Sicily '43. James Holland

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,