The Battle of Britain

by James Holland

  Arthur did not record whether he drowned his sorrows that night, but certainly the drink helped most people. ‘You anaesthetized yourself with a good old jar of beer,’ says Tony Bartley. ‘You flew all day and fought all day and then you played all night.’

  Bomber crews would spend a fair amount of time drinking too. Andrew Jackson and his crew would invariably head to the pub once they knew they would not be flying that night. Arthur Hughes would often go to parties in King’s Lynn or there might be a big drinking session in the mess. One evening in August, a spontaneous mess party developed and they all got so drunk they began playing ‘High Cock-a-Lorum’, which involved one team getting in a line, each man’s head between the legs of the man in front, and then members of the other team taking a running leap and trying to land as far along the backs as possible. Inevitably, there were injuries, one of them cracking his skull open, which required three stitches. ‘This morning he was very perky,’ jotted Arthur the next day, ‘and claimed never to have felt better.’

  Luftwaffe pilots would drink in the evening but by and large there was not quite the same degree of careless abandon about their drinking sessions as there was in the RAF. Siegfried Bethke felt there was an important difference between the two sides that summer. ‘They knew exactly what was at stake that summer,’ he says. ‘Our motivation and conviction was of a different dimension. We wanted to be successful but we didn’t have a national goal.’ The Luftwaffe pilots and crews were also more disciplined, more sober in their approach. Luftwaffe Staffeln would not have been allowed to go out on benders if they knew they would be flying the following morning; it would not have even occurred to them to do so.

  This did not mean they were completely abstemious, however. Ulrich Steinhilper and his fellow Gruppe members would be on the wine most nights, but they tended to talk shop, discussing tactics, the day’s events and other flying matters, which was not really the done thing in the RAF. In Ulrich’s case, he drank wine as a tension-reliever and also to help him sleep, but not with the intention of getting blind drunk. Hans-Ekkehard Bob says there was some drinking in the evening, but usually they would wait until they had a night off and then they would head into Lille, where there were lots of bars and good restaurants. They had a commandeered black Citroën they would use. ‘And there were very, very nice girls in Lille,’ says Hans. Like all the officers, Hans was now living in a requisitioned house a short distance from the airfield in order to get away from the attacks by Blenheims and ensure he got a good night’s sleep. ‘For us pilots,’ he says, ‘if there was a pretty girl in one spot, you tended to stay there.’

  Julius Neumann says he rarely drank in the evening and neither did anyone else in II/JG 27. Nor did his Staffel ever head out together for an evening in a bar or local restaurant. ‘We never did that,’ he says. Instead they would eat their meal and go to bed, or write letters or be writing up combat reports. Anyone who claimed to have shot down an enemy plane had to write one of these reports, and describe in some detail the action and circumstances and what they saw, rather like a police witness statement. For men like Hans-Ekkehard Bob, who already had thirteen victories to his name, this could be a time-consuming business. Hajo Herrmann and his Staffel would go into the village where they were billeted and chat up girls and have a drink, but there was not much opportunity for letting their hair down. ‘I was a Staffel captain and I tried to improve things,’ says Hajo. ‘I used my spare time to write reports, I didn’t waste time.’ He lived in reasonable comfort, sharing a house with five or so other officers. They had another house that acted as a mess, complete with Luftwaffe furniture. There was also, of course, the sea. The French beaches were not mined and covered with barbed wire like the beaches were in England. Mordyck was almost amongst the sand dunes and Siegfried Bethke enjoyed regular evening swims at La Panne, followed by dinner out in the town.

  For the British pilots, the waiting around was difficult. ‘There was a lot of tension in sitting around in dispersal,’ says Bee Beamont. ‘You jumped a foot when the telephone went.’ Bee slept as much as he could. ‘If you’d been fighting during the day and you’d gone off down the pub with the lads at night and then had a little bit more than you should have,’ he says, ‘by four o’clock in the morning when you were woken you probably had a bit of a hangover and so as soon as you got to dispersal you’d find a bed and lie down and go to sleep till somebody woke you up.’

