

  It was men who suffered in the sky as they handled those masterpieces of modern technique. It was men who perished in terrible suffering to carry out the plans of the strategists. It was men who sacrificed themselves so that others might live. It was men, too, who went through hell to redeem the military and political mistakes of some and save the honour of others.

  Is it by making people study graphs and curves of consumption that we shall teach them to hate war and to respect those who have been through it?

  That is why I felt I must, here and now, relate these few stones of flying men, culled from among hundreds and thousands of others which will be buried in ministerial archives and historical research departments. They are neither finer nor stranger than those which will remain unknown. I have chosen them rather haphazardly, merely because they are typical of certain phases of the war and of certain theatres of operations. Each of these stories gives the ‘feel’ of a particular aspect of the war in varying latitudes and circumstances.

  Their only common factor is the courage and idealism of those whose lives they relate, and they show above all that, under different guises, the highest virtues of man are the prerogative of no single nation.

  In each of these stories I have begun with a brief sketch of the main lines of the campaign in question, so that the reader can see the action involved in its right perspective and against the right background. Since for a great number of readers some of the campaigns—that in the Pacific, for instance—were in the nature of things rather distant, I have thought it advisable describe also those important actors, the aircraft themselves.

  For a pilot, every plane has its own personality, which always reflects that of its designers and colours the mentality of those who take it into action.

  The Spitfire, for instance, is typically British. Temperate, a perfect compromise of all the qualities required of a fighter, ideally suited to its task of defence. An essentially reasonable piece of machinery, conceived by cool, precise brains and built by conscientious hands. The Spitfire left such an imprint on those who flew it that when they changed to other types they found it very hard to get acclimatised.

  Certain aircraft will also go down to history as classics, typifying their epoch. The 1914-18 war calls to mind the Spad, the Breguet 14, the de Havilland DH-4, the Fokker and the Gotha. My generation, i.e. the 1939-45 generation, will immediately think of the ‘Spit,’ the Morane 406, the Stuka, the Messerschmitt 109, the Mosquito, the Yak, the Zero, the Fortress and the two-tailed Lightning.

  Each of these planes had its tale of technical troubles, disappointments and successes, of tactics imposed upon it by its design, and above all of affection or dislike of those who flew it.

  Pierre Clostermann

  CHAPTER ONE

  PRELUDE

  12th May 1940, Maestricht

  ‘During the night and in the early morning there were important enemy movements in the Ardennes region and towards the West. The columns include bridging crews. Large motorised armoured forces are on the march towards the Meuse coming respectively from Dinan, Givet and Neufchateau.

  ‘Our reconnaissance reports in addition strong columns on the roads on the general axis Maestricht-Tongres.’

  Intelligence Summary, 12th May 1940

  The storm coming from the East spread its flood over Flanders and the North of France. The hordes of refugees on the march ran up against our tangled and already disorganised military convoys coming up to stem the enemy tide. And already, infiltrating through the cracks in our hills, spreading over the plains, by-passing the towns, driving onward on a rattle of tracks and a stench of diesels, the Panzer divisions were about to fall upon France.

  Drifting on the east wind, the long white condensation trails criss-crossed the blue spring sky, and over the green countryside stretched the shadow of the long black smoke-trails of the invasion.

  The men, huddled in the ditches, shook their fists at the sky: ‘The swine!’

  The swine were the Stukas, tumbling down like an avalanche. First, a few black spots up there in the sky and a distant roar, then down they spiralled one after the other, and above the crescendo of the engines came the scream of the bombs.

  The W-shaped wings with their flaps and dive-brakes, perched on the two slender legs of the undercarriage, the yawning gape of the radiator—all that came smack down into your eyes with a roar like the Day of Judgment. The men were left dazed and quivering.

  A few cars were burning on the road and from some useless overturned B-2 came a whiff of burnt rubber and roasted flesh.

  ‘The swine!’

  And that included their own aircraft, whose wings they could see burning in a field; and also those who were getting massacred high up and far away, trying to make some impression on this terror which flowed over the roads and fell upon them from the sky.

  The long Dornier 17s were still slipping westwards, and from the
bellies of the serried squadrons of Heinkel IIIs fell the sticks of bombs, pirouetting down to smash stations and villages. Up above, the angry buzz of the Messerschmitt 110s keeping watch and, all around, the clumps of Messerschmitt 109s with their yellow bellies and their clipped wings, scouring the sky. Black crosses, nothing but black crosses.

  In spite of that, at every cross-road in the villages submerged by the armoured columns, on the banks of the Meuse, perched on the piles of the demolished bridges, the long tubes of the German 37-mm. guns were springing up, pointing skywards. At road junctions the half-tracks of the flak service were taking up position and setting up their multiple 20-mm. mountings. The clips of shells were lined up by the roadsides and the spotters kept a look out from the banks, rangefinders at the ready.

