by John Nichol
Taylor finally got home after four hours’ flying, with fifteen gallons, or about twenty-five minutes’ flight-time, remaining. Unlike the Luftwaffe’s jets, which had a maximum flight-time of ninety minutes, the Spitfire XIs did not guzzle fuel.
But the threat from the German jet fighters on Allied control of the skies was considered high enough to merit bombing missions against Me262 factories and aerodromes.
As Taylor made his way home, his thoughts turned back to the classroom lectures during training. It was a German general, Werner von Fritsch, whose quote from 1938 was drummed into their heads: ‘The military organisation with the best aerial reconnaissance will win the next war.’
The request for a PR mission to get the very latest information on the ground came variously from SHAEF, the Air Staff or Bomber Command.
The order rapidly filtered down to intelligence, meteorological and briefing officers along with photo interpreters. The command then went out to the engineers, flight mechanics and tradesmen who would start readying 16 Squadron’s Spitfire XIs while the pilot went into a briefing. After preparing for his flight, the pilot would board and carry out the sortie.
It all seemed clear-cut and possibly those who examined the black-and-white stills had little idea of what pilots experienced to get them.
The Mark XI could carry 218 gallons of fuel, more than three times the original Spitfire Mark I, and the pilot relied on its high speed, manoeuvrability and camouflage to stay out of trouble. With the pressurised cockpit, it could also go high, 45,000ft, without causing the significant effects of high altitude. Though the thin air still had an effect on the brain, as Taylor noted in his diary:
1. I tried to talk over the radio but couldn’t produce enough air to produce gutturals.
2. Difficulty in sucking: no palate to mouth, coughs are hollow, and sneezes produce agonised exhausted feeling in face and lungs.
3. Windscreen in front freezes completely over, blocking vision.
4. Bags of snowflakes appear in cockpit in quick descent.
5. The plane is extremely touchy and unbalanced. 1/8 inch movement of stick produces a steep bank or dive.
There was something about the photo reconnaissance Spitfire XIs of late 1944 that would surely have impressed R. J. Mitchell, the aircraft’s designer, who had not lived to witness the Spitfire’s remarkable evolution after dying of cancer in 1937. Without cannons or machine guns, its lines were clean and graceful. It was painted sky blue and had a touch of the glorious Twenties and the Schneider Trophy about it. It was fast and it could go high. More importantly, it had the sharpest pair of eyes on the battlefield.
The PR Spitfire pilots were entrusted with the most sensitive secrets and brought back golden information that could turn a battle.
The reconnaissance squadrons used experienced fliers, a close-knit group of men whose bonds were formed in dangerous, five-hour missions. There was little of the excitable chatter common in combat units.
They worked alone and were vulnerable. Many perished in poor weather, through oxygen failure or the enemy’s sophisticated air interdiction system of good radar coupled with fast jets.
* * *
For Jimmy Taylor the brutal reality of war was becoming ever more apparent. By mid-September 1944 his unit had lost three pilots. Taylor had sat with the rest of the squadron looking on glumly as they were told of the losses. One had spun down from a great height, probably due to oxygen failure, and two flight commanders had disappeared in bad weather. The deaths had a chilling effect on the pilots. They had all experienced ‘close calls’ and knew that death ran in close proximity to the PR job.
Flying over northern France, Taylor, who had holidayed in Europe with his father in the pre-war years, was shocked by the devastation. ‘What I saw overshadowed by far anything I’ve seen in England. Everywhere you look you can see craters, some older and grass-grown, others with the brown earth quite freshly disturbed . . . What hurt one most was not the damage to military objectives but the awful toll taken on the farms, villages and chateaux that were so unfortunate to be in the vicinity. A chateaux, once the pride of some wealthy owner, desolate with one wing shattered or like a sleeping giant, with all its shutters closed, except maybe for a servant’s window at the top, waiting for the return of the master.’
Jimmy was just grateful he would never have to face the savage reality of war on the ground.
* * *
After a week of low cloud and poor weather, on 19 November 1944 every Spitfire in 16 Squadron was sent into the skies. Taylor was given the specific task of overflying a jet base at Rheine, close to Germany’s border with Holland.
