I cruised around admiring the blue sea to the south and the great mountains to the north, and I was just beginning to think to myself that this was a very nice way to fight a war when the static erupted again and the voice said, ‘Blue Four, are you receiving me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but speak louder please.’
‘Bandits over shipping at Khalkis,’ the voice said. ‘Vector 035 forty miles angels eight.’
‘Received,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way.’
The translation of this simple message, which even I could understand, told me that if I set a course on my compass of thirty-five degrees and flew for a distance of forty miles, I would then, with a bit of luck, intercept the enemy at 8,000 feet, where he was trying to sink ships off a place called Khalkis, wherever that might be.
I set my course and opened the throttle and hoped I was doing everything right. I checked my ground speed and calculated that it would take me between ten and eleven minutes to travel forty miles to this place called Khalkis. I cleared the top of the mountain range with 500 feet to spare, and as I went over it I saw a single solitary goat, brown and white, wandering on the bare rock. ‘Hello goat,’ I said aloud into my oxygen mask, ‘I’ll bet you don’t know the Germans are going to have you for supper before you’re very much older.’
To which, as I realized as soon as I’d said it, the goat might very well have answered, ‘And the same to you, my boy. You’re no better off than I am.’
Then I saw below me in the distance a kind of waterway or fjord and a little cluster of houses on the shore. Khalkis, I thought. It must be Khalkis. There was one large cargo ship in the waterway and as I was looking at it I saw an enormous fountain of spray erupting high in the air close to the ship. I had never seen a bomb exploding in the water before, but I had seen plenty of photographs of it happening. I looked up into the sky above the ship, but I could see nothing there. I kept staring. I figured that if a bomb had been dropped, someone must be up there dropping it. Two more mighty cascades of water leapt up around the ship. Then suddenly I spotted the bombers. I saw the small black dots wheeling and circling in the sky high above the ship. It gave me quite a shock. It was my first-ever sight of the enemy from my own plane. Quickly I turned the brass ring of my firing-button from ‘safe’ to ‘fire’. I switched on my reflector-sight and a pale red circle of light with two crossbars appeared suspended in the air in front of my face. I headed straight for the little dots.
Half a minute later, the dots had resolved themselves into black twin-engine bombers. They were Ju 88s. I counted six of them. I glanced above and around them but I could see no fighters protecting them. I remember being absolutely cool and unafraid. My one wish was to do my job properly and not to make a hash of it.
There are three men in a Ju 88, which gives it three pairs of eyes. So six Ju 88s have no less than eighteen pairs of eyes scanning the sky. Had I been more experienced, I would have realized this much earlier on and before going any closer I would have swung round so that the sun was behind me. I would also have climbed very fast to get well above them before attacking. I did neither of these things. I simply went straight for them at the same height as they were and with the strong Grecian sun right in my own eyes.
They spotted me while I was still half a mile away and suddenly all six bombers banked away steeply and dived straight for a great mass of mountains behind Khalkis.
I had been warned never to push my throttle ‘through the gate’ except in a real emergency. Going ‘through the gate’ meant that the big Rolls-Royce engine would produce absolute maximum revs, and three minutes was the limit of time it could tolerate such stress. OK, I thought, this is an emergency. I rammed the throttle right ‘through the gate’. The engine roared and the Hurricane leapt forward. I began to catch up fast on the bombers. They had now gone into a line-abreast formation which, as I was soon to discover, allowed all six of their rear-gunners to fire at me simultaneously.
The mountains behind Khalkis are wild and black and very rugged and the Germans went right in among them flying well below the summits. I followed, and sometimes we flew so close to the cliffs I could see the startled vultures taking off as we roared past. I was still gaining on them, and when I was about 200 yards behind them, all six rear-gunners in the Ju 88s began shooting at me. As David Coke had warned, they were using tracer and out of each one of the six rear turrets came a brilliant shaft of orange-red flame. Six different shafts of bright orange-red came arcing towards me from six different turrets. They were like very thin streams of coloured water from six different hosepipes. I found them fascinating to watch. The deadly orange-red streams seemed to start out quite slowly from the turrets and I could see them bending in the air as they came towards me and then suddenly they were flashing past my cockpit like fireworks.
r /> I was just beginning to realize that I had got myself into the worst possible position for an attacking fighter to be in when suddenly the passage between the mountains on either side narrowed and the Ju 88s were forced to go into line astern. This meant that only the last one in the line could shoot at me. That was better. Now there was only a single stream of orange-red bullets coming towards me. David Coke had said, ‘Go for one of his engines.’ I went a little closer and by jiggling my plane this way and that I managed to get the starboard engine of the bomber into my reflector-sight. I aimed a bit ahead of the engine and pressed the button. The Hurricane gave a small shudder as the eight Brownings in the wings all opened up together, and a second later I saw a huge piece of his metal engine-cowling the size of a dinner-tray go flying up into the air. Good heavens, I thought, I’ve hit him! I’ve actually hit him! Then black smoke came pouring out of his engine and very slowly, almost in slow motion, the bomber winged over to starboard and began to lose height. I throttled back. He was well below me now. I could see him clearly by squinting down out of my cockpit. He wasn’t diving and he wasn’t spinning either. He was turning slowly over and over like a leaf, the black smoke pouring out from the starboard engine. Then I saw one … two … three people jump out of the fuselage and go tumbling earthwards with legs and arms outstretched in grotesque attitudes, and a moment later one … two … three parachutes billowed open and began floating gently down between the cliffs towards the narrow valley below.
I watched spellbound. I couldn’t believe that I had actually shot down a German bomber. But I was immensely relieved to see the parachutes.
I opened the throttle again and began to climb up above the mountains. The five remaining Ju 88s had disappeared. I looked around me and all I could see were craggy peaks in every direction. I set a course due south and fifteen minutes later I was landing at Elevsis. I parked my Hurricane and clambered out. I had been away for exactly one hour. It seemed like ten minutes. I walked slowly all the way round my Hurricane looking for damage. Miraculously the fuselage seemed to be completely unscathed. The only mark those six rear-gunners had been able to make on a sitting-duck like me was a single neat round hole in one of the blades of my wooden propeller. I shouldered my parachute and walked across to the Ops Rooms hut. I was feeling pretty good.
As before, the Squadron-Leader was in the hut and so was the wireless-operator Sergeant with the ear-phones on his head. The Squadron-Leader looked up at me and frowned. ‘How did you get on?’ he asked.
‘I got one Ju 88,’ I said, trying to keep the pride and satisfaction out of my voice.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Did you see it hit the ground?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I saw the crew jump out and open their parachutes.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘That sounds definite enough.’
‘I’m afraid there’s a bullet hole in my prop,’ I said.
‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘You’d better tell the rigger to patch it up as best he can.’
That was the end of our interview. I expected more, a pat on the back or a ‘Jolly good show’ and a smile, but as I’ve said before, he had many things on his mind including Pilot Officer Holman who had gone out thirty minutes before me and hadn’t come back. He wasn’t going to come back.
David Coke had also been flying that morning and I found him sitting on his camp-bed doing nothing. I told him about my trip.
‘Never do that again,’ he said. ‘Never sit on the tails of six Ju 88s and expect to get away with it because next time you won’t.’
‘What happened to you?’ I asked him.
‘I got one One-O-Nine,’ he said. He said it as calmly as if he were telling me he’d caught a fish in the river across the road. ‘It’s going to be very dangerous out there from now on,’ he added. ‘The One-O-Nines and the One-One-O’s are swarming like wasps. You’d better be very careful next time.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘I’ll do my best.’
The Ammunition Ship