Operation Diver

by Robert Jackson

  ‘Yes. Well, we’ve got another job for you, The whole squadron, I mean.’

  He set aside his cup and waved his hand at another armchair, indicating that Yeoman should sit down. In ordinary circumstances, Wing Commander Bentley would also have been present at this meeting, but he was away on leave. Yeoman was secretly pleased.

  ‘First of all,’ Sampson went on, ‘I have to tell you that you will shortly be leaving 100 Group. In a few days’ time you will be leaving for Tangmere to join 83 Group, which as you know is part of the Second Tactical Air Force — the spearhead of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force.’

  Sampson saw the look on Yeoman’s face and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly, ‘the invasion is coming. Sooner, perhaps, than a lot of people think. I can’t say when or where, for obvious reasons, but we are just about ready. And when it happens, the task of 83 Group will be to secure air superiority over the beaches.’

  The Air Commodore’s expression grew serious. He took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it, exhaling the smoke in a long stream.

  ‘We are, however, concerned with an immediate problem. We think — in fact, we know — that the Germans have a secret weapon which, if they use it in the right manner could destroy our chances of launching a successful assault on the coast of France.’

  He reached down into a briefcase that rested by the side of his chair and extracted a folder, which he handed to Yeoman.

  ‘Take a look at that,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think. You have some knowledge of German, don’t you?’

  Yeoman nodded, a little startled, and opened the folder.

  For the next few minutes he sat engrossed, taking in the known details of the weapon the Germans called the V-1, poring over the reconnaissance photographs of its launch sites. Finally, he closed the folder carefully and handed it back to Sampson.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ he said. ‘Absolutely astonishing! Do we have a defence against these things, sir?’

  Sampson looked at him. ‘Oh, we’ll doubtless be able to shoot some of them down. The real defence, however, is to hit their launching sites as hard as we can. The trouble is that the sites are absolutely stiff with flak; some sorties have already been flown against them by the medium bombers of 2 Group, and they have suffered considerable losses. So we have been forced to revise our tactics.’

  The Air Commodore paused, lit another cigarette, and then continued: ‘At this moment, four of 83 Group’s Spitfire squadrons are being modified to carry 500-lb bombs and sent across to Llanbedr on the North Wales coast for dive-bombing trials.’

  Yeoman shuddered inwardly. The thought of the graceful Spitfire’s outline marred by a bomb slung under its belly was almost too much to bear. And as for the idea of using the thoroughbred fighter as a dive-bomber…

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Sampson said, ‘but we’ve really got no alternative. The sites are much too small for night attacks to have any real hope of success, and as I’ve said the medium day bombers are suffering too heavily. At least the Spits, with their high speed, will have a good chance of coming through the flak.’

  The Air Commodore looked hard at Yeoman. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘not all the sites will be vulnerable to dive-bombing. At least one that we know of is built into the side of a cliff; the Germans are using a series of caves and tunnels near the River Oise to stockpile their pilotless bombs, and they are protected by a roof of earth and rock at least thirty feet thick. The only hope of knocking out this kind of objective is to bounce bombs into the tunnel mouths, and that is where 380 Squadron comes in.’

  There was a sinking feeling in the pit of Yeoman’s stomach. During their series of attacks on enemy airfields in 1943, he and his pilots had evolved low-level tactics whereby the Mosquitos released their bombs at high speed, a few feet above the ground, and literally skipped the missiles through the doors of hangars. The technique had proved very successful, if dangerous, but so far they had not tried it out against any other type of target.

  It looked as if they were now going to have their chance to do so.

  ‘Can it be done?’ Sampson asked.

  Yeoman, in reply, made little attempt to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, it can be done all right. Provided, of course, that a certain number of conditions are fulfilled.’ He ticked them off, one by one, on his fingers.

  ‘First, that we have a straight run-up to the target. Second, that the mouth of our cave or tunnel is big enough. Third, that we can get close enough to bounce our bombs inside without splashing ourselves all over the cliff face. And fourth, that nothing is shooting back at us.’

