It was 7 o’clock. The golden sunlight was softly gathered in the falling summer day and in the diaphanous cirrus clouds. It was the hour when, now that the war had receded to the North, the calm sea and the warm air breathed the joy of living.
The Halifaxes were heavily laden; petrol for twelve hours’ flying and three tons of arms and ammunition in parachute containers. The engines were labouring, flat out, the pilots climbing as steeply as they could without stalling, for the Adriatic is narrow and Yugoslavia’s tall mountains already capped the horizon. They also had to gain height quickly because in the Mediterranean the period of twilight is long and night hesitates before finally falling—and the Messerschmitt 109s stood guard on their Dalmatian airfields.
The Halifax flown by F/Lt. R. Chmiel, bearing the chequered red-and-white insignia of the Polish Air Force, crossed the Balkan coast at Dubrovnik.
Night had now swallowed up the mountains of Serbia. Hundreds of partisan fires twinkled amongst the hills, and lower down, in the valleys, the S.S. patrols had theirs too. The moon rose over the Alps and the pale Austrian plain, where the Danube, like a silvery ribbon, trailed its hundred loops. Vienna was over there to the left, invisible.
Everything was O.K. on board. The crew were silent, but they were thrilled to be making for Poland, their own country. The compass showed their course set for Warsaw. Theirs was a desperate mission, to help the desperate defenders of that heroic city.
Beneath the aircraft the plain began to wrinkle, to heave. Soon the mountains of the High Tatra appeared, their summits sprinkled with early snow. The moon had disappeared, blotted out by a dense cloud front which billowed in low dark rolling waves.
And there was Poland; but with the moonshine everything else had gone too; the big shining lakes, the forests, the white quarries were all hidden in the gloom. The crew’s long agony was beginning.
They were beginning to feel the first onset of fatigue, after flying for five long hours. The heavy four-engined planes ploughed their way through the treacherous storm-laden clouds. All along their track the flak opened up, the brief flashes from the 88-mm. visible in the valleys, on the hills and along the roads. One would have imagined that the planes were sprinkling the earth with stars as they passed over.
‘Navigator to pilot. Searchlights and flak three o’clock, some way off.’
Every face turned. A dozen or so miles away another Halifax was transfixed by the rapiers of the searchlights and all around flak was bursting. Then suddenly everything went dark, except for one drunken comet which spiralled quickly down and then vanished. Only five Halifaxes now.
After that the night seemed darker and thicker still. The pilots had to turn the instrument-panel lighting as low as possible, but it still seemed blindingly bright. Hours of inky blackness, all alike in that tunnel of cloud.
Then suddenly the horizon seemed hollowed out and reddened like the dawn. Drops of blood seemed to form on the frosty perspex.
The planes began to lose height—6000 feet . . . 5000 feet—and the speed increased. The source of the glow was hidden behind the black earth, but it gradually filled the sky. A vivid scarlet snake twisted under the wings—it was the Vistula; and, like a brilliant sunrise, Warsaw in flames was before them. The crews, hypnotised, drank in the light. The wireless operator had half risen to his feet and was looking over the pilot’s shoulder.The machine-gunners had turned their turrets to face forwards. Only the rear gunner, tucked away at the other end of the long fuselage between the two fins, looked out into the night and saw nothing—but his heart told him his country’s capital was there.
The vast brazier, devouring thousands upon thousands of burning, collapsing houses, lit the sky and showed up the dark outlines of the Halifaxes. From as far out as Sluzew flak ringed the town, and, at the sound of the engines, the 88s stopped firing horizontally over the town and began to grope the sky.
The town was one vast inferno, the ground and the sky mingling in one blinding eruption of flame. And men had been fighting in that hell for thirty-eight days already.
The aircraft came down low over the river to avoid the flak and jumped the wrecked bridges, whose shattered piles were mirrored in the blood-stained water. The pilot felt he was piercing a thick wall of fire. The engine temperatures shot up and the acrid smoke invaded the Halifax, making the crew cough.
Suddenly they entered a patch of shadow. It was the western part of the town, held by the enemy and where the insurrection had been quelled early on.
