Hurricane Squadron Read online

  HURRICANE SQUADRON

  ROBERT JACKSON

  Copyright © Robert Jackson 1978

  The right of Robert Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in 1978 by Arthur Barker Limited.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  The author wishes to thank Squadron Leader W. J. Rosser, DFC (RAF retired) and Lieutenant-Commander K. Calcutt (RN retired) for their invaluable help and advice.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  From ten thousand feet the River Somme looked for all the world like a basking snake, its coils shimmering in the early morning sun as they looped and twisted across the plain of Picardy west of Péronne. They lay six miles off the Hurricane’s starboard wingtip, and in die narrow cockpit Sergeant George Yeoman allowed himself a small mental pat on the back; he was right on course.

  He glanced down at the map on his knee, running his index finger along the thin pencil line of the track that ran from Manston, in Kent, to the little grass airstrip beside the Marne at Châlons: a distance of 179 miles. With a ground speed of 195 miles per hour, that gave him a flying time of fifty-five minutes. If all went well, he would be coming in to land at Châlons just before six o’clock, with plenty of time to make his report and stow his gear before breakfast.

  Yeoman settled himself more comfortably in the cockpit, flexing his shoulders against the tight grip of the parachute harness. He was glad that he had decided to make an early start from Manston; it was a perfect morning, and navigation presented no difficulty despite the fact that the rising sun shone full in his eyes. Yeoman could not remember feeling happier. He was alone in the sky, with nothing but the roar of the big Rolls-Royce Merlin in front of him for company, on his way at last to join an operational squadron. For the next few minutes there was nothing to do but relax and enjoy the scenery — nothing, that was, except hold a steady course, check the landmarks as they came under the nose, and make an automatic scan of the instrument panel every now and then.

  Idly, he wondered what his father would have made of the panorama that spread out on all sides. John Yeoman had taken his last look at the Somme four years before George had been born, and that had not been from a relatively comfortable seat two miles above the earth.

  George would never know what his father had really been like before that terrible morning of 1 July 1916; all he knew was that its aftermath had dominated his childhood, remembering the anger and bitterness that had choked his father’s voice whenever he had spoken of it. Now, looking down, it was almost impossible to imagine that nearly sixty thousand young men of George’s own age, and many considerably younger, had been killed or wounded among those lovely wooded hillsides on that one morning alone, or that before the battle had ended in September 1916 the casualty lists had topped the half-million mark; a whole generation wiped out or scarred for life.

  And now, twenty-four years later, the nations who had fought that deadly battle were once more at each other’s throats; but there would never be another Somme. The tank and the dive-bomber had seen to that.

  George remembered how deeply he had been moved by the stories of a friend, only a couple of years older than himself, who had come home, sallow-faced and trembling, in 1938 after a year in Spain with the International Brigade; stories of German dive-bombers, German fighters, German guns and German tanks, a whole army operating under the guise of volunteers and supported by an even larger contingent from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, mercilessly harrying the Republican forces to destruction.

  The tragedy was that no one had seemed to care; or if they had cared, they had brushed their fears out of sight like dust under a rug. George’s father had been one of them; he had dismissed the business of Czechoslovakia, and the rantings over the Sudetenland by Germany’s Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, regarded by some as a genius and by others as a dangerous lunatic, as a gigantic bluff; he had been convinced that the Czech affair would blow over, even though the Germans had mobilized their army in August 1938 and had seemed ready to back up their words by force.

  The illusions of John Yeoman, and millions of others like him, had been brutally shattered just a few weeks later, at the end of September. At Munich, with all pretence of a joint Anglo-French resistance to the demands of Nazi Germany thrown aside, Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Daladier of France had capitulated to Hitler. The Allies would not go to the aid of Czechoslovakia if German forces invaded her; Germany could have the Sudetenland, with all its resources and frontier defences, and what matter if Czechoslovakia were stripped naked so long as the rest of Europe was saved from the spectre of war?

  So Chamberlain had returned to London, brandishing the Munich agreement and proclaiming peace to a near-hysterical crowd; an uneasy, tenuous peace, little more than a breathing-space, bought by sacrificing the self-respect of Britain and France. And to John Yeoman, it had seemed that everything his friends had died for twenty years earlier had been wiped away by the stroke of a pen.

  The straight, shining line of a canal came up ahead, cutting the Hurricane’s track from north-east to southwest. The town over on the left was St Quentin; beyond it the canal curved away towards Cambrai, twenty miles to the north and falling behind in the distance.

  St Quentin; Cambrai. Magic names in Yeoman’s vocabulary. They were names that had captured the imagination of his youth when, in the long winter evenings, he had eagerly devoured books that had taken him into another world; a world of singing wind and humming wires, of roaring rotary engines and the drumming of fabric stretched taut over a wing; the world of Mannock, Immelmann, Ball and Richthofen, young men of a lost generation who had carved out a legend in the sky of Flanders, far above the mud in which his father had crawled.

