by Norman Gelb
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Pilot Officer Steve Stephen
There were times when you couldn’t not see a German up there. You came skidding up to one and tried to put him out of the sky, set him on fire, or damage him in some way, and then slip away before someone got on your tail.
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Pilot Officer Dennis David
There was a lot of nonsense at the time about ‘perfect deflection shots’. There was never a time for that in a dogfight. The only way you could shoot down a German fighter was getting very close to its backside and letting it have everything. Then you’d pull the stick right back into your gut for a sharp turn. You were pushed way down into your seat. Your eyeballs were pushed down into your face. It was like swinging a bucket of water around. The bucket goes around but the water stays in the bucket. You didn’t keep it up for long, but you were pulling a lot of ‘G’ while it was happening. There were a lot of aircraft in the sky. If you could, you made your attack on the bombers. But almost immediately, you were in a dogfight with the fighters which had come down to protect them. It seemed to go on forever — minutes at least — though it was only seconds. The fact was that if you kept your finger on the trigger, your ammunition would run out in fifteen seconds. So you fired only short bursts. You’d be fighting and turning, turning and fighting. You’d miss colliding with other aircraft literally by inches. It sounds barmy, but then suddenly, the sky was empty. You were suddenly alone. Your momentum had carried you miles away from the battle. You might see a blur of aircraft in the distance, but the sky around you was suddenly empty.
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Flight Lieutenant Tony Miller
In a dogfight, the sky was speckled with aeroplanes. Everybody was manoeuvering for position. People were upside down and going in all directions. I was chasing a Ju 87 one time when my special angel tapped me on my shoulder and whispered, ‘My boy, look in your mirror.’ I looked into the mirror and it was entirely occupied by another Ju 87. Gull wings. Couldn’t mistake it. He was right behind me. I did the smartest diving turn I’d ever done. There was so much ‘G’ on me that my seat collapsed. I sort of went down into the bottom of the cockpit. I even blacked out for a few seconds. He actually put a bullet through one of my wings. I found out about it afterwards.
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Pilot Officer Dennis David
Some Ground Controllers were better than others. You always get good and bad. The system was new, unique, never been used before.
And it was complicated. On the whole, ground control was good and that was one of the reasons we won the Battle of Britain. There were bound to be certain pilots who didn’t like certain Controllers and certain Controllers who didn’t like certain pilots. Some of the chaps — both pilots and Controllers — were very bossy, a bit God Almightyish.
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Wing Commander David Roberts, Sector Commander, Middle Wallop
Aside from my Senior Controller, Gavin Anderson, the other Controllers at the station were very much under training. But the chaps in the air had all the information we could possibly give them to intercept. We had problems with the radio. UHF hadn’t yet completely come in so everybody was still on HF. There was a lot of static and interference and distance limitations. It complicated communications.
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Air Vice Marshal A.D. Cunningham to Air Vice Marshal Keith Park
RDF [Radar] frequently underestimates the numbers of enemy aircraft in a raid. This is probably due to the practice of the enemy of stacking the a/c above one another. Further experience may enable the RDF operators to recognize the stacked formation. Heights obtained from RDF stations at present are the best that can be obtained with the apparatus at hand.
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Squadron Leader James Leathart
Controllers had to cope with poor radar reports, poor communications and mistakes by the Observer Corps. They had to do an awful lot of co-ordinating of information. It was true that they sometimes put lame ducks — who weren’t much good at flying and fighting — in the Ops Room. But that didn’t necessarily mean they were poor Controllers. The good Controllers were very good indeed. The Controllers we trusted, we trusted implicitly. Ronnie Adam was one of those. There were times when we’d say among ourselves, ‘Oh hell, Ronnie isn’t on today.’
