‘It must have been history’s biggest stab in the back,’ Yeoman interrupted. He sensed that although Bronsky hated the Germans, it was nothing compared to his hatred of the Russians.
Bronsky nodded. ‘After that, there was nothing we could do except get out. I made my way to Buczacz and managed to get on a bomber, one of several which were flying out to Rumania. We kicked our heels there for a few weeks, then the French decided they could use us and we eventually ended up in Paris.’
He set aside his tea cup and smiled wryly. ‘Any hopes we entertained of getting into action straight away were soon shattered. The French didn’t even have enough aircraft to go round among their own men, let alone a bunch of homeless Poles. There was some talk at one stage of sending us to Finland to fight the Russians, but that scheme fell through when the Finns and Russians signed their armistice in March.
‘After that, we got split up and shunted round France from one airfield to another. Some of us, the fighter pilots that is, were attached to defence flights responsible for providing air cover for French towns in the south, and the rest — myself included — were formed into a fighter group equipped with Caudron 714s.’
‘Never heard of them,’ Yeoman said.
‘I’m not surprised,’ the other retorted. ‘They were bloody awful crates, underpowered and underarmed. Anyway, we got operational just in time to help intercept the big German air raid on Paris on 3 June, and managed to bag a couple of bombers. That was our beginning and our end, really, because soon after that we got orders to pull out to the south of France. Then came the armistice, and we found ourselves on the run again. Like most of my colleagues, I came to England via North Africa and Gibraltar.’
Bronsky looked at his companion, and his face lost some of its seriousness. ‘Somehow,’ he continued, ‘I don’t think anyone is going to kick us out this time. It may take a hell of a long time, but between us we are going to win this war. I think, though, that the Germans will not prove to be Poland’s real problem. Sooner or later we will have the Russians to contend with, and then our problems will really start.’
Yeoman, vastly interested, was about to press Bronsky to elaborate on his views when Squadron Leader Kendal appeared in the doorway. He looked around the room, spotted Yeoman and Bronsky, and beckoned.
‘Are you fed and watered?’ he asked. They nodded. ‘All right, I’ll give you a lift down to the line. Yeoman, I want you to come up with me and get your hand in with the Hurricane again. Besides, I’d like to see how you shape up.’
Forty minutes later Yeoman, sweating profusely, was hurling his Hurricane round the sky in a determined effort to keep the dogged Kendal off his tail. He had to admit that Kendal was good, very good indeed, which was presumably why he had been given the task of knocking the Polish squadron into shape.
The squadron leader’s voice crackled over the radio. ‘All right, now it’s your turn. Ten more minutes and then we’ll go home.’
Yeoman raised a hand and peered into the sun through his fingers. Kendal’s Hurricane was sitting there, a dark, indistinct shape poised in the glare half a mile away.
Yeoman smiled to himself and turned in the opposite direction, rocking his wings as though searching for the other aircraft. He glanced back, squinting into the sun’s rays, and saw a glitter as Kendal turned after him. The other Hurricane closed rapidly in a shallow dive and Yeoman kept his eyes on it through his rear-view mirror, at the same time continuing to turn slightly this way and that.
Kendal levelled out a few hundred yards astern. Yeoman, timing everything to perfection, suddenly opened the throttle and whipped his fighter round in a tight turn, thin contrails streaming from his wingtips. He kept the stick back in his stomach and the ‘g’ pushed him down into his seat as the Hurricane wheeled round on its wingtip. Kendal, taken completely by surprise, overshot and Yeoman fastened himself on to the other’s tail.
‘Tacatacatacatac,’ he shouted over the radio, imitating the noise of a machine-gun.
For the next three minutes Kendal tried every trick in the book to shake off his pursuer, with no success at all. Yeoman stuck to him like glue, anticipating every move his superior made. At last Kendal, panting with exertion, called him up over the R/T.
‘All right, you cocky young bastard, that’s enough for one day. Let’s go and meet the Poles.’ Still followed by Yeoman, he rolled his Hurricane on to its back and pulled through into a dive, heading back towards Northolt.
