Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

by Norman Gelb

  To meet the German threat, Britain was divided by Fighter Command into four ‘Groups’. Southeast England was designated 11 Group territory. 12 Group covered the Midlands, while 10 Group, not officially formed until mid-July, covered the southwest. Northern England and Scotland came under the protection of 13 Group.

  Fighter aircraft hungrily consumed fuel in combat. They took great risks when venturing far afield in search of action. Accordingly, 11 Group, whose bailiwick was closest to the airfields on the far side of the Channel which the Germans had seized in France and the Low Countries, received the heaviest and most persistent raids as the Luftwaffe sought to control the skies over England. Though the squadrons in 10 Group further west were, with a few exceptions, not as severely put to the test, bases and installations within their zone of cover were also prime targets for the Germans as the battle progressed and they were often also kept fully stretched.

  Pilots in 12 and 13 Groups to the north faced nothing like the same intensity of combat, though they were regularly on patrol, sometimes intercepting enemy aircraft, shooting them down, seeing them off or being shot down by them. Their Group areas had to be protected in case German raids came their way. This happened rarely, so their most important contribution turned out to be their active duty in the south when they were sent in as back-up, as was the case for 12 Group pilots; or, as was the case for personnel in both Groups to the north, to fill gaps caused by losses in the south or to relieve squadrons there exhausted or decimated in combat.

  Group areas were divided into ‘Sectors’, each of which consisted of a main airfield (Sector Station) and usually at least one satellite base as well. In 11 Group, such satellite fields as Manston and Hawkinge were very near the coast. Planes were generally based there only during the day for fear of surprise dawn or dusk raids by German aircraft, based only minutes away across the Channel.

  Control of Fighter Command operations was centred at Bentley Priory in Middlesex, a handsome, venerable structure which had earlier been a girls’ school. There, Dowding set up a ‘filter’ room to receive radar reports and determine which tracked aircraft were hostile and which were not. These filtered radar reports on which planes required sustained monitoring were then fed to the main ‘Ops’ (Operations) Room at Bentley Priory, as well as to the Ops Rooms at the appropriate Groups and Sectors. These Group and Sector Ops Rooms were also fed reports from Observer Corps posts in their designated areas, which took over plane spotting once the enemy aircraft had passed over the sea-facing radar stations on the coast en route to their targets. The Groups relayed these Observer Corps reports back to Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory, so it would at all times have as complete a picture of developments as possible.

  The Observer Corps was a small army of volunteers equipped with binoculars, sextant-like devices, plane identification manuals and telephones. They reported on the direction, height and number of incoming planes, calculating to the best of their abilities, given the instruments at their disposal. It was a primitive system, but it was all that was available for the purpose at the time.

  The heart of each Ops Room was the plotting table. Plotters, mostly young WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) personnel armed with long wooden rods and linked by earphone to their sources of information, moved markers across the table to trace the movement of the attackers. Overlooking them on a raised platform were Controllers, who made decisions on how to cope with each enemy incursion.

  Having received details of an incoming raid from Fighter Command Headquarters and the Observer Corps, Group Ops would decide which of its Sectors would deal with it. Group Controllers would scan big wall boards which listed the state of play of each of the squadrons in the Group — released, available, ordered to readiness, at readiness, ordered to standby, at standby, ordered aloft, in assigned position above, sighted enemy, ordered to land, landed and refuelled. With this overall picture of what was at their disposal, and in what condition, and with markers on the plotting table revealing the challenge that had to be met, the Group Controllers would decide how many fighters, which squadrons or parts of squadrons, should be sent up after the enemy, bearing in mind that other enemy raids might be in the making and might soon materialize. Sector Control would convey instructions from Group, alerting or scrambling the designated squadrons and remaining in radio contact with the pilots as they climbed to intercept, giving directions and height instructions and some idea of the size of the incoming enemy formation. They remained in radio communication until a pilot called ‘Tally-ho’, to signal he was going in to attack.

