Squadron Scramble (1978)

by Jackson, Robert

  ‘Not bad,’ the other replied. ‘I got a Heinkel and Sznapka and Turek got one each, as well as a pair of 109s. Had a bit of bother with the buggers, though, not waiting for orders.’

  Kendal nodded. ‘Yes, we’ll have to get ’em all together and lay it on the line. We can’t have this privateering. Still, it’s been a good effort. We got thirteen confirmed, as far as I can make out, with three probables.’ A shadow crossed his face. ‘We lost three, though — Forbes, Sidorowicz and Czerwinski. I saw poor old Forbes go full tilt into a Messerschmitt.’

  Bronsky ambled across, his face split by a broad grin, with Sznapka and Turek in tow. He nodded at Yeoman and jerked a thumb at his two companions.

  ‘These two want to say sorry for pissing off,’ he said, ‘and thank you for letting them have their first kills. They say they not go off on their own in future.’

  ‘I’ll bet!’ said Yeoman, and glared at his wingmen. They looked terribly embarrassed and came to attention, doing their best to dick their heels. Since they were wearing flying boots this feat was a near impossibility, and they looked so funny that Yeoman burst out laughing. The two miscreants looked at one another in relief.

  The squadron was stood down an hour later. Kendal and Yeoman took advantage of the respite to carry out two practice flights with the Poles, one of which involved an interception on a flight of three Blenheim bombers. Later, the C.O. of the Blenheim squadron sent a message to Kendal. It read simply: ‘Thanks for the affiliation. We’re ready for anything, now.’

  Kendal showed it to Yeoman, who read it without expression. Poor bastards, he thought, they thought they were ready for anything in France, too, but they still fell in flames.

  *

  There was a party of appalling proportions in the mess that night, with the Poles pulling out all the stops to celebrate their first victories as a squadron. It started off fairly quietly, but there was a, sure indication of the course events would take when Fred, the steward, scurried out from behind his bar and removed a couple of glass-topped tables to a place of safety.

  At one point Yeoman made his way through the beery haze to try and ring Julia, but he learned that she was on V.A.D. duty and returned to the bar, leapfrogging a rugby scrum that was going on in the corridor next to the anteroom.

  The bar was a scene of utter chaos. Steve le Mesurier, the Intelligence officer, was seated at the piano, surrounded by a cluster of British and Canadian pilots who were singing ‘Balls to Mister Finkelstein’ at the tops of their voices. Turek was on his knees at the foot of the bar, trying to set fire to it with a cigarette lighter. He was not having much success, because Kendal, Bohanson and Bakewell, the other R.A.F. pilot attached to the Polish squadron, were busy extinguishing the bar, lighter and Turek with three soda syphons.

  Yeoman made unsteadily for the group, dodging a stream of soda water, and tripped over somebody’s legs. He fell into the middle of a circle of pilots who were sitting on the floor, pouring beer down their throats at a fast rate. A dripping flight lieutenant seized him by the arm and dragged him into a sitting position. He peered at Yeoman groggily.

  ‘Come’n join ushm’ he slurred. ‘We’re having a li’l comp-comp-comp’tish’n.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said Yeoman, lapsing into a Yorkshire accent in his intoxicated state. ‘What sort of competition?’

  ‘Inna minute,’ the other replied, ‘one of ush has t’leave the bar, an’ the othersh have to guess who it is.’

  ‘Gerroff,’ said Yeoman, and stood up. The flight lieutenant tried to grab his legs, missed, and fell on his face. Yeoman staggered up to the bar, picked up a pint of beer that appeared in front of him, spilt most of it down his shirt front, and started quoting poetry to no one in particular.

  Bronsky elbowed his way towards him through the throng, steady as a rock. ‘Some party, George,’ he bellowed. Yeoman felt his knees starting to give way. ‘Christ, Bron,’ he said, ‘I’ve about had it.’

  He looked around him, through the haze of tobacco smoke. Turek was fastening his tie to the rail at the foot of the bar, obviously preparing for a siege, and Kendal was wandering around minus his trousers, shirt tails flapping round his bony legs. His glassy eye fixed on Bronsky and Yeoman and he made a beeline towards them, landing against the bar with a crash and clinging to it for support.

