Spitfire

by John Nichol

  At 3.47am twelve Spitfire squadrons were sent up.

  Pilots could see streams of tracer bullets pass to and fro from soldiers on the beach and German positions looking down on them.

  It was difficult to concentrate when so much was going on down below. The Spitfires pushed around the sky, largely unnoticed by the Canadians now pinned down in a merciless crossfire on the beaches. The idea that Dieppe was going to be a walkover was quickly dispelled. German machine guns concealed in solidly constructed pillboxes sprayed belt after belt of bullets into the hapless infantry. Artillery from the surrounding area joined in, sending splinters of beach stones and metal among the troops. Some infantry got to the cover of the sea wall but few ventured over it. Waves began to wash in, flecked with red.

  * * *

  As demonstrated by his daring flight in the Spitfire IX to observe the fighter sweep into France, Harry Broadhurst was no shrinking violet. He also had a good nose for finding facts while absorbing detail, and a reputation as an acrobatic daredevil. Those attributes had served him well during the France debacle, the Battle of Britain and the Rhubarbs, where even a man of his skill had been badly shot up. He was already an ‘ace’ and had the decoration ribbons across his chest to prove he was not shy of a fight. Aged thirty-six, he was not going to be pushed around.

  But he had just taken a beating. During the Dieppe planning, he argued against using ‘stepped-up’ wings of fighters set at designated heights – low level, mid level and high level – patrolling over the beachhead. Broadhurst contended that it would be ‘too unmanoeuvrable’ against the small, agile formations of German bombers or fighters.

  His view went against that of the majority and led to Broadhurst venting strong disagreement. The matter had, in his words, ‘left me in the doghouse’.

  Doghouse or not, he was not going to be stopped from flying. Early in the morning, Broadhurst borrowed a Spitfire IX from RAF Hornchurch and went to have a look over Dieppe for himself. Just after 6.30am, flying at 20,000ft, he spotted groups of Fw190s in pairs or fours climbing up into the sun then diving through the stepped-up wings onto the aircraft and ships below before beetling back inland at low level.13

  Broadhurst studied the attacks from afar for some time before his experienced eye picked out two Fw190s approaching. Manoeuvring rapidly he latched onto the ‘number two’. He used the Mark IXs boosted power to close in on the German and then opened fire in a single, destructive salvo. The kill did little to soothe his discontent over ill-guided tactics as he landed at Biggin Hill.

  Broadhurst strode out of his Spitfire to the operations room and its direct line to Fighter Command. He did not keep his mouth shut.

  The bloody useless ‘stepped-up’ tactic was not working.

  Why? A senior commander wanted to know.

  Why? Why! Broadhurst was not going to hold back now. Because I’ve seen it with my own eyes! That’s why.

  At 7.05am, shortly after Broadhurst landed, radar plotters on the south coast began picking up large Luftwaffe fighter formations heading in a constant stream towards Dieppe. The wished-for battle of attrition was on.

  A series of terrific dogfights began. The two Norwegian Spitfire squadrons, 331 and 332, were up high and ready to take on the Nazis who still occupied their country. The Spitfires dived down on the mixture of 109s and Fw190s. But they were still in Mark Vs and it was proving increasingly inadequate against the Fw190. Despite their bravery, Norwegian-piloted Spitfires splashed into the sea, but they also took a few Germans with them.

  The stoicism of the Norwegian CO, Wilhelm Mohr, was evident as he walked with a fellow commander around the dispersal area to see what aircraft were available for the next sortie. When Mohr mentioned he wouldn’t be going on the next flight the British officer looked surprised. Mohr set him straight: ‘I am sorry but I am afraid I haf a bullet in my body.’ He pointed to a hole in his boot. During a melee his aircraft had been hit and the round had burrowed into his right leg.14

  Since 3am Alan Peart had been fighting back fears and doubts about what might happen in his first fight.15 Was he up to the job? Would a German ace spot his inexperience and go for an easy kill? If his plane was hit, would he be unhurt? If he had to bail out, would he be able to get the canopy open? As the hours passed he began to wonder if 610 Squadron had been overlooked. Reports came in of others getting kills but also suffering losses. There were mutters about ‘190s’ and ‘why the hell haven’t they given us Mark IXs?’ The dispersal-room chatter stopped when Squadron Leader Johnnie Johnson’s calm voice addressed them: ‘Time to get up there, chaps.’

