Richter crammed on more power and started to turn, the other 109s jockeying into position behind him with a hundred yards between each aircraft. He was still turning hard when a stream of tracer knifed past his wingtip, followed closely by a Hurricane. Two more Hurricanes converged on the rearmost aircraft of Richter’s flight, which was lagging some distance behind the rest; a moment later the Messerschmitt was fluttering down, tom in half. There was no sign of a parachute.
The four remaining 109s completed their circle. It was all they could do to hold their own. The Hurricanes ripped through them time and again, and it was as much as the Germans could do to get in an occasional burst as the British fighters zoomed past. Richter got off one lucky shot; a Hurricane faltered and broke off the attack, diving away and trailing a thin streamer of smoke.
A second Messerschmitt went down, breaking up as it fell. Richter knew that he and the two surviving machines had to make a break for it soon, or they would be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Either that, or their fuel would run out half-way across the Channel.
The Hurricanes drew away in readiness for another assault, and he saw his chance. He yelled: ‘Run like hell!’ over the radio and pushed down his fighter’s nose, levelling out a few feet over the Channel, closely followed by the other 109s. The Hurricanes pursued them for some distance, firing at extreme range, then broke off the attack and turned inland once more.
In a field near the southern outskirts of Dover, soldiers and civilians clustered round a smoking crater. An eyewitness was explaining excitedly how a Messerschmitt had dived into the ground vertically, shot down by two Hurricanes after a tremendous dogfight.
There was nothing left of the pilot but a fragment of shinbone. A soldier, combing through the scattered wreckage around the crater, picked up something from the grass; it was a silver hip-flask, blackened by flames. He wiped it on his sleeve and a name showed up faintly, engraved in the metal. He could make out only the initial letters, F.P.
He glanced round covertly to see if anyone was looking, then slipped the flask into his pocket. It would make a fine souvenir.
Chapter Three
The pilots of 505 Squadron had been at readiness since eight o’clock. Now, five hours later, they were getting bored. It was two days since the start of the German air offensive, but so far all the action had been confined to the south, in the domain of Fighter Command’s Eleven and Twelve Groups, leaving the reserve squadrons of Thirteen Group to play a waiting game.
The waiting could not go on much longer; everyone knew that. The southern squadrons had already taken a mauling. On paper, Fighter Command had come out on top in the battles of Eagle Day, destroying forty-five enemy aircraft for the loss of thirteen Spitfires and Hurricanes; but many more British fighters had been damaged, putting them out of action for some time. Together with the twenty-two fighters which had been lost the day before, it all added up to a rate of attrition which could not be sustained for long.
Bad weather had frustrated the Luftwaffe’s plans on the fourteenth, and the weather reports had indicated that the following day would be equally unpromising. Daybreak on the fifteenth had revealed a grey overcast, stretching without a break over most of the British Isles.
Then, quite unexpectedly, the clouds had begun to disperse shortly after ten o’clock, and the Luftwaffe had seized its opportunity. Forty Stukas, strongly escorted by Messerschmitts, had swept across the Channel and hit Eleven Group’s airfields of Lympne and Hawkinge, putting the former completely out of action.
Yeoman lounged in a deckchair outside the dispersal hut, reading a book. From time to time, he chuckled out loud. The sound disturbed Jim Callender, who was playing pontoon with three more pilots.
‘What are you reading that’s so funny?’ he asked, looking up. ‘The Manual of Air Force Law?’
Yeoman laid his book aside and stretched. ‘No, as a matter of fact it’s The Wind in the Willows. One of my all-time favourites. Every time I read it, I find something new in it.’ He grinned. ‘Actually, I was laughing because I was identifying Ratty and Mole and Toad with some of you types. I’m not saying who was who.’
One of the pontoon players, a dark-haired flight sergeant pilot named Simon Wynne-Williams — a veteran of the French Campaign, like Yeoman and Callender — looked in mock bewilderment from one to the other.
‘What’s he talking about?’ he asked. Wynne-Williams had not read The Wind in the Willows. Neither, apparently, had Callender.
‘Search me,’ he said. ‘I think he’s entering his second childhood.’
‘He never emerged from his first, if you ask me,’ said the other.
‘Ah, me,’ said Yeoman, assuming a long-suffering expression, ‘what a burden it is to have to share my existence with peasants and philistines.’
