Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  Soon squadrons from five airfields had answered the call and a huge dogfight involving 100 aircraft developed, by far the biggest seen in the war or indeed ever. Every pilot was on his own and co-ordination was impossible. Flying Officer Henry Ferriss arrived with 111 Squadron just as the first bombs began to plunge around the merchantmen. ‘It was a thrilling sight I must confess,’ he told a BBC Radio interviewer. ‘I looked down on the tiny ships below and saw two long lines of broken water where the first bombs had fallen.’7 Ferris led his flight in an attack on the second wave of Dorniers. ‘We went screaming down and pumped lead into our targets. We shook them up quite a bit.’

  As the formation split up he latched onto an Me 109 that was heading for home, chasing it far out to sea. It was a dangerous thing to do, inviting the possibility of being ‘bounced’ from above by an unseen enemy and with very little chance of rescue if he survived the attack and managed to bail out. This day, his luck was in. The German ‘was going very fast and I had to do 400 miles an hour to catch him up. Then, before I could fire, he flattened out to no more than fifty feet above the sea level and went streaking for home.’ Ferriss managed to get in five short bursts, ‘all aimed very deliberately. Suddenly the Messerschmitt’s port wing dropped down. The starboard wing went up, and then in a flash his nose went down and he was gone. He simply vanished into the sea.’

  It was only then that Ferriss noticed a stinging sensation in his leg. He had been hit and now there were two Me109s on his tail. They followed him back to the coast, launching several attacks and smashing his port aileron. Just before landfall they turned away and he managed to touch down safely. He was given a fresh aeroplane and took off on another sortie. Ferriss, who had been a medical student before joining the RAF in 1937, did not survive the Battle. Five weeks later he was killed in a collision with a bomber while executing a head-on attack.

  At the end of the month, Britain was winning the battle of attrition. Seventy-seven RAF aircraft had been lost of all types, and sixty-seven pilots killed. The Luftwaffe had lost 216 aircraft and 495 aircrew. The figures were not as comforting as they seemed. The Germans, initially at least, had numbers on their side. They had their huge bomber fleet and a fighter strength that was slightly larger than the RAF’s. Each force had its job to do. The bombers bombed. The fighters protected them. The Fighter Boys had a double duty. As well as trying to shoot down the bombers, they had to protect themselves – and sometimes each other – from the fighters who were striving to destroy them.

  In August the strain increased. The Germans switched tactics. Instead of trying to draw the enemy into battle by attacking convoys, they now concentrated on trying to blitz the bases from which Fighter Command operated. Hitler had given up hope of a negotiated settlement after his public ‘appeal to reason’ was rejected. Under his orders, Goering prepared a maximum effort, a knockout assault to gain air superiority over Britain that would either force surrender or clear the way for invasion. The attack would come – after a postponement due to bad weather – on 13 August, codenamed Adlertag, Eagle Day. The day dawned cloudy and rainy, but improvement was predicted and operations were scheduled for early afternoon. Some units never received the order and took off anyway, bombers flying without fighters and fighters without bombers, confusing both defenders and attackers.

  By mid-afternoon the confusion and the weather had cleared. At 3.30 p.m. radar spotted a huge force advancing across the Channel from the direction of Cherbourg along a forty-mile front. There were nearly 300 aircraft, the largest formation yet seen, many of them Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bombers. Eighty Hurricanes and Spitfires from 10 Group bases rose up to meet them. The Spitfires of 609 Squadron – an Auxiliary unit drawn from the gentry of the West Riding of Yorkshire, based at Warmwell in Dorset – had plenty of time to gain the height needed for them to swoop down out of the sun on a formation of Stukas. The dive-bombers were slow and cumbersome and weighed down with bombs, and they made easy meat for the delighted pilots. ‘Thirteen Spitfires left Warmwell for a memorable Tea-time party over Lyme Bay and an unlucky day for the species Ju87,’ wrote Flying Officer John Dundas in his diary. ‘No less than fourteen suffered destruction or damage.’8 The true number was five destroyed, but the punishment inflicted on the Luftwaffe that day was heavy. They had lost forty-five aircraft, the RAF thirteen.

  Most of the British casualties were suffered by squadrons attacking the escorts. No. 238 Squadron, based at Middle Wallop, had four pilots killed in fighting two days previously. Now they lost another two, with a third shot down and badly burned. All had been the victims of Me109s. The following day the unit was withdrawn from the battle to lick its wounds in the relative quiet of St Eval in Cornwall. One of the surviving pilots, Sergeant Eric Bann, wrote to his parents: ‘I am afraid that our duty on the front line has told its tale on our systems. Our engagements have been really hectic . . . we are all up and down with nerve trouble and have been sent to the rest camp . . . just Gordon Batt and I remain among the sergeants and many of our officers have gone.’9 Bann lived until the end of September. His Hurricane was damaged in combat over Fareham. He baled out, but his parachute failed. His friend Gordon Batt survived the war.

