Mosquito Squadron Page 2
In the operations room at Stade, frantic messages were received one after the other from the ‘Wurzburg’ ground control radars and from the fighters they had been directing. Everywhere it was the same story: the radar echoes had crumbled into shifting, meaningless bands of light on every screen in and above northern Germany.
Joachim Richter leaned back in his seat, staring at the big glass screen on which the orderly, moving spots of light had now come to a standstill.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he muttered. ‘I just don’t bloody well believe it.’
Yet it was true. Somehow, incredibly, the enemy had succeeded in blinding the radar eyes of the German air defences — eyes without which the night fighters could not be directed to their targets and the flak batteries could not lay their guns accurately. There was no means, now, of telling which way the bomber stream was heading, until it actually crossed the coast and its progress was reported by observers on the ground.
High over the German Bight, Lieutenant Stechel brought his Messerschmitt 110 round in a wide circle above the clouds. He knew that he must be right in the middle of the bomber stream, but despite the moonlight he could see no other aircraft.
Suddenly, he stood the fighter on its wingtip, pulling it round in a steep turn and bringing a startled exclamation from Dorfmann, still fiddling with his set behind him.
‘Sorry about that,’ Stechel gasped, levelling the wings. ‘Look outside. What do you make of that?’
At first, Dorfmann thought that the 110 was flying through a snowstorm. The aircraft was surrounded by a blizzard of strange particles, glittering in the moonlight. One of them whirled close past the cockpit canopy and it looked, in the fraction of a second before it was lost to sight, like a long strip of metallic toilet paper.
The observer opened his mouth to speak, and in that instant Stechel slammed open the throttles, pulling the Messerschmitt into a steep climb. Ahead and above, his keen eyes had picked out a shadow, fleeting across the stars.
‘Courier, one thousand metres!’ he yelled jubilantly. ‘We’ve got him, Dorfmann. We’ve got the bastard!’
The range closed rapidly, and now the other aircraft was easily identifiable as a four-engined heavy bomber with twin fins — either a Lancaster or a Halifax. Stechel didn’t care which. The enemy aircraft cruised serenely on, its crew apparently unaware of the danger creeping up on them, and Stechel manoeuvred his fighter carefully into position below and astern.
Something fell from the bomber’s belly, almost causing him to break off in alarm, and for a second he watched the dark bundles as they curved down past his port wingtip. Then they came apart, breaking up into confetti-like showers of more of the strange metallic stuff that had almost given him heart failure thirty seconds earlier.
The bomber was huge in his sights now but still he held his fire, closing right in until he was less than a hundred metres astern and just a touch below. The enemy rear gunner must be asleep.
Taking infinite pains, Stechel raised the nose a fraction and sighted on the bomber’s starboard wing between the two engines, a vulnerable spot where the fuel tanks were located. He could not understand why the Tommies had not equipped their bombers with ventral gun turrets as the Americans had done, so eliminating this dangerous blind spot.
He had selected cannon only and now his index fingers squeezed the twin triggers. A mixture of 30- and 20-mm cannon shells blasted out from the 110’s nose guns, shaking the aircraft with the recoil and momentarily blinding the pilot with the muzzle flashes. Powder smoke drifted through the cockpit.
Belatedly, the bomber’s rear gunner opened up, spraying tracer aimlessly into the night as Stechel’s two-second burst slammed home. He dived steeply away from his target, ready to pull up for another attack, and saw at once that there would be no need. A dull red glow in the bomber’s wing burst into a great streamer of fire, illuminating the square-cut tail fins; the target was now positively identified as a Halifax.
The ponderous bomber entered a diving turn to port, corkscrewing away from its attacker, its starboard wing now a mass of flame. Turning, Stechel followed it down as far as the cloud layer, watching it plunge into the opaque grey undercast. An instant later, a vivid orange flash split the clouds, followed in quick succession by several more of lesser intensity.
‘Not much doubt about that one, sir,’ commented Dorfmann, as the pilot regained altitude to resume his patrol. Nevertheless, it was the only enemy aircraft they saw that night, and they were luckier than most.
