Flames over France Page 3

  It was not until 1100 that GHQ finally relented — and even then its orders only added to the frustration of the Allied air commanders. They were authorised to attack enemy columns as first priority and Luftwaffe airfields as second priority, but built-up areas were to be avoided at all costs. This immediately robbed the first-priority task of much of its effectiveness, since the biggest and most inviting concentrations of enemy armour were to be found in the innumerable hamlets scattered throughout the Ardennes. In addition, the Allied bombers were strictly forbidden to attack enemy industrial areas or centres of communication — an order that directly contravened the operational plans so carefully formulated by the British and French Air Staffs over the previous months. In the end the French day-bomber force, utterly confused by the ambiguity of it all, simply stayed on the ground while General d’Astier begged GHQ for further orders that might clarify the position.

  By this time, Air Marshal Barratt’s impatience at the apparent lethargy of the French commanders had reached breaking point. Taking the initiative, he telephoned General Georges, Commander-in-Chief of the forces on the North-Eastern Front, and informed him that he intended to send the light bombers of the RAF’s Advanced Air Striking Force, the AASF, into action without delay. Georges murmured, “Thank God!” His men were hard pressed and the Panzers were breaking through everywhere. And yet it was Georges himself who had insisted that the Allied air forces should not attack built-up areas.

  Most of the AASF’s squadrons, based on a number of airfields in Champagne, between Paris and the Meuse, had been at readiness since 0600, with half their available aircraft ready for take-off at thirty minutes’ notice and half at two hours’ notice. In the few hours since then, however, the German advance had been so rapid that Intelligence had not been able to keep pace with the enemy’s movements, and it was not until noon that firm target information was available. A few minutes later, thirty-two Fairey Battle light bombers — one flight each from seven squadrons — took off from their respective bases with orders to attack enemy columns advancing through Luxembourg.

  They approached the target in four waves, escorted by a mere eight Hawker Hurricanes, which broke away and patrolled over the city of Luxembourg. The Battles made their attack and encountered no enemy fighters, but they ran into a blizzard of fire from mobile 20-mm cannon and machine-guns and thirteen of them were shot down.

  At 1530 the AASF mounted a second attack on the columns of the German Sixteenth Army in Luxembourg, again with thirty-two Battles. This time there was no fighter escort, and a squadron of Messerschmitt 109s came tumbling down on the British bombers. Ten Battles failed to return from this sortie. Twenty-three aircraft out of sixty-four, with as many more so badly damaged as to be out of action for some time, was a fearful rate of attrition, and the AASF flew no more combat sorties that day …

  Chapter Two

  Armstrong found the airfield at Berry-au-Bac without difficulty. It was a grass field, nestling in green, wooded country beside the main road that ran from Reims to Lyon. As he made a gentle descent towards it, hoping that the people down there knew he was coming — his Spitfire, to save weight, was not fitted with a radio — he reflected on his flight from England. The curious thing was that he hadn’t seen a single aircraft; he had even begun to wonder whether the rumours of invasion were true.

  “Oh, they’re true all right,” said the duty officer who greeted him as he climbed from the cockpit after taxying to a dispersal point on the southern side of the aerodrome. “The Hurricane squadron based here has been in action since dawn. They’ve scored some kills, too, and so far they’re all OK. They’re out now, over Luxembourg. Come and have something to eat while your Spitfire is being refuelled. If I were you I’d be on my way as quickly as possible; Jerry hasn’t paid us a visit yet, but I’ve a feeling he won’t be long.”

  They made the short trip to the mess tent perched on the duty officer’s motorbike. Armstrong spotted a number of Fairey Battle light bombers dispersed at the opposite end of the airfield. “Have they been in action yet?” he queried, clinging on grimly as the motor cycle bumped over the grass.

  “No,” the duty officer shouted back. “The bomber boys are really cheesed off. Their CO keeps ringing up Air HQ every ten minutes, but no luck. If I was them, though, I’d be content to stay on terra firma. Poor buggers,” he added. It sounded like an epitaph.

