Yeoman glanced quickly behind to make sure he was in no danger and then watched the Dornier’s death plunge. The twin-finned tail broke off and the rest of the aircraft flicked end over end several times in a kind of forward somersault, then fell away in a fast spin. After two or three turns both wings broke away outboard of the engines, and the now-blazing aircraft — or all that was left of it, half a fuselage and the wing roots with the engines attached to them — plummeted straight down. Yeoman lost sight of it as it dropped into the cloud, but it failed to worry him; there was not much doubt about that one.
He looked around him, getting his bearings. London was easy to locate, for a great pillar of smoke rose up through the clouds, marking its position. The Dorniers must be dropping their loads blind in the hope of hitting something worth while. Yeoman felt a deep pang of anxiety as he thought of Julia; he hoped that she was safe in a shelter, but his reason told him that she would be out in the thick of it, helping the injured. He resolved to ring her later and set his mind at rest.
Four Hurricanes passed above him, a couple of thousand feet higher up, heading towards the bomber formation that was wheeling like a flock of rooks over the capital. He climbed to join them, overhauling them gradually and intending to slide into position on the right of the formation. From a distance of a hundred yards he looked across at the nearest aircraft, which was at ten o’clock from him, and tried to make out its squadron code-letters.
The fuselage had a white-edged black cross stamped on it.
The aircraft were Messerschmitt 109s. Yeoman went hot and cold in rapid succession and his hand tensed on the stick, ready to send the Hurricane whirling down and away from the danger. Then, in an instant, the impulse to run vanished. He became deadly calm and detached, his mind working mechanically as he weighed up the situation.
The 109s were holding their course; they had not yet seen him, their pilots doubtless searching the sky above and behind. Yeoman took a deep breath and dropped back a little, below and behind the right-hand aircraft. He took a quick look round, checking his sight and making sure that his guns were set to ‘fire’. Then, very gently, he lifted the nose of his fighter a fraction and slammed a three-second burst of bullets into the Messerschmitt’s pale blue belly.
The 109 came apart like tissue paper in a great gout of flame. Yeoman applied coarse rudder, firing at the next Messerschmitt as it skidded through his sights. He saw a puff of white smoke erupt from it; the shining arc of its propeller disc suddenly broke up as the blades windmilled. A split second later the cockpit canopy flew off and the 109 dropped away below.
There was no time to see any more. Yeoman shoved the stick hard into his thigh, then back into his stomach as the Hurricane rolled over on her back. He went down vertically, plunging into the clouds several thousand feet below and easing out of his headlong dive while still among the white folds of vapour. He broke out of the base at nine thousand feet and immediately carried out a steep ‘S’ turn, looking over his shoulder, but there was no sign of pursuit. He expelled his breath in a whistle of relief and set course for Tangmere. He’d had enough for one day.
Yeoman’s two kills that afternoon brought the Polish squadron’s score during the day’s fighting to thirteen enemy aircraft confirmed and four ‘probables’, one of which was the second 109 Yeoman had attacked. Sergeant Sznapka was missing from the afternoon’s sortie, but he turned up later with a broad smile on his face. He had baled out and come down in a tree in the grounds of a stately home, and had experienced a sticky five minutes looking down the barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun brandished by an elderly but very determined lady before he managed to convince her that his accent was Polish, and not German. After that he had been entertained very royally, returning to the airfield full of tea and buttered toast in a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Sznapka, it seemed, was beginning to appreciate the niceties of English life.
It was with a weary sense of achievement that the pilots of Fighter Command collapsed into their beds at the close of that fateful Sunday. There was no doubt that they had given the Luftwaffe a hammering; nevertheless, the battle was far from over. That night, the sirens once again wailed over London, as two hundred bombers dropped their loads into the lurid streets. Darkness, from now on, was to be the defenders’ main enemy.
Chapter Ten
Yeoman returned to 505 Squadron early in October. The weather was poor and there was little flying. Wing Commander Hillier bagged a lone Junkers 88 off Bexhill on the fourth, then went off on leave.
