9th June 1940
"Rapier two, close up." Harry barked over the radio.
Silently, Jake moved up until he was nearly hugging the wing-tip of Harry's Hurricane. They'd just launched from HMS Glorious as the ship made way for England, as none of them felt the ship was safe without an air patrol. Seven more Iron Crosses adorned the side of Harry's fighter, making his total kills fourteen. The five Heinkel He-115 float-planes, a Fiesler Storch and a Arado biplane were followed by two Junkers Ju52 troop-transports on a fighter sweep two days later.
After an uneventful four days, on the Second of June, while out on a dawn patrol, the three of them had come across a flight of four Messerschmitt Bf-110 heavy fighters escorting ten Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers. They had dived into the formation, Harry picking off two of the heavy fighters in a shallow dive, while the other two had each hit the other '110s. With the escort destroyed and Bill having also destroyed one of the Stukas on the dive, they'd circled round and torn into the remainder. All nine had been destroyed in the ensuing scrap, three being credited to Harry before he'd run out of ammunition.
Ground attack fighter sweeps had also continued, with 46 Squadron proving to be an immense nuisance to the enemy, daily their marauding Hawker Hurricanes strafing convoys, trains, machine-gun nests and harrying the Luftwaffe in the air, challenging any attempt to regain air superiority. The outdated Fairey Swordfish biplane bombers carried by the carrier had also proven themselves, appearing out of the huge gorges of Norway's coast, accompanied by the Hurricanes to hit anything unfriendly that moved.
Harry pulled himself out of his thoughts and kept his head on a swivel. The thick mist wasn't conducive to their task, but he'd stick to it. Then he fixed his eyes on a shape slipping through the mist, four o'clock low.
"Seaplane, unidentified, four o'clock." he stated; "Circle starboard, one-eighty degrees and descend one-thousand."
"Roger boss." came the chorused reply.
They spread out a little and dived, banking around to starboard, coming down behind the unsuspecting aircraft. It was a monoplane with a radial engine and two large floats on pylons. Harry throttled back, allowing Jake to take the lead. The kid was only eighteen, but already an ace pilot, with a great deal of skill but limited confidence.
Jake screamed into the attack, a three-second burst demolishing the tail-fin and large glazed canopy of the aircraft that Harry had identified as an Arado 196 shipboard reconnaissance aircraft, used on steam catapults on battleships for spotting. However, just as the stream of bullets ripped into the rear of the floatplane, a spray of tracer left the rear-facing machine-gun of the Arado, slamming into the attacking Hurricane.
"Boss, major issues. Coolant system is fucked!" Jake radioed.
"Bill, escort. Get him back to the carrier or back to land, I don't care which." Harry ordered sharply as he climbed, spotting a silhouette of a large aircraft, four-engined aircraft circling the area about four-thousand feet above them.
Opening the throttle fully, he climbed, in a spiral, six-thousand feet, all the time circling to keep his eyes on the oblivious heavy aircraft in view. Flicking off the safety on his guns, he gently dived after it just as it turned to nearly face him, travelling at one-sixty degrees to his . Then all hell broke loose as a waist gunner let a stream of tracer at him, big streaks of red from a heavy-machine gun, probably a thirteen-millimetre, followed by a hail of similar bullets from a twin gun turret on the top of the fuselage.
Harry ignored the tracer, and the snapping noise as the supersonic bullets passed him. Closing to fifty feet, he still didn't waver, but pressed the gun button. Eight Brownings roared as they spewed a stream of bullets straight into the glass of the cockpit of the Focke-Wulf Condor.
Diving, he felt the aircraft shudder as the engine momentarily cut, followed by a loud BANG as a shell punched into the fuselage, ouch. Throwing open the cockpit canopy, Harry leaned out to see a tattered hole in the fabric skinning of his fighter. He turned and followed the Fw-200, snapping a few photographs with the gun-camera as the aircraft plunged into the sea. Not bad for such a powerfully armed aircraft against a lightly-armed fighter.
However, there was a problem. The Arado monoplane that Jake had shot down was used exclusively as a warship's catapult-launched reconnaissance aircraft. Harry grunted irritably and slammed closed his canopy.