  Peart tried to look nonchalant as he walked to his aircraft. But he could see the tension in his ground mechanics as they busied themselves around him, ensuring he was securely strapped in with parachute and Mae West life jacket. At the signal to ‘go’, Peart gave a thumbs-up and watched his flight sergeant mouth a ‘good luck’ then grin and make a motion of firing a machine gun with both hands.

  Peart felt a surge of elation and pride as the entire squadron took to the sky as one. He felt safe too, among so many experienced and respected pilots. For a brief moment he embraced the idea of the coming battle and was curious about how he would react under fire for the first time. Would he be hit? Would he fly home in terror? Or just sit there and take it?

  Then his mind settled on the concentration needed for rear-end Charlie.

  The squadron climbed to 7,000ft and Peart was struggling to keep up with the other eleven Spitfires as they made their way over the Channel.

  ‘Come on Red 12, stay with us.’ Peart applied more throttle to catch up as he swept left and right, tracking the sky. As tail-end Charlie, he was in danger of drifting away from the formation and being picked off singly.

  For a brief second Peart looked ahead and spotted a heavy pall of smoke towering over the coast. Dieppe. He could see flashes and explosions, vehicles at crazy angles, some in the water, some out. Tanks with dark smoke pouring out of their turrets. Anonymous shapes littered the beach. Bodies? Dead men. Our men. He had never before seen death and destruction on such a scale. He looked away.

  Below were two other stepped-up squadrons, one at 3,000ft and the other at wave-top level. 610 were there to provide top cover. Peart concentrated on doing the best job he could.

  Johnnie Johnson ordered them higher, to 10,000ft.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Fuck!’

  Peart heard expletives then started desperately searching the sky overhead.

  ‘Bandits. Fifty-plus. Coming down. 190s and 109s! Stand by.’

  Aircraft began weaving about madly.

  ‘Fight your way out.’ He recognised the anxious voice of the wing leader. ‘Get out. Watch those 190s above at six o’clock. All Elfin aircraft – get out!’

  ‘Red 12 break port.’ Peart immediately obeyed the command and turned the stick, diving hard left as Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs came down from astern and the flanks. He banked left and right, trying hard to stay out of enemy sights.

  ‘Jamie, strong enemy reinforcements coming in. About fifty-plus. Over.’ Johnson’s calm voice warned a squadron leader down below.

  ‘Red 12 you’re under fire. Under fire!’ Peart instinctively flung his Spitfire hard right and down. Still he couldn’t see the enemy, let alone fasten onto one to fire his guns.

  Around him Spitfires carried on fighting in pairs and fours. Down below he could still see the desperate fight for survival raging on the beach and in the waves. Men were dying down there but he had to focus his mind on the job in the skies.

  He spotted a Spitfire hurtling at speed just above the wave tops towards a destroyer. Peart was puzzled. They had been carefully briefed not to fly under 4,000ft around shipping. The navy gunners would shoot at anyone who came close. Flak flew towards the fighter. Another aircraft was not far behind. At the last moment the Spitfire shot up and over the destroyer. The enemy aircraft veered away in a tight turn, unwilling to challenge the navy gunners.

&nbs
p; To shake the superior Fw190 from his tail, Johnnie Johnson had resorted to the near-suicidal tactic of flying into his own flak by heading towards a Royal Navy destroyer. After fighting the Fw190 at close quarters he knew that the Mark V was really struggling. ‘Our Spitfire Vs were completely outclassed by the Fw190s and on this occasion I was certainly lucky to get back,’ Johnson recorded.16 The ‘V’s simply did not have the power to take on the 190s. Only the Mark IXs could and it seemed the only person flying one was Harry Broadhurst, still monitoring the course of the battle from above.

  Group Captain Harry Broadhurst was determined to do something about that soon after landing back at RAF Biggin Hill after his second Dieppe sortie. He telephoned Leigh-Mallory at 11 Group HQ and requested that Mark IXs be sent up in pairs or fours to counter the 190 threat. The reply he received was not encouraging. There were only four Mark IX squadrons available and they were detailed to escort the raid on Abbeville airbase by the American 8th Air Force.17

  Broadhurst just about restrained himself from using an expletive against a senior officer before the phone was back in its cradle.

  * * *

  When 610 Squadron landed back at West Malling, Peart gratefully accepted the mug of tea handed up to the cockpit along with a spam and cheese sandwich. Suddenly he felt ravenous. ‘Got your first taste of it today, Alan,’ his section leader leaned on his wing.

  ‘Yes,’ Peart quietly responded.

  ‘Lucky that 190 missed you. Seemed he was giving you everything he had.’

