Fortress England

by Robert Jackson

  “A point worth considering,” Glendenning said, scribbling furiously. “But the Beaufighter it is, then. You still have operational control of a Beaufighter trials flight at West Mailing, don’t you?”

  Armstrong shook his head. “No, sir. It was turned over to Fighter Command at the beginning of the year, but it’s still at West Mailing.”

  “Very well. I shall arrange for it to be reassigned. Who will be its commander?”

  “Flight Lieutenant Kalinski, sir. He undertook most of the trials last winter, developing interception procedures with the new radar equipment.”

  “Good.” Glendenning looked at the Pole, who had a gleam in his eye at the prospect of getting back into real action at the controls of a fighter. “Where would you prefer the flight to be based?”

  “Perranporth in Cornwall, sir,” Kalinski answered without hesitation. “It is now ready for operational use and is ideally placed for patrols to the south-west of Ireland, which will cover the route taken by the Kondors outbound from their Biscay bases. If the aircraft were made available immediately, patrols could begin within the week.”

  Glendenning smiled to himself. He suspected that the machinery necessary to begin Beaufighter operations from Perranporth had already been set up behind the scenes by Armstrong, in the anticipation that official approval would be forthcoming. Very well, then, he would make sure that matters moved swiftly.

  Armstrong cleared his throat. “There is just one other thing, sir.”

  The air commodore looked at him enquiringly. “Go on?”

  “Well, sir, I think Perranporth would make an ideal location for the whole of the special duties unit, at least while operations against the enemy naval effort remain top priority. It’s far too decentralised at the moment, with flights and detachments scattered all over the place. It’s very difficult to exercise effective command under these circumstances, especially if something has to be done at short notice, and I’m wasting far too much time flying around the country on the necessary visits.”

  “Just a moment.” Glendenning reached for one of the battery of telephones on his desk, and was soon speaking to a colleague in the Air Staff Directorate of Operations. There followed a wait of a minute or two, then Glendenning thanked whoever was on the other end of the line and replaced the receiver.

  “I hope you two can get on with the single-engined fighter boys,” he said. “The only unit scheduled for an immediate move to Perranporth is 66 Squadron, whose Spitfires will be flying in from Exeter in about a week’s time. That will leave plenty of room for you, although I should warn you that you might have to operate for at least part of the time from Portreath or Predannack, because Fighter Command’s convoy protection operations will take priority and they may have to reinforce Perranporth from time to time. You can get cracking with the move right away, if you like; I’ll follow up with the necessary paperwork.”

  Glendenning provided a staff car to take Armstrong and Kalinski to Croydon, where they had left their Harvard after flying over from Tangmere. They remained at the latter station overnight, collected their kit and, as soon as possible after breakfast, set off for Perranporth.

  It was a pleasant flight along the south coast, under a sky dappled with spring clouds that danced along before a westerly breeze, their track taking them over Bournemouth and Lyme Bay before crossing Devon, eventually sighting their destination airfield on the north coast of Cornwall. The newly-built airfield had three good runways joined by a perimeter track; blast pens, each able to shelter two aircraft, led off the latter. Perranporth had originally been opened as a satellite for Portreath, although other uses were now to be found for it. There was one large hangar and several smaller ones, a Watch Office, some flight huts and a Motor Transport Section housed in what had once been an explosives factory that had served the needs of tin mines in the area.

  Armstrong landed, checked in at the Watch Office, then he and Kalinski headed straight for one of the flight huts. Armstrong opened the door and entered a room that smelled of oilcloth and paint.

  “Have you got the kettle on, Briggsie?” he shouted.

  A door at the end of the room opened and a tall, gangling flying officer entered the room. James MacAlastair Briggs, Armstrong’s Adjutant, looked every inch a college lecturer, which is exactly what he had been before the War overtook him. He was an administrator of exceptional efficiency, and Armstrong knew that he was lucky to have him.

  “Yes, sir. I saw you coming in.” The Adjutant’s tone was mournful, in keeping with the expression on his thin features.

