Tempest Squadron Read online

  Richter’s thoughts turned wistfully to the Luftwaffe’s new jet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262. Faster than any Allied fighter by a good hundred miles an hour, formidably armed with four 30-mm cannon, it could have swept the British and Americans from the skies in the summer of 1944 if it had been available in sufficient numbers — but Hitler had become obsessed with the idea of turning this superlative aircraft into a ‘reprisal bomber’, and had ordered that all Me 262s coming off the production line should be fitted with bomb racks. This, together with the disruption caused by the Allied bombing offensive, had set the whole Me 262 programme back by at least six months, and only now were a few of the jets beginning to reach the fighter squadrons.

  There were twenty-five Me 262 jet fighter-bombers at Rheine, together with a mixed collection of 120 other fighters — Messerschmitt 109s, Focke-Wulf 190s, and a few Junkers 188s, the latter earmarked for night defence. Together, they formed the complement of Jagdgeschwader 66, the fighter wing which Joachim Richter commanded.

  The badge of Jagdgeschwader 66, a leaping panther, formed the centrepiece of the collection of photographs on the office wall. The good old 66th, thought Richter. It was almost five years since he had joined the Wing as a raw and untried pilot at the beginning of 1940, before the hectic days of the offensive in France and Flanders, and he had served on and off with it ever since, apart from one or two special assignments and a tour of duty with an experimental fighter unit.

  Now he had returned as commanding officer, transformed in less than five short years from a fledgling into a full-blown fighter ace with eighty-five victories to his credit, five more than the legendary von Richthofen had scored in the First World War. Most of those victories had been achieved on the Russian Front, in the early days when the Soviet Air Force was reeling in chaos before the German onslaught; the successes had been fewer after the middle of 1943, on both east and west fronts.

  Richter knew with absolute certainty now that the war was lost, as did so many of his comrades. Some of them, a few months earlier, had taken drastic action and attempted to assassinate Hitler; they had failed, and most of them had ended up dangling from meat hooks in concentration camps. Richter shuddered to think how narrowly he had missed being implicated in the Bomb Plot, as the affair had come to be known. An approach had once been made to him in tentative fashion, at a party, by an army colonel who had eventually questioned him about his loyalty to Germany, rather than to the Führer; but Richter had refused to make any revealing remarks or to commit himself to anything. He trusted no one, for in wartime Germany that was the recipe for survival. Nevertheless, in the days following the attempt on Hitler’s life he had lived in a state of constant anxiety, half expecting a visit from the Gestapo or the Field Security Police, not knowing whether his name might have been on a list of possible anti-Hitler sympathizers drawn up by the conspirators and subsequently seized by the authorities. Obviously it had not been, or he would not now still be here.

  He went back to his desk and, with a sigh of resignation, continued working his way through the stack of paperwork. Most of it simply required his signature, but he never signed anything without reading it first; he had known of more than one commander who had got into serious trouble by failing to pay enough attention to what appeared in his in tray.

  He had been busy at his task for fifteen minutes when von Gleiwitz appeared and announced the arrival of Major Schumacher. The latter came in and saluted; the adjutant relieved him of his dripping overcoat and went back into the outer office.

  ‘Come in, Johnny,’ Richter said warmly. ‘Come in and sit down. There’ll be some coffee along in a minute. Sorry to drag you over here in the rain; I just felt the need of a chat and the sight of your ugly mug.’

  The commanding officer of No. 1 Squadron, Jagdgeschwader 66 — and Richter’s second in command of the Wing — looked glum. Without being asked, he took a cigarette from the box on Richter’s desk. There was no formality between the two men; they had been close friends for too long, and shared too many dangers. ‘Have you heard the news?’ he asked suddenly.

  Richter looked at him questioningly. ‘No. What news?’

  ‘The Tommies have sunk the Tirpitz.’

  ‘Good God! When?’ Richter knew that the great battleship, the pride of the German Navy, had been lying at anchor in a Norwegian fjord for many months, surrounded by an array of anti-torpedo nets and anti-aircraft guns. The British had attacked her on several occasions, using both aircraft and midget submarines, but had only succeeded in damaging the 43,000-ton giant. Now it seemed that they had finished her at last, and it did not seem possible.