  Morale would decide the contest. The defenders were blessed with many advantages. They had radar and, by and large, sufficient aircraft and pilots to put the boon of early warning to maximum use. There were, for sure, periodic crises when there were shortages of men and machine. But there was an underlying strength in the system and the production lines of both fighters and pilots were picking up speed. However, the dismal example of France had shown that equipment and numbers did not decide a battle. The crucial question was: did the pilots have the skill and the nerve to keep going? By now they had the skill. In air-fighting you learned fast or died. Collectively, pilots did not achieve anything like the same degree of proficiency. In any squadron it was soon clear that there were some who had a sharper edge, whose reactions were a nanosecond quicker, whose eyesight was keener and whose determination a little stronger, which put them above the others. A minority of pilots shot down a majority of the enemy aircraft. Most pilots shot down nothing at all. It was resolve and esprit that counted. The Battle of Britain proved that the British pilots had more of it than their opponents.

  They enjoyed one enormous practical and psychological benefit: they were fighting over their own territory. That meant that pilots who baled out could, if they escaped serious injury, be back in action in days or in some cases hours. Crashed aircraft were patched up and recycled by special recovery teams. Surviving Luftwaffe aircrew, on the other hand, or downed but repairable aircraft, were lost to the German war effort for ever.

  The fact that the battle was fought was over the land they were defending also gave the pilots a huge motivational boost. The writings and recollections of those who took part are full of quiet patriotism. In the case of the many pilots from the Dominions who took part in the battle and who had never seen the Old Country before they came to fight for it, the loyalty was to an ideal more than a reality. This patriotic mood seemed to affect everybody. An extrovert character like Pilot Officer Crelin ‘Bogle’ Bodie of 66 Squadron grew poetical when describing his return to Coltishall at the end of a day in which he had shot down four Dornier 17s. ‘I flew to the coast and set course for home. Passing low over the fields and villages, rivers and towns, I looked down at labourers working, children at play beside a big red-brick schoolhouse, a bomb crater two streets away; little black heads in the streets, turning to white blobs as they heard my engine and looked up. I thought of workers in shops and factories, of stretcher-parties and ARP wardens. I hoped the “All Clear” had gone. I was tired. I’d done my best for them.’10

  Bodie, who was later killed in a flying accident, was writing about the events of 15 September 1940. This was subsequently taken as the point when the battle turned in Britain’s favour – though it did not feel like that to the pilots. The Luftwaffe had spent August following the sensible course
of battering Fighter Command on the ground. Six of the seven sector stations in 11 Group had been bombed almost to the point of collapse and five of the advanced airfields were severely damaged. In the air, just over 300 RAF pilots had been lost and only 260 had arrived to replace them, and the factories were struggling to keep replacement aircraft flowing to the squadrons. This did not mean that Fighter Command was on the point of collapse. The system was strong and even if the 11 Group stations had been knocked out there were other lines of defence to fall back on in the West and Midlands.

  As it was, miraculously, the pressure lifted. On 7 September the Luftwaffe changed direction. The 11 Group bases were left alone. The target now was London. The decision was based on Goering’s natural impatience and the belief (stubbornly maintained, despite the evidence that the RAF was still well-stocked with aircraft) that Fighter Command was on its last legs. That hot, sunny Saturday the Blitz began. Just before 4.45 that afternoon the sirens sounded and soon great fleets of bombers were laying waste the East End. Twenty-three squadrons raced to catch them and an epic dogfight involving more than 1,000 aircraft developed over the city.

  The raids went on all night and Londoners were at last plunged into the long-anticipated reality of aerial bombardment. For the RAF, however, the German tactical switch allowed its bases and infrastructure to be repaired rapidly. The squadrons had been unable to inflict much damage on the raiders. Only thirty-eight enemy aircraft were shot down, while RAF losses totalled twenty-eight, with nineteen pilots killed. As the raids continued, the defenders refined their responses. On 15 September, when the Luftwaffe attempted a repeat of the great attack of eight days before, Fighter Command was ready and waiting. For Pilot Officer Tom ‘Ginger’ Neil, a tall, elegant twenty-one-year-old who had joined through the volunteer reserve, it was ‘a very special day’. After a frustrating morning when he failed to shoot anything down, he and 249 Squadron were directed at a group of Dorniers flying over Maidstone on their way to London. ‘I found myself behind a Dornier and as I was firing at it, the crew suddenly bailed out,’ he recalled. ‘I was so close behind it that as one of the bodies came out, I ducked in the aeroplane, thinking, “My God, he’s going to hit me!”’ His interest was deflected by the swarm of German fighters who ‘set about me furiously and I defended myself’. Then, as he and so many other pilots were to remark, the violence suddenly evaporated. ‘You’re surrounded by aeroplanes like bees round a honey pot, and suddenly everything is quiet and there are no aeroplanes. It happens instantaneously.’

