SQUADRON SCRAMBLE
YEOMAN IN THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
ROBERT JACKSON
Copyright © Robert Jackson 1978
The right of Robert Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in 1978 by Arthur Barker Limited.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
It was dawn, and the reflected rays of the morning sun formed a golden avenue over the surface of the sea. They touched the castle of Lindisfarne and the ruined pinnacles of the monastery beyond it, and in them the seabirds wheeled like snowflakes, screaming as hunger drove them towards the offshore feeding grounds.
Here, on this rugged outcrop jutting out from the Northumbrian coast, many pages of Britain’s early history had been written. Two thousand years ago, this had been the land of the Celtic tribe of the Votadini; they had survived until the coming of the Sea Wolves, the Anglo-Saxon raiders who had smashed the British kingdoms in the north, vestiges of the fallen Roman Empire, and established their own kingdom of Bernicia.
It was here, a century later, that Christianity had first taken root in northern Britain, sown by the followers of Columba of Iona. They had endured, weathering the storms of nature and man, stolidly rebuilding what later sea-raiders were to destroy. Wars and skirmishes came and went, breaking on the ageless rocks of Lindisfarne like the sea itself.
The bells of the monastery were silent now, only the ruined stones retaining the memory of their echoes, and the seas that lashed the iron-bound cliffs of the Northumbrian coast brought with them a greater menace than Britain had ever known. Signs of that menace came with the tide in a hundred different ways. Empty crates, some of them seared by fire; oil from ruptured fuel tanks; articles of clothing and pathetic personal belongings; and sometimes, a lifejacket or an empty, overturned lifeboat.
A man sat on the castle mound, his back against the weathered stones, and gazed out across the sea. Once, he had gleaned a meagre living from combing the beaches to the south; but now the beaches were denied to him, sown with mines and barbed wire, and he had little to do with his life but gaze out over the water that had once been father and mother to him. He managed to exist; odd jobs brought in a few shillings, and he received a small pension because he had lost a leg at Jutland.
He was old, but his eyes were still keen, and he narrowed them against the wind as a speck came into view, moving low over the horizon from north to south. He watched it without much interest. It came almost every day, usually at the same time, and he knew it was an enemy aircraft; but it stayed well clear of the coast, brought no harm to Lindisfarne, and went on its way unmolested.
The old man removed his pipe and spat. They had a cushy job, those airmen. He thought of his own son, still in hospital suffering from severe bums and the after-effects of exposure after clinging to a raft for two days when the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Glorious was sunk off Norway. The old seaman raised a hand and wiped away a sudden tear. What was a twenty-four-year-old going to make of his life, with half his face missing?
Three miles out over the sea, the pilot of the Dornier 18 flying-boat watched the sunrise lighting up the Northumbrian coastline. He was a year younger than the old man’s son, yet already he was one of the most experienced operational pilots of Maritime Reconnaissance Group 31. Over the past eight months, operating from the group’s base in Heligoland, he and his crew had ranged as far afield as Norway’s North Cape, shadowing the movements of the British Home Fleet.
It had not all been easy. The group had lost four crews during the Norwegian Campaign, one of them shot down by, of all things, an elderly Avro Anson of R.A.F. Coastal Command. The gunner had survived to tell the tale.
The group’s task now, during these first days of August 1940, was to plot the movements of British coastal convoys and pass on the information to Luftwaffe Intelligence. The Battle of France had ended six weeks earlier, and now the Luftwaffe was gathering its strength for an all-out onslaught against England. Already, the German bombers had been pounding the convoys in the Channel with the primary aim of bringing the British fighter squadrons into action; but the British had been clever, carefully husbanding their reserves of Spitfires and Hurricanes for the main battle that was to come, instead of frittering them away in skirmishes.
Today, the North Sea was empty. There was no sign of any shipping, creeping southwards in the shelter of the coast; just a few fishing craft that were not worth bothering about. Another five minutes, and it would be time to turn for home.
Had the Dornier pilot but known it, his presence had not gone undetected. Off Eyemouth, naval personnel on board an innocent-looking trawler had already flashed details of the German aircraft’s course and speed to a communications centre at Rosyth. From there, the information had been transmitted to the R.A.F. Fighter Control Room at Ouston, in Northumberland. A flight of Hurricanes from Acklington had searched for the Dornier, but failed to locate it; the grey-camouflaged aircraft was difficult to spot, flying low above the waves.
The young Dornier pilot had just begun to turn away from the coast, his mission completed, when his gunner gave a shout of alarm over the intercom. The pilot tightened the turn, looking back as he did so, and in that instant he saw the British fighter.
It was a Spitfire, flying so low that its slipstream furrowed the sea. The Dornier’s gunner opened fire and the pilot saw an avenue of white splashes creep towards the British fighter. Then the Spitfire opened up too, and suddenly the interior of the Dornier’s fuselage was a nightmare of flying metal and screaming men as a solid burst of machine-gun fire tore into it. The rear gun ceased firing abruptly. The navigator shrieked, rose from his seat and took a few stumbling steps aft, both hands clasped over his eyes. He was already dead; a bullet had removed the top of his skull. He fell in a heap and lay still.
