We are back to escorting Mitchells and Bostons again but often above
solid cloud layer now and, at last, the bombs are falling into Germany. River and canal
lockgates, road bridges and railway marshalling yards receive attention, sometimes via
radar probing through cloud. On the way in, white, vertical condensation trails rising
ahead of us are V2s forming parabolas of death on their way, seeking people. Anyone.
Probably in Antwerp or London. One rocket landed on a soccer field and wiped out both army
teams near Antwerp. They carry a one ton warhead, lifting it at 2000 mph and coming down
at over 3000 mph so that, travelling beyond the speed of sound, there is a sonic boom as
well as an explosion on landing. The rocket engine flames must be immense but they sure
aren't warming the air up here at 16,000 feet. We have to rev up every five minutes to
clear the plugs of fouling, and fingers and feet are freezing.
High above us are the condensation trails of Fortresses streaming into
Germany. The smaller trails are their fighter escorts of Thunderbolts and Lightnings. I'll
bet the twin-boom Lightnings aren't doing any of their joyous cartwheels up there today.
German jets, twin-engined 262s, skirt around us occasionally, going
like the clappers. We have given up trying to catch them and they keep a respectful
distance when they see by our responses that we are alert.
The thrust through the Ardennes forest is becoming serious. Hitler's
plan is to take Antwerp, so dividing the British and American armies and taking our
nearest port for supplies supporting our northern thrust into Germany. It seems to be May
1940 all over again with a miniature Blitzkrieg at our weakest point, the twilight zone
between our northern and southern thrusts into the heart of the Reich. A gamble but their
numbers and speed have caught us by surprise and they are advancing under cloud cover.
It's all radar-aimed bombing now.
We keep sweeping around the St Vith area, however we are hampered by
fog. This is a better day as we escort 200 Lancasters and Halifaxes to administer some
heavy clout and it brings out a few ME 262s, but we fend them off. Futile to chase them.
December the 24th and the fog has lifted. Bombing is visual now and
they say that Jerry tanks are marooned through lack of petrol. They won't have a merry
Christmas in the Ardennes. The cooks do well by us, though. It is just another working day
for us. I guess that is what we are, not World War I individual fighter pilots but flying
workmen operating as a team. Touch wood, we will never have to keep flying through defeat
after defeat as the Luftwaffe is. How would 485 cope under conditions like that? I
suppose we would just keep on keeping on, making even more cynical and macabre jokes and
waiting for the end. Time is working for us. Victory by next summer for a certainty.
December the 29th. Clear weather now. We do a squadron sweep around the
Nijmegen-Rhine area with Owen Hardy leading. I have blue section on his starboard. I watch
the darkness just below the horizon. A favourite lurking area. A speck moves there and is
growing fast. A jet at 11 o'clock to us approaching to attack! Already at 9 o'clock to us
as I break the squadron port. Usually it is suicide to present one's tail to an attacking
fighter but with the squadron turning left they will be between me and the 262 as I turn
right. The Jerry and our Spitfires will be passing each other at 700 mph but with my
climbing in the turn, throttle open, the jet should speed through our gaggle and find me
flying parallel with him and above. That will startle him, or seeing a tangle of aircraft
turning towards him the Jerry pilot may not even have noticed the odd one turning right. I
could trump this German ace. Yes, the black crosses are sliding by me below, flying
straight and level. However fast his acceleration this jet will never outrun my cannon. He
must stay in range for 2 seconds. This dumb Kraut has had it.
Here goes the first jet shot down by a Spitfire 9. Nose down to follow
his certain dive. No! Hell! He's pulled up straight into the sun. I jerk back the stick
and he disappears into the white glare of my windscreen. I feel my speed falling off. A
glimpse of a wing knifing down the perspex of my hood. Stick thrust forward to follow but
the nose is reluctant to fall, slow even with bank and bottom rudder. The windscreen at
last traps the diving image; cannons chattering at last; the reflector sight has the
wingspan framed but the size of it compresses, shrinks into a far away toy. Black smoke
pours from both engines but I know it is a sign of health. How odd; the smell of burning
kerosene penetrates my cockpit and mask. My number two bobs up and formates. Robbie
followed my maverick turn and fired but neither of us can claim any damage.
An interesting experience. Salutary. Kiwi versus German eagle. Both
experienced. Both survived. Both learned something. A draw, I guess
A good sleep but something is horribly wrong. My watch says 10 past 9
and we are just coming to. The aerodrome is unserviceable through icing so we should have
been able to become serviceable ourselves - gently and slowly. Last night we saw the New
Year in, lubricating its passage, so we expected an uncomfortable awakening. But not as
startling as this.
