Spitfire

by John Nichol

This unorthodox form of preparation for his first patrol at least gave him a bit of Dutch courage as he awoke a few hours later, on 17 April 1945, and was taken to the ‘ops’ trailer for a briefing. An American division had been held up by a battalion of SS troopers dug in around a warehouse north of Bologna. The squadron was to patrol at 10,000ft until contacted by radio controllers on the ground. Bird felt his heart quicken at the prospect of experiencing combat for the first time, but as he entered the cockpit his emotions changed. ‘I was suddenly conscious that all the butterflies which had been so rampant in my stomach for the last twelve hours had melted away, to be replaced by an air of clinical discipline.’

  ‘Clear to go, Dragon Two.’ The call came over his helmet earphones. Bird felt a surge of elation as he opened the throttle and hurtled down the airstrip in his Spitfire IX. He was about to see action, to be in the war and do his bit. To help pay back the Germans who had attacked his country. The war’s end was close but at least he was now part of it. He pulled back on the stick and soared into the sky, excited, nervous, but more than ready for what was to come.

  Within ten minutes he had reached the patrol height of 10,000ft above the Apennines, where the sun was reaching into a cloudless sky. Just in front of him was the comforting sight of his leader’s aircraft but no words of comfort came over the wireless. Silence would be maintained until the frontline Ground Control Unit called up.

  Far below there were long lines of dust clouds twisting and turning through the Apennines and onto the roads of the Po Valley. No imagination was necessary to realise that this was the Allied troops in hot pursuit of the Germans in retreat.

  It was a sight that made Bird realise that the long years of the war were coming to a successful end.

  ‘Suddenly the wireless broke into life and I could hear Ground Control giving my leader a map reference for a new target. It was a rule that all pilots on this type of operation should individually acknowledge to their leader that they too have identified the target. With a swift glance down I was able, to my great relief, to identify the warehouse and quickly acknowledge the fact to “Dragon Leader”.

  ‘I turned my aircraft on its back and followed him down in almost a vertical dive. Beyond the long nose of my Spit I could see our target, a warehouse, getting nearer and nearer.

  ‘With one eye on my altimeter, I could see the needle passing the 7,000 the 6,000 and the 5,000ft marks with alarming speed. The next second or so I was at dive-bombing height of 2,500ft. I pulled the nose of the aircraft through the target and pressed the “bomb” button on the control stick.

  ‘Moments later, having pulled up to a safe height away from the flak, I quickly glanced down and saw my bomb bursting alongside the warehouse. A “near-miss”.

  ‘Acting on instructions from the ground we went in to strafe the warehouse with our 20mm cannons from a height of 500ft. This time one could see shells bursting inside the warehouse and we were to hear later from the forward troops that this attack helped to dispose of the SS anti-tank guns and help our own troops capture the location.’

  Although Bird was in action for the very final days of the war, death could still strike with little warning.

  He found that the dangers of ground attacks were extreme, with the SS determined to fight for every yard of ground. As they went to strafe a column of tanks passing through a village near Parma a barrage of tracer came towards them. ‘One such shell hit our leading aircraft which crashed in front of the leading tank which then proceeded to drive straight over it. All this unfolded before my eyes yet in that split second of battle one’s mind is strangely galvanised into suppressing emotion and pressing home your own attack.’

  As the pilots gathered back at base there was sadness and bitterness at the loss of an excellent and brilliant colleague when the war’s end was close. For Bird, the memory and thought of the arbitrary nature of war stayed with him. ‘The picture of that aircraft sliding beneath the tank remained an unhappy memory.’

  But with the Germans in full retreat over the River Po in northern Italy it was vital to keep up the pressure.

  Intelligence had come in that the retreating Germans were, against the Geneva Convention, using ambulances with red crosses to move operational troops. The order was given to fire on them. The squadron was hunting the vehicles over Spezia, on the northwest coast of Italy. Bird was concentrating hard to stay in position on his leader’s wing when he saw neat little clusters of white cloud around his aircraft.