  Then ahead, only a mile away, another target appeared: a lone Dornier was heading down the Estuary. ‘It took some time for me to catch up, because it was going in a slight dive. Eventually I caught it up and I suddenly found that a Spitfire was to my left. And thereafter it was fairly straightforward. A single aeroplane on its own, two of us. We took it in turns to fire. It went down and down and down, out to sea, across a convoy of ships.’ Both fighters were out of ammunition. Neil thought, ‘Oh God, we’re going to lose this one, he’s going to get home.’ They flew alongside their victim, close enough to ‘read all the letters on the cockpit and I could see the damage that had been done. And then it got slower and slower and slower and the nose came up and up and up, and suddenly the tail hit the sea and it splashed down and I felt satisfaction, total satisfaction.’ As they flew back, ‘over the convoy, the ships all blew their whistles’.11

  By the end of the day the same satisfaction was being felt all across Fighter Command. Wreckage of German aircraft and burned bodies lay in fields, lanes and streets all over south-east England. The figure of destroyed aircraft was given: 183 – a considerable exaggeration, as the true figure was nearer 60. RAF losses were light: 25 aircraft lost and 13 pilots killed.

  This mauling did not cause the Luftwaffe to abandon its attacks. It had learned the lesson, however, that air superiority was not achievable, and the Spitfires and Hurricanes that came out to attack them were not – as German intelligence reports persisted in claiming – the last scrapings of the RAF barrel. By the end of October the daytime bomber attacks ceased and the Germans concentrated on the marginal policy of bringing about a collapse of morale by nocturnal blitz.

  Thus ended one of the great battles of history. The pilots had not simply blunted Hitler’s invasion plans, which were half-hearted at the best of times. Their achievement was more strategically significant – and glorious – than that.

  The victory lit a beacon of hope. This was the first time since German territorial expansion began in 1938 that Hitler’s forces had suffered a major defeat. Out of this came practical consequences that would profoundly affect the course of the war. The most crucial effect was that – as Churchill always intended – our performance persuaded the Americans that we were worthy partners in the event of them joining the conflict. It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, of course, that pushed America into the war. But it was the survival of Britain as a base that allowed the United States to fight in Europe.

  There was also a moral aspect to the Battle of Britain that reached beyond mere realpolitik. It was a great triumph of the spirit that exalted the value of doing the right thing, no matter how painful and costly that might have seemed at the time. That summer, the British people were truly as they liked to imagine themselves – unperturbed, generous-spirited, heroic in a modest sort of way. And it was the RAF, the pilots in the air and the crews supporting them on the ground, who had led the nation in this finest hour.

  Chapter 11

  Flying Blind

  In Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 there is a passage that no one now remembers. While praising the fighter pilots, he also emphasized that ‘we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.’

  Almost every assertion in this statement was untrue. The RAF’s navigational ability was embryonic and targets were located as much by luck as judgement. The aiming of bombs was rudimentary and the damage they inflicted trifling. Only the parts of the Prime Minister’s speech referring to the regularity of operations and the losses suffered were correct.

  For most of its short life, bombing had been the RAF’s raison d’être. When the campaign was finally launched at the start of the Battle of France it was a severe disappointment and continued to be so for another two years. Culpability lay not with the crews but with the aircraft they flew and the navigational devices, bomb sights and bombs available to them. The senior officers who had talked up bombing as a war-winning device must also take some of the blame.

  The start of the Blitz generated a hatred of Germany that had previously been latent or absent. On 14 November 1940 the city of Coventry was devastated with more than 40,000 homes destroyed or damaged, 554 people killed and nearly a thousand seriously injured. The attack created an upsurge in popular pressure for retaliation and revenge. Before Coventry there were some – perhaps many – who felt it was unwise to provoke the Germans. Afterwards most shared the view of the young man who told a Mass Observation reporter: ‘We’re fighting gangsters, so we’ve got to be gangsters ourselves. We’ve been gentlemen too long.’1 From now on the bombing of Germany had the backing of the nation, even when everybody knew what that meant for the townsfolk of Cologne, Hamburg and the Ruhr, names that soon became very familiar from the radio and press bulletins.

  Bombing also satisfied another need. It showed that Britain could still do something, even when it had no soldiers in the field to face the enemy. Allied armies would later pursue German armies through North Africa, Italy, France and the Lowlands. But for much of the war the Strategic Air Campaign, as it became known, was the only way of striking directly at the enemy’s territory.

&nbs
p; It was generally accepted that Germany would have to be defeated at home if the Nazi plague was to be eradicated. Bombing was a good – and for the time being the only – way to start. Churchill summed it up in a phrase: ‘The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.’

  Some of the flood of young men clamouring to join the RAF were glad to be channelled off to Bomber Command. ‘I thought that the defence of Great Britain was over and the next step was to smash the Germans up,’ said Noble Frankland, a young Oxford undergraduate and member of the University Air Squadron. ‘I was quite keen to take part in smashing up the Germans, which I think was a fairly common sort of instinct, but I actually had the opportunity to do it.’2

  Others, however, brought up like so many would-be aviators on the Biggles novels of Captain W. E. Johns, and inspired by the deeds of the Fighter Boys, longed to be flying Spitfires and Hurricanes. After the Battle of Britain the call for fighter pilots dwindled. The demands of the Strategic Air Campaign meant the majority of men who flew with the RAF in the war did so with Bomber Command.