  George had wanted to fly for as long as he could remember. On leaving school he had got a job in a provincial newspaper office; it had hardly been inspiring work — his duties consisting mainly of fetching and carrying and making tea — but at least he had been able to put a bit of money aside towards his ultimate goal, which was getting into the air.

  On his seventeenth birthday he had joined the nearest aero club, and after that he had lived only for weekends, cycling twenty miles for the privilege of half an hour in the draughty cockpit of a de Havilland Moth biplane. He had taken to the little machine readily and had gone solo quickly, after only three and a half hours’ dual instruction, but it had been ten months before his logbook showed the total of nineteen hours that were necessary before he could take the test for his ‘A’ Licence. The flying test had been divided into two parts, an altitude test on the student’s ability to lose height properly and make an accurate approach to land, and a ‘figure of eights’ test to prove that he was capable of making sustained and accurate steep turns. George had found difficulty with neither, and had passed the Royal Aero Club examiner’s oral questions with a comfortable margin.

  He smiled to himself, recollecting. It had all been worth it: the financial sacrifice, the long hours spent in a freezing cold hangar helping the mechanics when there was no flying. There had been times, of course, when he had wondered if he was doing the right thing; like the time he had applied to join the Auxiliary Air Force, armed with his brand-new flying licence, only to be turned down flat. The rejection, howe
ver, hadn’t seemed so bad when someone had told him that the Auxiliaries were a toffee-nosed bunch of bastards anyway, and you didn’t stand a chance of getting in unless you were in the habit of cavorting around the countryside after foxes.

  Fortunately, the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve had not insisted on social attributes on the part of its applicants. The RAFVR, formed in 1936 to provide a nucleus of trained pilots, had accepted George readily and turned him into a Sergeant Pilot (Under Training) before he knew where he was, sending him and a bunch of others to a local civilian flying school for weekend training. Yeoman had started the course with the idea that he already knew a lot about flying, but his instructor — a quietly spoken man in his forties who had survived three years of the First World War flying observation aircraft over the enemy lines — had soon disillusioned him. George had been told in no uncertain terms that his civilian licence wasn’t worth a damn, that he would have to start from scratch and that there was a lot more to military flying than performing nice-looking figures of eight. And, Yeoman had soon been forced to admit, his instructor had been right.

  The year that followed had been the most hectic George had known so far. There had been no spare time; his job, and the demands of the VR — which insisted on his attending lectures on subjects such as navigation, theory of flight and armaments two evenings a week — had taken care of that. In the spring of 1939, after Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement and his Wehrmacht marched in to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia, everything had assumed a new sense of urgency; the RAF was expanding rapidly and it was clear to most that the Service would soon need all the pilots it could get.

  George and the friends he had made on the course had speculated a lot during that fateful summer, by which time they had left their faithful Tiger Moth primary trainers behind and were now flying more advanced Hawker Harts. They all felt that it was only a question of time before they received their mobilization orders. Things in Europe were moving fast now.

  The orders had come at last on 28 August, three days before the Germans marched into Poland. The students had gone home to await orders, and on 3 September, together with millions of others, George had listened to the heavy, tired voice of Chamberlain, telling the world that everything he had striven towards was in ruins and that Great Britain, for the second time in a quarter of a century, was at war with Germany.

  The next morning had found George on his way to Sealand, an airfield on the edge of the Dee Estuary in Flintshire. It was to be his home for the next ten weeks, and he had never worked harder. Sealand had resembled nothing closer than a huge sausage machine, devoted to teaching as many students as possible to fly Miles Master monoplanes — power-packed, speedy machines after the Tiger Moths and Harts George had been used to — within the available two months. Some, inevitably, fell by the wayside; George Yeoman was not among them. He had emerged in January 1940, continual bad weather having delayed the flying programme somewhat, with a total of 180 hours in his log-book and an unshakable feeling that he still had a great deal to learn.

  The Hurricane trembled under him as he opened the throttle slightly, increasing the power; he was a couple of minutes behind on his ETA. He felt completely at home in the narrow confines of the cockpit, although it was less than two months since he had first got acquainted with the fighter. A lot had happened while he’d been going through Operational Training Unit; in April, the strange, unreal period of the Phoney War had been abruptly shattered when the Germans invaded Norway. At this very moment, he reflected, RAF fighter pilots were fighting what appeared to be a losing battle against a vastly superior enemy over the mountains and fjords. He envied them; they, at least, knew what it was like to shoot at Messerschmitts and Heinkels, instead of towed targets.

  Still, he might soon have his chance. A few minutes ahead of him lay his first operational squadron, No. 505. The Hurricane he was flying was a brand-new machine, sent out to replace one lost in action. For, to the RAF’s fighter pilots in France, the term ‘Phoney War’ had never had any real meaning.

  Together with two other Hurricane squadrons and two equipped with the older Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters, No. 505 had been in France since the outbreak of war. Their task, in the main, would be to provide fighter cover for the ten squadrons of Fairey Battle light bombers that would be sent into action if the Germans attacked on the western front.