The Spitfire came in again, this time from the beam, firing as the Dornier turned away desperately. The young pilot screamed as a bullet shattered his right shoulder blade and emerged just under the collar bone, a white-hot lance of agony. He coughed, and blood spattered the front of his flying overall.
Somehow, he retained control, pointing the bow of the flying-boat out to sea. He managed to twist in his seat and look back through a red mist of pain, in time to see the Spitfire curving in for another attack. A devout Roman Catholic, he closed his eyes for an instant and forced his numbed brain to make an act of contrition. Then he waited for the burst of fire that would send the Dornier and its crew to their graves.
It never came. Instead, the Spitfire swept past, climbed and turned, and came in from astern once more. There was still no fire, and the British pilot repeated the procedure all over again. He pursued the crippled flying-boat for another couple of minutes, then tinned and flew away towards the land.
The Dornier limped out to sea. It was riddled with holes, but both engines were still running. The pilot, coughing up his lungs and passing out from time to time with pain, somehow managed to hold his course. Each time he fainted, he pulled the flying-boat’s nose up just in time to avoid diving into the water.
Ninety minutes later, he saw a ship. It was a German minesweeper. At his last gasp, he smacked the Dornier down on to the sea a hundred yards from the vessel. A boat put out, and seamen l
ifted him from the shattered cockpit, together with the bodies of the rest of the crew. On the captain’s orders, gunners sank the flying-boat with two rounds.
The pilot lingered in delirium for two days before he died. They buried him at sea. A month later, his mother received a letter of sympathy, bearing the Führer’s signature in facsimile. She tore it up and threw it on the fire.
*
Yeoman lay on the hillside, his head pillowed on his tunic, his eyes fixed on a sparrowhawk. He had been watching the bird for the past ten minutes, following its movements as it quartered the ridge on the other side of the river. He marvelled at the methodical way in which it sought out its prey, dividing the ridge into fifty-yard sections and then hovering, its keen eyes sweeping the undergrowth. If only we had eyes like that, he thought, the Huns wouldn’t stand a chance.
He stretched, luxuriating in the evening sunshine. It had been a murderously hot day, but now a light breeze blew up the Swale valley, bringing with it a welcome coolness. Yeoman loved this spot. Below him, the river rippled between wooded banks, curving away along the outskirts of Richmond, Swaledale’s ancient capital, dominated by the square, solid keep of its Norman castle. On his left, hidden behind the trees, lay the ruined abbey of Easby, among whose stones he had surreptitiously searched for jackdaws’ eggs as a child.
He had waited a long time for this short spell of leave. It was just a pity, he reflected, that he had not been able to celebrate his last operational patrol with a victory; he would have got that Dornier recce kite for certain, if his wretched guns hadn’t jammed at the crucial moment. Anyway, he had managed to put a few bursts into the flying-boat before it disappeared out to sea, so perhaps it hadn’t made it home after all.
He lay there, recalling his hectic three weeks in France. It all seemed a long time ago, but in fact it was only two and a half months since he had made his escape from Dunkirk with the battered, bloodied men of the British Expeditionary Force. The memory of it seemed unreal now, as did that of his six victories. If ever I go back to journalism after all this is over, he wondered, and write about what I have experienced, the people I have known, will my memory paint an accurate picture, or will it all be blurred and distorted by the passage of time?
One memory at least was clear, and in remembering he felt a sudden upsurge of warmth. Julia. Julia Connors, the lovely, red-haired American war correspondent with whose help he had escaped from under the very noses of the Germans after being shot down. They had parted in Paris, and although he had contacted the London office of her newspaper several times since his return to England, there had been no news of her.
Then, quite out of the blue, he had received a letter. It had reached him via his squadron. He sat up and drew it carefully from the breast pocket of his tunic, smoothing it out and re-reading it for the hundredth time. The handwriting was small and neat, and sloped backwards. Yeoman smiled to himself; so Julia was left-handed. He hadn’t noticed before.
Dear George,
I hope, this is going to get to you sooner or later. I have to know how you are, and what’s become of you. It was three weeks before I got out of France after I left you, but that’s a long story. The main thing is that I’m O.K., and I’m praying you are too.
I don’t know where you are, George, or even if you’ll ever read this. But if you do and are able to, please drop me a line. I would very much like to hear from you again. Maybe we can get together, if you are in the London area. I’d love to see you. Till then, look after yourself. Don’t get up to anything too rash.
Love, Julia.
He sighed and folded the letter away again. He had given up trying to read between the lines. Perhaps she was just taking a genuinely friendly interest in his welfare; on the other hand, it might be something more. He could only hope. The trouble was that he had a kind of inferiority complex where Julia was concerned; he couldn’t imagine that she would be seriously interested in a mere sergeant pilot, that she might want their relationship, founded on so short an acquaintance, to develop into something deeper than friendship.
Julia had occupied his mind more than he cared to admit over the past few weeks. Anyway, he told himself, there was little point in further speculation over her possible feelings towards him. He had replied to her letter, and if she still wished it he would see her as soon as he could. In the meantime, he would try to put. the distracting image of her out of his mind.
