by John Nichol
The Me109 was proving a formidable adversary for the Spitfire, even for those experienced pilots like Hugh Dundas who had survived the opening salvoes of the battle. On 22 August 1940 he was ‘jumped’ by a Messerschmitt. The first thing he felt was the explosion of cannon shells along the fuselage.
‘Smoke filled the cockpit, thick and hot, and I could see neither the sky above nor the Channel coast 12,000ft below. Centrifugal force pressed me against the side of the cockpit and I knew my aircraft was spinning. Panic and terror consumed me and I thought, “Christ, this is the end.” Then I thought, “Get out, you bloody fool; open the hood and get out.”
‘With both hands I tugged the handle where the hood locked onto the top of the windscreen. It moved back an inch then jammed. Smoke poured out through the gap and I could see again. I could see the earth and the sea and the sky spinning round in tumbled confusion as I cursed and blasphemed and pulled with all my strength to open the imprisoning hood.
‘If I could not get out I had at all costs to stop the spin. I pushed the stick hard forward, kicked on full rudder, opened the throttle. Nothing happened. The earth went spinning on, came spinning up to meet me. Grabbing the hood toggle again, I pulled with all my might, pulled for my life, pulled at last with success. I stood up on the seat and pushed the top half of my body out of the cockpit. Pressed hard against the fuselage, half in, half out, I struggled in a nightmare of fear and confusion to drop clear, but could not do so.
‘I managed to get back into the cockpit, aware now that the ground was very close. Try again, try the other side. Up, over – and out. I slithered along the fuselage and felt myself falling free. Seconds after my parachute opened I saw the Spitfire hit and explode in a field below.’19
Dundas had been shot down in a classic Messerschmitt tactic. The Luftwaffe pilots perfected a hit-and-run: diving fast to hit their prey, usually from below, then using their superior rate of climb to get away from retaliatory attacks. It was vital to staying alive. There was growing unease that if you got into a dogfight with a Spitfire, your chances of survival were vastly reduced. While Dunkirk had given some a foretaste of the fighter’s abilities, they were only beginning to sink in.
In short, the Spitfire was bad for morale.
‘Spitfire auf meinem Schwanz!’ – ‘Spitfire on my tail!’ – was gaining wide currency in German radio chatter. ‘From then it sometimes doesn’t last long until that voice doesn’t exist any more.’
Ulrich Steinhilper was one pilot who’d heard the phrase too often. ‘ “Spitfire on my tail” was usually a very bad surprise. And sometimes you panicked.’
Others shared his view. ‘I know my fellow 109 pilots were very fearful of the Spitfire,’ said Hans-Ekkehard Bob. ‘When the message “Achtung! Spitfire!” came, everyone shuddered.
‘The Spitfire was extremely manoeuvrable, albeit the 109 being still a bit faster, but you had to bring to bear all your skill and all of your feeling in order to be able to cope with the opponent in situations like that.’20
The 109 was being out-turned by R. J. Mitchell’s unique wing structure, and did not have the Spitfire’s ability to warn of an impending stall if it went into a spin. Messerschmitt pilots also struggled to open the narrow cockpit canopy in the panic of bailing out, and visibility was an issue. The 109 did not have the British fighter’s sophisticated gunsights, so the pilots had to do their own deflection-shot adjustment mid-battle, calculating how far in front of the moving target they had to fire to hit it.
But the differences were marginal. It was now becoming a question of attrition. Who had the numbers of aircraft and airmen?
The RAF might have plucky pilots and clever aircraft, but German might was overwhelming. It was time to throttle Fighter Command into submission.
From 24 August, the Germans went for the knockout blow. For the next two weeks there were glorious blue, cloudless skies. Airfields were struck day after day, telephone lines destroyed and radar stations blasted off-line. Spitfires and Hurricanes were hit before they could take to the skies. Pilots flying four or more sorties a day were lost to battle fatigue. Some squadrons all but ceased to exist in a single day. The London Blitz had begun and the German attacks were relentless. For the next fifty-six out of fifty-seven days the Luftwaffe bombed London, with 400 civilians killed in the first attack. Throughout the war, 43,000 British civilians were to perish from Luftwaffe bombings.
