Operation Diver

by Robert Jackson

  Fifteen Mosquitos of 380 Squadron, led by Yeoman, attacked on the evening of 10 September. After flying a long curve out of Belgium they came in low from the North Sea, straight out of the setting sun. Running the gauntlet of the light flak that spewed at them from gun positions along the promenade bordering the beach they thundered across the rooftops of the town, their bomb-doors open.

  In pairs, flying almost wing-tip to wing-tip, they roared down the broad ribbon of the Van Alkemadelaan, bringing traffic below to a screeching halt. Dutch civilians danced in the street and waved frantically to them as they streaked overhead in a thunderclap of noise at more than 300 mph.

  Ropes of glowing tracer streaked towards them as they sped towards the long lake, shimmering among the trees in the evening sunlight, but the Germans were powerless to disrupt the whirlwind attack now. Yeoman was the first to bomb, closely followed by Pilot Officer Grinton. There was a jolt as the two 500-lb bombs fell away, a brief glimpse of camouflaged objects in the clearing below, and then they were over and away, hurtling past the old house, pulling round in a hard turn back towards the coast.

  Yeoman looked back; the other fourteen Mosquitos were still with him, climbing away hard, weaving through the dark spattering of flak bursts.

  Behind them, a section of the Hague Woods vanished in the explosions of thirty delayed-action bombs. A great fountain of smoke shot into the sky, towering over the buildings, and a split second later there was a bright flash and an expanding bubble of flame that denoted the explosion of the V-IIs’ fuel dump.

  The great column of smoke was still visible miles out to sea, even when the shoreline had receded. Yeoman called up the other pilots over the R/T and learned that although some of the Mosquitos had been hit by shell splinters or machine-gun bullets, none of them had sustained serious damage. The only human injury was to Romilly’s navigator, who had collected a metal sliver in his thigh. It was a jubilant squadron that returned to Le Culot half an hour later.

  During the next few days 380 Squadron attacked five more V-II sites in Holland, with favourable results on each occasion. The last two targets, both near Leiden, were found to be only lightly defended, so after bombing the Mosquitos attacked the objectives with cannon fire. In doing so they sustained the only loss during the series of anti-V-II sorties: Warrant Officer Laurie’s Mosquito was hit by flak in the starboard engine, which blew up. Nevertheless, Laurie managed to steer the crippled aircraft back over Allied-occupied territory, where he and his navigator baled out safely.

  His squadron’s successes had led Yeoman to believe that they would be ordered to carry out more attacks on the V-II sites, but the course of events decreed otherwise.

  On the morning of 16 September, all wing and squadron commanders were summoned to a briefing at Tactical Air HQ in Brussels for an urgent briefing. It was delivered by the officer commanding the Second Tactical Air Force, an air vice-marshal, and he got straight to the point. Behind him, as he stood on the dais, was a huge wall map of Holland and Northern Germany, with large circles drawn about several points on the Lower Rhine.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, gentlemen,’ the Air Vice-Marshal began, ‘we hope that history will be made. In a combined operation code-named “Market Garden”, two American airborne divisions will drop on and capture the crossings of the Waal and the Maas at Nijmegen and Grave, and hold the road between Eindhoven and Grave. At the same time’ — he pointed to the map— ‘the British First Airborne Division has the task of seizing the bridge over the Rhine here, at Arnhem.’

  A mutter ran round the room and there were a few low, speculative whistles.

  The Air Vice-Marshal held up a hand for silence, then went on:

  ‘Once these objectives are secure, the armoured columns of the British Second Army will be in a position to drive up the narrow corridor from Eindhoven in a fast dash to the Rhine and link up with the most northerly of the airborne elements at Arnhem. It will be the largest airborne operation so far attempted, with one thousand troop-carrying aircraft and five hundred gliders involved.’

  He paused and surveyed the packed room for several moments. Then he said:

  ‘It is also, we believe, one of the boldest and imaginative schemes so far devised. If it succeeds — and it must succeed — then Field Marshal Montgomery believes that it will be a first step to opening a corridor for an armoured thrust directly across northern Germany to Berlin itself, in the hope of bringing the war to a speedy conclusion.’

