Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 20

ON THURSDAY, 22 APRIL 1943, two Spitfires from Takali airfield on the tiny island of Malta took off at first light and, banking, turned and headed north in the direction of Sicily. A year earlier, the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica had done their level best to crush the island and pummel it into the sea. Lying 60 miles to the south of Sicily, Malta lay directly in the path of any Axis shipping heading to North Africa. From this island, torpedo bombers, fighter aircraft, submarines and warships could all operate against the Axis supply line. The most successful Allied submarine of the war, HMS Upholder, had operated from Malta. So too had Force K, two cruisers and two destroyers that had played havoc with Axis shipping, so much so that in November 1941, 77 per cent of all Rommel’s supplies crossing the Mediterranean had been sent to the bottom. A few weeks later, his forces were driven back across Libya. Feldmarschall Kesselring, newly appointed C-in-C South, realized that Malta needed to be neutralized: its port facilities wrecked, its RAF contingent destroyed, its airfield made unusable, its harbours inaccessible for both warships and submarines. Luftflotte II, an entire air army, had been sent to Sicily for the purpose.

In April 1942, 6,728 tons of bombs had been dropped on the island, sixteen times the amount that had destroyed the English city of Coventry back in November 1940. Some 841 tons had been dropped on Takali airfield alone, and a similar amount on neighbouring Luqa. On five separate days that month there had been just one serviceable fighter left for the RAF to fly, and on one day, 14 April, there had not been a single one. Malta had been a brutal place to be back in April 1942.

Kesselring had not been able to finish the job, however. Malta had been on its knees, but his Luftwaffe were needed across the sea in North Africa to support Rommel’s planned offensive at the end of May 1942. More Spitfires had reached the island and the fightback had begun in the air, and very successfully too, but by June the island – and the fighter pilots – were beginning to starve. By July the situation was desperate. And by August, the shortages were so dire it had seemed that Malta might have to surrender after all. One last effort was made to save the island with the mounting of the most heavily defended Allied convoy of the entire war: Operation PEDESTAL. The Allies were determined the convoy should get through, the Axis were equally set on ensuring it failed. A mighty battle raged the length of the western Mediterranean as bombers, U-boats and fast torpedo boats were all flung at the convoy. Of the fourteen vessels that set sail, just five made it, including the one tanker, the Ohio, which despite being hit ten times and even having a crashed Stuka dive-bomber land on its decks, managed to limp in, woefully low in the water and with two destroyers lashed either side because its engines had stopped. It reached Grand Harbour on 15 August 1942, the Feast Day of Santa Maria, the most important festa in Malta’s calendar. A miracle had occurred. Malta had been saved.

In October the same year Kesselring had made one more effort to extract this thorn in the Axis side, but by then the island was bristling with fighter planes and his air forces were shot down in droves. Now, a year on from the height of the Malta Blitz, the island was still looking bashed and beaten, rubble still lay in the streets and life was tough for the Maltese, many of whom had been made homeless, but it was also awash with Allied fighter aircraft. How the tide had turned.

The two Spitfires taking off that early morning were from 249 Squadron, a Battle of Britain veteran fighter unit that had been operating from the island for more than two years, since the spring of 1941. Pilots had been rotated in and out, however, and the two now heading north had both been on Malta a few months only. One was the newly promoted Squadron Leader John J. Lynch Jr from Alhambra, California, just twenty-four years old; the other was even younger, twenty-year-old Flying Officer Irving ‘Hap’ Kennedy, from Cumberland, Ontario.

Since the outbreak of war, the RAF had attracted – and welcomed – pilots and aircrew from all around the world, and certainly the fighter pilots on Malta had always been a fairly polyglot bunch. Johnny Lynch really should have been flying with an American outfit, but having joined the US Army Air Corps – as it had then been – before the war, he had become impatient for some action and so had taken himself north to Canada and signed on the dotted line for the RAF instead. Although he’d wound up in one of the all-American Eagle Squadrons in England, he had then accepted an overseas posting to Malta in September 1942. Seven months on, he was not only still on the island but had taken command of the squadron and was in no especial hurry to join his fellow Americans now serving in the USAAF. Lynch liked 249 Squadron just fine.

Hap Kennedy had arrived on Malta just a month after Lynch; at the height of the siege, three months was considered ample time for a tour on the island, but throughout the Mediterranean theatre aircrew were carrying out longer tours now, as it was recognized that the more experienced the pilots were, the better the Allied air forces would be. Malta remained a physically tough posting and was still short of many of the creature comforts of home, but it had been transformed in recent weeks.

