Korean Combat (Yeoman Series) Page 4

  Yeoman spent most of the afternoon with the engineering officer, Flight Lieutenant John Burchall, who told him that one of the two-seat Meteor 7 trainers would be ready to fly the following morning. The other Meteors, he said, could be made airworthy at the rate of eight hours per aircraft. The ground crews were prepared to work in shifts around the clock to get the aircraft flying.

  ‘Well, don’t push ’em too hard,’ Yeoman told him. ‘If we can get the two Meteor 7s and a couple of the 8s airworthy before the end of this week, I’ll be quite happy. After all, we’ve only got six pilots at a time to cope with, and I want to check out all the instructors before we really get down to it.’

  Yeoman completed some paperwork and decided to take the rest of the day off; there would not be much chance of a rest later on. He gave himself a thorough workout in Iwakuni’s well-equipped gymnasium, showered and then went for a bicycle ride, accompanied by a USAF captain who had just arrived at Iwakuni and who was anxious to see something of the surrounding area. The two cycled down to West Iwakuni for a look at the Kintai Bridge, a very old and beautiful structure which, Yeoman had been informed, was famous throughout Japan. It spanned the swift-flowing Nishiki River, which bubbled down to the Inland Sea from the rugged hill country in the north-west; it was on the flat expanse of low-lying ground between the two arms of the Nishiki Delta that Iwakuni airfield was situated. The mass of bullrushes surrounding the delta provided a haven for water birds of a dozen kinds, and for those who enjoyed wildfowling there were mallards and snipe in abundance.

  Before long, the roads that ran along the banks of the Nishiki would be a riot of cherry blossom. Already, after such a short acquaintance, Yeoman was beginning to find Japan a land of beauty and delicacy; but Yeoman, a veteran of the European war, had never had to face Japan’s ruthless fighters. Those who had done so held a different view, and the hundred thousand crosses that lined the infamous Burma railroad testified to the savagery and brutality of her soldiers.

  There was no sign of that now, in Japan’s people. It was as though a supernatural hand had wiped the slate of their memory clean, replacing it with a subservience which those who had known the Japanese before found alien and unnerving. The whole Japanese nation seemed to have accepted its defeat with a stoic philosophy a westerner found almost impossible to comprehend; but Yeoman could not help wondering whether, if circumstances were ever altered in the future, the peasants who paused in their toil in the paddy fields beside the road to smile politely at the two cyclists might just as readily reassume a mask of ferocity.

  They returned to the mess and had a drink in the bar, then Yeoman excused himself and went to his quarters to read Julia’s letter before dinner. His quarters were spotless; two Japanese ‘girl-sans’ descended on them each day, dusting and polishing. Yeoman had one bad habit which had constantly infuriated his former batman, a Scot named McGann, who was now out of the Air Force and running a pub in Glasgow; the pilot seemed quite incapable of hanging up any item of clothing, or of hitting the laundry box that stood in a corner of the room with his dirty shirts and underwear.

  ‘Sorr,’ the dour McGann had told him on numerous occasions, ‘Ye’re bluidy room’s a bluidy pigsty, sorr.’

  At Iwakuni, it didn’t seem to matter. No sooner did Yeoman step out of his clothes than one of the girl-sans appeared out of nowhere and removed them, to return them later in the day, laundered and pressed. All the officers and NCOs at Iwakuni got the same treatment, and in return-for the girls were not paid very highly for their efforts-they left little presents of chocolate and cigarettes lying on their bedside lockers. One or two of the prettier girls, it must be said, got more of a present than they bargained for, and were quietly spirited off the base, visibly swelling round the middle. The airmen responsible were tongue-lashed by their commanding officers, lectured by the Medical Officer on the merits of using the products of various rubber companies, and quickly posted elsewhere. The girls in question received an allowance from the Families Fund, and usually lived happily ever after.

  The letter from Julia brought a brief feeling of homesickness to Yeoman. She and the child could have come to Japan with him, but Julia had decided to stay in England, at their Wiltshire home. She had been with him in Malaya, and knew that the presence of a wife close at hand could impose a dangerous extra strain on a husband under active service conditions.

