Sweetman eased Z3029, SA-R, gently off Wittering runway at a quarter to midnight on July 23 1942. According to his recollections after this sortie, at first he headed north before turning on a reciprocal course that brought him to the vicinity of Spalding. There, outlined against a cloud layer below and to starboard of him, he spotted the menacing shape of a Dornier Do217, flying south. As he closed in, Sweetman’s Hurricane was spotted by the Dornier crew and its dorsal turret gunner let fly with a burst of machine-gun fire. The bright red and white tracer rounds were way off target though. Banking to starboard, Sweetman closed to seventy yards, loosing off a deflection burst at the nose of the Dornier from his eight machine guns, but without any visible effect. The Dornier dived rapidly in an effort to escape the line of fire but Sweetman hung on down to 5,000 feet altitude, firing two more bursts as he followed his prey. These seemed to produce an immediate result as “twin streams of thick smoky vapour flowed from the enemy aircraft.” Furthermore Sweetman reported that the Dornier “turned right over on its back and dived vertically down out of sight.” Although it was bright moonlight, there was some broken cloud around at 3,000 feet and as he orbited the spot, Sweetman saw “the flare of an explosion below”, which he took to signal the end of his victim. Calling up Wittering sector operations, his position was fixed to within six miles of the crash site and he set course for base, landing back at 01.00 in an elated mood.
It was established that an enemy aircraft had crashed in a field at Fleet Fen south of Holbeach and according to 58 Maintenance Unit (58 MU) inspectors, it was a Dornier Do217E that was entirely destroyed, with wreckage strewn over twenty acres. It was their task to salvage as much material as possible and gather intelligence about this latest model.
The German crew had baled out and landed in a string between Fleet Fen and Holbeach itself and the occupants on duty in an Observer Corps post just outside the town had quite a shock when a German airman walked in and gave himself up! He was left in the care of two slightly bewildered observers while a colleague, quickly picking up the only rifle in the hut, ran outside and rounded up another of the crew a short distance away. A third German was found hiding in a farmyard and the fourth was apprehended nonchalantly walking down the road in his stockinged feet, having lost his boots when he abandoned the aeroplane.
Flt Lt Sweetman duly submitted a claim for one Dornier 217 destroyed but that signalled the beginning of another battle, this time with one of his own side. When the 486 Squadron Intelligence Officer made enquiries to support Sweetman’s claim, the crash having been confirmed by a searchlight battery at Whaplode Drove, he was told that a 409 Squadron Beaufighter crew, Flt Lt E L (Peter) McMillan (pilot) and Sgt Shepherd, had submitted a claim for the same aircraft. It was also verified that there was only one enemy aircraft shot down in that district that night.
In an article written by Bill Norman and published in the December 2000 issue of FlyPast magazine former night fighter pilot Peter McMillan recalled his two particular air combats with the enemy in July 1942 and remembered how he had to share his success with another squadron. Flying 409 Squadron Beaufighter VI, X8153, it was the first of his claims that he believed was the Fleet Fen aircraft – the one he, too, claimed as destroyed. Peter claimed only a damaged for his second engagement. From the details contained in McMillan’s combat report – just as with Sweetman’s – it is impossible to reconstruct clearly his precise location at the time of the Fleet Fen combat. However, a D/F bearing put him in the vicinity of Holbeach, and having fired off 339 rounds of 20mm cannon ammunition, he most certainly had a go at something that night.
McMillan’s combat report outlines his version of events. He wrote: “Take-off from RAF Coleby Grange was at 23.05 on the 23rd and after a short while the Beaufighter was handed over to Orby radar station to begin a GCI exercise.” This was a quite normal procedure during a patrol so that the night fighter crews could get in as much practice in the air as possible, at the same time as being instantly available if ground control detected a potential target. On this occasion, very soon GCI reported trade and McMillan was vectored northwards. Anticipating imminent action, he told Sgt Shepherd to set the cannon armament to ‘fire’ which involved Shepherd leaving his seat to go forward to the central weapons bay, between himself and his pilot. While he was doing so his intercom failed owing to a broken headset lead. Fortunately McMillan could still hear Shepherd – vital for the interception – but Shepherd could not hear his pilot’s responses. There was a buzzer link between the cockpits, however, and they found by speedy improvisation of a simple code they were able to continue with the interception.
