Spitfire

by John Nichol

  And silk scarves became obligatory. Constant turns of the head quickly brought on a rash when wearing a cotton shirt.

  In July, 115 RAF aircraft were lost. Defending the south-east, 11 Group were stretched to the limit and beyond. They flew more than 500 sorties a day to keep the intruders at bay.

  Everyone knew this was just the beginning. The intelligence was overwhelming. It was only a matter of days before the main attack would be launched.

  13 AUGUST 1940

  Joe Roddis was one of twenty ground crew packed onto the wooden benches of the Handley Page Harrow. Most of them could not conceal their excitement at their first flight. 234 Squadron had been ordered to Middle Wallop, Hampshire, at the core of Britain’s air defences.

  The 200mph converted bomber began a gentle descent over Salisbury Plain. Suddenly it lurched into a steep dive. Joe looked at his fellow mechanics. Was this normal?8

  Word came back from the cockpit. Air raid. Middle Wallop.

  The Handley Page roared towards the ground then levelled out just feet above the trees and farmsteads. Roddis found himself grinning idiotically. They finally touched down on the grass, rolled past a line of Spitfires and came to a halt. It seemed the airstrip had come through relatively unscathed.

  Joe and his mates joined the other ‘erks’ in the mess and grabbed a turnip jam sandwich. The siren started wailing as he moved to the tea urn. Another raid was coming in. The newly arrived 234 Squadron boys sat tight, thinking, what a shower, as the more experienced lads from 609 Squadron scrambled for the exit. Then they heard the wail of the Jericho Trumpet that had struck terror across Europe.

  Stukas!

  Roddis jumped up and ran outside. Bombs were falling heavily now. Not just the 250kg Junkers 87 ordnance – 50kg stick bombs from Heinkel 111s were slamming into the ground.

  Where the hell are the shelters?

  He dived to the ground, hands over his ears. A building erupted. Then another and another. Hangar doors smashed open. Glass shattered from office buildings, showering the grass strip in lethal shards. The explosions went on and on.

  It stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  Joe hauled himself to his feet. Smoke choked his lungs. Around him, shadowy figures staggered through the billowing dust. He heard shouts and cries for help. He stumbled forward over the fallen debris. Cries of ‘stretcher bearer’ pierced the clouds of dust; figures darted before him, some limping, some running. His ears rang with a constant, high-pitched whine that echoed the scream of bombs a few seconds earlier, tears streamed from his eyes as he rubbed them clear of debris. His foot caught on something mushy. He dared not look down. A forlorn cry pierced the dust cloud then abruptly stopped.

  It was 13 August 1940. The Germans had finally launched Adlertag, ‘Eagle Day’, precisely ten weeks after the last BEF boot had lifted from the sands of Dunkirk. RAF fighters were being destroyed on the ground and in the air as all three Luftflotte – air fleets – launched simultaneously from France and Scandinavia, flying 1,485 sorties on the day.

  There was no time to mourn the three airmen killed in the Middle Wallop raid. Joe Roddis was ordered to don his tin hat, get to the dispersal area and ready 234 Squadron’s Spitfires. Another wave was coming in and they were needed in the air.

  Fitters and riggers were each assigned their own aircraft. The 500-gallon petrol bowser pulled alongside it as the pilot left the cockpit. Ground crew swarmed over the machinery, topping up oil, glycol coolant, oxygen and ammunition. Within just twenty-six minutes the starter battery was plugged in, chock ropes stretched, ready for quick removal. The flight sergeant checked everything was in order and applied his signature beneath theirs to the paperwork, clearing the aircraft for flight.9

  The Spitfire was ready to fly.

  * * *

  At 4pm that day, 609 Squadron’s thirteen Spitfires were ordered to patrol at precisely 15,000ft over Weymouth and to expect a large formation of enemy aircraft. The next thing they heard was the voice of a German commander shepherding his sixty-strong fleet of Ju87 Stukas, escorted by Me109 and Me110 fighters. Not for nothing was the twin-engine 110 known as ‘the destroyer’. Capable of 350mph, it carried a potent mix of two 20mm cannons, four 7.92mm machine guns and a single rear-firing machine gun. It was not something you wanted on your tail.