By the time the embers of Stechel’s Halifax scattered themselves to extinction in the sea, some semblance of order was beginning to emerge from the chaos which had reigned in the operations room at Stade. Thirty minutes after midnight came the first reports that the leading elements of the bomber stream had turned south-east, and ten minutes later the crew of a night fighter called in to say that they had sighted bursts of yellow light, probably marker flares, over the mouth of the Elbe.
Richter glanced to his right and met the eyes of his neighbour, a tall captain who had spent the last two years on the Russian front and who wore the ribbon of the Knight’s Cross. The man’s face was grim. There was no longer any doubt about the RAF’s target for tonight.
‘It’s Hamburg,’ Richter said quietly. The other nodded. A few moments later, ground observers reported that the bombers were passing over Meldorf on a heading of approximately 110 degrees ‘in great strength’. General Schwabedissen immediately ordered all night fighters within range to break away from their designated control sectors and converge on the city, but by the time they arrived it was too late.
The martyrdom of Hamburg began at exactly 0057 hours in the morning of 25 July 1943, when twenty aircraft of the RAF’s Pathfinder Force dropped clusters of flares and target markers over the centre of the city. They were followed, five minutes later, by fifty-nine more bombers, each carrying a mixed load of incendiary markers and high explosive, so that by 0110 the area around the centre of Hamburg was lit up like a Christmas tree.
During the next forty minutes 728 heavy bombers unloaded 2,400 tons of bombs on the hapless city, many of them incendiaries. Raging fires swept through the shattered streets, joining with one another to cause a great firestorm, fed by hurricane-force winds sucked in from Hamburg’s perimeter. The winds picked up everything in their path, including people, and hurled it into the midst of the growing conflagration. Hundreds died in their air-raid shelters, suffocated by oxygen starvation as the inferno raged about them, their bodies reduced to ashes. Those who tried to flee were pulverized by high-explosive bombs, or mown down by flying debris. By 0145 a great sea of fire extended for seven miles between the docks area of Hamburg and the north-west suburbs.
Some bombs fell wide of the aiming point. One stick, jettisoned by a flak-damaged Lancaster, whistled down over the western suburbs and impacted on a maternity hospital. They killed sixty-seven people, mostly women and children. Among them were the wife and unborn child of Captain Wolfgang Lutz, who was trapped under a mound of rubble and eventually dug out, almost insane, nearly two days later.
To the personnel in the underground operations room of 2nd Air Division, the horror of Hamburg was something remote and impersonal. They had an inkling of it only through the terse reports that filtered in from the night fighters, groping blindly in the dark, from the flak batteries, the ground observers and the civil defence, and from the occasional tremor that shook the ground.
The radar was still useless, and not for some hours yet would the defenders know why. Throughout the raid, each bomber had dropped mysterious bundles — like those Stechel and Dorfmann had seen — at the rate of one every minute. The bundles broke apart and released thousands of strips of tinfoil, cut to the wavelengths of the German radar frequencies. Each strip produced a radar echo similar to that of an aircraft, jamming the radar screens with a mass of incomprehensible clutter. The British code-name for this simple and devastatingly effective device was ‘Window’.
 
; The last of the raiders droned away, and in the operations room the staff began to sift through the reports that had come in from the air defences. They held a grim portent for the future. Out of the vast armada that had smashed Hamburg, the flak and night fighters had shot down only twelve bombers.
*
The sun rose blood-red through the fires of the torn city. At dawn, an old man and his wife, haggard and red-eyed through lack of sleep and fear, emerged from the cellar of their little house on the outskirts of Stade and looked to the east.
Beyond the Elbe a massive pillar of smoke rose thousands of feet into the morning sky. It boiled and writhed, shot through with twisting ropes of black and brown. Its top spread out and drifted on the breeze, forming a dark, impenetrable carpet over their heads. They recoiled from it in terror.
