Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

by Norman Gelb

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  Aircraftswoman Second Class Edith Heap

  I know people who still have nightmares about being shot up and baling out. That was a time that taught me a lot about people. It taught me not to take people at face value. You found that some people you thought were going to be pretty terrific in a crisis were useless and some people who didn’t seem to have much to offer turned up trumps in emergencies.

  CRISIS

  As August drew to a close, the Germans, led by faulty intelligence into believing Fighter Command was on the verge of collapse, moved in for the kill. Ranging far and wide over southern England, the Luftwaffe sharply stepped up its attack, particularly on RAF airfields. The raids came over in such numbers that Operations Room Controllers had trouble determining which deserved priority attention from the limited defence resources at their disposal. It had by now become routine for sections of three aircraft or flights of six to be sent up against thirty, fifty, a hundred or more attacking aircraft. Such odds inevitably meant mounting casualties. Before long, only the very lucky squadron in the south still had enough men to put twelve planes aloft.

  This third phase of the Battle of Britain lasted fourteen days, from 24 August to 6 September. During that brief episode, British defences came close to collapse. The stress of combat encounters several times a day every day from first light to last exhausted Fighter Command pilots. There were mistakes and accidents. Morale began to slip among the veterans, who saw friends with whom they had flown since the outbreak of hostilities fall one by one to enemy action. During this two-week period, Fighter Command lost one quarter of its pilots — killed or seriously wounded.

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  Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding

  A fresh squadron coming into an active Sector would generally bring with them sixteen aircraft and about twenty trained pilots. They would normally fight until they were no longer capable of putting more than nine aircraft into the air, and then they had to be relieved. This process occupied different periods according to the luck and skill of the unit. The normal period was a month to six weeks, but some units had to be replaced after a week or ten days ... By the beginning of September, the incidence of casualties became so serious that a fresh squadron would become depleted and exhausted before any of the resting and reforming squadrons was ready to take its place. Fighter pilots still could not be turned out by the training units in numbers sufficient to fill the widening gaps in the fighting ranks. Transfers were made from the Fleet Air Arm and from the Bomber and Coastal Commands, but these pilots naturally required a short flying course on Hurricanes and Spitfires and some instruction in formation flying, fighter tactics and interception procedure.

  *

  Flight Lieutenant Alan Deere

  Our morale was getting a bit low because there were only three of us — George Gribble, Colin Gray and me — left in the squadron who had any combat experience. We had been there the whole time and were pretty tired. Each time we went up, there seemed to be more and more Germans up there. We’d gone through two squadron commanders. The new pilots who came in — they just went up and came down! You’d say to them, ‘Now, look, don’t get yourself lost. Stick with us. Don’t bother about shooting to start with.’ But, of course, they couldn’t resist peeling off and some of them didn’t come back and some had to crash land.

  One day, the adjutant rang me up and said, ‘There are two new pilots reporting for 54 Squadron.’ I said, ‘Thank God. Send them over.’ They turned out to be two New Zealanders, like me, who’d been three months at sea coming over. They’d only flown Wildebeests, a very old-fashioned aircraft, in training. They’d been sent to an operation conversion unit and given five or six hours on Spitfires. And that was it! They hadn’t even seen a reflector sight. They both got shot down the second day, were fished out of the Channel and ended up in the hospital together.

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  Flying Officer John Dundas

  Letter to his brother, Flying Officer Hugh Dundas

  Royal Air Force Station, Middle Wallop, 25 August

  Very sorry to hear that a 109 — or rather twelve of them — inflicted grievous bodily harm on you over Dover two days ago. Mummy sent me a wire yesterday, and you were mentioned as wounded in an 11 Group Intelligence Summary this morning. I haven’t heard any details, but I do hope the damage isn’t too bad. Write and tell me about it as soon as you’re well enough to do so. Anyhow, you’ll now get a nice spell of sick leave which I rather envy you.