They thundered over the airfield wingtip to wingtip, so low that their slipstream furrowed the grass, then pulled up sharply and broke into a tight circuit, curving down to land. As they taxied in, Yeoman saw a knot of figures standing outside the Polish squadron’s crew-room, watching them. Even at this distance, Bronsky’s huge frame was easily recognisable.
‘Not bad,’ said Kendal, as they walked away from their aircraft, ‘not bad at all. But I wouldn’t try those running-away tactics too often, if I were you, or some really determined Hun is going to put lead in your pants. We’ll have a talk about tactics later on. We’ve adopted a few of Jerry’s methods, not without some opposition from the brass hats, I might tell you.’
The Poles turned out to be a mixed bunch. Some, like Bronsky, were open and friendly; others cool and unsmiling, formally polite as they were introduced. Almost instinctively, Yeoman picked out the men who could be relied upon in a fight, men who would respond well to orders and the discipline insisted upon by the R.A.F. system.
‘Take them up one by one,’ Kendal told him quietly, ‘and form your own opinions. You can expect them to ask you a lot of questions, since you’ve been in action much more recently than myself. By the way, there are two more R.A.F. chaps on the squadron, Forbes and Bakewell, but you won’t meet them until tomorrow. Forbes is recovering from a sprained ankle and Bakewell has gone to pick up a replacement Hurricane.’
Yeoman flew with three of the Poles before the day was over, and found no fault with the way they handled their aircraft. The best of the three, without doubt, was a sergeant pilot named Sznapka, a diminutive man with a brown, weathered face and fair hair brushed severely back. His first love was flying, and killing Germans came a close second. The other two, Pilot Officers Turek and Sidorowicz, were solid and reliable types who would show up well.
Kendal had been right about one thing. That evening, after dinner, Yeoman found himself hemmed into a corner of the bar by half a dozen Poles, all of them eager to pump him for information on the latest enemy tactics and his personal combat experiences. He managed to make himself adequately understood, his somewhat lame French supported by Bronsky’s translations. In turn, he began to pick up a few words of Polish; samolot, he learned, was an aircraft, while lotnik and lotnisko meant airman and airfield. He resolved to improve his vocabulary at every opportunity.
Yeoman noticed that the Poles drank very little, apparently not having much taste for English beer. The exception was Bronsky, who drank several pints in rapid succession before excusing himself and retiring to bed shortly after nine o’clock.
Yeoman was curious about a medal ribbon worn by the big Pole, and asked one of the others about it. He learned that it was the Virtuti Militari, the Polish equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Bronsky, it appeared, had been awarded it for ramming an enemy bomber over Warsaw after his ammunition ran out — a detail he had omitted when telling his story.
The young pilot lay awake for a long time that night, considering his new acquaintances. He had never before met a group of men who were so dedicated to the task of killing the enemy, and somehow the knowledge was disturbing. One of the questions they had raised repeatedly concerned the ethics of shooting at an enemy pilot who had baled out, and Yeoman had mixed feelings on the subject. Once, during the Battle of France, he had deliberately killed a German dive-bomber pilot who had been trying to struggle clear of his crippled aircraft, but that had been in the heat of the moment, following a surge of mad fury. Whether he, personally, could do it in cold blood was a differe
nt matter.
Yeoman knew of at least two instances where R.A.F. pilots had been shot under their parachutes over southern England, and technically the Germans who shot them had been contravening no rules by doing so. If a pilot baled out over his own territory, he lived to fly and fight again. But to shoot at a German who baled out over England was a different matter, for he was out of the war anyway.
Nevertheless, the ethics of it had to be weighed against one stark fact. The Poles were exiles, their homeland under the jackboot of a ruthless invader, and many of them suffered the daily agony of not knowing the fate of their loved ones. Who could blame them, if their hatred transcended all other considerations?
One thing was certain; the Poles would need careful handling, for their own sakes as well as anyone else’s. It would be the greatest test of leadership Yeoman had ever had to face, and if he passed it he knew that he would, indeed, justify the thin stripe on his sleeve.
Suddenly, he felt full of confidence in the future. In the distance, the drum-roll of bombing drifted through the summer night; the Luftwaffe was hitting eastern London again. He smiled, remembering the warmth of Julia’s body in his arms as they lay together in the wonder of each other on that first night, and a great peace came over him as he floated into sleep.