  ‘Wanna find a store-basher,’ he said. ‘Wanna find a store-basher and punch his bloody nose.’

  Bronsky winked at his companion. ‘Okay, Boss,’ he said. ‘There’s one in your bedroom. Go beat hell out of him.’ They took Kendal’s arms and propelled him towards the door, urging him along the corridor. ‘Don’ wanna go to bed,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody store-basher in bedroom.’

  ‘That’s okay, Boss,’ Bronsky reassured him. ‘We’ll take care of him. Come on, now, 101 degrees.’

  They half-carried him up the stairs to his room, dropping him on his bed. He was snoring before they were out of the door.

  The party was still in full swing, but both Yeoman and Bronsky had had enough. The Pole went off to bed and Yeoman went out through the main door into the night, pulling his pipe from his tunic pocket and filling it. He lit up and sat on the mess steps, revelling in the cool, gentle breeze that played on his face. From a long way off came the muted drone of engines, and the pencil beams of searchlights played across the southern sky.

  Through the open door, the sound of singing drifted to him. Not a ribald song this time, but a haunting Polish folk melody, sung in beautiful, deep-throated harmony by the young men who had made themselves a part of England’s war.

  Suddenly he was deeply moved, and felt a tear trickle down his face. Half-ashamed, he wiped it away, looking round furtively to see if anyone was watching, but he was quite alone.

  Then the Canadians started to sing ‘Alouette’, and the spellbound moment was gone. He knocked out his pipe, rose, and went indoors.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Close escort!’ Richter snarled, his face white with fury. ‘Close escort! The bastards must be crazy! It’ll destroy every chance we ever had of getting to grips with the Tommy fighters on more than equal terms. First they switch the attacks away from the R.A.F. airfields, and now this!’

  His companion, Lieutenant Schindler, looked around cautiously and took Richter by the arm. ‘I know how you feel, Jo,’ he said, ‘but be careful what you say. If that bastard Kieler hears you, he’ll report you.’

  Captain Kieler was an administrative officer who had been posted to Fighter Wing 66 a few days earlier. He was known to be a fanatical Nazi, and there were whispers that he was something more than just a Luftwaffe officer. In any case, it didn’t pay to take undue risks. Richter and Schindler moved away from the front of the administrative section where they had been standing, and walked past the end of a hangar on to the airfield.

  Schindler, a tall, muscular man who had once been an Olympic athlete and was rumoured to have acquired a small harem of French girls since his arrival at Abbeville, grinned at Richter. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’ll be a comforting sight to have you fellows tucked in all around our formations. We’ve been feeling pretty naked and alone out there, up to now.’ He waved a hand in the general direction of the English Channel.

  Christian Schindler was a bomber pilot. Despite his relatively low rank, he was the commander of a squadron of Junkers 88 dive-bombers which had flown into Abbeville a week earlier. He was noted as one of the best dive-bomber pilots in the Luftwaffe, but his outspoken views had stifled his chances of promotion several times. Nevertheless, his superiors on the staff of General Kesselring’s Air Fleet Two had been shrewd enough to employ his talents to the full, and so he had been appointed to command a special duties dive-bomber unit known as Sondergruppe 320. Originally its task had been to make precision attacks on small but vital targets such as the radar stations along the south coast of England, but now it had become just another bomber squadron taking part in the big Luftwaffe air offensive against London, a fact that disgusted Schindler and his
crews. They could, Schindler maintained with justification, have done far more damage by continuing to make surprise attacks on the British radar, or on Fighter Command’s vital sector stations.

  If Hitler and Goering thought they could break the morale of the British people by sustained air attacks on London, thought Richter, then someone was giving them poor advice. Anyone who had fought the Tommies over France or southern England could tell a different story. These daylight attacks on the British capital were wasting the Luftwaffe’s most experienced bomber crews at an appalling rate. For the life of them, the pilots could not understand why the concentrated raids on Fighter Command’s airfields had not been allowed to continue. That was the only logical way to bring the R.A.F. to its knees; the present strategy seemed foolhardy. True, London was reeling under the day and night onslaught — but the R.A.F. remained undefeated, and until it was knocked out the promised invasion would be a risky venture.

