GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
Four victories in one night
For a while, until they reached a pre-arranged position, and in order not to betray by their transmissions their presence to the enemy's monitor stations, they had, in common with everybody else, kept radio and radar silence. But as soon as they were past five degrees east Bill reached forward to the control panel of his A.I. set and switched on, his fingers ranging over the mass of controls and buttons, finding them automatically in the darkness. The Mosquito was no longer blind and groping, a helpless target; it had become a questing and deadly hunter.
They were over the enemy coast, and keeping a sharp lookout for anything that might come their way. The German fighters were probably all off the ground by now, but their radio and radar must have been hopelessly bedevilled by interference. Bill was getting plenty of German interference on his own Gee set, making it difficult to fix his position; but the A.I. was quite free of it as the Germans had not yet caught on to a means of jamming our later types of radar such as Mark X.
Suddenly Bill stiffened, and his right hand slid along the control panel. Something had come into the radar vision of the Mosquito, and he warned Branse that he thought he had a contact. Branse instinctively switched on the gun-sight, carefully and deliberately adjusting its brilliance. Bill was watching the little blob of light of the blip on the cathode ray tube as it smeared its glowing, snail track across the face. He was shrewdly weighing things up, waiting for the right moment to act. Then he gave a few instructions, and the Mosquito went curving down after its target. They began to close in with suspicious ease, which caused Branse to comment that it might be a new boy they were after. When they were fifteen hundred feet behind their target they started to slow down; and when they were in to twelve hundred feet Branse caught sight of it, identifying it as hostile.
As with all good crews, Branse and Bill always made a point of each of them identifying separately the aircraft they were intercepting and then making up their minds about it. With this one Bill needed only a quick glance through his night binoculars to decide that it was a Ju. 88G.
Neither of them said a word as they pulled up behind the still unsuspecting German and Branse opened fire. Flames leapt from the engine cowlings as the Junkers was hit, and it began to wilt. But it still flew on, wallowing and undecided, and the flames dwindled. Branse hit the Junkers again in the same place, the port engine, and the fire broke out afresh. The enemy aircraft sagged and went into an ever-steepening dive, and then it exploded into the ground.
Only the glowing wreckage of their victim, scattered across the fields, disturbed the darkness below them. Branse banked the Mosquito around, and started to climb back towards their patrol line. They reached their beat and settled down to wait, keeping station in that wide arc of unseen fighters ringing the target. Inside, the Pathfinders were lining themselves up, making sure of their aiming points, and then the target indicators went down.
The German fighters would now come heading in from miles around and, after a while, their flares began to stab the darkness. Branse and Bill went off to search around one or two that were fairly close. But they did not pick up any contacts, so they went on waiting and watching, curbing their impatience and resisting the temptation to rush off in the direction of the fireworks. They knew that they must not leave a dangerous gap in the ring of night fighters which was standing guard out there in the darkness.
Nearly three-quarters of an hour passed after their first combat, and the bombers were already heading for home before Bill got another contact. They turned off in pursuit, and as soon as they straightened out behind their target Bill realised that this one was not going to be so easy. The blip showed from its position that the other aircraft was four miles away, and it was swinging about the tube in a way that suggested that regular, routine evasive action was being taken. But there was nothing half-hearted about the evasion, and even at long range Bill had to start taking quite severe counter-action in order to follow it. The closer they got the harder they had to work. This one was an old hand, taking no chances. Branse had scarcely got the Mosquito twisting into one manoeuvre than Bill was pouring out instructions for another.
And all through Bill's commentary, woven into the constant stream of instructions, there were clear-cut word pictures which told Branse where to look for the target, and how it was behaving.
The occasional acknowledgements Branse made were scarcely noticed by Bill. The tubes told him far better than any words how short the time lag was between his calling an order and its execution by Branse, and slowly they closed in. Bill was getting dry in the mouth, but at twelve hundred feet Branse raised his voice to stem the torrent of words and said that he could see their target.
Bill was longing to have a look, but there was a note of warning in Branse's voice, and he kept his head down on the set. The blip had locked itself in that fixed position that it always did when the pilot could see and follow the target; but even then the Mosquito was being thrown about in the heat of the chase, and Bill was being lifted out of his seat at one moment and having his face jammed down on the visor the next.
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