Air Strike Read online

  Air Strike

  Richard Townsend Bickers

  © Richard Townsend Bickers 1980

  Richard Townsend Bickers has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1980 by Robert Hale Ltd.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Extract from My Enemy Came Nigh by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Chapter One

  “I’d been airborne less than two minutes when those blasted Yanks opened up with everything they had.” Yule, his face normally as pink as a schoolboy’s under its desert tan, was red with indignation. He trembled with shock and anger, sweating in the Sicilian summer heat.

  Warren and Vincent, standing with him by the wreck of his Spitfire beside an olive grove, laughed loudly: the R.A.F. has an unconventional attitude to narrow escapes from violent death.

  The din of battle made the sultry air tremble. The Allied armies were fighting their way across Sicily from the beaches on which they had landed three days earlier. Artillery pounded, automatic weapons clattered, mortars thudded and bombs crumped at distances between a few hundred yards and several miles from where the three young pilots were grouped by the shot-down Spitfire.

  The snarl of aero engines was added to the noise of gunfire as Focke Wulf 190, Reggiane Ariete and Macchi C200 fighter-bombers of the Luftwaffe and the Italian Air Force strafed British and American positions; while Kittyhawks, Mustangs and Spitfires dived on German and Italian artillery, tanks and infantry with cannon, machine-guns and bombs.

  “Cheer up, Toby,” said Warren, big, blond and bland, always unhurried of speech and, except in combat, in his movements. “The slap-happy clots did it to me yesterday.”

  “And to me, the day before,” Vincent added, his eyes twinkling with his habitual look of a mischievous leprechaun, never still for more than a few seconds on his spindly legs. His foxy face under lank dark hair looked unhealthily sallow against the others’ tans: oatmeal was his darkest shade, however strong the sun.

  “But they didn’t shoot you down,” Yule pointed out. His unruly mouse-coloured hair and wide, guileless grey eyes made him look like a teenager who had just been dragged out of a rugger scrum. The impression was not entirely false, for he was a teenager, but the game he had been playing for the past twenty-two months was a more deadly one than rugby football.

  The squadron Intelligence officer, since he didn’t fly a Spitfire, did not feel entitled to treat the near-tragedy with the same levity. “It’s a bad show, Toby; but they’re as green as a bunch of novice nuns. They’ve come straight off their troopships from places like Nebraska and Tennessee where no one’s ever seen a Spitfire... probably never even head of one...”

  “And they’re panicky because they’re shit-scared,” Vincent added. He was habitually scabrous in his phraseology. He had bad breath too. And his teeth tended to look as though they had lichen growing on them. He was not the conventional picture of a glamorous fighter pilot.

  “They should recognise R.A.F. markings, dammit,” Yule complained.

  “These raw Yanks don’t recognise anything,” the I.O. told him. “They shot down two of their own Kittyhawks in the first twenty-four hours after they came ashore.”

  Yule brightened. “What happened about that? There must have been a hell of a stink.”

  “You didn’t tell us, Tusty,” Warren complained. “You should have warned us these Hillbillies are even shooting down their own types.”

  Vincent grinned, showing chipped and discoloured teeth. “I bet the mighty Air Corps didn’t take that lying down.”

  “They didn’t,” Tustin said. “They sent the rest of the squadron in to strafe the gun batteries that had done it. With instructions only to scare them, of course...”

  The three pilots looked at each other in awe.

  “You’re pulling our legs,” said Toby Yule. “Talk about total war! That must have made their ack-ack even more trigger-happy than ever.”

  “Especially if the Yank pilots were trying not to hit them,” Vincent said, laughing again. “When they are trying, they usually miss... so presumably when they try to miss, they’re bang on target.” This was not only meant ill-naturedly. It was also a customary expression of rivalry and patronising professional contempt; substantiated, unhappily, by the fact that a lot of the American air crews’ early efforts over Europe and North Africa had been less than accurate.

  “They can’t have aimed off by much,” Tyson told them. “They bagged half a dozen G.I.s.”

  “God almighty,” Warren murmured reverently.

  Yule was beginning to feel neglected. His friends had come to pick him up and now they were side-tracking. He said, “Getting shot down wasn’t the end of it, though. There was even worse to come. As I jumped out of the cockpit there was this damn great Goumier charging at me with an enormous knife in his hand...”

  “Oh, God!” Warren exclaimed, starting to laugh again. “He was after your goolies for his Christmas tree,” Vincent managed to say before mirth stifled him.

  Flight Lieutenant Tustin, more staid than his younger comrades, allowed himself to participate in the joke. “Bit premature... it’s only July...”

  “They could have dried them in the sun... so they’d keep,” Vincent gasped.

  Yule was joining in his friends’ laughter by now. He controlled himself long enough to say, “Couldn’t blame him... you know what they always do to bailed-out Jerries and Eyeties... and he obviously thought, as the Yanks had shot me down, I must be an enemy.”

  The Moroccan troops, Goumiers, took no prisoners. Their invariable treatment of all Germans or Italians who fell into their hands (and they would go out of their way to capture any airman whom they saw parachuting from his aeroplane) was to castrate them and cut their throats. When in doubt about someone’s identity they gave him the same treatment. Women, they raped before slitting their jugulars. They would inflict all three indignities on any young man who happened to take their fancy.

