Chapter 9
Into Battle
It would be some months before Fighter Command felt its way into the conflict. The blaring sirens did not signal the onset of an all-out aerial assault. The Luftwaffe had other targets. Hitler was anyway reluctant to antagonize an enemy whom he hoped to neutralize by negotiation. At the fighter stations dotted among the fields and villages of south-east England the squadrons watched and waited. Some flew off to join the small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France, operating from the same Pas de Calais airfields as their RFC forbears twenty-five years before. The excitement of the move soon dissipated and they settled down into the routine of false alarms and inactivity that was the drôle de guerre.
For Bomber Command there was no Phoney War. It went into action on the day war was declared and on many days thereafter. The experience of battle was a painful one: there were virtually no successes. Instead, the crews received a succession of bruising lessons on how little they knew and how inadequate their aircraft were to the gigantic task that had been imagined for them.
The first raid set a pattern that was to become dismally familiar. Barely had Chamberlain’s voice faded than the men of ‘A’ Flight, 89 Squadron, based at Scampton in Lincolnshire, were told to prepare for a raid on the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven. The flurry of initial activity subsided as the take-off time was delayed. The men stood by their Hampden bombers, smoking and fretting. One pilot, with a reputation for cockiness, found his ‘hands were shaking so much that I could not hold them still. All the time we wanted to rush off to the lavatory. Most of us went four times an hour.’
Eventually, just after 6 p.m., six aircraft took off, climbed over the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, then headed out over the ridged, grey monotony of the North Sea. Their instructions were to attack pocket battleships believed to be lying in Wilhelmshaven Harbour. If they couldn’t locate the target they had permission to bomb an ammunition dump on the shore. Under no circumstances were they to risk hitting civilian housing or even dockyard buildings and there would be ‘serious repercussions’ if they did. Like Hitler, the British government was extremely wary of provoking reprisals if non-combatants were killed.
As they approached what they thought was the target, the cloud clamped down to a hundred feet. They had nothing to aim at apart from the muzzle flashes from anti-aircraft batteries firing blindly towards them through the murk. Squadron Leader Leonard Snaith, who was leading the attack, ordered them to turn back. They jettisoned their bombs in the sea and headed for home. The initial disappointment of the pilot whose earlier nerves had initiated so many trips to the loo gave way to the realization that this was the right decision. ‘For all we knew,’ he wrote, ‘we were miles off our course. The gun flashes ahead might have been the Dutch Islands or they might have been Heligoland.’ They reached the Lincolnshire coast in darkness and touched down, tired and dispirited, at 10.30 p.m. ‘What a complete mess-up,’ recorded the pilot. ‘For all the danger we went through it couldn’t be called a raid, but we went through all the feelings.’ The remarks were made by twenty-year-old Guy Gibson who led the Dams Raid to become one of the most famous air warriors of the age.1 The experience of that initial, fruitless raid would be repeated thousands of times before Bomber Command approached anything like the efficiency that the oracles of air power had prophesied.
At least Gibson and his comrades had survived. The following day twenty-nine Blenheims and Wellingtons set off for Wilhelmshaven and nearby Brunsbüttel. Some of the force managed to find the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Emden and to drop bombs. By extraordinary determination and some luck, a few bombs hit the Scheer. They bounced off. Seven of the attacking aircraft were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire from fighters. Ten aircraft failed to locate their targets and one unloaded its bombs on the Danish town of Esbjerg, 110 miles to the north, resulting in the death of two civilians. Twenty-four airmen were killed – the first of the 55,573 men from Bomber Command who would lose their lives in the next six years.
Thus were laid bare Bomber Command’s fundamental weaknesses: the primitive navigational aids available meant that aircraft faced huge problems finding their targets; when they did locate them, they lacked the technology to deliver their bombs accurately; and if they did score a lucky strike, there was a sizeable chance the bombs would not explode. On the plus side, this and the raids that followed demonstrated that whatever the crews lacked in equipment they were superbly endowed with courage. There was no shortage of the ‘press-on’ spirit that would sustain the Strategic Air Offensive through the dark years that lay ahead.
