The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots

by Jon E. Lewis

  We, the aircrew, were happily unconscious of the bigger issues, and our only anxieties outside our own flying task were such seemingly vital domesticities as the establishing of the right to late breakfast, the night-flier’s extra egg, or petrol for leave. The activities of the Squadron were really all that mattered in the war, and they were all engrossing. Nevertheless, we could see the proportions of the task in our own sector and it was enormous. It was, in fact, only a small part of that confronting Fighter Command.

  Controllers, radar operators and pilots had to be trained in the use of new equipment and in new techniques. When John scored the first success there were but three pilots fit to fly the Beaufighter at night and the same number of competent operators. Method had to be worked out between pilots and their observers and pilots and ground controllers. Each separate operation had to be practised, and then dress rehearsals were needed. Yet the urgency of operations virtually ruled out practice at night because all available aircraft were required for the programme. We all needed practice, but when could we get it? Which comes first, training or operations, the chicken or the egg? This perpetual quandary, which must always beset the high commands in modern war, was very acute just then.

  We were up against poor serviceability of new equipment, and ignorance. The Beaufighters had their teething troubles which, though mostly minor, could become serious in night flying. The radar was new and delicate; it broke down frequently; and the mechanics who knew much about it were few. Our radar officers never spared themselves, working, it seemed, day and night, and often flying on operations as well as in tests and practices. The observers had had only the scantiest training, a number of them having been airgunners who had been given a short conversion course. As soon as a pilot was considered fit, he and his observer became operational as a crew. Thereafter they had to practise on the Germans. I shall remember it always by a not unusual incident during a daylight test flight in a Blenheim. I flew some distance behind another aircraft and I told my observer to turn on the radar. There was an “O.K.”, a silence and suddenly, a little later, an excited cry “I can see it!”, and then, after a few moments of suspense, “It’s gone!”, and further silence. And that was more than usually occurred, since on most occasions there was nothing to be seen on the radar tubes at all.

  By the end of 1940 we had been completely re-equipped, and sufficient pilots, six in all, had been scraped together to allow the operational programme to proceed exclusively with Beaufighters. The Blenheim had disappeared from night fighting so far as we were concerned, and those like myself who had not had the opportunity of flying a Beaufighter at night became non-operational. With impatience we waited for an opportunity for Beaufighter night solos, the essential prelude to becoming operational again; we were short of aircraft and at this season the weather was often bad, and so it was that Mike, John, Georgie, Spekie, Alastair and Jackson were on operations every night for about a month.

  After weeks of depressing inactivity, I was given a chance. With low, broken cloud and a forecast of deterioration, the weather was not ideal, but I was no longer a novice and, needing time only for one or two take-offs, circuits and landings, I was let go. What followed was not all my fault, nor can it be attributed wholly to the weather, for soon after I had taken off the control went off the air and all calls were ignored, with the result that I and the three others also airborne assumed the radio, either ground or air, to have failed. There was dangerous confusion. In that weather the decision to land while we knew we were near base was inevitable. It was every man for himself and, with the cloud at about 1,000 feet, we came in and landed as we could. I broke cloud, saw the aerodrome lights and, making an ill-judged and hurried approach, came straight in. I was too high and, to make matters worse, I held off too early and opened up a little to reduce the bump. The aircraft touched down and ran on with all the momentum of ten tons moving at eighty miles per hour. I braked hard, but we were on wet grass – there were no runways then and the flare-path, laid out into the wind, was sometimes too short to cover faults – and the boundary lights of the Andover-Salisbury road seemed to be approaching alarmingly. A moment later I was in the road and at rest at last. Suddenly everything was still. I got out and walked away from what had been a perfectly good Beaufighter, feeling rather an ass.

  A few nights later I tried again and, all going well, we were reinstated on the operational programme, so that one of the original six crews could then have one night off in six.

  With experience my confidence grew. I felt I was becoming accustomed to the Beaufighter and its idiosyncrasies. It was then unstable fore and aft, and so was not ideal for night flying. It always seemed – and this was in the imagination of an anxious mind – that the darker the night the worse was the effect of this instability. If there were sufficient external guides, lights in good visibility, a skyline or moonlit ground, it was easy enough to fly steadily, as in daylight; but if those aids were absent, the night dark and visibility poor, the instruments were the only guides, and instrument flying in the early Beaufighter called for unceasing and most exacting concentration. There were times when the loss or gain of a few hundred feet in the gentle undulation of its normal trajectory could not be afforded, and at such times there had to be no relaxing.

  In bad weather a return to base and landing became something of an ordeal. Effective blind approach and airfield lighting systems were yet to come, and at the end of 1940 we had to find our own way as best we could, depending on homing bearings and on recognition of the dim flare-path lights when we were near the airfield.

  Condensation and frost, which formed on both sides of the one-and-a-half-inch-thick windscreen as one came down into warmer air, were further impediments and, since the windscreen was close to one’s face, there was nothing to do but peer ahead through the small windows on either side of it.

