Hurricane Squadron Ace: The Story of Battle of Britain Ace, Air Commodore Peter Brothers, CBE, DSO, DFC and Bar

by Nick Thomas

  The station had purpose-built barrack blocks and married quarters, along with officer’s and NCO’s messes, while there were even squash and tennis courts. Brothers’ first impressions were all good, ‘It was a nice little airfield, well known for its joie de vivre – when not flying we pilots enjoyed a “jolly” in the mess bar or the White Hart [at Brasted], and visits to the London night clubs. Among our favourite haunts were the Shepherd’s pub [in Shepherd’s Market], or the Bag of Nails. If we had a pound for the entrance fee, then it was the Four Hundred.’

  In the pre-war years dining-in nights were held every week. These were compulsory and allowed junior NCOs to mix with their seniors, also bringing the officers who lived in the married quarters into the fold.

  At Biggin Hill, meals in the officer’s mess ranked with those served in some of the finest London restaurants. They consisted of four or five courses; the first of either mock turtle or brown Windsor soup was followed by a fish dish. The main course was usually a roast dish, and then came pudding and, at dinner, a savoury, while at lunch, cheese. There was a strict dress code. The officers wore black ties and blue waistcoats, while the mess stewards were equally resplendent in their white jackets and gloves.

  With dinner over, fruit bowls were introduced to the table, while those gathered stood to drink the Loyal Toast. Drinks were brought to the officer’s table and were signed for and added to the mess bill, the bar was not opened until later. Meanwhile, the officers would retire to the anteroom where, ‘suitably jollified by alcohol’, they would push the furniture to the edge of the room and the traditional mess games began, ‘we really used to amuse ourselves. Biggin was the finest flying club in the world; it really was.’

  Thursdays were guest nights, when white ties and No. 1 mess dress were worn, and in the style of the best restaurants of the day, the station band played throughout the meal.

  In many ways the services were still an extension of public schools; everyone knew their place, ‘When you arrived on the squadron, you were the new boy; the bog rat, just a pilot officer, lowest of the low. None of the more senior officers spoke to you, other than to tell you to press the bell to summon a waiter to get them a drink, or some similar trivial reason.’

  The squadron’s ‘A’ Flight was composed of Red and Yellow Sections, while Blue and Green Sections made up ‘B’ Flight. All newly qualified pilots were initially assigned to the Training Flight, only being permitted to take part in squadron manoeuvres once they were deemed ready. Naturally, Brothers was the first of the new influx to make the transition.

  Among the replacement pilots with Brothers were ‘Little’ Guy Harris and ‘Humph’ Russell, with whom he had trained at No. 9 FTS, ‘The three of us went to the same squadron. So we could talk to each other.’

  Brothers recalled the pattern of daily life during those pre-war years, ‘You were on parade at 0800 hours, colour hoisting; inspection of the chaps by the station commander and you marched off to your hangar.’

  With the formalities of the morning parade over the pilots made their way to their duties, ‘you went to the pilot’s room and had a cup of coffee and then at 1000 hours the flight commander told you to go off and do a reconnaissance of your sector and for us that was Kent and Sussex.

  ‘The pilots were given a map and sent off on navigation exercises and instructed, “You have got to find a church at this map reference and draw a picture of it on your knee pad” … or you’d be doing formation practice.’

  While Brothers was still undergoing training the RAF’s Home Defence Force had begun a major reorganization. On 14 July 1936 it was reformed into four commands: Bomber, Fighter, Coastal and Training. Fighter Command, whose headquarters were at Bentley Priory, Stanmore, was under Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Caswell Tremenheere ‘Stuffy’ Dowding (later 1st Baron Dowding, GCB, GCVO, CMG), and was divided into a number of groups, each protecting the airspace over a different part of the UK. No.10 Group covered south-west England and only became operational in July 1940, No. 11 Group controlled south-east England and London, No. 12 Group defended the industrial Midlands and East Anglia, while No. 13 Group covered the North of England and Scotland.