  The 109s nearly made hay with us over the Isle of Wight yesterday. They sent us off too late to do anything about the bombing of Portsmouth and too low to do anything about the myriads of 109s who were hovering around the scene and who, when they saw poor old 609 [Squadron] painfully clambering into the sun, came down on us. The result was that one of our machines was shot to hell, two more damaged and not one of us succeeded in firing a round. I was reduced to the last resort of a harassed pilot — spinning. It was humiliating. But fortunately we didn’t lose any pilots.

  John Dundas was killed in action one month after the Battle of Britain. Middle Wallop Sector Commander, Wing Commander David Roberts, recalls: (He was one of my best chaps. I was controlling at the time. He called up and said, “Whoopee! I’ve just shot down a 109!” That was the last we heard from him. He’d shot down one of the German fighter aces and the chap’s number two got him.’

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  Flying Officer Christopher Deanesly

  I was shot down at the end of July, spent some time in hospital, had some leave and returned to the squadron at the end of August. The squadron had changed a lot in my absence. It had been engaged in almost daily combat. Men were tired. Morale was drooping. We’d lost our best flight commander, Carr Withall, an Australian. We had all greatly admired him. We’d lost a lot of people, some of whom had been with the squadron from the beginning.

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  Flight Lieutenant Tony Miller

  Experimenting with new airborne radar equipment made me feel sometimes that I was out of the war. So I asked for a posting to a fighter squadron. Willie the Wasp said, ‘I can’t recommend you for posting unless you “put up a black’’’, which meant doing something terrible. I don’t know what happened then. Perhaps backdoor channels worked. But suddenly a signal arrived posting me to 17 Squadron, which was relieving a squadron which was going up north to recover, and, to my horror, to command the squadron! They had lost their CO — Taffy Williams — who had been killed in combat a few days earlier.

  My new squadron had gone through about five squadron leaders in the past three months. Then I appeared, quite green. I met the senior flight commander and he took me around and introduced me to the men and then a klaxon went. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s take-off. There’s your plane. Off you go.’ This was my first ten minutes as commander of the squadron.

  *

  Pilot Officer Dennis David

  In those desperate days, if you were twenty-one, you were an old man. It was horrifying to see the youngsters coming along. Some were only eighteen years old, but it wasn’t their age which scared you. They were so inexperienced. They’d had only eight or nine hours on a Hurricane. We needed chaps with thirty or forty hours of operational training. We needed chaps who could match the German pilots, who were jolly good.

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  Pilot Officer Jas Storrar

  I was nineteen and I felt that chaps of twenty-two and twenty-three were much more experienced and worldly wise. Not that we youngsters lacked any normal, healthy pursuits like drinking and that sort of thing. As fighter pilots, the senior men who had got where they were by promotion before the war were either no bloody use at all or very good indeed. The ones who were no use at all were lucky if they survived. They didn’t remain fighter pilots. They went off to staff jobs. Twenty to twenty-one was the age to be. Some of the older pilots didn’t have the daring and irresponsibility that was needed for the kind for combat we were in.

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  Pilot Officer Richa
rd Jones

  We aged faster than the average person. Towards the end, I was becoming more careful and that, in a fighter pilot, is a dangerous thing. I started to consider my neck, which I hadn’t considered before. I had thought nothing could happen to me. But I began to realize that things could happen to me. I became more cautious. Later on, just after the battle, when I learned I was going to be posted away for a rest the following week, those were the worst days I had. The week was absolute hell. Whenever we were scrambled, I’d think it would be just my bloody luck not to make it. I got very careful and where earlier I’d always made perfect landings, I began making a cock of landing. I’d overshoot and have to go around again.

  *

  Elizabeth Cook

  Richard [Pilot Officer Richard Jones] and I were engaged during the battle. I was away at Reading, working at a hairdresser’s. When I had a long weekend off, I’d go down and find digs or a hotel room near where he was stationed. I was very much aware of the situation he was in. I knew of the day-to-day danger he faced. There was always the possibility that he’d not come back, that he’d be killed. Men were being killed every day. The husband of one of my best friends, also a pilot, was killed. It could have been Richard. We just lived for the day. I lived for the time we could be together.