  ‘After dredging my mind for knowledge of such a meteorological phenomenon my thoughts were quickly dismissed by the voice of my leader in my earphones bellowing: “Weave, you stupid bastard, it’s flak!”

  A few minutes later they spotted a convoy of vehicles with red crosses in the mountains and Bird swooped to attack one on a precipitous hairpin bend. Before he could fire a shot the driver had jumped out and the vehicle went plunging hundreds of feet down the mountainside.

  Bird then followed his patrol leader, who had spotted an ‘armoured car’, following behind on the strafing run. As he saw his leader’s cannon strikes burst around the vehicle Bird lined up his gunsight to follow suit. ‘The instant I pressed the firing button I got a closer focus on the target and realised too late that it was a peasant’s horse and cart hell-bent on reaching cover.’

  Bird felt shocked by his part in taking the life of a non-combatant. ‘It made me feel sick to realise that I had slaughtered an innocent animal and human but such is the cruelty of high-speed war.’

  Bird was about to experience for himself what the true reality of war was like for those on the ground. With his Spitfire unserviceable after a long patrol, he had to go by truck to their next airstrip outside Bologna. What he saw stayed with him. ‘The houses in each village were virtually piles of rubble. I was probably seeing a microscopic reflection of what was happening in thousands of European villages at the moment. Nobody who has experienced such a journey can ever forget the utter desolation.’

  He then witnessed a sight that made his spirits rise. ‘Moving southwards along the same road were hundreds upon hundreds of lorries carrying German POWs being taken rearward to prisoner cages. As we passed through each village square the whole area was a grey mass of squatting and demoralised German soldiers waiting to be taken into captivity.

  ‘On that journey through the war-torn devastation of northern Italy, I realised quite forcibly that the end of the war was very close at hand.’

  * * *

  The Germans were now in full-scale retreat across Europe and, as more land was liberated, the true horrors of the Nazi regime were being witnessed by Allied troops.

  Joe Roddis, who had followed his squadron through France and into Belgium, was driving back to his latest Spitfire base in Holland when he ran out of petrol close to the Dutch concentration camp at Amersfoort. The Canadian troops who provided him with fuel showed him around the site.

  ‘We ended up at a long, unending row of brick ovens with mountains of ash by each one. It had been a concentration camp. That shook us all.

  ‘There were human bones, remnants of bodies. It was a real shock. This was the horror of what the Germans were capable of and I hated them for it. It made what we were doing, fighting the war, even more important.’6

  Nigel Tangye had parked up his Spitfire near Leipzig in the heart of Germany in order to visit a concentration camp. His American friends had told him about the horrors being discovered there and he wanted to verify them for himself. It was an experience that would live with him forever. It was mid-April 1945, a few weeks before Germany’s surrender, and the Americans had liberated Buchenwald concentration camp a few days earlier. They took Tangye through the neat brickwork of its front gates into the horror beyond.

  ‘The very air seemed to become murkily tainted as one got within a radius of a few miles.’ Despite the food and medical supplies that were arriving in vast quantities, inmates were still dying, with 400 being buried a day.

  ‘Around mounds of bla
nkets, clothing, cases of food and fresh fruit, there milled busy American GIs and solitary relics of human beings dressed in the inexpressibly doleful striped pyjama-like garment of the camp prisoner. They hobbled around bemused, living skeletons with a thin layer of yellow parchment over their bones, lifeless eyes sunk into huge black sockets between forehead and cheekbone.’

  However, there was one inmate who stuck out from the rest, standing at 6ft 8in and extraordinarily emaciated. Tangye wrote: ‘On his one-time huge frame the effect was horrifying, the more so because he had a large but very narrow head, a head with length but no width, like a plate on its edge.

  ‘I knew I would never forget this man, not because of his grotesque shape after privation and years of fear, nor because of the hint of a smile he contrived to summon. I knew I would remember him for his spirit. He was Dutch and could speak English, French and German and a little Polish so that he was of great value to the liberators. One saw him all day, head and shoulders above a group of officers, GIs, generals surrounding him and he pointing, talking, hobbling, the very mouthpiece of the silent death camp abandoned by its jailors.