Both men were carrying auxiliary fuel tanks that could be discarded once the fuel they carried had been used. The idea for this flight had been Lynch’s; he’d spent a fair amount of time at Lascaris, the operations and fighter control rooms dug into the rock underneath the island’s capital Valletta, studying patterns of behaviour by the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica, and realized they would often fly transport planes bringing in supplies early in the day. He hoped to catch some this morning.

Flying low over the sea, they were soon past Capo Passero on the south-east tip of Sicily and continuing on their way, Avola and then Syracuse off to their left. Just north of Catania, near the coastal town of Riposto, Kennedy spotted an aircraft heading south towards them and inland, presumably to land at either Catania or Gerbini. He wondered whether he should break radio silence, because it was clear Lynch hadn’t seen it. He decided he would – after all, it might be the only aircraft they saw.

‘Tiger Green One,’ he called over the R/T.1, 2 ‘Aircraft eleven o’clock ahead, same level, proceeding south. Over.’

Lynch still couldn’t see it.

‘Green One. Aircraft is now at nine o’clock,’ Kennedy said. ‘Might be a Junkers 52.’

After a pause, Lynch replied that he still couldn’t see it, so Kennedy told him he was going after it before they lost the aircraft entirely. Opening the throttle and banking away to the left, he soon caught it, creeping up directly behind as close as he could. Aiming at the port engine, he gave it a quick burst of cannon fire and saw the engine burst into flames and the aircraft immediately plunge down into the sea, before turning again and quickly catching up with Lynch once more.

On they flew, Mount Etna on their left, up through the Straits of Messina swiftly before anyone could fire at them and then turning to port along the north Sicilian coast. The sun was now up and behind them, which was ideal, and up ahead Kennedy soon saw three small specks of light, which at first he thought might be birds but then realized had to be aircraft. Once again he warned Lynch, who, still struggling to see, asked him to take the lead. Kennedy gave the Merlin engine extra boost and felt the Spitfire surge forward. Much to his delight, he saw the three aircraft were not fighters, as he’d first thought, but bigger.

‘Green One,’ he called. ‘The three aircraft dead ahead are twin-engined. I’m opening up a little more. We must catch up more quickly. Over.’

Lynch followed, and together they soon caught their quarry at barely 200 feet above the surface of the sea. In fact, they were three-engined Ju52s – transports, just as Lynch had hoped. Kennedy drew in close towards the nearest and, seeing the machine gun of the mid-upper gunner pointing upwards, realized the man was snoozing in the morning sun. It had been the perfect stalk – with the sun directly behind the two Spitfires, the German crews could not see them at all. Kennedy opened fire and, once again, the plane flipped over and dived into the sea. ‘I reckon that woke him up,’ he thought. Only now was Lynch catching up. Kennedy hammered the second of the three, and once again saw smoke billow from the port engine. Lynch now drew right up behind the third and blasted it into the sea, before turning to the second and finishing it off.

‘Green Two,’ said Lynch, ‘Green One here.3 Let’s go home.’

They climbed as they flew over Sicily then dived down low over Comiso in the south, at zero feet, watching men on the ground scattering in all directions. ‘We were rubbing it in,’ noted Kennedy.4

Back at Takali, they landed safely. Lynch was a serious, quiet fellow, and the ground crews called him ‘Smilin’ Jack’ because he rarely did. But he was smiling now.

‘What are you going to claim?’ he asked Kennedy.

Kennedy thought a moment. He wanted the CO to take him on another trip like that. He’d begun the day with three confirmed kills to his name, so the two he’d shot down alone gave him five and that made him an ace. It seemed a little churlish to demand he share the Junkers they both hit.

‘What about sharing even, two each?’5 he suggested.

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Lynch replied. Six days later, Lynch shot down another Junkers 52 on a similar early-morning sweep, although that time he hadn’t taken Kennedy. It was the 1,000th enemy aircraft destroyed by Malta-based units since the start of the war. That was a lot of enemy aircraft. Malta had been revitalized, and so had its pilots, now flush with experience, confidence and plenty of aircraft. The tables could not have been more blatantly turned.

