by Norman Gelb
Above the plotting table was a gallery from which the C-in-C and Controllers could see the complete picture and function accordingly. In addition, on the gallery were people from the balloon barrages, ack-ack, air raid warning and liaison officers from the army, navy and air force, and very often some of their junior staffs as well. There were often early morning visits by dignitaries. I particularly remember the visit of the Duke of Kent shortly before he was tragically killed and, of course, Churchill and army, navy and air force chiefs, of whom we poor mortals stood in fear.
One dull, grey night when action was obviously going to be light, the famous cartoonist Fred May, who was with barrage balloons, answered his phone on the gallery and then started to put something down on paper. That piece of paper was passed not directly to the Controller, but right around the gallery arriving finally at the Controller. A ripple of mirth had followed the paper. The message received was from a barrage balloon position and had been, ‘I am a farmer and one of your balloons has caught one of my cows.’ Fred May had drawn a cartoon of a fat farmer squeezed into a telephone box in the middle of a field with a cow suspended by a balloon above it.
Early July saw the first dawn 100 plus raids appear up the Thames Estuary. When I put one of those raids on the table, I was told it was not a realistic number and to take it off. We were on the outskirts of the bombing area, but it was a most dreadful feeling to be underground and feel the building shake when bombs exploded, even miles away.
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Aircraftswoman Second Class Edith Heap
I was in motor transport at Debden airfield when Dunkirk was being evacuated. People felt, ‘Invasion any time now. Our backs are right to the wall.’ We thought, ‘We’ve got to be ready for them.’
After Dunkirk, the CO said he wasn’t having educated girls messing around in transport when they could be doing something that would put their education to use. He wanted some of us to come into the Ops Room and be plotters. We said, ‘No, thanks.’ We liked what we were doing. We were having a super time in motor transport, driving all over the country. It was great fun. We would stop for petrol at an army base and they’d say, ‘Girls! Come and have a sherry.’ Because we were in uniform, we were protected. We didn’t want to change jobs.
But the CO said, ‘You do as I say or I’ll post you.’ So we went into the plotting room. There was a little bit of a lull at the time. We were first taught to read the plots on the table, which was divided into squares. It was, ‘Along the passage and up the stairs’, like reading a map reference. We had lots of dummy runs for practice. They would set up an exercise and we’d be told, ‘Such-and-such raid coming in, Angels so much, so many aircraft, etc.’ We’d hear it over our earphones and plot it on the board. It was easy. All you needed was practice to be quick.
The squadrons were called to the different levels of readiness by the Controller when he saw raids coming in on the board. He’d ring the squadrons at dispersal or the mess and say, ‘I want A-flight at half-an-hour’s readiness’, or whatever.
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Air Commodore Gerald Gibbs, Senior Staff Officer, 11 Group
We had long passed the age when some grey-beard of the past refused to employ women in the defence organization despite a terrible national emergency. He is reported to have said, ‘No women. They quarrel incessantly and their shrill voices would frighten the dogs.’ In the beginning, we tried to get the girls to leave those rooms in which R/T was broadcast from the aircraft during air fighting — for the language was terrible. But it wasn’t idle blasphemy or obscenity. It was the voice of men in the midst of fighting for their lives — and dying. The girls refused to leave their jobs and said that they didn’t mind the language as much as we thought. They added that it was nice of us to think of their being like that, all the same.
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Sergeant Tom Naylor
When we first started, we had all male plotters in the Ops Room. The WAAFs came in when the war began. By then I was supervising a crew of plotters, and we had mixed crews. Interestingly, the first lot of WAAFs were all part of the horse-riding set, real upper crust, smashing looking bits. We also had one or two very scruffy airmen, the lowest of the low, the type that couldn’t get a job on civvy street in peacetime. They used to do all the lousy jobs — scrubbing the floors, running errands, that sort of thing. One of them, I think, had never had a bath. It used to amuse us that our posh young ladies got on better with those scruffy types than they did with us. When the raids came in, I used to detail a corporal to hand out tin hats to all the plotters, including the WAAFs. It was funny, because on some of them those helmets would sit way down around their noses and others had them perched right on top of their heads. But the girls kept on plotting all the time.
They tended to be more nimble than the men plotters. They were younger than the men plotters, some of whom were old-timers. Also, many of the girls were highly educated. As for conduct under fire, when we were hit in a raid, you couldn’t help admiring the way the girls stuck to their guns and went on plotting.
In the early part of the battle, when there weren’t many night raids, we still had to be on the ball in the Ops Room round-the-clock. We’d get regular phone calls during the night to test the line, but it wasn’t easy staying awake on the 10.00 p.m. to 4.00 a.m. shift when nothing was happening. One night, the Controller and the others on the dais actually went to sleep — the whole lot of them! Bob Mason, one of our originals in the Ops Room, got a big piece of cardboard that night and wrote on it ‘THE DEFENCE OF BRITAIN’ and walked around the Ops Room with it.