Chapter Eight
The next morning got off to a bad start. This was the day when the Polish squadron, now fully operational, was to carry out its first combat patrols, and at seven-thirty a section of Hurricanes was scrambled to patrol Rochester at fifteen thousand feet. No enemy aircraft were sighted, however, and the section returned to base half an hour later.
One of the Hurricanes, flown by Flight Sergeant Adamek, developed radio trouble on the way in, and the pilot, already confused, missed his approach and overshot. At five hundred feet his engine suddenly cut out; the Hurricane stalled and heeled over, diving steeply into a clump of trees at the far end of the runway. A brilliant flash and a mushroom of smoke marked Adamek’s grave.
The rest of the squadron remained on readiness until eleven o’clock. Yeoman, striving to maintain a relaxed air, noticed the tension mounting steadily among some of the Poles. It affected even Bronsky, who suddenly got up from his deckchair, threw down the magazine he had been reading and wandered over to a dustbin, which he kicked savagely.
The Poles yelled their relief when, at last, the order came to scramble. It was a two-squadron operation in conjunction with the Canadians, who got away first. Yeoman was leading the Polish squadron’s ‘B’ flight, with Sznapka and Turek as his wingmen. The formation climbed hard towards the Thames estuary. The radio was appalling, the controller’s voice distorted and intermittent, and the first ‘hostile’ formation the Poles encountered turned out to be a squadron of Spitfires, sniffing round the sky in the vicinity of Manston.
On Kendal’s orders the squadron circled over the Isle of Sheppey, maintaining a steady eighteen thousand feet. Yeoman tried hard to make some sense out of the metallic squawks that came over the radio, but without success. He managed to pick out the word ‘bandits’, though, which meant that enemy aircraft must be somewhere in the vicinity.
Three Spitfires crossed his nose, from left to right. They went into a graceful, shallow dive over the Thames, the sun dancing on their wings. Yeoman took his eyes away from them and rolled his head to left and right, habitually searching the sky above and behind.
When he looked back, the leading Spitfire was no longer there. It took him a long, dangerous second to grasp what had happened. A mile away, a vivid ball of fire dropped towards the Thames. Yeoman yelled a warning into his microphone, wincing inwardly as the second of the three Spitfires disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and debris.
The next instant, everything fell apart in confusion as a shoal of Messerschmitt 109s came tumbling out of the sky, scattering the British fighters in all directions. The Germans had carried out an almost perfect ‘bounce’ on their opponents, and for a while it was every man for himself. Yeoman called up his flight, praying they would understand, and turned into the sun, clawing for altitude and expecting to feel the hammer-blow of cannon shells at any moment. Three thousand feet higher up he turned steeply, looking back; Sznapka and Turek were still with him, but there was no sign of any other friendly aircraft, judging by the excited Polish shouts and curses crackling over the R/T, however, the rest of the squadron were sorting themselves out well.
A pair of 109s passed underneath, rocking their wings uncertainly. Abandoning call-signs, Yeoman radioed his wingmen. ‘Sznapka, Turek! Deux Boches au-dessous! Attaquez!’
The two Hurricanes fell on the Germans like hawks while Yeoman weaved overhead, keeping a watchful eye on their tails. The German pilots must have been novices; it was all over in less than a minute. One of the 109s exploded on the right bank of the Thames and the other plunged into the river, raising a geyser of water. Jubilantly, the two Poles climbed up to rejoin their leader.
Yeoman’s sunward climb had taken his three Hurricanes to the fringe of the main air battle, gaining precious seconds in which to take stock of the situation.
Dogfights were going on all over the sky, spreading inland from the coast as far as Canterbury. Four or five long smoke trails marked the last plunge of crippled fighters. Like an electric light, a warning signal flashed across Yeoman’s brain. The Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons were engaging at least four squadrons of Messerschmitts; it was unlikely that the enemy would send over a formation of this size unless the fighters’ task was to clear the way for an incoming formation of bombers.
