Snowman’s Land (Part I)
The two-part story of a seemingly routine Second World War air battle and its stranger-than-fiction aftermath.
At 12:30 pm on 27 April, 1940, a two-seater, single-engine Blackburn Skua fighter/dive-bomber piloted by Captain Richard Partridge took off from the deck of HMS Ark Royal, Britain’s biggest aircraft carrier. He and his usual observer/rear-gunner, Lieutenant Robin Bostock, sitting directly behind him, now found themselves flying above the churning sea just over four-hundred miles west of Norway.
Joining them were a couple of other Blackburn Skuas based on the Ark Royal. All three aircraft belonged to 800 Naval Air Squadron, to which the schoolboyish-looking Partridge had been appointed commanding officer little more than four months earlier.
The formation was codenamed Yellow Section. For the purpose of radio conversations between its pilots, Richard Partridge was identified as Yellow Leader. He and his colleagues were due to carry out the latest in a succession of patrols above the Norwegian port of Åndalsnes. Their task was to prevent the Luftwaffe—the German air force—from attacking the Royal Navy vessels currently evacuating British, French, and Norwegian ground troops, which had failed to repel the recent German invasion.
Fifty-seven minutes after take-off, Partridge and his eastbound formation made landfall. Perched near the tip of the rocky and irregular coastline beneath them was the fishing village of Bud, which he and the rest of the squadron routinely used as a landmark. They also spotted a lone aircraft high above them, from where it was bombing HMS Flamingo, a Royal Navy sloop that was in Romsdalsfjord. Thanks to the aircraft’s distinctive elongated silhouette, they could tell it was a Heinkel He. 111H, known by British aircrew as “the flying cigar”.
Partridge yanked back his plane’s joystick and climbed towards the Heinkel, followed by his colleagues from Yellow Section. Even with their engines screaming at full power, the three Skuas took ten minutes to clamber up to the same altitude as the German aircraft, which was flying at 13,000 feet.
First to attack was Yellow 3, the plane flown by Sub-Lieutenant Basil Hurle-Hobbs, who approached his target side on. Aiming at the space in front of the Heinkel’s cockpit, he blasted at it with his four wing-mounted machine-guns. Not that he had anything to show for his efforts.
The two other Skuas then attacked the Heinkel, which once again seemed to be unscathed. As it turned and headed south over the mountainous, snow-covered Norwegian landscape, Partridge led Yellow Section in pursuit. Over the next few minutes, the Skuas initiated several more attacks, none of which yielded apparent results.
Determined to destroy the Heinkel, Partridge tried to get as close to it as he could. When he was about six-hundred yards from it, the bomber’s rear gunner opened fire on him. Luckily for Partridge, the chances of the gunner hitting him at that range with anything but a flukey shot were slim.
Holding his nerve, Partridge waited until he got much closer. With only around four-hundred yards separating the two planes, he fired a long burst at the Heinkel, but this had no palpable result.
Rather than repeat the previous afternoon’s mistake when he had used up all his ammunition while failing to shoot down another Heinkel, he edged even closer to his target. Painted on its fuselage were markings revealing that it belonged to the Luftwaffe bomber unit based at Aalborg in Denmark, which had been occupied on the same day Norway was invaded by the Germans.
From only about three-hundred yards, Partridge fired the last of his machine-guns’ ammunition. He must have hit the Heinkel’s rear-gunner, who stopped shooting at him. And he must also have damaged its port engine, which sprouted a trail of heavy black smoke. Obviously in serious trouble, the Heinkel—which was being attacked from below by another of the Skuas— lost speed as well as height.
Through his headphones, Partridge heard the voice of his observer/gunner. Robin Bostock asked him to fly alongside the Heinkel so that he could take a shot at it.
Partridge started to do as Bostock had requested, then had second thoughts because he knew they didn’t have much fuel left before they needed to return to the Ark Royal. Besides, there wasn’t any point in him continuing the patrol now he’d exhausted the ammunition in his wing-mounted guns. With all of that in mind, he ordered the other planes in Yellow Section to leave the doomed Heinkel and get back into formation. Once they had done so, Partridge asked Bostock to plot a course back to the Ark Royal.
Yellow Section was turning onto its new flight-path when without warning Partridge felt his plane’s engine cut out, its characteristic roar replaced by an unnerving silence. He and the two other Skua pilots had chased the Heinkel so far inland that there was no chance of gliding down onto the sea and getting rescued by the Royal Navy. Instead, he had to find a suitable landing place in the mountainous and snowy wilderness, which swelled in his cockpit window as his plane lost altitude.
He caught sight of a road running alongside what was obviously a large frozen lake, which he earmarked as his improvised landing strip. Just as he’d been taught, he approached the lake without lowering his plane’s undercarriage. It hit the ground so fast that it ploughed a furrow through the deep snow, eventually embedding itself in a snow-drift next to the road. Apart from a bent propeller, neither the plane nor its occupants incurred any damage.
Fearful that it might catch fire and explode, Partridge and Bostock scrambled out of the cockpit and sprinted away. But the expected blast never came.
Partridge and Bostock waited a few minutes before returning to their aircraft, from where they salvaged a revolver, a flare pistol, and a few other items of equipment that might prove useful. To prevent the Germans from getting hold of the plane’s R-1110 homing beacon, the radio receiver, and codebooks, Partridge punctured both fuel tanks with an axe, retreated a safe distance, and then set fire to the aircraft by shooting a flare into it.
Only then did they leave the scene of the crash. They set off in the direction of a shepherd’s hut they had seen from the air. Getting there took them several hours due to the deep snow.
Inside the hut, Partridge and Bostock found a stove, blankets, and some food. No sooner had they made themselves comfortable and settled down for the evening than they heard someone blow a whistle.
Relieved that a Norwegian Army patrol had found them so quickly, Partridge went out to greet their rescuers. Facing him was another young man. The stranger’s clothes were embellished by Nazi insignia. Worse still, he was armed with a knife and a revolver.
The concluding part of Snowman’s Land will go online tomorrow.