The Wilhelmshaven disaster gave the planners pause. For the next few months activity was confined to ‘Nickel’ leaflet-dropping operations, reconnaissance and shipping sweeps over the North Sea. Then on 14 December 1939 the RAF launched the biggest raid of the war so far: forty-three assorted aircraft were sent off to search for ships to bomb. A squadron of Wellingtons found a convoy in the Schillig Roads off Wilhemshaven and spent half an hour battling with low cloud trying to get into a favourable position to attack. They were intercepted by fighters and hit by flak, and five were shot down. Then, four days later, another biggish raid was mounted against shipping at Wilhelmshaven. Twenty-four Wellingtons were despatched. Mindful of the effectiveness of enemy antiaircraft fire, they were told not to stray below 10,000 feet. But flak was not the problem. The radar station on the Friesian island of Wangerooge picked up the raiders. Messerschmitt 110 fighters were waiting in the cloudless skies when they arrived. Half the force – twelve aircraft – were shot down and forty-two men killed. Five escaped from stricken aircraft to be made prisoners of war, an early indication of the meagre survival rates once a bomber went down. The Wellington had twin machine guns in the nose and tail turrets, firing .303 rifle-calibre bullets. They managed to shoot down two fighters. It was clear, however, that formations of bombers flying in daylight could not fend off fighter attacks. Before long almost all operations would take place under cover of darkness.
Flying in a bomber was a very dangerous business and would be the most hazardous wartime activity open to British servicemen. Non-operational flying could be almost as lethal as facing the enemy. Of the 202 airmen killed in bombers between the start of the war and the two disastrous Wilhelmshaven missions, ninety-nine were killed while on training or ferry flights.
By the end of the year nothing like the scenario envisaged in the RAF’s pre-war strategic blueprint had emerged. The Western Air Plans, drawn up in 1936, had as their target the factories, oil installations, roads, railways and utilities on which the enemy’s war effort depended. Political considerations meant that the moment to execute them had not yet arrived. Thirty months before the war Britain had moved to occupy the moral high ground in the debate over the ethics of aerial warfare. Chamberlain told the Commons that the air force would bomb only military objectives and take every measure to avoid civilian casualties. A few days after the war started, John Slessor, by now the RAF’s Director of Plans, had promised that ‘indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations as such will never form part of our policy’. Within a few years, the bombing effort would be organized to do just that.
For the moment, though, the desire to avoid killing noncombatants was sincere and attacks on land-based targets were banned. It was only when spring came and the German armies were on the move again that the restraint crumbled, then collapsed.
The winter stasis came to an end with the occupations of Denmark and Norway in April 1940. Both Fighter and Bomber Command were thrown into Allied attempts to prevent the invasions, to no effect and painful losses. The Hampdens could just about reach southern Norway from Britain, but as Arthur Harris noted the bomber was ‘cold meat for any determined enemy fighter in daylight’ and six were shot down in a single operation against Kristiansand on 12 April.2
Then the Germans began their great surge westwards. This had been long expected. Bomber Command’s job was to attack advancing troops and to disru
pt supply lines by destroying railways, roads and bridges. A number of bomber squadrons had been based in France since the start of the war. Eight of them were equipped with Fairey Battles. In their first, occasional encounters with the enemy it was clear that these were bad aeroplanes. They carried a three-man crew and were protected by two small-calibre machine guns, one mounted in a wing and the other in the rear. They were slow, a hundred miles an hour slower than the Luftwaffe fighters they would face. Nonetheless, the men who flew them continued to cling to hope. According to one of the fighter pilots waiting alongside them for the fighting to start, they were ‘pathetically confident in their tight formation with their fire-concentration tactics. We admired their flying and guts, but although we gave them as much practice and encouragement as we could, we privately didn’t give much for their chances.’3
So it turned out. On the morning of 10 May the German forces began to flow into the Lowlands like a river of molten lava. From midday, Battles, arranged in small formations of eight, set off to try and stop them. Ranged against them were great swarms of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers, sometimes hundreds strong. Of the thirty-two British bombers deployed, thirteen were shot down. The others returned riddled with flak, cannon rounds and bullets. There was nothing to show for the losses. The columns they had been sent to attack had usually moved on by the time the Battles arrived.
