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looked at Group Captain Davison. ‘You know, Hector,’ he smiled, ‘that could be quite a nice motto for the new Group. I must put up the idea to someone. Yes, the words have a fine ring. “Confound and Destroy”.’
    He turned back to Yeoman and said: ‘Well, that’s about it. Do you have any questions?’
    Yeoman stood up, picking up his cap from the chair arm. ‘Just one, sir,’ he said. ‘When do we start?’

 
     
    Chapter Three
     
    ‘Well, sir, how does it feel to be back in harness?’
    Joachim Richter lowered the magazine he had been reading and looked up, startled by the sudden question, from his chair in a corner of the flight hut. He removed his smoked glasses, which all pilots on readiness for night operations wore, and massaged his eyes carefully with the tips of his fingers. He’d been getting headaches lately, possibly caused by eyestrain. He ought to do something about that.
    He smiled at the speaker, Lieutenant Johnny Schumacher, who had fought alongside him over Malta a year earlier. Although glad to be away from the operations room at Stade, Richter’s posting to a completely strange unit instead of his old and familiar Fighter Wing 66 had come as a bitter disappointment, so it had been a welcome surprise when Schumacher had also turned up.
    ‘It feels good, Johnny. Very good indeed. I know a lot of you types don’t like this idea of flying single-engined fighters at night, but personally I don’t give a damn. Just give me a Gustav and some cannon and I’ll shoot Tommies off the moon, if I have to.’
    Schumacher laughed. ‘As bloodthirsty as ever! Seriously, though, do you think this scheme is going to work?’
    The scheme to which he referred had been dreamed up a couple of weeks earlier by a Major Hajo Hermann, a Luftwaffe lecturer in fighter tactics who was also a pilot of considerable repute. Lecturing during the day, as soon as evening arrived he would drive furiously to a nearby airfield and jump into the cockpit of a Focke-Wulfe 190, which was specially fitted with a 400-litre auxiliary tank to extend its endurance to two and a half hours. When an alert sounded and the probable target of the RAF night bombers was known, he would take off and roam the sky looking for trouble at heights of up to 30,000 feet, far above the bomber stream. He reasoned that wherever searchlights and flak appeared there must also be enemy bombers, and although his Focke-Wulf had no radar aids at all Hermann used his sharp eyesight to pick out his targets, silhouetted in the glare of Germany’s burning cities.
    After a handful of pilots using the same tactics had shot down a dozen RAF heavy bombers during one of the raids on Hamburg, the Luftwaffe High Command had fallen in love with the idea and authorized night operations by single-engined day fighters on a large scale. The code-name for these operations was ‘Wild Boar’.
    Richter sighed and flexed his arms. In common with the other eight or nine pilots in the room, he was wearing full flying kit and he felt hot and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he had just rebuked one young pilot for removing his flying-jacket; items of flying clothing could easily be mislaid in the commotion following an alert, and precious seconds wasted in searching for them.
    ‘I don’t know, Johnny,’ he said, in response to Schumacher’s question. ‘All I do know is that anything is worth a try. The bombers aren’t invincible, but we need more fighters.’
    He lowered his voice a little, so that only Schumacher could hear. ‘I’ve heard there’s talk of turning a lot of our aircraft production over to building a new reprisal bomber, something so fast that the Tommies won’t be able to catch it, and then there’s all this talk about secret weapons. To my mind, it’s all bloody nonsense. We’ve got to concentrate all our resources on shooting down so many Tommies and Amis that they’ll think twice about venturing over the Fatherland in strength, by day or