Orby GCI put them onto a vector of 100° and warned McMillan he would have to turn quickly onto the reciprocal of 280°. When the instruction to turn came he brought the Beaufighter hard round and there on Shepherd’s display tubes was the blip. But the target was jinking around and the contact was lost just as quickly. The Orby controller gave a quick course correction and Shepherd was back in business and this time he held on to it.
McMillan opened the throttles to 280mph at 9,000 feet altitude and began to close in on the target. At 650 yards range he obtained a visual to port and above and thought it to be a Dornier Do217 that was weaving and varying altitude. Calmly McMillan slid the Beaufighter over to bring his quarry slightly to starboard then closed to 250 yards range to make quite sure it was a hostile.
Confirmation was soon forthcoming because at this point the enemy opened fire, fortunately inaccurately. Slight back pressure on the yoke brought the gunsight on and McMillan let fly with three short bursts of cannon fire of two or three seconds each. After the third burst, a white glow appeared on the port engine and the target began to slow down. This caused the Beaufighter to overshoot its prey but as he passed below the Dornier McMillan saw the port engine was on fire. He hauled the Beaufighter round in a tight orbit and regained visual contact with the enemy aircraft silhouetted against the moon. He was in time to see two parachutes detach themselves from the aircraft just before it went straight down with the port engine blazing fiercely. He wrote: “My observer saw it explode on the ground and I claim this as destroyed.” This is a much more visually positive result than Sweetman was able to offer.
Now 486 Squadron would have nothing to do with this ‘sharing’ rubbish and the whole squadron closed ranks to validate Sweetman’s claim. Sweetman himself, accompanied by Sqn Ldr Clayton from Wittering operations and Plt Off Thomas (the squadron intelligence officer), visited the crash site the next morning where they consulted with Flt Lt Morrison of 58MU from Newark. The latter was responsible for examination and removal of the debris. 486 Squadron documents record that Flt Lt Morrison declared that, despite searching for evidence of cannon strikes, he could find none. It was known of course that Sweetman’s Hurricane was armed only with .303 machine guns. However, on this latter point, the recollections of two former 58MU recovery team NCOs, interviewed by Sid Finn for his book Lincolnshire Air War, provide a contrary view as they said they worked at the site for many days and found evidence of 20mm cannon strikes on the wreckage.
The New Zealanders did not let it rest there and proceeded to interview the police constable who had arrested the German crew. He stated that one member of the crew said they had been shot down by a Spitfire. This remark was taken to indicate that a single-engine, rather than a twin-engine, aircraft was seen which lent support to Sweetman’s claim, it being easy to confuse a Spitfire with a Hurricane in the turmoil of a night battle. In their opinion, a final corroboration of 486’s claim came when Captain G A Peacock, a Royal Artillery officer stationed at Wittering, made a formal written declaration, carefully witnessed by an army colleague and Plt Off Thomas. In his statement Capt Peacock wrote:
At about midnight I was walking in the garden of a house at Moulton Chapel, where I was staying on leave. My attention was attracted by the sound of machine-gun fire in the air. I saw two bursts of fire. . . after which an aeroplane caught fire and dived steeply. It passed
across the very bright moon, making the perfect silhouette of a Dornier. The aircraft crashed, a mile from where I stood, in a tremendous explosion... looking up again I plainly saw a Hurricane circling and it was from this aircraft that the gunfire originated. No other aeroplane fired its guns in the vicinity at the time of this action.
The lengths to which 486 Squadron went to back up their claim graphically illustrates the high degree of morale and camaraderie existing in RAF night fighter units at this time. The outcome was that 486 Squadron believed Harvey Sweetman had proved his case conclusively, yet ironically his original combat report does not carry the usual HQ Fighter Command ‘claim approved or shared’ endorsement. Peter McMillan’s report on the other hand is endorsed ‘shared 1/2 with 486 Sqdn’.
