Flames over France (9 page)

Chapter Six

The weariness clutched at every fibre of Armstrong’s body. He had flown five sorties since dawn; now, at six o’clock in the evening, grimy and unshaven, his body clammy with the sweat that had poured from him as he sweltered under the hot May sun in his fighter’s cockpit, he wanted nothing more than to bathe some of the tension away, snatch something to eat and fall into a coma.

He had lost count of the days. Today was 20 May, he thought, but without looking it up on the calendar he couldn’t be sure. The day before, the
Groupe
— its complement increased to eight aircraft with the arrival of some replacements, the survivors of another unit that had been decimated in the fighting — had moved again, this time to Anglure, north of the Seine, from where it had operated almost continuously in support of a doomed French counter-offensive aimed at preventing the Germans breaking through the Oise valley.

Armstrong had seen the failure of the counter-offensive for himself, etched in the smoke of burning French tanks as, high above, the French lighter squadrons had striven desperately to keep the
Luftwaffe
at bay.

On 17 May the Germans had crossed the River Sambre and by nightfall had penetrated the Forest of Mormal. The French counter-attack had not started until the evening of the 19th, having been delayed because of the difficulty in moving troops and equipment up to the jump-off point under constant air attack. In the small hours the attacking force reached its first objective, the railway line running between Berlaimont and Le Quesnoy, but the Germans rapidly reinforced their troops and succeeded in surrounding the French right flank near Englefontaine. By this time the French armoured support had collapsed through lack of fuel, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that General Mesny, the French commander, managed to extricate most of his forces from the rapidly closing trap.

That morning, Armstrong and his fellow pilots had flown two sorties in response to a desperate plea for help by the French 43rd Division, which had abandoned its positions and begun the march westwards. The move had been forestalled by a heavy German attack on the French fortified positions at Bavai, and the remaining seven battalions of the 43rd had found themselves involved in fierce fighting.

The fighter pilots had strafed the Germans until their ammunition had run out, but they had been unable to stave off the inevitable. One by one, the 43rd’s battalions had been annihilated, except for a few men who managed to get away. The 10th
Chasseurs
battalion, forming the rearguard, was assailed by a whole German infantry regiment. The
Chasseurs
fought on until their ammunition was exhausted, then they burned their colours, fixed bayonets and charged the enemy. To a man, they were mown down by the German machine-guns.

On 17 May, with the aid of five divisions which had just reached the front, the French had attempted to form a new field army to block the Germans’ advance along the Oise. Even at this stage, the French General Staff still believed that they had enough tanks left to launch a strong armoured counter-attack; in reality, the only armoured formation at their disposal was the embryo 4th Division, with two scratch battalions. This lay in the open country between the forward elements of General Guderian’s 1st
Panzer
Division and the River Oise, and was commanded by a tall, dignified tank officer, a certain Colonel Charles de Gaulle.

The first objective of de Gaulle’s two weakened and under-strength armoured brigades was the village of Montcornet, which had recently been captured by Guderian and commanded a strategic position astride the crossroads leading to Saint Quentin, Laon and Reims. The 6th Brigade approached the objective from Laon, following the left flank of the road, while on the right the 8th Brigade passed through Boncourt and Ville aux Bois, each column followed by a detachment of the 2nd Dismounted Dragoons and some groups of
Chasseurs
.

After a preliminary skirmish, the attack against Montcornet was launched in daylight and de Gaulle’s tanks penetrated into the outskirts of the village. With only one battalion of
Chasseurs
to support them, however, they could not hold on and were compelled to withdraw after destroying a single German tank. De Gaulle’s forces were pulled back, attacked by German aircraft all the way, and found shelter in the Forest of Samoussy between Sissonne and Bruyeres. The colonel summed up the situation to his staff officers in a single sentence.

“We are like lost children thirty kilometres in front of the Aisne,” he told them.

The situation brightened a little on 18 May with the arrival of some reinforcements, including forty Somua tanks of the 3rd
Cuirassiers
. The new arrivals came just in time, for by the morning of the 18th the 4th Division had only sixty tanks left, twenty of which were heavy 33-ton ‘B’ types. On the 19th, with the aid of these reinforcements, de Gaulle was ordered to cross the River Serre and attack Guderian’s lines of communication.

The attack was launched at 0700, the French tanks moving forward in three parallel columns, but by this time the Germans had had ample opportunity to mine the approaches to the Serre bridges and bring up their anti-tank batteries, and before the attack had been under way half an hour, the
Stukas
appeared in full strength. By 0900 de Gaulle’s thrust had ground to a halt, while on its right flank the supporting infantry were attacked again and again by bombers and German tanks, followed by infantry assault groups.

Desperate to hold on for as long as possible, the 4th Armoured Division’s infantry clung to their positions just short of Laon and suffered further attacks throughout the night, finally extricating themselves with great difficulty the next morning.

The gallant failure of de Gaulle’s small counter-offensive marked the French Army’s last chance to blunt the German advance with the use of armour. As Armstrong and the other pilots were climbing wearily from their aircraft at the end of the day’s last sortie, what was left of the French 4th Division was pulling back across the Aisne.

The pilots sat on the grass or in deckchairs near the dispersal hut, despairing now of a proper evening meal. Everything was in chaos, and they had to be content with bread and cheese, washed down by black coffee dispensed by a couple of orderlies. They chewed on their food mechanically, speaking in monosyllables between mouthfuls. Having finished, some wandered off to their tents, dog-tired, while others stayed where they were to smoke a last cigarette before turning in. Nobody took much notice when a telephone bell shrilled inside the hut.