Only a few isolated groups of partisans still held out there, surrounded by the S.S. troops. Searchlights were trained along the avenues lighting up the fronts of the houses. At every street corner there was a multiple pom-pom spraying the roofs with explosive bullets and covering the hesitant advance of the tanks.
A South-African Liberator came skimming over the chimney-stacks, firing with all its guns. It shot out some of the searchlights, but then the pilot, probably dazzled, crashed into a church steeple.
Further on the furnace began again. How could the charred debris of a town still continue to throw up so much heat and flame? How could General Bor’s men, hammered by German artillery, survive in this brazier—not only survive, but fight?
Even the drains were ablaze. The Germans had expended valuable reserves of fuel in an attempt to dislodge the partisans from the underground labyrinth that the S.S. patrols dare not venture into.
Warsaw presented such an appalling sight that the men in the Halifax wept, the tears leaving glistening traces as the heat dried them on their soot-blackened faces. They wept for their rent country, the monstrous war, their enemies’ ruthlessness, their Allies’ treachery and cowardice. They wept for their families buried alive in their homes. They wept for the futility of their own share in the fight now, and for a life without the savour of hope.
Over to the right the outline of a crippled Halifax appeared for a second against the wall of light and then fell into the conflagration—an incandescent spark falling back into the forest fire.
Like converging spokes of a wheel the Tiger tanks, crushing the debris under their tracks, were slowly working their way towards the burning centre of the old town, the headquarters of the Resistance. Chmiel saw two of them edging through the rubble and waving their long gun like the trunk of some prehistoric monster. The rear-gunner fired a long burst with his four Brownings, but the tracer bounced off the armour-plating like drops of water off a lump of granite. Suddenly one of the Tigers disappeared under an avalanche of rubble as a cellar roof collapsed under it. The Halifax circled over the flames at 300 m.p.h. The paint blistered on the wings and the showers of sparks eroded the perspex, making it opaque.
Trying to find the flares marking the Dropping Zone in this blinding chaos was obviously useless, and even the navigator from his vantage point in the bomb-aimer’s transparent blister could not make out the streets of his native town amongst those heaps of rubble. Microphone in hand, he tried to guide his pilot.
Other aircraft were braving the storm and struggling to get to the centre of the conflagration. Four Liberators of the South African S.A.S. Squadron had come on the suicide trip out of loyalty to their Polish comrades. Blinded, flaps down, they were stooging round, trying to find where they could drop their precious containers. The flak pursued them relentlessly, and, one by one, the big planes went down.
Chmiel’s navigator kept on trying, but it was difficult. Streets? What streets? Where were they in that nightmarish moonscape where the ground itself seemed to burn and vitrify the rubble to a level flatness?
They must find the Dropping Zone fast, drop the arms and ammunition and then get away from this flaming vault.
Ashes fell like black snow, but never reached the ground. They remained suspended between earth and sky as new gusts of hot air belched forth by the boiling cauldron below swirled them up afresh thousands of feet into the air.
The crew of the Halifax were drugged with horror. There comes a point where despair drives out fe
ar, and those seven men felt that their taut nerves had passed beyond even that point, into a state where nothing was left but hate and a desire for sacrifice. The normal regular laws of nature were in abeyance, and F/Lt. Chmiel knew that if he said the word the whole crew was ready to hurl itself at the enemy and crash the plane on a Hun target.
Ah! here was the district round the railway station, recaptured by the Hermann Goering Division. They could see a pontoon-bridge, hastily thrown over the Vistula by the Germans—the bridges in the city centre were all controlled by the insurgents—and a German convoy crossing. The trucks were bumper to bumper, and among the mass of vehicles on the embankment there five big self-propelled guns. The Germans, having nothing to fear from the Russian Air Force for the time being, were taken by surprise.
The turrets of the Halifax spat fire, the automatic 20-mm. on the ground replied angrily.
