The Battle of Britain

by James Holland

  The squadron was now based at North Weald, in 11 Group, a fighter airfield to the north-east of Epping Forest in Essex. Since their arrival five days before they had had plenty of scrambles but Tom, for one, had still not seen much action. Having landed back at the airfield, Tom had headed to the crew room and slept, fully dressed, his Mae West round his neck, until suddenly, at 4.30 p.m., they were scrambled, and ordered to patrol Rochester–Maidstone.

  They had climbed to 18,000 feet when they spotted puffs of ack-ack bursting and then immediately saw the armada of Germans – a wedge of Heinkel 111s, then Dornier 17s and above a huge cloud of fighters.

  Tom heard the attack cry, ‘Tally ho!’, and then they were turning towards the enemy, twelve Hurricanes against more than a hundred. Attacking from the beam, Tom watched the Heinkels fill his gunsight. ‘Like slugs,’ he thought. ‘Huddled together as though for warmth.’ Checking his gun button was ready to fire, he glanced either side of him and saw Hurricanes rocking and bunching eagerly. Banking more sharply to give himself a clearer run, he closed towards the bombers, which seemed to surge towards him. Now he was firing, the noise like thick, coarse fabric being ripped, the guns shaking the aircraft. Smoking fronds of tracer sped towards their target and he saw the De Wilde bullets sparking as they hit, and then he was speeding beneath their pale, curved bellies.

  Turning on his back, dust from the cockpit floor falling around him, he pulled hard and then began climbing back up, searching the sky. Aircraft were now moving in every direction. He pulled harder on the stick, turning and climbing. Suddenly the bombers had gone, but there were the 109s. One was away to his right, heading towards him but from the opposite direction. Tom turned towards it and fired but the Messerschmitt curved away in a slight dive. Following, Tom dived after him, straining the Hurricane and willing it to catch up. Giving it another burst, he again saw bright sparks and then a brief puff of dark smoke, followed by a thin plume of white and a thicker trail of grey.

  The Messerschmitt suddenly looked tired as Tom fired again – and again. Lilting almost lazily, the aircraft appeared to give up. A puff of debris exploded into the air, and then, like a dying animal, the Messerschmitt fell away, the angle of its dive steepening, the trail of smoke thickening. Tom had his first kill.

  But he had been guilty of watching his victim and not his back, a cardinal sin. Realizing this with a start, he began to climb once more and spotted a squadron of Hurricanes, Canadians of the newly operational 1 Squadron RCAF. Tagging on behind, Tom followed them as they climbed, flying north-east. Then, roughly parallel and heading in an easterly direction was another huge formation of enemy aircraft, the bombers some 1,500 feet below, the fighters about the same level. They were now flying on a convergent course. Drawing closer, Tom sensed the Canadians were about to attack but then suddenly half a dozen yellow-nosed Me 109s peeled off to the right and came around the rear of the Hurricanes.

  The Canadians now dived, and Tom followed. He felt as though he were part of a cavalry charge of the wildest kind, hurtling in a thirty-degree dive towards the bombers, and then, as they drew near, all the Hurricanes appeared to open fire at once. ‘Then, when a collision seemed inevitable, we were through,’ recalled Tom, ‘a chaos of wings, engines, and fuselages with black crosses.’ In an instant, the bombers were gone and so were the yellow-nosed 109s, and Tom was diving, the engine screaming, the controls rattling in his hand, his ammunition spent. Below him the Thames, with pillars of smoke rising into the sky. He began to pull out, huge forces pressing him into his seat, and his vision beginning to grey. Slowly, gradually, he straightened out, and caught back his breath. He was still alive.

  It was time to go home.

  The yellow-nosed Messerschmitts were from JG 52; almost every German fighter was in the air that late Saturday afternoon. Ulrich Steinhilper thought it an unbelievable sight. Flying top-cover, he marvelled to see the sky thick with German aircraft, the various levels stacked up one upon another as far as the eye could see. By the time he was within sight of London, he could see many oil tanks already burning brightly with huge clouds of smoke reaching high into the sky. He was also surprised to see so many Spitfires and Hurricanes – if the intelligence being told them by the High Command was correct, he reckoned there should have been minimal fighter opposition. As it was, he soon realized he could not afford to take his eye off the ball for a moment. ‘Everywhere was danger,’ he noted, ‘from the British fighters, from the heavy flak and from loose barrage balloons.’ One had become detached and was now floating around near their altitude, burning brightly amidst a cloud of thick, dark smoke.

