Jackson - Hurricane squadron : Yeoman goes to war

HURRICANE SQUADRON

ROBERT JACKSON

Copyright Robert Jackson 1978

The right of Robert Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First published in 1978 by Arthur Barker Limited.

This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

The author wishes to thank Squadron Leader W. J. Rosser, DFC (RAF retired) and Lieutenant-Commander K. Calcutt (RN retired) for their invaluable help and advice.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

From ten thousand feet the River Somme looked for all the world like a basking snake, its coils shimmering in the early morning sun as they looped and twisted across the plain of Picardy west of Pronne. They lay six miles off the Hurricanes starboard wingtip, and in die narrow cockpit Sergeant George Yeoman allowed himself a small mental pat on the back; he was right on course.

He glanced down at the map on his knee, running his index finger along the thin pencil line of the track that ran from Manston, in Kent, to the little grass airstrip beside the Marne at Chlons: a distance of 179 miles. With a ground speed of 195 miles per hour, that gave him a flying time of fifty-five minutes. If all went well, he would be coming in to land at Chlons just before six oclock, with plenty of time to make his report and stow his gear before breakfast.

Yeoman settled himself more comfortably in the cockpit, flexing his shoulders against the tight grip of the parachute harness. He was glad that he had decided to make an early start from Manston; it was a perfect morning, and navigation presented no difficulty despite the fact that the rising sun shone full in his eyes. Yeoman could not remember feeling happier. He was alone in the sky, with nothing but the roar of the big Rolls-Royce Merlin in front of him for company, on his way at last to join an operational squadron. For the next few minutes there was nothing to do but relax and enjoy the scenery nothing, that was, except hold a steady course, check the landmarks as they came under the nose, and make an automatic scan of the instrument panel every now and then.

Idly, he wondered what his father would have made of the panorama that spread out on all sides. John Yeoman had taken his last look at the Somme four years before George had been born, and that had not been from a relatively comfortable seat two miles above the earth.

George would never know what his father had really been like before that terrible morning of 1 July 1916; all he knew was that its aftermath had dominated his childhood, remembering the anger and bitterness that had choked his fathers voice whenever he had spoken of it. Now, looking down, it was almost impossible to imagine that nearly sixty thousand young men of Georges own age, and many considerably younger, had been killed or wounded among those lovely wooded hillsides on that one morning alone, or that before the battle had ended in September 1916 the casualty lists had topped the half-million mark; a whole generation wiped out or scarred for life.

And now, twenty-four years later, the nations who had fought that deadly battle were once more at each others throats; but there would never be another Somme. The tank and the dive-bomber had seen to that.

George remembered how deeply he had been moved by the stories of a friend, only a couple of years older than himself, who had come home, sallow-faced and trembling, in 1938 after a year in Spain with the International Brigade; stories of German dive-bombers, German fighters, German guns and German tanks, a whole army operating under the guise of volunteers and supported by an even larger contingent from Mussolinis Fascist Italy, mercilessly harrying the Republican forces to destruction.

The tragedy was that no one had seemed to care; or if they had cared, they had brushed their fears out of sight like dust under a rug. Georges father had been one of them; he had dismissed the business of Czechoslovakia, and the rantings over the Sudetenland by Germanys Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, regarded by some as a genius and by others as a dangerous lunatic, as a gigantic bluff; he had been convinced that the Czech affair would blow over, even though the Germans had mobilized their army in August 1938 and had seemed ready to back up their words by force.

The illusions of John Yeoman, and millions of others like him, had been brutally shattered just a few weeks later, at the end of September. At Munich, with all pretence of a joint Anglo-French resistance to the demands of Nazi Germany thrown aside, Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Daladier of France had capitulated to Hitler. The Allies would not go to the aid of Czechoslovakia if German forces invaded her; Germany could have the Sudetenland, with all its resources and frontier defences, and what matter if Czechoslovakia were stripped naked so long as the rest of Europe was saved from the spectre of war?

So Chamberlain had returned to London, brandishing the Munich agreement and proclaiming peace to a near-hysterical crowd; an uneasy, tenuous peace, little more than a breathing-space, bought by sacrificing the self-respect of Britain and France. And to John Yeoman, it had seemed that everything his friends had died for twenty years earlier had been wiped away by the stroke of a pen.

The straight, shining line of a canal came up ahead, cutting the Hurricanes track from north-east to southwest. The town over on the left was St Quentin; beyond it the canal curved away towards Cambrai, twenty miles to the north and falling behind in the distance.

St Quentin; Cambrai. Magic names in Yeomans vocabulary. They were names that had captured the imagination of his youth when, in the long winter evenings, he had eagerly devoured books that had taken him into another world; a world of singing wind and humming wires, of roaring rotary engines and the drumming of fabric stretched taut over a wing; the world of Mannock, Immelmann, Ball and Richthofen, young men of a lost generation who had carved out a legend in the sky of Flanders, far above the mud in which his father had crawled.

George had wanted to fly for as long as he could remember. On leaving school he had got a job in a provincial newspaper office; it had hardly been inspiring work his duties consisting mainly of fetching and carrying and making tea but at least he had been able to put a bit of money aside towards his ultimate goal, which was getting into the air.

On his seventeenth birthday he had joined the nearest aero club, and after that he had lived only for weekends, cycling twenty miles for the privilege of half an hour in the draughty cockpit of a de Havilland Moth biplane. He had taken to the little machine readily and had gone solo quickly, after only three and a half hours dual instruction, but it had been ten months before his logbook showed the total of nineteen hours that were necessary before he could take the test for his A Licence. The flying test had been divided into two parts, an altitude test on the students ability to lose height properly and make an accurate approach to land, and a figure of eights test to prove that he was capable of making sustained and accurate steep turns. George had found difficulty with neither, and had passed the Royal Aero Club examiners oral questions with a comfortable margin.

He smiled to himself, recollecting. It had all been worth it: the financial sacrifice, the long hours spent in a freezing cold hangar helping the mechanics when there was no flying. There had been times, of course, when he had wondered if he was doing the right thing; like the time he had applied to join the Auxiliary Air Force, armed with his brand-new flying licence, only to be turned down flat. The rejection, however, hadnt seemed so bad when someone had told him that the Auxiliaries were a toffee-nosed bunch of bastards anyway, and you didnt stand a chance of getting in unless you were in the habit of cavorting around the countryside after foxes.