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  Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding

  Orders were given to pilots in their aircraft by means of a very simple code which could be easily memorized. For instance, ‘Scramble’ meant take off. ‘Orbit’ meant circle. "Vector 230’ meant fly on a course of 230 degrees. As a matter of fact, the enemy did pick up and interpret the signals in some cases, but not much harm was done, except when they were able to discover the height at which a formation was ordered to operate and the time when it was ordered to leave its patrol line and land.

  ‘Pancake’ was the signal for the latter operation and I therefore introduced several synonyms [for it], the significance of which was not obvious to the enemy.

  The codeword for height was ‘Angels’, followed by the number of thousands of feet. When it appeared probable that the enemy were taking advantage of this information, I introduced a false quantity into the code signal. Thus (for example) ‘Angels eighteen’ really meant fly at 21,000, not 18,000. On more than one occasion, German fighter formations arriving to dive on one of our patrols were themselves attacked from above.

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  Wing Commander David Roberts

  In early June, I managed to escape from Fighter Command Headquarters, where I’d been a staff officer, and was assigned to be commander at Middle Wallop. The base there was still under construction. It was a shambles, in the hands of the construction contractors. It was temporarily occupied also by a flying training school. That made things difficult for me personally, because I was only a wing commander and I had to ask the group captain commanding the training school to leave. He was very cross and didn’t want to go. But he had to. It had been decided higher up that Middle Wallop would open as a major fighter base when our gallant French allies packed it in and the south of England was suddenly exposed to German aerial attack. Middle Wallop was to be a Sector Headquarters in 10 Group, which was to be formally established in July. When I got there, there was still a lot of work to be done. An Operations Room had to be set up. Station Headquarters and some of the main buildings had been built, but the hangars were still under construction. Typically, the married quarters, which we didn’t need, were ready. The only real problem we had setting up the Sector Headquarters was the damned contractors and their workmen who were all over the site.

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  Assistant Section Officer Felicity Hanbury

  My first husband he was a fighter pilot — was killed before the Battle of Britain began, right at the end of 1939. So when I became an officer — I was twenty-four years old then — I had already been made a widow by the war. It was quite a shock, coming at the beginning of everything. I had experienced what might happen to other people which, I suppose, wasn’t really a bad thing when I was put in charge of the airwomen, about 250 of them, employed at Biggin Hill — plotters, drivers, cooks, people in the armoury, equipment assistants, everything. One of my code and cipher officers married a pilot on the base. He was shot down and she didn’t know whether he’d reappear. But he did, thank goodness.

  The girls came from all walks of life. Some were well educated; others were not. There were so many wanting to join that you could sort them out as suitable for this or suitable for that. We had no difficulty recruiting. We had some difficulty absorbing them all at short notice.

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  Corporal Claire Legge

  I was in a repertory company on Hastings Pier before the war began. I wa
s twenty-one years old and supposed to be the costume designer, but in a repertory company you did all sorts of things. I played all the maids on stage, all the nannies, all those things.

  I had shared a dressing room with Dulcie Langham. She disappeared just before the war started. She said she was going to join the WAAF and that if I ever wanted any help or anything, I was to contact her. So when the war started, I did just that and Dulcie told me what to do. She told me I ought to become a plotter in the WAAF. I hadn’t the slightest idea what a plotter was. But that’s what I became. I went to school and was taught how to use these great long rods with arrows on the end for plotting. We were given a rough idea of what it was all about. We were — myself and seven other girls — the first ones to arrive at Tangmere [an 11 Group Sector Station]. It was February. We had practically no uniforms. We were given bloomers — they were called ‘passion-killers’ in those days. We were given a shirt and a tie and a macintosh and a beret. But we wore our own skirts. All we had really been taught was to manipulate those enormous rods. They had a battery at one end and a magnet at the other. We were supposed to pick up small metal arrows with them and place them where they had to be put on the plotting table. That was the basic business of plotting aircraft. You’d get a grid reference and you’d plot one arrow after the other across the board.

