Operation Thunderflash
Page 16
But a paradise with a wicked blemish. We all were familiar with the thud with which 88-millimetre shells burst. The 88-millimetre cannon was one of the most feared weapons of the war. On every front, it had wrought great destruction among the Allies, both as an anti-aircraft weapon and against land force; it was a formidable destroyer of tanks as well as of aircraft. We all knew too well, also, the vicious lash of the 37-millimetres which abounded among all the enemy’s flak defences.
My first thought was that we must be in the wrong place, for of course there was no flak at Nesdal; so we had been assured.
The 88 fetched down the Lanc. right behind me which Moakes had saved a few moments earlier. There were six of us left to attack the snow sheds inside the bowl, and one on its way to bomb the long shed on the far side of the ring of mountains.
The three aircraft in the second section of the two sections Leatham had been leading were all so far unscathed and none had been molested by any of the five night fighters we had encountered.
Their targets were the snow sheds on the floor of the bowl and the lower slopes. The rest of us had further to fly and now Moakes ordered one of them, the chap who had been flying on Moakes’s right, to detach and climb over the mountains to back up the one he had already sent to what should have been Leatham’s target.
The vick directly ahead of me, still flying impeccable formation, bombed.
It was a sight to gladden our hearts after the inflictions of the past ten minutes. They dropped one 4,000-pounder and six 1,000-pounders along and on the line where the flat-cars were. We plainly saw 37-millimetre guns smashed, thrown over, tossed into the air; and the bodies of enemy gunners flung far and wide in small pieces. One clutch of 37-millimetres went on firing and the 88 was unsilenced. The No 3 in the vick sent its last two 4,000 lb. bombs away in the second before the 88 caught it fair and square and brought it down, a mass of flaming and disintegrating wreckage.
The remaining flak guns were concentrating on the four of us left inside the bowl. The two survivors of the vick that had been leading Moakes and me bombed the sheds on the lower slopes of the eastern ridge with perfect accuracy and the eruptions of snow rose hundreds of feet into the air. The sheds collapsed. The 88 and the 37s went on shooting.
We did not know how the two who had crossed out of the bowl to destroy the long shed outside it were getting on, but in here it was all up to Moakes and me now.
The two other Lancs. turned and we saw them fly towards the two surviving flak positions.
Moakes’s aeroplane was outlined black against the snow and I bit my lips as I watched him turn steadily into position, his wingtips looking as though they would rasp along the mountainside. I saw his bombs fall and heard their explosions, reverberating from the sheer, barren slopes and throwing up giant geysers of snow and rock. A great overhanging ledge subsided and an avalanche roared down.
With snow and lumps of rock spattering us, we flew straight and level over our own targets. The 37-millimetre gun was still firing, but I realised that the 88 was silent.
Keith reported, unwontedly showing excitement, “Skipper...the boys’ve hit the eighty-eight.”
“Bombs gone,” said Bruce in his usual off-hand way. Uncle gave his usual jink upwards as he shed his burden. The bombs burst and our targets crumpled to dust under a pall of avalanching snow. Some 37-millimetre flak shells hit us.
I saw Moakes dive on the 37 mm. gun position with his front guns shooting. The flak gunners were ignoring him and scoring more hits on us.
Smoke poured out of both my starboard engines. I felt a stinging knock on my right arm. The aircraft side-slipped and I dragged it back on an even keel.
The gunners lay dead around the last 37 mm. gun as we roared overhead, losing height. My arm hurt. I asked Ray for full power on our port engines and heaved the stick back, scrabbling for height to get us out of the encircling mountains. I gave Uncle a few degrees of flap to try to force him up like a lift, and as soon as his nose was well up and he was climbing with signs of making it safely, I raised the flaps again — or, rather, asked Ray to — and we were up and over the western ridge; almost scraping the snow with our bellies.
Three Lancasters roared overhead and I read the identification letters belonging to Moakes and the two who had gone to bomb the shed outside the bowl.
