Ginger Lacey: Fighter Pilot

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  He was half-way across, wondering what law of mathematics it is which makes any given distance expand to five times its previously estimated length as one walks it, when he heard a harsh, concerted sound throbbing overhead with ominously increasing volume.

  Stopping, he rested the parachute between his feet and stared up, trying to determine the source of the quickly approaching noise; but the roar of engines seemed to fill the air and there was no immediate way of telling whence it came. Until, in a flash, silvery glinting in the sunlight, the aeroplanes swept thunderously into view: twenty Do. 17s and twenty Ju. 87s.

  ‘I never felt so naked in my life as standing in the middle of that airfield. I didn’t mind the hangars and camp which I had just left, being bombed … who would, after not having been offered a ride across the big airfield, on a hot day? … but I did object to the sticks of bombs which were being dropped across the aerodrome, where I was standing. It felt as though every bomb was being aimed individually at me.’ He flung himself face down on the warm, friendly-smelling grass, a dandelion tickling his nose until he sneezed; he clasped his arms above his head for some protection and hoped for the best.

  A stick of bombs fell only fifty yards away. Each explosion thudded through his chest and stomach and the two nearest ones lifted him inches from the ground with a sickening sensation. Dust and pebbles and clods of turf spattered around and on him. ‘I remember thinking at the time that lightning never strikes the same place twice.’ So, as the ground ceased trembling and the shower of earth subsided, he picked himself up with his parachute, sprinted to the edge of the nearest crater and dived into it. Instantly he gave a shout of pain and annoyance as, with a stench of singed serge, he felt himself scorched by a hot shard of bomb casing. For the next three or four minutes, while the Ju. 87 dive bombers came screaming down in successive waves, he crawled carefully about the hole in which he was sheltering, trying to find a place where he could lie down without being branded by almost red hot pieces of metal.

  But his theory about lightning never striking twice in the same place was vindicated and presently the attacking aircraft were gone and he was still unhurt. Climbing out of his crater, he did not even stop to look at the damage around him; he was conscious of columns of smoke and some haze in the air where dust clouds still hovered over stricken buildings, but there was no time to do a W. H. Davies act: ‘What is this life, if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.’ Sergeant Pilot Lacey was, at that moment, very full of care. He took to his heels, more energetically than he had done since his last game of rugger. You never knew when the beggars might be back and he had to get the Hurricane away.

  A couple of French mechanics came, grinning, out of hiding among the trees and helped him to start the engine. Then, picking his way among the bomb holes, he took off.

  It looked as though he were to be given a special chance to improve his knowledge of French topography, for that evening he was detailed, with four other pilots, to travel by lorry to Villeneuve and collect five new aircraft. His companions were ‘Hawkeye’ Lee, who had trained with him at Perth, Mackay who had a quick wit, Farnes and someone whose name he cannot remember.

  He recalls the journey as the worst he ever made in his life. A three-ton truck does not offer Babylonian luxury, in the first place. Added to this was the fact that their driver was a novice at his job, so the five passengers had to take it in turns to do it for him.

  For mile after mile they crawled along in second gear. The road was crowded with refugees. The column of forlorn, suffering men, women and children seemed never-ending as it trudged dumbly on its broken way to God knew where. These people had been moving at their heart-broken, heavy-footed pace for four days. Time and again German aircraft had dived on them to attack with bombs and machine gun fire. The purpose may have been partly to scare them off the roads and clear the way for the German Army’s advance; but nobody had any doubt that the attacks were mainly prompted by deliberate brutality and that perverted German sense of humour that finds amusement in any bullying act.

  The five British pilots felt reluctant to sound the horn of their lorry to force a path through this press of miserable humanity. They saw bloody heaps of torn clothes and flesh which were the remains of children slaughtered by the Luftwaffe in unopposed straffing of the road, carried still by their parents on farm-carts laden with old people and a few household goods. Ancient women sat, with their legs dangling over the sides of the carts, keening and praying for safety. Their husbands, shrunken with fear and hunger, muttered dry-throated curses on the enemy who, they knew, would come and come again.