  Peart nodded then took a large bite of sandwich. I didn’t even bloody well see him.

  He had to spot enemy fighters at a distance otherwise he’d be dead.

  ‘Fuel your belly up,’ the officer patted his shoulder. ‘We’ll be back up shortly.’

  Ground crews worked hard to turn around the aircraft. It was like the Battle of Britain again. Rearm, refuel, polish the cockpit windscreen then patch up bullet holes and return the aircraft to duty. All within half an hour. Peart looked on in admiration.

  ‘Come on, I heard they’re serving something called “nearly-spam” and chips in the mess.’

  Peart felt a slight wobble in his legs as he got down. He was grateful. Grateful for his luck and grateful to have experienced combat for the first time and survived. Even if I didn’t see the bastard!

  * * *

  Harry Strawn waited for six hours before the scramble order came. As he lifted his Spitfire into the sky he felt certain, along with his fellow Americans of the 309th Squadron, that he was about to be tested in combat for the first time.

  Despite the aircraft around him it felt lonely in the cockpit. He tightened the flap of his flying helmet, trying to cut out the sound of wind rushing past. His mouth and nose were enclosed in the mask containing his microphone transmitter. His broad shoulders brushed the cockpit sides as he glanced around looking for his fellow fliers. He felt shut off from the rest of the world, cocooned yet vulnerable.

  Soon they would be in a fight. Someone trying to kill me. Certainly there would be flak. He tried to recall the lecture given by a veteran. White puffs on the ground meant AA was shooting at you; if puffs appeared in the air with red in them they were very close. All you can do is ignore the fact that a shell, three and a half inches across and travelling at speed, could make a severe mess of the cockpit.

  Best to remember you’re in a small space occupying a tiny piece of sky.

  That piece of sky was not small enough for some in the 309th. Strawn watched as three of his fellow American fliers, men he’d been having breakfast with only that morning, were sent streaking downwards in flames in their Mark Vs. The only silver lining was hearing someone shout in glee over the radio, ‘Got him! I’ve got him!’ and seeing an Fw190 head down, emitting smoke.

  Strawn swooped low over the Dieppe beach. It was not a sight he wanted to dwell on. Bodies floated in the surf or straddled obstacles. Men were clearly fighting for their lives as gunfire pummelled them from all sides. Seeing the bloodbath on the beaches made the dangers of flying easier to accept. ‘Thank God I’m in the air, for there it comes quickly and easily. At least you don’t have to witness wholesale slaughter.’

  Because the tanks arrived late, the infantry were forced to press ahead. Some of the Churchills had flamethrowers, which could easily have wiped out the machine-gun nests and gun emplacements in the cliffs. Instead, it had become a scene of carnage and mayhem, with officers and men cut down. When the tanks finally arrived only twenty-nine got ashore, but a dozen were then bogged down on the soft shingle under their tracks.

  Then the British commander unwittingly made the decision to reinforce failure.

  At 7am he launched his reserves of two battalions into the hell of the beaches. As the landing craft approached, the Germans opened up with everything – machine guns, mortars and grenades.

  The slaughter ashore grew by the hour. The idea of holding Dieppe for ‘two tides’ was simply not feasible. At 10.50am the decision was made to withdraw.

  At 11am the RAF unleashed a heavy attack on German defences around Dieppe prior to laying a smokescreen. Landing craft, supported by destroyers, began the hazardous operation of retrieving those who had survived the slaughter. As the ships came in close to shore and within range of German machine guns, the order was given to abandon all equipment, including the brand-new Churchill tanks. The Royal Marine landing-craft crews, hearing the clatter of bullets strike against their hulls as they pulled up the shingle, felt some relief. Their job had just been made marginally easier.

  The German gunfire grew in intensity, as they fired blindly into the smokescreen knowing the British were on the back foot. Soldiers clambered onto a landing craft only to find themselves back in the water after it capsized or sank. The wave crests were streaked red. Then the smokescreen began to thin. Gaps appeared and the enemy machine-gunners poured everything they had into them.

  A handful of Blenheim and Boston bombers came thundering across the Channel to lay down more of the precious smoke.

  Sensing their chance, the Luftwaffe threw bombers and fighters at the ships and ground troops. The Spitfires engaged in a bitter battle to hold them off. For those at 3,000ft above the shipping, there was little room in which to manoeuvre from attacks above.

