Tempest Squadron Read online

  TEMPEST SQUADRON

  Robert Jackson

  © Robert Jackson 1981

  Robert Jackson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1981 by Arthur Barker Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  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 One

  THE PILOT OF THE TWIN-ENGINED AVRO ANSON GAVE A gaping yawn, a compound of boredom and tiredness, and peered down at a fragment of Belgian landscape that appeared momentarily through the ragged veil of stratus cloud. That single glimpse was sufficient; he had no need to check his map to find out where he was, for he had come to know this bit of Europe like the back of his hand.

  Three or four times every week, the Anson pilot made the same tedious run from Redhill, in Surrey, to Eindhoven in Holland, carrying mail, laundry, fresh clothing, whisky, soap and other odds and ends that combined to make life just bearable for the pilots of the Spitfires, Typhoons and Tempests belonging to the squadrons of the RAF’S NO. 83 Group. He and the other men who flew the lumbering Ansons of No. 83 Group Support Unit also brought frequent batches of replacement pilots, for the Group’s losses in action were heavy. Idly, he wondered about the five men who now sat behind him, shivering with cold despite their flying jackets as they huddled in the Anson’s vibrating fuselage. Four of them looked too young to be out of school, while the fifth ...

  The Anson pilot shuddered inwardly. The fifth man had, at some time, suffered appalling burns; his face was a mass of scar tissue out of which two dark eyes shone like live coals, burning with some indefinable emotion. Below the eyes, a shapeless lump might have passed for a nose, while the mouth was a white slit surrounded by lesions.

  The burned man was a flight lieutenant, and below his pilot’s wings he wore the ribbon of the DFM, an indication that he must once have been a non-commissioned officer. His hair was snowy white, but it was impossible to guess at his age. Whatever story of suffering lay behind that mask-like face, the Anson pilot thought, the man must be crazy to be going back into action again after what he had obviously been through.

  No. 83 Group was right in the thick of the fighting in November 1944, operating from advanced airfields in Holland in support of Field-Marshal Montgomery’s Northern Group of Armies as they drove on doggedly towards Germany. The Germans were resisting ferociously and there was bitter fighting every step of the way, as the men of the 1st Canadian Army had found to their cost when, at the beginning of November, they had stormed the fortress island of Walcheren — still defended by the Germans and commanding the approaches to the vital port of Antwerp — in the wake of a terrific air and naval bombardment.

  Only after nine days of savage fighting had the last Germans on Walcheren surrendered, and the ferocity of the battle had brought the total of Canadian casualties, in their 2nd Division alone, to almost four thousand in five weeks.

  On 8 November, the day before Walcheren fell, the American 3rd and 7th Armies on the southern sector of the Allied front had crossed the Moselle, while further north the 1st Army toiled forward from Aachen towards the Roer; elsewhere, however, the US 9th and British 2nd Armies in Belgium and Holland were having to fight for every yard of ground, hampered by continual rain and low cloud that prevented the Allied Tactical Air Forces from lending effective support.

  For the armies in the north, the great natural barrier that guarded Germany’s western frontier — the River Rhine, across which the 1st British Airborne Division had tried and failed to secure a bridgehead at Arnhem the previous September — remained a long way away. November, too, was nearly half over, and it would not be long before the fog and rain gave way to winter snow.

  As though to emphasize this fact, a flurry of sleet lashed suddenly against the perspex of the Anson’s windscreen. The pilot noted that visibility was growing steadily worse, but it no longer mattered; the Turnhout-Eindhoven road was visible at intervals through the drifting layers of shredded grey cloud and the airfield itself was only five minutes away.

  He called up Eindhoven and obtained immediate clearance to land. The sleet intensified as he descended through the stratus, levelling out at a thousand feet over the flat, waterlogged Dutch countryside.