The battering continued. On 12 May Battles of the Belgian air force had been attempting to bomb the bridges over the Albert canal to the west of Maastricht to deny passage to the advancing Germans. They failed, losing ten of the fifteen aircraft that took part. Then it was the turn of Bomber Command’s 12 Squadron, also equipped with Battles. There was an appeal for six crews. The entire squadron stepped forward, so the first six on the duty roster were selected. One was unable to take off when its hydraulics failed, but the rest swooped down on the bridges at Vroenhoeven and Veldwezelt. Only one aircraft made it back, sieved with shot and shell. There were devastating losses elsewhere on the Front. In two days of fighting, the entire RAF force in France had been halved from 135 to 72.
With the blitzkrieg rippling towards France there was no longer any virtue in restraint. Any remaining hopes that the Germans might choose a more scrupulous approach against Western targets than they had shown against Polish ones were shattered with the mass bombing of Rotterdam. After some dithering, permission was given for an attack on road and rail junctions at Mönchengladbach. This was the first of thousands of raids directed at German towns. The results were negligible, but four civilians were killed by the tumbling bombs. Three were Germans: Carl Lichtschlag, sixty-two, Erika Mullers, twenty-two, and a two-year-old girl called Ingeborg Schey. The fourth was a British citizen. Ella Ida Clegg had been born fifty-three years before to a British father, who left Oldham to work as a factory foreman in the Rhine. Nothing else is known about her. She was listed in official records only as a ‘volunteer’. The first corpses had names, but that did not last long. Soon these losses became commonplace and names gave way to numbers.
Four days later Bomber Command at last set out to implement its grand design, laid out in the pre-war Western Air Plans: to paralyse the enemy by attacks on its oil supply and transport nexus. Ninety-nine aircraft – thirty-nine Wellingtons, thirty-six Hampdens and twenty-four Whitleys – flew off to attack sixteen targets in Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr.
Nothing much happened. Most of the aircraft dropped their bombs, but to little effect. The standard of accuracy was abysmal. One bomb apparently aimed at a factory in Dormagen landed instead on a large farm, killing a dairyman, Franz Romeike, who was on his way to the lavatory. Some bombs fell on Münster – even though it was not on the list of towns to be hit. This black farce was the opening scene of one of the war’s great dark dramas.
‘Thus began the Bomber Command strategic air offensive against Germany,’ wrote Noble Frankland, himself a bomber navigator and the author with Sir Charles Webster of the official history of the campaign. ‘For many years it was the sole means at Britain’s disposal for attacking the heart of the enemy, and, more than any other form of armed attack upon the enemy, it never ceased until almost exactly five years later Germany, with many of her cities in ruins, her communications cut, her oil supplies drained dry and her industry reduced to chaos, capitulated . . . It was probably the most continuous and gruelling operation of war ever carried out.’4
The fighter squadrons based in France, and those sent over from England to join them, were swept up and tossed around by the tempest blowing across the flatlands of Flanders. Flying Officer Maurice Stephens, a Cranwell graduate, had flown off from Kenley with the rest of 3 Squadron just after midday on the day of the German attack. He bumped down on the grass at Merville, an old RFC base, to see that, despite all the time the defenders had had to prepare, confusion reigned. ‘On the far side of the airfield another Hurricane squadron had just arrived,’ he wrote. ‘There was feverish activity as pilots and ground crew sorted the mass of equipment which had been hastily unloaded from the transport aircraft.’ They ‘snatched a hasty lunch of bully beef and biscuits, with the inevitable mug of strong, over-sweet tea’. Then, over the field telephone came an order for a flight of six aircraft to patrol a line between Maastricht and Bree in Belgium, where the German forces were expected to attempt the breakthrough into France. There was only one map available, which was given to the flight commander; the other pilots were expected to follow him. They saw nothing ‘except roads packed solid with the pathetic stream of refugees. It was to become a depressingly familiar sight.’