Another burst of fire from out of the night, and my port outer engine shot out sparks and went dead. Uncle’s nose dropped irrevocably.
A tremendous outbreak of shooting above us. The fifth Me 110, the one that had broken off when we entered the bowl, must have lain in wait for our reappearance. But it had reckoned without the skill and determination of Moakes and his crew, and the support of the other two.
Just before we thudded onto the deep soft snow and began to glissade down the slope outside Nesdal’s encircling ring of hills, the Messerschmitt hit the snow a quarter of a mile away in a shower of sparks and slid downhill smouldering and emitting great gouts of smoke.
Suddenly it was very quiet and very cold. Blood trickled from my right arm; and in the impact of landing I had broken my left leg, I thought: but when I reached down I felt blood coming from a tear in my flying boot and knew that I had been wounded in the shin as well. Both wounds hurt abominably and I felt weak.
In such a shattering thump onto the earth it was the nose that took the worst damage.
My intercom was still live in my ears. I asked, “Bruce...are you OK?”
There was no answer and I almost panicked. My voice was not quite steady when I said, “Ray?”
“I’m here, Bill. Bloody good landing...”
“Never mind that...see about Bruce.” He scrambled past me. “Nick?”
“I’m fine, Bill...beastly cold...well done...you did a grand job. “
“Keith?”
“All ticketty-boo, Bill. I’m coming for’ard.”
“No hurry...there’s no fire risk...all taps off...Eddie?”
“Wizard, Bill...lovely landing...cor, it ain’t ‘alf cold, though...where’s the coffee, then?”
There was no need to ask Dan how he was, for as soon as the aircraft had stopped sliding he had come to see how I was, and all the time I had been talking to the others he had been putting a tourniquet on my right arm. Now he turned and beckoned to Nick and together they began helping me from my seat.
Ray stuck his head through the entrance to the nose blister and turret. “Bruce has got a sore head, Bill: banged it when we landed. Got knocked out for a moment. Reckon he did more damage to poor old Uncle; not that it makes any difference now.” His expression changed and he asked, “Are you all right, Bill?”
We became aware for the first time that the other three Lancs. were circling us.
I said, “Get out with the Aldis lamp, Dan...signal them we’re all OK.”
“I’ll tell ‘em you’re wounded, too...”
“Forget that...”
But he ignored me and went astern to scramble out on the snow and tell the others we had all survived.
Opening the door brought a bitter draught into the aeroplane and I shivered, my teeth chattered and my arm and leg began to throb and ache.
“Right,” I told the others. “On your way. You’ve got all your survival gear...compasses...maps...Norwegian money...rations...get cracking as quickly as you can...”
I didn’t hear them answer.
I didn’t hear anything until, coming blearily out of a morphia-drugged sleep, I opened my eyes and saw a man with huge shoulders bending over me: he had a pair of piercing blue eyes and a craggy great nose; his hair, what I could see of it under his thick knitted cap, was like straw.
“Oh, God!” I groaned, “The horrible Herrenvolk.”
The stern, rocklike face creased into a smile and in a deep, lilting voice he assured me, “Not bloody likely! I’m Norwegian: Haakon Haukelid. I’m in command of the Resistance around here...Milorg...your friends tell me you were briefed all about us before you came on this mission.”
Haakon took my left hand in his grip. “We are deeply grateful to you...to all of you...you are very brave men...very young men to risk your lives for us.”
“Tell him, Haakon,” Nick urged.
“Tell me what?” I asked shakily.
So Haakon told me about his part in Operation Thunderflash and I said, grinning weakly, “How did it go?”
“Not one of the bastards left alive,” he said, full of pride. “But we lost some good men. The Germans thought of sending the flak, but they never imagined they’d need more infantry up there. The two platoons they had there fought well but most of them were too old for front line service and the rest invalided out of it. Fairly easy to dispose of. Typical of them: arrogant and over-confident.”
“I seem to have heard that somewhere before,” I murmured. “But won’t they take the most hellish reprisals against everyone at Nesdal, for this?”
