Flames over France by Robert Jackson Page B

way.
    Armstrong told his ground crew about the problem with the guns, then went off to have a word with the intelligence officer, from whom he borrowed a cigarette — he normally smoked a pipe, but had no English tobacco with him and couldn’t stand the aromatic French blends — and sat on the grass beside the dispersal hut to watch the others coming in. Villeneuve was among the first back. Presently, after a lengthy conversation with the intelligence officer, he strolled over to where Armstrong was sitting, fishing his pipe out of a pocket as he did so. The English pilot stood up as he approached. Villeneuve looked tired, and there was a deep frown on his forehead.
    “So, my English friend, eight of us have returned. Two have landed elsewhere and two are missing. You destroyed a German, I understand. Well done. That makes three.” He sighed and glanced up at the sky, over which some fleecy clouds were creeping.
    “It is not enough. Not enough, by any means. We have to shoot down more of them. Our tactics are wrong. We need more fluidity, more freedom of action. The problem is, you see, that unlike your Royal Air Force, we are tied to the requirements of the army. We have no independence. We, the group and escadrille commanders, make representation to higher authority on how we might change things. We have done it many times since the start of the war, and we have been ignored just as often. If the Germans defeat us, God forbid, it will not be the fault of the pilots at the front.”
    Still frowning, he tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and lit it before speaking again.
    “The news is bad,” he said. “I have just been informed that our French day bomber force is no longer capable of mounting attacks on the Meuse bridges. The losses have been too high. Which means, mon ami , that everything now depends on the RAF … ”
    Had Villeneuve and Armstrong but known it, the machinery that was to result in the martyrdom of the RAF’s Advanced Air Striking Force had already been set in motion. In the early hours of that morning, General Billotte, commanding the French First Army Group, had telephoned Air Marshal Barratt and begged him to send the AASF into action in the Sedan area. “Victory or defeat hinges on the destruction of those bridges,” the French general had emphasised. Barratt had accordingly authorised the AASF to attack the pontoons which the Germans had thrown across the Meuse, and the first two missions of this kind — carried out between 0430 and 0630 by ten Fairey Battles — had been encouraging, all the aircraft returning safely to base.
    A few of the pontoons appeared to have been damaged, but Guderian’s panzers continued to rumble across into the bridgehead established on the west bank the previous evening. Further north, the 6th Panzer Division pushed through a second breach in the Montherme area, while in the Dinant sector Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzers poured into a third bridgehead. Up to this point Air Vice-Marshal Playfair, the AASF’s commander, had been holding the AASF in reserve to give his squadrons a few more hours in which to scrape together their available resources; these amounted to only sixty-two Battles and eight Blenheims, but with the French bomber force shot out of the sky by mid-morning Barratt and Playfair had no alternative but to commit these battered remnants.
    Between 1500 and 1600 that afternoon, the AASF threw every aircraft that could still fly into the cauldron. It was a massacre. No. 12 Squadron, which had already suffered heavily at Maastricht two days earlier, lost four aircraft out of five; No. 142 four out of eight; No. 226 three out of six; No. 105 six out of eleven; No. 150 lost all four; No. 88 one out of ten; No. 103 three out of eight and No. 218 ten out of eleven. Of the eight Blenheims sent out by 114 and 139 Squadrons, only three returned to base. It was the highest loss in an operation of similar size ever experienced by the RAF, and all that was