  “What did you do?” Tustin asked.

  “I yelled “Je suis anglais” and pointed at the roundel...” Yule gestured at the red, white and blue circles on his fighter’s fuselage.

  “That stopped him?” The Intelligence officer sounded incredulous.

  Yule was no longer laughing. He shook his head. “No. He just shouted something in Arabic and took a tremendous swipe at me with his dagger.”

  Vincent and Warren were not laughing now either. “What happened then?” they asked together.

  Yule pointed to the other side of the crashed Spitfire. “He’s over there.” Then he glanced down at the webbing holster on his right hip, and, noticing the flap was open, began fussily to close it over his .38 Smith and Wesson.

  The other three exchanged glances.

  “He’s still here?” Warren asked. “What’s he hanging around for?”

  “He didn’t have much option,” Yule replied. “I shot his effing head off” He burst out in renewed laughter in which his friends joined, including Tustin.

  Toby Yule was customarily restrained in his language. Tustin, who was in his mid-th
irties, thought it only reasonable that a youngster of nineteen who had just survived two close contacts with violent death should be so much in shock that he resorted to obscenity for relief.

  Yule paused in his laughter to blurt: “I wish... I wish I could do the same... to... to those half-witted cowboys who shot me down...” Which further amused his brother officers as they staggered about with laughter, there among the olive trees under the burning sun of southern Sicily.

  *

  Squadron Leader Walter Vladimir O’Neill, commanding Yule’s squadron, had high cheekbones and wild green Slavic eyes inherited from his Russian mother. And body odour, not inherited from anyone in particular. At prep school he had been called Stinker. At public school, with more imagination, Bisto. At the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, with that nice touch of R.A.F. subtlety in nicknames, he had been dubbed Fiver; derived from Chanel No. 5.

  At the age of twenty-six, with the flying start of graduation from Cranwell to boost him on his way up the promotion ladder, he should have been a wing commander by now, after six year’ service. That he was not was attributable to excessive zeal coupled with arrested mental development. Sqdn. Ldr. O’Neill was regarded far and wide by his superiors as an unmitigated nuisance. Traditionally, one way of ridding oneself of a nuisance is to promote him and post him away to another job. In this way vast numbers of military, naval and air force officers have achieved high rank; merit having nothing to do with their advancement. In the matter of Fiver O’Neill, however, although the death and wounding of hundreds of his seniors had provided many opportunities to promote him, his masters had merely shifted him sideways rather than upwards. He had arrived at his present rank in 1940 and this was the second squadron he had commanded. If his lack of brainpower was one handicap, it was paradoxically an even greater one that he flew like an angel. To see Walter Vladimir O’Neill in flight was to witness poetry in motion. The Germans’ greatest fighter ace in the desert campaign, Hans-Joachim Marseille, was always recognisable to the rest of the Luftwaffe by the beauty and precision of his flying. In Desert Air Force, at least among fighter units, anyone could spot when Sqdn. Ldr. O’Neill was at the controls of a Hurricane or Spitfire, from miles away. He was so good at it that no one in higher authority ever dreamed of giving him anything else to do: as a squadron commander he had to fly more than anyone; as a wing commander, other duties would have intruded. And, besides, with his level of stupidity, the fewer people’s lives he was responsible for the more easily everyone breathed from his Wing C.O. to Air Ministry.

  Yule, brought back to camp in the squadron I.O.’s Hillman light van, was dumped outside the Operations tent.

  “So you’ve bent one of my Spits, Toby,” was his Commanding Officer’s greeting; accompanied by the waft of aftershave and toilet water with which Fiver O’Neill sought to mitigate his distressing personal affliction.

  “The Yanks bent it, sir.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “Not a scratch, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll get one of theirs in return... teach ’em some manners... damn bad form shooting down one’s own side...”

  My God! He means it, thought Toby, meeting that mad sea-green stare.

  The squadron commander went on, “Sit down, Toby. Tell me all about it. What exactly happened?” He had been leading a formation on another task when Yule took off, and the first he knew of the episode was when he landed back and found him missing.

  Flying Officer Yule shifted an ammunition box around to face O’Neill’s canvas chair.

  “I was scrambled for a couple of one-o-nines that were shooting up an American ack-ack site, sir. They were down to a couple of hundred feet and only about five miles from here, so I spotted them at once. I’d got the leader plumb in my sights, with 60 degrees deflection... a piece of cake... and I was just pressing the tit when the blasted Yanks shifted their aim from the Jerries to me...”

  “Wish I’d seen it,” O’Neill interrupted. “I’d have led the chaps straight in and clobbered the idiots.”

  Yule didn’t doubt it, and the thought worried him. “That might have tickled them up a bit too much, sir... they could have started shooting at every Spit, Mustang and Kittyhawk...”

  “It seems to me that’s what they’re already doing. Anyway, go on.”

  “That’s about all, sir. Our gallant allies promptly shot me down as soon as I tried to engage the enemy who were strafing them.”