Those engine sounds are unfamiliar - foreign. That chatter of cannon
fire means that we have been caught with our pyjama pants down. A good thing that the
walls of our house are thick stone. Even so I pull on some clothes behind a concrete
pillar. If these Jerries have bombs they will know the location of our Mess for a
certainty. Heads on pillows are turning and questioning. Stirrings, footsteps upstairs.
Shouts outside.
From the doorway to the cobbled street we see evil black smoke boiling
up in columns, rising above the rooftops. Jerry is blitzing the field half a mile away.
Has blitzed it. The 109s are overhead now, arrogantly circling, hoods open, waving. Down
the street civilians are waving back. Well, the Jerry pilots said they would return! From
an upstairs window a futile revolver pops. Johnny Pat in pyjamas appears, shoves his way
out into the street and takes outraged potshots with a Mauser carbine. Best we can do, our
Ack Ack troops have gone on ahead because we are shifting north in a day or two to
Gilze-Rijen.
Sitting ducks, our kites last night were left lined up in an L on the
tarmac. Lined up with parade ground precision. Totally exposed. Undefended. Jack Yeatman
and Mac Ralph are overnighting at another field but they are not likely to come back and
get stuck into this socialising lot. Our runway will be recorded as u/s at all our bases.
There are six 109s but they must be mostly out of ammunition so the odds would be OK if
their return coincided.
The CO has no tormenting targets now, they've waved the last auf
wiedersehn and scarpered off north into occupied Holland.
"Kingi, you're dressed, you had better trot off and see how the
groundcrew have come through this nonsense."
I pass our Army Political Officer who is galloping around town taking
the names and addresses of those who have been waving back too enthusiastically. A
painless job, fine-looking young women mostly. Jogging close to the roadside ditch I keep
a wary eye on the horizon. Puffing, I find the desolate stench growing stronger. Here are
our kites collapsed, still smoking, sagging tangles of blackened metal circled by clean
wingtips and tails. The full 90 gallon drop tanks of high octane have assisted the
cremation of the OUs painted on for more than identification - they were 485's banner
A dozen gone in one stroke. This has kicked in the slats of our 'damage done to losses
sustained' record
An occasional overheated ammo pop.. pop... startles me. Maybe that is
why there is no groundcrew visible? Yes, sensibly they are in the nearest ditch. Still
stunned and dazed. Almost incoherent but unhurt.
"We're all here. All OK" is the chorus.
"A good thing you made the ditch OK. Did you have any warning,
Chiefy?"
"Well, we saw these strange kites coming in low…"
"Thought they must be Yanks in Mustangs coming in."
"Aye, thought we'd see some fun when they landed on the ice."
"Then they turned in to fire..."
"Alf left the engine running and he ran. Ha!"
"We all scarpered. Two Six. Into the ditch. Into bomb holes."
"Our air supremacy! That's a laugh that is."
In the massive galvanised iron hangar there are three surviving,
untouched, being repaired. Owen Hardy's kite is parked in front, standing but riddled with
bullet holes. In the tyre is a copper-covered 8mm slug. I pull it out for a souvenir.
Pilots come. And questions - but no answers. Yet.
A lot of chatter with lunch. So we were not especially selected, the
word is that the attack was general over the northern sector as though Hitler is still
hypnotised by his ‘Antwerp for Christmas’ vision. Is the Luftwaffe coming to the
aid of the Ardennes party 15 days late? How were so many 109s and 190s put together when
they have been as scarce as hen's teeth since D-day?
The weather warms and the ice clears so we respond to a call to escort
Bostons bombing Zaltbomme bridge. We have Mac's and Jack's kites, the three survivors in
the hangar plus some Spitfires passing through and landing for refuelling. They are
press-ganged for the operation, our numbers completed by a couple borrowed from the
Belgians who weren't targeted. I take Z, my ash-heap Y-job will be replaced tomorrow, they
say.