Yeoman turned towards the coast, followed by his two faithful Poles, cursing the inadequate radio contact with Control. The bombers must be somewhere — but where? They could be coming in from any point of the compass between east and south.
Sznapka’s excited voice echoed suddenly over the R/T, a babble of Polish out of which Yeoman recognised one of the few English words the Pole had learned: ‘Bandits!’ Without warning, Sznapka’s Hurricane broke away and hurtled towards Deal in a steep dive. After a moment’s hesitation, Turek followed suit.
Yeoman went after them, fuming at their lack of discipline. Then his anger was forgotten as he spotted what Sznapka had been the first to see; a formation of thirty fat Heinkels, crossing the coast at about ten thousand feet. A few other fighter pilots had sighted them too, and about a dozen Spitfires and Hurricanes were converging on them. Yeoman put out a hurried call over the R/T, telling Kendal what was going on, but there was no response.
Ahead of him, Sznapka and Turek had already selected a bomber apiece and were worrying them like terriers, ignoring the return fire that streamed at them from the others. Yeoman leapfrogged the formation and made a beam attack on a Heinkel that was slightly lagging behind the others, seeing his bullets knock chunks out of its starboard wing. He sped over the bomber with feet to spare and pulled round in a tight turn, opening fire with his wings almost vertical as the Heinkel floated into his sights. A large plate detached itself from the bomber’s port engine and its undercarriage leg fell out of its well to dangle in the slipstream. Dense smoke billowed back, obscuring Yeoman’s vision. Acrid fumes entered the cockpit and he pulled away sharply, turning to make another attack.
It was not necessary. The bomber dropped out of formation and went into a tight spiral, leaving a question mark of smoke in the sky. Two parachutes broke away and drifted down.
Yeoman went into a climbing turn and looked around. The Heinkel formation held its course, but there were gaps in its ranks now. Two fighters came racing at him head-on and he tensed, finger on the gun-button, ready to engage them. A moment later he relaxed; the newcomers were Sznapka and Turek. They dropped into position alongside him and grinned, giving the thumbs-up. He shook his fist at them, resolving to tear them off a strip when they landed. In this case the end had clearly justified the means, but it wouldn’t always work out like that.
They turned for Northolt, low on fuel, and arrived over the field a few minutes later. The ci
rcuit was jammed with fighters, all requesting priority to pancake, and it was a good five minutes before Yeoman and his wing-men managed to slot in. They landed and taxied in carefully to avoid other aircraft which were heading for the dispersals; two pilots had apparently not been careful enough, for a Hurricane and a Spitfire were locked together in a jagged embrace of chewed-up metal, smothered in foam. Yeoman looked for the code letters as he taxied past; the Spit belonged to the Canadian squadron, but the Hurricane was a stranger.
Yeoman shut down his engine and climbed stiffly from the cockpit. His fitter and rigger, Corporal Martin and L.A.C. Turner, looked at him expectantly. ‘Any luck, sir?’ Martin asked.
Yeoman nodded. ‘Got a Heinkel,’ he told them, leaving them wreathed in smiles as he walked towards the flight huts. Sznapka and Turek caught up with him and slapped him on the back, chattering excitedly. ‘Go away, you pair of bastards,’ he growled, trying to keep a stem expression on his face, ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ Sznapka, getting the gist of Yeoman’s words, looked suddenly crestfallen.
The Polish squadron’s Intelligence officer, Flight Lieutenant le Mesurier — chosen for the post because of his fluent French and smattering of Polish — was having trouble with the pilots who clustered around him, shouting at the tops of their voices and waving their arms. Yeoman didn’t envy le Mesurier’s job, which was partly to deflate the often exaggerated claims made in the heat of battle. The hardest part was to get the excited pilots to sit still for a couple of minutes while he made some sense out of their combat reports.
Yeoman got a mug of tea and a sandwich from Molly, the plump, matronly woman who ran the N.A.A.F.I. van and whose smiling face always greeted the return of the pilots, and collapsed into a deckchair with a sigh of relief. A minute later he was joined by Squadron Leader Kendal, his mouth full of pork pie.
‘Well, George,’ Kendal said through a flurry of crumbs, ‘how’s it gone?’
Squadron Scramble (1978) Page 9