What seems clear now is that there were several enemy aircraft and RAF fighters in close proximity that night for, in addition to the Fleet Fen Dornier, at least one more Dornier was lost from each of KG40 and KG2 at unknown locations. The “twin streams of vapour” reported by Flt Lt Sweetman do not necessarily mean the Dornier had been hit, since it was known that aviation fuel had a propensity to produce black exhaust smoke when engine throttles were suddenly rammed open. It might be felt significant that Flt Lt Sweetman also lost sight of his target – last seen in a radical manoeuvre quite in keeping with its design capabilities – at a critical moment, while Flt Lt McMillan recorded that his gunfire set one engine of his target on fire and Sgt Shepherd had it in view down to impact. On the other hand, when questioned by 486 Squadron, the MU officer – without, it has to be said, the benefit of a lengthy inspection – is reported as saying he “found no evidence of cannon strikes”, yet his recovery team senior NCO, who spent more than a week at the site, firmly expressed the opposite view. Even one of the German crew admitted seeing a twin-engine aeroplane fly past him as he fell from the bomber.
Well, in the historian’s ‘paper war’, evaluation and accreditation may seem important – and there are certainly puzzles enough in this incident! But in the ‘shooting war’, while there was clearly a healthy element of unit pride involved, the only important thing in the end is that someone actually shot down a raider when the enemy was at the gate.
This busy night was not yet over for Peter McMillan though, and once again with the advantage of hindsight, the outcome of his second combat was not quite as he thought.
As soon as he had reported the first kill to Orby he was passed to sector control for position fixing and then back to Orby GCI. More trade was reported to the east. McMillan was vectored onto 100° and advised of a target at four miles dead ahead at 8,000 feet altitude. McMillan increased speed to 280mph to close the gap and calmly asked Orby to bring him in on the port side as the moon was to starboard. A stern-chase followed and when he got within one and a half miles range of his quarry Orby GCI advised him they could not help him any more and told him to continue on 110°. After a while Sgt Shepherd picked out and held an AI contact although the target jinked around before settling on a course of 090°. McMillan’s vision was hampered by cloud now but Shepherd neatly brought him down to 1,500 yards range and there, off to port and slightly above, was the silhouette of an aircraft. Keeping it in sight he crossed over to approach with it slightly to starboard. With the lighter sky behind him and fearful of being spotted, McMillan swiftly closed to 500 yards, eased up behind it, identified it as a Dornier Do217 and let fly with his cannons, all in a series of smooth, decisive movements. He saw flashes of his fire hitting the enemy aircraft, which immediately did a quarter roll and dived away. McMillan endeavoured to follow but lost sight of the Dornier and it disappeared into the ground returns (electronic ‘noise’) on Sgt Shepherd’s screens. When they reached 4,000 feet with 320mph on the clock he pulled out and returned to base, claiming the Dornier as damaged.
Peter McMillan’s second adversary that night was Feldwebel Willi Schludecker, a highly experienced bomber pilot who flew a total of 120 ops, of which thirty-two were made against English targets. Survivor of nine crash-landings due to battle damage, Willi came closest to oblivion the night he ran into Peter McMillan. Willi Schludecker was briefed by KG2 to attack Bedford with a 2,000kg bomb load carried in Dornier Do217, U5+BL, wk nr 4252. Approaching The Wash, Fw Heinrich Buhl, the flight engineer and gunner, had trouble with one of his weapons and let off a burst of tracer into the night sky. Willi thought that may have attracted a night fighter because a little later the crew spotted an aircraft creeping up from astern. This is believed to be McMillan’s Beaufighter. Displaying a considerable degree of confidence, Willi decided to hold his course and allow it to come within his own gunners’ range. Both aircraft opened fire simultaneously with the greater muzzle flash of the Beaufighter cannons preventing McMillan from seeing return fire and the Dornier crew thinking their own fire had made the Beaufighter explode! When the Dornier made its violent escape manoeuvre – bear in mind it was an aeroplane designed and stressed for dive-bombing – they never saw each other again.
In fact Peter McMillan would have been justified in claiming two Dorniers as destroyed that night because Schludecker’s aircraft was so badly damaged in the encounter that he had to jettison the bomb load and head for home. It was with the greatest of difficulty that he made it back to Gilze-Rijen in Holland, where he crash-landed the Dornier at three times the normal landing speed after making three attempts to get the aircraft down. That was Willi’s ninth – and last – crash-landing because he spent the next six months in hospital as a result of his injuries and it put an end to his operational flying career.
On March 9 2000 Peter McMillan, Willi Schludecker and Heinrich Buhl came face-to-face for the first time when they met in Hove at a meeting arranged by Bill Norman. This time it was a friendly encounter between men who, in Heinrich Buhl’s words, “had been adversaries but never enemies” and who found they had much in common.
