by Norman Gelb
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But the front in France did not stabilize. Nor did it stabilize anywhere else where the Germans were attacking. Whatever obstacles appeared in their path were systematically obliterated or swept aside. Where the German big guns could not be brought into play, dive bombers — their terror-generating sirens screaming as they zoomed down towards their targets — performed as airborne artillery with devastating efficiency. German infantry units, ferried in by gliders, leapfrogged Allied defensive positions, making nonsense of traditional French and British troop deployment tactics. German paratroopers descended en masse to seize installations which, because they were virtually unapproachable by military units on the ground, were thought to be invulnerable. German bombers took out Allied airfields, rail depots and other strategic targets. The skies were dark with German aircraft — almost four thousand of them deployed for the various roles to which they had been assigned.
It took the Germans a mere five days to batter the Netherlands — which would have preferred neutrality — into submission, seizing key positions and making the obliteration of the heart of historic Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe horrifyingly needless. The Belgian border fortress of Eban Emaael, touted as impregnable, fell to German gliderborne commandos in a matter of hours. The French air force crumbled. The Luftwaffe seized and held mastery of the skies over Western Europe, while the Wehrmacht proved unstoppable on the ground.
Six Royal Air Force fighter squadrons were based in France when the Germans launched their offensive. Four more were sent over in the days which followed and, while remaining based in southeastern England, other British aircraft shuttled over to fly from fields in France during the day, or swept across the English Channel to undertake specific patrol or interception missions.
But the RAF was able to make little impact on the enemy. There were occasional successes and many individual acts of great heroism, but the British couldn’t even come close to matching in numbers the vast German air armada. Furthermore, many of the German pilots had greater combat experience than their British adversaries, from exposure to combat earlier in the war and from participation in the Spanish Civil War, which had come to an end only the previous year. British fighter pilots, virtually none of whom had ever before fired their guns in action, soon found they had to expend the better part of their energies defending themselves and their airfields, rather than providing cover for the badly mauled Allied ground forces.
The situation bred confusion. Communications, where they existed at all, quickly broke down. As the German ground forces crashed forward, RAF squadrons were forced to withdraw to bases further back, and then to pull back again. They took savage losses. Modern Hurricane fighter planes were the best of the British aircraft sent to confront the Germans, but they were neither as fast nor as manoeuvrable as the Messerschmitt 109. Various other, less modern British aircraft deployed in France were even more at a disadvantage when they came up against the 109 and the Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bomber, and when they had to cope with deadly German ground fire.
Of thirty-two Fairey Battle light bombers which attacked German panzers advancing through Luxembourg on the first day of the offensive, thirteen were shot down and all the others were damaged. Of seventy-one light bombers sent to wipe out the German bridgehead across the Meuse in France four days later, forty never made it back to base — and the bridgehead remained intact. A flight of six twin-engined Blenheim fighter-bombers sent to intercept a German raid near Rotterdam was pounced upon by Messerschmitt 110s and only one was able to make it safely back to England. British fighter pilots in combat in Europe gained experience very quickly, but many of them did not live long enough to put it to use. Their adventures bordered on the sacrificial. ‘After just a few days of combat,’ Pilot Officer David Looker recalled, ‘most of us were living on our nerves.’
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Pilot Officer Roland Beamont
We were scrambled from the little grass field to which we had been moved when our main base at Lille was bombed and sent south of Brussels because of reports of a German advance there. It was a lovely day — good visibility. We climbed through broken cloud to about 15,000 feet. I was flying Number Two to my flight commander, Voase Jeff. I had never been in combat before. Suddenly we saw some planes flying right to left in front of us, twenty or thirty of them — Dornier bombers. What I didn’t see was that they had an escort of Messerschmitt 110s above them. We went in to attack the Dorniers. I got so excited, I opened fire well out of range. My flight commander tore me off a strip afterwards. He said he was in front of me and still out of range and there I was firing behind him and nearly hitting him.
We closed in on the Dorniers. I hit one pretty hard. While I was wondering what was happening to everybody else, I suddenly noticed some stuff coming down past me, like bright rain. It was tracer bullets. There was a Messerschmitt 110 very close, doing a very tight attack on me from above. I ducked out of that and from then on it became entirely defensive on my part. My reactions were those of a chap trained up to a point but not trained in any detail on what to do once that point was reached. I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t the slightest idea, except I thought if I’m under fire from a fighter, the thing to do was pull that aeroplane of mine into the tightest possible turn, which I did. I got a view of that 110 diving away out of sight.
I was now very conscious of the fact that there was probably another bunch of German planes sitting up above, waiting to jump on me. I was down to very little ammunition. I was on my own in a very unhealthy situation. I finally got back to our base, after touring around France looking for it, and found we’d lost two of our twelve chaps that day.