Joe Roddis
At Middle Wallop the pilots of Joe Roddis’ squadron were taking a mauling. Of the twenty-one experienced fliers who had arrived on Eagle Day, only three remained. ‘It worried us when so many pilots were shot down. It’s hard to explain but we looked up to them, were proud of them and we were doing all we could to get them airborne.’21
For those at the forefront of the conflict it was a desperate time to keep the fighters in the skies. The last flight of the day would usually land by 10pm, then had to be ready for action five hours later. The mechanics would often sleep under the wings.
An experienced crew using two hoses from a bowser could get refuelling times down to three minutes. Roddis immediately quizzed the pilots on where they might have been hit, then combed the fuselage for holes. ‘We tracked the course of the bullets to see where they had gone and if they had caused any other damage. If they had gone through the propeller it didn’t really matter as we would just use a rat-tail file to file it out and clean it up. It might whistle a bit after but that didn’t matter. We had to have the aircraft ready to fly again in twenty minutes. If that couldn’t be done it would be pushed aside and we would help someone else get their aircraft ready.’
Ziggy Klein and Jan Zurakowski, two Poles whose aircraft he serviced, ‘were only really happy in the air shooting Germans down, and they were good at it’.22 They and their fellow countrymen made up 5 per cent of the pilots, but their hatred of the Nazis was such that they were accounting for 15 per cent of Luftwaffe losses.23
The nearest protection mechanics had was a slit trench. Joe Roddis had now been bombed enough to know they had to dig deep into the solid chalk beneath Middle Wallop. The hard-won experience saved his life when the Germans used a new ruse. ‘We’d been brought to full readiness but not scrambled. Pilots were in cockpits, ground crews ready for a quick start and still they held us on the ground! Directly above us, pretty high up, were hordes of 109s just circling round and round but doing nothing threatening. Everyone was watching the show above us when they suddenly stopped circling and headed off for Southampton.
‘Scramble!
‘Red Very flares flew skywards and off our squadron went, closely followed by 609 Squadron, the whole lot climbing up to get the 109s. We watched for a short while in the silence that followed. Then we became aware why they had enticed our Spitfires away. Ju87s that had been out of sight above the 109s were diving down. We didn’t stop to count them, just headed at top speed for the slit trench. I dived in and crouched there, listening to the diving Stukas and the crash of their bombs flattening our buildings.
‘You could see the bombs leave the Stuka at the end of its dive.’
Their speed in getting to the shelter and its depth meant the shrapnel from exploding ordnance whizzed harmlessly overhead.
‘When Jerry came we got our pilots airborne then dived for the slit trench. The pilots went out to take them on and often paid the ultimate price. To us, our pilots earned everything we could do for them.’
* * *
Fighter Command was losing dozens of pilots a day – killed, wounded or missing in action. Squadrons were rotated in from around Britain to replace the dead, the lame and the exhausted.
The strain was beginning to show, with pilots noticeably more short-tempered. Some wondered aloud how much longer they could carry on.
At Biggin Hill, intolerance reached new levels. There were occasions when, if a chink of light showed from a window, the offending bulb was shot out by rifle fire.
The focus of pilots’ attention remained the jangling of
the dispersal phone. Nerves were frayed to the extreme.
Figures came and went. Veterans could see the look of death on the faces of some young pilots who they knew would soon become notches on Luftwaffe tally boards. And it was not just the young and inexperienced who were being claimed.
Michael Doulton had served in the RAF for almost a decade, having joined the Auxiliary Air Force in 1931. He had not gone into his family’s famous ceramic business, Royal Doulton, and instead became a mechanical engineer. Standing at 6ft 8in, Doulton was not difficult to pick out in a crowd. Which was probably why the young American, Carol Christie, spotted him while skiing in Davos in 1938. Their romance swiftly led to marriage the following year then, a few days before war broke out, Doulton was called up to the RAF.