  Biggin Hill was a part of No. 11 Group, whose headquarters was Hillingdon House, RAF Uxbridge. Here, the Group Operations Room was in an underground bunker. Commands were passed to the Group’s Sector Stations, each of which was in charge of several airfields and their fighter squadrons. The Sector airfields were: RAF Tangmere (A Sector), RAF Kenley (B Sector), RAF Biggin Hill (C Sector), RAF Hornchurch (D Sector), RAF North Weald (E Sector), RAF Debden (F Sector), RAF Middle Wallop (Y Sector) and RAF Northolt (Z Sector).

  When Brothers arrived, No. 32 Squadron was still participating in experimental air operations, as Pete put it, ‘doing practice interceptions on civil aircraft.’

  Throughout 1936 the Air Ministry’s establishment at the Bawdsey Research Station near Felixstowe, Suffolk, was experimenting with radar equipment. No. 32 Squadron’s role was in the refining of the detection and interception systems, including those identifying the plots of ‘friendly’ aircraft using direction-finding apparatus. It was important for the controllers to know where ‘friendly’ aircraft were located if they were to direct them from the ground to intercept enemy formations. This was achieved by the use of a transponder, which automatically replied to ‘interrogation’ from the ground with an identification signal. This system was later known as Identification Friend or Foe (IFF): ‘Three of you would be launched off. I was the junior so I carried the stopwatch and every two minutes I gave a fifteen second radio transmission.’

  This was picked up by a series of monitoring stations, ‘Once they had your signal they knew your direction, using the plots from any two monitoring stations gave your position.’

  The routine was well rehearsed: ‘Radar would plot incoming aircraft to Croydon, for example, and we’d go off to intercept them somewhere over the Channel or East Kent.’

  The station commander, acting as controller, gave a vector (or course) on which to steer, ‘and off you went. We’d just fly past and report how close we’d been and when we first sighted them.’

  The controller would follow visual reports on the target’s position against those of the fighter. At the moment his own data indicated that the fighters should have made a successful interception, he gave the command ‘Fire!’ upon which the lead fighter dropped a flare. Ground observations recorded the relative distances between hunter and prey at that particular moment in time.

  The early days of using the system could be frustrating, but were not without their amusing moments, especially when the controller accidentally left his microphone open as he followed the plot, which had to be updated every few minutes: ‘Then you’d hear him over the radio, saying, “Vector: How the hell can I see the blackboard with your fat bottom in the way?”’

  A new series of experiments began in December 1937. These included the ‘interception’ of RAF Ansons and foreign airliners. It was important that the pilots of the latter didn’t become suspicious of the encounters: ‘We weren’t allowed to fly close to them [the airliners]. We had to fly straight past and pretend we just happened to be in the air at the same time. But as early as 1937, we were “intercepting” KLM and Lufthansa airliners.’

  The ‘targets’ frequently began their descent soon after crossing the coast, making it difficult for the Canewdon Chain radar station, near Biggin Hill, to maintain a fix. This, and the plots of aircraft not involved in the experiments, led to fifteen failures out of twenty-nine attempts. On 31 March 1938, however, Sir Henry Tizard, Chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, wrote to Sir Wilfred Freeman, Air Member for Research and Development (later Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfred Rhodes Freeman, 1st Baronet, GCB, DSO, MC.) regarding one of these experiments, conducted during a lull in general flying activity. An Avro Anson was plotted making an approach from the Belgium coast: ‘It was detected with great regularity and accuracy by Dover and was intercepted by Biggin Hil
l right on the coast. The whole experiment was very satisfactory, particularly, as although it was a fine day, there were a good many clouds about and I should not have thought it was a very easy day as far as visibility was concerned.’

  As a result of taking part in these experimental interceptions Biggin Hill was, as Brothers explained, ‘the first station to have an Operations Room’. In the early developmental days, the equipment and plotting methods remained fairly rudimentary: ‘In those days, all the plotting in the Operations Room was done in chalk on a blackboard.’

  While the use of a blackboard was low tech for such a crucial system upon which the nation’s defence depended, it was used successfully under wartime conditions. When the Biggin Hill Operations Room was hit, it was able to transfer its operations, reverting to the pre-war methods.