  The air commodore looked at Yeoman for a long moment, his face impassive. Then he said:

  ‘All right, Yeoman, I know how you feel. I know, too, that we seem to be asking the impossible. But it’s vital — more vital than you can possibly realize at this point. Otherwise we wouldn’t ask in the first place. Now, I’ll repeat my question. Can it be done?’

  ‘Probably,’ Yeoman said.

  Sampson gave one of his thin smiles. ‘That’s good enough for now. You’ll be getting full target data in a day or two.’

  He stood up abruptly, as though to close the meeting. He stood a good head taller than Yeoman; the latter had not realized how tall the Air Commodore was.

  ‘There’s just one more thing,’ Sampson said. ‘We want you to be ready to go in two weeks, so it’s going to mean a lot of hard work for you and your crews. In the meantime, another daylight bomber “show” against the No-Ball sites is scheduled for next Monday, weather permitting, and the Newchurch Wing will be providing fighter cover. So why don’t you nip down there, borrow a Spitfire and take a look at things first hand? The experience might be useful. I’ll fix things up, if that’s all right with Group Captain Davison.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Davison agreed, speaking for the first time. ‘And, George — you might be interested to know that one of the Spitfire units at Newchurch is 505 Squadron. You were with them in 1940, weren’t you? Might see one or two old faces.’

  I doubt it, thought Yeoman, as he saluted and left the office. Most of the old faces I knew from those days are dead. So far, he had been one of the lucky ones; but he had an unpleasant feeling that his luck was about to run out.

  Chapter Three

  It was good to be in the cockpit of a spitfire again, even if that cockpit seemed small and cramped in comparison with a Mosquito’s.

  Yeoman was pleased that he had not lost his old touch; the Spitfire responded to the pressure of his hand on the stick like the thoroughbred she was, riding the currents of air smoothly and effortlessly.

  Yeoman had not flown a Spitfire since 1942, when he was in Malta, and that had been an elderly and war-weary Mk V. His present mount was a far different aircraft — a Mk XIV, packed with the power of a big Rolls-Royce Griffon engine, developed from the faithful Merlin, that could thrust it through the sky at a top speed of over 430 mph and take it to an altitude of 43,000 feet. It was armed with two 20-mm Hispano cannon and four .303 machine-guns; it also had a new type of ‘teardrop’ cockpit canopy which, unobstructed by metal struts, gave the pilot an unparalleled all-round field of view.

  His elevated position under the clear cockpit hood had made Yeoman feel a little exposed at first, but the feeling had passed in minutes and now he sat there and rejoiced behind the whirling arc of the big five-blade Rotol propeller.

  He had been right; there had been no familiar faces. The personnel of 505 Squadron had changed continuously since those hectic days of 1940, when its pilots had fought against hopeless odds in the summer skies of France and England. The men who had flown by his side were gone, either sacrificed in battle or scattered to the four winds. He no longer felt a sense of belonging, of identity, and it saddened him; for it was with this squadron that he had learned the tricks of his trade, surviving to become a veteran.

  It was the morning of Monday, 3 April, and Yeoman had been at Newchurch — an advanc
ed fighter airfield in Romney Marsh, Kent, close to the Channel coast — for twenty-four hours, having been flown down from Burningham by Terry Saint in the Airspeed Oxford that was used as the station ‘hack’.

  After a few circuits in the Spitfire XIV to get his hand in once more, he had been shown round Newchurch by Squadron Leader Tim Phelan, a genial Irishman from County Wicklow who was 505 Squadron’s present commander. Phelan, a Spitfire man to his fingertips, had come to the squadron from the Vickers factory at Castle Bromwich, where he had spent a year as a production test pilot. As he was nursing a broken wrist, having fallen off his bicycle during the blackout, he offered Yeoman the leadership of the squadron during the forthcoming operation against the No-Ball site, subject to the approval of the Wing Leader. Yeoman jumped at the chance.