Neatishead GCI was involved with so many interceptions at this time, to the extent that occasionally, in its own words, it became “overcrowded”. Just such a situation occurred on July 27/28, a night of lively action when Wittering’s Mosquitoes claimed two more Do217s off the north Norfolk coast, part of a raid heading for Birmingham. Neatishead GCI took on 151’s Sqn Ldr Dennis Pennington and Flt Sgt David Donnett (RO), then handed them back to Coltishall sector control because of too many plots. Fortunately, while waiting for Coltishall to start the ball rolling Donnett picked out a contact for himself – freelancing, as it was called, which was something all night fighter crews trained to do for these circumstances. They tracked down a Dornier Do217 and although it was hit hard and seen going down, Pennington’s night vision was suddenly impaired when an instrument light shield fell off in his cockpit and he lost sight of the target. In action nearby was Mosquito DD629, flown by Plt Off Ernest Fielding and Flt Sgt James Paine (RO) who confirmed they saw an aircraft burning on the sea in Pennington’s vicinity. This is believed to be U5+FL from I/KG2 flown by Lt Hans-Joachim Möhring who, with his crew, was lost that night. About the same time, Fielding and Paine, patrolling the swept channel coastal convoy route under the control of Neatishead GCI’s Flt Lt Ballantyne, themselves exchanged fire with another Do217, claiming to have hit it hard. The bomber was last seen trailing sparks and flames that disappeared suddenly at sea level east of Cromer, prompting them to claim one Do217 destroyed. Fw Richard Stumpf and his crew from KG2 failed to return that night and it is possible that Fielding was the cause of his demise.
If there needed to be yet further evidence of the high state of morale among RAF night fighter crews at this time, it was emphatically demonstrated yet again on the night of July 30/31 1942, in a war-torn night sky over Peterborough. That night saw a heavy raid on this engineering and railway centre, from which the Luftwaffe did not emerge unscathed, two aircraft falling to the defences, one to AA and another to the RAF.
In the first incident a Junkers Ju88A-4, wk nr 2086, 1T+CR, of III/KG 26 is believed to have been hedge-hopping its way back to a base in Holland (altho
ugh the unit was actually based at Rennes) when it was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Peterborough. It was seen heading north-east away from the city, at low level and on fire. So low was it that the Junkers collided with overhead electricity cables near the village of Thorney. It staggered and as the pilot fought to keep it airborne, it was hit repeatedly by fire from a .303 machine gun wielded by Sgt Fox, one of the crew of a nearby searchlight post. 1T+CR crashed in Green Drove, Thorney, killing all on board – Ofw V Bechthold, Fw L Drees, Ogfr K Heberling and Gefr H Bredemeier.
That same night a Mosquito crew of 151 Squadron had several lively encounters with enemy raiders, believed to be en route to attack Birmingham, despatching one Dornier Do217 into the cold waters of the North Sea, sixty miles off the north Norfolk coast and another, nearly as far inland, into the depths of the peaty Fenland soil.
It was 22.30 when Fg Off Alex McRitchie, an Australian pilot with 151 Squadron, lifted his Mosquito NFII, DD669, from the runway at RAF Wittering and set course for Cromer in company with his Nav/RO Flight Sergeant E S James. They were briefed to carry out a patrol some sixty miles off the north Norfolk coast. It will be remembered that Alex had cut his teeth flying Fighter Nights on Defiants with the squadron a year earlier and now he had a chance to add to the success that 151 Squadron was enjoying with its new Mosquitoes.
There was just time to get in one practice interception before Neatishead GCI passed McRitchie over to the Chain Home Low (CHL) station at Happisburgh on the north Norfolk coast, which had plotted an incoming raid. After being put onto a chase that turned out to be a false alarm, five bandits were detected heading towards the English coast. McRitchie was vectored onto a course for a stern-chase on one of these incoming aircraft. His target was quickly overhauled and identified as a Dornier Do217 that, after two brief but devastating bursts of cannon and machine-gun fire, caught fire and plunged into The Wash below. Alex McRitchie’s victim was Dornier Do217E-4, wk nr 5469, U5+GV flown by Ofw Artur Hartwig of IV/KG2 who, along with his crew, died in the encounter.
No Place for Chivalry Page 21