Yeoman kicked his heels disconsolately around the crew-room. He felt like a stranger in his own home, for Wynne-Williams and most of his comrades of earlier days were gone, either swallowed up by the sky or posted elsewhere to pass on their skills. Even the indomitable Callender had departed, protesting, for Church Fenton in Yorkshire, where an all-American fighter squadron was to be formed as part of the R.A.F. before the end of the month.
When another of the squadron’s pilots was posted to a different unit at Church Fenton during the last week in October, Yeoman seized the opportunity to fly him there in the Magister and find out how Callender was getting on. He made nearly the whole trip at less than four hundred feet, lashed by blinding rain and following the Great North Road until he turned right for Tadcaster. Despite the cold and the rain, Yeoman whistled happily to himself as he cruised along; he was flying the ‘Maggie’ from the front seat, which meant that most of the driving rain missed him and soaked the man in the rear cockpit.
‘Can’t beat I.F.R. navigation,’ he grinned at his dripping passenger as they squelched across Church Fenton’s grass towards the flight huts.
‘I.F.R.?’ the other queried, through chattering teeth.
‘I Follow Roads,’ Yeoman replied.
‘God,’ the passenger said, ‘is it always like this up here?’
‘Only for ten months in the year. Come on, what you need is a good brew.’
They found Callender in one of the huts, sharing the warmth of an iron stove with a small group of pilots. His face lit up when Yeoman walked in.
‘George, you old bastard!’ he yelled. ‘Just the guy I need to cheer me up. Come and meet this bunch of wasters.’
He introduced Yeoman to his companions, three more Americans and another R.A.F. pilot. ‘Welcome to the Eagle Squadron,’ Callender grinned. Yeoman looked round the room. ‘Where are the rest of them?’ he said.
‘Oh, I forgot to mention it — this is the Eagle Squadron, at least for the time being. It’ll take us at least a month to get up to strength. We haven’t even got any kites — except for that one, that is.’ He pointed out of the window at a decrepit-looking Magister, wilting tiredly outside a hangar.
Later, over lunch in the mess, Callender told Yeoman about the Eagle Squadron, and how it had come into being.
‘Remember when we were in France? Well, a lot of the guys back home were keen to come over and give us a hand then, just like they did in the last war when they formed the Escadrille Lafayette. This time, however, things moved too fast, and the French folded up before anything could be done.
‘Anyway, all the applications originally submitted to the French have been turned over to us, and a lot of Americans are being recruited in Canada. Over thirty trained pilots are already on their way out to us, and there’ll be more — many more. What we’ve got so far is a nucleus, and a damn’ fine one too. A couple of the guys you just met flew P-40s against the Japs in China last year, so the experience is there. They’re desperate to get their hands on Spitfires and have a crack at the Huns.’
Callender lit a cigarette and inhaled, looking sideways at his friend. ‘George,’ he went on, ‘I’ve a confession to make. There have been times when I’ve had my doubts about whether we can win this war or not. Everything seemed to be stacked against us. But not any more. We’ve a dozen nations fighting alongside us, now, and sooner or later we’re going to pick up that little bastard in Berlin and wipe the floor with him.’
Yeoman was in a pe
nsive mood as he flew back to Tangmere in weather that was improving steadily, with watery sunshine breaking through the clouds. He had never seen Callender express himself so vehemently before. We are all changing, he reflected; we all went into the cauldron as boys, and those of us who are fortunate enough to float to the surface are emerging as men.
Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind. What was it Julia had said, when they were on the run before the German Blitzkrieg in France? Sooner or later, America would make this her war too. Well, he had just seen the proof that her words were slowly but surely coming true. What he had witnessed, to be sure, was only a small beginning; but a beginning none the less.
Then something else pounded at the back of his mind; fragments of his father’s words, the words of a man who had fought in the carnage of the trenches. War kills and maims more heroes than it makes. He had a sudden, horrific vision of a million dead men, marching mile on mile in grey procession, and a shudder ran through him.
