Night Raiders

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  When he had made another 20 paces the moon emerged brilliantly through a chink in the clouds and he flung himself down. He had not been quick enough to avoid the vigilance of one of the lookouts. The German shouted a challenge and began to run towards him. Yardley leaped up and raced for the trees to his right. He heard a shot and immediately after it another. Two bullets whistled past. Then he was among the trees and pounding uphill, tripping over fallen branches, sinking into leaf mould which gave way under the snow. Panting and desperate, he ran half-blinded with the sweat that stung his eyes.

  He reached the top of the rising ground and waited while he recovered his wind and gathered his wits. Far away on the road he could hear motor engines, he could see headlights. He felt trapped but he started to trot on again.

  At three in the morning he was on the eastern outskirts of Schutzstadt: weary, frightened but determined that he would cover the last two miles even if he had to fight his way through with the five rounds remaining in his revolver and the dozen he carried in his pocket.

  The worst part was yet to come. He had to pass houses and there were troops billeted in some of them. There were anti-aircraft-gun sites and searchlights to negotiate. There would be sentries and night-duty crews awake.

  He still had the help of the clouds which intermittently obscured the moon. Taking advantage of every interval of darkness, he made a series of dashes from cover to another place of concealment. Three times some restless dog barked and each time he froze, thinking it had heard or scented him. But the barking soon ceased and he continued his way towards the aerodrome.

  The aerodrome lights were visible from a long way off and all his confidence returned once more. Night flying was going on: patrols taking off and landing. There had to be many Albatroses with engines warm and full of fuel, ready to go. Excitement began to rise.

  He came to the road he must cross in order to reach the aerodrome. There was a long run of hedge outside the wire along one section of the perimeter, and that was the place where he and Ilse had decided he should cut his way in. The hedge would protect him and prevent his silhouette or shadow being spotted.

  He waited a few minutes to make sure nobody was about before he sprinted across the road.

  He flopped onto the ground at the eastern end of the hedge, where he had planned to cut the wire; and as he landed on all fours his hand encountered cloth and firm human flesh under it.

  Yardley gave an involuntary exclamation of surprise and lunged forward, groping for some vulnerable part of this intruder: his neck, preferably.

  Ilse’s voice said quietly and calmly, “It’s I, Eric.”

  “Good God!”

  He recoiled and her hand reached out and tugged at his arm.

  “Here I am.”

  “Ilse, what the hell are you doing here, you... you idiot?”

  “I cycled here,” she told him calmly. “I was worried about you starting the engine on your own...”

  “You promised you’d stay at home if... if...”

  “If you made love to me.” She laughed. “But you got me to promise under false pretences: because you told me you intended to make love anyway. So my promise didn’t count.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Ilse. Go now. At once.”

  He felt her arms about his neck and her lips on his.

  “I’m staying until you are safely away, Eric.”

  “You will never get away. There will be a hue and cry as soon as I take off.”

  “Not necessarily. I have been here for two hours and aeroplanes are constantly coming and going.”

  “Stay here, then. I can manage on my own.”

  “All right.”

  First light was showing faintly on the horizon. He held her for a moment, kissed her and said, “God protect you.” Then he had cut the wire and was creeping along the hedge towards the nearest Albatros.

  He stayed pressed against the hedge for a moment while he took stock. There was nobody around. He came cautiously out of hiding and went to the aircraft. Ilse had told him that it had landed half an hour earlier and been refuelled. He touched the engine cowling. It had a canvas cover over it. He took off a glove and slid a hand up to touch the machine’s plywood nose: it was warm.

  He took the cover off and climbed to the cockpit. By the light of a torch, shaded by his hands, he examined the instruments, primed the cylinders, set throttle and ignition. Then he got out and pulled the propeller through a few times, heaving with most of the strength left in his tired body.

  He returned to the cockpit and switched on. He eased the chocks away from the wheels, made one final inspection, then, with the wheels now lightly chocked, he swung the propeller. Three swings and nothing happened. He began to panic, ran back to the cockpit and reset the timing and throttle.

