‘That was bloody hairy,’ said Pieter over the interphone.
Hans was the first to reply. ‘Whose piece-of-shit idea was that?’
‘Well it’s not like we had a lot of choice,’ Max replied wearily. ‘Given the way things turned out, it was lucky we did.’
‘I’m sure there must’ve been an easier way,’ grunted Hans.
Stef’s voice piped up. ‘Sir, I’ve been doing -’
‘For Christ’s sake, Stef, you can call me Max now.’
‘Yeah,’ added Pieter, ‘I reckon you’ve earned that by now, Baby Bear.’
‘Ahh, shit, Pieter, can you stop calling me that!’ answered Stef, his boyish voice rising angrily.
Max nodded. ‘Cut him some slack, eh?’
‘Thanks, sir . . . Max.’
Pieter cast a sideways glance at him. ‘Aha . . . the boy’s finally learning.’
‘He’s old enough to fiddle with his balls and scratch his arse now,’ Hans added helpfully.
‘Hans, you’d know, wouldn’t you?’ said Stef.
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘You’re always scratching and rubbing your arse.’
‘Not all the time!’
‘Errr . . . you do, Hans; we’ve all seen you at it. You can never leave your arse alone,’ contributed Pieter.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t sniff your fingers afterwards.’
‘Yeah? Well, you little red-haired weasel-boy, when we’re done today I’m going to ram my fist down your throat, then you can taste it for yourself and see.’
The rest of his crew laughed lightly. Max smiled; it was good to hear the banter pass to and fro between them once more. It had been a while since he’d heard them fool around like that. He looked out of his side window to see Schröder’s fighter out to one side maintaining a steady position a hundred yards out from their port wing-tip.
He switched to radio. ‘How’re things with you, Schröder?’
‘Fine . . . fine.’ His voice sounded flat, neutral. He knew Schröder was dwelling on those of his men he had lost back on the ground. Certainly they had not long been acquainted, and in no way was it the pilot’s fault that they had been caught in that explosion. But as the leader of a group of men it was his burden to feel responsible for them.
‘That was a close-run thing,’ said Max.
‘Yes, very hectic.’
‘I’m sorry. You lost a lot of good men, Schröder.’
‘Yes . . . the best.’
‘That’s never easy.’
‘No.’
Schröder didn’t elaborate, but Max knew he was replaying the appalling scene in his mind. The churning sea of flames, those men flailing slowly in agony . . . unpleasantly slowly. When he replayed that image in his mind, it struck him that some of those poor bastards had been struggling for thirty seconds before they’d succumbed. It had probably been one of the worst things he’d ever witnessed during this war. And that was saying a lot.
‘We needed to make that stop, it was necessary, Schröder.’
‘You think so?’
‘If it hadn’t been for that airfield, this mission would be over. That would have been an end to it. We’d never have made it across on the fuel we had.’
‘Well, maybe, we’ll see if it’s all been worth it when you’ve dropped your bomb,’ Schröder replied tersely.
Right now it sounded like he wanted to be left to himself.
Max couldn’t blame him. In the sky, one on one with a squadron of American fighter pilots flying their superior P51s, Schröder and his men had magnificently displayed their skill, their experience and courage, taking only one casualty while inflicting nine. On the ground, amidst the confusion, he had lost nearly all of his men to a single well-aimed bullet.
‘What’s your fuel situation?’
‘Not bad . . . let me talk with Günter and Will.’
Just three of the fighters had managed to make it off the ground, bursting through the wall of flames above the fuel truck, only seconds behind them. Just three. If they came across another squadron, Max didn’t fancy their chances.
‘We all have about the same amount of fuel, approximately a quarter of a tank each . . . we didn’t have time on the ground to fill up properly.’
‘That gives you about two hundred miles before you need to go back. I’ll have Stef call out a warning at one hundred, one-fifty and final warning at one-seventy-five.’
Schröder was some time responding, but he eventually came back just as Max was about to repeat his last message. ‘Fine.’
