Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  The task meant not only mounting continuous patrols above the port and beaches, but roaming behind the lines to intercept the attackers before they could reach their victims. These sorties took place out of sight of the troops, leading to many a shouted accusation of ‘Where was the RAF?’ in the weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation, and many a brawl. The charge was unjust. Awful as the experience of the evacuation was, it would have been immeasurably worse were it not for the efforts of Fighter Command. Churchill acknowledged this in his speech in the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, when he spoke of the ‘victory’ that had been won by the air force. For the pilots of Fighter Command the satisfaction of having tested themselves against the Luftwaffe and not been found wanting could not be savoured for long. It was clear at the beginning of June that the real showdown awaited them and it would not be long in coming.

  Chapter 10

  Apotheosis

  In July 1940 the greatest air battle ever fought began. Nothing like it had happened before. Nothing like it would happen again. The military and political consequences of it were colossal, shaping the way we live and think today. As well as being one of the great events of history, the Battle of Britain was also the moment when the RAF came of age. Fighter Command’s victory embedded the air force in the minds and hearts of the nation, and validated, resoundingly, the existence of the third service.

  One of the unique characteristics of the battle was its visibility. Civilians were able to watch their defenders in action. Men, women and children could look up from city streets, suburban avenues and country lanes, and see tiny machines twisting and swooping, streams of glittering tracer, ragged banners of oily smoke, the blossoming of a parachute and afterwards, the fading chalk marks scribbled in the cornflower blue of an English summer sky by the condensation trails.

  A sophisticated seventeen-year-old, Colin Walker Downes, was staying with his mother in Hampstead and watched as ‘the RAF fighters weaved their white vapour trails through the lace pattern of the Luftwaffe bombers and fighters against a background of deep azure’. Downes’s reaction was similar to that of every young male who witnessed these sights. He ‘longed to join the gallant Few’. Unlike most, his wish was granted and he ended the war as a fighter pilot.1

  The spectators’ fates and those of the young men fighting in their name were vitally intertwined. The Government seized on this fact to cement social cohesion, and propaganda moved fast to associate the airmen with those they were fighting to protect.

  Britain’s greatest propagandist was Winston Churchill. Even before the contest began he was at work creating the myth. In his speech to the House of Commons on 18 June he gave the battle its name, set out the stakes – no less than ‘the survival of Christian civilization’ – and identified the heroes on whom deliverance depended. ‘I look forward confidently to the exploits of our fighter pilots, who will have the glory of saving their native land, their island home, and all they love from the most deadly of attacks,’ he told the packed benches of parliamentarians and galleries stuffed with VIPs. On 20 August, before the battle had reached its climax, he struck another indelible image when he created the legend of ‘The Few’: the ‘fighter pilots whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes, day after day’.

  To build the notion of commonality, of shared endeavour and sacrifice, the egalitarian characteristics of the air force were given the maximum emphasis. It was the boy-next-door aspect of The Few that artist (and former RFC pilot) Cuthbert Orde stressed in the Foreword to the collection of portraits of Fighter Command pilots he was commissioned to draw by the Air Ministry in September 1940. ‘I have often been asked if I have found a definite type of Fighter Pilot,’ he wrote. ‘I have thought about this a lot, but I feel sure the answer is “No” . . . The most striking thing about the Fighter Pilots . . . is their ordinariness, just “You, I, Us and Co.”, ordinary sons of ordinary parents from ordinary homes. So when you wonder where they come from, dear reader, whoever you may be, contemplate your own home, your profession and your background, and you have the answer.’2

  By the end of the battle, Orde’s claim was to a large extent true. Fighter Command was the most motley elite the British armed forces had ever seen. In the summer of 1942 the range of pilots in 32 Squadron – based at Biggin Hill, the quintessential fighter station, set in the bucolic Kent countryside – was a propagandist’s dream. It included Sergeant John Proctor, who left school at fourteen to become an RAF apprentice, before graduating to flying duties; Ollie Houghton, a Coventry-born ex-aero fitter, who joined the squadron via the RAFVR; Bill Higgins, another RAFVR man and former village schoolteacher; Alan Eckford, from solidly middle-class Thame in Oxfordshire, who joined the RAF on a short-service commission in 1938; and Michael Crossley, the squadron commander and an old Etonian.