Suddenly, he wanted to be back in action again. There had been a time, just after his return home, when he had never wanted to hear the sound of gunfire again; but after a period of rest he, like most of the other fighter pilots he knew, was once more itching for a crack at the enemy.
A lot had happened during the past two months. Immediately after Dunkirk Yeoman’s squadron, Number 505, had moved to Leconfield in Yorkshire, where it had exchanged its tired Hurricanes for Spitfires. Under the merciless drive of their C.O., Hillier, newly promoted to the rank of wing commander, the pilots had trained hard, mastering their new fighters.
Yeoman had taken to the Spitfire almost at once, finding the nimble fighter a sheer delight to fly, but some of his colleagues had grumbled that they would have preferred to keep their Hurricanes. He grinned as he remembered the plight of his friend, Jim Callender, the ‘Tiger from Texas’ who boasted an American father and an English mother. Callender had decided, in the middle of a solo aerobatic session over the Yorkshire coast, to beat up Scarborough. Coming out of a loop, he had pushed the stick forward rather abruptly to send the Spit into a dive. He might have got away with it in a Hurricane, but the Spitfire hated rough treatment of this kind.
Several things had happened in rapid succession, all of them catastrophic and all of them elaborated on at length by Callender when he came to tell the story in the mess. First of all, his engine had stopped dead. Then a stream of fuel had shot out of the vent pipe in front of the windshield and splashed all over the cockpit canopy. In the split second it took for this to happen, Callender had been lifted bodily out of his seat to the full extent of his safety belt, accompanied by a shower of dust and bits of paper from the bottom of the cockpit. By the time his backside connected with his seat again the Spit was going down in a vertical dive, its propeller windmilling. The pilot had closed the throttle, then opened it again cautiously; to his relief the engine responded and he brought the Spit out of its headlong plunge with barely five hundred feet to spare, howling over the rooftops of Scarborough like a tornado.
The carburettor had been the trouble. Experienced Spitfire pilots were in the habit of losing height quickly by rolling the Spit over on its back and pulling back the stick, which did not interrupt the fuel flow, Callender had learned the hard way.
In July the squadron had moved up to Usworth, near Sunderland, which it shared with the Hurricanes of 607 Squadron. Together with other fighter units on the northeast coast, its task was to intercept German reconnaissance aircraft and the occasional bomber that ventured into the area. Yeoman had found the job dull, never sighting an enemy machine until his encounter with the Dornier 18 the day before he went on leave. Still, he was sure that the squadron would be moving south fairly soon; the fighter squadrons in the south-east had already seen considerable action over the Channel, and some of them must be due for a rest. In that case, their place would be taken by the squadrons now in the north, in Number 13 Group’s area.
The sun was well down now, partly hidden by the trees, and the breeze was growing chilly. Yeoman got up and put on his tunic, brushing bits of grass from it and tugging to straighten out the creases. He had lost all his kit in France and the tunic was new — as new as the ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Medal that gleamed proudly on his breast. He still felt self-conscious when he thought about the medal; there were others, he thought, who had deserved the award far more than himself. Nevertheless, the ribbon told the world that its wearer was not a new boy any more, that he had achieved something.
He walked down the steep incline that fell away through
the trees, vaulting a low wall on to a rocky path that eventually joined the Richmond-Catterick road. He retrieved his push-bike from its resting place among a bed of nettles, where he had carelessly dropped it, and bumped his way along the path, wobbling round the biggest of the stones.
He reached the road and turned right, panting up the hill past St Mary’s Church and the old grammar school — closed now for the summer holidays — where he had spent much of his boyhood, and turned left into the market place. The clock on Trinity Church showed five to eight, and for a summer’s evening there were curiously few people about. A small group of soldiers on a street corner broke off their earnest conversation with some local girls to throw catcalls after him as he cycled past, but he took no notice.
He had arranged to meet his father, John Yeoman, at an old pub called the Black Bull, up a winding street on the other side of the market place. His father lived in a small village a couple of miles out of Richmond, but one evening in the local there had been enough for both of them. George had become something of a hero, discovering to his surprise that there had been a write-up about him in the local evening paper, and although both he and his father were secretly proud of the fact, the constant back-slapping and beer-buying had soon become an embarrassment. At least in town they could enjoy a drink and a game of darts in peace.
He dismounted outside the Black Bull and wheeled his cycle through to the back yard, pushing it out of sight behind some beer barrels. These were times when no personal property was safe, especially near an army camp the size of Catterick, and a bicycle would be fair game for any soldier who happened to miss the last bus back to barracks.
John Yeoman was already in the bar, half-way through his second pint and contemplating the smoke curling upward from his favourite cherrywood pipe, when his son walked in. The two nodded to each other. There was little outward sign of affection, but in fact they shared a deep mutual respect and admiration. Since the death of George’s mother in the influenza epidemic of 1919, when George was only a baby, John had brought up the boy single-handed, and no one would deny that he had done a good job of it. John was a gamekeeper, and much respected in the neighbourhood; it was his eternal pride that the respect extended to his son, and now that George was back from France, with a decoration into the bargain, his cup was full.
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