  He made a gentle left turn over the village of Veldhoven, bringing the Anson into line with the runway in use. The approach lights, strings of glowing beads beyond the beating windscreen wipers, floated towards him. He came in over the threshold, the Anson’s nose at a slight angle to the runway to compensate for a crosswind, then brought it into line once more with a swift touch of rudder as he eased back the stick and closed the throttles in a single, fluid movement. The Anson’s mainwheels touched the runway a few moments later, kicking up spray as they passed through large pools of water.

  The aircraft’s five passengers pressed their faces to the windows as the pilot taxied in, surveying their new home with feelings that varied from excited anticipation to dismay.

  Eindhoven bore more than a passing resemblance to a First World War battlefield. There were bomb craters everywhere, filled with water, and the surface of the field was a sea of mud, with not a trace of grass anywhere. Holes in the runways and taxiways and the ground immediately to either side had been hastily filled in and the surface levelled. Months of Allied bombing had wrecked the airfield installations, but the RAF had quickly erected canvas hangars soon after moving into Eindhoven, and flying operations were conducted from caravans and tents.

  The dispersals were crammed with aircraft, shrouded under camouflage netting — Typhoons and Tempests mainly, but with a sprinkling of Spitfires and a few Auster army co-operation aircraft. The Anson taxied past the burnt-out wreck of a Junkers 88, which no one had bothered to clear away, and came to a stop a few yards away from a long, low caravan which bore the hastily-painted sign ‘Operations’.

  The pilot shut down the engines and went back into the fuselage, where his passengers were gathering their kit together, and opened the door, admitting a blast of damp, raw air and a spatter of rain. He picked up a sack of mail and indicated several more which were stacked at the rear of the fuselage.

  ‘Give me a hand with these, chaps, will you?’

  Bowed under the weight of their personal kit and the extra burden of the mail, the five replacement pilots squeezed through the exit door and jumped down on to the tarmac, following the Anson pilot towards the caravan. Someone inside opened the door and they filed gratefully through, shaking the rain from themselves. A flying officer, seated at a small trestle table, looked up as they crowded in and addressed the Anson pilot.

  ‘Wotcher, Ken. Stinking weather, as usual.’

  ‘It never varies,’ said the Anson pilot, picking up a tin mug from the table, inspecting it closely and tipping the dregs it contained on to the floor of the caravan. ‘Any tea on the go?’

  ‘In the urn over there. You blokes’ — turning to the replacements — ‘you blokes grab some too, I reckon you could do with it. The Boss wants to see you as soon as he gets back. He’s out on a sortie at the moment — an absolute glutton for punishment, he is. Everyone else is stood down. Group Control doesn’t think there’s much to be gained by flying in this weather, but the Boss thinks otherwise. He’s gone off with a section of four Tempests to Rheine to try and catch the Huns with their knickers down. Should be due back soon.’

  He rummage
d around on the table and produced a sheet of paper. ‘Let’s see,’ he muttered. ‘Who’s who?’ He checked off their names, and said: ‘That’s fine. Two of you for 505 Squadron, two for 473 and one for 449. Hope you don’t get yourselves killed, like the last lot did,’ he added cheerfully.

  The replacement pilots squatted down on the sacks of mail they had just brought in and sipped the hot tea gratefully. The flying officer, pretending to scrutinize some papers, surveyed them covertly; like the Anson pilot, he wondered about the burned man. The others were a pretty routine bunch; one pilot officer and three sergeants, all young, but second-tour men nonetheless. A bit more promising than some of the types the Eindhoven Wing had been getting recently, straight from Operational Training Unit. They hadn’t lasted long, and no wonder. They hadn’t even been capable of handling the Tempest properly, never mind fighting the Huns.

  A sudden, savage squall of rain hammered the caravan and he cast a worried glance out of the window. Visibility was so bad that he could hardly see the airfield boundary, and the cloud base was getting lower all the time. He hoped the Boss was okay, then smiled inwardly at his fears. The Boss had a sense of direction like a homing pigeon.

  Nevertheless, he felt considerable relief when, a minute later, the radio in one corner of the caravan gave a sudden crackle. The set was tuned to the Flying Control frequency, so that the duty officer in Operations could hear what was happening at all times.