  Some people read but Bee never did. Nor did Allan Wright. He greatly enjoyed reading but he couldn’t whilst waiting to be scrambled. ‘If you’re immersed in a book,’ he says, ‘and you are suddenly called out, it takes a few seconds, or a minute or so to readjust and I thought that might slow me up.’ Instead he preferred to talk to his fitter and rigger, check his aircraft and simply watch what was going on.

  Time between missions was different for Luftwaffe pilots because they usually knew when they would be flying – normally only a couple of pilots would be kept at cockpit readiness in case of intruders. ‘Very often it was decided in the evening before the mission what every pilot had to do the next day,’ says Hans-Ekkehard Bob, ‘whether it would be a free hunt, or close escort.’ Pilots still felt tense waiting around to fly, however, but would spend the time in much the same way their British counterparts did. ‘Writing, reading, playing chess, eating, sleeping etc,’ scribbled Siegfried Bethke, ‘passing the hours, each in his own way.’ Hans used to play a German card game called Skat a fair amount, and like Siegfried would swim in the sea whenever he got the chance.

  Relaxation was crucial to a pilot’s chances of survival, and those who were able to switch off and turn their minds to other things would tend to live longer. There was a balance, however. Getting blind drunk and flying still half-inebriated was obviously not a good idea, but nor was living and breathing the war every minute of the day. A cool, calm head was also essential. In times of intense pressure and stress, the body tenses, the muscles shorten, and the heart rate quickens. In these circumstances it is harder for the brain to make calm, informed decisions, so panic takes over and the brain works irrationally. By keeping calm and measured, the effects of pressure lessen: the heart rate remains at a steadier pace, the body feels more relaxed and so those split-second decisions that can mean the difference between life and death are more likely to be the right ones. Hajo Herrmann, for example, was superb under pressure, able to control his fears and think clearly at all times. ‘My crew always said that I was extraordinarily calm in the plane,’ he says, ‘even when there were fighters and flak around us, but you had to be like this.’

  Certainly all the best pilots shared this attribute. Hans-Ekkehard Bob says he always felt in complete control in his aircraft and that adrenalin prevented him from feeling scared. Pete Brothers reckoned experienced pilots developed a kind of sixth sense. ‘You’d get the feeling that someone was looking at you,’ he says, which would make him look round in time to take evasive action. The difficulty for the sprogs – as new pilots were known in the RAF – was that flying these machines was still a comparatively new experience. When Pete Brothers or Hans-Ekkehard Bob got into their planes they knew precisely what their machines were capable of and in the heat of battle could manoeuvre their aircraft without having to think about what they were doing. For men new to action it was a completely bewildering, frightening and alien experience, and apart from the especially cool-headed most tended to panic, then not to be able to make informed decisions, so they were invariably shot down.

  Familiarity with one’s aircraft combined with experience also helped the better pilots to get more from their machines. Pete Brothers was fortunate enough to be taught by a First World War ace who told him that when he was about to black out he should put his head on his shoulder, which stopped there being such a direct flow of blood from the head. ‘It slows the blacking-out process down,’ says Pete. ‘Enables you to pull another couple of g before you pass out. I used to tell the chaps in the squadron.’ He also learned other tricks. ‘Supp
ose you see tracer passing on your left,’ he says. ‘The instinct is to turn away from it. The chap who is shooting will have noticed that he is flying to the left of you and he will be correcting his aim. Trick him – go through where he is firing and you’ll collect a few holes but you’ll throw him off his aim.’ Pete always used to wind a bit of rudder trim, so that his Hurricane was always yawing, or crabbing, slightly. He felt it helped put any would-be attacker slightly off his aim.