  As he started to climb out again, Ilse’s voice came out of the darkness.

  “I’ll do it. You stay there.” There was urgency in her voice, and a tremor of nervousness.

  “Get away... right away...”

  “No!”

  She ran round to the front and seized the upper blade of the propeller. He subsided into the cockpit and leaned out, watching her. She put all her weight on the blade and it spun a half-circle with a stab of flame from the engine and a cough from the engine. Yardley’s heart bounded with the prospect of imminent freedom. Ilse grabbed the propeller blade again and swung once more.

  In the seconds before the engine caught, he heard men shouting and in the increasing light he saw soldiers running towards him.

  Ilse had watched the mechanics swinging propellers that morning — yesterday morning, now — she had told him, and she knew that she must jump back and aside as soon as the engine fired; to avoid being chewed up by the propeller or run into by the aeroplane.

  She leaped out of the way now and dived under the port wing to pull the chocks away.

  Yardley could not hear the volley of rifle shots that was fired at him, but he saw the soldiers put their rifles to the shoulder and aim, he saw the flashes at the rifles’ muzzles and felt the impact of bullets against the plywood and canvas around him.

  Ilse, bent double, scuttled backwards from under the wing. She raised her hand to wave at him. He saw her smile as he waved and smiled back.

  He opened the throttle and the Albatros surged forward.

  Ilse turned to run to the hedge and he saw her fall as bullets pierced her in a dozen places between head and waist.

  A bullet clipped the edge of the cockpit and another grazed his helmet.

  He brought the stick back and the Albatros soared into the air. Banking steeply, climbing, turning, looking down, he saw Ilse’s body on the snow and a German soldier turning it over with his booted foot. More were gathering around and he dived at them, firing the Spandaus, and they scattered and fell.

  He turned westward with smarting eyes. Freedom lay a short flight ahead. There was nothing left now for which to return to Germany when the war was at last over.

  If you enjoyed reading Night Raiders, you might be interested in Air Strike by Richard Townsend Bickers, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Air Strike by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Chapter One

  “I’d been airborne less than two minutes when those blasted Yanks opened up with everything they had.” Yule, his face normally as pink as a schoolboy’s under its desert tan, was red with indignation. He trembled with shock and anger, sweating in the Sicilian summer heat.

  Warren and Vincent, standing with him by the wreck of his Spitfire beside an olive grove, laughed loudly: the R.A.F. has an unconventional attitude to narrow escapes from violent death.

  The din of battle made the sultry air tremble. The Allied armies were fighting their way across Sicily from the beaches on which they had landed three days earlier. Artillery pounded, automatic weapons clattered, mortars thudded and bombs crumped at distances between a few hundred yards and several miles from where the three young pilots were grouped by the shot-down Spit
fire.

  The snarl of aero engines was added to the noise of gunfire as Focke Wulf 190, Reggiane Ariete and Macchi C200 fighter-bombers of the Luftwaffe and the Italian Air Force strafed British and American positions; while Kittyhawks, Mustangs and Spitfires dived on German and Italian artillery, tanks and infantry with cannon, machine-guns and bombs.

  “Cheer up, Toby,” said Warren, big, blond and bland, always unhurried of speech and, except in combat, in his movements. “The slap-happy clots did it to me yesterday.”

  “And to me, the day before,” Vincent added, his eyes twinkling with his habitual look of a mischievous leprechaun, never still for more than a few seconds on his spindly legs. His foxy face under lank dark hair looked unhealthily sallow against the others’ tans: oatmeal was his darkest shade, however strong the sun.

  “But they didn’t shoot you down,” Yule pointed out. His unruly mouse-coloured hair and wide, guileless grey eyes made him look like a teenager who had just been dragged out of a rugger scrum. The impression was not entirely false, for he was a teenager, but the game he had been playing for the past twenty-two months was a more deadly one than rugby football.