  ‘I’m all in favour of that,’ Yeoman murmured to the man next to him, the commander of a Typhoon fighter-bomber Wing. ‘It seems a hell of a long way to Arnhem from Eindhoven, though.’

  ‘Forty miles,’ the other whispered back, ‘and that’s as the crow flies. Bloody sight longer by road.’

  The briefing went on. Other senior officers, group commanders and various specialists, took the Air Vice-Marshal’s place, and gradually a complete picture unfolded of the massive air support operation that the units of Second TAF would be required to provide. While squadrons of Spitfires kept the Luftwaffe at bay, the light bomber and fighter-bomber units would attack enemy barracks, communications and known concentrations of troops and armour in the Arnhem area.

  Then came the shock. With attitudes ranging from astonishment to frank disbelief, the assembled pilots heard a senior air staff officer tell them that Second TAF would remain clear of the Arnhem sector during the initial air drop and also during subsequent drops of reinforcements and supplies — for fear that the British aircraft might become disastrously tangled with formations of patrolling American fighters.

  The Typhoon Wing Commander voiced the thoughts of most of them as he and Yeoman had a smoke and a cup of tea before returning to their respective units.

  ‘It seems bloody senseless to me,’ he said. ‘They’ll need us most when they’re consolidating, just after they’ve hit the ground. Nobody mentioned anything about smoke markers to indicate enemy positions, and there doesn’t seem to be any thing like an adequate ground-to-air radio link. And as for getting mixed up with the Americans — Christ, I’ve never heard such bloody nonsense. And what happens if the weather clamps? Why, our Typhoons fly in weather the Yanks won’t even look at, and we find our targets too.’

  The Wing Commander looked suddenly grave. ‘No, old boy,’ he said forcefully, ‘things don’t look promising. That’s what you get when you’ve a big operation planned by a lot of generals sitting on their arses in London, instead of by chaps who are up the sharp end and who know a bit about what goes on. If you ask me, it could turn into an almighty cock-up.’

  Even he could have had no idea how disastrously and tragically prophetic his words would turn out to be.

  380 Squadron flew its first mission in support of the Arnhem landings at 1045 the next morning, an hour before the paratroops were due to make their drop. Sixteen Mosquitos were airborne, their assigned target an enemy Panzer barracks on the north-east outskirts of the town of Arnhem itself, In four tight boxes of four aircraft, making a diamond-shaped formation, they crossed the Albert Canal and entered Dutch territory, their course taking them over the fringes of the battered town of Eindhoven, in the vicinity of which the RAF had many times attacked power stations and the big Phillips factory, which produced electronic components for the Luftwaffe and the enemy air defence systems. There was a lot of smoke to the south of the town, where a tank battle appeared to be in progress around the village of Valkenswaard; above it, squadrons of Typhoons wheeled like birds of prey, with flights breaking away from time to time to fire their rockets at some unseen target.

  Yeoman warned his crews to keep a good lookout — not so much for enemy fighters as for other Allied aircraft, of which the sky was full. It was a bright, sunny Sunday morning, with excellent visibility, and the sight of formations of Spitfires, sweeping the sky ahead, was a comforting one to the Mosquito crews. They would have little to fear from the Luftwaffe; the flak — and there was plenty of it in the Arnhem area — would be their main c
oncern.

  ‘Volkel’s taking a pasting,’ said Hardy, looking out beyond the Mosquito’s starboard wing-tip. Yeoman glanced across: in the distance, over Volkel aerodrome, fighters — impossible to tell whether Spitfires or US Mustangs at this distance — were swarming like hornets, making their strafing runs and then climbing away fast through clusters of anti-aircraft bursts.

  ‘Rather them than us,’ Yeoman muttered, recalling his own bitter experiences of attacking enemy airfields.

  The Mosquitos sped over another arrow-straight canal, and then a railway-line. On the latter the wreckage of a locomotive, the victim no doubt of the Typhoon’s attentions, was smouldering gently. They crossed the broad, shining band of the River Maas at Grave, where the US 101st Airborne Division was scheduled to drop, and then thundered over the Waal north-west of Nijmegen, the objective of the US 82nd Airborne.