  Pete believes that experience was the key to survival and points out that in 32 Squadron not a single pre-war pilot lost his life that summer. ‘People were shot down,’ he says, ‘but no-one was killed. It was always the new boys that got the chop.’ In many ways he was right, but battle fatigue was also a merciless killer. ‘Fighting was tiring,’ says Bee Beamont. ‘It was all cumulative. The weeks went by and the pressure never stopped, and then there was the loss of your colleagues.’ It was precisely this cumulative effect that was now beginning to seriously take hold of the Luftwaffe pilots especially. The new boys arriving were green and under-trained, but the experienced ones were being flown into the ground. This was because commanders like Kesselring and Sperrle had no choice but to keep them flying. It was true that there was little proper understanding of combat fatigue, and this did not help the pilots’ cause, but the main reason for pushing the pilots so hard was that the Luftwaffe had been given the task of destroying the RAF, a job that required a force far larger than was currently available. The increasingly desperate shortage of new and repaired aircraft made the situation progressively worse because no sprog would be given an aircraft above a more experienced pilot. So the older hands had to fly on and on and on, every day, without let-up. Only bad weather would spare them from combat sorties, and even then, if the weathermen thought the skies might be clear over England, they might still be sent over. These missions would be called Mülleinsatz – a ‘rubbish action’. ‘We used the phrase to refer to actions that were not only unreasonable,’ recorded the 9/JG 52 diarist, ‘but also pointless because the weather was so bad.’

  ‘We began to feel the fatigue and the tiredness that comes with living under constant threat,’ noted Ulrich Steinhilper. Adrenalin would keep them going during combat. ‘We would feel the relief of returning to base, but would then have to cope with the emotions of having lost friends and colleagues, knowing also that within minutes we would have to do it all again.’

  It was the relentlessness that was so difficult to deal with – the lack of time off, and the lack of any real release of tension. It was true that the German pilots did not have quite the same anxiety of waiting to be scrambled, but this was small consolation. There was the exhaustion of combat flying married to an anxiety on every sortie of not having enough fuel to get home. ‘We only had ten minutes to fight,’ says Julius Neumann, ‘and then we had to go back.’ It was all too easy to misjudge that narrow window. Many a pilot flew back with his fuel gauge on empty, every passing second wracked with tension that he might not make it. Plenty did not.

  45

  The Crux

  ‘THERE’S NO WORD I can start off with,’ jotted Olivia Cockett, ‘to give the mood of these ghastly days and nights of bombs on London.’ Even so, she was managing to keep a grip on herself; only once had she broken down and had a good cry. She also felt better having seen one big, strong fellow crumple up and sob like a child. Her home in Deptford was frighteningly close to the London docks, and overnight she had found herself on the front line of the war. On Sunday night she had put out an incendiary that landed beside her coal cellar. These were small bombs containing an explosive charge which would ignite some incendiary material inside the casing and start a raging fire, and were thus potentially lethal if not quickly extinguished. The following night a high-explosive bomb at the end of her garden brought all the garden walls down and left a crater ten feet deep and thirty wide, and smashed a lot of windows in the process. She had since replaced the glass with cardboard and done the same for the lady living opposite.

  Every night had been spent in the cellar. ‘I cannot sleep,’ she wrote, ‘especially since I was the only one awake to hear the incendiary bomb … I daren’t sleep now.’ She had ten sheltering with her, including a cousin of forty with his mother of seventy, and her sister-in-law and two-year-old nephew. ‘Brother a hero in the AFS,’* she added, ‘doing rescue work and laughing and joking and looking 20 years older in three days, during which he had seven hours off duty.’ Her brother, like all those involved in civil defence, had been fully mobilized.