  The squadron Intelligence officer, since he didn’t fly a Spitfire, did not feel entitled to treat the near-tragedy with the same levity. “It’s a bad show, Toby; but they’re as green as a bunch of novice nuns. They’ve come straight off their troopships from places like Nebraska and Tennessee where no one’s ever seen a Spitfire... probably never even head of one...”

  “And they’re panicky because they’re shit-scared,” Vincent added. He was habitually scabrous in his phraseology. He had bad breath too. And his teeth tended to look as though they had lichen growing on them. He was not the conventional picture of a glamorous fighter pilot.

  “They should recognise R.A.F. markings, dammit,” Yule complained.

  “These raw Yanks don’t recognise anything,” the I.O. told him. “They shot down two of their own Kittyhawks in the first twenty-four hours after they came ashore.”

  Yule brightened. “What happened about that? There must have been a hell of a stink.”

  “You didn’t tell us, Tusty,” Warren complained. “You should have warned us these Hillbillies are even shooting down their own types.”

  Vincent grinned, showing chipped and discoloured teeth. “I bet the mighty Air Corps didn’t take that lying down.”

  “They didn’t,” Tustin said. “They sent the rest of the squadron in to strafe the gun batteries that had done it. With instructions only to scare them, of course...”

  The three pilots looked at each other in awe.

  “You’re pulling our legs,” said Toby Yule. “Talk about total war! That must have made their ack-ack even more trigger-happy than ever.”

  “Especially if the Yank pilots were trying not to hit them,” Vincent said, laughing again. “When they are trying, they usually miss... so presumably when they try to miss, they’re bang on target.” This was not only meant ill-naturedly. It was also a customary expression of rivalry and patronising professional contempt; substantiated, unhappily, by the fact that a lot of the American air crews’ early efforts over Europe and North Africa had been less than accurate.

  “They can’t have aimed off by much,” Tyson told them. “They bagged half a dozen G.I.s.”

  “God almighty,” Warren murmured reverently.

  Yule was beginning to feel neglected. His friends had come to pick him up and now they were side-tracking. He said, “Getting shot down wasn’t the end of it, though. There was even worse to come. As I jumped out of the cockpit there was this damn great Goumier charging at me with an enormous knife in his hand...”

  “Oh, God!” Warren exclaimed, starting to laugh again. “He was after your goolies for his Christmas tree,” Vincent managed to say before mirth stifled him.

  Flight Lieutenant Tustin, more staid than his younger comrades, allowed himself to participate in the joke. “Bit premature... it’s only July...”

  “They could have dried them in the sun... so they’d keep,” Vincent gasped.

  Yule was joining in his friends’ laughter by now. He controlled himself long enough to say, “Couldn’t blame him... you know what they always do to bailed-out Jerries and Eyeties... and he obviously thought, as the Yanks had shot me down, I must be an enemy.”

  The Moroccan troops, Goumiers, took no prisoners. Their invariable treatment of all Germans or Italians who fell into their hands (and they would go out of their way to capture any airman whom they saw parachuting from his aeroplane) was to castrate them and cut their throats. When in doubt about someone’s identity they gave him the same treatment. Women, they raped before slitting their jugulars. They would inflict all three indignities on any young man who happened to take their fancy.

  “What did you do?” Tustin asked.

  “I yelled “Je suis anglais” and pointed at the roundel...” Yule gestured at the red, white and blue circles on his fighter’s fuselage.

  “That stopped him?” The Intelligence officer sounded incredulous.

  Yule was no longer laughing. He shook his head. “No. He just shouted something in Arabic and took a tremendous swipe at me with his dagger.”

  Vincent and Warren were not laughing now either. “What happened then?” they asked together.

  Yule pointed to the other side of the crashed Spitfire. “He’s over there.” Then he glanced down at the webbing holster on his right hip, and, noticing the flap was open, began fussily to close it over his .38 Smith and Wesson.

  The other three exchanged glances.