  It was no wonder that when an American newspaperman was seeking a story, the Air Ministry steered him in their direction. The reporter spent the evening of Thursday 15 August 1940 with 32 Squadron in their local, the White Hart at Brasted. It was the end of one of the hardest days of the battle. At 9 p.m. the conversation faded as the radio was switched on. The voice of the announcer was calm, but the events he described could not have been more dramatic. Throughout the day huge formations of German bombers, protected by large fighter escorts, had been flying from their bases in northern France to pound targets in the south of England.

  The pilots listened in silence, until the newsreader revealed the day’s score. At least 182 enemy aircraft had been destroyed, he claimed. Only 34 British fighters had been lost. The quiet was swept away by a wave of cheering and a wall of blue serge backs sprang up at the bar, yelling for celebratory pints. In his report the journalist wrote that he ‘found it incredible that these noisy youngsters were in fact front-line troops, even then in the thick of battle’. The figures given for the day’s fighting by the BBC were a vast exaggeration, the result of a process of official inflation and the confusion of battle, and the true ‘scores’ of both sides would not emerge until much later. But the rest of the picture is accurate enough.

  The depredations of the Battle of France and the air fighting at Dunkirk had taken a heavy toll of Fighter Command, but after the fall of France in June 1940 there was a breathing space of a few weeks. Hitler wanted to give Britain time to contemplate its isolation, and the consequent apparent hopelessness of its situation. It would surely then come to its senses and sue for peace. Besides, the army and the Luftwaffe deserved a rest after their heroic exertions. The lull gave Dowding an opportunity to reshuffle his squadrons, sending the most depleted off to rest, and to absorb new pilots and rehearse the command-and-control system that was vital to success when the Germans came.

  Looking back, Dowding admitted that ‘it is difficult to fix the exact date when the Battle of Britain can be said to have begun. Operations of various kinds merged into one another almost insensibly.’ There were grounds for choosing 10 August 1940 when the Luftwaffe began full-scale attacks on objectives on land. Instead, he chose, ‘somewhat arbitrarily’, 10 July, when German formations began hitting convoys in the Channel. His reasoning was that ‘the weight and scale of the attack indicates that the primary object was rather to bring our Fighters to battle than to destroy the hulls and cargoes of the small ships engaged in the coastal trade.’3

  The intention then was to drag Fighter Command into a battle of attrition. Thus, Hitler could continue to exert military pressure on Britain in a measured fashion in keeping with his aim of cowing the country into submission without the necessity for invasion and conquest.

  ‘Stuffy’ Dowding’s personality sat oddly with the dashing image of the outfit he commanded. Trenchard, with whom he clashed in the early days, branded him a ‘dismal Jimmy’. His fellow aviators on the Western Front also found the non-drinking, non-smoking loner hard-going. In 1918 he married Clarice, the widow of a soldier killed in the war, and the following year they had a son, Derek, who went to Cranwell and flew with 74 Squadron during the Battl
e. In 1920 Clarice died after a short illness. Dowding moved in with his father, then with his sister. He devoted himself to work, becoming the RAF’s Director of Training in 1926 and working his way up to take over Fighter Command when it was formed in 1936. Behind the buttoned-up facade lurked an inquiring mind. ‘Since I was a child, I have never accepted ideas purely because they were orthodox,’ he once said. He proved it by countering the prevailing, Trenchardian, pro-bomber view that reigned at the Air Ministry, and he fought fiercely to ensure there were enough Spitfires, Hurricanes and men to fly them when the great test came. For all his stiffness, he felt emotions intensely. It was Dowding who gave currency to the name by which his pilots became known and loved, in a letter he wrote to ‘My Dear Fighter Boys’ in June 1940, telling them ‘how proud I am of you and the way you have fought since the “Blitzkrieg” started.’ Later his affection for them manifested itself in a fashion many regarded as cranky. He was a keen spiritualist and announced that he had been visited by the ghosts of departed pilots.

  In the summer of 1940 he was fifty-eight years old and had been due to retire in 1939. In view of the looming crisis the Air Ministry had asked him to stay on until March 1940, then to July, then to October. Then Churchill retired him. This was seen by himself and his supporters as a slight. But his time was more than up and anyway he was worn out.