  It was at Maestricht that the first blow of the battering-ram fell. The narrow streets of the little Dutch town overflowed with the continuous flood of tanks and trucks, crawling along the banks of the Meuse to the pontoon bridge thrown across alongside the collapsed railway viaduct by the German engineers. All that swarm of vehicles flooded on to the roads to Tongres and Bilsen and poured in. an endless stream over the intact bridges across the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt and Vroenhoven. A few miles to the south, the fort of Eben-Emael, its glacis covered with variegated parachutes and capped with smoke, had just succumbed. The haggard defenders came stumbling out of the shattered casemates and staggered down to the plain, picking their way between the carcasses of the gliders and covered by the submachine-guns of the enemy parachutists. On the dark waters of the canal the empty rubber dinghies of the special assault troops drifted away.

  Inside those few square miles, bounded to the west by the Albert Canal—that gigantic and useless anti-tank ditch—to the north by the Meuse and the Maestricht Canal and to the southeast by the Jaar, meandering through the flooded fields, seven Panzer divisions concentrated.

  Directed one by one, by the sweat and dust-covered Wehrmacht traffic policemen; over the bridges still standing the tanks and the six-wheeled armoured cars slowly crossed, their long antennae waving. But once over, the tanks accelerated in a roar of exhausts, churning up the macadam with their steel tracks. The impregnable defences had crumbled, the infallible plans had been torn to shreds, the comprehensive measures had been swept aside.

  It was then, to put off the inevitable, that our fighters and bombers were cruelly thrown into the furnace, in pathetic driblets. Who could have seen them, lost as they were in the vast sky? Those poor French planes which took off on clear mornings in May 1940 and never came back, pounced on by the Messerschmitts or picked off by the flak! Yes, the flak. For already this was a nightmare for the pilots, the little guns of the automatic flak with their long venomous barrels spitting up strings of steel pearls which sliced off your wings and blinded you. Every German battalion brought reinforcements to the flak as it passed. The quadruple 20-mm. anchored themselves between the poplars on the banks and more 37-mm. were unloaded from the trucks. The gun crews in shirt sleeves piled up the ammunition and stumbled over the heaps of empties. The observation post was perched high up the chimney of some brickworks and the battery commanders scanned the Meuse valley through their glasses. There was a flak emplacement every fifty yards along the three miles of the canal from the Vroenhoven bridge to the Veldwezelt bridge. Protected by them, the convoys of troop-laden trucks passed through in an endless stream. There was no risk anyway, for the Luftwaffe was mistress of the sky.

  The two previous alerts had proved it. The Belgian Fairey Battles of the Hepcée flight, reinforced by the Pierre flight, had taken off from Aeltre between Ghent and Bruges. The three sections of three aircraft dived through a terrific flak barrage, only to be picked up by the watchful Messerschmitts. Six planes out of the nine were shot down. With sublime courage two pilots, Captain Glorie and Sergeant Delvigne, whose bombs had not fallen on the first run over the target, came back a second time into the furnace and crashed in flames. The bridges were still intact. A few hours later the R.A.F. had a try. The eight Hurricanes of No. 1 squadron, commanded by Squadron-Leader ‘Bull’ Halahan, took off to keep the Messerschmitts out of the way, while six Fairey Battles of Bomber Command tried to destroy at least the Veldwezelt bridge. They ran into the Messerschmitt 109s from Aix-la-Chapelle, Hehn, Hohenbudberg, Gladbach and Vogelsand, more than 120 fighters. The rendezvous with the bombers was at 9.15. It was 9.12. Three minutes left to clear the way for the bombers. The Hurricanes went for the Messerschmitts bald-headed and were soon struggling heroically against the angry pack. Halahan’s plane exploded and his parachute opened in the nick of time over the canal. F/O Lewis came down soon after. Three Messerschmitt 109s were destroyed, but the R.A.F. fighters were overcome by superior numbers and four others were shot down.

  The diversion did, however, produce the desired effect. The six Battles dived straight into the flak, straightening out a few yards from the bridge. Three bombs scored hits, but three planes were shot down. A fourth, piloted by F/Lt. Garland, the Flight Leader, crashed straight into the bridge, which collapsed in a shower of spray. The fifth spiralled down, one wing torn off.

  The sixth managed to get home, escorted by the two surviving Hurricanes.

  The fields round about were strewn with charred carcases of aircraft—crumpled wings, shattered fuselages, pathetic bits of aluminium surrounded by circles of dead grass, blackened by oil and flames from the gutted fuel-tanks. Occasionally a few German sappers would hastily dig a trench where the poor smashed bodies of the pilots were laid, wrapped in the silk of their parachutes.

