by John Nichol
The British plane dived from 4,000ft and stuck relentlessly to the German aircraft’s tail. Despite the Messerschmitt’s efforts to shake him off, the Spitfire remained within effective range. The Spitfire pilot then allowed the 109 to manoeuvre behind him. It didn’t last for long. With a few manoeuvres the Spitfire was free, and by executing a steep turn, was back on the enemy’s tail.
The Spitfire was also now faster in straight and level flight. The first supplies of 100-octane fuel had arrived from America a few months earlier, replacing the less powerful 87 octane and producing the capability for emergency boost. If in trouble, the pilot could push a red thumb-lever to override the engine’s boost control, activating fuel injection for an extra 34mph. To preserve the engine it had to be used sparingly.
The trial made the RAF confident that the Spitfire could outfly, outclimb and outfight the Messerschmitt. But it was misplaced confidence. The 109E model used in the test probably had engine-cooling problems. Its two-stage supercharger normally gave it far superior climbing and diving capabilities than both Spitfire and Hurricane. And the Germans never intended to fight in the way the RAF wanted them to. Their tactic was to climb high, dive fast, strike, then race back up to safety.
As well as packing more punch with their cannons, the 109s had self-sealing petrol tanks, which reduced the chances of fire. Better still, the 109E had fuel injection at negative gravity, allowing the pilot to push his stick forward into a steep dive confident the engine wouldn’t cut out.
No fuel could get to the Spitfire’s Merlin engine in a vertical dive, as there was no fuel injection to feed back up to the engine. The only solution was to flip it onto its back, turning the engine upside down and getting the fuel running back. It was an awkward way to fight a plane.
The Luftwaffe was also learning things about the Spitfire that gave them confidence. They were quick to test one captured in Dunkirk when the pilot failed to destroy it after a forced landing.
The German ace Werner Mölders was less than complimentary. ‘As a fighting aircraft it is miserable. A sudden push forward on the stick will cause the motor to cut and, because the propeller has only two pitch settings [take-off and cruise], in a rapidly changing air combat situation the motor is either over-speeding or else is not being used to the full.’
But they were only testing the early Mark I version and had yet to capture a Mark II. Both sets of trials had flaws and the harsh reality of combat would prove a very different testing ground for the aircraft and their pilots.
If the Germans had greater numbers, more experience and better aircraft than their RAF counterparts, why weren’t they making it count?
It was a question both sides asked themselves soon after a lone yacht slipped off the northern French beaches on 4 June and carried the last handful of Dunkirk evacuees home.
As Europe fell under Nazi domination, the escape of a third of a million professional soldiers was a victory of sorts. ‘Wars,’ Churchill reminded the nation, ‘are not won by evacuations.’
The Luftwaffe lost 132 aircraft at Dunkirk to the RAF’s 99 (which included 38 Spitfires and a total of 80 pilots). But numbers, especially for the well-supplied German war machine, were not everything.
On 4 June, the day the week-long evacuation ended, Fighter Command was left with 331 Spitfires and Hurricanes, despite Dowding’s parsimony. The RAF needed fliers and aircraft.
The heroics over Dunkirk meant the Spitfire was establishing itself in the public eye, but ready cash was needed to build it in its hundreds. Each production Spitfire cost just under £9,000. Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron turned manufacturer, decided to publish a price list to give it some meaning. The £2,000 engine, the £2,000 wings and the £800 Brownings were contrasted with the more affordable compass (£5), clock (£2), spark plugs (eight shillings) and rivets (sixpence).22 The average civilian worker’s pay was about £3.10s. a week, with fighter pilots getting around £5. The Spitfire Fund was launched by Beaverbrook through the media in the early summer of 1940. The public duly chipped in. In fact, they did more than that. The £1 cheques grew into thousands, and ultimately the fund reached £13 million.