Max had suspected the landing was going to be risky. They all had. But none of them suspected it would be that bad. Rall, starved of good local intelligence, had been forced to make an assumption that there would not be troops stationed close enough to respond so quickly to the airstrip being taken.
It had been bad luck. Koch’s men had done well to keep the Americans at bay for so long. He hoped the young captain had managed to bail out of that fuel truck before it went up.
‘Max!’ Hans shouted over the interphone. ‘We’ve got some coming in on our four o’clock!’ Pieter leaned forward and looked out of his window, craning his neck to look backwards.
‘He’s right, looks like about six or seven of them, fighters . . . I can’t see what type.’
‘Okay, Pieter, this time you better take the bombardier’s gun. Stef?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘I want you on the waist-gun. Hans, you’re on the tail-gun. ’
Hans had trained himself to use the tail-gun, which was the only gun that had not been replaced with MG-81s, and remained duel Brownings. ‘Training’ had been little more than reading the tail-gunner section of the B-17 Flight Crew Manual and firing off a few dozen rounds of the limited supply of 0.5 inch ammo the plane carried. But he was ready to use it in anger now.
It was sensible for Stef to be in the comparatively safer waist-gun position, with fuel and range now the most crucial variable of the mission; he needed their navigator alive and well to ensure the most efficient route across. They could scarcely afford to lose him and drift valuable miles off course.
Or maybe he was just trying to keep the young lad out of harm’s way.
Both Hans and Stef confirmed their orders and began to scramble to their positions.
‘Schröder, bandits, four high.’
‘We’ve seen them. Listen, we will have to engage them close to you, so that you can bring your guns to bear on them. My men and I are low on ammunition.’
Schröder was right. They stood a better chance if the dogfighting went on within range of the B-17’s gun positions - the bomber’s guns had plenty of ammo to burn, and the additional firepower would go at least some way towards levelling the playing field.
Max debated whether to lock the plane with the autopilot and man the forward-gun position. He had fired an MG-81 several times, but was, by no stretch of the imagination, a good shot. He might not hit anything, but the additional firepower couldn’t hurt. But then, if the plane took damage to any of the engines or flaps, there would need to be someone in control to react immediately.
He decided he would be better remaining in his seat.
‘Schröder, we jettisoned our belly gun and our starboard waist-gun, you need to lead them in on our port side, or to the rear of the plane, to get the benefit of our guns. Have you got that?’ he called to Schröder.
‘Uh-huh. I’ll try. Good luck.’
Max switched back to the interphone. ‘This one’s going to be nasty. We’ve only three of our little friends looking after us, and six of them coming in. Schröder and his men are bringing the fight close to us so that we can back them up with our guns. Hans? You in position yet?’
‘Yeah, just about,’ he grunted as he squeezed his large frame into the cramped confines of the tail-gunner’s position.
‘Hans,’ called Pieter, ‘any tips for me and Stef?’
‘Yeah . . . yeah, just make sure you draw
a good lead. Ten yards in front of the target for every two hundred yards target range. Fire in bursts no longer than two seconds, the heat causes the guns to lock.’
‘Thanks, you big ape. Make sure you save some for me and Stef.’
Max decided to quieten them down. ‘Let’s keep the comm. clear. I want to hear sightings and confirmed kills, nothing else until we’re out of this.’
His crew murmured assent.
A moment later, Hans’s voice came across loudly. ‘I can see ’em now. Spitfires! Goddamn Spitfires! Three of them are engaging our boys, three splitting off and coming for us!’
Oh shit . . . here we go again.
Chapter 48
Mission Time: 6 Hours, 24 Minutes Elapsed
180 miles across the Atlantic
Schröder pulled up steeply and rolled to his left as the three bandits rose up to meet them. He found himself laughing aloud. This was good, old-style dogfighting. One on one, the sort of duelling he had excelled in during the early days of the war.