  Her letter was full of homely things, of how she and June were planning to visit Yeoman’s father in Yorkshire when the weather took a turn for the better, of how Hermann the cat-which Yeoman had rescued and adopted on a German airfield, a starving kitten, six years earlier-continued to thrive. It was the kind of letter Yeoman needed; a letter full of unspoken reassurance that all was well at home, leaving him with nothing to worry about except his own welfare.

  He read it through twice, then sat in a reminiscent mood for a while, smoking his pipe, then walked across to the main mess building for dinner. The American major, with whom he had gone cycling earlier, told him that there was a party in one of the USAF squadron’s crew rooms and asked him if he would like to go, but Yeoman excused himself on the grounds that he was flying early the next morning and, after a couple more drinks, went to bed.

  The following morning, immediately after breakfast, he telephoned the Meteor Conversion Flight and found that a Meteor 7 was ready to fly, as the engineer officer had predicted. Dumping his flying kit in the jeep that had been assigned to him, he drove round to No. 99 Wing Headquarters and picked up Group Captain Trayce; the latter had never flown a Meteor before, and Yeoman had promised to check him out.

  Yeoman found that the ground crews appeared to have done an extra job of work on the Meteor, which carried the Australian serial number A493-300; its aluminium skin gleamed and the long cockpit canopy sparkled in the morning sun. The morning was crisp and clear, with only a few wisps of high cloud to mar the sky, so they could really put the Meteor through her paces.

  Warrant Officer Adams showed Yeoman the Form 700, the technical log that recorded snags on individual aircraft; there were none, so Yeoman checked round the aircraft and then signed the form. Then he and Trayce put on their flying overalls and climbed aboard the machine, the Group Captain settling himself into the front cockpit.

  Unlike the single-seat Mk 8, the Meteor 7 was not fitted with ejection seats. Cheerfully, Yeoman explained to Trayce:

  ‘I’ve put you in the front, sir, because I’m told that if we have to get out of a Mk 7, the chap in the front usually hits the tailplane. Actually, the drill is to jettison the hood, then roll inverted with our harness undone, whereupon we fall out, with a bit of luck.’

  He ran through the cockpit checks with the group captain, then went through the engine starting procedure, looking round first to ensure that no personnel or loose objects were in the vicinity of either the intakes or the wake of the jet pipes. When both Derwent turbojets were running smoothly at 5,000 rpm, and the engine checks completed, he called the control tower, using the latter’s military callsign for security reasons.

  ‘Blackfoot, this is Anzac Baker One. Taxi clearance?’

  'Anzac Baker One, you are clear to taxi. The QFE is one zero one four.’

  Yeoman gave a thumbs-up to the ground crew, who had unplugged the ground starter battery that was used to supply electric power for turning the turbines, and opened the throttles. The Meteor moved forward a few yards, stopped briefly as Yeoman tested the brakes, then moved on again, turning on to the taxi strip. He let Trayce handle the aircraft, coaching him as they went along.

  ‘Take care not to open and close the throttles too frequently, sir, or we’ll get excessive jet pipe temperatures and maybe an engine surge. Keep it smooth; she takes time to respond to throttle opening, and you’ll need to use the brakes when we turn.’

  The Meteor reached the end of the runway and turned on to the long strip, Yeoman instructed Trayce to taxi forward for a few yards to straighten the nosewheel. Then, with the brakes on, the engines were
run up to take-off rpm while the two occupants checked the instruments prior to take-off.

  ‘Okay, sir, ‘Yeoman said, ‘let’s go. Open the throttles smoothly to take-off rpm. That’s fine. She won’t swing, so there’s no need to worry about that.’

  The Meteor gathered speed smoothly, accelerating much more slowly than a piston-engined type.

  ‘Wait till she reaches 70 knots,’ Yeoman instructed, ‘then ease back the stick. Not too far … that’s it. The nosewheel needs to be just clear of the ground, and then she’ll fly off the ground at about 100 knots.’