  ‘It happened sometime yesterday,’ Schumacher answered. ‘The details haven’t been generally released yet, but I’ve just come from Bruckner’s office’ — he named Rheine’s Senior Intelligence Officer — ‘and he showed me a copy of a report that’s just come over the teletype, circulated to all fighter commands by the Fliegerführer Kirkenes, in Norway. It seems that the battleship was attacked by a force of Lancasters, using very large bombs, and they made short work of her. The bombers got clean away, too; there wasn’t one of our fighters in the air. There’ll no doubt be the usual spate of excuses and recriminations,’ the Major concluded wryly.

  One more nail in Germany’s coffin, Richter thought. Defeat in both west and east, defeat in the air, defeat at sea. He felt old and weary, knowing that all the sacrifices of the past five years had been in vain. Nothing but a miracle could save Germany now.

  An orderly came in with the coffee, poured out two cups and left. Richter took a tentative sip and made a face.

  ‘God, that’s awful,’ he said. ‘What I’d give for a cup of real coffee again, instead of this ersatz!’

  Schumacher raised an eyebrow. ‘You can get it,’ he commented, ‘if you move in the right circles, just like anything else. Do you remember that party we went to in Berlin, last August?’

  Richter remembered it very well. Both men had had a few days’ leave due to them, and since Schumacher had relatives in Berlin they had decided to spend it there. One evening, as they had been getting pleasantly drunk in a night club reserved for officers, someone — Richter couldn’t remember who — had invited them to a party at a house in one of Berlin’s exclusive suburbs, so far unscarred by Allied bombing.

  Their anticipation had quickly turned to disgust. In a Germany where the majority of the population was existing on rations hardly fit for pigs, the guests at this party had been guzzling every imaginable kind of drink, gorging themselves on beef, ham, roast pork and fowl, and delicacies no doubt looted and hoarded from the occupied territories. And the guests themselves ... Richter’s mouth still twisted in distaste when he thought of them. Haughty women, glittering with diamonds, willing to sell their aristocratic bodies to the highest bidder; senior officers of the SS and the SD and the various political branches of the Nazi Party, boasting of their conquests and, as the drink took hold of them, of the atrocities they had committed in the name of the Third Reich.

  And there had been the much decorated Paratroop colonel, his left arm missing, who had emerged from the shadows like a spectre and, before anyone could intervene, had overturned one of the groaning tables, shattering dozens of bottles and spattering their contents over immaculate uniforms and costly dresses. Richter could still see the puffy, outraged faces that had gaped at him open-mouthed, hear the gasps and stifled screams of the women and the crunch of splintered glass as the colonel strode stiff-backed through the debris towards the door, spitting out a single word:

  ‘Bastards!’

  They, too, had made their exit then, knowing that they had just witnessed the end of a man’s career, and perhaps even of his life — hating themselves inwardly, too, because they had not had the courage to do what he had done.

  The memory of that party — and, indeed, of Berlin itself, with its unhealthy mixture of misery and forced gaiety — depressed him. It was time to change the subject. He picked up a green folder from
his desk and passed it to Schumacher.

  ‘I’d like you to take a look at that, Johnny. It’s the dossier our Intelligence boys have compiled on the new RAF fighter wing that moved into Eindhoven a month or so ago — the one whose Tempests have been giving us a little bit of bother.’

  Schumacher opened the folder and began to read through the contents in silence, sipping his coffee from time to time. After a while, he put the folder aside and gazed at Richter thoughtfully.

  ‘Quite an experienced outfit, by the look of things,’ he commented. ‘And the commanding officer — what’s his name? Ah yes, Yeoman. He’s not exactly a novice, either, is he?’