‘The chickens are coming home to roost,’ muttered the old man, dragging himself on unwilling feet towards the stable at the bottom of the yard to tend to his mare.
Behind him, his wife whispered hoarsely ‘It is the will of God. The will of — ‘ Her voice broke in a sob and he turned towards her. She was leaning against the wall of their home, both hands clutched to her chest. He managed to catch her as she fell, and she died in his arms a few seconds later.
He carried her indoors and laid her gently on the sofa, closing her eyes. Then he went to the stable and stood for a long time, stroking the neck of his mare, soothing away the fear of the night. Deep within him, anguish was tearing him apart; but he had forgotten how to cry.
Chapter Two
The two men walked along the narrow lane, their shoes kicking up spurts of dust. All around them, apart from an occasional clump of trees and a distant church steeple, showing dimly through the low-lying wraiths of mist that were beginning to creep across the fens, the countryside was entirely flat. Away to the left, the sun was a vast red ball on the western horizon.
The men walked in silence, conscious of the evening sounds: the lowing of cattle, far away, the chatter of a startled blackbird, the rustle of unseen creatures in the hedgerow bordering the lane. Suddenly, one of the men, a grizzled warrant officer with two rows of medal ribbons indicating service in just about every part of the British Empire since the end of World War I, slowed his stride and turned to his companion, a much younger Flight Sergeant.
‘Hang on, Sam,’ the older man said. ‘I’m not as young as I was. Let’s stop for a smoke.’
The other nodded his assent and they perched on a nearby fence, unbuttoning their battledress and looking out over the quiet landscape. The warrant officer produced a crumpled packet of Player’s and offered a cigarette to the flight sergeant before taking one himself. They both lit up, the smoke smelling sweet in the open air.
The flight sergeant belched suddenly and the man beside him grinned.
‘Station farm, duty pig speaking,’ he said.
‘It’s that bloody beer, Len,’ the other protested. ‘Can’t get away with it at all. Don’t tell me the locals have been drinking the stuff for years — I saw the look in their eyes as we were leaving. I’ll bet the landlord got some real stuff out as soon as the door closed behind us.’
Warrant Officer Len Thomas made no reply. Personally, he liked the little tavern on the village green, even though most of the other senior NCOS from RAF Burningham went elsewhere and it was a four-mile walk from the airfield. Then he smiled inwardly, admitting to himself that what he really liked about the place was the landlord’s sister, Betty, a plump rosy-cheeked widow in her forties whose husband had been killed in North Africa. Maybe, he thought, when she’d had time to forget, and things had settled down a bit, he’d ask her if she would consider getting together with him. A man might do a lot worse.
Thomas took a pull at his cigarette and then looked down at his hands, spreading out his fingers. They were broad and muscular and he was suddenly, for the first time in his life, acutely ashamed of them, of the ingrained oil and dirt collected in years of grovelling around in the guts of aero-engines. It seemed that no amount of scrubbing would remove it, but he resolved to try harder. That sort of thing might put a woman off for good.
‘They’re early tonight,’ said Sam Porter, the flight sergeant, his voice cutting abruptly across Thomas’s thoughts.
‘What?’
Porter jerked a thumb towards the south-east and Thomas stared out across the fens, over the pools of mist, puzzled for a moment. Then he, too, heard the unmistakable note of engines, muted at first, then swelling gradually to a full-throated roar. Both men stood up, scanning the horizon, but as yet no aircraft was visible.
‘There he is,’ Porter said, pointing. Thomas saw it at the same instant: a long, dark shape, rising above the mist several miles away, but nevertheless recognizable as a Short Stirling bomber by its tall tailfin. The Stirling turned and climbed steadily away towards the east; it was followed by another and another. The two men counted fifteen in all, following each one as it climbed out over East Anglia until it was lost in the gathering gloom, heading for a rendezvous point with hundreds of others from airfields all over eastern England. The sky over the coast near Great Yarmouth would soon be echoing with man-made thunder as the great bombers wheeled like a flock of rooks before sorting themselves out into their designated stations and heading into the eastern darkness towards their distant target.