  The Spitfires climbed to 20,000ft while a squadron of Hurricanes took care of the 110s. 609 Squadron were now behind and above the Germans. More critically, they were coming out of the sun. Some lessons from France had been well learned. With the enemy in their sights, it was time to close for the kill.

  Just as the squadron leader shouted ‘Tally-ho’, Pilot Officer David Crook, twenty-five, saw five Me109s pass directly beneath him. Crook, a Cambridge graduate from Huddersfield who had joined the Auxiliary Air Force two years earlier, had already claimed a Stuka in the previous month. He saw an opportunity to double his tally. He immediately broke formation and dived on the trailing fighter, sending a hail of bullets from very close range. The Messerschmitt caught fire and corkscrewed down thousands of feet, leaving an endless trail of black smoke behind him. Crook followed the burning machine down through the clouds.10

  Moments later the tangled wreckage of the 109 lay in a field, the black crosses on its wings visible through the flames. The pilot was still inside. He had made no attempt to get out while the aircraft was diving.

  Crook decided he must have been killed by his first burst. He pulled back on his stick but was too late to take part in the unfolding drama above. ‘Just after I broke away to attack my Messerschmitt, the whole squadron had dived right into the centre of the German formation and the massacre started. One pilot looked round in the middle of the action and in one small patch of sky he saw five German dive-bombers going down in flames, still more or less in formation.11

  ‘We all heard the German commander saying desperately, time after time, “Achtung, Achtung, Spitfire . . .” ’

  It had been a complete rout. Thirteen Luftwaffe planes were destroyed in the space of four minutes. One member of 609 remarked afterwards that he might have missed the Glorious Twelfth the day before, ‘but the glorious thirteenth was the best day’s shooting I ever had’.

  Owing to bad weather, poor intelligence and Fighter Command’s resistance, the Germans failed to achieve their objective of knocking out 11 Group’s airfields.

  On Eagle Day the RAF bagged seventy-one aircraft and lost twenty-nine.

  * * *

  It was not just the machines that were having an effect. There was a tacit understanding among their pilots that they were all that stood between freedom and occupation. They were the housecarls of the skies, the men who looked the enemy in the eye and gave them a taste of Anglo-Saxon steel.

  They were not all from British shores, of course. Some of the toughest came from South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and there were also a handful of American volunteers. The fiercest came from those countries already under Nazi thrall: Poles, Czechs, French and Belgians – men with little to lose and a point to prove.

  This international brotherhood did not flinch from danger. Some favoured charging directly at the enemy, spreading panic through formations. ‘A head-on attack does far more to destroy the morale of the approaching bombers than anything else,’ one bullish pilot advised. ‘It upsets the driver so much, the poor old pilot. He was the chap who turned tail . . . go straight through the formation, turn round when you get through. And try and have another go from the rear.’12

  For most pilots, fear was left behind as they rapidly climbed to meet the enemy. Back on the ground it was never far away, everyone knowing that this day might be their last. Friendships could be fleeting. ‘See you for a drink down The Ship later,’ pilots would banter on their way to a scramble, knowing that ‘later’ was an open-ended affair. They had seen pilots come and go. Like Arthur Rose-Price, brother of the film actor Dennis Price, a twenty-one-year-old who arrived at Gravesend to join 501 Squadron and was shot down and ki
lled over Dungeness, Kent, the same day, leaving the luggage in the back of his car unpacked.13

  While death was ever-present it was a subject rarely raised, until a comrade died. Even then it was often buried in the amnesia of binge drinking. Most of the young pilots dealt with it by blithely telling themselves ‘it won’t happen to me’, but not all. It played on the minds of those who survived and lost close friends. For David Crook, who had just shot down his second German, the loss of his schoolboy friend Peter Drummond-Hay, with whom he had joined up then fought alongside, was almost unbearable. ‘I could not get out of my head the thought of Peter, with whom we had been talking and laughing that day, now lying in the cockpit of his wrecked Spitfire at the bottom of the English Channel’.14

  Although few talked of death, it stalked the dispersal room as pilots slouched, slept, joked, talked, ate, smoked and drank, while waiting for the phone to signal the next sortie. When the call came, they all, hardly more than boys, stopped talking. All eyes were riveted on the receiver.

