Yet despite this, numbers of German Me 109s still roughly matched those of their British counterparts. It was true that Fighter Command pilots held some home advantages. They had their early-warning system and if they survived being shot down, they could return to fly again. Nonetheless, it was the British fighters who had the harder task. First and foremost, they had to shoot down German bombers, but at the same time they had to try to avoid being shot down themselves by German fighters. But although a bomber presented a bigger target, it was harder to destroy than a fighter, not least because most bombers had plenty of armour plating. A Heinkel 111, for example, had some 600 lb of armour plating; a Ju 88 was even better protected. With just fifteen seconds of bullets rather than fifty-five and no high-explosive cannon, British pilots often found they were short on firepower. It meant the pilots often had to keep their fingers on the firing button for long periods of time to achieve any results. This required keeping the aircraft fairly steady, which in turn made it more vulnerable to enemy fire. Also, every bullet fired at a bomber was a bullet that could not then be used against an attacking Me 109 or 110.
Nor did it help that so little time had been spent on gunnery. Both sides had neglected this aspect of training, but at least the Germans had begun the summer understanding that the best results were achieved by taking the enemy by surprise and hitting him from close range. In May, Fighter Command was setting the harmonization range at 400 yards. By July, 250 yards had become the prescribed distance. Pete Brothers had his guns harmonized even closer than that, even though, strictly speaking, it was against RAF rules. He was not alone; many of the more experienced pilots did the same. ‘You needed to get up jolly close,’ he says. ‘Fifty yards if you could; as close as possible and then you really did hammer it.’ Tom Neil soon reset his guns at 150 yards.
Getting in close had now filtered down to the training of new pilots coming through, who were now told to get in behind the enemy and shoot them from dead astern. In early August, Sergeant Jimmy Corbin had been sent to the fighter OTU at Hawarden. A 23-year-old metalwork and maths teacher from Tonbridge in Kent, Jimmy had been hooked on flying ever since seeing Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus as a boy. Refused entry into the RAF at seventeen, he had later, in December 1938, been accepted into the RAFVR, although because of the short provision of training places it was not until November, more than two months after the outbreak of war, that he was finally called up to begin his EFT course.
Nine months later, he was at his OTU training to go operational on Spitfires. There was no more mention of ordered formation attacks, although he did practise flying vic formations, which struck him as counter-productive. ‘It was bloody silly,’ he says. ‘If you are flying in a really tight formation, wing inside wing, there was only one person looking for the enemy and that was the commander.’ The course highlight was the gunnery training, which involved air-to-ground firing only and against fixed targets. That was it, and was no preparation at all for the mad, frenetic air-to-air combat that was to come.
‘We couldn’t shoot for toffee,’ says Tom Neil. After the war, he attended the School of Land Air Warfare and became associated with operational research. ‘It was deduced that of every hundred bullets fired by us,’ says Tom, ‘ninety-seven missed.’
Pete Brothers had the unfortunate experience of being shot at by one of the squadron’s new boys. Chasing an Me 109, Pete banked only to see in his mirror that his number two’s guns were firing across him. ‘I was a bit rude to him,’ says Pete. ‘Told him to desist!’ Back on the ground, Pete hauled him off for some one-to-one gunnery practice, and took him off ops for five days. ‘That was a great blow to his pride,’ says Pete, ‘but it taught him a sharp lesson.’
Some people mastered deflection shooting, but very few – the leading aces only. It was no accident that the most successful fighter pilots so far – men like Dolfo Galland, Mölders and Helmut Wick – were Condor Legion veterans, with a bucketload of combat experience behind them already. Dolfo Galland was also a fine shot on the ground; he understood the principles of deflection shooting and was a skilled marksman.
Sometimes aircraft came down because of a catastrophic mechanical failure. The Hurricane, for example, also had a habit of leaking oil from a seal around the propeller. ‘It would cover your windscreen,’ says Tom Neil, ‘and you couldn’t see out.’ The canopy of both the Spitfire and the Hurricane also tended to steam up if they lost altitude quickly. How many pilots were lost because they could not see properly will never be known, but it was certainly a proportion. Others were hit by stray bullets streaking across the sky as aircraft tangled and turned in a dogfight.