  Richter corrected Schumacher’s pronunciation of Yeoman’s name and said:

  ‘No, he isn’t. Quite a hot cookie, by all accounts. Thirty victories to his credit or thereabouts, which is pretty high for an RAF pilot. Don’t forget, the RAF didn’t have the benefit of the turkey-shoot we enjoyed on the Russian Front. It’s strange, but in many ways his career seems to have run parallel to my own. France, then the Battle of Britain, as the Tommies call it, then North Africa and Malta. He apparently commanded a Mosquito squadron before his present job.’

  ‘Why the interest in this particular unit?’ Schumacher wanted to know. ‘The Tempest is the best fighter the Allies have got, admittedly, but I can’t see them being too much of a threat to us here. They won’t risk our flak.’

  In this he was right; Rheine was the most heavily-defended airfield in Germany, with long lanes of quadruple 20-mm anti-aircraft guns protecting the approaches to the main runway and many more gun positions scattered around the airfield perimeter. Together, they were capable of putting up a veritable steel umbrella over the head of any aircraft that was landing or taking off — an umbrella which, most Allied fighter pilots had already decided, was sheer suicide to try and penetrate.

  ‘You miss the point, Johnny,’ Richter said reprovingly.’ Very soon, we shall have a considerable force of Messerschmitt 262 jets here at Rheine, all of them committed to attacking the Allied forces across the Rhine. They will be capable of inflicting considerable damage, so you can bet that the Allies will do everything in their power to knock them out. Now, since they won’t risk attacking them here, on the airfield, they’ll try and catch them on the way home, when the jets are short of fuel — and you can also bet that they’ll use the Tempests to do the job. Don’t forget that the Tempest is the only Allied fighter with a reasonable chance of catching a 262, especially at low level.’

  ‘So we’re going to have to beat the Tommies at their own game?’ Schumacher queried. Richter nodded.

  ‘That’s right. We’re going to have to keep them on their toes all the time by maintaining regular patrols over the approach to Eindhoven whenever a 262 sortie goes out. It’ll mean some very close liaison work with the jet boys, and it will be risky, for we shall be operating at medium and low level and are likely to meet a lot of opposition from the enemy flak. I can’t see any other way of dealing with the problem, though.’

  He stared thoughtfully at the green folder for a few moments, then said:

  ‘I wonder what this Yeoman fellow is thinking right at this very moment? I wish I could meet him.’

  ‘Perhaps you will, and sooner than you think,’ Schumacher smiled. ‘If things continue to go on the way they are, he’ll probably be sitting in your chair before very long!’

  Richter laughed. ‘I don’t give a damn who sits in this chair, Johnny, so long as he doesn’t have a red star on his hat. I don’t think it will come to that, though; I still believe that we can hold the Allies on the Rhine until they come to their senses and agree to the armistice terms we are bound to put forward, sooner or later. It’s the only way out for us now, Johnny.’

  ‘So you don’t reckon much to all this talk about new secret weapons which will supposedly soon win the war for us?’ Schumacher asked.

  ‘No, I don’t. We can’t win the war now, Johnny; that’s an impossibility. There’s too much stacked against us. But we can force the Western Allies and the Reds into a situation where they’ll forget all about this unconditional surrender nonsense and agree to armistice talks. We can do it by gaining total air superiority over the territory of the Reich.’

  He leaned forward over the desk, emphasizing his words with short stabs of his index finger. ‘We need fighters, Johnny. Fighters and still more fighters. Aircraft like the Messerschmitt 262, in their hundreds, so that we can smash the Allied bomber formations and give our war industries some respite. Then we’ll show the Allies that Germany is not finished yet! We’ll make them realize that an invasion of our Fatherland will be such a costly undertaking that they’ll never dare attempt it.’

  ‘But the Führer will never sue for an armistice,’ Schumacher objected.

  Richter gazed at him steadily. His companion met his eyes and nodded slowly in answer to the message that was best left unspoken. The problem of Adolf Hitler was one that could still be resolved by the German armed forces, when the time was right ...

  The commander of Jagdgeschwader 66 got up suddenly and strode over to the window, rubbing one of the panes with the palm of his hand to clear away the condensation. The rain had stopped, and there seemed to be brighter patches among the grey cloud masses.