The money came from all corners. The people of Basutoland in southern Africa stumped up enough for an entire squadron; a South Wales village raised £5,000 following the death of a son flying for the RAF. In Manchester, prostitutes arrested for soliciting were given the option of ‘donating’ a princely £3 rather than facing prosecution.
The shape and size of the aircraft also drew people in. ‘There is something irresistibly endearing about a very small thing that fights like hell,’ a Daily Telegraph columnist observed.
The fundraising drew even more attention to the Spitfire. It was becoming a national symbol of defiance as well as a tool for retribution.
* * *
The British had been quick to recognise and capitalise on the Spitfire’s global appeal. Colourful images showing a Spitfire flying over the White Cliffs of Dover with titles of ‘Wings for Victory’ or ‘Back them Up’ appeared in publications around the world.
As a teenager John Blyth was enthralled by stories of the great heroes of aviation, often daydreaming in class about being in a Spitfire cockpit and taking on the ‘Hun’.
There was one small snag. Although his parents were English, he was an American citizen from Oregon on the West Coast and, although he talked little about it, his father had been gassed on the Western Front while serving in the British Army during the Great War. After the war, he emigrated with his wife to America where they managed to scratch out a rural living among the giant redwoods of Oregon until the 1930s Great Depression struck. At one point John’s father resorted to foraging cascara bark, used as a laxative, to pay for his son’s school uniform.
John had excelled at school, reading books voraciously and aviation ones in particular. One day he opened a magazine to find flights advertised for ‘a penny a pound’. As he weighed only 90lb, John managed to persuade his father to part with ninety cents and found himself trundling over a bumpy field in a vintage biplane. Then he was in the air. ‘I couldn’t see much over the edge of the cockpit so I had to open the little side door for a better view. I loved it, I really loved it, but never imagined I’d one day take these machines into battle.’
Blyth learned to fly by joining the nascent Oregon Air National Guard. But he told his parents he felt it was his duty to go to England and join the war effort. ‘I knew about the dangers but thought that was something that had to be faced. I remember saying goodbye to my parents. They understood the dangers too but also knew this was something I needed to do. Flying was the most important thing to me, then fighting the war.’23
* * *
If Castle Bromwich had been better managed, there should have been 1,000 Spitfires ready for the front in summer 1940 – enough to equip all of Fighter Command’s squadrons in the south of England. But despite Nuffield’s promise of sixty per month by April 1940, the plant had yet to build its first Spitfire four years after its foundations had been laid.
Churchill recognised in Beaverbrook a man who got things done, and duly appointed him Minister of Aircraft Production. It did not take his lordship long to see things were greatly amiss at the £7 million factory. Not only was the production line chaotic, the unions seemed unaware of the very real danger Britain faced. There were sit-down strikes over petty pay disputes. Workers came in late and left early. There was fraud. ‘In the meantime, we manage to build the odd Spitfire or two . . .’ wrote one exasperated manager.
The Spitfire was a complex aircraft to build. It required precision engineering and techniques outside the experience of the Midlands automobile builders.
Beaverbrook happily accepted Nuffield’s half-hearted threat of resignation on 17 May and sent in managers from the Vickers defence company, who owned Supermarine, to take over. Sackings of workforce and management followed.
Things changed rapidly. But not in time. While Hitler easily replenished his stocks after t
he losses sustained in France to the tune of 155 Me109s a month, just twenty-three Spitfires came off Castle Bromwich’s production line in July. The Germans could also now use French factories to replace the 1,667 aircraft lost or damaged during the spring offensive.
Fortunately, employees at Supermarine’s factory in Southampton were clocking up seventy-two-hour weeks. Ninety-four Spitfires were built in June, and 134 in July.
And the Luftwaffe had not only suffered physical losses at Dunkirk. Their experience of the Spitfire’s venom and its pilots’ tenacity had asked difficult questions of the ‘master race’. ‘The days of easy victory were over,’ Major Werner Kreipe recorded in his diary. ‘We had met the RAF head on.’24
It was time to pause and restock before the British could be battered into submission.