  But, of course, when we got to Tangmere, they hadn’t got any of those sophisticated rods. All they had was a bit of wood with a thumb stall on the end — that rubber thing bank clerks put on their fingers to count paper money. So you were throwing the arrows on the table and sort of pushing them into place. And we had a croupier thing for pulling the arrows off. It was very primitive. The table was arranged in such a way that you could really reach to put most of the arrows in the proper grid references by hand.

  We were connected by headphones to two sources, to various Observer Corps posts and to what was known in those days as RDF — Radio Direction Finding. We know it as radar today. The plots were passed to us in a four figure grid reference. The table would be 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 across and 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 up. If you got 1-5-0-3, you’d go across one and a half squares and up half a square. That would signify the position of the enemy aircraft coming in.

  In front of the plotting table was a raised dais where sat the Controller, who was the boss man; an Ops A, often an airwoman, who would take down instructions from Group when they came in; an Ops B, who was the controller’s assistant; and an Ops Bl. Also there on the dais was the army, who passed on the information on the table to warn the anti-aircraft batteries of what was happening. The order for any forms of readiness, scramble, do anything, was not the responsibility of the Controller at Tangmere before anything happened. He was only responsible once the battle was joined in his Sector. Up to that point, it was the Controller at Group Headquarters who was responsible. He had a similar, but much more comprehensive picture of the entire Group area. We just had a picture on our table of our Sector and a little bit outside it. So up at Group, the Controller there would decide when something was happening and it was time to bring a squadron to readiness.

  When you think of it, it was so laborious it wasn’t funny. Ops A had a pink form in front of her. Until that moment, she’d probably just been sitting around. But as soon as she put her hand to her headphone and braced herself to take a message from Group, everybody was alerted. We knew something was coming down. The message would come through and if it said, ‘Tangmere’, she would write down Tangmere. Then it would say, ‘Such-and-such squadron’. She’d write down the squadron. Then it would say, ‘A-flight to readiness’ or ‘A-flight ten minutes’. She’d write all that down and hand it to the Controller and he would see what was happening. He would hand it to Ops B. Ops B would action it. He would lift his telephone and say ‘Squadron A-flight five minutes’, or ‘Come to readiness’, or ‘Stand by’, or whatever it was. The pink form would then be passed to Ops B1, who would tick it off as actioned. The pink form would then be passed to a teleprinter operator in a little cubby hole, who would make a record that it had happened.

  How many of us there were on the plotting table depended on how many Observer Corps posts were manned, usually about six and the two RDFs. If something was happening, it would first of all come through from RDF and it would be plotted and it would be watched. Our Controller would be watching it and 11 Group would be watching it. As soon as it was evident as to where it was actually going, Group would decide which Sector would look after it. Our Controller would be getting instructions from Group while using what we were plotting on the table as a reference to see what it was all about. The raid would come up towards the coast and as it arrived within, say, ten miles of the coast, at a distance where it could be seen from the ground, the plotting of that particular plane would be stopped by the radar, and taken over by Observer Corps, who would then plot it until it went out of their area into the next Observer Corps area. We on the plotting board would each be connected by phone to different Observer Corps posts which reported their observations of the incoming enemy. As the enemy moved from one Observer area to the next, the girl connected by phone to that area would take over plotting its movements on the table. There was sometimes some duplication. A supervisor went around in the Ops Room, seeing what was happening and tidying up.

  We did the twenty-four hours between us. We had a weekend every three, and a day off every week. Three days a week we had a three watch shift, but the other four days, two watches were operating and that was pretty rough. Then it was usual for us to do one four hour and one eight hour shift in every twenty-four hours.