‘I think,’ said Callender, getting up slowly, ‘that a remark like that is going to cost you your pants.’ He moved menacingly towards his laughing colleague, followed by Wynne-Williams.
The ops telephone shrilled and they all froze, looking expectantly at the open door of the hut. A moment later Hillier burst out, struggling into his Mae West lifejacket, yelling at the top of his voice.
‘Scramble! Angels Twelve, over the Tyne. There’s a big gaggle coming in!’
Cards, books, magazines and chairs went flying as they ran for their Spitfires, whooping and yelling like schoolboys. Yeoman’s parachute lay on the wing of his aircraft and he buckled it on while a mechanic; started the engine. The Merlin coughed into life in a cloud of blue smoke and the mechanic scrambled out of the bucket seat, making way for its rightful occupant.
Yeoman swung his leg over the cockpit side-flap and lowered himself into the seat, his parachute forming a cushion under him. He fastened the Sutton harness, closed the flap and plugged in his R/T lead. A mechanic unplugged the starter battery, closed the flap on the side of the engine cowling and gave Yeoman a thumbs-up.
On paper, 505 Squadron was up to its full complement of twenty fighters; some, however, were unserviceable and others were undergoing routine servicing, so that the unit’s full flying strength was twelve Spitfires. These were split into two flights, ‘A’ and ‘B’, and each flight in turn was subdivided into two sections. ‘A’ Flight provided Red and Yellow sections, ‘B’ Flight Blue and Green. Yeoman, leading Blue Section, was Blue One. His wingmen, a sergeant pilot named Keenan and a very young and inexperienced pilot officer, Hamilton, were Blue Two and Blue Three respectively.
Yeoman mentally went through his cockpit checks. BTFCPPUR — Brakes, Trim, Flaps, Contacts, Pressure, Petrol, Undercarriage, Radiator. All O.K. The six Spits of ‘A’ Flight were already taxiing out. Time to go. A quick look round, and a thumbs-up from Hamilton and Keenan. Handbrake off, a touch of throttle and the Spitfire began to roll forward, bumping slowly across the grass, rolling on its narrow-track undercarriage as Yeoman applied coarse left and right rudder alternately, yawing the long nose from side to side to clear the blind spot directly in front of it. He wrinkled his nose; the cockpit reeked of glycol as usual.
He made a final cockpit check, as he taxied out and turned into wind. Some pilots skipped them, and some pilots ended up dead. It was little use getting off the ground in a hurry only to have your engine pack up in a dogfight because you hadn’t bothered to check the oil temperature.
RAFTS. R for retractable undercart, green light on. A for airscrew in fine pitch. F for flaps up. T for trim, just a little aft of centre on the wheel in the cockpit. S for Sperry gyro, caged. Another quick look round; nothing above and behind. A hand signal to his two wingmen and he pushed the throttle wide open as he turned into wind, sending the Spitfire lurching forward across the field. Stick forward a little to lift the tail, but not too far or the long propeller blades would dig into the ground.
The Spitfire bounced two or three times and then became airborne. Yeoman selected ‘undercarriage up’, briefly thanking God and Supermarine for the automatic retraction system that had replaced the laborious
pump-handle method of earlier marks. He settled down into a steady climb, reaching up and closing the cockpit hood.
‘Hello, Blackbird, Stingray airborne.’ That was Hillier, making contact with control.
‘Roger, Stingray, vector 010, Angels one five now. Patrol Tynemouth and await instructions. Estimate sixty plus bandits twenty miles out, Angels twelve, course 190.’
Sixty plus. If radar was correct, this was a really big one — the biggest raid to hit the north of England so far. Yeoman wondered what they were after. It must be the Tyne shipyards, and probably the airfields in Northumberland and Durham.
The twelve Spitfires went up quickly to fifteen thousand feet, slicing through the broken cloud that hung over the coast. The broad estuary of the Tyne and the sprawling complex of Newcastle, seen dimly through a veil of industrial haze, was below and to the left. Yeoman picked out the wake of a large ship, something at least the size of a cruiser, forging out to sea between the north and south piers.
