by Norman Gelb
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Squadron Leader Jack Satchell
I interrogated personnel of an army detachment stationed near where Pilot Officer Carter crashed. They saw his plane come out of the clouds. An object left the cockpit and then became two objects, one of which was Carter. The other object was his parachute. We found it thirty yards from his body. Why his parachute was not strapped to him was a mystery. I assumed that, in his haste to get out of the plane, he did what he was accustomed to do when he landed after a sortie: he undid both his fighting harness and his parachute straps. He probably baled out before he realized what he had done. Poor devil — his agony of mind during those few seconds must have been frightful. His brain must have been working pretty fast on his way down.
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Pilot Officer Mike Heron
We were on readiness one day — Flight Commander Ken Gillies, myself and Pilot Officer Watkinson. A call came through that there was a German bomber stooging around; would we try to intercept it. We took off into very low cloud — I suppose 600-700 feet cloud base. We climbed up through cloud which was more or less continuous and were vectored while climbing up. Ken Gillies was leading. I was flying on his right hand, starboard side — number two. Watkinson was number three on the port side.
When we came up on top of the cloud, we were again given a course to fly and spotted a Heinkel 111 maybe two or three miles away and went towards it. When we were within a mile of it, it must have spotted us. It changed course and started jinking in and out of the cloud. Had the chap the sense to remain in cloud, we wouldn’t have been able to locate him and we did lose him for a minute or two. But then, because of his stupidity in coming out, we altered course and, though we lost him again once or twice, we got nearer and were able to attack him-first Gillies, then myself, then Watkinson.
Then Gillies suddenly said over the radio, ‘I am obliged to break off combat.’ That was all. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he was wounded or there was some damage done to his plane. People’s voices in combat situation were usually excited or strained. I couldn’t tell whether he was in pain from the way he sounded. I never saw him again. His body was washed up on the coast several weeks later.
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Flying Officer Ben Bowring
Some pilots got so tired they probably went straight into the German bombers they were attacking. The pace was exhausting. If you weren’t already in the air, you’d sit down to breakfast to eggs and bacon, the horn would blow and you were off and it wouldn’t let up. There was a squadron commander at Manston who was so battle fatigued that it’s practically certain he knew what he was doing when he crashed into a German aircraft. There were masses of them coming over. He told us, ‘If I have to, I’m going in.’ I think he was so tired he just couldn’t cope. It was like swimming against a strong tide. You could go on for so long, but eventually some of us had to go with it.
Investigation of Psychological Disorder in Flying Personnel of Fighter Command by Air Vice Marshal Sir Charles P. Symonds and Wing Commander Denis J. Williams, 1942
Lagging or breaking away from formation may be noticed. Deterioration in flying, bad landings and general carelessness were commented upon — ‘His flying isn’t as good as it was ... ’ ‘He begins to lose his appreciation of danger and thus either gets killed or else merely piles up.’ Common to all these stories was an account of the development of fear to a degree which called for an increasing effort of will to control it. Some degree of fear was admitted as natural and stimulating, increasing alertness and sharpening judgment. Any effect fear might have had in claiming attention and impairing efficiency was in the earlier stages of the operational career offset by the interest of the job, the desire to do well at it and perhaps win a decoration, and the offensive spirit. The experience of a few successes added to the weight of these balancing factors, and the balance was such that once airborne the pilot was relatively fearless. The cumulative stress, both mental and physical, weakened the inhibitory effect of the balancing factors, so that fearlessness was gradually lost. An effort now had to be made to control fear. One officer ... described himself as getting into a state in which you don’t care whether you are shot down or not ... He thought that a number of pilots were lost in the Battle of Britain from getting into this state. Another noticed that he was becoming jumpy and irritable, and that he had a sudden craving for leave, though previously he had not wanted it or taken it. Another found himself waking tired in the mornings, and feeling jumpy when a show was on ... Discipline was held to be of great value for ‘discipline on the ground reflects itself in the air; if you can’t keep together on the ground, you can’t keep together in the air.’ ‘Individualism is frowned upon and the pilot is only an individual while he is pressing his button. The individualists are soon missing.’
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Pilot Officer Richard Jones
I later had a lot to do with a Bomber Command crew. It was important for bomber people to be part of an operational unit. But I was a bit of a loner. A lot of the Fighter Command pilots were. When we were in the air, we operated individually. If we were in trouble, it was up to us alone to get out of it. I remember one of our men — a very likeable person — who, at readiness in the crew room, would sit and read and when you spoke to him, he wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t hear you. He was very much alone. When we were under stress, we tended not to speak much. I was like that. I still am.
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Pilot Officer Birdie Bird-Wilson
Yes, I was afraid. It came out at night mostly, when I was asleep. I had terrible nightmares. It seemed as though I was flying half the night although I was still in my bed. I think anybody who says he wasn’t afraid is a bloody liar — unless he was a chap like Sailor Malan, a superb pilot, an excellent leader and a man of great mental stature. But people had to put a shield around themselves. Externally, some were hale, hearty, debonaire. They showed a couldn’t-care-less attitude. But I’m convinced they got down on their prayer mats many, many times. When they were by themselves or before they went to sleep, I believe they had a quick conversation with God Almighty.