  With the emphasis now switched away from attacks on the British fighter airfields, the only alternative was to bring the Spitfires and Hurricanes to combat and shoot them down in sufficient numbers to achieve the air superiority necessary for the invasion, and this could only be done if the German fighter pilots were permitted a high degree of autonomy. During August, the German fighter squadrons had specialised in what the Luftwaffe termed ‘freie jagd’, or free hunting, in which the Messerschmitt Geschwader had swept the English sky in a bid to clear the way for the bombers. The orders that dispensed with freie jagd, and instead tied the fighters to close escort, seemed unnecessary and foolhardy. At one stroke, they hamstrung the movements of the German fighter squadrons and handed the initiative to the R.A.F.

  Richter was unhappy. Although many of his friends remained optimistic, he knew in his heart that the Luftwaffe had already lost the Battle of the Island. He saw no hope of an invasion taking place with the September tides, and once September had gone the autumn weather would destroy any further prospect until the spring. As Schindler had remarked pessimistically just a short while earlier: ‘This bloody war looks like going on for ever.’

  Richter’s latest assignment did nothing to improve his good humour. In order to ensure good liaison between the bombers and their escorting fighters, an experienced fighter pilot was to fly operationally with each bomber group, observing developments from the lead aircraft and subsequently making a detailed report to Air Fleet Headquarters, with recommendations on how fighter-bomber affiliation could be bettered — assuming, of course, that he got back to make his report at all.

  It was just his luck, the pilot reflected ruefully, that he should be the one selected from Fighter Wing 66 — the penalty for having twenty kills to his credit and an ‘above average’ rating. The only bright spot was that he had been assigned to fly with Schindler; he had developed a great affection for the bomber pilot in the short time he had known him, and had the utmost respect for his capabilities.

  The pair stood in the morning sunshine and surveyed the activity in front of them, as ground crews fuelled and armed the Messerschmitts of Fighter Wing 66 and the adjacent Junkers 88s of Schindler’s Sondergruppe 320.

  ‘Well,’ Richter remarked, ‘I’ll soon know what it’s like to be on the receiving end. I can’t pretend I’m looking forward to it.’

  Schindler fished out a cigar from the pocket of his tunic and lit it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If the Intelligence reports are correct, we should be able to walk all over the Tommies today. It will be the biggest effort so far. We’re putting more than seven hundred bombers into the air, as you heard at the briefing. Intelligence reckon that if we can keep up the pressure throughout the day the R.A.F. will be on its knees by nightfall.’

  Richter looked away. He wished he could share his friend’s optimism. He looked at his watch: the hands were creeping towards ten o’clock. Take off was in forty-five minutes. The date was Sunday 15 September 1940.

  *

  Yeoman walked into the crew-room and hung his Mae West on a peg. ‘Hi, Jim,’ he said, catching sight of Callender behind a newspaper, ‘what’s going on? The erks pounced on us as soon as we landed and started refuelling before our feet hit the deck.’

  Callender tossed his newspaper aside. ‘Another invasion scare,’ he said. ‘We’re going to cockpit readiness in ten minutes.’ He grinned. ‘Nice to have you back. How’s your Polish?’

  ‘Improving gradually,’ Yeoman smiled. ‘I’m staying with them for another week or so until they learn the ropes. Any panics while I’ve been away?’

  Callender shrugged. ‘No more than usual. The Huns have been hitting London pretty hard, but we seem to be coping, McKenna bought it yesterday, by the way. Took a Dornier with him, though.’

  Yeoman made no reply. Sudden death was something one learned to live with, and you didn’t talk about those who had gone. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d better get back to the Ukraine. It looks as though we might be busy.’

  He returned to the Polish squadron’s crew-room and sat smoking his pipe on the grass outside. It was good to be back at Tangmere, and the prospect of action exhilarated him. The Poles were standing around in groups, talking amongst themselves in low tones. Something serious must be in the wind for the squadron to be brought to readiness the moment it arrived. Maybe this was the real thing; maybe the invasion was coming, after all. Well, he told himself, we’ll give the bastards a run for their money.

  A sudden commotion caught his attention. Pilots were erupting from 505 Squadron’s readiness hut and racing for their Spitfires. As they strapped themselves in, the Canadian squadron’s Spitfires started up with a characteristic crackle of Merlins and began to taxi. Yeoman watched as they turned into wind and began their take-off runs, lifting into the air and heading east at full throttle. A couple of minutes later 505 Squadron’s fighters followed them.