  The squadron leader tilted back his chair and began inserting an Egyptian cigarette into a gold-banded amber holder. “You were lucky to get down safely.”

  “With so little height, yes. I thought I was going slap into olive trees or a vineyard... no time to look around for a good spot...”

  O’Neill gave him a sharp stare. “What are you shaking for, Toby? Got ague... or malaria?”

  “N-no, sir.” Something worse: an instant flash in his mind’s eye of the six-foot Moroccan pounding towards him brandishing a knife that seemed, in recollection, to have been about a yard long.

  “What’s up, then?”

  “There was a Goumier, sir... luckily, only one of them... don’t know what he was doing on his own... charged at me to stick his dagger in me...”

  “Excitable, the Goumiers,” Fiver agreed. “How did you dissuade him?”

  Yule dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet. “Had to shoot him, sir.”

  His C.O. leaped to his feet with a roar. “Bloody good show! Where is the brute? I’ll have his head mounted for the mess...”

  “We thought it best to leave him where he was, sir. The people in the farm where it happened were frightfully agitated, sir... dead scared of what his mates would do if they found out... they started digging a hole and planting him straight away, sir.”

  “Damn! He’d have made a unique trophy for the squadron... any taxidermist would be delighted to work on a Goumier’s head. Good show, Toby; but it’s hardly an even score, is it? A Spit to a Goumier.” He turned to Flt. Lt. Tustin, who was standing by. “Find out the identity and location of the unit that shot Toby down, Tusty, and the name of the C.O. Quick as you can. I want to go and have a quiet word in his ear.”

  Chapter Two

  Technical Sergeant Tommy (Tommasso) Pienze, swarthy, stunted and whippet-like, late of one of Chicago’s less salubrious precincts and currently engaged on a Government-sponsored tour of the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, as Transportation Sergeant of a light anti-aircraft battery, saw a jeep with R.A.F. markings bumping towards the gun site along a cart track, exclaimed “Oh, oh! Thar she blows,” and began walking quickly towards the command post, first spitting a stump of cigar from his mouth.

  The guns had been silent for more than an hour, in the gathering dusk, and Pienze’s headache had just abated. His hearing was getting back to normal. If those goddamn Kraut airplanes would lay off for another hour or so, it would be too dark for any more air attacks and things should stay quiet until first light. The battery would be silent, that was to say: for there would be no respite from field artillery fire night or day.

  He had witnessed the shooting down of a Spitfire that afternoon, stony-faced; but his emotions had been strong, for he admired aviators (he thought they were mad; but heroic). And here came retribution. He had spotted the identity of the friendly aircraft at once, but it was too much to expect the li’l ol’ Ozark mountain boys, the cowhands from Montana and store clerks from Duluth, whom the battery mostly comprised, to know a B 17 when they saw one, let alone a British fighter. Specially not when Kraut fighters were already spraying cannon shells and machine-gun slugs around their ears from the air.

  Ducking under a fallen beam that obstructed the door to the farmhouse, he straightened up in the living room and ripped off a sharp salute. “Major, sir, there’s a Limey jeep coming down the road. Guess it’s gotta be the Commanding Officer of that outfit we shot down that Spitfire of, sir.”

  Major Corrado winced. He found Sgt. Pienze’s tortured syntax harder to bear than
enemy fire: not that he had much taste for the latter either; he felt the Mob had let him down by not ensuring him an appointment in some sheltered base area. “O.K., Sergeant, guess I’d better go see what the guy wants. Bring him up to my room.”

  The major left his second-in-command to handle the next crisis and climbed the creaking stairs to a bedroom at the front of the house. From there he watched the jeep stop with a jerk, and a squat, huge-shouldered R.A.F. officer swing out a pair of legs that would not have disgraced a billiards table, then lever himself over the jeep’s low side. The large, flat face of the visitor, under a battered and faded Service Dress cap with the stiffening removed from the crown, stared with ineffable Slavonic inscrutability at Sgt. Pienze, who had by now appeared at the front door.

  The sergeant snapped his best salute and stamped his foot on the ground as he had seen British soldiers do. A tactful gesture, the major thought with approval. He heard Pienze’s gravelly voice announce, “Technical Sergeant Pienze, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “Tell your C.O. I want to see him.”

  “I already did, sir: saw you comin’ down the road.”

  “And what did he do; take off in a cloud of dust by the back door?” The voice that reached Maj. Corrado through the shattered window made him think of two ice flows grinding together, and he shivered. “He’s standing-by for you in his quarters, sir.” To hear Pienze talk, his Commanding Officer thought, you’d think he had at least ten years’ regular service behind him, instead of having been dragged kicking and screaming into the Army as a draftee; after even Cosa Nostra couldn’t fix him up with a 4F medical category.

  “O.K.,” said Fiver, who spoke English, Russian, French, Polish, Italian and German with great suppleness and prided himself on his command of idiom. “Let’s get with it: drag ass, man.”

  “Y’bet, Squadron Commander, sir...”

  “Squadron Leader.”

  “Yessir.” Pienze cast a suspicious look at the haversack slung over the squadron leader’s shoulder. “Do you mind my asking what you have in that musette bag, sir?”