  Also in the thick of it was Siegfried Bethke and his 2nd Staffel. Diving down on to a squadron of Hurricanes that were attacking the bombers, Siegfried managed to get on to the tail of one. They had nicknamed the Hurricanes Hurenkähne, literally ‘whore barges’, and now he opened fire and saw bullets and cannon strike and then it burst into flames. He watched the pilot bail out and float downwards as the Hurenkähne dived, scything through the air, a mass of flame and smoke.

  Also entering the fray were the Hurricanes of 303 Kociuszko Squadron. The Poles had impressed in the first few days in action, but much to his great frustration Jan Zumbach had still to open his account and had begun to worry that he was somehow jinxed. Ordered into the air around the same time as 249 Squadron, they had climbed to 20,000 feet, patrolling the north of London. It was the cotton wool bursts of flak over the Port of London that had alerted Jan to the attackers. Beneath them, to their right, he now saw the large formation of bombers and their fighter escorts. Jan expected to dive down upon them immediately in an effort to break up the bombers before they began dropping their bombs, but Boozy Kellett ordered them to fly on.

  Writhing with irritation, Jan then heard a Polish voice telling them to attack. It was Paszkiewicz, swooping down with the other sections – and Kellett – following. Jan’s heart began pounding so much he could hardly breathe. Spitfires were attacking as well and now a huge swarm of diving, wheeling aircraft buzzed and twisted across the sky, tracer criss-crossing murderously. Two blazing Dorniers dived in front of him, then parachutes puffed open. Jan followed the others in a glancing frontal attack but as he pressed down on the gun button, nothing happened. Cursing wildly he realized he had failed to turn off the safety catch.

  Wrenching his Hurricane into a tight turn, he doubled up over the stick from the force of negative-g, and then a Dornier sprang up in front of him, growing until it filled his sights. The tail-gunner opened fire and then Jan pressed down again and this time bullets sped from his guns, the Hurricane shuddered, but smoke began streaming from the Dornier’s port engine. Another burst, and a flash of flame. ‘Just like that,’ noted Jan, ‘it all seemed easy.’

  English and Polish voices filled his headset. Jan dived after another Dornier, getting so close it was a sitting duck. When he opened fire, it blew up with his first burst, debris clattering against his own machine. A voice now shouted, ‘Watch out, Messerschmitt!’ and in the same moment, Jan saw a 109 on the tail of a Hurricane, but he was too late to help. And now he was fighting for his own life as a dozen Me 109s seemed to be drawn on to him by Jan’s attempt to intervene. With lines of bullets crisscrossing over him, he steep-turned hard to the left and blacked out. When he came to, he had lost some 12,000 feet and was all alone in the sky and with a few holes gaping in his port wing. Only as he set course back to Northolt did he realize his oxygen lead had come detached; no wonder he had passed out.

  Arriving back over Northolt it was now his turn to perform a victory roll. He was not alone – the squadron made claims for eleven Dorniers and three more damaged and two Me 109s and two damaged. They had paid a price, however. Athol Forbes, one of their flight commanders, had been shot down and wounded, another pilot lost half his buttock, and a third bailed out and landed in a suburban garden.

  In London that afternoon was RV Jones, who had been working at the Air Intelligence office at 54 Broadway, between Victo
ria and St James’s Park, when the sirens began to wail. Making no immediate rush for the shelter, RV remained where he was but soon heard bombs and machine-gun fire. Even so, they did not appear to be very near, so he and his boss, Fred Winterbotham, joined others who were already watching from the roof. Against the clear blue late-afternoon sky, they watched bombs bursting, and smoke billowing from fires that were already raging from the docks in the East End. High above, formations of German bombers, RAF fighters weaving and diving around them like angry wasps. Occasionally a parachute would drift down.