  In places the road was jammed across its whole width and the only way to make any progress was gently to nudge the wretched people aside with mudguards and bumpers as the three-tonner crawled ahead in low gear.

  Those who were not driving slept in the back of the lorry. Their overpowering tiredness came from their incessant vigilance in the air, the many hours they had to fly each day and the nervous tension which had never left them. Already, after only four days in France, they were having a foretaste of the rigours and weariness of the Battle of Britain.

  At last dawn came and Villeneuve was only a few miles distant The grey light shewed them even more clearly the pathetic picture of suffering and they almost wished that it was dark again. The pinched faces of hungry, terrified children; the sullen resignation of families who stubbornly carted their dead instead of abandoning them in ditches; the hatred in the voices which, when the R.A.F. lorry was recognized, shouted ahead to clear a path and urged the pilots who rode in it to hurry on their way and get on with the work of shooting down les sales Boches: these were the pattern of that night and the following dawn, which are printed indelibly on the memory.

  Heavy-eyed and stiff, the five of them clambered down from the lorry, found their aircraft, hurriedly checked the harmonization of the guns and the amount of fuel in the tanks, and took off. They had been ordered to carry out a patrol on their way back to base. After what they had seen on the road overnight they were ripe to do some killing. Not fifteen minutes after they were in the air Lacey saw a speck in the sky away to the starboard. He looked at it steadily for a few seconds … yes … it was an Me. 110.

  The five Hurricanes turned towards the solitary enemy aircraft; but its pilot had sharp eyes too. He turned as well, and though they chased him as far as the German frontier, they had to let him go; he was too fast for them. Even so, there was some satisfaction to be had: ‘It was nice to be five to one and chasing him.’

  It had been an unpleasant night and a disappointing morning. Some food would be welcome. They approached Betheniville …

  Lacey flicked on his R/T and called Hawkeye Lee. ‘D’you see what I see?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do. Where have the blighters gone?’

  For the tented camp had disappeared.

  Puzzled and annoyed, they circled the field once, looking for signs of life. They saw someone, shading his eyes, gazing up at them; and as they landed he came running to meet them. Lacey cut his engine and shouted at him from the cockpit.

  ‘What’s happened, Corporal?’

  ‘The squadron’s gone, Sarge.’

  ‘I can see that. Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know. But they went that way.’ The corporal pointed southward. ‘And they left me here on my own.’

  The pilots stood round the corporal, laughing uncertainly and making wry comments. It might take them all day to find the squadron’s new base: surely the corporal should have been told where to rejoin them? Anyhow, there was a big dump of petrol in four-gallon cans.

  ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ said Lacey, ‘fill up with petrol and go looking for the squadron.’

  But the corporal had other ideas. ‘No petrol,’ he told them firmly. ‘I was given strict orders to burn it all.’

  ‘But you haven’t burnt it yet?’

  ‘No. But I was told to burn it all. I wasn’t told anything about refuelling any aircraf
t.

  This was commendable conscientiousness and in other circumstances might have been amusing. But after a nightmare journey, a frustrating patrol, and the prospect of a search for the squadron which could have been avoided if someone had used a little common sense, the five tired, hungry pilots gave the corporal short shrift. Euphemistically, Lacey puts it: ‘We managed to convince him that he wasn’t going to burn any petrol until we had filled our tanks.’ This they did, filtering the petrol through a chamois leather. Even so, it was a pity to leave any behind; but they had no way of taking any cans with them. As they climbed away they saw the bright flash and pillar of smoke which told them that the corporal was dutifully obeying orders. What a waste, when tanker crews were being torpedoed and drowned or burned to death almost every day in their efforts to get the precious fuel through.

  There were a dozen other airmen who had been left behind to help in packing up the last of the squadron’s gear. They, and the few French civilians loitering about the airfield, all claimed that the Germans were ‘ten miles down the road.’ Before turning south, Lacey and his companions flew back looking for the enemy; not finding him, they set out on their vague search for the rest of 501.

