“Scheisse…!” Marseille snarled in shock, angry he’d almost fallen prey to his own predictions of enemy flak as he jerked his stick sharply and banked the jet hard to port. Pöttgen followed off his left wing with the remaining two aircraft of his schwarm trailing to his right as a trio of smoky, black explosions bracketed his original path.
He craned his neck, searching this way and that for a good look at the rest of his men even as he called for damage reports over the radio.
“Foerster is down!” The leader of their third schwarm – ‘Yellow Flight’ – advised urgently, even as Marseille’ eyes settled upon the sight of flaming wreckage spiralling toward the earth off to starboard, black smoke trailing in thick clouds.
“Losing power in port engine, Mein Herr…” Leutnant Unger from Blue Flight also advised as Marseille cursed angrily under his breath. “Control surfaces damaged… finding it difficult to maintain level flight… sorry, Mein Herr…”
“You’ve definitely been hit, Stefan: I can see fluid leaks underneath the fuselage…” That report came the pilot’s wingman, dipping his own jet down to take a look at the belly and wings of his colleague’s aircraft.
“Understood, Weber… thank you.... Unger: head back to base as best you can,” he responded without a second thought. “Weber; go with him: make sure he gets home safe.”
“Jawohl, Mein Herr…!” The pair banked away from the rest of the formation as flak continued to pepper the sky ahead, the leader of the two jets streaming a faint trail of greasy smoke from one exhaust.
“The rest of Schwarm-Blau form on Gelb…!” Marseille called quickly, pushing his nose downward and building speed. “Schwarm-Gelb will lead the attack and the rest of us will fly top cover. Watch your altitude and watch for fighters down low: we might be able to outrun the Tommis but we damn-sure can’t out-turn them, so stay out of dogfights if you can avoid it! Now: let’s get out of here before this verdammt flak does their job for them!”
The remaining nine jets dove steeply as one, speed rising quickly to maximum as the sleek aircraft sliced through the air like huge, metal sharks. The original Me262 prototypes from which the J-15 had been developed had originally sited the engines in pods midway beneath each wing, leading to far greater wind resistance and far greater stress placed upon the wings and airframe during high speed manoeuvres.
The decision to move these inboard to the wing roots on the production model had reduced stress placed upon the Schwalbe’s airframe and greatly improved its dogfighting capability. That being said, most J-15A pilots preferred to engage in hit-and-run attacks that exploited their far greater speed rather than entering into close-quarters combat against piston-engined opponents that were always going be tighter in a turn. Flak continued to follow them as they dived in but the increased speed quickly allowed the jets to outrun the worst of it, and within a few moments the ground fire had ceased altogether.
“Watch your tails, kameraden; no flak means they’ve got jäger coming in” Marseille advised sharply, not telling his men anything they didn’t already know as he scanned the skies for Allied fighters. “Schwarm-Rote to ten thousand; the target is all yours, Gelb...”
Those who didn’t know Marseille well might’ve wondered why he was seemingly happy to ‘sit back’ and allow others to mount the attack. Those closer to him, like Pöttgen, knew better: if there was one thing Hans-Joachim Marseille loved more than anything else when in the air, it was shooting down enemy fighters; the higher the odds the better. When Yellow Flight went in to attack, they were certain to draw a response from Allied fighters defending the airbase, and when that happened, Marseille and the rest of Red Flight would be ready to pounce.
The five jets that now comprised Yellow Flight continued their dive as their colleagues levelled out behind them, with Kaestner, the flight leader, easing back on his throttles to control their increasing rate of descent.
“Four thousand metres…” he counted off, pulling up out of the dive just two thousand feet above the desert floor. “I’ll take lead… Eugen – open up formation and be ready to break right; Dolf…” he added, referring to the remaining ‘odd one out’ left without a wingman, “…form on me and prepare to break left. Watch your tails, boys: the Tommis aren’t going to be happy when we sent this big bitch into the – !”
Oberleutnant Sebastian Kaestner was prevented from completing his sentence as every aircraft of Yellow Flight, his included, simultaneously disintegrated quite suddenly and rather unexpectedly in explosions of black smoke and orange flame.