  They turned north along a railway-line that joined another at right-angles between Arnhem and the village of Oosterbeek. Beyond the junction, on the edge of a wood, was the Panzer barracks that was their target.

  ‘Christ,’ exclaimed Hardy as they drew nearer. ‘Look at that, will you?’

  Yeoman saw at once what the navigator meant. The sky over and around Arnhem was black with aircraft. A squadron of Mosquitos in ragged formation, one of them trailing smoke from an engine, slid past a few hundred yards to port, heading in the opposite direction, and a few moments later three flights of American Thunderbolt fighters cut across 380 Squadron’s noses and turned in from the beam, checking the Mosquitos’ identities before sweeping off to the south.

  From the corner of the woods beyond the railway junction, columns of smoke were rising. Above them, more Mosquitos were twisting and turning through a maze of anti-aircraft fire.

  ‘It looks like some bastard has pinched our target,’ Yeoman said over the intercom. Then, to the rest of the Squadron, he ordered: ‘Straight in and straight out, chaps. No heroics. Bomb on my signal.’

  He had seldom seen such flak. It came at them from all sides and the sky all around was filled with flashes and explosions. The pilots needed all their willpower to hold a steady course.

  The enemy barracks, a cluster of sheds and low buildings surrounded by pine trees and partly obscured by smoke from the previous attack, was coming up under the nose. The formation headed for it in a shallow dive. Yeoman took the middle of a group of large sheds as his aiming point and forced himself to keep a steady voice as he issued his instructions over the R/T. The sky was filled with blinding, multi-coloured light and the smoke of the shell bursts streamed past the aircraft as they swept down towards the target. Shell splinters rattled on wings and fuselage.

  ‘Bombing…bombing…now!’

  The sixteen pilots pressed their bomb releases simultaneously on Yeoman’s signal and thirty-two 500-lb bombs curved away as the Mosquitos came out of their dive. The formation now broke up and scattered on Yeoman’s command, each aircraft weaving crazily away from the nightmare cauldron of fire.

  Over the radio, a voice said quietly: ‘Blue Four. I’m hit. Trying to—’ Flight Sergeant Parker’s words were cut off in mid-sentence.

  Pulling his aircraft round in a tight turn, Yeoman saw a Mosquito plunging vertically to earth, racked by glaring explosions as its fuel tanks went up in flames. It hit the ground in a rippling bubble of fire, scattering fragments over a wide area.

  The target area was completely covered by a great pall of dust and smoke. Yeoman had no intention of making a run over the top to try and observe results. He pressed the R/T button.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. Form up on me.’

  One by one, to the south of Arnhem, the Mosquitos came swinging in to rejoin the formation. On the way back, a few miles east of S’Hertogenbosch, they dived down to make a vengeful, murderous attack on an enemy motorized column, raking it with cannon fire until their ammunition was expended. When they had finished, the road was littered with shattered and burning vehicles along a two-mile stretch.

  Forty minutes later, as the nerve-taut men of the Allied fighter squadrons tore hungrily into a hasty meal and awaited further orders, the first waves of the gigantic armada of transport aircraft and gliders thundered over the flat Dutch landscape en route for their objectives.

  In the towns and villages around the dropping zones, the people of Holland, emerging from church in their Sunday best, gazed up in speechless awe as the vanguard of the great five hundred mile long sky train roared overhead, disgorging thousands of coloured parachutes, unaware of the desperate battles that were soon to engulf them and their neat little homes.

  Chapter Eleven

  From fifteen thousand feet. Yeoman and Hardy looked down on the flames of Arnhem: a glowing, flickering eye, dull red and evil in the surrounding darkness.

  ‘Poor devils,’ Yeoman said quietly. There was nothing else to say; no other words to describe the misery and horror that was the fate of the decimated remnants of the First British Airborne Division.

  For a week they had held on gallantly, in the face of terrible odds. Before the drop, the paratrooper commanders had been told that they would have little to fear; that the Germans in the Arnhem area were in disarray and were beginning to recruit invalids, boys and old men. Instead, they had encountered battle-hardened troops of the elite Waffen SS, German paratroops and two Panzer divisions which, according to Intelligence, had not existed. Moreover, the German forces were led by able and experienced generals such as Kurt Student, whose airborne forces had captured Crete in 1941 and been on the brink of invading Malta the following year.