  Then once again the white alarm rockets, announcing a new sacrifice. Blasts on whistles and the shrill hooters of the Flugalarm. Before the aircraft were even visible the 200 barrels of the flak reared up and opened fire—a prodigious drum-roll as a prelude to the execution.

  Wreaths of smoke ran along the tow-paths and a thousand dazzling parabolas of 20-mm. tracer shells formed a mosaic of black and grey bursts. The trucks had stopped. The soldiers in their field-grey clung to the running-boards and looked round questioningly. Suddenly the drivers switched off and jumped into the ditches, the men crouched down behind the trees.

  Six aircraft swept up like whirlwinds from behind the brick steeples of Maestricht. They were the Breguet 693s of Fighter Squadron 1/54—mid-wing monoplanes with twin Gnome-Rhone engines, fuselages shaped like tadpoles and twin fins set high on the tailplanes. Starting from a perfect right echelon formation, they fanned out in a deafening roar. Each aircraft climbed steeply through the streams of tracer, its identification markings showing up clearly on the grey fuselage. They levelled out, then dived hell for leather, bomb bays open. The first, No. 49, one engine already in flames, let go its six light bombs, which ricochetted and exploded among the camouflaged lorries. Like a comet dragging a long fiery tail it turned and its heroic pilot came back, enfilading the road with his cannon and his fixed machine-guns. Rolling from side to side, out of control, it broke away and. crashed in a terrific shower of sparks on top of a group of armoured cars which were ground into the dust by the impact of the six-ton plane going at 300 m.p.h.

  Breguet No. 21 came in flat out, let go its bombs and then levelled out over the canal, hugging the water and pursued by black bursts. On the way it machine-gunned two flak emplacements, whose crews collapsed over the guns. It got away.

  The third plane attacked through the incandescent ribbons which scored the sky. The flak guns strewed its path with thousands of fragments of steel. Among the crash of the bombs and the roar of engines four sharp metallic cracks rang out—four hits on the slender wings, four trails of smoke. The Breguet immediately burst into flames like a torch. The pilot switched off his engines, lowered his flaps, and went into a violent sideslip and belly-landed in a marshy field with a scream of metal.

  There was a lull in the flak. The gunners looked round wondering ‘what next?’ A new flight of three Breguets, Nos. 7, 9 and 4 which had feinted towards Tongres, came back at right angles to the c
ongested enemy columns, so low that they seemed be slipping from one field into the next. Taking advantage of the lull, they shot between the trees, dropped their bombs and let fly with their guns, and then jumped the row of poplars. But the flak had the last word all the same, for two of them were disgorging a heavy stream of black smoke.

  More Breguets arrived, soon caught in the impenetrable meshes of the flak. The wings of No. 14 were torn to ribbons, and the machine, its ailerons gone, and now quite unmanageable, crashed into the trees by the roadside, bounced, and hit the ground/in a cloud of dust which was soon fringed with flame.

  No. 19, a river of fire twenty yards long issuing from its punctured tanks, suddenly climbed vertically and two dark shapes emerged from the cockpit and started spinning down—two parachutes opened out, apparently fixed in space while the plane flicked over and went into a spin.

  The last of the Breguets, No. 22, engines flat out, dived desperately in turn, multi-coloured tracer whipping under its fuselage. It dropped its bombs diagonally across a park of artillery tractors. Then it was hit, wobbled, and fragments of aluminium tom off by the bullets fluttered in its slipstream, but miraculously it got through and vanished into the dense smoke of the fires raging all along the road.

  That was the end. A hundred or so vehicles were blazing away on the road, their burning fuel eating into the tar. The sky was bespattered with bursts in thick clumps and criss-crossed with grey smoke-trails. Through the roar of the column getting under way could be heard from the Tongres direction the muffled rattle of the flak baying after the surviving Breguet. Once again the tanks and trucks were irresistibly on the move. Eight aircraft for four minutes’ respite!

  The flak stayed in position, and the sacrifice went on. In the course of the afternoon the R.A.F., following the heroic French fighter-pilots from 1/54, made another effort to halt the avalanche of enemy armour from Maestricht. Collecting all its available Fairey Battles, it sent them into the fray. Sixty-seven planes started—thirty-one came through, most of them so severely damaged that they were unable to get back to England. Later on it was the turn of the Lioré-et-Olivier 45s, while our Curtiss’s, our Dewoitines and our Moranes tried to get their teeth into the formations of Dorniers. The Messerschmitts’ death-dance went on in our skies just the same. A thousand successes, but also five hundred pilots massacred because they were too few and it was too late.