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  Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone

  The veterans, if you could call them that — I was only twenty-three — could concentrate on fighting. The younger chaps had two battles to fight. They were fighting the Germans and they had to battle to concentrate on simply handling their aircraft. It made them much more vulnerable to the enemy. We did our best for them. You tried to pair off an experienced chap with a newcomer. But one by one the experienced chaps were promoted to other squadrons or got shot out of the skies themselves. Newcomers sometimes were only there a couple of days. There was a young sergeant named Sprague, a very serious lad. He was good. I knew he was good. I always took the new ones up before they went into battle to make sure they could at least fly the aeroplane. Sprague went missing within a week — shot down and killed, we later learned. He’d only got married the week before. His wife came down and waited on the road running on the side of the airfield. Day after day, she just waited there, hoping her husband would come back. She just wouldn’t go away.

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  Flight Lieutenant Bob Stanford-Tuck

  You told the new man all you could. If you had time, you’d take them up and show them what you meant. You’d show them how to turn correctly, and evasive manoeuvres. Then you’d let them fly alone for a bit and you’d get up sun and make a dummy run at them. If they just floated along, wondering, ‘Where is he?’ and you knew they hadn’t seen you, at the last instant, when in combat you’d open fire, you’d say over the radio, ‘OK. You’ve had it.’ They learnt very quickly from that not to fly down sun if possible. If they got through the first two or three combats, I thought they’d be all right. But it was always the new boys who copped it first. Suddenly something would come up their backside and wham!

  I used to watch the newcomers in the van taking us down to dispersal from the mess. They would fiddle with their scarves. They were so obviously nervous.

  *

  Air Vice Marshal Keith Park

  My first aim was not to have my squadrons caught on the ground and destroyed, as happened in Poland, Holland and France in 1940. At the same time, I had to conserve my fighter strength by not being drawn into the air by false alarms or feint attacks by German fighters.

  I was worried daily from July to September by a chronic shortage of trained fighter pilots and it was not until the battle was nearly lost that Air Staff at the Air Ministry assisted by borrowing pilots from Bomber Command and the Royal Navy. Incidentally, [after the Battle of Britain] when I was posted to Flying Training Command, I found that the flying schools were working at only two-thirds capacity and were following peacetime routines, being quite unaware of the grave shortage of pilots in Fighter Command.

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  Pilot Officer Roger Hall

  I’d been a regular officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, but I’d always wanted to fly, so I was willing to drop a rank when the chance came to join the RAF. After preliminary training, I was sent to an Operation Training Unit near Liverpool to be taught to handle a Spitfire. We were supposed to have twenty-five hours on the plane. A lot of the men completed the course in just two days and were sent right off to squadrons. They were needed so urgently. It took me four days. It was very sketchy training. Target practice was firing our guns into a sandbank in the Mersey Estuary. The first time I was in combat, we got to a German bomber formation as it was coming in. I fired at a Dornier with which I then nearly collided. I didn’t wait to see what happened to it. I broke away to follow my section leader, Ferdie Holmes. We were attacked by some German fighters. Trying to get away, I began turning madly. I called on the radio to ask Holmes where he was. He said, ‘I’m on your tail. Just keep turning.’ He was killed later in the war.

  The odd thing was you didn’t really learn to fly until you were in combat. You jolly well had to then. I never had a very high opinion of my talents either as a pilot or a fighter pilot. But you did all sorts of things with the aeroplane you’d never dreamt of doing — flick rolls, looping-a-loop, all sorts of tricks to outmanoeuvre the enemy. The others in the squadron tried to teach me. I never felt nearly as good as they were. I was usually more concerned with keeping my aircraft in the air than in keeping the enemy out of it. I developed some confidence later on. After a bit, it came naturally. You learned what you had to learn to survive.

  I had a smart little sports car. One of the fellows in the squadron said, ‘If you’re killed before I am, can I have it?’ I told him I didn’t care what happened to it if I was killed. I thought my chances were fifty-fifty.