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Pilot Officer John Ellacombe
There were fourteen, fifteen hours of daylight each day. You were on duty right through. Chaps were being lost all the time. We had seventeen out of twenty-three killed or wounded in my squadron in less than three weeks. We had another eight aircraft shot down with the chaps unhurt, including myself, twice. It was a fight for survival. There was tremendous ‘twitch’. If somebody slammed a door, half the chaps would jump out of their chairs. There were times when you were so tired, you’d pick up your pint of beer with two hands. But no one was cowering terrified in a corner. My greatest fear was that I’d reach the stage where I’d show fear. But it took me years after the war to get rid of my twitch.
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Sergeant Mike Croskell
At Exeter, there was no mess on the base. The officers went to live at the Rougemont Hotel. The rest of us stayed with local people. The days were very long. We’d go to work at the crack of dawn and stay on duty till last light. I was billeted with very pleasant people in the town of Honiton. I got very tired. I’m not normally bad tempered, but I got very irritable and the people I stayed with said something about it, it was so obvious. Those were rough days.
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Sergeant Dick Kilner
There was always the fear that there might be a Jerry behind you. Generally if you could see the bombers and their fighter escort, you knew what you were up against. If you didn’t see the fighter escort, that was when you had to look around because they’d be there somewhere and it was time to worry. Half your mind would be on attacking the bombers; the other half would be on looking around for the fighters you couldn’t see.
Once you were in action, you were too busy trying to shoot something down or trying not to be shot down yourself to be frightened. But there was tenseness, fear, apprehension right through, from the first time I was jumped by a 109 — that was over France
at the very beginning — and realized what was happening was real. Some of the worst of it was sitting on the ground waiting for the telephone to ring and for someone to shout ‘Scramble.’ You came to accept it as normal.
There was a lot of laughter. It was an escape mechanism. If you got back from a trip and had had a bit of a hairy time in action, you didn’t tell it as the hairy time it was; you’d tell it as a joke.
You had to put up a front, particularly if you were in a position of command and the way things were happening, it wasn’t long before I was a deputy flight commander, leading the flight when my flight commander was away. You had to hide your own feelings so as not to upset the others. You’d resort to humour and bravado. You’d laugh things off.
We did some very strange things on the ground. My flight commander, Adrian Boyd, was a man of ideas. We were very conscious of the fact that England might be invaded and we would not necessarily have an aeroplane to fly with when it happened. We might have to get involved in guerilla warfare. That was very much in the air at the time. Adrian was all for improvising weapons we might use. He reckoned you could kill somebody with a Very flare pistol, which you could, though a Very cartridge wasn’t the best missile for the job. So he got a cartridge, took out most of the gunpowder, but left the detonator and projection powder in. He then filled it up with rusty nails, tin tacks, small bits of old metal he could find. He was going to make some sort of blunderbuss, something like a shotgun. He tied it to the back of a Nissen hut and aimed the thing at the remains of an old windmill not far away.
There was a chap named Guy Branch lying in a deckchair nearby, waiting for the telephone to ring and to be scrambled. That blunderbuss went off with an enormous bang and Guy, who hadn’t been in on this, literally went six inches out of his chair. It made quite a noise, but we weren’t convinced it had done much to advance the war effort.
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Pilot Officer Jas Storrar
Coming back from an interception, Guy Branch was shot down and landed in the sea off Poole Harbour. He was about a mile from the coast. The rescue people had seen him coming down and a lifeboat was on its way out to him. I saw him in the water. He waved to me. I circled over him, and stayed as long as I could. The lifeboat couldn’t have been more than fifty to a hundred yards from him so when I got back, I reported that he had been picked up. I telephoned his wife and told her he was all right.
Being a bit of an offshore sailor in the years since the war, I can see now how, with a bit of rolling sea, they were able to miss him. But at the time I simply couldn’t understand how somebody in the water, wearing a green Mae West, couldn’t be spotted. But he wasn’t. Fora long time, his wife lived in hope that he’d been picked up by the other side. But he hadn’t been. He died that day. He shouldn’t have gone then. His number wasn’t really up yet.
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Pilot Officer Christopher Currant
From Memories of a Fighter Pilot
Once again he took the air and Croydon was the base
To fight it out in fear and sweat so many times each day
To smell the burn of cordite flash, to see the flames of war
High up above the fields of Kent, the dive, the zoom, the soar.
Returning from a clash of foes one day he came across
A sight which burnt deep in his soul and never can be lost
A pilot dangling from his chute towards the earth did drift.
He circled round this friend or foe, so hopelessly alone
To keep away who ever dared to fire on such a gift.
It was a useless gesture though, as round and round he flew
He saw as in an awful dream first smoke and then flames spew
Curl up his back as arms he waved and burn the cords of life
Snapping his body from the chute, snatching him from war’s strife.