  The Beaufighter tended to tighten up in turns, and this, accentuating the ever-present difficulty of making accurate turns on instruments, resulted – at least in my experience – in unwitting gains or losses in height in all but gentle turns. Being usually frightened and so cautious, I made a practice of very gentle turns at low altitude, imagining the consequences of losing too much height, and knowing only too well the embarrassment of blundering back into cloud again by gaining it. The airfield might come into view too late, and going obliquely across the flare-path, unable to make the steep turn that might have got me in, I would have to go on in a wide sweep into the outer darkness again and away from those feeble but homely lights, hoping that when I saw them again I would be better aligned for landing. I would see some lights, but from low altitude their pattern was not plain. Suddenly they became the flare-path, not exactly where I had expected it but off to one side; still I might be able to “make” it. Perhaps in the act of putting the wheels down hurriedly I would let the machine gain some height. The airfield lights seemed to go out. My immediate instinct was to push the nose down, to lose height and to regain contact with the ground and the guidance of the lights quickly, but my caution made me lose height gingerly; it might yet be all right when, out of cloud, I saw the lights again, or it might not, and then the whole anxious process might have to be repeated.

  Finding base and getting down to Mother Earth could be both long and anxious. It seemed that there were no rules to learn, and sometimes when I landed I found myself in a cold sweat, knowing that I had been lucky and wondering what would happen next time.

  The acme of unpleasantness was reached one night when the enemy made a serious mistake about the weather and lost five aircraft, probably through icing: a loss which the Press attributed incorrectly but perhaps intentionally to our fighters. The blitz was on Southampton and we were making a maximum effort. The weather was awful. As a new experience for me, there was an icy, electric haze in which I was still floundering at 22,000 feet, unable to reach the clear air. There was a constant bluish discharge from one side of the windscreen to the other and on the airscrew blades, and a ghostly ligh
t in the cockpit which made it impossible to see anything outside.

  Dependent only on the blind-flying instruments and their dazzling, sickly green needles, I began to feel, as I grew tired, that my power over the machine was becoming uncertain and that I might suddenly find myself unable to control it. My senses denoted turns; yet the needles showed straight flight. I tried to turn left and, depending on my senses (other than my vision), operated the stick and rudder to produce a left turn; but the instruments insisted that I was not turning, and a vicious pull on the controls to produce a turn which the needles would admit caused such sensations that I dared not continue it. But a turn to the right could be made, I found, according to the needles and the pressure on my seat, and so I turned right handed, the long way round. Chasing the enemy was a hopeless proposition. In these conditions it was all I could do to keep myself poised, somewhat unsurely, with my machine more or less under control. My only chance of destroying an enemy in that sort of weather (and, I then thought, in any sort of weather for that matter) was haphazard collision.

  As I was feeling my way back to base, a load of incendiaries was dropped just behind me. I was at a few hundred feet only and the glare from them, as they burnt, was reflected in and diffused by the haze in which I was flying in a way that was distracting and, until I guessed its source, alarming. There was a good deal of tight-rope walking that night.

  As I have said, we had few opportunities for training at night because all serviceable aircraft were usually required for operations, but on one memorable occasion absence of enemy activity coincided with good local weather and we were able to carry out some interception practice. Grouping about in the dark at close on three hundred miles an hour called for steady flying and a cold-blooded nervelessness that I had not got. I had always had vague doubts about it: now I would see what it was like.

  Using navigation lights, we took off in pairs, one behind the other, and set off. When all was ready the crew in front extinguished lights and the crew behind tried to approach on radar to within visual range. Instead of the daylight swoop to attack, there had to be a steady and deliberate stalk to close range, then a search, the pilot looking where his observer told him for a small patch that was darker than its surroundings; and finally a stealthy closing up to point-blank range. This much I knew; but how to put theory into practice was another matter, and the machine behind – when it was mine – wandered and weaved about, trying to close in and just maintaining radar contact, sheering off or shooting underneath as the target suddenly loomed up as it were out of a fog, converging frighteningly. After this, my first practice, I was despondent; I felt out of my depth.

  At that time, I think, most of us were ignorant as well as inexperienced. We had yet to understand the full significance of the illumination of the background and the size of the silhouette to appreciate that, against bright starlight, a Beaufighter could be seen from a thousand feet below, while against the ground it remained invisible down to about 300 feet. We had not yet learnt that the correct technique was to search (exploiting the fact that our sight is more acute on the periphery than at the centre of the eye) with speeds synchronised so as to avoid blundering on when the invisible opponent, though left behind, would still appear as radar “blips”, seeming (until the observers too had acquired experience) to be drawing away ahead. We did not yet possess the encouraging knowledge that most aircraft, except our Beaufighters, had tell-tale exhausts, and that surprise could always be on the side of the radar fighter against a bomber without radar. There was much we had to discover and develop for ourselves, for it was new ground we were breaking.

  That winter (1940) there was a short spell of brilliantly clear and very cold nights, and the enemy took full advantage of them, keeping up his raids, it seemed to us, all night long. We did all we could, flying long patrols on several consecutive nights, but it was of no avail. Six crews reported about seventy radar contacts, but all were lost inconclusively. In our contribution of thirteen hours’ patrolling during those three nights, my observer and I got and lost our first contact on an enemy aircraft.