‘If only, if only we had some bombs!’ The pilot gritted his teeth and fought the crazy temptation of turning about and crushing the whole set-up under the Halifax’s thirty-ton weight. No! he must first deliver the Sten guns, the Brens and the grenades to Bor-Komorovski’s soldiers, who needed them so desperately. And he must also get back to his base, to be able to return the next day, and go on returning until the flak finally got him.
‘Navigator to pilot. This is Poniatovski Bridge, turn right at the next one.’
Here was the old town again, flanked by the working-class districts. The blackened skeletons of the blocks of flats rising from the shambles. Over Kierbedz Bridge the plane turned and found itself over Krasinski Square. Five green flares in the shape of a cross and sheets arranged in a T-shape to show the direction of the wind—as if every flame for miles around didn’t already sufficiently show that!—it was the D.Z.
Men were running below, waving. The Halifax turned tight, flaps down, engines throttled back, and came back over the square, bomb-bays open. Just then black puffs appeared over the ruined buildings—it was the 88s on the hill in the park shooting at the plane. The splinters mowed down some of the men on the ground, and, just as the containers fell clear, the Halifax was shaken by a terrific explosion. It was almost turned on its back, but the pilot miraculously righted it, so low that it hit a wall—No. 4 engine started racing, its propeller had gone west. The flight engineer, his stomach ripped open by a splinter, raised himself on his arms, switched the engine off and closed the fuel-cock.
The parachutes hardly slowed down the fall of the dangling cylinders in that superheated air. Three of them caught fire before reaching the ground.
In the aircraft Chmiel wrestled with the controls. Round him the wounded moaned—four of the crew had been hit by the shrapnel which had riddled the fuselage. The navigator, hurled across the cabin by the explosion, had smashed his skull on a corner of the radio set and a trickle of blood flowed from his nose. He was cluttering up the gangway.
‘Task completed! We must get out of this.’ Straight back was out of the question, as every flak battery was on the qui vive. They would have to skirt north-east and north of Warsaw and find shelter in the shadows on the right bank of the Vistula. There stood Rokossovsky’s troops, thirty divisions halted in their headlong pursuit of the Germans by order of the Kremlin, and now calmly waiting for the tragedy to run its course.
The crew of the Halifax were exhausted, but they still had six hours’ flying time ahead of them—probably seven, on three engines—before they could get the wounded back to Brindisi. It was pretty rough, when there were Allied airfields a few minutes away. Allied? The pilot shrugged his shoulders and turned left to get on to a southerly course.
‘Look out, pilot! Plane seven o’clock! ’
Chmiel, in spite of being an engine short, started to corkscrew. Down to pick up speed, then up and away to the right. The string of tracer passed under the wing and went weaving away into the night.
Where was that plane now? He was certainly coming back, as the Halifax was a perfect target, outlined against the burning city. The night-fighter, painted black against the black sky, its exhausts carefully masked, slipped through the night, keeping his target between the glare and himself.
‘There he is!’
The pedal-operated turret swivelled round and the mid-upper gunner had his hand on the button ready to fire, when an extra large explosion over there in Warsaw raised the veil for an instant and revealed the enemy plane.
It was a low-wing twin-engined plane with a glass-house nose and twin fins.
‘Holy Mother of God!’
Its fuselage bore a red star.
‘Hullo, mid-upper, can you still see him?’
No reply.
‘Well, can you? Answer!’
In the end a voice stammered in the intercom. ‘I didn’t shoot. . . . I couldn’t. . . . It was a Pe-2.’
But the Pe-2 had shot all right.
The Halifax set course for Brindisi again. The rear-gunner, numb with cold in his turret, was not the last to see the bloody light over Warsaw, which was destined to continue for twenty-six days and twenty-six nights more. They could not call up the other planes in 138 Squadron over the R/T as they still had five hours’ flying over enemy territory—long, anxious hours.
Just as the radiant summer sun rose over Italy the Halifax at last landed on Brindisi airfield. The other pilots were anxiously waiting for her, together with the ambulance and the fire-crew.
As he taxied towards the control tower Chmiel instinctively counted the empty dispersal bays. The five other planes must be lost; they could not be behind him, as he was late himself and his tanks were empty.