  That summer of 1940 he exercised superb control over his squadrons, making countless vital decisions, almost all of them correct. He was later criticized for not throwing more of his reserves against the Luftwaffe at an early stage. The debate is sterile. The point is that he won the battle. He was helped very effectively by Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, commanding 11 Group, which covered London and the South East and bore the brunt of the German assault. The forty-four-year-old New Zealander gave personal encouragement to his men, flying round the bases in his own Hurricane, listening as much as talking.

  At the start of July Dowding had fifty-nine squadrons available. Thirty were equipped with Hurricanes, nineteen with Spitfires, eight with Blenheims and two with the Boulton-Paul Defiant, a hybrid which, although it had its uses, was hopeless as a day fighter. Most of the squadrons had between fifteen and twenty pilots ‘on state’. Many of them, though, were exhausted and some units had been savagely reduced – 73 Squadron, for example, had only seven pilots. There were also serious shortages of aircraft. The ravages of the early summer were still being repaired. Twenty-two units had fewer than twelve fighters. The ability to fight a war of attrition depended on the aircraft factories maintaining a steady flow of replacements. This was possible thanks to the existence of the shadow factory system – another example of British foresight, and also of the energy of the Minister for Aircraft Production, the Canadian newspaper magnate and Churchill crony Max Beaverbrook. By the end of the battle, production was more than keeping pace with losses.

  The efficiency of the command-and-control structure was a crucial factor if Fighter Command was to be nursed through its recovery period. It operated like a nervous system which conveyed information from the extremities to the centre, where data was analysed and action initiated. The nerve endings were the radar stations and Observer Corps posts, which picked up raiders and noted their type, numbers, height and direction. The brain was Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Priory, an elegant mansion perched on the heights above north London at Stanmore in Middlesex. The arms and hands were the group and sector stations.

  The Bentley Priory filter room would ascertain whether the aircraft were friend or foe and deal with the inevitable inconsistencies in the reports. The processed details were then passed to the Operations Room next door, where the raid was plotted on a large map table which provided a striking visual representation of the threat.

  At the same time the information was flashed to the relevant groups – 10 Group (South West), 11 Group (South East), 12 Group (Central England and Wales), 13 Group (the North and Scotland) – which had their own ops rooms and maps. The maps were constantly updated by plotters wearing headphones. Using what looked like a long-handled croupier’s rake they pushed arrows across the squares, each marked with an ‘F’ for friendly, ‘H’ for hostile and ‘X’ for unknown, and colour-coded to show the time of the report. When the system was working smoothly it was reckoned to be possible to get fighters airborne within six minutes of a raid being detected.

  Once an attack was confirmed, the controller of the sector or sectors affected would scramble his fighters and guide them to meet the attackers. The ideal interception was from above, when the German fighters which escorted the bomber fleets were at the limit of their endurance and with little fuel to spare for dog-fighting, and before the bombardment began. If the defenders took off too early they might themselves be running low on petrol by the time the raiders appeared, or back on the ground. Too late and they would fail to disrupt the attack. Once the enemy was sighted and the controller heard the cry of ‘Tally Ho!’ the pilots were left alone.

  Controllers also had to consider the limits of pilots and machines. Time was needed for men to recuperate and for aircraft to be patched up. To manage this, commanders maintained their squadrons at various stages of availability. ‘Released’ meant that usually they were free to leave the station for short periods. ‘Available’ required them to be ready to take off at ten, fifteen, thirty or sixty minutes notice. At ‘Readiness’ they had to be able to run to their aircraft and take off within five minutes.

  ‘Readiness meant that you were sitting in the dispersal hut togged up in your “Mae West” life vest, your aeroplane all ready for instant departure,’ remembered Flying Officer John Young of 249 Squadron.4 ‘Standby meant that you were sitting in the cockpit with your helmet on, your hood slid back, listening on the radio for start-up.’ For some the hanging around was the most nerve-wracking part of the experience. ‘The most stressful thing in the Battle of Britain was sitting at readiness, waiting for the scramble telephone to ring,’ said Sergeant Cyril ‘Bam’ Bamberger of 610 and 41 Squadrons. ‘I couldn’t relax. You tried to read a book or you tried to play draughts or you pretended to doze. The phone would ring and immediately you jumped up, but it was probably that the NAAFI van was coming with tea. Then you flopped back and tried to relax again.’5