  Colonel Raymond Lee was also at work that Saturday afternoon, trying to catch up on his correspondence. At first, he paid no attention to the sirens, but then, when he heard anti-aircraft guns begin to pound followed by a series of heavy explosions, he began to take note. When he heard aircraft he went outside on to Grosvenor Square and, straining his eyes, looked up and saw tiny glinting specks of aircraft high in the sky. Then McDonald, one of his Embassy colleagues, came down from the roof and reported huge fires raging in the docks. Now, massive mushrooms of smoke were rising high into the sky, blotting out a number of barrage balloons, which themselves were around 5,000 feet high.

  Meanwhile, Tom Neil had landed back at North Weald, where he had clambered down wearily from his plane and had begun tramping back across the field, only for the siren to start before he had even reached the dispersal hut. Moments later, enemy bombers could be seen approaching. Fighter Command groundcrew had, by now, refined the art of refuelling and rearming in a matter of minutes, so as soon as his Hurricane was ready, Tom took off again, his fourth sortie of the day. Climbing to 8,000 feet, he saw the enemy was by now too far away. Straining to catch them, he felt utterly hopeless – he was one solitary Hurricane chasing fruitlessly after hundreds of the enemy. Even so, by the time he had climbed to angels fifteen, he managed to catch up with a straggling Dornier. It was still a bit too far away, however, while puffs of ack-ack were now bursting worryingly close by. Firing several long bursts from too far away, Tom could only watch the Dornier continue calmly on its way. ‘I flew back,’ noted Tom, ‘my guard down. Totally spent. Since breakfast, I had been in the air for more than four hours.’

  Back in the Pas de Calais, the pilots were excitedly discussing the mission. At Mordyck, Siegfried Bethke learned that his wingman, Feldwebel Rudorrfer, had shot down three Hurricanes in addition to his one. Some of his pilots had returned with flak damage to their aircraft, others with bullet holes. One of Siegfried’s friends had been rammed and forced to bail out and had been taken prisoner.

  Ulrich Steinhilper had been shaken to see a 109 latch on to the tail of another and shoot it down by mistake. He had also seen pilots falling, their parachutes on fire, but not a single one of their own Gruppe had been shot down – all had safely returned. They had also been delighted by radio intercepts of the British radio which had revealed numerous references to an elite ‘yellow-nosed’ wing. Ulrich had not shot down anything himself, but he knew he would not forget that afternoon in a hurry. The aerial battle over London had been a beautiful but awe-inspiring sight. ‘The pure azure-blue of the sky,’ he wrote, ‘with the sun dimmed by the sinister smoke penetrating to extreme height; this interwoven and cross-hatched by the contrails of fighters locked in their life and death struggles. In amongst this the burning balloons and the few parachutes in splendid and incongruous isolation.’ Like many pilots, he had not failed to realize the significance of what had happened that day.

  Raymond Lee, meanwhile, seeing the bombers had gone, had hailed a taxi and hurried towards the fire. As he drove through London, people already seemed to be carrying on as normal, people reading papers or wandering through St James’s. Finally, he reached the Tower of London and from Tower Bridge he looked down the Thames and saw immense fires raging on both sides of the river. Leaving his taxi, he walked down through Wapping, the streets crowded with fire engines and hoses, police and soldiers forming picket lines. ‘Tremendous fires were raging within a block of where these crowds were,’ noted Lee, ‘but they displayed little excitement and no signs of panic.’

  Having touched down for the last time that day and staggered back to dispersal, Tom Neil learned that the squadron had taken a hammering. George Barclay had force-landed somewhere, Pat Wells was missing, ‘Boost’ Fleming had been shot down in flames, although he had been spotted bailing out; Sergeant Killingback had bailed out but was badly wounded, and so too was Sergeant Smithson. Sergeant Beard had also been shot down but had bailed out. Pat was later reported to be in hospital but Boost Fleming had been killed. Landing by parachute, he had been on fire. Burns and shock did for him. Fighter Command lost twenty-five aircraft and sixteen pilots killed that day, the Luftwaffe forty-one aircraft and fifty-two aircrew dead. But for 249 Squadron, six pilots shot down in one afternoon was a big loss – more than a quarter of the squadron down in a stroke. ‘The dispersal hut,’ noted Tom, ‘seemed empty that night.’