  “All right, Briggsie, what’s up?” Armstrong wanted to know.

  “It’s this place, sir,” Briggs protested. “It’s awfully bleak, to say the least. And there are no stoves in the offices or the flight huts. You can’t even take a stroll along the clifftop for fear of being blown off your feet, and it’s a three hundred foot drop.”

  “Oh, cheer up,” Armstrong said. “There’ll be warmer weather along soon. Anyway, you’ll soon be too busy to worry about feeling chilly, and I expect the stoves will arrive in due course. Meanwhile, where’s that cuppa?”

  Briggs told the two pilots that he had managed to fix up accommodation for the squadron’s personnel in an hotel in Newquay, some five miles up the road. It was not a particularly satisfactory arrangement, he admitted, and he was trying to organise something nearer the aerodrome, but there were a lot of troops in the area and accommodation was in great demand. It was the best that could be done for the time being.

  “Don’t worry about it, Briggsie,” Armstrong said reassuringly. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  In fact, the hotel was more than fine; it was splendid. A large white building with a concave facade, it commanded a fine view over Fistral Bay. Apart from the land mass of Ireland to the north-west, the next land, if one continued due west, was North America.

  The hotel, Armstrong learned, was run by identical twin brothers, little tubby bachelors who wore identical black suits, identical bow ties and identical patent leather shoes. Perhaps predictably, they were nicknamed Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They were detested, uniformly and without exception, by every military occupant of the hotel. Only two elderly lady residents, who had refused to leave the place that had become their home under any circumstances, treated them with deference.

  Many of the hotel’s occupants, Armstrong found to his surprise, were Canadians — officers of the 1st Canadian Division, which had been hurriedly landed in France a couple of weeks before the armistice and just as hurriedly evacuated again. The Canadian Division now formed part of Britain’s coastal defences, and from top to bottom it was fed up, as Armstrong and Kalinski discovered when they shared a breakfast table with some of the officers on their first morning in the hotel. One major, whose name of Grant McKenzie clearly betrayed his ethnic origins, expressed the general air of discontent.

  “What we want,” he said, “is to be part of those British commando forces. We came over here for action, and we aren’t getting any. Nobody is taking any notice of us. It seems we’re a kind of embarrassment. Hell’s teeth, anything would be better than this. There’s no decent food, no decent drink, and the miserable bastards that run this place are straight out of Charles Dickens.”

  His voice was loud. The two elderly ladies, who had been finishing their breakfast in a corner of the dining room, eager to escape before the influx of what they deemed to be the brutal licentious soldiery, looked scandalised and made their exit. Armstrong felt sorry for them; their world would never be the same again.

  Armstrong felt sympathy for the men from across the Atlantic, too, especially since many of their countrymen were already in action in the air; but the threat of invasion, although it appeared to have receded, had not vanished altogether, and even one Canadian division was a valuable asset to Britain’s defences. To turn England into an impregnable fortress was the first priority; then, from behind its ramparts, offensive operations could begin.

  And Britain
could never be an impregnable fortress while mighty German warships and ocean-going submarines roamed the seas, preying on her lifelines.

  The Beaufighter flight from West Mailing arrived at Perranporth on the twenty-second day of April, a Monday. It comprised four aircraft, still bearing their black night-fighter camouflage, and was commanded by a large, cheerful Irishman called Eamonn O’Day. A flight lieutenant, he was a recent addition to the special duties squadron, selected personally by Armstrong because he was one of the few pilots to have achieved successes against German night bombers while flying Bristol Blenheims. His radar operator was Warrant Officer Phil Kershaw, who had been Armstrong’s gunner during the early days of night intruder operations, also on Blenheims, before the Beaufighter had come along.

  O’Day and Kershaw, who was probably the RAF’s most experienced radar operator, made a formidable team. They had already knocked four German night bombers out of the sky on the approaches to London, and had been fair set to increase their score when the order to move to Perranporth had come through. If they were disappointed, neither of them showed it.