At dinner we have a clearer picture. It was a really sneaky time to
attack before breakfast on New Year's morning so surprise was effected but of the 300
bandits plaguing us in the north 84 were shot down by Tactical Air Force and of the 600
that attacked the Yanks further south over 200 were shot down. Our squadron losses of
aircraft will be replaced tomorrow but Jerry's losses were, most significantly,
irreplaceable pilots. They say that some of the attacking pilots had very little ink in
their log books. A scratch team because so many experienced pilots have been put through
the mincers of Russia and the Med. A daft scheme, this attack, because the ratio of our
pilots to theirs is now loaded even more heavily against them. A desperate gamble, needed
perhaps, because a fortress mentality won't win the war for the Nazis; the Vl and V2 sites
will soon be overrun and their super submarines are coming off the slipways too late for
effective service now. It's too late, Adolf, too much military clout has flowed out of the
industrial muscle of America. Dad McNaughton was prophetic at New Plymouth when he said,
"We have got them in a bag:' Now too much high explosive is pouring down the mouth of
the bag for flesh and blood to resist. How much longer?
It must be worthwhile but the cost of the war, winning it and losing
it, will be somewhere between 15-30 million lives. Newspaper commentators make ghastly
guesses. Even though Stalin said that the cheapest and easiest thing to replace is human
life one wonders if it all makes sense at any level.
Just a few friends lost seems too much to me. In every bunch of mail,
sometimes in a pub conversation on leave, there is news of someone known, a friend, gone
for a Burton. Dad McNaughton was killed flying a Liberator, one said bombing an aerodrome,
another said dropping mines on the Danube to hinder traffic on that waterway. Horby was
killed in France leading a Polish flight, his Mustangs outnumbered. If I have to go it
would have been good to have gone with him.
I'm more likely to be potted by flak from the camp cook. It almost
happened. I remember, often now, returning alone to the beachhead and descending slowly
through low cloud, a little early by calculation in order not to let down into our balloon
barrage. Shock vision! The balloons were so far ahead I must be over the German lines! and
sure enough I had avoided Scylla but Charybdis exploded into red streams hosing around me
throughout the frantic climb back into cloud cover, pursuing me, following me, within a
wingspan, through every twist and turn.
Monty Montgomery bought it in Italy through the bad luck of having to
crash-land on rough ground after being shot up. He had done so well, too, getting a DFC.
Our targets become personal sometimes. Human. Stan Browne doesn't talk
about his shooting up of a train laden with S.S. troops in the Ardennes, even though our
Army HQ rejoiced. He and two Belgians found a funnel down through cloud with the train
framed in the gap. It was literally going west. The first firing run got rid of the AA
guns on the roof; the second put the penetrating cannon shells into carriages forcing the
troops to flee out the windows into the snow. Here the third run with machine guns mowed
them down. No comment in the logbook as though he is drawing a veil over the scene in his
mind.
Is all this killing having an effect upon our memories? Is the
brutality hardening us? Separating us from civilians at home at an emotional level? Is our
moving amidst life and death, pain and destruction, comradeship and loyalty, duty and the
overcoming of fear, the absorbing too much too young, making us more - or less -
sensitive?
We get our clipped-wing Spits just one day after the blitz and are back
in business, escorting Bostons to bomb Houfalize.
We are hushed with the loss of Al Stead and Frank Mathews. They are our
first casualties on ops for many months. Al rejoined us after Christmas, surviving the
kerfuffle over his shooting down the crazy Spitfire pilot attacking him and now, a
fortnight later, it is his turn. They attacked an engine on a siding in a wood but it was
a booby trap that was set off under them. Flying debris got them both, eventually. Al died
in his crash-landing and Frank baled out too low and struck the ground with his parachute
not fully open. Stan felt, flying with them, that they should have made it, damaged but
sounding OK on the RT.
Glen Miller produced my favourite music and now, organising for
entertainment of the troops, he has disappeared, mysteriously, on a plane off south-east
England. Shot down at night in one of our forbidden areas, perhaps.
And Rommel, I have heard, died of wounds after being shot up in his
jeep in France last October. Death everywhere.
I pack the two bottles of cognac carefully into my bedroll. Gunk sidled
up to me and slipped me the word that to double my money I should invest it in brandy here
and resell it in Holland. I can't be bothered, I say, but, no trouble, give him the money
and he will attend to purchase and reselling.
Fair enough. I pull the leather straps tight. Touch wood, they can't
come to any harm on the journey to Gilze-Rijen.
But in CHAPTER 25…they do! In the war, particularly near the end,
suffering from battle fatigue, I put a lot of faith in superstition. After a frightening
thought I would touch wood. I even took a twig to bed with me so that I could touch wood
in advance of haunting thoughts. Jesus freed me of that bondage. I found that the wood of
His Cross had more substance!