Armstrong rose stiffly to his feet and was about to wander off to bed when Villeneuve emerged from the hut, looking perplexed, and caught sight of him. The day before, he had made Armstrong a flight commander; the Englishman was now one of the
Groupe
’
s
senior surviving pilots and has passed the five-victory mark which made him, as the French called it, an ‘ace’.

“There’s something odd going on, Armstrong,” Villeneuve said. “Here we are in the thick of things, and suddenly I’ve been ordered to take all available aircraft to Le Bourget — that’s the civil airport at Paris, as you may know — first thing tomorrow morning. I’m supposed to report to a
Commandant
Daurat. I knew someone of that name years ago. If it’s the same fellow, he’s a transport pilot. I wonder what it’s all about?”

“Perhaps they’re going to give us all some leave,” grinned a nearby pilot, who had overheard. “Give us a chance to dip our wicks, one last time, before — ” He made a cutting motion across his throat with the edge of his hand. Villeneuve ignored him, being preoccupied with the orders he had just received. At length, he said:

“We shall know soon enough. In the meantime, get some sleep. We shall all need to be up before dawn.” He glanced towards the north-east, where the rumble of artillery fire could be heard. “Closer,” he murmured to himself. “Always closer. God knows, sleep may be hard enough to come by.”

Armstrong slept, undisturbed by the noise of the guns, but he awoke feeling far from refreshed. He knew that he must have been dreaming again, although he could not recall what the dream might have been. He had experienced a recurring dream during the past two or three nights, an odd dream in which he had been imprisoned in a small room, struggling to get to the chink of light that revealed some sort of entrance, but prevented from doing so by mounds of jigsaw puzzles, broken up into their component pieces and piled in his path like miniature mountains. Most tired pilots who had been in action, he knew, dreamed about combat, of being chased by dogged enemy fighters or of being trapped in burning aircraft. Not him; he dreamed about bloody jigsaw puzzles. Perhaps he was going round the bend.

Shaking his head, he crawled out of his one-man tent stark naked. Some of the Frenchmen, he knew, had taken to sleeping in their clothes in case they had to make a hurried departure, but Armstrong refused to follow their example. He felt scruffy enough as it was, with yesterday’s sweat and grime dried upon his skin.

The morning air was cool, with just enough chill in it to clutch at the back of his throat as he took his first deep breath. He blinked against the red, molten ball of the sun, its upper rim just beginning to poke over the horizon. There were tendrils of haze across it, but whether they were caused by drifting smoke or the natural mists of early morning he had no means of telling. He stood there for a few moments, inhaling to clear his head. He would have liked nothing more than to go for a short run — his morning habit for years now — but he knew that there would be no time. Instead, he dived briefly back into his tent and re-emerged clutching his razor — still the same one that had been given to him by Madame Bessodes an eternity ago — a grimy towel and a cake of soap.

There was a water-filled trough at some distance from his tent, and he was glad to see that he was the first there; no soapy scum was floating on the surface. Bending down, he splashed freezing water over his head, leaving his face wet, and rubbed the cake of soap around his jawline. Then he dipped his shaving brush into the water and set about trying to work up some sort of lather, a task accompanied by only partial success. This was one morning ritual that caused great amusement among his French colleagues, most of whom had not shaved for days. It didn’t seem to have affected their performance in action. Armstrong shaved carefully, allowing an interval of a minute or two before putting the razor to his face. He had found by accident that if you left your face wet for a while, shaving with cold water presented no problems — why, he had no idea. But when he had finished his face was smooth and unnicked, and he felt a lot better as he dried himself down after washing all over.

Within minutes the other pilots were up and about, breakfasting on bread, sausage and steaming black coffee while the mechanics tested the engines of the Hawks. The valiant ground crews had worked all night to make the aircraft serviceable, repairing battle damage, and must have been fit to drop. Armstrong noticed that everyone glanced surreptitiously at the eastern sky from time to time, as though expecting an enemy air attack to materialise at any moment. He reflected that they had been lucky so far. The luck could not possibly last.

The flight to Paris took only a few minutes, the eight Hawks landing on schedule at Le Bourget. Colonel Villeneuve discovered to his delight that he and
Commandant
Daurat were indeed old acquaintances, and that Daurat was commander of the French GHQ Transport Flight. Villeneuve asked him what the score was, and was amazed when the other spread his hands wide in perplexity.

“I have no idea,
mon
Colonel
,” he said apologetically. “I know only that I had a telephone call from a GHQ staff officer yesterday evening, who told me to prepare a fast bomber for a vital mission this morning and to provide a fighter escort. Yours was the
Groupe
best placed for that task. The problem, as I quickly discovered, was that no bomber was available. At length, in desperation, I telephoned a friend at the Air Force test centre at Saint-Inglevert and he asked the CO there if a machine could be spared. There was only one, an Amiot 354.”

This, Villeneuve was aware, was France’s finest and fastest bomber. It had not yet entered service and was still undergoing its trials. For the test centre to spare it, something really important must be in the wind.

At that moment, a messenger roared up on a motorcycle and addressed Daurat. A general had arrived on the airfield; he was waiting in Daurat’s office and was not, it seemed, in a particularly pleasant mood. Daurat jumped on the pillion and sped away towards the operations room; Villeneuve and his pilots stayed where they were, wondering what was going to happen next.

While they waited, they watched with interest as a brand new Amiot 354 landed and taxied in. It parked close to the fighters, the polished metal of its wings and fuselage contrasting sharply with the drab camouflage of the other aircraft. Three crew members climbed from the Amiot, and the pilot came over to introduce himself to Villeneuve. His name was
Capitaine
Henri Lafitte, and he was a test pilot. Like Villeneuve, he was completely in the dark about the true nature of the mission.

“It must be something important, though,” he said. “We’ve been armed, especially for the occasion.”