The sun was shining strongly as he landed at Tangmere, but it took much more than its warmth to dispel the black mood that had settled upon him,
*
It happened on the last day of October: one of the few really cloudless days in the month. A section of the Polish squadron’s Hurricanes, led by Tadeusz Bronsky, was scrambled to intercept a small raid that was crossing the coast at 25,000 feet. A few minutes later 505 Squadron’s Red Section, led by Yeoman, was also scrambled.
Yeoman and his two wingmen climbed hard, pushing their Spitfires to the limit. Ahead of them, and still much higher up, half a dozen long contrails speared across the sky towards London. As Yeoman watched, three more contrails appeared, intermittently at first, then becoming more solid and defined as Bronsky’s Hurricanes closed with the enemy.
Yeoman was puzzled. The enemy aircraft were now visible as Messerschmitt 109s, but the Hurricanes seemed to be having no trouble in overhauling them. A moment later, he saw the reason why. Six objects curved away from the 109s’ bellies and fell earthwards. The Messerschmitts had been carrying bombs.
Three of the 109s immediately headed back towards the coast, dropping below contrail height as they put down their noses to gain speed. With little hope of catching them, Yeoman ordered his section to the assistance of the Poles, who were engaging the three remaining Huns.
The latter were fighting back hard, and Yeoman closed in on one which was firing at a twisting Hurricane. He pressed the gun-button and the 109 broke hard right into the fire of Yeoman’s number two. It went over on its back and fell into a vertical dive, disappearing against the landscape. The other two broke off the unequal fight abruptly and dived away, pursued by the British fighters. Yeoman got in a long shot at one of them and thought he had hit it, but the Messerschmitt sped on unchecked. Together with its companion, it drew away gradually from its pursuers. The Spitfires and Hurricanes chased their opponents for a few miles out to sea, then gave up. Together, they set course for Tangmere.
Yeoman drew level with Bronsky’s wingtip and looked across. The Pole waved, then stuck up two fingers in a gesture of disgust.
Suddenly, Yeoman felt a thrill of alarm as he caught sight of a ribbon of smoke, trailing from the underside of Bronsky’s fighter. A split second later, the fierce glow of flames broke out at the root of the smoke trail. Urgently, Yeoman pressed the R/T switch.
‘Bron, look out, you’re on fire! I repeat, you’re on fire!’
‘O.K. George, thanks, I can handle it. Better keep clear, though, just in case.’
The Pole’s voice sounded calm and laconic. Yeoman moved his Spitfire away, putting an extra fifty yards between himself and the burning aircraft.
The smoke became thicker with every passing second. He saw Bronsky reach up and slide back the cockpit canopy. It moved a few inches, then stuck. Smoke billowed up around the pilot, pouring from the cockpit and enveloping the Hurricane’s fuselage in a grey shroud. Yeoman found himself shouting out loud, willing the Pole to get the canopy open and bale out.
A blinding orange light filled the sky and the hammer-blow of a shock wave hit Yeoman’s Spitfire, almost sending it out of control. He corrected it instinctively, missing his number two’s aircraft by a matter of feet.
Bronsky’s Hurricane had vanished, torn apart by the explosion of volatile petrol vapour in its tanks. Pilot and machine had become a whirling cauldron of hot gas that froze instantly, rolling across the sky in a white cloud. Widely scattered debris fell earthwards, trailing thin tendrils of smoke and vapour.
So the valiant, great-hearted Bronsky died, the ashes of his body scattered over the Kentish Weald. They mourned his passing briefly that night, the Poles silently toasting his memory and then throwing their glasses into the fireplace. A few R.A.F. newcomers to the mess, who had not known Bronsky, looked on in amazement; but the rest understood, and some, like Yeoman, joined the Poles in their short remembrance.
‘War maims and kills more heroes than it makes …’ his father’s phrase buzzed around Yeoman’s mind like an angry wasp as he lay in bed that night. One by one, the men he had known and respected were being claimed by the embattled sky. How many more, he wondered, would have to die before the madmen who had plunged the world into war were finally brought to heel?