  “He’s still here?” Warren asked. “What’s he hanging around for?”

  “He didn’t have much option,” Yule replied. “I shot his effing head off” He burst out in renewed laughter in which his friends joined, including Tustin.

  Toby Yule was customarily restrained in his language. Tustin, who was in his mid-thirties, thought it only reasonable that a youngster of nineteen who had just survived two close contacts with violent death should be so much in shock that he resorted to obscenity for relief.

  Yule paused in his laughter to blurt: “I wish... I wish I could do the same... to... to those half-witted cowboys who shot me down...” Which further amused his brother officers as they staggered about with laughter, there among the olive trees under the burning sun of southern Sicily.

  *

  Squadron Leader Walter Vladimir O’Neill, commanding Yule’s squadron, had high cheekbones and wild green Slavic eyes inherited from his Russian mother. And body odour, not inherited from anyone in particular. At prep school he had been called Stinker. At public school, with more imagination, Bisto. At the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, with that nice touch of R.A.F. subtlety in nicknames, he had been dubbed Fiver; derived from Chanel No. 5.

  At the age of twenty-six, with the flying start of graduation from Cranwell to boost him on his way up the promotion ladder, he should have been a wing commander by now, after six year’ service. That he was not was attributable to excessive zeal coupled with arrested mental development. Sqdn. Ldr. O’Neill was regarded far and wide by his superiors as an unmitigated nuisance. Traditionally, one way of ridding oneself of a nuisance is to promote him and post him away to another job. In this way vast numbers of military, naval and air force officers have achieved high rank; merit having nothing to do with their advancement. In the matter of Fiver O’Neill, however, although the death and wounding of hundreds of his seniors had provided many opportunities to promote him, his masters had merely shifted him sideways rather than upwards. He had arrived at his present rank in 1940 and this was the second squadron he had commanded. If his lack of brainpower was one handicap, it was paradoxically an even greater one that he flew like an angel. To see Walter Vladimir O’Neill in flight was to witness poetry in motion. The Germans’ greatest fighter ace in the desert campaign, Hans-Joachim Marseille, was always recognisable to the rest of the Luftwaffe by the beauty and precision of his flying. In Desert Air Fo
rce, at least among fighter units, anyone could spot when Sqdn. Ldr. O’Neill was at the controls of a Hurricane or Spitfire, from miles away. He was so good at it that no one in higher authority ever dreamed of giving him anything else to do: as a squadron commander he had to fly more than anyone; as a wing commander, other duties would have intruded. And, besides, with his level of stupidity, the fewer people’s lives he was responsible for the more easily everyone breathed from his Wing C.O. to Air Ministry.

  Yule, brought back to camp in the squadron I.O.’s Hillman light van, was dumped outside the Operations tent.

  “So you’ve bent one of my Spits, Toby,” was his Commanding Officer’s greeting; accompanied by the waft of aftershave and toilet water with which Fiver O’Neill sought to mitigate his distressing personal affliction.

  “The Yanks bent it, sir.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “Not a scratch, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll get one of theirs in return... teach ’em some manners... damn bad form shooting down one’s own side...”

  My God! He means it, thought Toby, meeting that mad sea-green stare.

  The squadron commander went on, “Sit down, Toby. Tell me all about it. What exactly happened?” He had been leading a formation on another task when Yule took off, and the first he knew of the episode was when he landed back and found him missing.

  Flying Officer Yule shifted an ammunition box around to face O’Neill’s canvas chair.

  “I was scrambled for a couple of one-o-nines that were shooting up an American ack-ack site, sir. They were down to a couple of hundred feet and only about five miles from here, so I spotted them at once. I’d got the leader plumb in my sights, with 60 degrees deflection... a piece of cake... and I was just pressing the tit when the blasted Yanks shifted their aim from the Jerries to me...”

  “Wish I’d seen it,” O’Neill interrupted. “I’d have led the chaps straight in and clobbered the idiots.”