Mosquito Squadron
Authors: Robert Jackson
© Robert Jackson 2015
Christopher Nicole has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1981 by Corgi.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
It had been a long, hot day, and the old man was very tired. Every jolt of the cart sent new aches through his bones, and although the sun had now set and the air was cooler, clouds of midges continued to plague him.
He stared moodily at the backside of his patient, plodding old mare. Her patchy coat was grimed with coal dust, as was the old man himself. The sway of her body between the cart shafts registered protest and he gave her an affectionate flick with his long stick, dislodging a cluster of flies which seemed intent on bedding down for the night.
‘Not long now, old girl,’ he muttered encouragingly. ‘Soon be home now.’
It wasn’t fair, he complained inwardly, to make them work until such an hour. Why, it was only a matter of months ago that Schneider, the coal merchant for whom they worked (the old man always considered himself and his mare as partners) had put the pair of them out to grass. No longer of any use in a mechanized age: that was the expression the pompous ass had used. Well, here they were, back in harness again, because Schneider had come begging with cap in hand after the authorities had requisitioned his fine new-fangled trucks to move supplies destined for the troops on the Russian front up to the docks in Hamburg.
The old man glanced over to his right, across the miles of flat, low-lying ground and the great expanse of the Elbe estuary towards the old Hanseatic seaport — the second largest in the world, or so they said. Dieter had told him about that. He smiled with inward pride as he thought of his only son; Dieter knew all about such things, for he was a clever lad who had been top of his class in college. The old man wished that he had had the benefit of such an education, for he wouldn’t now be staring at the coal-streaked posterior of a horse. At least that was one good thing Hitler had achieved; he had given the youth of Germany the chance to be educated, no matter what background they came from.
Educated, he thought with sudden bitterness, to be pitch-forked into this crazy war. He had fought in the previous one, and he knew that the real losers were the poor bastards who had to do the fighting, no matter what side they were on. Like the twin sons of his neighbour, Widow Mengel, swallowed up with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad along with ninety thousand others. Hardly a family in Germany had been untouched by that catastrophe, and it had been quickly followed by another: the collapse of the Axis armies in North Africa. Then, only a few days ago, had come the news that the British and Americans had landed in Sicily. The newspapers said that the Allies were being pushed back into the sea, but the old man didn’t believe them, although he never said as much to anyone, not even to the few close friends with whom he smoked a pipe twice a week in the Red Hen just down the road from his little house on the outskirts of Stade. Talking too much could be dangerous, and the old man wanted to go on smoking his pipe and drinking a few steins in the Red Hen for a few more years to come.
His thoughts turned to Dieter once again. At least the boy was safe enough, commanding a flak battery on the outskirts of Paris and having a pretty good time there, by all accounts. One of the old man’s greatest regrets was that the German Army had never got as far as Paris in the last war; but the next generation had got there all right, and the cognac Dieter brought home during his leaves was more than welcome as a change from the Red Hen’s beer.
In fact, reflected the old man, Dieter was probably safer than most of the folks at home. The air raids were getting worse. The Tommies, who came at night, had been bad enough, but now the Amis were coming over in daylight, and the Luftwaffe didn’t seem able to stop them. What was it fatty Goering had said, back in ‘39 in one of his radio broadcasts? ‘If an enemy plane ever flies over the territory of the Reich, you can call me Meyer.’ Yes, that was it, or something like it. Well, thought the old man, I’ll bet those poor devils in Essen and the other Ruhr towns are calling him Meyer now, and a few other names besides.
The old man let the mare have her head while he fished out a battered pipe and tamped some tobacco into it. Searching his pockets, he found a box of matches, struck one and touched it to the bowl, carefully shielding the flame in his cupped hands. These days, one could be locked up for showing any kind of light after sunset.
Puffing contentedly, he tapped the weary mare with his stick, urging her to move faster. There was still a good deal of daylight left, and with luck they would be home before dark. He didn’t like to arrive back after nightfall, because his wife worried about him and her heart was by no means strong; there was no sense in causing her unnecessary anxiety.