Strangely, he felt no fear at the thought that perhaps he, too, was living on borrowed time. The prospect of violent death had worried him once, but in an odd way he had come to accept it as inevitable, and with that acceptance had come a kind of comfort.
He had never been a religious man, and the thoughts that now crowded unbidden into his mind as he lay alone in his darkened room troubled him deeply. Could it be possible, he asked himself, that all the courage, the humanity, the compassion and the comradeship he had witnessed over the past months were really destroyed by death, like the snuffing out of a candle flame? Or did something remain for ever on a plane unseen, vibrant and powerful, like the forces that held the stars on their paths? He envied men who had gone to their deaths with deep faith, men like poor McKenna, who he had once seen sitting in the cockpit of his Spitfire, helmeted head bowed in prayer, while the Roman Catholic chaplain stood beside him on the wing and gave absolution. Well, McKenna was gone now, so presumably he would know the answer — if there was one. Yet there were others, too, who surrounded themselves with an aura of boyish irreverence; men like Jim Callender, who feared neither God nor the Devil, who found utter fulfilment on the knife-edge of action and who would go to their deaths uncomplaining, if need be. Theirs, too, was a kind of faith — a self-assured confidence in their own ability to match their wits against anything and come out on top. Maybe, in the final analysis, it all boiled down to the same thing.
It was a long time before Yeoman slept that night.
Chapter Eleven
It was bitterly cold in the Hurricane’s cockpit, and Yeoman huddled deeper into the tenuous warmth of his fur-lined flying jacket. Fifteen thousand feet below, London burned, a sprawling sea of glowing coals in the surrounding darkness. Yeoman looked down, and thought once again of Julia,
It was 15 November. A lot had happened in the last fortnight, beginning with the signal that Flight Lieutenant King, 505 Squadron’s adjutant, had handed to Yeoman on the first of the month. ‘Report forthwith’, the wording had run, ‘to Number 1303 (night-fighter) Flight, R.A.F. Manston, for flying duties’. Yeoman had left Tangmere with a mixture of pleasure and regret; 505 Squadron had meant a lot to him, but the challenge that now faced him far outweighed all other considerations.
The German bombers, shielded by the cloak of darkness, were striking hard at England’s cities. Only the night before, the centre of Coventry had been virtually wiped out in the Luftwaffe’s most devastating and concentrated raid so far, and the enemy had escaped practically unscathed.
The British night-fighter defences were still pitifully weak. A new and powerful twin-engined aircraft, the Bristol Beaufighter — carrying airborne interception radar and a mighty armament of cannon and machine-guns
— had just entered squadron service, but it would be some time before it became available in numbers, and meanwhile the R.A.F. was forced to rely on hopelessly inadequate machines such as the Defiant, hastily turned over to the night-fighter role because of its unsuitability in daylight combat, and pure day-fighters like the Spitfire and Hurricane. Admittedly, one or two squadrons were using the fighter version of the Blenheim as night-fighters, but their success rate so far had been almost nil — mainly because the Blenheim was slower than the bombers it was supposed to catch.
Yeoman smiled wryly beneath his oxygen mask. All that stood between the German bombers and London was a flight of four Hurricanes, of which he was now a part, and even the Hurricanes were experimental: Mark IIs fitted with Merlin XX engines and armed with four 20-millimetre cannon instead of eight machine-guns. They formed a powerful enough punch — when they worked. But stoppages were the rule, rather than the exception, and over the past ten days two of Yeoman’s fellow pilots had suffered the frustration of getting a fat Heinkel squarely in their sights only to have their guns jam after the first few rounds.
Yeoman brought the Hurricane round in a wide sweep over east London, keeping well clear of the main searchlight concentrations. Being shot down by one’s own antiaircraft defences was a prospect he didn’t relish, and that was a risk 1303’s pilots ran continually.
Squadron Scramble (1978) Page 12