With sickened horror in his heart he landed back at base.
He cried himself to sleep that night and thanks to God’s good grace
That he was spared yet once again to live and fight this fight
Against the things he saw as black for things he believed were right.
*
Winston Churchill
This ... period 24 August-6 September ... seriously drained the strength of Fighter Command as a whole. The Command lost in this fortnight 103 pilots killed and 128 seriously wounded, while 466 Spitfires and Hurricanes had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Out of a total pilot strength of about a thousand nearly a quarter had been lost. Their places could only be filled by 260 new, ardent but inexperienced pilots drawn from training units, in many cases before their full courses were complete.
*
British ground defences were strengthened during the course of the summer. The troops ferried home from Dunkirk were rested and regrouped. Additional forces had been recruited and were being trained. Armament factories were churning out equipment to replace what had been abandoned on the beaches of France. Preparing to repel the enemy became the watchword as reconnaissance planes brought back word that the Germans seemed about ready to launch their cross-Channel attack.
Vessels of all sorts had been requisitioned by them throughout Germany and occupied Europe and brought to dozens of ports along the Channel coast facing England to take part in or support the planned landings. RAF bombers had attacked them, as had the Royal Navy. But intelligence reports made it clear that the German threat remained undiminished.
The enemy had gathered thirty-one divisions of infantry and armoured troops for the first three waves of their landings on English beaches. They were engaged in rigorous landing training. Their paratroops were primed to be the vanguard of the assault.
In their public pronouncements, British officials taunted Hitler for failing to make good his threat to invade. In private, they knew too well that the invasion remained a very real danger, and possibly was imminent.
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GHQ Intelligence Summary
5 August
German light tanks up to six tons may be carried in land planes and up to nine tons in flying boats. It appears that the German Ju 90 land plane (of which some fifteen exist — 6 July 1940) could carry one or more tanks up to a total weight of something between nine and ten and a half tons ... It has now been reported that Ju 52 aircraft usually used for troop transportation, of which a large number are available, will be used to transport ‘tankettes’, and that special ‘tankettes’ are being constructed.
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New York Times
Berlin, 14 August — Foreign correspondents were informed this afternoon that dancing would be forbidden again throughout the Reich, beginning at once. A dancing prohibition was effective during the entire Western campaign, but it was modified after the French capitulation to permit dancing two evenings a week. The reason for the modification, it is believed, was to enable victorious Reich soldiers home on vacation to enjoy and rest themselves. Reimposition of the ban appears to indicate that this period of relaxation and vacation is ended and that serious warring is imminent.
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W.F. Leysmith, New York Times
London, 15 August — Fifty German parachutes without owners were found yesterday spread over a wide area in Scotland and the English Midlands, and today one of the biggest manhunts in British history was under way. As yet, no parachutists have been run to earth, and a Midland farmer who picked up several parachutes on his land said there were no marks to indicate any Germans had descended there.
Unofficial sources in Berlin were quoted by the United Press as saying ‘suicide squads’ of German parachutists had been landed in the Midlands to sabotage British industry. An Associated Press dispatch from Berlin, however, said Germans called British reports of finding Nazi parachutes ‘a midsummer night’s dream’ and added that, ‘the English mind is full of fantasy’. The parachute ‘attack’ is believed by many to have been a German ruse, the purpose of which is not yet clear, except that it was possibly meant to create panic.
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br /> Alfred Duff Cooper, Minister of Information
Radio Broadcast to the Nation, 17 August
We should not have liked him [ Hitler] to come before we were ready to receive him, but we are quite ready to receive him now and we shall really be very disappointed if he does not turn up. We can assure him that he will meet with that welcome on our shores which no invader has ever missed. This was to have been a week of German victory; it has been a week of British victory instead.
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War Cabinet
Chiefs of Staff Committee, 26 August
An analysis of recent German air reconnaissances had shown that a great interest was being taken in aerodromes in the extreme southwest of England, and that certain aerodromes had sometimes been visited two and three times daily.
It was suggested that the Germans might be contemplating a diversion in this area in order to draw our forces away from southeast England, which was at present the focus of our attention.
A report ... has been received through the. military attaché, Washington, of a German plan to land a force of rubber motor boats in southwest England, with the object of cutting off Devon and Cornwall and then advancing up the Severn Basin and down the Thames Basin, thus cutting off the south of England. The Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, has regarded this report as unreliable.
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Commander-in-Chief of the German Army
30 August
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE PREPARATION OF OPERATION SEA LION
Task: The Supreme Commander has ordered the services to make preparations for a landing in force in England. The aim of this attack is to eliminate the Mother Country as a base for continuing the war against Germany, and, if it should be necessary, to carry out a complete occupation ...
PROPOSED METHOD OF EXECUTION:
a) The Luftwaffe will destroy the British Air Force and the armament production which supports it and it will achieve air superiority. The navy will provide mine-free corridors and, supported by the Luftwaffe, will bar the flanks of the crossing-sector.