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Leading Aircraftsman Peter Burney
At the radar station on the Dover Cliffs, we tracked aircraft in, feeding information to Fighter Command Ops Rooms, which decided when and where to scramble aircraft. The installation was just a series of wooden huts with most of the radar equipment underground. I operated as a radar screen reader, feeding information through. It was a miniature Ops Room. You would report action coming in from a certain angle. You would estimate from experience whether it was going to be a small or large enemy attack. This would be cross-checked with other stations dotted around the area. A picture would be assembled. Since one was only looking at blips, you had to estimate roughly that one kind of blip meant fifty planes were coming and another meant only one plane.
Fighter Command depended entirely on the information fed in through its tentacles. If you had conflicting evidence coming from, say, three radar stations — because of atmospheric or other conditions — with one station reading something on the screen that was highly exaggerated compared with the other two, Fighter Command would question your reading. Then, two or three pairs of eyes would double-check.
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Sergeant Tom Naylor
Not many people in the country knew at the time what radar was, even though so much of our information in the Ops Room came from radar stations on the coast. There was a chain of radar pylons there and funny stories went around about them. Lots of people swore that when they’d driven past those pylons in their cars, their engines had stopped. So the rumour got around — it was even in the newspapers — that Britain possessed a death ray. The government didn’t bother to refute those rumours.
There’s no doubt about it that radar saved our bacon during the Battle of Britain. We used to sit in the Ops Room and we used to hear about the German squadrons boiling up around Abbeville in France or someplace like that, building their formations. They’d mill around and we could see them coming into this vortex and forming up a big gaggle.
The numbers of them really shook you. Before the war, when we plotted, we used to play around with twelve Spitfires and three Heyfords and thought that was a lot. Now you’d say to yourself, ‘What the devil are we going to do against three hundred aircraft?’ And that was only one raid. Another lot would come up — maybe eighty aircraft. The Germans were doing something the pre-war exercises never envisaged. They were sending over a lot of bombers escorted by even more fighter
s.
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Flying Officer Jeffrey Quill
When the battle heated up, the job of the Spitfire squadron was to climb up, engage the German fighter escort and let the bombers go by. We’d take off and be vectored out. We’d see a bloody great formation of Dorniers coming in at 12,000 feet. We’d be told to ignore them. Up above were their fighter escorts. Our job was to get up and engage those fighters, get a good old dogfight going, get everything milling around, during which time the bombers would be groaning inexorably along. With any luck, by the time they got anywhere near their target, we’d have forced all their fighter escorts out of position and down would come our Hurricanes to get at those bombers. That was the general idea. The Spitfire and the Hurricane complemented each other. They were an ideal couple, provided we could handle the battle that way. The two aircraft together — plus the radar — those were the things that won the Battle of Britain.
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Flight-Lieutenant Bob Stanford-Tuck
I flew both Spitfires and Hurricanes. It was like comparing a thoroughbred race horse with a brewer’s dray, a great big brute. The Spitfire was faster, of course. Better rate of climb. Very nimble to the controls — responded quickly. A very beautiful aeroplane.
The Hurricane was much larger, more sluggish on the controls. But it had one tremendous advantage over the Spitfire in combat. When you were in a Spitfire, your gunsights just in front of your face, the plane’s nose went right out away from you. You had no downward vision at all, hardly. You’d lose sight of your target when you turned because your nose would get in the way. In the Hurricane, the nose tapered down a bit. That was a tremendous advantage, because when you were firing at your target in a Hurricane, you could pull around, place your deflection to hit him, and still have him in view in a steep turn while you were shooting at him, because your nose sloped away.
But the Hurricane wasn’t up to the Messerschmitt 109, while the Spitfire and the 109 were exactly similar. I flew the first 109 we captured down to Farnborough and it was a damned fine aircraft. One advantage it had over the Spitfire was direct fuel injection.
I shot down 109s when flying Hurricanes, but only when I had the advantage of height. I’d stick my nose down and go for them. But a Hurricane couldn’t match the 109 on the same level. I spoke to German pilots after the war and they said, ‘Hurricanes? We didn’t worry about them. It was the Spitfire we worried about.’
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Pilot Officer Desmond Hughes
The Defiant had the same engine as the Spitfire and the Hurricane but — being a two-seater — was trying to lug around over a ton of extra weight for its turret and second man. Therefore its climb, in particular, was much inferior to that of the Spitfire and the Hurricane and caused it to have a lot of trouble when it was faced with the Messerschmitt 109. It was a good bomber destroyer, if you could get to the bombers before the 109s got to you. And the people who had flown Defiants at Dunkirk, and had done well there, also felt they could cope pretty well with the twin-engined Messerschmitt 110. One time, we ran into nine Dorniers flying along in tight formation. There was a Spitfire squadron on hand to keep their 109 escort occupied on top. There were only seven of us. When we came within range, our squadron commander said, ‘Okay, pick your targets.’ Those Dorniers were severely mauled. I saw two of them go down in no time at all. But it was one of the few occasions when that sort of attack was successful for the Defiants; one of the few times we were able to get in before the 109s came at us.