  505 Squadron shared Newchurch with the Spitfire 9s of No. 56 and the Hawker Tempest 5s of Nos 3 and 486 Squadrons, the latter a Royal New Zealand Air Force unit. Yeoman was particularly interested in the big, powerful Tempests, with their Napier Sabre engines air-cooled through a huge radiator under the nose similar to that of the Typhoon, from which they had been developed; it was the first time he had seen this, the fastest fighter in RAF service, at close quarters. When he expressed interest in flying one he was told that he would have to get in some time on the Typhoon first.

  Unlike Yeoman, Phelan treated the Tempest with magnificent contempt.

  ‘Horrible bloody thing,’ he snorted. ‘Seven tons of sheer brute force. No fun in flying those, George; steer clear of ’em. I saw one go straight into the deck the other day; some bloke was doing an air test over the field and he pulled too much ‘g’ in a turn. The Tempest went straight over on its back and flicked into a spin. And that was that. Wham!’

  He made an expressive downward gesture with his hand.

  ‘You can’t spin ’em, you see, George. It takes thousands and thousands of feet before they’ll come out. In fact, one of the 3 Squadron types told me the other day that if you accidentally get into a spin below ten thousand feet, the only thing to do is bale out, fast.’

  Yeoman thought that Phelan was perhaps being a little unjust in his attitude to what appeared in most respects to be a superb fighting machine, but made no comment. He resolved to try a Tempest for himself at the first available opportunity.

  Nevertheless, as he climbed out over the Channel on this clear April morning at the head of 505 Squadron, he could understand Phelan’s sentiments very well. A love affair with the Spitfire was difficult, if not impossible, to break off.

  He took the formation up to twelve thousand feet, heading for the cliffs of Cap Gris Nez. Five thousand feet lower down flew the bombers — fifteen North American B-25 Mitchells, fast twin-engined aircraft which were now replacing the ageing Douglas Bostons in the medium bomber squadrons of the RAF’s No. 2 Group. Almost exactly two years earlier, an American Major named Jimmy Doolittle had led a formation of Mitchells in an astonishing attack on Tokyo after taking off from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. They had been the bomber’s combat debut, now it was one of the most widely-used aircraft of its kind in every theatre of war.

  Flak rose to meet them as they crossed the coast, exploding in white puffs around the bombers, but they sailed through it unharmed, their formation as impeccable as ever, So far, there was no sign of any fighters.

  The target lay twenty miles inland, in forested country not far from the ancient battleground of Crecy. The Mitchells made for it in an arrow-straight line, their shadows following them, leaping hazily across wooded hillsides and the white-walled hamlets that nestled in their folds.

  Yeoman brought the squadron down a couple of thousand feet and warned the pilots to keep their eyes open, but apart from a few streaks of high cirrus cloud the sky remained empty. He turned his attention back to the bombers; they should be just about over the target now, although try as he might Yeoman could not distinguish anything unusual among the green and brown hues of the landscape.

  Then the flak came up. Just a few clusters at first, bursting across the path of the bombers, indicating range and altitude to other batteries that lay hidden in the woods. Suddenly, the sky was filled with drifting clouds of smoke as the burst of hundreds of shells speckled the air. It was incredible that anything could survive the holocaust, and yet the Mitchells flew on steadily, straight and level. Yeoman could imagine only too well how the pilots must be sweating with fear and tension as they rode the shock-waves from the shells, waiting for the merciful moment of bomb release.

  Each Mitchell carried three thousand pounds of bombs. On a signal from the lead aircraft, twenty tons of high explosive fell from the bellies of the fifteen bombers and plummeted towards the woods. Yeoman saw the explosions ripple across the ground, misty shock waves flickering outwards from them. Light green patches appeared instantly against the darker background as trees crumpled and collapsed in splintered ruin. Dark smoke fountained up, blotting out a rectangular area of woodland.

  Two immense flashes glowed vividly through it. Black clouds burgeoned up through the smoke of the bombs, boiling, flameshot pillars that rose to a height of several thousand feet with incredible speed.

  The flak continued to rise, thicker than ever, vengefully pursuing the Mitchells as they began a slow turn towards the west, clearing the target area. The Spitfires turned with them, maintaining their higher altitude, and as they did so Yeoman suddenly saw one of the bombers drop slowly out of formation, trailing an intermittent stream of smoke from one engine. Two parachutes popped open in its wake, and an instant later the Mitchell fell into a tight spiral dive. It vanished among the trees in a splash of flame.