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Flight Lieutenant Peter Brothers
Our squadron had pre-war experience in dealing with control, such as it was, before the war began. We did experimental flying at the time. We would intercept incoming airliners. We weren’t allowed to fly close to them. We had to fly straight past and pretend we just happened to be in the air at the same time. But as early as 1937, we were ‘intercepting’ KLM and Lufthansa airliners. In those days, all the plotting in the Operations Room was done in chalk on a blackboard. When we weren’t flying, we acted as plotters in the Operations Room so we watched the system develop and, by the time the war came, we knew a lot about it and understood exactly what the Controllers were doing.
They tried their best, though their information wasn’t always as accurate as it should have been. The main complaint was that very often they weren’t giving you the height advantage you wanted. And often the scramble signal was given too late, but that was because the last thing we wanted was to be caught by a spoof raid and be back on the ground refuelling when the main raid came in. Until the Controllers were satisfied that it was the real thing and not just another spoof, they didn’t launch us and that meant we were sometimes sent up late. We’d complain over the radio and say, ‘For Christ’s sake, the Germans are way above us.’
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Sergeant Jim Hallowes
We always went for the bombers a couple of thousand feet higher than the Controller said. We found it produced results.
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Flight Lieutenant Sir Archibald Hope
We were supposed to know the codenames of the convoys going through the Channel. One time, the Controller, who was an ex-member of our squadron, said, ‘Patrol Bosom’, which was the code-name for a particular convoy. But it sounded as if he’d said, ‘Patrol Bosham’, where there was a pub we used to go to together. Bosom, the convoy, was south of the Isle of Wight. Bosham, the village, was just outside Chichester, and that’s where we patrolled. Finally, I told the Controller, ‘We’re over Bosham but there’s nothing to be seen.’ He said, ‘Are you over Bosom?’ I said, ‘Yes, we’re over Bosham.’ He said, ‘Where the ships are?’ I said, ‘Where “The Ship” is!’ That was the name of the pub. That’s when the penny dropped and he said, ‘You’re in the wrong bloody place.’ We finally got to the convoy. Fortunately, nothing was happening there.
By and large, the Controllers were pretty good. The Controller could only use the information he got, and if the information he got was faulty, he couldn’t improve on it and so often it was faulty. Some of the radar stations were bombed and that affected radar coverage.
The day Tangmere aerodrome was bombed, we were kept at 20,000 feet to deal with the fighter escort. They said, ‘There are 109s coming and you’ve got to tackle them. Don’t bother about the bombers.’ Another squadron was going to deal with them. We could see all the Ju 87s below coming in to bomb the aerodrome and none of the enemy fighters we were supposed to concentrate on in the sky at all. Not one. We were doing nothing up there. In the end, I said, ‘To hell with this. I’m going down after the bombers.’ I suppose somebody had misinterpreted the radar information.
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Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone
Some reports took longer to come through to the Controller than others, but they all somehow had to be married together. An enemy formation could climb 2,000 feet between the time it was first seen till the time it was plotted. The Controller sometimes put me in a wonderful position above the enemy with the sun behind me — you couldn’t ask for anything better than that. But one or two were a little bit stupid. They tried to get us to do things that were beyond the pale. We found, for instance, that when the Germans started using their advanced model 109s, they could
fly very high, up to 35,000 feet. Once the Spitfire got to 30,000 feet, it was beginning to run out of oomph; it was hanging on its prop a bit. And you weren’t really doing any good up there. But for some Controllers, it was against their pride to see another lot of Germans and not send us after them. Strictly speaking, we were required to follow their instructions. But I’d call down and say, ‘No can do.’ Junior chaps leading a flight wouldn’t have the authority to say no. I lost one chap because he was sent up too high.