* * *
To reinforce the fact that he meant business after France’s surrender, Churchill ordered the navy to prepare for the destruction of the French fleet in the Algerian port of Oran to prevent it falling into Nazi hands. The same day, 18 June, he stood up in the Commons and left no doubt as to his intentions. ‘The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.” ’25
Hitler was riled. Churchill would feel the wrath of blitzkrieg. War Directive No. 16 was drafted. German High Command was ordered to prepare for invasion. ‘The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English motherland as a base from which war can be continued and, if necessary, to occupy completely.’
The key requirement was the defeat of the RAF. ‘The English Air Force must be eliminated to such an extent that it will be incapable of putting up any substantial opposition to the invading troops.’
Churchill was only too aware of the threat. In the early part of his ‘finest hour’ speech he had asked: ‘The great question is: can we break Hitler’s air weapon?’
It was time to find out.
CHAPTER THREE
THE BATTLE FOR BRITAIN
19 Squadron Spitfires at RAF Duxford, May 1939
Answering Fighter Command’s call for volunteers, Bernard Brown swept through the gates of Biggin Hill in his maroon J-type MG. Not one to draw attention to himself, Brown had been seduced by the advert for the sporty two-seater which promised ‘The Car with the Racing Pedigree’. It was certainly an improvement on the plodding Hawker Hector biplane he had disastrously flown to Calais.
The Luftwaffe had arrived a few minutes before Brown and sulphurous smoke now billowed from a random pattern of craters. Ground crew dashed around, planting red flags next to every unexploded bomb. Above the warning shouts and cries for help, Brown could just make out the retreating throb of German bombers.
He weaved between the unexploded ordnance and parked his MG outside the Officers’ Mess. Throwing a kit bag over his shoulder, he walked past the broken windows into the building. He was greeted by a mess orderly removing the names of those who had been killed in recent air battles from their pigeon-holes in the post rack. He wondered how long his name would stay up there.
‘You’re already an experienced pilot, Brown,’ the conversion training officer had told him a few weeks earlier. ‘There’s a Spitfire over there. Get yourself airborne and do what you like with her.’1
Brown’s soft eyes could quickly harden in a fight. They had gone through the full spectrum as the Mark II swept him through the air. It was unlike any aircraft he had experienced. As he put the Spitfire through its paces, soaring over the southern English countryside, he realised he had a battle-winning aircraft at his disposal. He had spent a joyful half-hour in experiencing the freedom of the skies.
Now he took in Biggin Hill’s cracked windows and smouldering runway.
The Battle of Britain was underway. Churchill had asked whether the RAF could break Hitler’s air weapon. If this was the answer, it was not an answer he or the free world wanted to hear.
* * *
America’s support for Britain, vital in terms of materiel, was being openly questioned by Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador to London. If it continued, would it not be harmful to Washington’s future relationship with Germany?
His views were gaining support. They were certainly backed by Charles Lindbergh, the millionaire American aviator whose caustic views on Spitfire production had already been expressed.
It had been foolish to think the RAF, with little over 300 frontline fighters, could hold off the mighty Luftwaffe.
Britain’s show of defiance was coming to a humiliating end. Hundreds were dying needlessly. It was far from being the nation’s finest hour. At the height of the rout in France, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, had hotly argued with Churchill to seek peace with Germany.
Churchill smote aside all dissenters with characteristic determination. ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
Good as strong words were, they could not shoot down a Messerschmitt or stop a Heinkel’s payload. And the French had gifted them airfields little more than twenty miles from the British coast. Now the 410-mile range of the 109s was not such an issue. They could escort their bombers some distance into England.
No one really questioned the Luftwaffe chief of staff’s assertion that it would take ‘between a fortnight and a month to smash the enemy air force’.