  It seemed to me that our efforts had reached a crisis, and while I had the small satisfaction of knowing that I was not alone in being unsuccessful, I was concerned about my own part in it. I was tired, having had no adequate leave for what seemed many months – the crew shortage allowed us only to snatch a day or two here and there – and I had sore eyes, caused by prolonged exposure to draught (it came up through the crack between the escape hatch and the fuselage side; it curled up over your head and caught you straight in the eyes) and my confidence had recently been badly shaken by some unnerving returns and landings of the sort I have already tried to describe. I was beginning to think that I would not be able to pull it off the next time and that I would fall off the tight-rope; and in that low state of mind I was relieved to be sent away for a fortnight’s course on beam flying and blind approach.

  This gave me a welcome change from night flying, and incidentally allowed my eyes to recover. I learnt a way of approaching, unseeing, to land at an airfield by using a beam transmitted from that airfield as a guide. It would be possible, in any weather, to approach from a distance with deliberation, and the certainty that, on breaking cloud, one would be correctly placed to land straight ahead. Thus the tempo of the operation would be slowed down and it would become more manageable.

  The operation (hitherto hit-and-miss so far as I was concerned) of finding and landing at an airfield in bad weather could now be done by following rules, and then safe arrivals, which had been accidental and so destructive of confidence, would now, if achieved by following the rules, have just the opposite effect. I returned from the course with new confidence and feeling well and refreshed.

  On the night of March 13th, 1941, the unexpected happened. I destroyed two enemy aircraft. This was luck unbounded, and these were experiences which I knew could never be equalled. For the rest of that night it was impossible to sleep; there was nothing else I could talk about for days after; there was nothing else I could think about for weeks after.

  With these victories – and even one of them would have sufficed – a great deal had suddenly become worth while, and this was success such as I had never dreamt of; it was sweet and very intoxicating. I saw my name in the papers, and the Squadron, so long in obscurity, coming into the limelight; for these were its sixth and seventh confirmed successes. It became suddenly ‘a famous night-fighter squadron”. The public was let into the secret; it was equipped with Beaufighters and there were veiled allusions to a secret weapon. There was a lot of glamour and excitement attached to being a night-fighter pilot; we felt a good deal beyond ourselves.

  On that night there was an almost full moon and the weather was very fine. We had been flying for more than an hour when we were put on to a bomber that was going back empty. We were overtaking fairly well, and by the time we passed over Bournemouth were about a mile behind. We closed in a bit more and Ripley, my observer, got a close radar contact over to the left. I turned a little to the left, and I could hardly believe my eyes, for there was another aircraft about a hundred yards away and on the same level. It was black and its fish-like fuselage glistened dully in the moonlight; it was unmistakably a Heinkel.

  Converging rapidly, I turned to come behind and dropped below with an automatism that surprised me; my machine seemed to be on rails, so easily did it slide into position. I was afraid I would be seen in that light – and the Beaufighter would have been a sitter – but interceptions were not expected then, and the enemy gunners were not keeping a good look-out. I was able to creep up unmolested until I was within a hundred yards and forty-five degrees below. The machine looked enormous; the wings seemed to blot out the sky above me; now, a squat silhouette, it had lost its recognisable form. I saw the four rows of exhausts, each with six stubs, and now and again one of them would belch out a bigger flame than usual.

  The moment had come to shoot; it was now or never. Holding my breath I eased the
stick back a little and the Heinkel came down the windscreen and into the sight. It went too far and I found myself aiming above. Stick forward a bit and the sight came on it again. How ham-fisted this was! I pressed the firing-button. There was a terrific shaking and banging, and to my surprise I saw flashes appearing, as it seemed, miraculously on the shape in front of me. Pieces broke away and came back at me. I kept on firing, and it turned away to the right slowly, apparently helplessly and obviously badly damaged. My ammunition finished I drew away farther to the right. I had overshot, and I could see the Heinkel over my left shoulder still flying all right. Nothing happened, perhaps nothing was going to happen, and suddenly I thought that it was going to get away. I had had a chance, a sitter, and I had not hit it hard enough. It seemed that I had succeeded in the almost impossible feat of firing two hundred 20-millimetre shells at this aircraft at point-blank range without destroying it. It had been like the crazy kitchen sideshow at a fair, impossible not to hit something; but here, so I began to think, I had hit nothing vital.

  And then I saw a lick of flame coming from the starboard engine. It grew rapidly, and enveloped the whole engine and soon most of the wing. The machine turned east and started to go down slowly; it looked by now like a ball of flame. We followed it down from 11,000 feet until, minutes later, it hit the sea, where it continued to burn.

  It was said that the crew baled out, but none was picked up. I did not think of them any more than they probably had thought of the people they had been bombing. This kind of warfare, though in some ways cold-blooded murder, was as impersonal as it was mechanical. This was a big-game hunt, and thought was focused on personal achievement. In the aftermath it was satisfactory to know that the enemy bomber force had been reduced by one, but immediately it was the elation of personal success with neither regrets nor outraged scruples that monopolised my thoughts.