  ‘In those first days he must have been responsible for saving scores of lives, hovering on the very threshold of death, by the miracle of his presence and uncanny energy in briefing the Americans as to what was what, where to go, what the priorities were.’

  Long after the nightmarish days at Buchenwald, Tangye would remember this Dutchman, ‘a star against the black night of the death camp’.

  * * *

  As she shopped for knickers at Lillywhites, it suddenly struck Ann Todd that the abandoned evening performance during the air-raid warning when war had been declared in 1939 seemed a lifetime ago. Her acting career had continued successfully and she still took to the stage despite the bombs and made films that allowed people to forget the pain and fear of war. She had gone from having a baby during the Blitz, to sheltering during an air raid while her Spitfire pilot husband Nigel Tangye was flying in a bomber above London.

  On 8 May 1945 she was in the underwear department of Lillywhites in Piccadilly Circus when the sirens sounded over London, signalling the war’s end. ‘We all went mad. People were crying and laughing. Customers in different forms of undress rushed to the windows and flung pants, petticoats, bras and stockings out into Piccadilly. They fluttered down onto the crowd below, who had also gone mad, like pink and white coloured petals proclaiming our victory over Hitler. They turned darkness into light.’ It was VE Day, the war was over, and life could begin again. ‘From now on we were able to sleep at night in our beds without fear; the most wonderful feeling in the world.’

  * * *

  For a week, Ken French’s Spitfire unit had been stood down as it became clear from 30 April that Germany was beaten. On 8 May, 66 Squadron was told to assemble on the airfield to be informed that active operations had ceased. After a year of near-constant offensive operations, the sudden end felt strange. ‘We were the survivors but we spared a thought for our many friends who had fallen by the way. The announcement was received with a sense of relief on one hand but on the other was almost an anticlimax. The war had become a way of life, our only way of life. It would be difficult just to cut off and get to normal living.’

  When I visited Ken, still living alone in his Leigh-on-Sea home in Essex, his daughter had told me to simply go through the unlocked front door and I would find him in his chair. It was a surreal experience to simply wander into this WWII veteran’s house, calling his name to ensure I didn’t startle him. Yet there he was, propped up in an armchair, surrounded by paintings and pictures of his beloved Spitfire. Still living relatively independently aged ninety-five, his recollection of those events of 1945 were still crystal clear and his eyes brightened as he talked of his days flying the Spitfire.

  ‘Flying the Spitfire was a dream; we ruled the skies and were afraid of nothing. We were invincible. There was nothing in the air like it; it was a perfect aircraft. I enjoyed the war and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. You made good friends and lost good friends; it was a happy time and a sad time. I made friends I still have seventy-five years on. Though there are only a couple of us left now, our generation who fought the war is nearly gone.’ Sadly, Ken was to join his departed friends a few months after we spoke. One less Spitfire veteran to tell the story.

  * * *

  On 7 May 1945, Hugh Dundas, who had been one of the very few pilots in near-constant action since the early days of the war over Dunkirk, found himself at the well-equipped airfield of Treviso, just a few miles north of Venice. 324 Spitfire Wing’s log recorded: ‘We no longer carry out operations from this date. In other words the war has ceased.’

  Dundas added: ‘And I was alive.’

  His early adulthood had been entirely shaped by aerial warfare. It was time to experience life. ‘I had a lot of catching up to do in other directions. And I could hardly have been better placed for the purpose, with the glorious city of Venice on my doorstep and with a comfortable, fully-staffed villa for the entertainment of visiting VIPs, who were numerous. The Dolomite mountains were two hours’ drive away and Rome “a mere sixty minutes” by Spitfire.

  ‘Slowly I unwound. And from this fortunate vantage point I spent time exploring and discovering some of the pleasures of life which I had been missing.’ He was able to enjoy a cheerful intermezzo before buckling down, in what would be the hard austerity of postwar Britain, ‘to the serious business of earning a living away from the cockpit of a Spitfire’.