“What the hell?” Pöttgen exclaimed in reflex from high above, his face a mask of stunned surprise as he watched five aircraft blown apart before his eyes. “Schwarm-Gelb is hit, Mein Herr… Schwarm-Gelb is hit…!”
“Scheisse…!’ Marseille snarled angrily, unable to see what had occurred from his position. “Sound off, Sebastian: what are your casualties…?”
“They’re gone, Mein Herr…!” Pöttgen replied immediately, urgency in his tone now. “They’re all gone…!”
“What do you mean, they’re…?” Marseille began angrily, but his words were cut short as he lowered his left with to afford a better view of the ground below and finally caught sight of five burning piles of wreckage smeared across the ground below and a similar number of grey smoke trails leading off to the north, all of them having passed directly over the top of the huge, slowly-climbing transport. He began following them back toward their point of origin and his heart leapt into his mouth as he caught sight of a large aircraft – clearly also a jet of some type – heading straight for them from the same direction at what appeared to be incredible speed.
“Achtung…! Fast jet approaching from the north…!” Marseille instantly rolled the Messerschmitt into a dive, turning in toward the newcomer. “Prepare to manoeuvre… prepare for…!”
There was no time to say anything more. Such was the approaching aircraft’s velocity that the air around his J-16 was already filled with a cascade of pink/red tracer. Just two rounds struck the aircraft, one blasting a huge chunk out of the tip of his rudder while another struck the lower fuselage a glancing below just aft of the tailpipes, it too leaving a similarly-large and jagged hole in the jet’s aluminium skin. Marseille continued his dive, building airspeed as the rest of Red Flight broke formation around him, all the while fighting with the controls as heavy vibration fed back through the air frame from the increased turbulence around his damaged rudder.
Craning his neck around, he watched in awe as the huge jet howled past behind him, climbing away and, it seemed, still accelerating despite carrying what had clearly been a pair of either huge bombs or equally-large fuel tanks below its wings. It was an RAAF aircraft – the ‘flying kangaroo’ roundels and Commonwealth desert camouflage scheme made that clear enough – but the gaping maw of the intake below its nose and its tall, twin tails were as alien to Marseille as everything else about its appearance.
It was only as he levelled out, eyes still locked on the passing jet, that he finally realised there were more aircraft approaching from above, two huge swarms of fighters diving in from extreme altitude, and a momentary and very uncharacteristic stab of fear Marseille’s heart told him with absolute certainty that those aircraft weren’t friendly.
“Fighters…! Enemy fighters diving in; three o’clock, high…! Watch your tails…! Watch your tails…!”
Trumbull powered beyond twenty thousand feet, afterburner roaring as he left the remaining Messerschmitts far behind. That he’d missed the squadron leader with his cannon was a small annoyance at worst; all five of his heat-seekers had struck home, completely destroying the flight that had clearly been about to attack the struggling Galaxy. They’d managed to restart both engines, but the struggle to build airspeed was continuing and it would be several more minutes before the climbing transport would be flying faster than the enemy jets were able to match.
“Tally ho, chaps!” Alec called out over an open channel, well aware that assistance was
incoming, having been party to the planning of it. “I’ve broken them up a bit for you; make the most of it, now!”
“Nice one, Harbinger: thanks for the assistance… we’ll take it from here… All flights: Get into ‘em, boys – you’ll only have a moment or two so make the most of it…!”
Howling downward at twenty thousand feet, having commenced his steep dive from twice that altitude, Squadron Leader John ‘Willy’ Williams DFC struggled with the controls of his Mustang III as the gauge displaying his Indicated Air Speed (IAS) wavered around 430 knots. The actual true air speed was closer to 470 knots – well over 880 km/hr – and was the absolute upper limit of the fighter’s maximum safe dive speed.
Around him, the remaining fifteen pilots of No.450 Sqn RAAF maintained similar speed, also forced to wrestle with their controls to prevent their aircraft ‘porpoising’ due to the buffeting their dive produced. What little information they possessed on the new German jets suggested they ‘d easily outrun a Mustang in an even fight, but in a dive the piston-engined fighter might just manage to match their speed for a few moments in level-flight, possibly providing for a small window of opportunity to attack. Number 450 Squadron had therefore spent many desperate minutes arduously climbing to the Mustang’s maximum service ceiling of 41,000 feet before diving back down once more into the fray.