We could expect to be outnumbered almost every time we flew. But one day, we flew a three squadron formation to patrol along the Luxembourg frontier. It was tremendous. I’d never flown with thirty-six planes before. Suddenly I saw four aeroplanes appear over the back of the formation and another four behind them. Messerschmitt 109s. That was my first experience of the total inflexibility of big formations. The 109s came in on our bottom squadron. I could see their guns firing. Two Hurricanes streamed smoke and a third went out of formation and turned away. Before anyone could do anything about it, the 109s pulled sharply up, full power, straight up into the cloud, totally out of reach. They’d beaten this mass formation of ours. We lost those three Hurricanes. One chap baled out. The other two were killed. We had a few more battles, but ten days after the Germans began their push, we were evacuated back to England. By that time we had only four Hurricanes left out of our normal complement of sixteen, which wasn’t enough to carry on the flight.
In France, it suddenly dawned on you — as your colleagues disappeared one by one — that you might not last out the day. During the height of the battle over there, replacement Hurricanes were being flown in by RAF pilots from England. These were ferry pilots assigned to deliver new aircraft to us and then to be flown back in an Anson [twin-engined light transport] or something like that. But if the Anson didn’t arrive and the squadron commander was hard-pressed like our squadron commander was — it was Johnnie Dewar at the time — he’d say to these ferry pilots, ‘You may think you’re going back to England, chum, but you’ve had it. There’s your Hurricane over there. We’ll find you a billet for tonight.’ They then flew with our squadron as replacements, sometimes without documentation. Some of those poor fellows then got shot down and there was no record of their having been with us. They were just missing in action.
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Flight Lieutenant Peter Brothers
I was at Biggin Hill when things were hotting up in France. We went out there a half-hour before first light, landed in France, operated there and went back for the night to Biggin Hill. The object of the exercise was to try to help stem the German advance. But the organization was so chaotic that we really were operating almost independently. We went over to Merville, refuelled — which we had to do ourselves, from cans — started our own aircraft with handles — we started each other
’s aircraft, left them ticking over and went down the line to the next one — and then took off and just roamed around looking for German aircraft. One of our first actions was strafing the airfield at Ypenburg near Rotterdam, which had just been captured by the Germans. When we strafed the German planes on the ground, it turned out they’d already been burnt out, apart from one I found tucked in between the corners of the hangars. I set that one afire. We discovered months later that some Dutch people had been saving it to escape to England.
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Pilot Officer Birdie Bird-Wilson
Just after the German offensive began, my squadron was ordered to carry out a patrol over the Hook of Holland. Of the twelve Hurricanes that went out, we lost five — the squadron commander, Squadron Leader Tomlinson; a flight commander, Flight Lieutenant Donne; two sergeant pilots; plus Pilot Officer Halton-Harrop. I had tossed up with Halton-Harrop for the twelfth man position on that patrol. He won. He was shot down and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans.
It was pretty bad. The wives of the men who were missing came to the mess every day to see if there was news of their husbands. But we didn’t get any news. It was a lesson for the rest of us to delay marriage and to try to keep our families out of such things.
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Flying Officer Christopher Foxley-Norris
I went to France with a squadron of Lysanders, an Army Cooperation squadron. We lost the lot — twelve out of twelve. Some of the men were killed and others baled out and were rescued. But we finished up over there with no aircraft.
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Flight Lieutenant Sir Archibald Hope
The second or third day we were in France, for some reason all the other aircraft in our squadron were unserviceable. For two hours I patrolled our base, sitting above it in case a German raid appeared. One aircraft! What could one aircraft have possibly done if there had been a raid? Our radio facilities were extremely primitive over there. There was no radar. Quite honestly, there was no way of knowing what was going on. When we were sent up to patrol Brussels, which the Germans hadn’t yet taken, we were shot at by our own troops.
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Assistant Section Officer Molly Wilkinson
There were two Blenheim squadrons at Wattisham in Suffolk where I was at this time and these aircraft were sent across the Channel to provide cover for the British Expeditionary Force. Whenever the planes went out, we’d lose somebody. The losses were dreadful. Friends were being killed. The squadrons would come back and there’d be three aircraft gone. A lot of the pilots later turned out to have been captured and held as prisoners of war. But we didn’t know that at the time.
It was shattering. I was nineteen years old. You can imagine what it was like to a young girl. You got very fond of these boys who weren’t much older than I was. You knew they’d gone out in the morning and you waited to count the aircraft coming back. We’d go to see who might not be there. We didn’t connect it to the bigger battle. We were more involved with the people than with the war. It was our own little world. The awful part was losing a friend. You’d be expecting to do something in the evening with one of your friends and he just wasn’t there. He hadn’t come back.
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Pilot Officer Donald Stones
On one mission, our squadron of Hurricanes was ordered up to escort some Blenheims over Arras. But the Blenheims didn’t appear. Our orders were then to look for German aircraft. If we didn’t find any of them, we were to attack the spearhead of the German tanks coming up the Cambrai road. Finding no Blenheims or German aircraft, we had no option but to do that. We lost three aircraft to ground fire and I’m sure our .303 ammunition just bounced straight off the tanks below.