  When dawn broke on 10 July 1940 the Channel was smothered with cloud and rain drenched the sandbagged Observer Corps posts on clifftops and headlands. Behind them the radar stations probed the skies for intruders. The station at West Beckham on the Norfolk coast was the first to register a blip on one of the cathode-ray tube displays. At 7.30 a.m. pilots of 66 Squadron, based at Coltishall in Essex, got the order to scramble and three of its Spitfires took off into the wet skies. Led by Pilot Officer Charles Cooke, the section climbed fast through the rain and cloud and at 10,000 feet broke through into brilliant sunshine. Cooke was given a vector bearing, which led him to where the enemy aircraft had been last spotted. At 8.15 a.m. the intruder came into sight. It was a lone Dornier 17 bomber, probably on a reconnaissance mission to report back on the weather over the coast. One by one the Spitfires peeled off to attack. As they swooped down, the pilot of the Dornier threw his aircraft around the sky in a desperate attempt to avoid the stream of fire floating towards him and to give his gunners a chance to shoot back. One bullet from the Dornier’s 7.9 mm machine guns smashed through Cooke’s windscreen, flooding the cockpit with freezing air.

  Then one fighter, attacking from underneath, found the belly of the bomber with its eight Browning machine guns. Smoke began to spout from the Dornier. It went into a banking turn and glided smoothly down, until it struck the grey seas off Yarmouth to be swallowed, swiftly, by the waves. All four crew were killed. The Spitfires returned to base, the victors of the first small clash of the battle.

  It turned into a busy day. There were eight convoys at sea. The biggest, code-named ‘Bread’, was rounding the North Foreland at about 10 a.m. when it was spotted by another Dornier reconnaissance aircraft – this one accompanied by thi
rty Messerschmitt 109 fighters. These were the Luftwaffe’s quickest, nimblest aeroplanes, the equal of the Spitfire and faster than the Hurricane. Their objective, apart from protecting the lone recce plane, was to pick a fight with the British defenders. Fighter Command obliged. Six Spitfires of 74 Squadron took off from Manston, perched high on the North Foreland, and raced to intercept. They concentrated first on the bomber – a mistake. The Me 109s pounced and a series of wheeling dogfights developed that brought the aircraft over Margate, where the citizens got the first of many ringside seats at an air battle. Two Spitfires were damaged, but their pilots were unhurt and managed to make it back to Manston. None of the Messerschmitts was shot down and the Dornier limped back across the Channel to make a crash-landing.

  Historians have tended to divide the Battle of Britain into three phases, with the first period characterized by attacks on shipping, the second on Fighter Command infrastructure targets, and the third on cities and London in particular. This suggests a method and concentration in the German approach that was, in reality, quite lacking. On that day, 10 July 1940, a large German formation also bombed Swansea, damaging ships, railways, a power station and a munitions factory, and killing thirty people. Among the pilots that launched a fruitless attempt to catch them was Wing Commander Ira Jones, Mick Mannock’s old comrade and now in charge of the training airfield at Worthy Down. He took off in a Hawker Henley, used for towing targets, armed with only a Very signal pistol, which he discharged eloquently but uselessly at the raiders.

  The biggest clash, however, was over the ‘Bread’ convoy. At 1.30 p.m. radar noticed what seemed to be a large cluster of aircraft building up over the Pas de Calais. Twenty minutes later the sky above the convoy was crowded with hostile aircraft – nearly thirty Dornier bombers protected by sixty Me 110 twin-engined fighter bombers and Me109s. The convoy was being shadowed by a protective patrol of only six Hurricanes from 32 Squadron. They called for help. The first to ride to the rescue were Hurricanes from 111 Squadron, who attacked the bomber formation head-on. It was a very risky tactic, but the effect was devastating. ‘You could see the front of the aircraft crumple,’ said Flying Officer Ben Bowring of 111 Squadron. The shock tended to cause the pilots to break formation, losing the limited mutual protection it gave, leaving individual aircraft easier prey for the fighters. ‘A head-on attack did far more to destroy the morale of German bombers than anything else,’ said Flying Officer Brian Kingcome of 92 Squadron. ‘It upset the poor old pilot so much that he turned tail. When he was sitting and couldn’t see the attack, and he was protected by a nice sheet of metal behind him and he could hear his gunners firing away, he was in a much more relaxed state of mind than when we were coming straight at him and there was nothing between himself and the guns.’6