JULY 1940
In the build-up to their main assault, the Luftwaffe made probing attacks, seeking weaknesses in the British defences.
When a Schnellbomber was spotted on 7 July 1940, rapidly closing on shipping in the Humber, Green Section of 616 Squadron scrambled. Climbing hard through the overcast, they broke through into blue skies close to the distinctive pencil shape of a Dornier 17.
Hugh ‘Cocky’ Dundas managed a quick burst before the German pilot dived, frantically trying to hide in the broken cloud.2 Dundas stayed relentlessly on his tail.
‘There followed an exciting chase as the German pilot tried frantically to elude us. But nowhere was the cloud solid, he was bound to come out into gaps and by good fortune we maintained contact with him, worrying at his heels like spaniels hunting in cover. He fought back gallantly – desperately would perhaps be a more appropriate word – and for a time his rear-gunner returned our fire, though it was an unequal exchange, which must have been utterly terrifying for him. His tracer bullets streamed past and I received a hit on the outer part of my port wing. But the advantage was all in our favour. The rear-gunner was silenced and the dying Dornier descended in its shroud of black smoke, to crash into the sea.’
The Dornier had no answer to the Spitfire’s bank of Brownings, dispatched by Dundas, a ‘part-time’ flier. Of the forty-two operational squadrons available to Dowding, twelve were Auxiliary Air Force. The fate of Britain rested largely in the hands of solicitors, landowners, artisans and millionaire playboys.
* * *
The fact that there was one more bomber lying at the bottom of the North Sea made little difference to German preparations. The Luftwaffe was gathering a fleet so powerful that it would sweep aside any resistance – a force of 2,460 warplanes: 1,200 bombers, 280 Stuka dive-bombers and 980 frontline fighters.
Despite the frantic efforts at Southamp
ton, and finally Castle Bromwich, in early July Dowding could muster only 226 Spitfires and 344 Hurricanes serviceable with crew.3 And he still had only 1,000 pilots.4 This was simply not enough to defend Britain’s coastline. Despite the best efforts of Fighter Command, Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers were getting through the defences.
Nearby explosions were the only warning mechanic Joe Roddis of 234 Squadron had when a flight of Dornier 17s arrived at dawn over St Eval in north Cornwall. He dashed outside with the other mechanics. Incendiaries were flaring dangerously close to the row of eight wooden huts. Then some landed on the roofs. The airmen scrambled up and kicked them off. Roddis felt both terrified and excited. The screaming bombs and flying shrapnel flew through the air. Finally he was in the war.5
A final stick of bombs came in, throwing up soil, flames and debris as they arced across the airfield towards their accommodation. The final bomb struck the last hut along the line. This time they started an inferno that was impossible to escape. Joe looked at his fellow airmen in horror. They all knew who slept in the end hut – the young women who served them tea and sandwiches, always with a smile. Joe felt a sense of nausea creep up through his guts. The NAAFI girls. There was nothing that could be done. Joe watched with both horror and mounting rage as the screams subsided.
* * *
The home defences were doing their best to stop these attackers getting through. The Spitfires were often flown by men like Bernard Brown, who had barely spent a dozen hours in a fighter, or novices with ten hours’ training on fighters. Luftwaffe pilots had an average of thirteen months under instruction, and 200 flying hours. As one German air ace put it, they were ‘an invincible war machine that had swept previous opponents away’.6
Fighter Command had other weaknesses. They stuck to the rigid ‘Vee’ formation. The ‘Vee’ was formed of three aircraft, with two behind the leader, covering the rear. It was designed to take on a bomber force, in the belief that, flying all the way from Germany, they would have no escort. Following the fall of France, that was no longer a safe assumption. And those at the rear of the Vee had little opportunity to avoid a ‘bounce’ by enemy fighters. The best they could do was follow one veteran’s advice: ‘Always keep your head turning. It takes about four seconds to shoot down a fighter, so look around every three!’7