  Flying at the most economical cruising speed, they made their fuel last as long as possible; but finally they had to decide on a place where they could land, make enquiries and refuel. The most suitable was Barbery, a military airfield outside Troyes.

  Here they were given a cold reception by the Commandant: ‘Get your aeroplanes off my airfield as soon as possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if the Germans spot them on the ground they’ll come and bomb us in an attempt to destroy them.’

  MacKay looked at Lee, who looked at Lacey. The last, as spokesman, said: ‘That’s all very well, but we can’t take off until we have refuelled.’

  ‘You can have some of our petrol. Anything … only hurry and go.’

  ‘We can’t use your petrol: it’s not up to our octane value … Sir.’

  The Commandant looked as though he wished he had special powers to send British N.C.O. pilots in front of a firing squad. Lacey, watching him with his particular brand of irritating blandness, wondered if the Frenchman would dash his cap to the ground and jump on it. He didn’t do that, but he did stamp his feet and deliver a tirade of which they did not understand a single word; although they correctly deduced the meaning of ‘défi’ and ‘insurbordonné’ which recurred frequently. When at last they had convinced the Commandant, by their silence and the medium of a few commonly understood English phrases, that they were determined not to pour French petrol into their Hurricanes, he pointed to a pile of camouflage nets and stalked away talking huffily to himself.

  Doing the decent thing, the sergeants pulled the camouflage netting over their five unwelcome aircraft and left the camp, to find any sort of British unit.

  Two hundred yards from the main gate, they arrived at a cafe. Without a word, they crossed the road and seated themselves. They had not eaten since the previous evening.

  ‘We had about a ten-egg omelette each, with asparagus and rum. And then, when we left, it was such a wonderful day that we just lay down on the pavement and went to sleep.’

  Lacey recalls the meal casually, but the youthfully matter-of-fact words hide a poignant picture of exhaustion.

  When they woke, they spent the rest of the daylight hours fruitlessly trying to get in touch with some R.A.F. formation. There was nothing for it, eventually, but to find empty beds in a barrack room on the camp and settle down for the night. It was all very well to expect officers and senior N.C.O.s to use initiative, but this was carrying things a bit too far. Irritants like this were worse for morale than any amount of bombing. They wondered what efforts the squadron was making to find them.

  Next morning they learned, with the help of the French Commandant, that 501 was on the small airfield of Allemanche, fifty miles away. They rejoined their unit and flew two patrols that day.

  In the meanwhile the other pilots had been increasing their score. On the 14th, Flying Officer J. R. Cridland shot down a Do. 17, Flight Sergeant Payne and Sergeant Dafforn each a He. III, and Sergeant Proctor two of the latter. On the 15th, Do. 17s were destroyed by Flight Lieutenant Griffiths and Flight Sergeant Payne, and a Me. 110 by Sergeant Proctor. Pilot Officer Lindsell and Pilot Officer C. Hancock, who were on their way between Rheims and Betheniville by car, picked up the pilot of Griffiths’s victim after he had baled out. Cridland and Pilot Officer Hairs together engaged another Do. 17 at 10,000 ft, and after the former had silenced its rear gunner, they saw the bomber spinning down with its fuselage in flames and smoke pouring from both engines; but as they did not see it hit the ground and no report of this was received, they were denied a confirmed victory.

  The Do. 17 pilot whom Lindsell and Hancock brought back to camp did the squadron a lot of good. Sitting in surly silence as they drove up to the dispersal point, the German refused any overtures of kindness. When offered a cigarette he refused it with a curt remark of which they guessed the gist by its contemptuous tone and the twist of his mouth. When he saw the hard-working, but unmilitarily untidy fitters and riggers around the Hurricanes, he laughed openly and commented again. By the time he had been taken into the Operations tent, all the pilots and most of the ground crews had seen him: nothing could have been better calculated than his arrogance, to bring home to them the misery that awaited Britain if the Nazis won the war.

  That German prisoner was paradoxically the best public relations man the unit could have encountered.