He quickly scanned the sky to grab a snapshot of the entire skirmish, momentarily placing all nine other aircraft taking part in this particular exchange.
‘Pull these buggers after us down and to the left, and we’ll lead them close to Max’s lads,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice calm and measured.
‘Yes sir,’ both other fighter pilots replied.
The three Me-109s rolled over and dived down towards the left, one tidily behind the other like the carriages of a train. They raced past the three Spitfires still rising to meet them and all six planes fired speculative bursts in the hope of scoring some early damage. Several hundred bullets whistled angrily through the air between the two formations of advancing planes.
None of them hit anything.
Schröder’s guns clattered uselessly as the last of his ammo belts fed through.
I’m out.
He realised all he could do for now was play bait for the Spitfires and lure them in as close as he dared towards the bomber’s guns. As Schröder and his men descended to a position several hundred yards behind and to the left of the B-17, the Spitfires mirrored their arc of descent and followed their route around and down. Within a few fleeting seconds they would be lined up behind the Me-109s and in a perfect position to start shredding pieces off them.
Meanwhile, the other three British fighter planes were ascending towards the bomber from the right. Schröder hoped that Max’s boys could see them approaching and had at least one gun trained on them as they came in.
Behind them, Schröder could sense the Spitfires falling into a comfortable tailing position, closing the gap swiftly. Any second now he expected them to commence fire, but not yet. From their tidy manoeuvring he suspected these pilots were experienced. They would want to pull in a little closer before firing to guarantee a more effective opening salvo and avoid wasting rounds. A sensible ploy, but not without its downside, as Schröder had learned from experience. Many a time an enemy plane had escaped him, scrambling out from beneath the lethal gaze of his crosshair because he’d waited a second too long to get a better, cleaner, closer shot.
He hoped those Spitfires behind them were making the same mistake, holding off one or two seconds too long to get a guaranteed kill with the first volley.
Time to move.
‘On my command . . . Günter, Will, break right and left, I’ll lead the first of them in,’ he called out.
‘Break!’ he shouted a second later.
Both flanking Me-109s rolled in opposite directions and dived, and two of the Spitfires followed in hot pursuit leaving one doggedly following Schröder as he veered to the right and subtly closed the gap, drawing it closer to the B-17. The unfortunate British fighter pilot was about to find out for himself what sort of damage the tail-gun of a Flying Fortress can deal out.
The bomber grew in size as Schröder led his pursuer in towards the rear of the plane. Just as he’d begun to suspect the tail-gunner was sleeping on the job, the duel barrels suddenly opened up, firing twin streaks of tracers into the empty space between Schröder and the British fighter. The bullets sped past in front of the Spitfire and drifted quickly back as the tail-gunner adjusted his lead. Half a dozen bullets found their mark along the right-hand side of the fighter’s fuselage and almost immediately a thin whisper of leaking oil trailed out from the Spitfire. The British pilot seemed unperturbed and calmly held position for a few seconds more before firing a burst of gunfire that clipped the tail of Schröder’s Messerschmitt.
Schröder pulled up sharply, hoping the Spitfire would follow suit and expose her underbelly to the bomber’s left-hand waist-gun, but instead the British pilot seemed already to have learned the error of his ways and pulled warily away from the bomber.
At the same time, the other three Spitfires that had split away to specifically target the bomber rose one after the other and raked the underside of the Flying Fortress as they climbed effortlessly past her. The belly of the bomber shed a small shower of fragments that twisted and spun away below her.
As the three fighter planes streamed up past him to his right, less than fifty yards away, Max fleetingly caught sight of one of the British pilots, twisting round in his seat to look back at the bomber as they climbed up into the sky and prepared to come around for another pass.
For some reason they both nodded courteously at each other.
Pieter spun the bombardier’s gun upwards and fired a largely ineffective volley at the last of the three planes, his aim insufficiently in advance of his target, the bullets flew harmlessly behind it. Max heard Pieter cursing angrily over the comm.
‘Pieter! . . . shut up!’ he found himself shouting.