  The air drop had gone wrong from the very beginning. Since not enough transport aircraft had been available to carry the whole of the Airborne Division, much had depended on a vital reinforcement drop the following day, 18 September, but this had been delayed by bad weather. Meanwhile, although part of the first wave of paratroops had captured the vital bridge and held on to it, fierce counterattacks soon split the airborne force into three separate pockets.

  The Americans at Grave and Nijmegen had fared much better, but the armoured spearheads of the British 30th Corps, advancing up the narrow corridor from Eindhoven, had met much stiffer resistance than they had anticipated, with consequent delays to their timetable. In particular, they had found that the approaches to the bridge at Nijmegen were heavily defended, and it was some time before they had been able to hammer their way through to link up with the American airborne troops.

  Even after that, the nature of the countryside — a maze of dykes and ditches — meant that the British tanks had been forced to keep to the long, narrow road that ran from Nijmegen to Arnhem, and the armoured column had to fight for every yard of the ten-mile journey. By that time, the battle for Arnhem was already lost. The remnants of the Airborne Division, utterly exhausted, devoid of food, water and ammunition despite the heroic efforts of the Allied air transport squadrons — who braved murderous anti-aircraft fire and took appalling losses only to release their cargoes over dropping zones which were now in enemy hands — were gradually being forced to surrender.

  Apart from the attack on the Panzer barracks just before the airborne assault, 380 Squadron had played no direct part in support of the Arnhem operation. Together with the other Mosquito FB V-1 squadrons of Second Tactical Air Force, it had been employed exclusively on night intruder sorties, the Mosquitos striking singly at airfields deep inside Germany.

  The task of maintaining air cover over the First Airborne Division had fallen to the Spitfire squadrons, but their operations had been continually hampered by bad weather. Day after day the rainclouds had been stacked up in heavy layers, and in the frequent torrential downpours the fighter pilots had been forced to concentrate more on keeping their squadron formations than on keeping a lookout for the enemy. Fortunately, the weather had presented the Luftwaffe with similar problems.

  So Yeoman and his pilots had seen little of the air drama unfolding over Arnhem, but they had gleaned a little of it from the
harrowing stories told by the crews of a couple of flak-damaged Dakota transports which had made emergency landings at Le Culot. Yeoman would never forget the sight of one of the pilots as the latter huddled by the stove in 380 Squadron’s crew tent, white-faced and trembling, clutching a mug of tea and telling his story in staccato sentences:

  ‘I’ve done three supply drops over Arnhem. I don’t want to do a fourth. We’ve lost half the squadron. The last trip was an absolute bastard…we were supposed to make a formation drop, but it didn’t work out that way…got split up in a cloud on the way in. My navigator was right on the ball and we dropped out of the muck right over Arnhem… Jesus, the flak! You could have got out and walked on it.

  ‘There was a Stirling in front of us, dropping its load. It was already on fire. Then it took a direct hit and broke clean in half, just aft of the wing. The front part went down in a great, slow, ponderous spin and blew up on the edge of the town. I could see more aircraft, burning on the ground.

  ‘I just pointed the Dak’s nose at where the dropping zone was supposed to be and started praying. I don’t mind telling you, I made most of the run with my eyes shut. God only knows how we got through.’

  And the Typhoon fighter-bombers of Second TAF, Yeoman thought bitterly, which might have been working wonders in suppressing the enemy flak batteries with their rockets and cannon while the supply drops were taking place, were instead operating a long way to the south, shooting up trains and convoys…

  ‘Steer zero-seven-five, skipper,’ Hardy said, breaking into the pilot’s thoughts. Yeoman swung the Mosquito round on to the new heading and the red glow that was Arnhem gradually receded into the distance.

  Their principal target that night was Rheine, where there was known to be a concentration of night fighters. At least some of the latter were likely to be airborne, for RAF Bomber Command was shortly due to attack the Dortmund-Ems Canal. Yeoman planned to hang around in the vicinity of Rheine for as long as his fuel allowed in the hope of catching some of the enemy aircraft on take-off or landing.