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  Pilot Officer Desmond Hughes

  When our squadron was posted down from Lincolnshire to Hornchurch towards the end of August, we faced the tragedy almost immediately of losing our CO, Philip Hunter. He was last seen going out over the Channel in pursuit of planes that had bombed the town of Ramsgate. We never found out what happened to him. It did our morale not much good. There’d been a certain amount of hero worship about him. He was so good. He was a brilliant pilot. Everybody thought the sun shone on him. He seemed to be invulnerable. It was a hell of a shock when he went.

  The leading of the squadron had to come down to people who weren’t experienced. We had an inexperienced replacement as CO and two inexperienced flight commanders. They felt they had to lead though, under the circumstances, they weren’t the very best people for that task. The fact was our Defiants were out-turned, outclimbed and outgunned by the Messerschmitt 109s. In the last week in August, we lost nine gunners and five pilots. We’d lost a CO dead, the acting CO shot down injured, both flight commanders shot down injured.

  When we were scrambled one day, there were only two of us with serviceable aircraft. The others had been lost or so shot up they had to be grounded for repairs. We just managed to find our way through the craters on the airfield, which had just been bombed. As we climbed up, it was interesting to be told that the two of us were being vectored against thirty plus. We climbed on. When we got to about 12,000 feet, the Controller came through terribly apologetic. ‘Terribly sorry, old boy, but they’ve turned away.’ I can’t say that Richard Stokes or I or our gunners wept when we heard that. When we went back up to Kirton-in-Lindsey in Lincolnshire, we were led by our most experienced surviving pilot, Samuel Richard Thomas, only a pilot officer and not yet twenty-one years old.

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  Sergeant John Burgess

  We hadn’t seen much action when we were at Coltishall in 12 Group. There were two squadrons there — 264 Squadron, who reckoned they were the cat’s whiskers, having done very well at Dunkirk, and 222 Squadron, of which I was a member. Late in August, 264 Squadron — they flew Defiants — was sent down to Hornchurch to relieve one of the frontline squadrons ther
e. In one week, they suffered fantastic casualties. The squadron was virtually decimated. We had waved them off as heroes going to add new laurels to their victories over Dunkirk. A week later, they were finished and we were sent down to replace them.

  Funnily enough, we weren’t worried. We hadn’t had much combat experience ourselves. We thought we’d just go down to Hornchurch, do a few circles around the sky, a few Germans would conveniently fall to the ground and that would be it. At the age of twenty, you don’t think too deeply. I had the feeling that I was sort of going to be part of a live newsreel. You’d go up and everything would be lovely. You’d see aircraft shooting at each other and you’d shoot at one or two, and perhaps one or two of the Germans would shoot at you, but the bullets would miss you and that would be it.

  But the first week at Hornchurch was hell. Just after we got there, in the early afternoon, we were ordered to the satellite aerodrome at Rochford, about fifteen minutes away, to stay there for twenty-four hours. We took all our operational aircraft along — fourteen Spitfires in all. On the way, we were told to start climbing. A heavy German raid was building up. We got up to 22,000 — 23,000 feet and were told to patrol Maidstone-Ashford, one of the major RAF patrol lines on the approach to London. German bombers were said to be coming in with their fighter escorts. When the CO spotted the enemy formation, we went into line astern, getting reading to attack. I couldn’t see the enemy, but the CO said, ‘Going down! Going down! Going down!’ and down he went, turning on his back. The others followed after him, on the attack, one by one. I was last in line — number fourteen, and I still couldn’t even see the Germans we were attacking. Eventually, the chappy ahead of me — number thirteen — rolled on his back and went screaming towards where the enemy was supposed to be. I went after him. As I rolled over on my back and straightened out, I looked down and there they finally were — massed patterns of greeny-brown aircraft with little white crosses on their wings. It was a very large formation of Messerschmitt 110s — maybe thirty or forty of them. I dived down. I had no fear. They wouldn’t hit me, just like Errol Flynn never got hit in his films. As I dived down, one group of the 110s formed a big defensive circle, going round and round. I straightened up and went for that circle. The 110s were passing in front of me, one by one. I kept firing. I kept my finger on the button. Finally, I had to pull away. I don’t know if I hit anybody. But there was a bullet hole in my wing tip. I thought, ‘Jolly good. I’ve got a souvenir.’ That was my first taste of combat.