He took off at 11am from Melsbroek airbase in Belgium, gaining height as he headed over Germany. Flying at 26,000ft he noticed contrails developing so he lost altitude before photographing the jet airbase. ‘Suddenly, while I was in the middle of a run, there was a loud bang from the engine. It stopped momentarily. I tried to continue but a cloud of smoke filled with oil came out of the exhausts, followed by a sheet of flame. I switched off my cameras and juggled with the controls to try to get the engine to run properly. But the smoke continued to pour out and my windscreen was soon covered in oil so that I had to open the hood to see out. I called up Melsbroek on the radio and reported that I had engine failure. They told me to try to get back by gliding at 140mph on a course of 230 degrees, although the wind of 60mph at my height was against me and reduced my speed over the ground by that amount.
‘I was leaving a trail of dirty grey smoke behind me which would soon attract the Germans’ attention. There was an eighty-seven-gallon petrol tank between me and the engine so when smoke began to come up from the cockpit floor I felt that the whole plane might explode at any moment and decided to bail out before I was blown out. I made careful preparations and told Melsbroek what I was doing, then when the radio cut out at about 14,000ft I turned the aircraft upside down, released my harness and dropped out.
‘Unfortunately either I hit the tail or the wing. I felt as if I had been cut in half and lost consciousness. I was woken up by a small voice urging me, pull the ripcord, pull the ripcord! I did so and saw the parachute begin to open, then I lost interest in proceedings.
‘The next moment the ground rushed up, the same voice called, knees together, knees together!’ Jimmy Taylor, the Eton pupil and vicar’s son from Portsmouth, was now alone, and on the run in enemy-occupied territory.
Jimmy had been evading the Germans for five days when he rounded a corner, cold and dirty, but just a few miles from the Allied front line. He was in good spirits and feeling confident about getting home.
His escape kit, tucked in a plastic box inside his tunic, had sustained him through the cold November days. Water purification pills, biscuits, chocolate, twenty-four Horlicks energy tablets and a rudimentary compass had all proved useful.
The only downside was that he had been shot down near the town of Borne, in Holland, on a Sunday and had planned to be home within two days as he had a date in Brussels on the Wednesday.
It was a fine Friday morning. The crump of frontline guns was getting closer and thoughts of being back in 16 Squadron’s mess grew. The sound of artillery fire increased. Taylor, dressed in a scruffy civilian coat, rounded a corner and found himself looking at a battery of 88mm guns. He shuffled on, eyes down. He was almost past the last gun when an officer approached him.
‘Don’t you know there’s a battle going on and there’s a good chance of your being killed?’ the man said sternly.
‘Yes,’ Taylor replied in German. ‘I want to leave here as quickly as possible.’
‘Gut. The sooner the better for your own sake.’
‘Danke,’ Taylor replied then walked on, sensing that the officer was suspicious. After walking fifty yards he could not resist stopping to look back.
The officer was standing still. Their eyes met and Taylor instinctively felt the game was up. But he carried on.
A minute later he felt a hand on his sh
oulder. A grim-looking German soldier with a sub-machine gun hanging round his neck stopped him.
‘Komm mit mir!’ the soldier demanded.
Taylor looked at him blankly.
‘Come with me!’ the soldier repeated.
‘Why?’ Taylor replied, trying to play dumb.
‘Just come.’
A few minutes later the soldier asked whether he was Dutch or German.
‘Dutch,’ Taylor replied, knowing he could not bluff being a German.
‘Then why don’t you speak Dutch?’ the soldier smirked.
By now he was surrounded by a group of twenty German artillerymen.
‘Take off your coat.’ Taylor did as he was told, revealing his blue RAF battledress from which he had removed his wings.
‘What’s this uniform?’
‘My working clothes,’ he replied.
‘Where did you get it?’ The questioner moved threateningly forward.
‘From the Germans,’ Taylor responded, sticking with his story that he was a labourer.
As the tunic was removed they found other pieces of equipment that Taylor claimed to have found in a ditch.
Then the German officer arrived. He took one look at the flight lieutenant stripes and Taylor knew further bluffing would be useless.
‘Bad luck, old man,’ the man drawled in perfect English. ‘You nearly made it!’