  ‘Tramway, Tramway,’ a metallic voice said, ‘this is Ramrod. Four miles south-east. Requesting immediate pancake.’

  The louder tones of Flying Control came back immediately. ‘Ramrod, this is Tramway. You are cleared to pancake. Runway in use is zero-nine, surface wind one-one-zero, fifteen knots. Visibility one thousand yards, rain. Queen Fox Easy nine-nine-eight.’

  The two pairs of Tempests came straight in to land. The burned man caught sight of them as they slipped in from the east, vague shapes becoming solid outlines as they emerged from the rain-mist. Even on the ground, out of their element, they looked full of power and purpose.

  Sydney Camm, chief designer of Hawker Aircraft, the man who had created the legendary Hurricane which had borne the brunt of the fighting in the Battle of Britain, had designed a brilliant fighting machine in the Tempest Mk v. Taking as his basis the Hawker Typhoon fighter-bomber — a big, rugged design which was really a piece of flying artillery — he had turned it into a new aircraft that was the fastest, most potent piston-engined fighter in service anywhere in the world.

  From the outset, the Tempest had been designed to achieve air superiority at low and medium levels — in other words, to counter the threat posed by fast enemy fighter-bombers. Its ability to carry 250 gallons of fuel gave it a formidable combat radius of over five hundred miles; operating from bases in the Low Countries it could range as far as Berlin. Its 2,400 horsepower Napier Sabre engine, driving a massive four-bladed de Havilland propeller, gave it an impressive acceleration and a top speed, straight and level, of 440 mph. The aircraft weighed seven tons, and in a dive it could achieve speeds of over 500 mph — a useful margin in an emergency.

  The view from the Tempest’s cockpit — which was situated well aft, on a level with the trailing edge of the wing — was excellent. The pilot sat under a transparent ‘blister’-type cockpit canopy, affording good all-round vision: thanks to the position of the cockpit he could look down and behind, covering the dangerous blind spot which left so many other fighters vulnerable to attack.

  At the touch of a thumb, the Tempest pilot could unleash the formidable power of four 20-mm cannon, whose magazines held eight hundred shells — enough for twenty seconds of firing time. Also, like the Typhoon, it could carry two 1,000-lb bombs or eight rocket projectiles, although this configuration was not normally used as it impaired the aircraft’s range.

  The first Tempest squadrons had been thrown into battle against the V-I flying bombs, which had been unleashed against southern England in the summer of 1944, and the new fighters had destroyed over six hundred of them. The battle against the ‘buzz-bombs’, however, had revealed some serious defects in the Tempest’s Sabre engine, and at the end of September the aircraft had been temporarily withdrawn from service while the snags were ironed out.

  A month later, two Tempest squadrons — Nos 505 and 473 — had been sent to Eindhoven as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. They were accompanied by a third squadron, No. 449, flying Spitfire XIVS.

  Together, they made a formidable team. No. 505 Squadron had been in the thick of the fighting right from the start; an Auxiliary Air Force unit, it had fought in France in the dark days of 1940 as part of the RAF’S Advanced Air Striking Force, and in the months that followed the evacuation from Dunkirk its pilots had chalked up an impressive score of enemy aircraft destroyed during the Battle of Britain. After that, flying Spitfires, it had taken part in offensive fighter operations over Occupied Europe for three years, on and off, and in 1944 it had been one of the first RAF squadrons to cross over to France in the wake of the Allied invasion.

  The second squadron of the Eindhoven Wing, No. 473, was a Royal Australian Air Force unit and, flying Curtiss Kittyhawks and later Spitfires, had fought in North Africa and Sicily before coming to England to join other Spitfire squadrons in carrying out fighter ‘sweeps’ over France and the Low Countries. Following closely on the heels of No. 505, the Australians had crossed the Channel and begun operations from Normandy shortly after D-Day.

