Mosquito: Menacing the Reich: Combat Action in the Twin-engine Wooden Wonder of World War II by Martin Bowman Read Free Book Online Page B

Mosquito in a dive. I did manage to regain control from the violent yaw to port by slapping the starboard Merlin right back. I called to my No.2 to take over and I flew through the smoke and dust still obscuring the target. I cleared flying low over the Royal Palace and poor old D-Dog received another load of shot from a machine-gun sited on the roof, just beside a huge Red Cross. D-Dog still wanted to make circles to port and I thought that perhaps I would have a little more control if I were to jettison the drop tanks. I tried that; the starboard tank dropped away but apparently the wiring to the port drop tank had been severed and that one stayed there. The yaw was exacerbated by this and my right leg was very cramped but pushing as hard as I could we sidled our way home to Scotland after I had jettisoned our bomb load after crossing the Norwegian coast near Stavanger.
    ‘Johnno’ Gaunt adds:
    Peter was doubtful whether the aircraft would make it back to UK so flew north for several minutes debating whether to turn right and head for Sweden, but the engines kept going and we gained height slowly, so went west over the mountains.
    Mallender takes up the story again:
    I stuck John in the backside with the little tube of morphia that we carried. Even so he managed to remain conscious and helped me to get home until I told him that I could see the Scottish coast. I had managed to crawl up to 5,000ft whilst crossing the sea and thought that it was about time I found out if I was going to be able to land the old lady. I dropped 15° of flap and throttled back the port engine a bit but before I had time to ease back to reduce speed much she shook violently and I noted that we were still flying at 140 knots. All the other aircraft had got safely home so I had the runway to myself. Rather unwisely, I now admit, I put the undercarriage down and the pre-stall shaking began immediately. I put down about 15° of flap (previous experiments had taught me that this seemed logical), I jettisoned the top hatch and powered her over the boundary at something near 140 knots. She stayed down all right but was burning up runway much too fast. I touched the brakes and that did it. She spun round and around like a Dervish, collapsed the under-carriage and finally came to rest in what I thought was a heap of ply, balsa wood and aluminium. I was really quite pleased to see George Curry’s grinning visage looking down through the open hatch. He helped me out and together we lifted from his seat a very comatose, if rather battered, navigator.
    ‘Johnno’ Gaunt, who was put into an ambulance and taken to a Naval Hospital just north of Aberdeen, concludes:
    They sewed me up in the last hours of 1944. Got a bar to the DFC for that escapade; notified by telegram whilst in hospital. 154
    Back to night operations again and on the night of 31 December 1944, seventy-seven Mosquitoes were despatched to Berlin and twelve to Ludwigshafen. One of them was Z-Zebra 155 of 128 Squadron, which was flown by Flight Lieutenant Leicester G. Smith RNZAF , who with his navigator Warrant Officer Bill Lane completed fifty-two operations on the Mosquito B.XVI from October 1944 to April 1945. Twenty of these were to Berlin. Smith recalls:
    The big ‘Cookie-carrier’ B.XVI was a wonderful aircraft to fly and although it had a pressurised cabin it was not used on operations in case of internal damage from flak. Take-off time was 16.15 hours. The flight plan kept our aircraft to 10,000ft to 6° East and an indicated airspeed of 215 knots at that height. It was a glorious evening for flying, as so many evenings were and mainly over 7/10ths cloud. The reason given was to miss the cumulonimbus cloud tops. We climbed to operational height and levelled out at 26,000ft. Flak was heavy between Lübeck and Hamburg (commonly called the Gap). Shrapnel was whistling around everywhere but our sympathy went out to one Mosquito crew who was coned by at least twenty searchlights. Flak was