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Squadron Leader Jack Satchell
I was sent to France to be Fighter Controller at Merville. I’d never controlled a bloody fighter in my life. We started up shop there. We set up an operations room in a requisitioned part of a farmhouse — with no equipment. They fixed us up with telephones all over the place. Every one of them had exactly the same ring so that when one rang you had to pick them all up to discover which was the right one. It was hopeless. It couldn’t be done. Anyway, the Huns came along too quickly for us to get started. Somebody said there were some motorbikes coming up the road. It was the bloody Krauts. So we left mills bombs inside the house, primed to go off when anyone touched a telephone. Then we climbed through the loo window in the back and took to the fields.
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Squadron Leader Ted Donaldson
Replacements came for the planes we lost in France and we lost them too, and more replacements came and we lost them as well. I think we must have lost dozens of planes in our squadron alone in France — burnt out, bombed or shot down. We were in an awful shape by the time we finally got pulled back to England.
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Flight Lieutenant Frederick Rosier
From the Royal Air Force point of view, the battle for France was a complete and utter shambles. There was no intelligence. Communications were poor. Everything appeared to be ad hoc. Things were laid on at very short notice. The roads were crammed with refugees. I arrived there the evening of May 16th with eleven other Hurricanes. A chap came running up to me and said, ‘If you have any fuel left, keep your engines running. There are forty plus coming this way.’ So we kept our engines running till they started overheating. We then discovered that the RAF ground staff had left the airfield without a word to us. We’d been left completely on our own. I think the confusion was a measure of the strain they’d been under for days.
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General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Diary, 17 May
I wonder if we have told the people in the country how serious things are. It won’t do to have them suddenly waking up to a disaster.
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Pilot Officer Denis Wissler Diary, 18 May
This was a bad day as we lost seven out of nine planes and four out of nine pilots, if not more. Derek Allen [who had crash landed after being shot down three days earlier] is missing again. There are rumours of a quick move [from their base in France] and if this is so, I shall lose nearly all my kit ... John Lecky was killed and Flight Lieutenant Boothby injured in a car crash. What a waste.
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Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office Diary, 19 May
News pretty bad — Germans now driving N.W. to cut through to Channel ports between us and French. French army not fighting ... We must fight on, whatever happens. I should count it a privilege to be dead if Hitler rules England. I had not thought I should have to live through such awful days.
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Flying Officer Richard Gayner
Terror and exhaustion dominate my recollections of that period over France and Belgium — terror because of all the bloody Huns. There were many more of them than of us, they had better aeroplanes, they were trying to kill us, and they were better at it than we were. They liked war and most of us didn’t like war at all.
I was exhausted because I was getting up at half-past three or four in the morning and flying three or four sorties a day. Communications and orders from headquarters and our wing were practically non-existent. Our job was to stop German aircraft attacking our ground forces and gain air superiority over the battlefield. We weren’t even able to start that job. There weren’t enough of us. The sky was swarming with Messerschmitt 109s, and we lost over a third of our pilots in twelve days’ fighting.
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Investigation of Psychological Disorder in Flying Personnel of Fighter Command by Air Vice Marshal Sir Charles P. Symonds and Wing Commander Denis J. Williams (both eminent neurologists), 1942
One officer told how in the Battle of France, he knew quite well when he had had enough — he was so frightened that he sweated every time he got into an aeroplane and couldn’t sleep. He had to carry on as there were no reliefs. After a period of rest he did brilliant work, gaining the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and bar and since he was in
terviewed has won the DSO [Distinguished Service Order].
*
As Royal Air Force losses in Europe mounted, with no effect on the relentless German advance, it became an increasingly anguished concern for Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, RAF Fighter Command. Having carefully monitored enemy air activity in the war, Dowding was certain the Germans were aiming to seize air supremacy over England, as they had elsewhere, when the time came. He was further convinced that if the Germans managed to succeed in that endeavour, Britain was doomed to defeat. He warned that the defence of Britain could not be properly maintained if his fighter squadrons were squandered in Europe in a struggle which increasingly appeared lost. He insisted he needed fifty-two fighter squadrons at home — he had been promised that many by the Air Ministry — to fight off massive German air attacks which he knew were in the offing. But within days of the launching of the German offensive on the continent, Dowding was faced with the fact that Fighter Command was far under strength, so many of his planes having been sent to the slaughter in Europe, and still more apparently destined for the same fate.
A dour, stiff, humourless man, Dowding, appropriately nicknamed ‘Stuffy’ and known by all his colleagues to be overdue for retirement, had become a nuisance to the British War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff. He was undisguisedly outraged when his squadrons were taken from him and dispatched to France and Belgium. He warned that Britain was leaving itself defenceless by sending off his precious fighter planes and his even more precious pilots, so many of whom had already fallen in combat.