  On the 13th, Cecil Beaton was glad to escape London and get back to his house in the country. Every night he had listened to the German bombers from the basement of his South Kensington home. They sounded to him like a slow swarm of bees. ‘Jerky bees – buzz-er-buzz-er-buzz,’ he scribbled. He noticed that many normal household sounds, such as the banging of a door or the crackle of wood on a fire, had now become noises of destruction. On Monday, the third day, he had been taking pictures of bomb damage when the sirens had gone again. ‘I wander deserted streets,’ he noted, ‘that, until the sirens had sounded, had been a hive of business activity.’ The all-clear siren was, he thought, more penetratingly shrill than the warning. ‘And so another raid had ended, and we buy more evening papers to learn what damage has been done.’ Friends told him of bombs that had fallen nearby but in just a few days he confessed he had already become something of a bomb snob, only impressed when he met someone who had been actually grazed by bomb blast.

  He had spotted a wax head lying among the debris of a former hair-dressing salon in Albemarle Street, and later returned to try and find it again, this time armed with his camera. As he arrived, a demolition party was pulling down a large top-heavy facade. Watching the walls collapse with a mighty ‘whrump’, he waited for the dust to settle then clambered over the rubble and found a new wax head among the cracked mirrors, shards of glass and other wreckage. Cecil asked the men whether they had seen a head with golden hair flying wild, and to his surprise they had. Unearthing it, they handed it to him, and he then photographed it against the backdrop rubble. ‘I felt thoroughly sad and somewhat unnerved as I walked down the havoc of Savile Row,’ he scribbled later, ‘where scarcely a window-pane remains intact. And the East End is far worse.’

  Harold Nicolson had driven back to London on Sunday the 8th, his journey interrupted by some craters in the road near Maidstone. ‘When we get nearer London,’ he wrote, ‘there is a great pillar of smoke rising like it used to when an oil well was aflame in Persia or Iraq.’ The Ministry of Information now braced itself to face one of its toughest tests: heavy air raids over London and the prospect of an imminent invasion. Harold and Duff Cooper urged Churchill to broadcast to the nation, to which the Prime Minister agreed, and Harold prepared a speech for him, which he ignored. However, as Harold admitted, the speech was nonetheless ‘effective’.

  If the enemy were to try an invasion, it could surely not be much longer delayed, he warned. They had therefore, he said, reached a pivotal moment in Britain’s history, one that ranked with the days when the Spanish Armada approached, and when Nelson alone seemed to stand between Britain and the French armies at Boulogne. ‘But what is happening now,’ he said, ‘is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.’ It was a time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm, which they were already doing. ‘This effort of the Germans to secure daylight mastery of the air over England is, of course,’ he told the nation, ‘the crux of the whole war. So far it has failed conspicuously.’

  Harold Nicolson’s Home Intelligence reports on morale suggested there was no major cause for concern. There was shock at the bombing of London, but little sign of defeatism. The people who were taking it the worst were the elderly women of the East End. ‘Old women and mothers are undermining morale of young women and men by their extreme nervousness and lack of resilience,’ it was reported on the
Monday. A more general national survey suggested there was bitterness but increased determination to ‘see it through’. There was dismay that there were not enough anti-aircraft guns – in fact, there were only a third of the guns that had been planned pre-war, most siphoned off to the navy. It was also clear more rest centres, mobile canteens and improvements to public shelters were urgently needed. A mass exodus from the East End was causing concern, as were reports of rising anti-Semitism and class feeling because the bombs had mostly landed in working-class areas.

  As the week wore on, however, morale improved noticeably. General Pile had had sleepless nights over what to do to improve AA fire over the capital and on the 11th ordered his gunners that night not to worry about aiming or accuracy, but to simply fire as much as possible. That night, his thirty-five gun sites launched 13,221 rounds of heavy ack-ack – around one every two seconds. It worked – the bombers pushed noticeably higher that night and in many cases avoided flying over the city at all. More importantly, the population were delighted. ‘Morale has jumped to new level of confidence and cheerfulness since tremendous AA barrage,’ ran the morale report on the 12th. ‘This is true of every district contacted, including East End.’ Growing class resentment was diffused when on Friday the 13th the grounds of Buckingham Palace were hit by three bombs whilst the King and Queen were at home. After a week of heavy bombing, British morale was showing no sign of cracking whatsoever.