‘I wonder if it’s Hamburg again,’ said Thomas.
‘Doubt it,’ Porter retorted. ‘They’ve hit Hamburg three times this week already. They’ll be off to somewhere in the Ruhr, more likely. I don’t fancy their job, poor buggers. Especially in Stirlings. The bloody things won’t climb above fifteen thousand.’
Porter frowned suddenly and threw his cigarette end into the road. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘at least they’re operational. I’m beginning to think our lot will never get into action. I nearly had a fight with a bomber boy in Downham Market the other day; “the no-op squadron”, he called us. But he was dead right.’
Thomas looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘The CO knows what he’s doing. He won’t declare the squadron fully operational until every man knows his job inside out, and that includes engine fitters, my son. Working up a new squadron is never easy; I’ve seen it all before. It takes time to build up a team, but this is going to be a good one, I can feel it in my bones. Those lads can fly, and the CO’s the best of the lot.’
There was a note of pride in his voice. Porter sniffed and began to fasten up his battledress buttons, for a sudden chill had crept into the air as the sun sank below the horizon.
‘You knew him before, didn’t you.’ It was a statement, rather than a question.
Thomas smiled and nodded. ‘Aye, I did,’ he said, his voice betraying his Lancashire origins. ‘In France, before Dunkirk. Green as grass, he was, but he soon learned. He was luckier than most. Got shot down, hitch-hiked his way across half France, got shot down again and came off the beaches with the army. Went through the fighting in August and September ’40, too.’
‘Seems a bit funny though, having a single-seat fighter bloke commanding a Mosquito squadron,’ Porter said.
Thomas removed his forage cap and scratched his head. ‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s got a hell of a lot of experience. He was in North Africa and Malta too, you know. And I heard on the grapevine that he didn’t volunteer for a transfer to twin-engined aircraft; he was sent on the Mossie conversion course, got in a few ops with 2 Group and then they promoted him and told him to get on with the job of forming a squadron.’
Porter looked sideways at his friend. ‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ he said.
Thomas grinned. ‘Comes of having mates in admin., if you want to know the secret.’ He put on his cap again and shivered slightly.
‘Damn it, it’s turning cold. Come on, let’s get a move on. It’s not for the likes of you and me, Sam, to question who gets posted where or why. Our job’s to keep the Merlins turning.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s just time for
one in the Mess, and then we’d better turn in. The squadron will be back first thing in the morning, and no doubt there’ll be the usual number of snags to sort out. I hate the very thought of other people tampering with my lovely engines.’
Porter laughed. ‘You’ve just got to remember that there’s a war on,’ he said. Together, they walked off in the rapidly spreading dusk.
*
Squadron Leader George Yeoman, DFC, DFM, was nursing a hangover. He felt for his oxygen mask, which was dangling loose by its strap, clipped it into position over his face, turned the oxygen fully on and took several deep breaths. His head began to clear almost at once, but in his stomach the breakfast he had forced down was only just holding its own with the residue of last night’s alcohol.
It was six o’clock in the morning of 1 August 1943, and the ten Mosquitos of No. 380 Squadron, RAF, were returning to their Norfolk airfield of Burningham after spending four days at the Armament Practice Camp at Fairwood Common, in Gloucestershire. It had been a hectic period during which No. 380’s crews had flown intensively, carrying out air-to-air firing against towed targets, live bombing exercises off the Welsh coast, and practice interceptions on the Beaufighters of No. 68 Squadron, which shared Fairwood Common with the APC.
Yeoman made a mental resolution never, ever, to drink again with 68 Squadron. He hadn’t intended things to get out of hand, but a spontaneous party had developed because 380’s last night at Fairwood Common had just happened to coincide with the award of a DFC to one of the 68 Squadron navigators.
Still, he thought, his chaps had deserved to let their hair down. He had been driving them pretty hard over the last few weeks, and now they were as good as he could make them. The squadron was a team at last, right down to the lowliest airman.
‘Not feeling very well, skipper?’