Without doubt, however, most people were shot down without having ever seen the enemy. ‘It was always the one you didn’t see,’ says Pete Brothers, ‘that shot you down.’ This was how 609 Squadron lost so many pilots in July; by turning the tables they then got their own back once the August battles began.
This was why altitude was the most important tactical advantage of all for the attacker. With height, a pilot could position himself in the best possible position to attack – that is, with the sun behind him, making him blind to the aircraft below. The Me 109, above all other aircraft, was ideal for this. A pilot could swoop down, hammer an unsuspecting flight of Spitfires or Hurricanes with a big punch, then quickly climb away again out of danger and repeat the process.
In contrast with the men of Fighter Command, all the Luftwaffe fighters had to do was shoot down Spitfires and Hurricanes, and they had the very best aircraft with the right armament to do the job. They could – and should – have been winning hands down, but by denying their natural advantages Göring was effectively forcing them to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. They were becoming the hunted rather than the hunters.
Their primary role was no longer to shoot down British fighters, but to protect the bombers. Fighters, designed to be offensive weapons, were being made to play a defensive role instead. In their panic – and because of their lack of tactical understanding – the Luftwaffe High Command failed to realize that by shooting down Spitfires and Hurricanes their fighters would have been protecting the bombers. It was an unforgivable mistake.
42
Breaking Point
IN CHURCHILL’S SPEECH to the House of Commons on 20 August, he repeated the line he had muttered to Ismay a few days earlier about how much was owed to ‘the few’, although he was careful to include all those in Bomber Command. ‘On no part of the Royal Air Force,’ he added, ‘does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers.’ Certainly their losses were proportionally the highest, as Arthur Hughes was uncomfortably aware. Since 10 May, Bomber Command alone had lost 693 aircraft, and that included 191 since the fall of France. Just in August, 235 men had been lost, 150 of whom had been killed, with the rest either wounded or now POWs. The Prime Minister also pointed out that the current battle against Germany was different from the 1914–18 war in other ways. ‘The whole of the warring nations are engaged,’ he said, ‘not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere. The trenches are dug in the towns and streets. Every village is fortified. Every road is barred. The front line runs through the factories. The workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage.’
Yet there were also many risking their lives at sea. There were men like Joe Steele on board Darthema and Andrew Begg on Icarus still carrying out anti-invasion patrols and sweeping for, and laying, mines. There were the men still manning the colliers that were hacking their way around the British Isles. And there were also the many men daring to cross the Atlantic to bring vital food, supplies and armaments to Britain. Now even neutral shipping was no longer safe; on 17 August, Hitler had declared a total blockade of Britain. From now on any ship steaming in the direction of the British Isles was liable to be attacked and sunk by the U-boats.
With the Western Approaches still largely undefended, the U-boats were cont
inuing to have a field day. Thirty-eight ships and 195,825 tons of shipping were lost in July to German submarines, while in August that figure rose to fifty-six ships and 267,618 tons. These were crippling losses, and on top of that the Germans now had a few precious four-engine long-range reconnaissance aircraft – not the ill-fated He 177, but the Focke-Wulf 200, or Condor, as it was known – which were now operating from the French Atlantic coast. Not only were they proving superb ship and convoy spotters, but they could also attack shipping too. The Condors managed to sink a further fifteen vessels worth 53,283 tons during August. Against them, Britain had almost nothing – not until 16 August was a U-boat damaged by an aerial depth charge dropped by a Coastal Command aircraft.