In any case, he didn’t like to linger on this stretch of the road. He preferred to look straight ahead and pass along it as quickly as possible, past the tall fence with its concrete posts and barbed wire, the long, low mound beyond it, the gate and the armed sentries. He did not know what went on in there, nor did he want to; in fact, he could not even hazard a guess. There were a lot of aerials around the bunker, sticking up like skeletal fingers, but what purpose they served he had no means of knowing.
The guards were there as usual. He knew most of them by sight, and somehow they had found out his name. One of them called out to him as he drew abreast.
‘Why, it’s old Kurt, the coalman. Long past your bedtime, old codger. Hurry along home, now. The Tommies might be over tonight.’
The old man spat into the road. ‘Then you’d better keep that thick skull of yours under cover, hadn’t you?’ he grunted.
The sentry laughed and watched as the old man trundled on his way, leaving an acrid smell of sweat and pungent tobacco behind him. Overhead, the stars were beginning to come out, showing briefly through rifts in the cloud that was drifting slowly in from the sea across Lower Saxony.
*
Beneath the long mound, protected by fifty feet of earth and reinforced concrete, lay the great underground operations room of the Luftwaffe’s 2nd Air Division. The room was bisected by a huge sheet of frosted glass; on it, overlaid with a grid, was an outline map of Germany, the Low Countries and part of the North Sea. On the other side of the screen, behind small individual desks, sat twenty or so Luftwaffe women auxiliaries; each girl wore a headset and was in direct contact with one of the big ‘Freya’ warning radar stations that stretched in a great arc along the north-west coast of Germany, down through Holland and into Belgium.
In front of each girl, meticulously checked and rechecked to ensure that it was in full working order, was a small projector. As soon as a report of an incoming raid was received from one of the coastal radar units, she would project a spot of light on to the appropriate square of the grid. The spot could be varied in size to indicate the strength of the attackers to the fighter controllers across the room.
The latter sat in two long rows directly in front of the screen. Behind them, on a raised dais, was the position reserved for the Divisional Commander or his deputy. On this occasion the big chief, Lieutenant-General Schwabedissen, was present in person, flanked by liaison officers from the various fighter units under his command. There was another identical operations room in Germany, at Doberitz near Berlin, a third at Metz, in France, and a fourth at Deelen near Arnhem, in Holland, all in constant touch with one another. Between them, they were responsible for the air defence of the Third Reich by day and night.
Seated third from the left at the end of one of the rows of liaison officers, Major Joachim Richter sighed deeply and felt a craving for one of the long cigars he had taken to smoking recently, but smoking in the operations room was strictly forbidden. It was a pity, for a smoke might have relaxed some of the tension; the air was electric with it. Apart from the whirring of electric fans and an occasional nervous cough, there was almost complete silence. It was always like this when a raid was known to be building up; already, radar stations on the Belgian coast had detected what appeared to be large formations of bombers assembling over East Anglia, but they had not yet set course and so far there was no indication of which route they would take, or what their target would be. All the fighter controllers could do now was wait, together with the night fighter crews who were at readiness throughout Germany and Occupied Europe.
It was over five months now since Richter’s unit, Jagdge-schwader (Fighter Wing) 66 had been pulled out of Sicily, from where it had taken part in the great air battles over Malta, and brought back to Germany to take part in the defence of the Reich. Richter’s mind went back to the summer of 1942 and to a conversation with an old friend, a Stuka dive-bomber pilot named Conrad Seliger, soon after JG 66’s arrival at Catania. Things had seemed rosy enough then, with Rommel’s Afrika Korps heading flat out for Cairo and an invasion of Malta on the cards, but a few short months had been enough to shatter all Axis hopes of a victory in the Mediterranean. Malta had never been invaded, and her warships and bombers had continued to strangle Rommel’s supply lines until, after a wild chase all the way back across the Western Desert, the Afrika Korps had been crushed to extinction between the nutcrackers of the British and American armies in Tunisia. Now, using Malta and the newly-captured Tunisian bases as a springboard, the Allies had gone ashore in Sicily, and Richter had seen enough official reports on the situation to know that there was almost no hope of holding them there. The only logical thing to do, he thought, was to abandon the island and adopt a strong defensive posture in Italy, where the mountainous terrain did not favour the attacking forces.