  At just over that speed, the Meteor rose reluctantly into the air.

  ‘Okay. A quick touch on the brakes to stop the wheels spinning, then undercarriage up. Flaps up. Good. Hold her down until she reaches 155 knots, then start the climb. Best climbing speed is 210. Right; let’s have a left turn along the Inland Sea, and enjoy the view. We’ll go up to twenty thousand.’

  The view as they climbed was superb. Below them lay the Inland Sea, with its dozens of green islands; on their left the whole vista of southern Honshu, and on their right the island of Shikoku.

  They reached twenty thousand feet and Yeoman sat contentedly in the rear cockpit while Trayce got accustomed to the new experience of flying a jet. In fact, it was some time since the group captain had flown anything, apart from the occasional light aircraft, but he handled the Meteor with a natural ease and, once he had got the hang of things, went into an aerobatic sequence with crisp, precise control movements.

  They landed after an hour, both thoroughly satisfied with the way the aircraft had handled, and taxied in to the Conversion Flight’s dispersal. As they walked into the crew room, still discussing the merits of the Meteor, three men rose to their feet, hurriedly setting aside the mugs from which they had been drinking.

  ‘Ah,’ said Yeoman, ‘you must be the rest of the team.’ They made mutual introductions; Yeoman already knew the names of the newly-arrived instructors-Flight Lieutenants Benson and Sanderson, and Flight Sergeant Cowley — but now he could fit faces to them. All of them had good flying records, and a considerable amount of instructional time.

  He checked out all of them on the Meteor 7 later that day, then briefed them all thoroughly on the way he wanted the flying programme to be handled. The first six students had been sent off for forty-eight hours to the fleshpots of Tokyo; they would be back the next day, by which time the second Mk 7 should be ready.

  Yeoman had not realized it until now, but the sudden appearance of the twin-jet Meteor over Iwakuni had attracted a great deal of interest. The Conversion Flight began to receive a constant stream of visitors, ranging from USAF personnel to war correspondents; the RAF staff politely told both that they were not allowed to release any information about the Meteor’s performance, although they did permit some of the Americans to sit in the Mk 7’s cockpit and promised them a ‘ride’ at some future date, if it was within their power.

  The next day, however, something happened that caused the interest of the bases’s personnel to shift elsewhere. At two in the afternoon, as the first Australians were about to make their first flights in the two Meteor 7s, a sudden loud crack, like a short clap of thunder, startled everyone on the airfield and brought personnel rushing out into the open, thinking that an aircraft had crashed.

  They were just in time to see a silver dart, steaking across the airfield high up against the blue, preceded by its sonic boom as it pulled out of its dive. It sped across the sky in complete silence, to be followed moments later by the scream of its engine.

  Losing height steadily, it passed over the Inland Sea and then turned, a faint speck in the distance, until it was heading towards Iwakuni’s runway. It made a smooth touchdown, identifiable now as a North American F-86 Sabre, and taxied over to the Meteor Conversion Flight. The pilot of the sleek, swept-wing jet shut down his engine and climbed from the cockpit. He strolled towards Yeoman and the others, who were looking at the Sabre’s clean lines with envy written on their faces, and removed his flying helmet, grinning.

  ‘Just thought you’d like to take a look at a real airplane,’ he said.

  The pilot was Jim Callender.

  Chapter Four

  ALL OF THEM-AMERICANS AND RAAF PERSONNEL ALIKE-HAD been waiting for this moment for weeks, and they were not disappointed. High over Iwakuni, Meteor and Sabre twisted and turned, their silvery wings glittering in the sun, as two of the most experienced fighter pilots in the world pitted their wits and skills against each other.

  It was now mid April, and six weeks since the work of converting the Australians to the Meteor had begun. All of them had soloed on the single-seat Meteor 8, and the last batch were completing their gunnery training, carrying out strafing attacks on a small uninhabited island in the Inland Sea and air firing exercises against a drogue towed behind a converted A-26 light bomber, loaned for the purpose by the USAF. Soon, the two Australian squadrons would fly their battle-weary Mustangs for the last time, returning to Japan to become fully operational on the Meteor.