  The next day, Flying Officer Piet Van Berg also arrived with his Hurricane flight from Eastchurch, and that afternoon a Handley Page Harrow transport aircraft flew down from Crosby-on-Eden, carrying the squadron’s administrative staff and Dickie Baird, who had been tying up the loose ends. Somehow, thanks to Brigg’s organisational skills, niches were found for everything — aircraft and personnel alike. That Tuesday night, Armstrong went to bed much contented. The secret squadron was at last beginning to take shape.

  Chapter Nine

  Bordeaux-Merignac Airfield — Saturday, 26 April 1941

  The early morning throbbed with the sound of engines. In front of the hangars, ground crews busied themselves around four Focke-Wulf Kondors, running up their motors, checking equipment, loading bombs and drums of ammunition, making sure that each aircraft’s tanks were correctly filled with 2,000 gallons of petrol, the maximum load.

  From a safe distance, the aircrews — twenty-four men in all — enjoyed a last smoke before take-off. Two men stood a little apart: they were Hauptmann Fritz Meister, officer commanding No. 1 Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 40, and his most senior subordinate pilot, Oberleutnant Rudolf Riedel, who was also a close friend and his co-pilot.

  “What are you thinking, Rudi?” Meister asked suddenly, conscious that his companion was wearing a thoughtful expression. The other started and tossed down his cigar butt, grinding it to extinction with the heel of his flying boot.

  “Oh, I was anticipating the future,” Riedel answered. “The Kondor has done a fantastic job. After all, it’s only a converted airliner. I just wish it had a bigger bomb load. A thousand kilos isn’t a lot. I was just imagining how many more ships we’ll be able to send to the bottom when its replacement comes along.”

  Meister gave a grunt. “Anticipation can be a dangerous thing, Rudi,” was all he said. He knew something that Riedel did not: the aircraft scheduled to replace the Kondor, the Heinkel 177, was still a long way from entering squadron service, even though it had first flown in 1939.

  The Heinkel 177 had been plagued with problems from the outset. First of all, it had been subjected to a ridiculous Air Staff requirement that insisted on every new bomber, even one of its size, being stressed for dive-bombing operations, with the result that it was much heavier than originally intended. Then there were the engines. Although the He 177 was a four-engined aircraft, Heinkel, instead of mounting the engines individually on the wing, had taken the radical decision to couple them in pairs, each pair in a single nacelle, driving a single propeller.

  There had been a clear indication of the trouble to come when the first flight of the prototype had had to be curtailed when the engines overheated. Although several prototypes were now flying, the engine problems had not yet been overcome and Meister thought that it would be at least another year before the type was fit for operational use.

  In the meantime, KG40 — the Luftwaffe’s only long-range bomber and maritime patrol unit — would continue to use its handful of Kondors, aircraft originally designed as 26-passenger commercial transports for Lufthansa, the German airline.

  Today’s mission was to follow a classic pattern. The five bombers were to attack a small British convoy approaching the west of Ireland, then continue on to Stavanger, in Norway. They would remain there for a day or two, waiting for information on the movements of other British convoys, then return to Bordeaux, making a second attack en route.

  Sometimes, KG40’s operations took it further south. Only a few days earlier, the Kondors had intercepted a convoy between Portugal and the Azores, bound for England from Gibraltar, its presence betrayed by a shadowing U-boat. The Kondors had sunk five vessels, the U-boat three more.

  The NCO in charge of the ground crews, an Oberfeldwebel who had been assigned to KG40 ever since its formation, came up to Meister and saluted.

  “Herr Hauptmann, I beg to report that everything is ready, and that all the aircraft are fully serviceable.”

  Meister thanked him in friendly fashion, observing none of the cold aloofness that some officers displayed in their relations with other ranks. His life, and the lives of all his crews, depended on the skill and dedication of such mechanics, who were known affectionately to the flying personnel as Schwarze — ‘Blackies’ — because of the oil that stained their overalls and hands.