  Geoffrey Wellum, aged just nineteen, was among those who found respite through writing in the summer of 1940.15 ‘Moisture collects on my flying boots from last night’s heavy dew. It’s going to be a lovely day . . .

  ‘Dispersal pen and my Spitfire. I pause and look at her. A long shapely nose, not exactly arrogant but nevertheless daring anyone to take a swing at it. Lines beautifully proportioned, the aircraft sitting there, engine turning easily and smoothly with subdued power. The slipstream blows the moisture over the top of the wings in thin streamlets. Flashes of blue flame from the exhausts are easily seen in the half-light, an occasional backfire and the whole aeroplane trembling like a thoroughbred at the start of the Derby.’

  He was ready for when the order came.

  ‘Bound to come sometime. It’ll be a miracle if we get through to midday without one.

  ‘Waiting. Thoughts race through the mind. Some read. Some sleep, such as Butch Bryson. He’s out to the wide, or is he? Could be after the amount of Scotch he put away last night. I must say I enjoyed that little party a lot. You get a good pint in the White Hart. Pleasant crowd in there as well. Had a letter from a girl called Grace yesterday, sister of a schoolfriend. She seemed interested, shall have to give a bit of thought to her sometime.

  ‘I must have nodded off into an uneasy doze. How long, I wonder. I find myself sitting bolt upright. The phone must have rung. Yes, that’s it, the bloody phone again. I swear that if ever I own a house I shall never install a telephone, so help me. All heads and eyes are turned toward the telephone orderly. He seems to be listening for an agonisingly long time.’

  False alarm. The NAAFI van had broken down. A flat battery.

  ‘Relax, try to relax, I suppose that’s the answer. Don’t know the meaning of the word. Nevertheless, let’s make a real effort. Hard work, relaxing . . .’

  The phone went again. A lone German fighter had been spotted on the radar, coming over Gris Nez, most likely a dawn sortie to check on the weather over Britain.

  Two aircraft were dispatched to chase him off. Five minutes later the same thing happened again.

  ‘Black Section, scramble!’

  AUGUST 1940

  In the year since he had dashed to church to tell his stepfather war had been declared, Brian Bird had turned from schoolboy to farmhand.

  The sixteen-year-old was cycling to work through the Kent countryside when, ‘Something made me turn my head . . . As I did so, I heard with frightening clarity the familiar drone of a German aircraft and without a doubt it was very low. Turning my head skywards I immediately saw a German Dornier. It was so low I could see the crew in its cockpit.16

  ‘The thought flashed through my mind that at any moment the road ahead would be peppered with cannon shells and bombs and that would be my end. I threw myself into a nearby ditch with my head firmly pressed to the ground and my heart pumping with utter fear. In a moment some degree of courage returned and it was with immense relief that I saw the Dornier had passed overhead.’

  The bomber was on its way to hit an anti-aircraft battery outside the village of Iwade, as part of the plan to level the air defences prior to invasion.

  It was an exceptionally dry August. German bomber formations appeared on the horizon immediately after dawn. Teenagers like Brian could only look up and stare with a mixture of awe and envy as the plucky RAF fighters tore up to meet them. ‘This was followed by the sound of machine-gun fire, and one knew that the Spitfires and Hurricanes were doing their best to repel the attacks. At other times the anti-aircraft guns would open fire and we watched black balls of smoke near the invading aircraft as the shells burst many thousands of feet above.

  ‘This was a particularly dangerous moment to be in the open fields because of falling shrapnel. On numerous occasions I found myself lying in a ditch with the female farm workers. We were far too scared of falling shrapnel to have any ideas of a quick romance, although when the all clear sounded there were a few hugs and kisses of relief.