  For months now, the RAF and French Air Force fighter squadrons had been skirmishing with the enemy over the Maginot Line, that great, supposedly impregnable structure stretching along the river Meuse. Some pilots had already made a name for themselves; one of them, a New Zealander named ‘Cobber’ Kain, had shot down a dozen or so enemy aircraft up to now, and a few others were climbing steadily up the ladder.

  Yeoman suddenly remembered that it was Friday. He wondered if he would have the opportunity, over the weekend, to investigate the local countryside. He had a sudden nasty thought that it might be Friday the thirteenth, then grinned at the thought that he could hold any such foolish superstition. Anyway, it was the tenth. Friday, 10 May 1940. He was twenty years and one month old.

  He glanced down, checking his map. For the last few minutes he had been flying over rolling, wooded hill country cut by a single wide river: the Aisne. Beyond the hills, ahead of him, lay a broad valley some ten miles across, bounded on the south by another spur of high ground; in the valley, easily identifiable ahead and to the left, at ten o’clock, was Reims.

  He was fully alert now, his reverie pushed out of his mind by the business of getting the Hurricane down safely. He throttled back, beginning a gradual descent to three thousand feet. No point in trying to contact anyone over the R/T; his radio had died just after he had crossed the Channel, and there hadn’t been a squeak out of it since.

  The river Marne was under him now, with a tributary curving away northwards in the direction of Reims. A railway line crossed his track, running between Châlons-sur-Marne and Epernay, over on the right. He peered ahead, scanning the terrain to the south of Châlons, searching for the minute patch of open ground among the woods that would be the airfield. He spotted it without difficulty, nestling in the ‘V’ formed by the junction of two railway lines.

  He reduced his speed to 140 miles per hour and joined overhead, looking down over the side of the cockpit, picking out a cluster of drab canvas tents. Nearby, eight or nine Hurricanes stood in a neat line, their camouflage making them difficult to spot against the sun-scorched grass. Other aircraft, some familiar and some not — the latter presumably French types — were dotted here and there around the field.

  A yellow windsock flapped limply, indicating a slight breeze from the west. He turned downwind, descending to a thousand feet and methodically carrying out his cockpit checks: undercarriage down, flaps down, fuel mixture fully rich, brakes off, propeller to fine pitch. A blast of air whirled into the cockpit as he reached up and opened the hood.

  He brought the Hurricane down in a long, curving approach, with power on, turning towards the field into wind at five hundred feet and crossing the boundary at 86 miles per hour. The grass seemed to expand to meet him. He levelled the wings, easing back the stick and closing the throttle in a simultaneous movement. The fighter floated for a short distance, bounced slightly as the mainwheels touched, then the tail settled and she was firmly down, rumbling over the uneven ground.

  He taxied forward, using short bursts of power, weaving from side to side to clear the blind area in front of the nose. Over by the parked Hurricanes an airman waited with raised arms, ready to marshal him into place.

  Suddenly, Yeoman saw the man hurl himself to the ground. A split second later, the world blew up in his face.

  There was a dim impression of a shadow, skipping over the cockpit. Then the ground ahead of him erupted in a great gout of smoke, earth and stones, accompanied by a terrific crash.

  Instinctively, he threw an arm up in front of his face as the Hurricane slewed sideways, caught by the blast. The port undercarr
iage leg folded up and the wingtip struck the ground violently, tearing a long furrow. Yeoman was thrown forward brutally, banging his head on the gunsight.

  Groggily, he clawed at his safety-harness release. Acrid smoke drifted into the cockpit, choking and blinding him; waves of hellish noise battered his ears.

  Someone was pulling at his shoulders, helping him out of the cockpit. A voice was yelling something in his ear; he couldn’t make any sense of the words. Then he was over the side, stumbling away from the crippled fighter, half supported by a figure who was still shouting at him. A shock wave hit him in the back like a giant hammer and the ground gave way under him. He was lying face down in a trench, with an enormous weight on top of him.

  Suddenly his head cleared. He tried to sit up, spitting out soil. The weight was still on top of him. The words made sense now: ‘For Christ’s sake, keep your head down!’ He cowered, trembling, in the bottom of the trench, as the earth shook beneath him.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. The crash of explosions died away and the roar of engines faded in the distance, leaving only a strange crackling, roaring noise. The weight left him and he raised his head cautiously, peering over the edge of the trench. The crackling and roaring came from his Hurricane, which was blazing fiercely, sending dense smoke spiralling up into the morning air. A black pall was already forming over the field from other burning aircraft and bowsers. There were craters everywhere, like brown sores, and the air stank of cordite. A couple of the tents had disappeared, and he could see bodies scattered beside the wrecked flight line.

  For the first time he turned to look at his companion, taking in the sergeant’s stripes and the pilot’s brevet, the green silk scarf wound loosely around the neck. Above the scarf a freckled, sunburned face grinned at him. The voice that addressed him had an unmistakable Texan drawl.