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Pilot Officer Roland Beamont
One morning, we were waiting at dispersal and heard a throbbing noise. We looked up and saw a twin-engined aircraft flying towards us at about 4,000 feet, under cloud. I said, ‘That’s a Ju 88!’ My colleagues said, ‘It can’t be.’ So we called the Operations Room and asked, ‘Do you have any enemy plots near here?’ They said, ‘No. The board’s clear, old boy. Nothing at all.’ I said, ‘We’ve got a Ju 88.’ They said, ‘You can’t have.’ It went half circle around our field, unmistakably a Ju 88. Eventually, my flight commander picked up the phone to Operations and said, ‘I don’t give a damn what you fellows say. I’m taking a section up after him,’ which he had no authority to do. We scrambled a section, but couldn’t find him any more. He had pulled up into cloud and we’d lost him.
Right through the summer, well before the start of the night blitz on London in September, the Luftwaffe engaged in sporadic night-time attacks on Britain. Sometimes they hit such specific targets as the strategic port areas of Plymouth and Bristol. But often the night attacks during the summer were just harassing raids, with bombs dropped wherever they might fall, part of a German campaign to snipe at British defences in off-hours and to encourage the people of Britain to force their obstinate leaders to sue for peace.
The raids were not big. Often it was just a solitary bomber coming over after dark to do its damage. But British air defenders, whether on a standard nocturnal patrol or dispatched to intercept specific attackers, had little success in coping with them. With only very primitive radar apparatus in their aircraft, they could rarely see anything in the night sky. They went up, looked futilely around till their fuel ran low and then came down again. Virtually no attackers were brought down at night and a number of British aircraft were lost in landing accidents on fogged-in and badly illuminated fields. But for public morale purposes, Fighter Command felt obliged during the Battle of Britain to dispatch interceptors against the German night-time raiders, while pressing ahead with efforts to develop suitable equipment for effective night fighting.
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Wing Commander Peter Chamberlain
Dowding was becoming more and more confident that his fighters could probably head off the bombers the Germans sent over by day. But he feared that their bombers would get through at night. That was why he set up the Fighter Interception Unit.
On Blenheims, with which most of the night fighter squadrons were equipped, the AI [Air Interception radar] was pretty ineffective. What we were trying to do at the Fighter Interception Unit was place a properly equipped fighter into position to secure an interception at night. Until the Blenheims could be provided with efficient AI, it was close to a waste of time to try to intercept in the dark. Crews were lost in bad weather at night. It simply didn’t serve any useful purpose. My orders from Dowding were to develop the night fighter into a useful aircraft.
My team consisted of clerks, pilots, gunners, riggers, fitters, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, and of course there were the boffins and the odd gremlin. The boffins were the scientific folk — professors, inventors, mathematicians. Gremlins, on the other hand, bore no scientific examination. They were a crafty, pestilential race, grotesque in their habits and thoroughly blameworthy. You could plead that they guzzled your glycol. You might allege that they muddled your maps. It wouldn’t do any good.
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Flight Lieutenant Tony Miller
I had got very interested in airborne radar. But I was posted instead to the Operations Room at 11 Group headquarters at Uxbridge, which disappointed me very much. One of my duties was to appear in the Ops Room at 6.00 each morning to go through signals that had come in during the night and hand them out to senior people. One morning, I saw a signal which said Fighter Command was going to form a special unit for experimenting with airborne radar. Names were asked for posting to it. I seized that signal and ran all the way up the stairs to the senior staff officer’s room and said, ‘Please, sir, me!’ He said, ‘No. I’m afraid somebody else has been posted.’ I rang up somebody I’d worked with earlier at Fighter Command headquarters, Walter Pretty — he later became Air Chief Marshal — and I said to him, ‘Walter, who’s got the job?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to tell you. That’s against the rules.’ I said, ‘OK, but is he in such-and-such squadron?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Then is he in such-and-such squadron.’ He said, ‘Not there either.’ I said, ‘Right. Then he hasn’t flown a Blenheim at night as much as I have and I ought to have the job.’ And I got it.