Haakon Haukelid’s eyes darkened and he frowned. “They will not be able to. They will not be able to break through the tunnel until next April. We have five months in which to disperse everyone.”
“They’ll bomb you...”
“The mountainsides overlooking Nesdal are honeycombed with caves: we can exist there safely. We have food, and your people will send us more by parachute. Their mountain troops cannot reach us: we have hundreds of experienced ex-mountain infantrymen in Milorg. We can hold them.” He laughed and smacked his thigh. “I was wounded in 1940 and I limped for two years; the Germans thought I still had a gammy leg, but I cured it long ago. I reached you in four hours, on skis.”
“Four hours!” I gasped. I turned angrily on the others. “What the hell are you doing hanging around here? I told you to go.”
“No hurry,” said Nick. “The Norwegian nights are long; especially as far north as this. There’s hardly any daylight and, anyway, who could reach us? Only chaps like Haakon.”
I appealed to Haakon. “Can’t you make them understand? They’ve got to go. At once.”
“We’re staying with you, Bill,” said Nick and the others all repeated it.
“Look,” I said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood and I’m hurting like hell. It’s not good for me to have to have a row with you. Besides, you’re bloody mutineers: I’ve given you an order. Damn well carry it out.”
They laughed.
Haakon said, “Don’t worry, Bill, I’ll see them on their way. Some of my chaps came with me: they’ll guide them.”
“Can you get them home to England?”
“Of course. It will take time, but we shall do it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t move, with this damn leg,” I apologised. “It’ll be all right in a day or two.”
“A doctor will be here presently,” Haakon said. “He doesn’t ski quite as well as I do, but he won’t be long. We’ll put you on a sledge and take you to a safe place until you are well.”
“I’m going to stay,” Nick said. And so did all the others.
“Haakon?” I appealed.
“It’s not safe,” he said, supporting me. “We can’t hide you all until Bill can leave. You must go.”
“I’m staying,” Nick said stubbornly.
“Get to hell back to England,” I said. “This isn’t the time or place for sentimentality or...or...undisciplined disobedience.” I couldn’t restrain a grin.
“All right,” he agreed. “But only because Haakon says we...I...would be a nuisance by staying.”
“Good. And give Margaret...Margaret Leatham...my love and tell her I’ll be seeing her soon.”
A look of astonishment dawned slowly on Nick’s face and he said, with obviously reluctant admiration, “Well...well, I’ll be...! You...you devious young devil...so that’s who it was, all the time!”
“Don’t jump to conclusions from a message of friendship,” I said: thinking of my first love and knowing she was lost to me for ever. I had no illusions about our return. The regular Shetland boat service, known admiringly as the Shetland Bus, could not operate between September and April, on account of the heavy weather at sea. Perhaps the RAF could pick us up by air, but I doubted it. Pick-ups were invariably done by a Lysander, which did not have the range to reach us and return. A bigger aircraft would need too long a runway and could not land on some farmer’s field like a Lysander did.
I knew I was in for a long sojourn in Norway, even if the others could be moved clandestinely to Sweden, which was neutral, and sent home from there. I realised how badly I had been hurt : a shell splinter from the Me 110 which had attacked us in our last few airborne minutes had smashed a bone in my leg, and the wound in my arm was severe. I would be lucky to keep both limbs, attended by a doctor in some remote hiding place and poorly supplied with medicines.
“Just get back to England. Give Margaret my love. And don’t let them crew you up with anyone else. Oh, yes: and take Wolfie with you; we may need him again!”
“We won’t fly with anyone else, Skipper,” they chorused. “We’ll wait till you get home, Bill. We’re still your crew, even if we have to leave you here and go back without you.”
“Don’t be wet,” I told them. “It’s just that you’re such a lousy crew, I wouldn’t want to wish you onto anyone else. Besides,” I added, taking advantage of the fact that I had wiped the worry off their faces and set them laughing, “you may not be lucky enough to find another above average pilot next time!”