  Armstrong found some of the Battle crews drinking tea in the mess tent; they seemed cheerful enough, although they must have known that the odds were stacked against them. Despite himself, because he despised such thoughts, he found himself wondering how many of them would still be around in a couple of days’ time.

  Armstrong discovered that his companion, a flying officer called Edmonds, was a Hurricane pilot who had been grounded on doctor’s orders for a few days because of a chest infection. He brought Armstrong a mug of tea and a plate of bully beef and biscuits. Armstrong wasn’t really hungry, but he knew that he would be in a couple of hours’ time, so he chewed mechanically on the unappetising fare, conversing with Edmonds between mouthfuls. Edmonds told him that the two AASF Hurricane squadrons had seen a fair amount of action in recent weeks.

  “We’d been chasing their reconnaissance aircraft, mostly Derniers, all through the winter months; knocked down a number of them, too. Then, all of a sudden, they started sending over fighter formations, usually at high altitude. They would try to bounce us as we climbed, making one or two passes and then high-tailing it back into Germany. At first it was just Me 110s we came up against — not much problem with them. But last month we encountered more 109s, and we noticed that the Huns had changed their tactics. Sometimes, two or three squadrons of Messerschmitts would carry out a sweep as far as Metz or Nancy; they would stay up really high and they’d only fight when they had to. Our guess is that they’ve been experimenting with new battle formations. Oh, and they’re not using Dornier 17s as much as they used to; they’ve been sending over Junkers 88s to do their recces, and they’re devilish hard to catch.”

  Armstrong nodded. “I was on the receiving end of Ju 88s in Norway,” he said. “It wasn’t pleasant, I can tell you.” He gave Edmonds a brief résumé of his reconnaissance activities during the Norwegian campaign, and got the impression that he might as well have been talking about something that happened on the moon. It was understandable; the Hurricane boys in France had been in action almost from the word go, as indeed had their French counterparts.

  Changing the subject, he looked around the mess tent. “A bit sparse in here, isn’t it?” he commented.

  Edmonds grinned. “Oh, we’ve got a proper mess. It’s a chateau at Guignicourt, about four miles away. Very comfortable, too. This is just so the boys can grab a quick snack between sorties. Speaking of which, I think I can hear them coming back. Shall we take a look?”

  They went outside into the sunlight. It was late morning and the sun was high; they squinted into it, trying to make out the returning Hurricanes whose Merlin engines they could now hear clearly. Suddenly they were there, three of them, the first to return, slanting down the sky in line astern, well spaced out, engines crackling as the pilots throttled back on the approach to land. There was another sound, too; a shrill whistle as the wind played around the eight gun ports in the wings of each aircraft. That meant the Hurricanes had been in action; if they had not, the little canvas patches glued over the ports to prevent the guns from freezing at altitude would still have been in place.

  There were other signs of action, too. The first Hurricane to land had fabric stripped from its rear fuselage. It taxied past the mess tent on its way to the dispersal and the pilot gave Edmonds and Armstrong a thumbs-up sign.

  One by one the other Hurricanes came in to land. Armstrong counted twelve — the full squadron. Trucks carrying ground crews followed the aircraft to their dispersals; one of them collected the pilots and brought them to the tent, where they hungrily launched an attack on the food set aside for them. The squadron int
elligence officer arrived from somewhere and began to interrogate them as they ate.

  “Got a 110,” said a tall young pilot officer who was the pilot of the first Hurricane to land. “Damn’ near got me first, though. Cannon shell went right through the fuselage and exploded on the other side. Gave me a hell of a fright. Then he overshot and pow! I had him.”

  The remark gave Armstrong cause to ponder on the robustness of the Hurricane. If the cannon shell had hit a Spitfire, which had an all-metal fuselage as opposed to the Hurricane’s structure of canvas-covered wooden spars, it would most probably have exploded inside and blown the tail off.

  Armstrong would have liked to talk to the Hurricane pilots, but he reminded himself that he had a job to do. A refuelling bowser had been parked next to his Spitfire for some time; now, its task completed, it moved off towards the recently-landed Hurricanes.