Pressing on his push-to-talk for the radio, he opened his mouth to speak before there was a crackle of sparks and an acrid smell filled the cockpit. Immediately releasing the button, he cursed silently. The twenty-millimetre shell from the under-fuselage gondola cannon of the Focke-Wulf had fucked his radio.
Diving to try and get Glorious in his view, Harry spotted the silhouette of a huge ship approaching at speed. He was just about to throttle back and try and enter the circuit when he spotted huge gun turrets, two forward, each with three guns. Sticking the nose down, he jammed the throttle wide open and dived for the deck as the ship began blazing away with inaccurate flak fire. He spotted Glorious, listing and on fire, raked with shell-holes. And on the far side, a second battleship, identical in most ways to the first.
Between them, the destroyer escorts lay, riddled with holes, burning. They were lost.
Narrowing his eyes in anger, he made a cold calculation. Glorious too was lost. She had lost speed, and the immense armament of the twin battleships would spell her end. His bullets would have no effect on the turrets. Then he spotted the open bridge and the warfare control installations on the mast.
Hunching himself down behind the armour plate, he rolled in on the battleship, three-hundred miles an hour, five feet off the sea at most. Then suddenly he jerked the stick back, and then slammed it down. The aircraft leapt upwards and then dived. Harry let off a burst of bullets at the bridge, then another at the mast full of radar equipment before diving back to five feet. He pulled around when suddenly, he was bracketed by bursts of gunfire from all along the ship. Staccato flashes lit up the side and suddenly, the Hurricane was pierced with thousands of holes, caused by shrapnel.
Letting fly with a long burst, right down the side, he snarled behind his oxygen mask as the light anti-aircraft installations were filled with flying bullets, shrapnel and ricochets. But the Hurricane was dying, he could feel the airframe groaning, the shredded skinning flapping in the airflow.
Then the breeches clacked, empty. No more bullets. There was nothing he could do... almost. Turning the aircraft around to face the battleship, he jerked the canopy open and tried to gain some height. Fuck, vertical control wasn't present. The engine coughed and spluttered before ceasing to turn over.
Harry feathered the three-blade propeller that had replaced the two-blade De Havilland unit. He was lucky the sea was calm, as he set down the Hurricane on the water, it didn't dig in, and he snapped off his harness, quickly grabbed his Browning Automatic Rifle in its watertight leather case, along with his copy of the squadron log and slung them around his back before climbing out. Looking down onto the wing, he noticed the film box for the gun camera was loose, held on only by a nut.
Kneeling down, he unfastened it from the aircraft, which was still floating. That quickly went in the rifle bag. Looking up as he heard a droning noise, Harry nearly smiled at the irony. An Arado 196 floatplane alighted on the water and taxxiied up next to him, the lone pilot pushing open his canopy.
Taking it as the invitation that it was, Harry swam the twenty feet from his sinking Hurricane to the float of the Arado and up to the cockpit. The moment he had a chance, he drew the Colt M1911 he kept holstered under his jacket, racked the slide and shot out the radio.
"Guten nachmittag mein freunde." Harry said with a predatory grin, holding the gun a few inches from the pilot's head; "Fliege ein-neun-vier mass."
He had the pilot at gunpoint under orders to fly one-nine-five degrees. That should take them to around the Shetlands where he could either force the pilot to land or bail out.
In Memoriam HMS Glorious and her crew.
In Memoriam HMS Acasta and her crew. In Memoriam HMS Ardent and her crew.
In Memoriam Hawker Hurricane 46 Squadron, Royal Air Force.
In Memoriam Fairey Swordfish 823 Naval Air Squadron.
Finally, In Memoriam Gloster Gladiator 263 Squadron Royal Air Force and 802 Naval Air Squadron.
These men died fighting the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. May we learn of mistakes from the past and never let such a conflict be repeated.
'…of ships sailing the sea. Each with its special flag or ship-signal. Of unnamed heroes on the ships, of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach. Of dashing spray and the winds fighting and blowing.' Ralph Vaughan Williams: Sea Symphony.