We flew by day or by night, as was appropriate, carrying out our experiments. The apparatus didn’t work all the time. It was difficult to interpret the signals. We’d take off in Blenheims in a pair. One would settle in. The other would come up behind and check signals on its own radar system and try to interpret them. We were trying to work out some procedure for falling in behind a target and getting within shooting range. When we tried it by day, the intention was, of course, that all this would eventually happen at night.
But there was a serious snag about airborne radar at the time. The maximum range of the apparatus was its height above the ground, because it was broadcasting electronic pulses which came back from the ground as if it was picking up a target. So we needed direction from ground control to get into position behind a target. He would tell you when he’d done his best and for you to switch on your AI set. Willie the Wasp [as Wing Commander Peter Chamberlain was called by his men in the Fighter Interception Unit] invented a code signal for switching on the radar in the aircraft — ‘flash your weapon’. When the Controller saw you were within your range of a target, he’d say, ‘Flash your weapon’, which of course means something else in a modern context.
Willie the Wasp was a cheerful chap with enormous energy. He was always prodding us on — ‘Do this. Do that. Come on, get on with it!’-which was why he was called Willie the Wasp. He was the guiding spirit of the Fighter Interception Unit.
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Flight Lieutenant John Cunningham
There wasn’t much hope of the Blenheim achieving anything at night, but from a public morale point of view, I don’t think that could be admitted. They were sent up at night in the hopes that incoming enemy aircraft would be illuminated by searchlights and because we had no other aircraft to send up at night until the advent of the Beaufighter late during the summer.
The Beaufighter was a very toughly built, rather brutal looking aircraft. It was a jolly good war machine, but its airborne radar was extremely unreliable in the early days. We had to rely on external aerials on the aircraft and we had endless trouble with ‘squint’. Because these planes lived out in the open, when they got wet, water got into the radar system and the signal that came in from the wing aerials could not be balanced up. We learned early on to send the planes up in pairs during daylight to test their radar. Your target would sit in front of you and your radar operator would sit in the back of the Beaufighter looking towards the tail. As you came up to your ‘target aircraft’, you’d ask him to sing out its range and elevation. You’d position the target dead ahead and ask him, ‘Where is it now?’ He’d look at the radar and say, ‘It’s about thirty degrees left and above you.’ So you’d tell him to come off his seat and look forward and he’d see that the aircraft which he thought was in one place was somewhere else. That was ‘squint’. We tried and we tried during that summer, but we didn’t achieve any success with that problem until after the Battle of Britain.
Another problem with the early Beaufighte
r was that when you loaded it up with ammunition, it became unstable in pitch. The aeroplane would either tend to go into a dive or climb more steeply than it should have. It didn’t have the basic stability that all aircraft must have. It could only be brought under control with great concentration of effort. That was why a lot of people were killed in Beaufighters early on, flying unstable aircraft at night or in cloud or when they had no visual horizon. It was very demanding. A lot of pilots failed on that.
I spoke to Fighter Command almost immediately and said, ‘Hey, this isn’t right!’ They told me to take the aeroplane back to the manufacturers in Bristol to get their chief pilot to fly it, which I did. At Bristol, they were horrified. They hadn’t tested the aircraft loaded with cannon ammunition and all the junk that we’d got. As a result, the later editions of the Beaufighter which were produced after the Battle of Britain came out with a much bigger tail. But before that happened, there were pilots who crashed, worn out by the struggle to keep themselves in the air in Beaufighters.
Grossly inflated ‘kill’ claims on both sides in the Battle of Britain were inevitable. A pilot shot at an enemy aircraft, saw smoke come out of it or pieces of it drop off, saw it go into a spin or into a seemingly uncontrollable dive, and believed he had shot it down. He reported as much to the squadron’s intelligence officer when he landed, and, unless challenged, his kill was added to the accumulating scores of one side or the other. In a sky full of swooping, twisting, diving enemy aircraft, a pilot couldn’t always be expected to follow his victim down to make sure of his fate. Even when the sky was clear, it wasn’t wise to linger about when something might come swooping down at him at any moment.