Both knew that as a fighter pilot his life was at risk every day. In mid-August he just made it back to Tangmere after his aircraft was damaged in a dogfight. That evening he went back to the cottage near the airfield that he shared with Carol, who was pregnant. He confessed his fears. She knew the dangers he faced daily; his tussles with the Germans had left him with three confirmed kills. Then, on 31 August, she waited all night for the sound of his footsteps approaching the door of their cottage. But none came. Michael had perished during a melee over the Thames.
Carol met his death with astonishing stoicism. They had discussed it in private and agreed only to dwell on the happiness they had shared. But Carol needed an outlet for her emotions and wrote a long letter to her father in Rhode Island the following day.24 ‘I pray that he came down into the sea and that he will just vanish. I have no desire for the horror of bodies or funerals to come between me and my last happy memories of Michael, young and strong and confident. To have him just disappear suddenly and cleanly in the midst of life and never return broken and dead is how it should be. You see, ever since the war started and I expected to lose Michael, I have wanted a child. So that if Michael were lost something of our love would live on and so it wouldn’t be the end of everything for me . . .
‘Now what is behind me is all happiness, and no two people were ever so happy right up to the last minute as we were, and I don’t look forward to complete emptiness. I have his child to think of, and even if I felt hysterical I wouldn’t be, because of the baby . . .
‘How many times Michael and I have said: “If we died tomorrow, how much more happiness we have had than most people.” I am now finding that I meant it. I keep looking at his things – everything reminds me of some happy time together. The little bear he pulled out of his cap at the station when he left Davos. The bluebird pin he gave me to keep me happy while I was at home. The five tins of his favourite oxtail soup sitting in the cupboard. His brushes. I don’t want to put them out of sight. I want to have them around and relive every glorious moment . . .
‘Michael was so happy about the baby – thank God he knew before he died. He made me promise I would go home to you if he were killed. But don’t waste grief on me. Remember that I have a child to look forward to and that I have had eighteen months of wonderful happiness.’
Doulton’s body was later found inside his aircraft, the gun button still set to ‘Fire’, the throttle fully open.25
* * *
The Battle of Britain heroics were witnessed by thousands on the ground, including boys who yearned to join the knights of the skies unashamedly glamourised in the press. Among them was sixteen-year-old John Wilkinson, who watched the aerial duels from his school in Horsham, West Sussex. ‘Standing outside I witnessed the fighters perform their deadly ballet, painting condensation trails and machines falling from the sky. It filled me with awe.’26
When the Germans switched to the Blitz on London, Wilkinson experienced the fear and devastation of war first-hand and it made him determined to fight back. ‘The noise of anti-aircraft guns firing and the bombs exploding throughout the night was horrendous. One night the house two doors from us was bombed and destroyed. Our windows were shattered, walls cracked and all our heavy plaster ceilings fell down. In the morning the streets and lawns were littered with small, very sharp shell fragments from the anti-aircraft shells.’
Getting to work as a junior clerk in the City near St Paul’s Cathedral, Wilkinson had to scramble over rubble not knowing if his office would still be standing. The streets around the famous church were laced with fire brigade hoses. ‘I passed buildings with flames pouring from their windows. There simply wasn’t enough water to put them out. The firemen had to move to areas where they could be more effective.’
The kernel of an idea that had been forming in Wilkinson’s mind began to take a grip. I can get up there and take on the bastards who’ve done this.
Three years earlier his mother had paid seven shillings and sixpence for him to go on a brief flight in a biplane. Wilkinson had been instantly hooked.
He looked up from the flames and rubble around St Paul’s into the dirty smoke obscuring the blue skies. He was eighteen and could make his own choices. I’m going to join the RAF and become a fighter pilot.
He also had a point to prove to his mother and the wider world. Eight years earlier, his father had taken his own life after their business in the US went bust during the Great Depression. Wilkinson would prove to everyone that he was a man worthy to lead his family.
His ears caught a familiar sound. He looked up and saw a flight of Spitfires pierce the smoke to meet the enemy threat. I have to fly.
* * *
But the battle’s losses were building and the time for someone who had more flying hours in Spitfires than anyone else in the RAF remaining a spectator was over. Civilian test pilot Jeffrey Quill knew there would be no point testing new Spitfires if there was no country left from which to fly them.