In his letter to Brooke back in early April, General Alexander had stressed that HUSKY required the all-out commitment of the Allied naval and air forces – especially the latter – to support the army. He had not been disappointed. At the end of May both Brooke and the prime minister had visited Algiers to see for themselves how preparations were coming along, to provide a bit of a morale boost for the men and, of course, to confer with the senior commanders. On Monday, 31 May, Churchill and Brooke sat down with Eisenhower and the three service chiefs for HUSKY; and Tedder, as overall Allied air commander, was able to report that his men had been blasting Axis communications for weeks and were already exerting considerable pressure on the enemy’s windpipe. A few days later, at Eisenhower’s villa, Tedder reported to Churchill that they were attacking relentlessly, bombing communications centres, airfields and the enemy’s main bases. A Daimler-Benz factory near Naples, producing engines not just for the Messerschmitt 109 but also the Italian Macchi 202, had been hit on 30 May; airfields at Bari in southern Italy had already been hammered and so they had now turned on Foggia further up the leg of the peninsula. Intelligence showed the Italians had moved some units further north still from Foggia all the way up to Piacenza. ‘Our bombing of ports and railways,’ Tedder told him, ‘was interfering effectively with shipping and supply lines.’6

There were now almost 3,500 Allied aircraft in the Mediterranean, a huge fleet and well over double the size of the Axis air forces in the theatre. Air power had always been at the heart of British and then American strategy, a central part of the ‘steel not flesh’ principle designed to keep the numbers of young men fighting at the coal-face of war as small as possible. Unlike the Axis, the Allies were truly fighting on air, on the sea and on land, and coordinating their operations very effectively, despite ongoing grumbles in certain quarters – gripes that were generally made through ignorance and a lack of understanding rather than reflecting real deficiencies.

Really, the development of Allied air power was quite remarkable. Although Britain had developed the world’s first fully coordinated air defence system before the outbreak of war and had used it superbly during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, the RAF’s performance in France beforehand had shown up just how little thought had been given to tactical air power – supporting the army in their operations on the ground. Bombing capability had also been far short of what had been confidently hoped. The United States, on the other hand, had merely had the US Army Air Corps rather than a fully fledged air force. By May 1940, at a time when Messerschmitts were marauding at will over northern France, the Americans had just 160 fighter aircraft and fifty-two heavy bombers. Since then, not only had production of aircraft in both the United States and Britain risen urgently and dramatically, the means of operating them had been transformed too, and it had been in North Africa, over the desert sands, that Allied tactical air power had been born.

Air Chief Marshal Tedder had certainly played his part. Lean, thin-faced, with dark, keen eyes and a pipe never far from his mouth, he was sharply intelligent, forward-thinking and driven by belief in the huge possibilities air power might yield. So too had Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. An Australian by birth who had been brought up in New Zealand, he had arrived in Egypt in the middle of 1941 and taken over command of what became the RAF’s Desert Air Force. Known to all as ‘Mary’, derived from ‘Maori’ – a nickname that, curiously, he rather liked – he was a tough and charismatic figure, bristling with ideas and energy; he devoutly believed air power was vital not just for strategic bombing and defence but also for achieving victory on the ground.

Tedder had understood that improving technical maintenance in the field had been a first step, but had also overseen the development of new methods – or doctrine – as Army and RAF together strove for a clearer understanding of the role of close air support in a land battle. Army commanders wanted to have the air forces at their beck and call, but Tedder – and Coningham – rightly resisted this. Air commanders, they argued, were best placed to judge when and where air power should be used. An army commander would always want permanent air cover almost directly above his troops, but while an air commander would certainly help take out specific targets, he would also direct his aircraft to destroy enemy air forces or supply columns before they reached the front. Fortunately, Tedder and Coningham had Churchill’s support and a new directive, based on the concepts of air support that had been outlined by Tedder, had been issued back in September 1941.

By the early summer of 1942, Coningham had honed his tactics further, thanks to his collaboration with his number two, right-hand man and administrative chief, Air Commodore Tommy Elmhirst, a diminutive and altogether quieter fellow as well as the owner of incredibly bushy eyebrows. Coningham might have been the visionary but Elmhirst was the enabler, implementing greatly improved management of supplies and maintenance, as well as better ground control and a system of leap-frogging. Landing grounds were established all along the coast from the main airfields around Cairo to the front. Stores and supplies were built up at each, which meant forward units could keep as close to the fighting front as possible. If they needed to retreat suddenly, the aircraft could take off and the ground crew shuttle back to the next landing ground. The aircraft would then join them on their return from operations over the front. This enabled Coningham’s fighters and bombers to harry the enemy almost constantly, and after the fall of Tobruk on 21 June 1942 and with Eighth Army in full and desperate retreat, it was the Desert Air Force that very probably saved it from annihilation, hammering the pursuing Axis forces without let-up.