As a photo reconnaissance pilot, Taylor knew he might have information about PR Spitfires that would be useful to the enemy, so when he was transferred to an interrogation centre he resolved to keep strictly to ‘name, rank and number’ despite threats of being handed over to the Gestapo.
At one point one of his interrogators became aggressive, shouting and thumping his desk. The door opened and an immaculately dressed colonel with grey hair entered.
‘What’s all this noise about?’ he asked in faultless English.
‘It’s this man, he’s shouting at me and making threats,’ Taylor replied.
‘Oh dear,’ the officer said. ‘We can’t have this sort of thing.’ Then he turned to the interrogator. ‘You mustn’t treat Taylor in this way, he’s a gentleman.’ Then he turned back to Taylor. ‘I see you’ve been to Eton. I’m most interested in the English public schools. You must come and talk to me about them.’
Only later did Taylor learn that a technique the Germans used was for a prisoner to be ‘rescued’ by a senior officer after a harsh interrogation, which sometimes made them talk. However, all Taylor ever gave them was a made-up number for the squadron he was in. Then he was sent to a POW camp on the Baltic coast. For 16 Squadron Spitfire pilot Jimmy Taylor, the war was over.
* * *
John Wilkinson (standing second on left)
It was not just up high that the Spitfire was proving its worth. As a counter to the German ‘Battle of the Bulge’ offensive, it was needed in the ground-attack role.
John Wilkinson had waited almost three years to become an operational fighter pilot on joining the RAF, aged eighteen, in 1941. After a few months’ operational flying he had an ‘assist’ in shooting down a V1 in 1944 to his credit.2 The God-fearing Wilkinson, whose father had committed suicide during the 1930s financial crash, was posted along with 41 Squadron to Ophoven in Belgium. He was soon flying the powerful Spitfire XIV, whose five-bladed propellers driven by the Rolls-Royce Griffon engine could get them to 20,000ft in just five minutes.
He had already felt the ‘hand of the Lord’ upon him in recent weeks after several near-misses, including an attack on a ‘flak train’, which had hidden AA guns.
In late January 1945, Wilkinson, now twenty-two, spotted a German ammunition truck trundling along a road and dived to attack. ‘While I damaged the truck I was not satisfied with the results and circled around for another attack. As I approached I saw men running for the ditch dragging another man with them. Ignoring the men, I opened fire once again on the truck and there was an enormous explosion, such as I had never seen. I quickly pulled up to avoid the blast and debris and returned to a cruising altitude. It would have been an immoral waste of life to attack the men in the ditch who survived and who I presumed were probably lowly conscripted privates.
‘One does not feel any animosity towards these targets, just the need to destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war. Such is the futile waste when one must engage in war to prevent the destruction of our way of life and preserve our freedom.’
On 2 February 1945, Wilkinson received a battered letter, posted several months earlier, from the family of his great friend, Bunny Henriquez. The news was devastating. Bunny had been killed shortly after John had visited him at his base, when his Lancaster was shot down by a German night fighter over Pomerania.
On the same night Bunny’s daughter had woken up screaming, asking her family to ‘pray for Daddy’. As Wilkinson walked across the frozen grass of the airstrip he felt bitter at the loss of his closest friend and resolved never again to form strong bonds with flying companions.
Anger seized him as he pressed the starter engine. The Spitfire XIV’s powerful Griffon, despite the cold, emitted a deep roar. Wilkinson thrust the throttle forward and took off from their snow-covered airfield in Belgium with his squadron leader. Their mission was to shoot up anything on the ground. Wilkinson made an oath that that day he would find the enemy and exact retribution. ‘Bunny’s death made me incredibly angry. Of course people were dying all the time but he was a real friend. We had trained together, laughed together and I had been welcomed into his family home.’
Flying at 12,000ft, Wilkinson had already made several strafing runs on trains and trucks when suddenly he spotted the black outline of a German staff car. ‘They were a choice target since it meant high-ranking officers capable of the decision-making that could result in casualties on our side. They saw me coming, halted the car and ran into a field. I destroyed their car and then I went down after the officers. It was the only time I fired my guns in real anger and I fired on these officers because they were the ones running the war. I don’t know how many I killed or injured but I made sure I strafed them with everything I had – 20mm explosive cannon shells and .50-calibre armour-piercing incendiary bullets.’