  ‘During a particularly heavy barrage of anti-aircraft fire I was sheltering at the doorway of a barn when I heard a whistling noise growing louder and louder. Suddenly, within a few inches of my feet there was a loud thud and upon looking down I saw a jagged eighteen-inch piece of shrapnel embedded in the ground.’

  On another occasion Bird came even closer to death during a night-time bombing when he decided to dash from the vicarage’s air-raid shelter to retrieve his wristwatch from his room. ‘There was a long burst of machine-gun fire and the sound of an aircraft flying very low overhead.’ Bird sprinted in the dark back downstairs just in time. ‘There was the most horrendous explosion, the house was shaken to its foundations, glass blown out of every window and clouds of dust everywhere.’ Fortunately, the family remained unscathed but Brian was determined he was going to do his bit for King and Country to defeat the ‘terrible Hun’ roaming freely over his homeland.

  Bird’s desire to fly had been piqued with the Air Training Corps when they visited an RAF base and he was taken up in an Anson aircraft. ‘I can vividly remember the thrill of being deputed by the pilot to wind up the undercarriage just after take-off and wind it down again as we came in to land.’ Brian’s future was decided. He was going to become an RAF pilot and take the fight directly to the Germans in the skies.

  * * *

  But it was not just farm boys who suffered from the indiscriminate bombing. The Germans were intrigued by the English public school system and its ability to produce leaders. They did not want to leave it unscathed.

  A shower of incendiary bombs threatened Jimmy Taylor’s carefully assembled collection of model aeroplanes at Eton College in Windsor.17 ‘One incendiary fell through the roof of my house and landed on the armchair in a boy’s room, burning his Eton tails and trousers. Walking to lessons next morning I saw a finned tail protruding above the surface of a piece of wasteland.’

  A follow-up attack a few days later suggested that the school was indeed being deliberately targeted. A 500lb bomb demolished the music precentor’s house. Fortunately, the teacher and his wife and seventy boys escaped unscathed.

  The next morning, the school clerk entered his office and almost fell down a hole in the floor. At the bottom lay a delayed-action bomb, too awkwardly placed and too delicate to be defused. The area around Upper School was evacuated.

  Taylor and his schoolmates continued with their schooling, although ‘it was difficult to concentrate on lessons when the wretched thing was liable to explode at any moment’.

  Taylor had completed his evening homework and was about to apply the finishing touches to a model Me109 when there was a tremendous roar. ‘Damn the Hun,’ he cursed as a yellow smudge smeared the cockpit.

  A great lump of masonry had flown over the four-storey Lupton’s Tower and onto the opposite side of the Yard, but the 500-year-old College Wing adjacent to Upper School remained sturdily in place.

  For Taylor, the German belligerence provided further incentive
to turn his model aircraft hobby into something real.

  LATE AUGUST 1940

  The first phase of the German plan to pummel England into submission seemed relatively straightforward. Destroy the RAF on the ground and in the air; target harbours and storage facilities and level the ground defences around London.

  The Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers 88s could bomb from height, while the feared Stukas would be used for precision attacks. All would be protected by fighters.

  Pilots like Helmut Wick quickly learned to use the 109’s supreme climbing and diving power, along with its cannon, to great effect. Starting combat operations late in 1939, he did not have the experience of the Spanish Civil War, but already had more than a score of kills to his name. He was certainly not going to be outdone by a Spitfire, especially when he found himself suddenly outnumbered. ‘To the right there is nothing, but I cannot believe my eyes when I look the other way. The sky is full of Spitfires and just a few 109s. I go straight into a dogfight but at once get a Spitfire on my back. At full speed I try to lose him. Now I have one Spitfire in front and another behind me.18

  ‘Damn it! I dive vertically away to lose him then climb again. Suddenly I see white trails shooting past. I look back. Yet another is behind me, sending his tracers past my ear like the “fingers of the dead”. I will thank God if my mother’s son can get out of this fight! I manage to outclimb the Spitfires and try again to help my outnumbered comrades but each time the Tommies come down behind me. Suddenly a 109 comes past very fast with a Spitfire behind it. This is my chance. I get behind the Spitfire and centre it in my gunsight. After a few shots it goes down.’