The pause that followed between Rommel’s defeat at Alam Halfa at the very beginning of September that year and the Battle of Alamein in the third week of October had allowed Coningham and Elmhirst to develop their forces yet further. Piecemeal units were kicked into touch and replaced by groups of fighters, divided into three wings, each with its own administrative staff. This centralization of administration allowed wing and squadron commanders to get on with the job of leading their men and fighting the enemy rather than worrying about paperwork and logistics. It also meant the pilots could train harder and better. Gunnery techniques were improved and the hours in logbooks increased. Coningham didn’t want his pilots thinking about flying; that was to be automatic. He wanted them thinking about how best to shoot down the enemy or destroy targets on the ground.

Like Tedder, Coningham also firmly believed the aim of a tactical air force should be to win air superiority over the battle area. Once that was achieved, more direct support could be provided for the troops on the ground. In other words, while the Desert Air Force could offer close air support to Eighth Army, it could do much more than that; but although it was obviously vital to form close working relations with the army command, it was also essential that the air commander be left to command his force how he, as an airman, thought fit. Sometimes, for example, he could best help troops down below not by responding to a specific target request, but by neutralizing a threat further back behind the enemy.

Coningham had also learned from the enemy, and while he had been impressed with how effective dive-bombing could be, he had also realized how vulnerable the Junkers 87 Stuka was as it emerged from its dive to any Allied fighter waiting to pounce, and that generally it was simply too slow in all forms of flight. Instead, he increasingly used fighters, especially the rugged US-built P-40 Kittyhawks, as fighter-bombers, not least because they could out-dive the latest Messerschmitt 109s and Macchi 202s. The ‘Kittybombers’ soon became an incredibly effective weapon, and increasingly so as the pilots gained in experience. Able to hurtle towards a target at speed, which made them harder to shoot down, they could drop their load and speed on out of the fray. The results were quickly felt. Not only did the RAF save Eighth Army’s bacon, it contributed to the victory at Alamein every bit as much as the troops on the ground – as Montgomery, to be fair to him, freely acknowledged. And Monty also accepted and understood the importance of working hand-in-hand with the air forces, gladly agreeing to joint tactical HQs as Coningham had proposed.

Coningham’s developments, backed up by Tedder and combined with the authority to act independently from the army commanders conferred by Churchill, transformed close air support in North Africa and laid down the basis of future doctrine not just for the RAF but for the USAAF as well – which was significant, because with the TORCH landings had arrived burgeoning US air forces, including a bevy of bright, dynamic and hugely competent airmen only too happy to learn, improve and develop the very exciting and ever-growing potential of air power.

Prominent among them was Lieutenant-General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, who had first reached North Africa soon after the TORCH landings as USAAF Theater Commander. Spaatz was fifty-one, with a resolute jaw, trim silver moustache, intelligent eyes and a natural air of charisma and authority. An experienced airman with combat experience from the First World War, he had risen up the ranks of the Air Corps during the 1930s to become Chief of Plans. A close friend and colleague of General Henry Harley ‘Hap’ Arnold, C-in-C of the USAAF, Spaatz had been at the forefront of modernizing America’s air forces. Energetic, open-minded and forward-thinking, he oozed competence and good sense from every pore. Sent to Britain in 1940 as an observer, he had swiftly – and correctly – concluded the Luftwaffe had little chance of winning the Battle of Britain. A bomber man first and foremost, he recognized that weight of numbers, both of aircraft and of bombs, counted, and that the Luftwaffe simply didn’t have enough of either. But he’d also been impressed by RAF organization, and had returned to Britain earlier in 1942 to take command of the fledgling US Eighth Air Force.

US involvement in North Africa meant that no sooner had he begun to lay foundations for the Eighth than he was needed in the Mediterranean instead. He had arrived in Algiers in November with a number of misgivings, not least the depletion of Eighth Air Force, which lost some fourteen units of fighters, bombers and transports to the Mediterranean.

There had been a further concern, however, and that was doctrinal. The Eighth was a strategic air force designed to operate on its own, and they had worked out and agreed their doctrine for daylight operations in coordination with, but separate from, RAF Bomber Command. The duties of Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, however, were very different: part strategic, part coastal and part tactical in support of ground operations. For this he had good numbers of aircraft, but inexperienced crews, an untested logistical organization and no doctrine at all for close air support. What’s more, unlike the RAF, which was an independent armed service, the US air forces were part of the army. Eighth Air Force could operate without interference from the army ground forces, and were already doing so; but North Africa was already proving a different kettle of fish.