He made another check around the cockpit and, satisfied that everything was as it should be, switched on his reflector sight. The red circle and dot appeared as if by magic on the bullet-proof glass in the centre of his windshield. His finger stroked the milled wheel of the safety catch; all he had to do was turn it to ‘fire’, press the burton and his eight .303 Brownings would roar out, hammering eight thousand rounds per minute — or 266 rounds in an average two-second burst — into an area two feet in diameter 250 yards in front of the nose. It was enough to punch a sizeable and, hopefully, fatal hole in the wings or fuselage of an enemy aircraft, even if the burst missed a more vital spot such as the engine. Two of the eight guns were loaded with armour-piercing ammunition, two with incendiary and four with ball. Four out of the last twenty-five rounds in each box of ball ammunition were tracer, to warn the pilot that his firepower was running out. In the port wing root, a synchronised G42 film camera waited to record the results of the pilot’s shooting.
‘Hello, Blackbird, Stingray calling. Orbiting Tynemouth, Angels fifteen. Any gen?’
‘Roger, Stingray, bandits over Blyth, now heading 180, Angels twelve, confirmed sixty plus. Vector 350 to intercept.’
The Spitfires swept round in a wide arc, re-crossing the coast and heading north. So much for the ‘twenty miles out’ bit, thought Yeoman. The radar, sometimes notoriously inaccurate, must have been playing tricks again.
‘There the bastards are, eleven o’clock!’
Yeoman scanned the horizon, and saw the enemy almost at once: a great cloud of dots spread out across the sky, scudding along over the mass of broken cloud. ‘Sixty plus’ had been a very conservative estimate. There must be at least a hundred of them.
‘Ker-rist!’ Yeoman recognised Jim Callender’s drawl.
‘All right,’ Hillier snapped, ‘cut the cackle. Blue and Green Sections, upstairs. Red and Yellow, with me. Head-on attack.’
The six Spitfires of Blue and Green Sections went up to eighteen thousand feet, searching the sky above the enemy bombers. The latter were identifiable as Heinkel 111s, and speckled across the sky above and to either side of them were groups of smaller dots which must be their fighter escort. For a minute Yeoman was puzzled. The bombers were coming from the north-east, presumably from Norway, and the Messerschmitt 109 did not have sufficient range to undertake the long haul over the North Sea. Then he realised that the fighters were not 109s at all; they were twin-engined 110s.
The enemy formation seemed dislocated. In fact they had already been in action, intercepted over the Farne Islands by a squadron of Hurricanes from Acklington. The Hurricanes had tangled with the Messerschmitt 110 escort and had come out decidedly on top. Several 110s had been either shot down or damaged, and others had fled for home.
The bombers, however, had continued steadily on their course, escorted by the surviving 110s, and now Hillier’s small force of Spitfires was all that stood between them and the vital Tyne shipyards, At least the British fighters, coming out of the south-east, had the sun in their favour.
While ‘A’ Flight went for the bombers, Blue and Green Sections of ‘B’ Flight split up, manoeuvring to attack the Messerschmitt escort from different angles. Yeoman led his Blue Section towards four 110s on the left flank of the bomber formation, the Spitfires diving hard from the beam.
The Huns showed every inclination to fight, turning to meet the Spitfires head-on. As they did so, Yeoman saw four black objects, like teardrops, fall away from under the Messerschmitts’ bellies and go fluttering down. So that’s how they step up the range, he thought; auxiliary fuel tanks.
The 110s split up into two pairs, one of them suddenly climbing to the left to take the Spits in the flank. They ran full tilt into the aircraft of Green Section, sweeping down unobserved out of the glare, and suddenly found themselves fighting desperately for their lives. Yeoman lost sight of them as the other two 110s came hard at his section, their noses twinkling with the flash of their cannon. He fired back, cringing as the smoke trails from the enemy fighter’s guns seemed to converge on a spot between his eyes, but the no’s shells streaked over the top of Yeoman’s cockpit and the next instant the fighter was gone, buffeting the Spitfire with its slipstream as it flashed underneath.
‘I’m hit! Christ, I’m hit!’ Hamilton’s shrill, panic-stricken voice burst over the radio. Yeoman turned hard, looking back. Blue Two, Sergeant Keenan, was still with him. A mile away, a parabola of black smoke curved down into the clouds. Yeoman pressed the R/T button.