  Sweltering in their cockpits, their nerves and reactions razor-sharp, it had not taken long for Yeoman and Callender to get the measure of one another. It was Callender’s second visit to Iwakuni since the beginning of March; his fighter wing was already fully equipped with Sabres, and had already been in action against the MiGs over the Yalu. He had come over again at Yeoman’s request so that the two pilots could assess the relative combat merits of Meteor and Sabre.

  Against the Sabre in a straight and level run or in a long dive, Yeoman had already discovered, the Meteor had no chance; the American jet was at least 100 mph faster. However, Yeoman had also found that the Meteor had two important assets for survival; a sustained climb that the Sabre could not match, and the ability to turn tighter than its opponent. Nevertheless, Yeoman was worried. There was little point in matching the Meteor against the MiG-15 if the British fighter was forced to fight on the defensive all the time; a whole new range of tactics would have to be very carefully worked out.

  The two pilots were about to embark on another high-speed run when the voice of the Iwakuni controller came over the radio, requesting them to land immediately. Wondering what was going on, they broke off their trials and went down to land, Yeoman’s slower Meteor following Callender’s Sabre.

  They found that an urgent briefing had been called for all pilots. They were addressed by the USAF colonel commanding Iwakuni, and he told a grim story.

  It was known that since early April 700,000 troops, most of them Chinese, had been deployed in North Korea. There were thirty-six Chinese divisions on a line between the Imjin River and the Hwachon Reservoir, and twelve more deployed eastwards between the reservoir and the Sea of Japan. To the west of the reservoir, four Communist army groups were in position along a 75-mile front as far as Musan. Facing them, all along the front, the United Nations forces were outnumbered by three to one.

  ‘At dawn this morning,’ the grim-faced colonel said, ‘the enemy launched a major offensive. They attacked, and are continuing to attack, with wave after wave of troops, and are seemingly heedless of casualties.

  ‘First reports indicate that the main weight of the attack has fallen against the weakest part of the United Nations line, which is held by the 6th Republic of Korea Infantry Division. This, we believe, is being chopped to pieces. The result is that a dangerous gap is being created between the two American units on either flank, compelling them to pull back in a defensive shield north of Seoul.’

  The colonel looked directly at Yeoman and the Australians, and went on: ‘In both east and west, British Commonwealth forces are heavily committed. On the eastern flank, we believe that the Chinese advance has already been checked by the 27th Commonwealth Brigade, with the result that the focal point of the battle is slowly switching to the west. According to the latest Intelligence reports, the Chinese have thrown six field armies into this sector, in a bid to break through to Seoul.’

  Yeoman looked at the m
ap on the wall behind the colonel, wondering what stood in the way of those hordes. He had not had time, recently, to catch up on the situation reports.

  The colonel went on to explain that the battered ground forces were screaming for air support, and that Fifth Air Force had ordered every available aircraft to be sent into action. That included the Australians.

  The Meteors had not yet been declared operational, and so could take no part in the coming action; in any case, they did not have sufficient range to make operations over Korea from Iwakuni a worthwhile proposition. But the piston-engined Mustangs did, and there were plenty of those on the airfield, including six Australian aircraft which were held in reserve to make good any losses suffered by the squadrons in Korea.

  But no orders came for the Australians and RAF pilots at Iwakuni to fly in action that day, even though their colleagues in Korea were fully committed to the battle. All they could do was kick their heels in frustration and watch a constant succession of USAF Shooting Stars take off for Korean targets, while Yeoman and Group Captain Trayce haunted the operations centre in an effort to find out what was happening.

  It seemed that the full force of the enemy offensive had fallen on the 29th British Infantry Brigade, which was defending the vital crossings over the Imjin River with only six thousand men. Some of the heaviest attacks had fallen on the 1st Battalion the Gloucester Regiment, which was dug in at a barren spot known as Hill 235, above the hamlet of Solma-ri.