  The Eindhoven Wing’s third unit, No. 449 (Royal Canadian Air Force) Squadron, had been formed in the summer of 1942 and had begun its career as a fighter-bomber squadron. Equipped with bomb-carrying Hurricane HS, it had spent the first few months of its existence carrying out hazardous low-level attacks on ‘pinpoint’ targets such as radar stations on the coasts of France and Belgium, and had suffered very heavy losses in the process. Re-equipping with Spitfire 9S in 1943, it had received the much more powerful Mk XIVS the following year and had taken part in the battle against the flying-bombs. When Nos 505 and 473 Squadrons had returned to England to re-equip with Tempests in September, No. 449 had joined them and gone to Holland with them, still flying its Spitfires. Its primary task now was to provide top cover for the Tempests.

  Through the rain-streaked windows of the caravan, the burned man watched the four Tempests as they taxied in, weaving from side to side as their pilots strove to see past the long engine cowlings. They swung on to their dispersals, the pilots using rudder and short bursts of throttle to turn their noses into wind. One by one, the whirling propellers became motionless and the rumble of the engines died away.

  The burned man looked with interest at the nearer Tempest, its outline blurred by the rivulets of rain. What might have been a smile puckered the scars around his mouth as he watched the cockpit canopy slide back and the pilot emerge, feeling with his toes for the little hollows, covered with sprung hinges, that were built into the side of the Tempest’s fuselage above the wing. Standing on the latter, the pilot reached up and closed the canopy to keep out the rain, then he jumped down and ran towards the operations caravan, head lowered against the heavy drops.

  He burst into the caravan and slammed the door shut behind him, shaking himself like a dog and showering the other occupants with water. Throwing his flying-helmet and oxygen mask on to the table he made straight for the tea urn and poured himself a mugful, taking a long swallow and surveying the newcomers over the rim.

  His eyes met those of the burned man, and his left eyelid drooped in a barely perceptible wink. Then he set down his empty mug, shrugged off his flying-jacket and threw it into a corner. Now, for the first time, the newcomers saw the Wing Commander’s rank braid on the epaulettes of his battledress, and the ribbons underneath his pilot’s wings: the DSO, the DFC and Bar, and the DFM.

  Suddenly, the Wing Commander gave a broad grin. ‘Welcome to Eindhoven,’ he said. ‘My name’s Yeoman.’ He pointed a thumb towards a second bedraggled figure that entered the caravan, dripping water
. ‘And this is Squadron Leader Tim Phelan, OC 505 Squadron.’

  ‘Hiya,’ Phelan said, giving the new pilots a cursory glance. Like Yeoman, he made a beeline for the tea urn. ‘Carter and Dawlish have gone off to Flying Control,’ he said, naming the other two pilots who had just returned from the recent sortie. ‘One of their pals over there is going into Eindhoven and they’ve organized a lift.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ Yeoman said, turning to the seated flying officer, ‘can we get hold of some transport for these chaps? My car is picking me up in a few minutes’ time, but apart from Squadron Leader Phelan there’s only room for one more passenger, so I’ll take the flight lieutenant, here.’ He nodded at the burned man.

  ‘Right, sir,’ the flying officer said, reaching for a telephone. Yeoman perched himself on the edge of the trestle table and looked at the new pilots, smiling.

  ‘I don’t suppose your first impression of Eindhoven is very favourable,’ he said. ‘However, there is one crumb of comfort — we are all billeted in the town itself, and the Dutch have made things quite cosy for us.’

  He stuck a hand in his battledress pocket, pulled out a battered briar pipe, inspected it closely to make sure that there was still some tobacco in it, and lit it. A cloud of evil-smelling smoke drifted through the caravan, and one of the new sergeant pilots politely stifled a cough.

  Yeoman chatted away for a few more minutes, contentedly smoking his pipe. He never once mentioned anything remotely connected with operational flying, and the burned man knew that this was deliberate; the Wing Commander was setting out to make the new arrivals feel completely at ease, while appraising them at the same time. There would be plenty of opportunity to present the hard facts to them in the morning.

  There was the sound of a motor outside. Yeoman got up and rubbed a clear patch on one of the windows, which had misted over.