  Richter returned to his desk and reached for the telephone. A minute later he replaced the receiver, a broad smile on his face.

  ‘The weather’s starting to break up nicely, Johnny,’ he told Schumacher. ‘Let’s get over to Operations. I think we might just pop across the Rhine and tickle up the Tommies this afternoon.’

  *

  The Focke-Wulf 190D-9 fighter was a vastly more potent fighting machine than the earlier FW I90A models with which, two years earlier, the Luftwaffe had for a time wrested air superiority from the RAF’S Spitfire squadrons over France. Fitted with a Jumo 213 radial engine that could be boosted to 2,240 horsepower by means of water-methanol injection, the ‘Dora-Nine’, as it was known to its pilots, could reach a speed of 440 mph at 37,000 feet. It was armed with two 20-mm MG 151 cannon and two 13-mm MG 131 machine-guns.

  Because of the new engine, the nose of the Dora-Nine was much longer than that of the earlier FW 190 models, which made taxiing a difficult and painfully slow business. This was a constant source of worry to Richter; with the German fighter airfields under continual threat of attack, it was risky to spend too long on their exposed surfaces. Now, as he led the line of twelve Focke-Wulfs out to their take-off position at the end of Rheine’s long runway, moving the long nose from side to side with use of the rudder and careful bursts of power so that he could see the way ahead, he kept craning his neck to scan the clouds above and behind. It would be just like the Tommies, he thought, to pop down out of the overcast with a section of Tempests, shoot up the field and make their escape before the anti-aircraft gunners had time to react.

  But the sky remained empty and the Focke-Wulfs reached the runway without hindrance, lining up on it in pairs. Over to the right, Richter could see several Me 262s parked by the side of a long wood that concealed their blast shelters. Clouds of steam rose behind them as the hot gases from their turbojets seared the sodden ground.

  Richter glanced to his left, where Schumacher’s aircraft was positioned alongside, and saw the Major wave briefly, indicating that he was ready to go. Richter acknowledged, then released the brakes and opened the throttle slowly, ruddering to keep straight as the Focke-Wulf started to move. A slight forward pressure on the stick brought the tail up and a few seconds later he was airborne, raising the undercarriage and starting a gentle turn to the left, over the airfield buildings.

  The twelve Focke-Wulfs levelled out at three thousand feet, just under the cloud base, and set course to 240 degrees. Behind them, at Rheine, the Messerschmitt 262s were taxiing out for take-off.

  The operational plan called for six bomb-carrying jets to attack armoured convoys between Maastricht and Aachen. The Focke-Wulfs, in the meantime, would sweep the area to
the south of Eindhoven, looking for any RAF fighters that might be alerted to cut off the jets’ escape route. The jets had further to go, but their higher speed meant that they would be starting their attack just as the piston-engined fighters entered their patrol area.

  The flat landscape of northern Germany slipped quickly by under the Focke-Wulfs’ wings as they sped on, their cockpit canopies almost brushing the swirling grey vapour of the cloud base. They skimmed the southern outskirts of Bocholt and a couple of minutes later they were streaking over the broad ribbon of the Rhine. Fifteen miles further on was the River Maas, and beyond that enemy territory.

  Their entry into the latter was signalled by a stream of glowing anti-aircraft shells that came up at them from the corner of a wood, briefly lighting up the leaden sky. The fire was wide of the mark and the Focke-Wulfs flew on, ignoring it, their pilots searching the narrow corridor between the clouds and the earth for any sign of enemy fighters.

  They crossed the parallel waterways of the Deurne and Bois le Duc Canals, and a minute later picked up the railway line that ran southwards from Eindhoven and then curved away eastwards in the direction of Roermond. Richter decided to take his fighters a few miles farther west, as far as Valkenswaard, and then sweep back towards the railway line, across the track of any enemy aircraft that might be heading south from Eindhoven. As additional insurance, he ordered half his formation to climb up through the clouds and circle just over the tops; he could call them down if he needed them, and they would give warning of any Allied fighters that might be approaching from high altitude.