  A corporal on a bicycle came pedalling across the airstrip and, after ascertaining that Armstrong was the Spitfire’s pilot, informed him that it was topped up with fuel and ready to fly. Armstrong saw that a couple of ground crew were standing beside the aircraft, having pushed over a trolley-accumulator from one of the Hurricane dispersals. It was time to be off.

  Edmonds gave him a lift back across the field and watched as Armstrong climbed onto the Spitfire’s wing, having completed the necessary formalities with the ground crew and walked round the aircraft to ensure that everything was in place. The pilot swung his leg over the cockpit side-flap and lowered himself into the seat, the parachute forming a cushion under him. He did up its straps, making sure that they were good and tight, and closed the cockpit flap before fastening the seat harness. He carried out his pre-start checks, gave a signal to the ground crew, then pressed the twin starter buttons. Ahead of him, the propeller gave a few slow turns and then dissolved into a blur as the engine coughed into life in a cloud of blue smoke. One of the airmen unplugged the starter battery, closed the flap on the side of the engine cowling and gave Armstrong the thumbs-up.

  The pilot mentally went through his cockpit checks: brakes, trim, flaps, contacts, pressure, petrol and radiator, all OK.

  A quick look round, a wave to Edmonds who was sitting astride his motorbike a few yards away. Handbrake off, a touch of throttle and the Spitfire began to roll forward, bumping slowly across the grass, rolling on its narrow-track undercarriage as Armstrong applied coarse left and right rudder alternately, yawing the long nose from side to side to clear the blind spot directly in front of it. He wrinkled his nose; the cockpit reeked of glycol coolant as usual.

  He made a final cockpit check as he taxied out and turned into wind, getting a green light from the concrete hut that served as flying control. RAFTS. R for retractable undercarriage, green light on. A for airscrew in fine pitch. F for flaps up. T for trim, just a little aft of centre on the wheel in the cockpit. S for Sperry gyro, caged. Another quick look round; nothing above and behind. He slowly opened the throttle, sending the Spitfire lurching forward across the field. Stick forward to lift the tail, but not too far or the propeller blades would dig into the ground.

  The Spitfire bounced two or three times and then became airborne. Armstrong turned, trimmed the aircraft to climb, then held the stick between his knees as he used one hand to pump up the undercarriage, the other resting securely on the throttle lever. The Mk II Spitfire, which was equipping Fighter Command’s frontline squadrons, had an automatic undercarriage retraction system, but not so the Mk I, which included his photo-recce PR Mk IB.

  With the undercarriage safely retracted, Armstrong settled down for the long climb towards the Belgian frontier, which he planned to cross at 15,000 feet north-east of Montmedy. He then intended to descend, building up speed for a fast seventy-mile run across the Ardennes to Dinant, photographing road junctions where concentrations of enemy vehicles would be likely to show up.

  Presently, the broad ribbon of the Meuse crept beneath the Spitfire’s wings. He was scanning the sky constantly now, aware that to anyone flying higher up, his blue-painted aircraft would stick out like a sore thumb against the greens and browns of the landscape. He passed Montmedy and continued on his present course for a while, turning left when he picked up the railway line that ran from Luxembourg to Namur. There seemed to be a lot of smoke rising from the ground away to the right, but he could not see what was causing it.

  He forced himself to concentrate on the task in hand, rolling his head constantly to monitor the danger area above and behind, then searching the ground ahead for signs of enemy activity. His first objective was Neufchateau and he map-read his way towards it, taking the Spitfire down in a shallow dive as he approached the ancient town, which was situated on some heights with roads radiating from it in all directions.

  Armstrong sped over the town at 5,000 feet, tilting his aircraft in order to obtain a vertical photograph; the camera, mounted in the fuselage side, was designed for oblique photography, and pointed down at an angle of thirteen degrees. No ground fire came up at him, for which he was thankful; he had anticipated being shot at by friendly ground forces as well as by the enemy, for the Spitfire’s silhouette was not exactly familiar in these parts.