Already scattered by the unidentified jet ploughing through their midst, the remaining four J-16s of 3./JG27 suddenly found themselves in the very unusual position of being the prey rather than the predator. Two were hit almost immediately, the detonations of 20mm shells rippling across their wings and upper surfaces as the Mustangs whipped past and levelled out quite close to the ground. The jets broke up quickly, one pilot managing to bail out as his aircraft folded up around him. Williams took his own flight onward, focussing on one of the remaining two and quickly picking out the squadron leader’s flashes. deciding it the best of the two targets.
Still trying to accelerate out of its own evasive manoeuvres, Marseille’s jet wasn’t travelling anywhere near fast enough to outrun the oncoming Mustangs. He was still an exceptional pilot with years of combat experience however and instantly threw the Schwalbe back to port, corkscrewing away as cannon fire scorched by where he should’ve been moments before.
No rookie himself, Williams had anticipated the move and tried to turn into the jet’s path, but at such a high terminal dive speed, the Mustang’s ability to manoeuvre was almost nil and he was unable to bring the aircraft around far enough to line up a shot. The fighters were forced to overshoot, levelling out lower down as their airspeed dropped away and they were again able to fly normally once more.
Marseille, with Pöttgen now back in position as wingman, made the most of the situation, reversing his corkscrew the moment the enemy had passed and bringing his own cannon to bear on his attackers. The pair of twin-barrelled cannon in the Schwalbe’s lower nose burst into life, each spraying torrents of 23mm shells after the retreating Mustangs at better than 3,500 rounds per minute. With a deft flick of his wrist against the shuddering joystick, he walked the stream of red tracer across the path of one of the trailing fighters and then another, both aircraft torn apart by the fusillade.
“I want altitude, Rainer!” He snarled over the radio, pushing his throttles wide open and lifting the J-16’s nose. “We need more altitude to really show these schweine a lesson!”
The two remaining J-16s powered upward, both pilots secure in the knowledge that the jets could easily out climb any piston-engined aircraft at any height. By the time they’d passed through thirty thousand feet they’d left 450Sqn far behind, and Marseille was casting his head this way and that, ignoring the shuddering he still felt through his controls as he searched desperately for the huge enemy jet.
“Where is he… where is he…?” He muttered with soft fury, incensed over the loss of so many men under his command.
“We need to fall back, Mein Herr…!” Pöttgen reasoned, visibly shaken by the experience. “What were those rockets? Guided rockets! And that thing was so damned fast… what chance do we have…?”
“We have the same bloody chance as anyone else who straps on a bloody parachute!” Marseille snarled back, his actions not entirely rational now as rage controlled him. “That filthy whore just killed five of our men, Rainer… our friends… and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with it! If he has any more of those ‘guided rockets’, then we’re dead anyway, but he’ll have to slow down if he wants to dogfight, and if he does that, I will bloody have him…!”
Almost on cue, he banked slightly to the starboard and finally caught sight of it off to the south-east, crossing their path perhaps five thousand feet below and heading back toward Kibrit at high speed.
“There you are, you bastard…!” He growled softly, rolling over and diving away in pursuit, leaving Pöttgen to play catch-up. “Keep your distance, Rainer,” he added quickly, forcing his throttles wide open once more and building speed. “I don’t want you in my way when I take this drecksau…!”
The F-35E was fitted with a number of avionics systems that were state-of-the-art even by 21st Century standards and could almost be classified as outright ‘magic’ in 1942. One of these sensor suites was the AN/AAQ-37 DAS (Distributed Aperture System), a set of six high-resolution infra-red detectors mounted around the Lightning II’s airframe that established an unobstructed, 360-degree ‘view’ around the aircraft through all three dimensions. Able to detect missile launches at ranges over 1,000km, it was this unit that had enabled Trumbull to pick up the approach of the final Aggregat A-4 within seconds of becoming airborne.