  On VE Day, Joe Roddis suffered his worst wound of the war. 485 Squadron began celebrations in a civilised manner with a game of football at their new base, a former Luftwaffe airfield in Germany. Roddis managed to run into some barbed wire, lacerating his arms. A quick trip to the medic and a few bandages passed him fit for the celebrations proper.

  ‘The relief that the war was over was incredible. I’d always known we would win; I’d had total faith that we could not lose. The fact that the war in Europe was really ended didn’t seem to sink in immediately. But by the end of the day with all work stopped the celebrations really began. All the messes were thrown open with free booze and food and the mood was set. Old Johnny Dallas, a sergeant rigger, had been saving a bottle of Benedictine for this day and he soon polished it off, even though I had never known him to drink before. As the evening wore on things began to get a bit hectic. Bonfires were lit at the dispersal and when somebody discovered a store filled with artillery shell cases they threw them onto the fire and things got really hot.

  ‘At one stage a crowd of us stopped some lads from pushing a Spitfire into one of the bonfires. That closed down the celebrations. After that it was little groups of men just standing around and drinking quietly, wondering what would happen to us now.’

  Ray Holmes had walked into the ancient market town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, in bright sunshine and was in a bookshop when the shop radio announced Germany’s surrender. After five years of war and 2,000 hours’ operational flying, he had planned in his mind a huge party. But instead of rushing back to RAF Benson, he decided that finding the right book was more important.

  Back in Benson, the officers changed into their ‘best blues’ uniforms and went down for a beer in the mess. The atmosphere was one of forced cheerfulness. ‘The truth was that we had all been at full stretch for so long we could not relax when the tension suddenly went.’

  Talk turned to demobilisation, jobs on civvy street or long service commissions, and then to those not around to see the victory.

  The chatter abated when the Mess Secretary announced on the Tannoy that the mess would throw open its cellars.

  ‘This was more like it,’ Holmes said. ‘We waited expectantly for the champagne to put us in the right party spirit. My first drink was an inch of Spanish sherry in the bottom of my pint beer glass. I had to finish this off rather quickly to make room for the ruby port that followed. Then somebody poured me a slosh of Gordon’s gin. The cellar was already f
eeling the strain. The Mess Secretary suggested we should tank up for a while with beer.’

  The drink flowed and the party began in earnest. Not being a drinker, Holmes spent the night with the room spinning as he lay in his bed, before he was roused the next morning for a mission to photograph the French coast. ‘Some humorist at Group thought up an amusing idea not to let us go to seed . . .’

  Struggling with a thumping hangover, Holmes just about managed to complete the job, albeit assisted by turning his oxygen supply to the level needed for 50,000ft.

  * * *

  The war in Europe might have ended but the best was yet to come for Holmes.

  Churchill had decided that he needed peace and breathing space in order to consider Germany’s terms of surrender. With Europe liberated, where better than the pre-war holiday resort of Biarritz in the spring?

  But as Prime Minister he needed good communications with London. The men of 541 Squadron were sworn in as King’s Messengers to loyally carry diplomatic mail between Biarritz and Whitehall. With the swift Spitfire XIXs doing the bulk of the travel, a letter written by Churchill from a splendid villa overlooking the golden sands would arrive in London within four hours.

  Two pilots were kept on constant standby at Biarritz and after a few days Holmes found himself not only in a stunning part of France, but in the company of Britain’s great war leader. Initially Holmes, known for ramming the Dornier over Buckingham Palace, had thought it a leg-pull when he was told Churchill wanted to see him.

  It was not and he was ushered into the Prime Minister’s bedroom.

  ‘In an enormous double bed, propped up with pillows and surrounded by newspapers and documents, sat Mr Churchill. He beamed at me over heavy horn-rimmed glasses and extended a strong hand that looked lonely without a cigar.

  ‘ “Holmes?” he said. “Battle of Britain, they tell me?”

  ‘ “Yes, sir.”

  ‘ “Glad to know you. Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable. Don’t worry about me, I’m not ill; I do all my correspondence in bed and get up about noon. Had any breakfast?”