  Later that evening, RV Jones went back home to Richmond, wondering whether this was the end of everything. ‘The fires in the docks were enormous,’ he wrote, ‘they could never be put out before nightfall. Even if we jammed the beams completely, the night bombers would have perfect markers, for the flames in the docks could be seen from the coast.’ It seemed to him that all the Luftwaffe had to do was keep the fires stoked with successive raids, while the main force pulverized the rest of central London.

  Certainly, the Luftwaffe was not finished that day, and as RV Jones had correctly judged, the fires had not been put out by nightfall. A further raid had arrived after 8 p.m., but although this was still in daylight, no attempt was made to intercept it; Fighter Command was spent for one day, it seemed. More bombers, in smaller numbers, flew over the city throughout the night, right up until four the following morning, adding to the difficulties of the population and firemen below. One of the night raiders was Hajo Herrmann, leading his 9th Staffel. Incredibly, it was already his sixty-ninth combat mission of the war. He regretted the turn on London but had a clear conscience. He was convinced that they had done everything possible to conduct the war as a struggle between combatants rather than civilians. Yet British bombers had been indiscriminately bombing Germans for some time without any retaliation, conducting what Hajo viewed as a war of terror. He hoped that by their answering like with like, the British might be compelled to return to warfare according to the rules. ‘That was preached by our leaders at every level,’ noted Hajo, ‘and I, from bitter personal experience, never had any reason to doubt it.’

  Raymond Lee had gone out to dinner that night – with the writer Somerset Maugham amongst other guests – since no-one had thought to cancel because of the bombings. Afterwards, he walked back to his club, and found many of the staff sleeping awkwardly on sofas and on chairs, evidently feeling safer on the ground floor. He had known the ‘hard pounding’ was bound to come at some point, but he sensed there would now be no let-up and that a new phase of the battle had begun. ‘The Boche has failed to knock out the RAF by attacking the airdromes,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘has failed to cripple industry by random and widespread bombing, and has made no impression whatever upon the British civil morale.’

  44

  Summer Madness

  SATURDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER, had also been the day on which the Joint Intelligence Committee advised the Chiefs of Staff that an invasion was once again imminent. Hundreds of invasion barges were now stacked up the other side of the Channel, and numbers were increasing daily. They also had intelligence on German troop movements and had picked up the fact that von Richthofen’s dive-bombers had been moved near to the Pas de Calais. Four German spies had also been caught landing from a rowing boat on the south-east coast, and they confessed that their job had been to report troop movements of British reserve forces. Furthermore, the conditions of the tide and moon, not to say the weather, were highly favourable between 8 and 10 September. It all seemed to point heavily to one thing. With enemy bombers already over London, the
Chiefs of Staff accepted the JIC’s advice and at 5.20 p.m., issued an official alert.

  The army was already at eight hours’ notice, but General Brooke’s Chief of Staff, General Bernard Paget, now gave the ‘immediate action’ to all troops in Eastern and Southern Commands, and then, at 8.07 p.m., Brooke issued the signal ‘Cromwell’, the code word that warned all troops to go at once to their invasion battle stations. Although only a warning, however, the ‘Cromwell’ signal was issued to all Home Guard commanders, many of whom interpreted it to mean the invasion was already happening. Across countless towns and villages, church bells were rung, calling the Home Guard to arms. In no time, reports were flooding in of German parachutists landing and fast motor boats approaching the coast. Of course, nothing of the sort was happening. Although the British had spent most of the summer expecting German parachutists to descend at any moment, Göring had still not even pledged his precious Fallschirmjäger to the invasion operation, despite OKH’s plans for them.

  There were plenty of boats out at sea, but none transporting German infantry to England. All local naval commands had been put at immediate notice by night and short notice by day. The 29th Minesweeping Flotilla, for example, had been ordered to lie offshore at Eastbourne as a first anti-aircraft line. ‘We made up a barrage line,’ says Joe Steele, ‘about eight trawlers stretched across the harbour and as planes came over we’d open fire with our 12-pounder and twin .5s.’ As Joe admits, it was not very effective – the 12 pounder was not designed as an anti-aircraft gun and neither were the .5-inch machine guns – but the trawlers were cannily placed should the invasion have been mounted.