But that was someone else’s problem. It was here, over Germany, that the Luftwaffe’s greatest battles would be fought, and Richter yearned to be in the thick of them. Fighter Wing 66, after a short rest and re-equipment with new Messerschmitt 109Gs — ‘Iron Gustavs’, as the pilots nicknamed them — had been in action almost continuously since its homecoming, operating out of Zwischenahn. and already some of the pilots had scored notable victories against the American B-17 Flying Fortresses attacking Wilhelmshaven and other north German ports.
Richter, however, had seen no combat since the days in Sicily. Instead, he had received immediate promotion to Major and had been temporarily withdrawn from operations; this subterranean vault had been his home for four months now.
Normally, Richter was assigned to the day shift, and despite his frustration at not being allowed into action he was forced to admit that the job had its compensations, foremost among which was the little nurse in Stade. Three times a week she finished work at six-thirty, just in time to get back to her apartment and have a meal ready for when he came off duty. She had been making determined attempts to have him move in with her, but so far he had resisted successfully. Both of them were having a pretty good time, but he had no intention of being trapped. There were still a lot of wild oats to be sown.
Richter was glad he was not a family man, like his friend Captain Wolfgang Lutz. Lutz’s wife was expecting a child at any moment, and so Richter had agreed to take the captain’s place on the night shift so that the man could be free to pace up and down the corridors of the maternity hospital in Hamburg. Richter smiled to himself, visualizing Lutz’s bald head glistening with the anxiety of impending fatherhood, and resolved not to put himself in that sort of situation for a long time to come.
Richter glanced at the illuminated wall clock. The hands showed 2245, and beneath them the date glowed boldly in the dimly-lit room: 24 July 1943. Perhaps, thought Richter, the Tommies won’t be over tonight, and realized at once that he was deluding himself. The weather forecast was good, with a moon and partial cloud cover up to 22,000 feet all the way across the North Sea. They would be on their way, all right. It was too much to hope that the radar reports of bombers assembling over the east coast of England were incorrect.
A few minutes later, the first spot of light appeared on one of the squares on the left-hand edge of the map. More appeared as the minutes went by and further radar reports came in, until the whole bore a striking similarity to a stream of glowing ants, crawling steadily eastwards. Two light spots, of lower intensity than the rest, were some distance ahead; Richter knew that these would be the pathfinders, their bomb-bays full of incendiaries and target markers.
The operations room now hummed with activity, as the women auxiliaries translated the constant stream of radar information into dancing slivers of light on the big map. Telephone bells shrilled and the room was filled with a confused babel of voices as the controllers and their liaison officers issued instructions to the waiting night fighters, antiaircraft concentrations and civil defence organizations throughout 2nd Air Division’s sector. Richter drummed his fingertips absent-mindedly on his desk top, eyeing the crawling stream of incoming bombers and wondering which direction it would ultimately take. His task was to liaise with the night fighter units in the Bremen area; these were to be held in reserve for the time being, until the ultimate direction of the enemy bomber stream was ascertained.
Already, some night fighters were on station off the north German coast, circling out over the sea beyond the Frisian Islands. The night fighters were mostly twin-engined Messerschmitt 110s; each one assigned to an individual zone, the zones overlapping to form a long chain extending from the Baltic to Belgium. The fighters were controlled by ‘Wurzburg’ tracking radars, which took over from the ‘Freya’ early warning chain as the bombers approached German territory and fed information on courses, heights and speeds to the fighter controllers. The latter would bring the night fighters into contact with the bomber stream, and after that it was up to the radar operators in the Messerschmitts to locate individual bombers with their ‘Lichtenstein’ airborne interception radars and steer their pilots to within firing range.