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Pilot Officer Derek Smythe
A problem with the Defiant was that you had two people instead of one in that aircraft concentrating on combat — the pilot and the gunner. If the plane was being attacked, the gunner might be taking a bead on the attacker while the pilot, who had no guns, might see something else developing from another direction which required him to take pretty smart evasive action. One moment I might be aiming at an enemy fighter in one place. The next, I’d be looking up at the sky or down at the earth below. In a melee, the Defiant pilot couldn’t very well just provide a gun platform. He’d be shot down in no time flat. But the gunner might find his target disappearing from his sights because of the pilot’s evasive action.
I didn’t feel particularly exposed manning the guns in the turret of the Defiant. The thing that really frightened me was the fact that the oxygen bottle was right between your legs back there. If you got hit in the oxygen bottle, it was perfectly obvious what would happen. It would blow up and your family fortunes would go with it.
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Flight Lieutenant John Cunningham
There was a serious attempt by Fighter Command to see if the Blenheim fighter bombers could be adapted to drop bombs on incoming formations of German bombers. In practice, we did diving attacks to see if we could drop bombs on towed targets. The idea was to dive and overtake the bombers, drop our bombs on them and then hopefully clear out of the way. The thing was given up when the real Battle of Britain started in July and the day battle took over. By early summer, the Blenheim was seen to be more of a hindrance than anything else. During the day battles, we were generally kept on the ground and out of the way, otherwise we’d only confuse the picture. Our own fighters used to think we were Ju 88s. We looked not unlike them. Our only hope might have been at night. Blenheims were sent up at night in the hope that enemy aircraft would be illuminated by searchlights so they could be attacked. We had no other aircraft to send up at night, so the Blenheims had to go. There wasn’t much hope of achieving anything with them. We couldn’t see anything at night. But from a public morale point of view, I don’t think that could have been admitted.
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Sergeant Len Bowman, Defiant air gunner
Most of the time, night flying was pretty boring. There was very little you could see. We were vectored onto a bandit one night, found it and were catching up. I had him in my sights and we were closing on him. I made sure my guns were on ‘fire’ and was just about to press the button when this thing I was aiming at opened up with its guns blazing and shot down a German bomber we hadn’t seen at all. It was a Blenheim I’d had in my sights. I’d almost shot down one of our own.
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Pilot Officer Andy Anderson
We’d take our Blenheims up at night and fly around the searchlights, trying to see something. If we did see something, we’d nip in. But if you got too close to the searchlights, instead of lighting up German bombers, they’d light you up for the enemy. They were mostly bombers at nights and there was no great danger of getting hurt, but it was possible. Once my air gunner said, ‘There goes an aeroplane. We just missed it!’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you shoot at the bloody thing?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t tell whose it was.’ Basically it was a very frustrating experience, with an element of waste of time. But we were young and keen and when we went up, we thought we might be lucky. Still, we were envious of the day boys who were getting on with things.
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Leading Aircraftsman Francis Pecket
It could get very hectic on the ground, keeping the aircraft serviceable. As a rigger, my job was to look after the control column of the aircraft, and the wiring and all that. The fitter was the flight mechanic. He would look after the engine. There was usually one fitter and one rigger assigned to each plane but sometimes you had to see to others too. A machine had to be inspected before flying. We had to see there was sufficient petrol in, and sufficient glycol to cool the engine, and that the undercarriage and control columns were working properly. We had to check for leaking or faulty petrol pipes and radiator. The working of the engine had to be checked. Bullet holes had to be properly patched up. The armourer looked after the guns and rearmed the aircraft after it had been in combat. We were kept very busy.
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Aircraftsman Second Class Albert Hargraves
Bowser drivers not only drove the bowsers; they also refuelled the aircraft from them. The bowsers were small, carrying maybe 850 gallons of 100 octane. At the back was a litt
le auxiliary motor which you started by hand. That drove a pump which drove the petrol into the aircraft tank. If you had trouble with the motor, you had to refuel the aircraft by hand. You’d use square tins, sit on the aircraft and pour the petrol in through a big filter. You used to get doused in petrol every day. All you’d be wearing was boilersuit overalls and a pair of wellies. You’d get petrol all over yourself. You could always tell a bowser driver on the field. There’d be a yellow halo right around his body where the fumes were coming off his overalls. The octane was green. Even when you had a shower, when you sweated, you’d have green streaks coming down your face. You used to stink up the billets with the smell of the octane. Your mates would tease you about it.
An RAF fighter squadron consisted of twelve planes, though to keep twelve in the air generally required a basic strength of at least eighteen planes. There were always problems which kept aircraft grounded for repairs. One plane might have guns which tended to jam. Another might have oil pressure problems. Others would have bullet holes that had to be patched up or radios which were malfunctioning. They’d be taken out of the line and reserve aircraft would be brought forward. There also had to be replacements on hand for those which were shot down or had been damaged in accidents, which grew more frequent as the men grew more tired and as inexperienced pilots were drawn into the ranks of the active service pilots.
Each squadron was divided into flights of six planes each — A-flight and B-flight. And each flight was divided into sections of three planes each. A flight commander — a flight lieutenant by rank — would lead each section. A-flight would consist of red and yellow sections; B-flight of blue and green sections. This colour coding was by name only, for ease of identification by Controllers and pilots alike.