‘Blue Three from Blue One, are you O.K.? Blue Three, come in. Are you O.K.?’
There was no answer. Slowly, the streamer of smoke began to disperse on the wind. Beyond it, two black dots that were the 110s were high-tailing it out to sea. There was no sign of the other two.
‘All right, Blue Two, leave ’em. Let’s get after the bombers.’
Keenan acknowledged briefly and the two Spitfires turned southwards, scudding along over the clouds. Yeoman searched the horizon. Not for the first time, he marvelled at the sheer speed of air combat, and at the vast scope of the sky. One moment the sky would be full of whirling aircraft; the next it would be empty. This, he knew, was the dangerous time, the moment when a pilot, fresh from the exertions of combat, was tempted to relax for a moment — and leave himself wide open to an enemy fighter, arrowing unseen out of the sun.
Apart from himself and his wingman the sky seemed quite deserted, but a lot of shouting was going on over the radio and the air battle must still be raging further south. He told Keenan to keep his eyes peeled, then switched to another channel and called up control.
‘Hello, Blackbird, Stingray Blue One calling. Requesting vector.’
‘Roger, Stingray Blue One, transmit.’
‘Stingray Blue One transmitting, one … two … three … four … five.’
There was a momentary silence. Then: ‘Stingray Blue One from Blackbird, vector 160. Bogeys over Tynemouth heading 190. Switch to Channel “A”. Buster.’
‘Buster’ meant get a move on. Yeoman and Keenan opened their throttles and turned on to the heading that had been given to them. It was Keenan who spotted the enemy first, a widely spaced trio of twin-engined machines popping up out of the clouds a couple of miles ahead. His yell almost shattered Yeoman’s eardrums.
The aircraft were Junkers 88s, and they were fast. Even at full throttle, the Spitfires had their work cut out to overhaul them. Black smoke trails streamed from the 88s’ engines as the enemy pilots crammed on power.
Yeoman selected the left-hand bomber and went into a shallow dive, gaining speed and coming up from astern and slightly underneath. The 88’s ventral gunner opened up, but his shots were wild. Yeoman opened fire too, but the range was too great. He cursed himself for acting like a bloody beginner and crept in closer, his thumb resting lightly on the button. Tracer floated from the Junkers in orange clusters, moving apparently slowly and then separating and flashing around the Spitfire like deadly wasps.
Yeoman’s thumb
jabbed down and a two-second burst pumped into the 88’s fuselage. There was no apparent effect; the enemy bomber flew on steadily. There was a sudden loud banging noise, like a hammer beating on a drum, and holes appeared in the Spit’s starboard wing. He kicked the rudder and the fighter skidded out of the line of fire. Sweat trickled in rivulets down the sides of his nose and he wiped it away with his sleeve. That had been too close for comfort.
Keenan called up, his voice filled with disgust and frustration, ‘Blue Two to Blue One — my bloody engine’s boiling. Breaking off. My 88’s pissed off into the clouds.’
Yeoman acknowledged and glanced back. The bomber in front of him was the only aircraft in sight. A rift in the clouds revealed a city over on the right, with a river looping tightly through its heart. From the peninsula girded by the river, a solid, angular tower jutted up. He had no trouble in identifying Durham.
The 88 was still heading south at full throttle. He closed in again, this time from above and behind, and put another burst into the fuselage just behind the cockpit. A slight touch of rudder and bullets ploughed into the bomber’s left wing, between engine and fuselage. Yeoman swore fluently; the bastard refused to burn. More tracer converged on his fighter, causing him to swerve violently aside once more.
Suddenly, the Junkers dropped like a stone, plunging into the cloud layer fifteen hundred feet lower down. Yeoman throttled back rapidly and followed suit. He glanced at his altimeter; nine thousand feet. He had no idea what the Junkers might be up to; all he could do was hold a straight course and hope for the best.
He broke through the cloud base at four thousand feet, over the outskirts of a town. Three tall chimneys and the squatter shapes of cooling towers close by them dominated the familiar skyline of Darlington. On a sudden impulse he looked up at the grey cloud layer, streaming just a few feet above his cockpit canopy. Hanging there, surrounded by a rainbow-like halo, was the ghostly shadow of the Junkers, almost directly overhead.
Squadron Scramble (1978) Page 3