  Brothers explained that each of the squadron’s pilots spent time chalking-up the ‘enemy’, something which gave them a greater insight when called into action, ‘When we weren’t flying, we acted as plotters in the Operations Room, so we watched the system develop, which meant that we understood more fully what the controllers were doing.’

  It was during these flights that new code words were created, which became a part of the fighter pilot’s vocabulary, including ‘angels’ for altitude, ‘orbit’ for circling while searching out the enemy, or ‘bandits, ‘tally-ho!’ was used for attack, and ‘pancake’ was used as the order to land.

  A series of radar masts along the south and east coasts formed what was known as Home Chain Low. Information from the radar stations (which could only look out to sea) was relayed to Headquarters Fighter Command’s Filter and Operations Room, along with details of visual sightings from shipping and then from Observer Corps posts (once the ‘enemy’ was over land). Updated every five minutes, the strength, speed, altitude, location and direction of each enemy raid was plotted on the operation room table. The counters were colour-coded in synchrony with the coloured zones on the Sector Station clock. If the plots were old, a shout would go up, ‘Three colours of the table!’

  It was intended that as the raid developed, HQ Fighter Command, Stanmore, would forward details to the appropriate Group Headquarters where the state of operational readiness of each squadron was displayed. The Group Controller would feed details down to their Sector Stations. The Sector Controllers in turn scrambled the appropriate fighter response. It was not possible to scramble overwhelming numbers into the air for fear of missing the raiders, or leaving the way clear for the enemy once the fighters landed to rearm and refuel at the same time.

  A Red Letter Day for the squadron had come on 19 January 1937, when, following His Majesty King George VI’s approval of their Crest, a ‘Hunting Horn, stringed’, with the motto, ‘ADESTE COMITES’ (Rally round, comrades), it was formerly presented to the squadron by Air Vice-Marshal F.L. Gossage, DSO, MC, acting AOC in Chief, Fighter Command: ‘We wasted no time in getting the crest painted onto the tails of our Gauntlets.’ Eight days later Brothers reached a personal landmark when his commission was confirmed (London Gazette, 20 February 1937).

  Changes were on the horizon, when on 22 March, as a part of the expansion of Home Defence, the squadron lost ‘B’ Flight, which became the nucleus of the newly reformed No. 79 Squadron, also flying the Gloster Gauntlet II and based at Biggin Hill; the two squadrons continued to have close links, sharing both pilots and ground crews well into 1940. The inter-squadron rivalry, however, was keen, as Brothers later recalled, ‘We decided we’d have a contest to see who could do the shortest landing. We had to pack it up when some chap hit the hedge and turned his aircraft over and smashed it up.’

  On 12 April, Squadron Leader A.W.B. McDonald, who had been detached to help form No. 79 Squadron, returned to command No. 32 Squadron upon which, ‘Our former CO, Wing Commander G.T. Richardson, assumed command of No. 97 (B) Squadron on promotion.’

  On Empire Air Day, 24 May 1937, an audience of 20,000 gathered at Biggin Hill to enjoy the annual airshow. Nos. 32 and 79 Squadrons took part in a Wing Formation. This preceded team competitions, both units fighting hard for superiority in a number of challenges, including the battle-climb. ‘As a sideshow, spectators were able to pay sixpence to speak to us at 5,000ft. There was a set menu of aerobatic manoeuvres and they could make a request and we’d put our Gauntlets through the manoeuvre you saw.’

  More public relations work followed on 26 June, when the squadron took part in the ‘Mass Flight’, of twenty-five squadrons as a part of the eighteenth and final RAF Display at Hendon.

  July saw a fortnight of Combined Operation and Coast Defence exercises, while between 9 and 12 August, nineteen squadrons took part in the annual Home Defence exercise. It was officially reported that, ‘most day and night raiders were intercepted and attacked’. Analysis of the exercise, however, demonstrated that the control and display system still lacked the speed and precision to provide effective interceptions; there was a fine line between success and failure.

  In late September and early October, the squadron’s pilots gained further gunnery practice in readiness for the Sir Philip Sassoon Flight Attack Competition, which was held on 7 October. Brothers’ logbook recorded that the squadron came a creditable second.