Günther Prien and U-47 had left Kiel on 27 August for their ninth combat patrol, and, although they had not been at sea since July, were soon back to their successful best, sinking a 7,000-ton ship on 2 September, another one two days later and three ships on 7 September. It augured well for another bumper month, for getting ready to join U-47 and U-65 already out in the Atlantic were twelve more U-boats, including seven now based at Lorient in France, which meant saving a week’s sailing time to reach the Atlantic, which in turn enabled the U-boats to remain hunting out at sea for longer.
Admiral Dönitz’s delight at his U-boats’ continued success was, however, tempered by his frustration at the still small numbers of ocean-going submarines. ‘The results we could have obtained during these months had we had more boats,’ he wrote, ‘are obvious.’ Hitler had vowed to build hundreds of U-boats but these had been empty promises. The army and Luftwaffe, especially, had taken precedence over the navy when it came to supplies of steel and other materials. It was soul-destroying for Dönitz. Typical of the kind of production bottlenecks that were hampering all areas of German war production, twenty-three ocean-going U-boats had been delayed because of a shortage of torpedo tubes. Dönitz remained absolutely convinced that his U-boats could bring Britain to her knees, but he envisaged being able to send a hundred or more U-boats into the Atlantic at any one time, rather than between nine and twelve, the best he could manage at present.
In fact, had Dönitz been able to send triple or even double the amounts of U-boats into the Atlantic, the inevitable losses would have been hard to sustain. As it was, they were sinking more ships than were being newly produced by British shipyards. ‘Losses have been very heavy,’ it was soberly reported in the War Cabinet’s weekly review on 29 August. The next evening, Churchill confessed to Jock Colville that one of the things that was really beginning to worry him was the ‘startling shipping losses in the North-West Approaches, where lay the seeds of something that “might be mortal” if allowed to get out of hand’. In fact, shipping losses were about to get even worse. Dönitz’s band of brothers were about to bring new tactics to bear – tactics that would bring even greater destruction upon the cold, grey waters of the Atlantic.
In the towns, villages and fields of southern England, people continued to watch the aerial battles with a sense of excitement and wonderment. Swirling con-trails were left high in the deep blue summer sky, and occasionally what had been a glinting pinprick one minute would become a thrillingly low-level chase the next. Douglas Mann had a friend from school staying and they spent their days helping out on the farm, watching the aerial battles and collecting spent cartridge cases that used to clatter down from above. One day, the fighting seemed to get a little too close. They were loading trusses of hay but with machine guns going off and aircraft falling in flames they decided to take cover behind the hayrick. The horse was getting frightened and restless so they let him free then took cover once more. ‘We crouched behind the hayrick,’ says Douglas, ‘while assorted bits of metal came down from above.’
John Wilson had also returned to Kent at the end of Marlborough’s summer term, but unlike Douglas he had now left school. Still seventeen, he nonetheless offered his services to a retired admiral who was organizing the LDV in Hawkhurst. Given an armband and a rifle with five rounds, he spent a number of nights sitting on the top of a hill watching out for parachutists. ‘Very dull,’ he says. ‘No roadblocks.’ More fun was taking to the roof of his parents’ house armed with an air rifle. One time a Messerschmitt roared over so low he had to duck. ‘That chap went so bloody fast,’ he says, ‘I didn’t even have the rifle to my shoulder.’
There had been few opportunities for taking pot-shots at low-flying Messerschmitts between 19 and 23 August, however. The bad weather had been a much-needed breather for RAF Fighter Command. Airfields were further patched up and squadrons rotated, exhausted pilots had a chance to catch up on some sleep, while groundcrews and CRUs performed miracles in repairing damaged Spitfires and Hurricanes. And while Göring was addressing his commanders at Carinhall on 19 August, Air Vice-Marshal Park also took the opportunity to circulate new instructions to his ground controllers in 11 Group. High on the list were orders not to venture far from land – gliding distance from the coast was the absolute limit. ‘We cannot afford to lose pilots,’ he wrote, ‘through forced landings in the sea.’ As a rule of thumb, Park had ordered that Spitfires be directed against enemy fighters and Hurricanes against the bombers, although now, against mass attacks inland, only a minimum number of squadrons were to engage the enemy fighters. The main object was to attack the bombers. Controllers were also not to be shy about calling on 12 Group to help patrol 11 Group airfields should all the squadrons around London be airborne. There was also encouragement for 303 Kociuszko Squadron, which was to be allowed to patrol over inland airfields, especially when the ‘older squadrons’ were on the ground refuelling.