  His relief was short-lived. A few miles further on, about halfway between Neufchateau and Bastogne, intense small-arms fire rose to meet him; he was soon clear of it, but he knew that his aircraft had taken several hits in the wings and fuselage. He could not believe that the enemy had advanced this far already, and could only assume that he had been the target of friendly fire.

  As it happened, he was wrong. It was his ill-luck to have flown slap over the top of a German airborne force which had landed at this point in the Belgian Ardennes in the early hours of the morning, just as the gliders were going down on the fortress of Eben Emael. In fact there had been two such operations. In the first, twenty-five Fieseler Storch army co-operation aircraft, renowned for their short take-off and landing performance, had deposited 125 volunteers of the German 34th Infantry Division near Esch-sur-Alzette on the Franco-Luxembourg border. The task of the detachment was to hold the crossroads at Esch until General Heinz Guderian’s Panzers arrived. The Storchs made two sorties, and by first light the task force was in position. One of the Germans’ first contacts was a bewildered gendarme, who politely informed them that they were on neutral territory and asked them to leave. Equally as politely, they arrested him. There were no further incidents before the German ground forces arrived, and by 0900 the forward elements of the 1st Panzer Division had reached the Belgian frontier after crossing the whole of Luxembourg with hardly a shot fired.

  The more northerly operation ran along similar lines. Here, two assault groups, comprising the 3rd Battalion of the elite Grossdeutsehland Regiment and a special volunteer force, some 400 men in all, were landed at Nives and Witry, midway between Neufchateau and the towns of Bastogne and Martelange. Their task was to keep the roads to Neufchateau open for the passage of Guderian’s tanks, which would then press on towards their main objective: the River Meuse, and the town of Sedan.

  The operation, code-named Niwi, began at 0420 that morning, when 98 Storchs carrying 196 troops took off from Bitburg and Deckendorf and headed for their objectives. Everything did not go entirely as planned. Although the first formation of 56 Storchs landed their troops at Witry on schedule, the Nives group of 42 aircraft became badly scattered, and some of the Storchs landed as much as nine miles from their objective. It was not until the early afternoon that the two assault groups were able to link up, and it was at precisely this time and place that Armstrong had flown overhead.

  A short while later the Storchs brought in the second half of the force, which enabled the Germans to beat off attacks by Belgian and French troops until Guderian’s armour arrived later that day.

  Three or four miles past Witry, Armstrong knew that something was wrong. His oil pressure was rising alarmingly, and it was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm in the cockpit. His instruments told him that his engine was overheating, and
he knew that he was going to have to break off the sortie.

  He turned back towards the Franco-Belgian border, intent on finding an airfield on the other side. Throttling back as much as he dared, he found that he could just maintain his present altitude. He flew steadily on, smelling his engine growing hotter and hotter all the while, knowing that he was going to have to get down soon or risk the consequences. With an enormous gush of relief he saw the Meuse up ahead, and a few minutes later picked up a town which he identified as Mezières. Searching the area, he found what he was looking for; a light green patch which his trained eyes told him was an airfield.

  He judged the wind direction by reference to drifting smoke on the ground and began his approach, operating the undercarriage lever. Nothing happened, except that a red light winked at him mockingly from the instrument panel. Hydraulics shot up, he thought fleetingly. There was no time to worry; only time to act, and act quickly. The oil temperature was nearly off the clock and smoke was trailing from the engine exhaust stubs, growing denser by the second.

  He tightened his harness straps and lowered the seat as far as it would go in order to protect his head if the aircraft should flip over on its back. Sliding the hood back, he locked it in position; air rushed into the cockpit and he suddenly realised that he was bathed in a clammy sweat. The smoke from the exhaust stubs was now shot with glowing sparks and glycol fumes were beginning to invade the cockpit.

  He was over the airfield boundary now. Vivid details imprinted themselves on his mind; twin-engined aircraft, some intact, some wrecked, dotted here and there among bomb craters. Look for a clear patch ahead. He’d forgotten to do something. Christ! With a hand that was far from steady, he switched off the battered engine and cut off the fuel supply. Far from dying away, the smoke now belching from the exhaust stubs increased in volume.