  The two formations, fighters and bombers, headed flat out for the coast. Suddenly, after five minutes, one of Yeoman’s pilots called excitedly over the R/T:

  ‘One-oh-nine, three o’clock low!’

  Yeoman dropped his Spitfire’s wing and saw the enemy aircraft almost immediately, flying on a parallel course at about five thousand feet. He pressed the transmit button.

  ‘Roger. Next time, whoever called, identify yourself. Yellow Section, go and get that Hun. The rest of you watch out — there may be others.’

  The three Spitfires of Yellow Section peeled off one after the other and dived towards their target. The remainder had a grandstand view as they massacred the unfortunate Messerschmitt, whose mangled wreckage was soon blazing fiercely in a field.

  Yellow Section climbed back up to rejoin the formation.

  ‘Must have been blind as a bat,’ someone commented laconically.

  Three more enemy fighters, Focke-Wulf 190s this time, were sighted near the coast. They followed the British aircraft for some distance, but made no move to attack. Eventually, they turned away.

  Times had changed, thought Yeoman. The Luftwaffe’s fighter pilots were no longer the aggressive, cocksure men they had been when he had first encountered them, four years earlier; the air war had taken its toll, in morale as well as in human life.

  Yet, he thought grimly, it was dangerous to generalize. Some Luftwaffe fighter units were very, very good indeed, and were led by determined men who had been in the war right from the start. Some of them claimed to have shot down formidable numbers of enemy aircraft, particularly on the Russian Front. The Allied air forces might be slowly gaining the upper hand, but the Luftwaffe was far from beaten. Grim days still lay ahead.

  The Spitfires accompanied the Mitchells as far as Beachy Head and then the two formations parted company, the bombers turning west towards their base at Hartford Bridge and the fighters heading in the opposite direction towards Newchurch.

  They arrived over the airfield to find the circuit crammed with American Mustang fighters, all jockeying for position to land. Yeoman called up Flying Control to find out what was going on and was told that the Mustangs had been out on a big ‘show’ over Germany, escorting Flying Fortresses on a mission to Magdeburg. Short of fuel, they had headed for the nearest English airfield as soon as they had crossed the coas
t.

  Yeoman managed to find a gap in the middle of all the confusion and slotted his Spitfires into it quickly, bringing them down to land in pairs. He taxied in, weaving carefully between parked Mustangs, and shut down the engine, thankfully freeing himself from the constriction of his seat and parachute harness.

  Tim Phelan was waiting for him as he climbed out of the cockpit and jumped down off the wing.

  ‘Well, George. How did it go?’

  ‘One bomber down, one 109 down. Caught him napping. No opposition, except from the flak, and there was plenty of that. Those bomber boys were right on the ball, though; they really plastered the target.’

  Phelan nodded. ‘They usually do. Trouble is, those bloody No-Ball sites are so hard to find.’

  He waved a hand at the conglomeration of American fighters.

  ‘Proper bloody shambles, this is. I hate to think what would happen if the Jerries sent over a few fighter-bombers during the next couple of hours. Come on, let’s have a word with the Intelligence Officer and then have a beer or two with the lads before lunch.’

  The bar of the officers’ mess was packed with Americans, gesticulating and talking in loud voices about the morning’s operation. A handful of RAF officers, sandwiched into corners, regarded this alien invasion of their sanctum with expressions closely akin to horror.

  Yeoman and Phelan forced their way through the throng to a small oasis that had been formed at one end of the bar by a group of 56 Squadron pilots, who obligingly made way for them and then closed ranks again, determined that not even the full weight of the USAAF fighter group was going to budge them from their position.

  Phelan managed to catch the eye of the harassed barman, obtained their drinks and handed one to Yeoman. The latter took a long swallow, sighed appreciatively and lifted his glass, eyeing what remained of its contents.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Better than average, in fact.’

  Phelan grunted. ‘Witch’s piss. You can’t get a good drink this side of Dublin. The English never could make a decent brew.’