  Fairly soon after the start of the Battle of Britain, I stopped plotting. I was made a corporal and my job was to do a liaison between RDF and the Observer Corps. As a raid came up, I assessed which Observer Corps area it was going into, got onto the appropriate Observer Corps, gave the warning and arranged the hand-over of the plotting as best I could. I was on duty at Tangmere the day North Weald was bombed. The girl on the table who was on to North Weald got word over her headphones and said, ‘Oh my God, they’ve been bombed.’ The supervisor snapped, ‘Shut up and get on with your job.’

  But up until the day France fell, everything was free and easy. We didn’t wear uniforms, for instance, on the evening shift, because if you were going out you’d just put on your high heeled shoes. I remember a remarkable girl called Sunneva. She appeared on duty in a black dress wearing earrings. That was the order of the day. Nothing was happening. We used to take our knitting and our sewing around the table. We used to play throwing pennies onto the table — the aim was to get them in the middle of squares. We threw paper darts around. This was mainly on the late duty, when senior officers weren’t likely to come around. We had a super Controller, Squadron Leader Vick. He went along with all of this.

  The day France fell, we went on duty as usual, with all our bits and pieces and the sewing and what have you. And Vick came on duty and stood there and looked sternly at us and cried out, ‘Flight Sergeant!’ The Flight Sergeant said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Vick shouted, ‘Get these bloody women out of here!’ One by one we were all sent out, relieved one by one by men, and we were herded off into a rest room. We sat there a half-hour, three-quarters of an hour, and eventually the Flight Sergeant appeared and said, ‘Now, you lot, you listen to me.’ We were told in no mean fashion that all this was to stop. There would be no more knitting, no more sewing, no more chatting, no more anything. And that’s how it was. From that moment onwards, we were soldiers.

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  Aircraftswoman Second Class Ursula Robertson

  I applied to the newly formed WAAF for entrance as a cook, in which I was trained, only to be turned down on the grounds that I was trained. I was accepted instead to be trained in the wonders of Operations Room dogma. After preliminary training, I was assigned to the prestigious Fighter Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory in Stanmore, north of London. The Operations Room and Filter Room at Bentley Priory were in the underground block there. I
t was rather claustrophobic and a good ten minutes’ walk through the tunnel when a complete change of watch took place — airmen, airwomen, officers and all.

  The Operations table was a table on which a map of the UK had been drawn on a grid system. Each of us who were plotting was plugged into a particular Sector. From Group Operations Rooms we received through headphones the information, which we then plotted on the table. On receiving the first intimation of a raid through our headphones, we would stand up and say, ‘X Raid!’ loudly, bringing everyone to alert and a rush of liaison staff from the rest rooms. Up to that moment, the atmosphere was calm and rather boring. There was only a token staff present. But within minutes, the whole atmosphere would be changed to alert expectancy.

  The plot would be given us as a raid number, two grid mark letters, the direction and strength of the raid. With a magnetic rod we would position the tip of a coloured arrow to that plot. The time clock above the table was marked off in five-minute coloured sections. We had to watch the clock and change the colour of the arrows on the plotting table accordingly, so that the information would be kept up to date. We took a round disc noting the strength of the raid and placed it beside the arrow with the number of the raid. Plots and strengths were received from coastal radar and Observer Corps stations. When we took over on duty, we put on headphone sets, wiping them well if we were sensible, as there was a lot of throat infection to be gained from close living and working conditions at that time. Also, the fairly new and intense strip lighting, to which no one had been accustomed, caused bad eye strain. We plugged our headphones into a dual socket with the plotter who was going off duty. If it was quiet, this was a simple operation. You had time then to have a word or two and to speak with the operative at the Group Operations Room you were plugged into. Usually, talking was not allowed except for time checks and raid alerts. When the raids came over thick and fast, we could plug in for two or three minutes and review the table, number of raids, etc, before taking the next plots. When the raids came in great numbers, we could have two persons working together on, say, four numbered raids each.