He had to do his bit. He knew Vickers Supermarine would put up a stiff fight to stop its top test pilot going to war, so he told them something close to the truth. ‘In order to do my job properly I must gain first-hand experience of fighting in a Spitfire.’27
In August 1940, Quill joined 65 Squadron at RAF Manston and in a matter of days he began operations for real. Quill’s squadron was sent to Dover, where 109s were shooting down barrage balloons. He spotted a fighter and went for him, getting close before opening fire. ‘I saw my tracers going right through his fuselage. I expected him to swerve or half-roll or something, so was all keyed-up to follow but he just went straight on down so I gave him another burst and another and still he went on downwards and not very fast.
‘I thought I had been spending too long on him and turned quickly to see if anyone was behind me and found all clear but a lot of aircraft swirling around some way away. Thinking about it on the way back I came to the conclusion that I must have hit the pilot in the head or the back with the first burst because of his complete indifference to my fire.’ Quill had killed the German outright.
He was soon to find out that RAF Manston was high on the list of Luftwaffe target bases. On 12 August he was sitting in his Spitfire, engine running, ready to taxi out for take-off, when there was a tremendous bang behind him.
Quill looked over his right shoulder in time to see one of the hangar roofs ascending heavenwards. ‘This was followed by showers of earth and black smoke, then more and louder “crumps”. I caught a glimpse through the smoke of what looked like an Me110 pulling sharply out of a dive and concluded it was high time for Quill to be airborne. We were being dive-bombed.
‘I put my head down, slammed the throttle wide open, wondering what chance I had of getting airborne before a bomb dropped immediately ahead of me or even on me . . . As I became airborne I glanced in the mirror and saw nothing but bomb-bursts and showers of earth and smoke immediately behind.’
Seconds after his wheels left the ground a 109 swooped overhead. Quill went to ground level, weaving furiously. In the following seconds he knew he would be cold meat for any swooping Messerschmitt. He looked around, saw no Germans and pulled the nose up into a steep spiral turn. ‘We had of course been extremely lucky. Bu
t our best bit of good fortune was that the Me109s who came boring down at us just as we were getting airborne hopelessly overshot because they were going much too fast. They should have slaughtered us.’28
They had indeed been lucky. One part of Goering’s plan had worked to perfection – to lure the fighters into the air, where his 109s would destroy them. However, the agile Spitfires eluded them.
In terms of accuracy, the attack was a resounding success. The Germans dropped 148 bombs on the airfield, but Manston was open for business the very next day. The only near-casualty had been a Spitfire whose propeller had been bent out of kilter from the blast of a bomb exploding immediately behind. The unfortunate pilot was left stranded in the middle of the target area surrounded by incoming explosions but survived physically unscathed. The British were showing an unexpected resilience that incensed Hitler and his cronies.
But their fortitude was being tested to its limits. The clear skies continued into September. The raids on air defences went on unabated. For the first time, Fighter Command’s losses outstripped those of the Germans.
In a two-week period from 24 August to 4 September, 295 British fighters had been destroyed and 171 damaged, with the Luftwaffe losing barely half this number of 109s.29 Despite Beaverbrook’s improvements, the factories produced 269 new and repaired fighters. In the same period, 103 pilots were killed and 128 wounded.
Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the brilliant tactician in charge of 11 Group, warned of the seriousness of the losses. In desperation, the RAF returned units that had taken a battering in Dunkirk to the arena.
Among them was 222 Squadron, where Hilary Edridge, twenty-one, and Tim Vigors, nineteen, had formed a close bond on the ground and a formidable partnership in the air. Theirs was a friendship that would have been unlikely outside war. Edridge was a gentle, church-going Catholic who had a deep love of literature and music. Vigors was a proud Protestant Anglo-Irishman with the Tricolour painted on his Spitfire’s nose. His grandfather, from Co. Carlow, was also something of a ‘player’. When caught in bed with a maid, his excuse to his wife was: ‘If one is going to appreciate Château Lafite, my dear, one must occasionally have a glass of vin ordinaire.’ Vigors had been hooked on aircraft ever since his godmother had taken him on a flight just before the war.