Back at Merville they were refuelling when a formation of Heinkel 111s appeared and began dropping bombs. ‘We took off in whatever direction we happened to be pointing, hoping to catch the Heinkels,’ Stephens wrote. ‘It was hopeless. There was no radar, no fighter control at all. We were just wasting aircraft and hazarding aircraft in the hopes of finding our quarry in the gathering darkness.’
They kipped in a Nissen hut at the airfield and awoke at dawn to take to the skies, pitting themselves against an enemy that swept forward with all the inexorability of a force of nature. This time events were more satisfactory. Stephens was patrolling with five other 3 Squadron Hurricanes between Saint-Trond and Diest in Belgium. They realized now that the absence of radar and ground control made little difference, as ‘the scale of enemy air activity was so great that the odds were very much in favour of making contact’. Sure enough, ‘suddenly we spotted about sixty tiny black dots . . . flying west like a swarm of midges. The next moment we were among them – Stukas, with an escort of about twenty Me 109s.’
Stephens manoeuvred his Hurricane behind one of the dive-bombers until it was framed in his reflector sight, then ‘opened fire from about fifty yards’. The range could hardly have been closer and the approach would have won the approval of Mannock and Ball. The effect was spectacular. ‘After a short burst he blew up in an orange ball of flame, followed by a terrifying clatter as my Hurricane flew through the debris.’ Stephens went on to shoot down a Dornier 17 before his fuel warning light glowed red and he looked for somewhere to put down.5
The British fighters put up a terrific fight against the Luftwaffe, inflicting more casualties than they suffered. But the numbers were overwhelmingly against them and the impressive paper strength of their allies in the Armée de l’Air was illusory. The French Air Force were unreliable allies and co-operation was ragged and sometimes only grudgingly given, and, by the end, often not at all. The squadrons were soon reeling. Every aircraft shot down or abandoned in the headlong retreat (which mirrored the experience of the RFC in the opening weeks of the First World War) was one less machine to defend Britain.
On 13 May the first German tanks crossed the Meuse. The following day, seventeen British fighter pilots were killed or mortally wounded. Twenty-seven Hurricanes had been shot down. These attrition rates could not be sustained, yet the French were still clamouring for more aircraft. Churchill was inclined to oblige the
m, but Hugh Dowding, Fighter Command’s austere chief, resisted further sacrifice.. As it was, the hopeless defence had thinned the ranks of men and aircraft alarmingly. The fighters had knocked down about 300 enemy aircraft, but they had lost just over 200 in the process. Altogether, fifty-six pilots were killed in the twelve days between 10 and 21 May, with another thirty-six badly wounded. Most of them had been extensively and expensively trained, and had far more theoretical preparation for aerial war fighting than those who were going through the flying schools at home. Some units had been eviscerated by the fighting. When Stephens and 3 Squadron returned to England after ten days, just before the arrival of the Germans, they left behind nine dead pilots.
There was no time to lick wounds, for another battle was already looming. At Dunkirk, some half a million British and French troops were penned in with the sea at their backs, awaiting the Germans’ final onslaught. The honour of finishing them off had been given to the Luftwaffe. Their leader, Hermann Goering, had promised Hitler it would be an easy task. The RAF now had the duty of defending the exhausted lines of soldiers, waiting stoically on the beaches for salvation. Like the airmen of the last war, the RAF pilots had a detached view of the battlefield, one that was unlikely to make them want to swap their role, whatever its dangers, for the life of a foot-soldier. Brian Kingcome of 92 Squadron looked down from the cockpit of his Spitfire and saw ‘beaches [that] were a shambles, littered with the smoking wreckage of engines and equipment . . . The sands erupted into huge geysers from exploding bombs and shells, while a backdrop to the scene of carnage and destruction was provided by the palls of oily black smoke rising from the burning harbour and houses.’ He marvelled at how the ‘orderly lines of our troops stood, chaos and Armageddon at their backs, patiently waiting their turn to wade into the sea’.6
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