He cleared and switched off his last engine. The medical orderlies took off the wounded. The rest of the crew jumped down.
How blue the sky was here! When their mates ran up and asked how it had been, they shook their heads and said nothing. They had not yet emerged from their nightmare.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAX GUEDJ
The Mess in the Free French Air Forces H.Q. in South Kensington, 25th August 1944.
At a corner of the bar he sat silent and alone, for he was not of a ‘matey’ disposition and his recent experiences had embittered him. We were at the other end of the room talking in low voices, and about him, naturally. Through all our talk about ‘shop’ you could sense our intense admiration for Max, the famous Squadron-Leader ‘Maurice’ of Coastal Command, and we were not exactly beginners ourselves.
On his uniform he wore the Croix de la Liberation, the D.S.O. and a double D.F.C. Max Guedj already had more than a hundred shipping strikes in Beau-fighters and Mosquitos to his credit. He commanded a wing. He was surrounded for us young chaps by a halo of respect, even of legend—the Prinz Eugen do on 12th May 1942, the two Junkers 88s shot down off Royan after a dog-fight which lasted a full forty minutes, the Brest show, etc, etc. It all served to isolate him even more.
We knew from the B.B.C. that a couple of days previously he had led fifteen Mosquitoes in an attack on two mine-sweepers and a Narvik class destroyer near Le Verdon, and that the minesweepers had been sunk by rocket fire and the destroyer severely damaged. We also knew that he had every reason to be sad, for he had had to leave his baby daughter behind in Morocco, and he knew that his father had been clapped in prison by Frenchmen in the service of the Germans.
What always surprised us was his preference for shipping strikes. Hardly what one would expect of a man of thirty-two with a cool clear brain and a legal training. He was at the head of one of those units made up of real hard cases, few of whom survived a whole tour of operations of thirty trips. For three and a half years he had been holding out in a branch of the service where 75 per cent losses in one month was normal.
For one thing, the flak was frightful. On the previous day, for example, 24th August, twelve Beaufighters from 236 Squadron and eight from 404, led by E. W. Tacon, a New Zealander, had attacked the two destroyers stationed at the Pointe de Graves. The two ships had sunk in flames, but only three Beaus had got back.
&
nbsp; The enemy fighters were worse still. In the previous March, for instance, six Messerschmitt 109s from Mérignac had jumped six Torbeaus (Torpedo-Beaufighters), only two of which got away, and one of those killed its crew when it crashed on landing.
It was 12.30. The Colonel and the staff officers got up. Lunch was ready. We watched Max get up too, and go with them. We never saw him again. The pace of the air war was getting hotter, and Max seldom took his statutory leave.
On a dreary winter’s day in 1945 Jacques Remlinger and I were sitting in Pete Wickham’s office at Fighter Command H.Q. at Stanmore. A telegram arrived and he handed it to me without a word. Jacques read over my shoulder, ‘Max missing.’
We were flabbergasted. It was incredible. Max, the greatest ace in the whole French Air Force from 1939 to 1945, to get himself shot down in Norway, after four years of fighting, with France already liberated and the war nearly over! And yet, in one sense, what an admirable end—to go off like that, away from the sun, into the cold shadow of the Arctic Circle, the cinders of his body scattered over the icy waters, of Ofot Fjord.
R.A.F. Coasted Fighter Station, Banff
He stepped out of the darkness and silence of the deserted airfield into the light of the Mess. The two blankets slung across the door fell back behind him. He blinked as he took off his Irvine jacket, the collar of which was damp with fog and smelt of mutton fat and crudely tanned leather. The air was full of the noise of chairs falling and furniture being knocked about. The sinking of a 9000-ton transport at the entrance of the Zuyder Zee was being celebrated and the chaps were having a wizard time.
Max stopped by the door for a moment, slipping his forage cap under his shoulder strap with the old familiar gesture. His entry was greeted as usual with cries of ‘Good evening, Sir. Have a drink, Sir?’
‘No, thank you.’ He was always conscious of his sharp voice and of his French accent.
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) Page 11