  Myles Duke-Woolley, at just twenty-six, was a pugnacious Battle of Britain ace and leading his squadron on its third sortie of the morning. He felt like they were waiting to be picked off. Being able to spot an enemy fighter from far away was, as Peart was beginning to learn, a skill that required a lot of practice. ‘The Duke’ was good at it. He wouldn’t have survived this long if he hadn’t been. Yet in the turmoil of Dieppe and from his low position even he failed to see a lone German fighter that dived on them from a great height and out of the sun. Skilfully, the pilot steadied his dive until he was coming at the Spitfires head-on with a closing speed of 800mph. Confident in his marksmanship, the enemy pilot opened up from 600 yards away. It was then that Duke-Woolley spotted him. And he was too late.

  With the German fighter closing at 400 yards a second, he simply did not have the time to react in the second and a half at his disposal.

  ‘He shot down two aircraft in the squadron I was leading and both pilots were killed. We could do nothing but carry on and the squadron most commendably did not waver. The German’s attack was skilful and came right from the eye of a blazing sun in a cloudless sky, and in those conditions quick positive identification is very difficult.

  ‘I lost two pilots for nothing in return. It was bad and a sad business but part of the sort of price you incurred by being pegged on a leash with a small fixed area in which to “work”. We were sitting ducks, really, and unfortunately were singled out by a first-class poacher.’18

  At 12.30pm the Allied beachmaster controlling the Dieppe shore was given the order to leave. He’d got a few more off the beaches than expected, given the enemy fire. Some men who had been pinned down for seven hours behind large rocks or the beach wall had
made a run for it. The beachmaster watched as men dashed down through the smokescreen to the promise of a landing craft and the thought of getting out of their nightmare and back home to safety. Some ran without weapons, some without helmets or any equipment. Some ran straight, others weaved. He watched as the German machine-gun fire cut through the smoke, snapping at the stones then thudding into flesh. Soldiers were sent sprawling onto their faces with bullets in their backs. They whimpered and cried for help. A few got through, their pinched faces telling a story of a harrowing morning of carnage and chaos. Gratefully, they splashed through the blood-tinged surf and up into the landing craft. Even then they knew they were not safe, as they waited anxiously for others to board before the engine roared in reverse and the boat backed away, all the time under fire.

  Others simply stayed put under cover, forsaking the chance of dying while escaping for survival as prisoners of war.

  As the last landing craft puttered away from the bloodied shingle, the RAF Hurribombers dived in to suppress the German guns.

  Now it was a question of getting the flotilla back across the seventy-five miles of sea to home and safety. The Luftwaffe was not going to make it easy.

  More than six hours after his first flight over Dieppe, Harry Broadhurst found himself on his third sortie shortly after 12.30pm. He immediately spotted the destroyer HMS Berkeley under attack from German dive-bombers. She had lost steerage and was drifting, at the mercy of the swooping aircraft. He radioed for the covering Spitfire squadrons to take position at the rear of the convoy. They were not in time to stop two 190s dive towards the destroyer, one scoring a direct hit on its stern. Broadhurst emptied almost all his ammunition into one 190 but it got away. The Berkeley began to sink but others got alongside, rescuing survivors.19

  For an hour there was no sign of the enemy. But all involved knew the Luftwaffe would return, once they had rearmed and refuelled.

  The indefatigable Broadhurst set out on his fourth sortie of the day at 3.15pm and flew directly to Dieppe as the clouds closed in. He was tired, having been up since 3am, and was aware he was pushing his luck. But he knew he flew a Spitfire superior to anything the Germans had. Which was just as well, he realised, when he spotted two Fw190s diving out of the sun. Despite his exhaustion, Broadhurst was able to pour on the power and the Merlin 61’s supercharger did not let him down. Which was a good job. For very quickly the Fw190s doubled in number, eager to find one last prey before their day of plenty ended. With four Fw190s on his tail Broadhurst knew that in a Mark V he would have been dead or dangling from the end of a parachute. Instead, using the Mark IX Spitfire’s high speed at altitude, he managed to keep out of range long enough to evade all of them by roaring up into cloud. The 190s did not follow. A few minutes later he came out of the murk and found himself close behind a Blenheim trailing smoke, its three-man crew doing their best to limp home. The twin-engine bomber would not have stood a chance against a German fighter. Broadhurst came alongside and waggled his wings, giving the crew a thumbs-up. The looks of gratitude softened some of the anger that was burning inside him after a day of poor tactics and misjudged leadership. He took up station above and behind the Blenheim, staying close until it landed at the coastal hub of Tangmere.