Haakon looked disapproving: he didn’t understand RAF humour, but the others appreciated it.
A lump came into my throat when they left me: and a bigger one when my thoughts, with nothing else to occupy them, returned to Margaret; and the knowledge that we could never resume where we had left off: not in six months’ time which was the soonest I could expect to get home, or ever.
But, however long it took me, there would always be another fine Lancaster to replace U for Uncle, and more ops. to fly until I had finished my first tour of thirty: I still had eighteen to do.
If you enjoyed reading Operation Thunderflash, you might be interested in Fighters Up, also by Richard Townsend Bickers and published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Fighters Up by Richard Townsend Bickers
One
Images and sensations; and the cold.
The pictures forming in his mind of violent death and flaming destruction, the icy tremors of his body, the voices - sometimes the screams - in his ears: all formed a pattern, and, he supposed, a kind of crazy rhythm. Every experience, every event and situation, had its own rhythm, and this one was the rhythm of aerial combat.
The memories came whether he was sleeping or awake. If asleep, they roused him with a start and sweating: in bed, or a deep doze in a canvas chair in the pilots’ but out at dispersals, where the Hurricanes and Spitfires stood ranged in their blast pens. They came when he was wide awake: ostensibly reading Flight or The Aeroplane in the dispersal hut, or the Daily Telegraph in the mess ante-room. They recurred even when he was in conversation, or among a group with a pint tankard in his hand in mess or a pub. All it needed to set the images and the sensations going was the glimpse of a face that had shared them, the mention of a name, or some allusion.
“Break! Blue Two, break!”
“Behind you, Simon!”
And his own voice: “Break right, Tug!” “Bandits, two-o’clock, above, coming in.” “Blast you, Robbie, you nearly took my tail off.”
But Robbie had not heard him. When the Hurricane flashed past, Howard saw that it was burning and its pilot was limp, head lolling.
The rhythm of air fighting: attack and defence, thrust and parry in a three-dimensional brawl at over three hundred miles an hour, closing speeds of twice that much.
The rhythm of gunfire from an adversary, coming at him in short bursts: of multi-coloured tracer drawing curved lines across the sky, the bark of cannon and the rattle of machineguns;
the cadence of his own shooting and the joyful shock of the bright splashes his incendiaries made when they hit their target; the dazzle from his .303 Brownings and 20 millimetre Hispanos, at first light and dusk, from muzzle flashes and tracer; the wing-overs, half-rolls off the top of a loop, sideslips and stall turns that were the aerobatics of battle; the shrieking of the wind in his gun muzzles when he had blasted their canvas covers off, the howling it made as it tore through the holes that enemy fighters or flak had punched in his Hurricane or Spitfire: these were the kaleidoscopic fragments of sight and sound that composed the pictures and noises which tormented him.
The war would enter its third year in four months’ time. In 1939 - away back in 1939 - four months had been a short period which brought no change to his life; except the addition of several hours’ flying time in his logbook. Now, in the early summer of 1942, four months seemed as long as a peacetime year used to. No operational fighter pilot could delude himself with the certainty that he would live so long.
The mental pictures, lively with their accompanying noises, were sharper now than they had been for six months. R.A.F. Monkston lay only another twenty miles ahead; and it was at Monkston that he was stationed when war broke out.
With his recollections came the physical response that made him shiver as though he were in an unheated cockpit at 30,000 feet, or crouching in a slit trench in Norway while the Germans bombed the airfield. He had always loathed the cold, but those few weeks of the farcical, abortive Norwegian campaign had made his hatred personal, it was so deep; as though Cold were an entity, anthropomorphic, tangible.
The Medical officers had said he would get over his nightmares and the horrors that could descend on him at any time in broad daylight. The bad memories and physical reactions never assailed him in the air; which, it seemed, was all that mattered. The doctors’ bland earnest reassurances were sometimes, however, accompanied by a look of such intensity that it made him wonder what was really in their thoughts.