  The bombers took off at five-minute intervals, heading individually out over the Atlantic. Each aircraft carried a crew of six: two pilots, a navigator, a radio operator, a flight engineer and a rear gunner. Once en route, the radio operators were able to pick up coded signals from a U-boat shadowing the convoy, constantly updating its position.

  Skirting the southern tip of neutral Ireland, the Focke-Wulfs altered course to the north, and had already been airborne for several hours when Meister, in the leading aircraft, sighted the convoy in the vicinity of the Rockall Deep. He counted a dozen merchant vessels, escorted by a couple of elderly destroyers — American warships supplied to the Royal Navy, judging by their four funnels — and informed the aircraft that were following.

  On Meister’s orders, the navigator left his station to man the 20-mm cannon in the nose, while the radio operator took up position behind the MG 15 machine-gun in the ventral gondola. Selecting what looked like an oil tanker, the pilot began a rapid descent, levelling out at a very low level over the sea and turning in to make a beam attack on the vessel. He had no other alternative — the Kondor was fitted with only a rudimentary bombsight, which ruled out attacks from medium or high level if there was to be any hope of success.

  The black bulk of the tanker was silhouetted clearly against the horizon. Meister went for it at full throttle, the airspeed indicator showing over 300 kilometres per hour. He increased height slightly to forty-five metres, the optimum for this kind of attack. Correct altitude was a crucial factor, for in the first three seconds after release the bombs would fall five, fifteen and twenty-five metres — forty-five in total; in that time the bomber would have covered 240 metres, so that was precisely the distance from the target from which the bombs had to be released.

  Dropping the bombs was the co-pilot’s responsibility. While Meister steered the aircraft directly towards the tanker’s superstructure, he remained glued to the bomb-sight, coolly awaiting his moment as the Kondor sped over the water at eighty metres per second.

  At exactly the right moment he pressed the bomb release and the aircraft’s four 250-kilo bombs dropped away in rapid succession, curving down towards the ship in a gentle arc. In the nose, the navigator was blazing away with his cannon, raking the tanker’s decks, concentrating on a single gun mounting on the ship’s forecastle.

  The Kondor thundered over the tanker’s deck and now the ventral gunner opened up, his bullets sweeping across the ship’s superstructure. He saw a splash in the sea that indicated a near miss by one of the bombs, but that was all: the other three were squarely on target.
There was no immediate explosion, for the missiles were fused to explode after an eight-second delay to enable the aircraft to get clear.

  After leap-frogging the ship, Meister took the Kondor down to sea level again and held it there until he was clear of the convoy. The rear gunner reported that the destroyers were putting up flak, but that it was inaccurate. Then, excitedly, he told the crew that the tanker had exploded.

  Meister turned the big aircraft, climbing as he did so. The stricken tanker, a vessel of around 8,000 tons, was already surrounded by a sea of blazing fuel oil, from which a mushroom of thick black smoke ascended. As he watched, the ship broke in two. Racked by further explosions, bow and stern slid below the waves with a speed that was terrifying.

  Such a sight always sent a chill along Meister’s spine, and he forced himself not to think about the luckless men on the doomed tanker.

  He went on circling the convoy while the other three aircraft made their attacks, directing them on to the most important targets, and within minutes three more ships were ablaze and sinking. As the bombers droned away into the northern sky, the escorting destroyers set about the task of picking up survivors, their crews only too conscious of how impotent they had been in averting the disaster.

  Unknown to the naval gunners, however, they had scored a success. A hundred miles north of the convoy, the crew of the fourth and last Kondor to make its attack reported that the aircraft had sustained flak damage and was leaking fuel from the wing tanks. The aircraft was past its point of no return, leaving the crew with no alternative but to fly on in the hope of reaching Stavanger, or to turn back and make an emergency landing in Ireland, where they would be interned for the duration of the War.

  Half an hour later, the fuel loss was so bad that the pilot knew that returning to Ireland was his only option; as it was, he would barely make it. Signalling his intention to Meister, he turned the big aircraft round through 180 degrees and headed south-eastward, making for the coast of Donegal.