‘Sorry,’ he answered sheepishly.
Schröder still had that stubborn bastard on his tail. He was good. The Spitfire was proving bloody hard to shake off. Once again he quickly scanned the sky, attempting to grab another updated snapshot of their little skirmish.
He could see one of the Me-109s trailing a thick pall of black smoke and descending in a shallow dive away from the party and down towards the sea in an easterly direction. Schröder couldn’t tell if it was Will or Günter. Whoever it was, he presumably was heading back to France in the futile hope that the plane would get him all the way back to land.
One of the Spitfires was also spouting smoke, with the other 109 in hot pursuit. As he watched, the Spitfire was caught by a further well-aimed burst that carved through the starboard wing like a saw through dry wood. A short trail of tumbling debris was left in the plane’s wake. Suddenly, the wing ripped off and the plane instantly rolled over and commenced a slow spiralling dive towards the sea.
One of ours and one of theirs.
They needed to do better than that. Schröder pulled his plane up and once more led the obstinate British pilot behind him towards the rear of the bomber again, hoping that whichever one of Max’s lads was manning that position could work his magic once again and land a dozen more shots on target.
The three Spitfires that had successfully raked the underside of the bomber had so far been untroubled by either the Me-109s or any fire from the bomber. They turned around in a graceful arc above the B-17 and were now approaching from the front, head on, in a steep predatory dive.
Max looked up in horror as he realised they were lining up to make the cockpit their next target.
‘Pieter! Three of them coming fast, twelve-high!’
He imagined what three Spitfires in a tightly formed train, each firing about five seconds worth of .303 millimetre rounds one after the other into the small, enclosed space of the cockpit, would do to him and the plane.
‘Pieter! Do you see them!’ he called again, this time his voice breaking nervously.
Max could do little but watch their rapid approach. He could pull the bomber into a climb, push her into a dive or roll the plane left or right, but he knew the plane was so slow to manoeuvre that there would be no way they’d avoid the incoming fighters. All he’
d be doing would be putting his gunners off balance.
‘I see ’em Max, I see ’em!’
Pieter swung his gun up and carefully lined the gun sight with the first of the three planes. Ten yards for every two hundred range.
He pulled his aim down slightly, anticipating the continued path of the leading Spitfire. ‘Come on, you little bastards,’ he muttered to himself.
The plane in the lead was holding his shot until the very last moment, two hundred feet away and still Max waited with a face screwed up with anticipation for the first high-calibre round to strike home and begin the process of shredding him and the front of the plane to pieces.
Suddenly, he saw the muzzle flash of the fighters’ six guns blazing and tracer lines began to lance down through the air just short of the bombardier’s compartment in front of the plane.
At the same instant from the compartment below, Max heard Pieter open fire.
Both Pieter and the pilot appeared to have overdone their target-lead, but in the few seconds that were left before the bomber’s cockpit resembled nothing more than the chewed-up knuckle of a dog’s bone, Pieter was going to have to pull his aim up and hit the Spitfire first.
‘For fuck’s sake, draw in the lead!’ Max shouted with desperate frustration as the fighter found the nose of the plane and dozens of rounds punctured holes through the metal plate above the bombardier’s compartment and below the cockpit.
He winced as loose shards of debris rattled around in the compartment below him with bullet-like velocity. Pieter surely had to have been hit by some of that, a bullet or shrapnel. But he could hear the gun still firing. Max watched as the tracer lines from Pieter’s gun rose up from below and found their target.
The duel MG-81s, firing a steady line of tracers, shattered the cockpit glass of the leading Spitfire and the fighter plane ceased its firing immediately, speeding down, missing the nose of the bomber by mere feet. Pieter continued firing towards the same point in space, knowing that the second and third fighters were lined up directly behind where the first one had been. The two other Spitfires cautiously avoided the solid line of fire coming up towards them and broke in different directions, roaring past the cockpit on either side, their attacking dive foiled this time.