  A telephone shrilled, and heads turned expectantly towards the Polish squadron’s hut. Yeoman suddenly remembered that he had left his lifejacket in 505 Squadron’s crew-room and ran off to get it. When he returned, panting, the others were climbing into their Hurricanes. He jumped on to the wing of his aircraft and learned from the rigger that the squadron had been ordered to cockpit readiness. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  *

  Richter screwed up his eyes against the glare of the morning sun, which was climbing towards its zenith, and peered it the sky ahead over Schindler’s shoulder. It was hot in the Junkers 88’s glasshouse cockpit, and Richter felt claustrophobic and uncomfortable. He could, he decided, do without the company of his fellow men in the confines of an aircraft. He turned his head and looked at the navigator, Sergeant Zimmermann, who glanced up briefly from his chart and winked reassuringly. The radio operator and flight engineer had already closed down their positions and taken up station behind the Junkers’ rearward-firing machine-guns.

  The Thames estuary sprawled ahead of them, twelve thousand feet below the bomber formation. Richter looked around, craning his neck, at the stepped-up echelons of Junkers and Dorniers, strung out across the sky like dark birds of prey. Speedy Messerschmitts flashed over the serried ranks, their wings glinting in the sun.

  Richter wished he didn’t feel so jittery. It seemed an age since they had taken off from Abbeville and made their rendezvous with the other bombers over the French coast. He envied his colleagues of Fighter Wing 66, and their hawk-like freedom. They were out there now, guarding the flanks, their fifty Messerschmitts forming a silver stairway into the glare of the sun.

  Richter glanced at the clock on the instrument panel. It was eleven-fifty. He heard Zimmermann warning Schindler over the intercom that the target was coming up in ten minutes. The bombers were crawling over a layer of broken cumulus cloud, through which landmarks showed up clearly. Looking down through one gap, Richter picked out a large town; that must be Canterbury. He peered up through the cockpit roof, scanning the sky above1 and behind. So far, there was no sign of any Tommy fighters. It was as though the whole of southern England was a
sleep. Well, thought Richter grimly, two hundred and fifty bomb loads will soon wake them up.

  The British, however, were already wide awake. Ever since they had assembled over their airfields on the other side of the Channel, the bombers had been tracked by the cold, impersonal eyes of the radar. In the control room of Fighter Command’s Number Eleven Group at Uxbridge, Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, the Group C.-in-C., had been holding his twenty-four squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes back until the last possible moment. Now, with the enemy formations in sight of London, he unleashed them.

  In Schindler’s Junkers 88, the intercom crackled with a sudden warning cry from one of the gunners, Sergeant Heuss. ‘Achtung! Enemy fighters on the starboard beam, closing!’

  Richter saw them an instant later — a line of black dots, growing steadily bigger, sweeping across the sky above the white banks of cloud. They were Spitfires, two squadrons of them, and they hurled themselves beam-on at the enemy bombers. A Spitfire whistled through the German formation, its sleek, green-and-brown lines elongated by its speed, flashes twinkling along the leading edges of its wings. It was followed by another, and another. The Junkers shook to the recoil of its own machine-guns as the gunners raked a fighter that sped past, revealing the graceful elliptical curve of its wings. Richter, feeling utterly naked, cowered in the cockpit behind Schindler and had a fleeting glimpse of a line of jagged holes appearing in the Spitfire’s fuselage, just aft of the roundel. Then it was gone.

  Grey fingers of smoke filled the sky. Hazy fumes from the guns drifted through the Junkers’ cockpit, making Richter’s eyes water. Away to the left a Junkers dropped out of formation, both engines pouring smoke. There was a sudden, blinding flash as a Spitfire, its controls stiffened by the speed, smashed headlong into a second bomber. Two parachutes blossomed out from nowhere and hung there, tiny white splashes against the darker hues of the landscape below. Something — it was impossible to tell whether British or German — fell through the formation in flames, leaving an arrow-straight trail of oily black smoke. Then, suddenly, the Spitfires vanished as rapidly as they had come, heading back to their bases to refuel and rearm.