Bunny’s death had not gone unavenged. But his passing did make Wilkinson think for once about his own mortality. ‘I knew that I could possibly die but simply didn’t think about it. I don’t even remember talking about death with my comrades. If people had their own fears they handled them on their own and in private.’
Moments after mowing down the officers Wilkinson found himself on the receiving end of heavy groundfire as he passed over a hidden grass airfield. ‘In such cases the best defence against antiaircraft fire is to use the full climbing ability of the Spitfire XIV. Heading up at 8,000ft per minute, one can usually climb out of trouble. However, in this case I could see the tracers and explosive shells gradually catching up with me. I instinctively flipped the Spitfire on its back and pulled a high “G” manoeuvre to dive just as I felt the bullets hitting my machine. There is no mistaking the sound of it. The engine was screaming as I headed down with the ground racing up to me at over 500mph. I pulled out of the dive very sharply, almost at ground level, and levelled off – one of the many fine qualities of the Spitfire – thereby avoiding disastrously mushing into the ground. I could see the tracers going over the cockpit hood but I was so low that if they depressed their guns any further they would be shooting each other. In a split second I was over a hedge and away.’
The near-miss left Wilkinson shaken but grateful to be alive. ‘Until one experiences combat, no matter how well trained, it is utterly unpredictable how one will react. Being shot at fine-tunes the senses beyond description. The sounds, smell and feel of combat are absolutely unparalleled by any other endeavour on earth. Only those who have experienced it first-hand can truly appreciate and understand the power of adrenaline as it courses through the body, raising every nerve to the peak of efficiency.’
As John spoke to me
from his home in Spearfish, South Dakota, recalling his brushes with death, it was clear that his faith in both God and the Spitfire was a major factor in sustaining him through those dark days of war. ‘In my opinion the Spitfire is the greatest flying machine ever built,’ he told me. ‘I loved that aircraft so much, and flying them was such a great joy for me.’ It was also his trust in God that saw him through. ‘The protecting hand of the Lord regularly guided me away from harm. It was He who shepherded me safely through the war.’ Sadly, John died in early 2017, another of the veterans I had interviewed who passed away as I wrote this book.
* * *
The adrenaline of combat had been coursing through Hugh Dundas since his days over Dunkirk, in the Battle of Britain, on Rhubarbs over France, in North Africa, Sicily and now Italy. He had had an incredible wartime career and it was starting to take its toll. He was now a Group Captain in charge of the Spitfire Mark IXs of 244 Wing in Italy – at the age of twenty-three, the youngest ever in the RAF to hold the rank equivalent to an army full colonel. Whether it was his youth or sense of responsibility, Dundas still insisted on leading from the front.
‘It was my job to ensure that fear was held within restraint. If it took hold it would quickly spread through every squadron of the Wing. And yet there was no one who felt more afraid than I, so the job was a hard one.’3
Like most who had lost their boyhood glorification of war, Hugh Dundas had to contend with the possibility of death on operations, along with the memory of his brother John, killed in 1940. ‘The old struggle was raging within me – the struggle between the knowledge that I should fight on and the desire to call it a day and stay alive.’
Since the Salerno invasion of Italy in late 1943 the Allies had fought long and hard on their way up Italy, struggling through the seemingly endless German defensive lines. Dundas insisted that his Spitfires play their part by using them as ground-attack aircraft to harass supply lines. Thus, when a bridge north of Rimini needed to be destroyed in the late summer of 1944, he was at the forefront, leading his formation of Spitfires. The fighters were in their fighter-bomber role, a task for which they were well equipped, so much so that one commander had said they ‘out-Stuka the Stukas’. Dundas looked over his shoulder and took pride in the glorious formation of twenty Spitfires behind him, in the blue summer skies. The picture had been completed as they soared over the evocative Italian countryside of vineyards, sharp mountains and ancient hilltop towns. He savoured the moment. At some point the war would end and such experiences were unlikely to happen to him ever again.