The DAS has been tracking Marseille and Pöttgen for some time but hadn’t considered them a threat while the jets had been moving in the opposite direction. As they commenced their final dive however it had again warned Trumbull, prompting him to bring the F-35E hard around in a sharp turn to port and push his own nose upward to meet the new attack.
The moment he was able to see the two Messerschmitts high above, his HMDS (Helmet Mounted Display System) was instantly able to allocate his remaining Sidewinder on to the leading jet. Capable of ‘lock-on after launch’, the AIM-9X kicked free from its mounts within the F-35E’s weapons bay and hissed angrily away from beneath its nose, immediately flicking upward and recognising the lead J-16 as its designated target.
Marseille picked up the launch immediately and was smart enough to recognise the approaching Sidewinder as being identical to the ‘guided rockets’ that’d already killed so many of his comrades moments before. He banked sharply away, rolling at the same time to enable him to keep an eye on the approaching missile, and noted that it instantly changed course to follow.
“Break left, Rainer… break left…!” He barked an order over the radio, realising instinctively there was little chance of avoiding impact and not wanting his wingman close enough to be hit by the same explosion. As Pöttgen obeyed and turned away, Marseille waited until what he judged to be the last moment before snapping the hurtling J-16A back in the opposite direction in the vain hope it might elude his tiny pursuer.
It almost worked. Even a missile travelling at three times the speed of sound had limits to what it was capable of, and the sharp manoeuvre Marseille effected was almost enough to break lock as it vainly tried to intersect his dramatically changing course. As it was, the Sidewinder’s proximity-fused warhead managed to barely enter maximum effective range for just a fraction of a second.
It was enough. The weapon’s 9.4kg annular blast-fragmentation warhead detonated, expanding into a scything ‘cylinder’ of steel shrapnel that sliced neatly through the mid-point of the J-16A’s port wing like a hot knife through butter. The Schwalbe immediately began to roll around its longitudinal axis as the loss of half a wing also meant a resultant loss of aerodynamic lift on that side. The J-16A became an out-of-control, spinning projectile hurtling toward the ground at better than 500 knots.
“Get out, Hans… get out…!” Pött
gen’s urgent cry came through over the radio even as Marseille calmly went about the process of unclipping his harness and hauling back on the large lever by his right leg that jettisoned the aircraft’s teardrop-shaped cockpit canopy. The wind caught it the moment it broke free from the fuselage, whipping the curved piece of plexiglass and metal framework quickly away into the slipstream as Marseille reached up with both hands to grasp the frame of the armoured windshield and hauled himself from his seat. It didn’t take much effort. The moment he lifted the bulk of his own weight beyond the central axis of the roll, centrifugal force alone was enough to throw his body the rest of the way clear of the cockpit.
The slipstream caught him too, dragging him ‘backward’ as the still-spinning Schwalbe accelerated away ahead. His head struck the jet’s tail a fraction of a second later as the airframe continued through another full spin, spinning him violently around in mid-air with a sickening crunch as a stab of pure agony flared through his neck and shoulders and vanished again with equal suddenness. Marseille groggily tried to focus his eyes, unable to register a clear view of the world beyond his flying goggles, and wondered if he’d lost consciousness momentarily as a sickly, almost numbing feeling swept through his mind.
It was at that moment he first realised there might be a problem as he unsuccessfully tried to give a shake of the head to clear his thoughts and discovered that he was unable to carry out the movement. Still spinning as he fell, he then tried to open his legs and arms in an attempt to steady and slow his descent prior to deploying his parachute and again found himself incapable of the action.
He knew that meant something… something bad… but in his current, dazed state the veteran pilot found it impossible to focus his mind enough to think clearly. He’d been flying at almost thirty thousand feet, and his remaining pilot’s instincts also told him that he should be experiencing difficulty breathing due to the low levels of oxygen in the atmosphere at such altitudes. It occurred to him that all these facts should probably worry him quite a bit, but it was difficult to concentrate as he continued to spin through the air, the world spiralling about him.
Winds of Change (Empires Lost Book 2) Page 94