  On the 17th May, by which time Lacey felt as though he had been in France for a year instead of a week, he attacked German armour for the first time. On the second patrol of the day his section saw a long line of Panzer Mk III tanks streaming along the road. Going down steeply, they opened fire with their .303 machine guns. ‘It was like shooting at elephants with a peashooter. The tank commanders didn’t even pay us the compliment of closing their turrets: they just ducked their heads as we came over and stuck them out again as soon as we’d gone past. The tanks rolled on completely undamaged.’

  Such was the war for 501 Squadron during the next ten days. They were under canvas again and in some respects their life on campaign was much the same as it had been for their grandfathers in the Boer War forty years earlier. But, though their living conditions were crude, their morale was good; and they had with them still some reminders of the good life on permanent home stations: someone still had to be Mess Caterer and do the Sergeants’ Mess marketing between operational flights, for instance.

  Weariness was ever-present. Pilots and mechanics both took advantage of every opportunity to stretch out on the grass or in a battered deck-chair and snatch a few minutes’ sleep between intervals of work. Whoever had to go into Sezanne or the neighbouring villages to buy food with which to supplement issue rations, welcomed the break from the always imminent call to scramble or to lend an extra pair of hands to repair a Hurricane damaged by flak or the bullets of an enemy aircraft’s machine guns.

  Anti-aircraft fire was a daily increasing menace. As the Germans swept across France and the British bombers and fighters operated more over enemy-held territory, the flak sites seemed to multiply with the indestructible fertility of cancer cells. Every time the squadron flew, now, they had to dodge the flak bursting around them with unnerving accuracy. First there would be the grey puffs of smoke opening out like dandelion seed; then they would look down and see the wicked red and yellow flashes from the heart of a coppice or the shelter of a farmyard wall, where the gun sites were. A few seconds later the billows of smoke from the bursting shells would be closer, there would be a thud as a sliver of metal struck a wing or fuselage; the air would be made turbulent as salvos burst in quick succession. For a few seconds the effect was mesmerizing: the apparently lazy approach of the flickering trail of tracer; then the dreadful moment when it flashed past with astonishing speed and you knew that it had been aimed at
you and barely missed.

  One morning, when the squadron was operating in full strength, the twelve Hurricanes flew into a barrage of anti-aircraft fire so intense that the air around them boiled with the viciousness of a storm cloud. The pilots felt violent gusts of air snatch and drag at the control surfaces. Lacey, flying as Yellow Leader, saw Flight Sergeant Payne’s aircraft, ahead of him in the Red Three position, flung into an involuntary half-roll. It dropped like a stone for a couple of hundred feet and as Lacey struggled to hold his own machine level he saw the other slowly roll out to level flight and clamber up to position again. The turbulence created by the flak had been enough to toss the fighter completely upside down despite its pilot’s effort to hold it steady.

  Pilot Officer Sylvester did not return from this patrol, after having been last seen diving on a gun site. He turned up the next day, and reported having forced landed: badly shot up by a Do. 17 he was attacking and by heavy A.A. guns, he had lost his bearings.

  Even among operational fighter pilots there are some who are not cast in a heroic mould. Lacey recalls one of the squadron who, from the first, betrayed a marked reluctance to fly when there was danger of being shot at, either by flak or enemy aircraft. During one of the air raids on one of the fields from which 501 operated in France, Lacey, caught as usual with his pants figuratively down, took to his heels in what he claims was better than Olympic 100 metres time. There was no one else in sight at the moment that he began to run for shelter, and as he hurled himself into a slit trench he supposed it could have no other occupant. He was immediately disillusioned by a grunt and the smell of tobacco. Having landed face-down, in a sprawl, it took him a moment or two to ease into a more collected position; then, looking round, he saw that he had a companion: steel-helmeted, leaning comfortably against the end wall of the trench as he sat on a cushion, smoking a pipe, was the reluctant pilot—reading a newspaper! Lacey thinks he must have gone there directly after breakfast. It was then about lunch time …