The Luftwaffe was back with a vengeance on Saturday, 24 August, however. Manston was so heavily bombed that it was decided necessary to evacuate all administrative personnel permanently, while nine people were killed and ten wounded on an attack on North Weald. The next day, Warmwell was one of the main targets. Bee Beamont was just coming back from a forty-eight-hour leave and drove straight around the perimeter track to see how ‘B’ Flight were getting on before heading into Exeter to change. But no sooner had he stepped into the dispersal hut just after 5 p.m. than the squadron was scrambled. Hastily putting on his Mae West and harness over his No. 1 uniform, he dashed to his Hurricane and took off along with the rest of the pilots, some sixteen aircraft in all.
As they hurried as fast as they could towards Warmwell, Bee suddenly spotted eight little dots, which developed into twin-engine bombers. Then another five appeared, then another six and a further five, before they realized there were as many as a hundred plus. Desperately scanning the skies above for enemy fighters, the squadron tore into the leading bombers, Bee opening fire on a Do 17, which, much to his satisfaction, rolled over after just one burst.
Also diving down upon the formation was 609 Squadron. David Crook was almost last in line. ‘I shall never forget seeing the long line of Spitfires ahead,’ he noted, ‘sweeping down and curling round at terrific speed to strike right into the middle of the German formation. It was superb!’ With the twin advantage of height and the sun behind them, they were in the perfect position, and helped to split up much of the German formation. David chased after an Me 110 but dived too fast and in the heat of the moment forgot to throttle back and overshot badly. Instead of the Zerstörer being knocked down, the German rear-gunner managed to plant a line of bullets across David’s wing. ‘I learnt not to be over enthusiastic after this show,’ noted David, ‘and always took my time. Much better – and safer!’
Meanwhile, Bee Beamont was considering whether to use the speed of his dive to make a split turn and then head back into the fray, but glancing back at the lines of tracer he saw the Me 109s were already amongst them, so continued diving and, when he eventually pulled out, briefly blacked out as a result of the negative-g. He was now at around 5,000 feet above Dorchester. Up above, a confused action was still going on. A burning Hurricane suddenly hurtled past, a livid ball of flame, followed by a wheel leg from a bombe
r. Climbing back up again, he then saw an Me 109 dart from a cloud, evidently intent on heading back home. As Bee turned on to his tail, the German pilot spotted Bee and broke left. Firing across the turning circle, Bee saw his De Wildes strike the fuselage. Half rolling, the German dived. Following, Bee unleashed another burst as he rolled out of the dive, which proved a crippling blow. Slowing dramatically, he tried one more turn, but seeing Bee positioned for the kill, he deliberately stalled and dropped, which took Bee’s sights off him. He then dived down and sideslipped into a field near Abbotsbury, a thick trail of smoke following him down. Bee watched him hit the ground, the Messerschmitt slewing amidst a cloud of dust and smoke. Circling, Bee saw the pilot on the wing, firing into his machine. Flames licked from the cowling, then the German raised his hand as Bee roared over him. The pilot was Gefreiter Bröcker of 1/JG 53, and he had been attacked by one Spitfire and two Hurricanes, of which Bee was the second.
Bee landed back down at Exeter to find most of the squadron already back, and talking excitedly. Then more sobering news: Sergeant James Cowley had been shot down and wounded, and then they saw a Hurricane, that of Peter Comely, the last man back, approaching the airfield. Suddenly, his plane flipped over and dived towards the ground. When it was found, the aircraft was discovered to be riddled with bullet holes and Peter had had most of his hand shot away. He had probably passed out through loss of blood.
The Battle of Britain Page 63