As if to complicate matters further, there had been no unified command. The Americans were doing their thing in Twelfth Air Force, and the RAF were doing theirs – and were also split up between Eastern Air Command in Algeria and Tunisia, and the Desert Air Force and other units of RAF Middle East. The set-up had been designed in this way to support the landings and on the assumption that Tunisia would be swiftly captured; but by the end of 1942 it was clear that this had been wishful thinking. Spaatz, quite rightly, had felt that the dispersal of command and total lack of any coordinated close air support doctrine had been threatening to undermine the material strength being thrown into the theatre.

But everything the Allies had been doing in Tunisia in terms of air power had been new. Even in Libya, where Mary Coningham had been developing his Desert Air Force into a finely tuned tactical force offering close air support, he and his men had still been feeling their way and working out methods on the hoof. What’s more, they only had Eighth Army to support, whereas in north-west Africa there were the American, French and British ground forces to support, all new to fighting and each with different structures and attitudes to air power. Joined-up thinking on air power was decidedly lacking. Yet if they were feeling their way, it was hardly surprising. After all, just three years earlier the United States had only had an air corps amounting to a handful of fighter planes; it had already come an incredibly long way in really no time at all.

Clearly, unifying the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean had been essential; and it had been done, as part of the shake-up in February 1943 in which Eisenhower had been made Supreme Allied Commander and Alexander put in charge of 18th Army Group. Tedder had become C-in-C Mediterranean Air Command and so the overall Allied air commander. Under him fell RAF Malta, RAF Middle East and also the new North African Air Force, which was by far the largest single command now in the Mediterranean. This was given to Spaatz, and directly under him was now the Northwest Africa Strategic Air Command headed by another American hot-shot, Major-General Jimmy Doolittle, a celebrated aviation pioneer and a household name back in the States. In the same reorganization, all Allied tactical air forces were handed over to Coningham, first as Air Support Tunisia but then renamed North African Tactical Air Force, which also fell within Spaatz’s command. Coningham’s new deputy was Brigadier-General Larry Kuter, who had helped write the USAAF’s strategic air doctrine; he too was supremely competent and forward-thinking, and was eager to hone this exciting and rapidly developing weapon every bit as much as Tedder, Spaatz, Coningham et al. Nor was that all. Also under Spaatz’s umbrella were coastal air operations against Axis shipping and the all-important training command.

It was notable how well these commanders, different people all, and suddenly thrown together, seemed to get on. A pioneering spirit welded them together. For sure, ruffles occurred along the way – including a fairly major spat between Coningham and Patton in March during the latter’s command of US II Corps. Patton, with no understanding at all of the new doctrine being developed for close air support, had angrily demanded a permanent umbrella of fighter cover for his operations in southern Tunisia. Coningham and Kuter had told him this was not possible, prompting ire from Patton and an increasingly heated exchange that ended with Coningham accusing the American of crying wolf. Tedder had been furious with Coningham for threatening Anglo-US relations, while Alexander had thought Patton had rather deserved it. On Tedder’s insistence, however, Coningham was forced to apologize and visited Patton in person. They shook hands and lunched together, and, as Patton noted, ‘We parted friends.’7

At the start of the Tunisian campaign, Allied soldiers on the ground had grumbled that the Luftwaffe appeared to roam at will above them; by the end, there were no such complaints. Day by day, week by week, the Allied air forces began increasingly to dominate the skies. The American and British contribution in terms of numbers, logistics and effort was simply immense. By the last days in Tunisia, some three thousand Allied aircraft were dominating barely three hundred of the Axis. This level of commitment produced more than a hundred new airfields in the theatre, and all-weather ones at that, which required labourers, concrete, graders, bulldozers and other plant – almost all of which had to be shipped from the United States or Britain. After Kasserine, five new airfields were built around the nearby town of Sbeitla – all within seventy-two hours.

Meanwhile, in the skies, increasingly confident and more experienced airmen were winning the day. On Palm Sunday, 18 April, intelligence reached Coningham’s air forces that around a hundred Ju52 transport planes were approaching Tunis. It was late afternoon and in all, four squadrons of Kittyhawks and eighteen Spitfires climbed into the air to try to intercept the fleet of enemy transports. In what became known as the ‘Palm Sunday Turkey Shoot’ no fewer than seventy-four Luftwaffe aircraft were shot down.

No matter that on the ground, US troops were still a little green and learning the ropes, or that British forces were still working out an effective way of war; in the air, in a matter of months, the Allies had transformed their offensive capabilities.