  There were further changes when, on 15 January 1938, Squadron Leader R. Pyne, DFC, arrived at Biggin Hill as supernumerary squadron leader. He assumed command nine days later, on Squadron Leader McDonald’s posting to RAF Staff College.

  Meanwhile, on the international scene, on 15 March, Hitler’s troops marched into Austria, which was absorbed into the Reich. This marked a further increase in the pace of squadron training. The Empire Day flying demonstrations of 23/24 May 1938 took on a more warlike form than in previous years, perhaps being aimed at an international audience. One of the set pieces was an attack on a ‘torpedo boat’ and on a bridge, while anti-aircraft batteries successfully peppered a drogue.

  The RAF’s new fighter, the Supermarine Spitfire, treated the spectators to a breathtaking demonstration, while a heavily guarded Hawker Hurricane provided a static display. Famously, a month earlier, a Hurricane had made a high-profile flight from Edinburgh to Northolt, achieving an average speed of 408 mph. Little did the audience and the nation realize that at the time, the aircraft on which liberty would soon depend were equipped with guns that didn’t work over 15,000ft.

  Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe had 500 bombers, including Heinkel He 111s, Dornier Do 17s and Junkers Ju 87s, which, along with the Messerschmitt Bf 109A, had already seen service in the Spanish Civil War.

  It would be another three months before No. 32 Squadron was modernized. On 1 June, still flying the Gauntlet II biplane, Brothers was assessed as ‘above average’ as a pilot and in air gunnery.

  July 1938 saw Fighter Command take part in its second major air defence exercise. With four more radar stations in operation, the system’s coverage was greatly increased. Operationally, however, the detection, information filtering and control of interception aircraft often fell short. Consequently, investigations began looking into how to refine the operation of the defence system.

  Britain’s Shield, an air defence exercise, was held between 5 and 7 August 1938, using the five stations: Bawdsey, Dover, Canewdon, Great Bromley and Dunkirk. Meanwhile, members of the Observer Corps forwarded details of overland sightings. Brothers’ logbook records that he participated in the first two days of the trials.

  Rumours that the squadron was about to be re-equipped with the Hawker Hurricane were confirmed on 11 August 1938, when they received their first dual control Miles Magister. Over the following few weeks all of the squadron’s pilots were given training on the type: ‘Compared to the Hurricane Mk I the Magister was heavier and 25 mph slower. Its handling characteristics were very similar, even to the extent that it could “get away” from a less experienced pilot, especially in a dive.’

  One of the many differences in the Hurricane from anything the pilots had flown before was the cockpit layout. Unlike earlier air
craft the instruments were ordered, something which was soon adopted in most future designs: ‘The standardization of the instrument layout greatly assisted “blind flying”. It also made picking up new types easier.’

  In a sign of the growing threat of war, orders were received on 23 August for the squadron’s Gauntlets to lose their silver dope finish for a camouflaged scheme of dark green and dark brown, with the belly and underside of the wings and tailplane being painted black.

  Politically, the situation remained tense. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany twice between 15 and 29 September, during what was to be coined the ‘Munich Crisis’. Chamberlain famously returned, having secured an agreement signed by Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy, by which Hitler annexed the majority German-speaking industrialized Sudetenland, but guaranteed the sovereignty of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Arriving back at Heston airport on 30 September, Chamberlain held aloft the signed document in triumph, announcing, ‘I believe it is peace in our time’.

  Churchill’s prophetic response was, ‘you were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.’

  During the crisis the government had ordered ‘the emergency deployment of a greater part of the home defences.’ The station was under a state of ‘immediate readiness for war’ following the issuing of the code word ‘Diabolo’. While the squadron’s heightened state of Readiness was in time downgraded, the events in Munich signalled a further increase in flying time for all of the squadron’s pilots. Meanwhile, the squadron had taken delivery of the first batch of Hurricanes, Brothers making his first flights in L1655 on 24 and 30 September, ‘…we got Hurricanes, which was a great change … Oh yes; great fun … You read the book and then you were off … we converted to Hurricanes, and carried on doing the same sort of thing, plus gunnery practice.’

  On 24 November and again a fortnight later, Brothers was able to practice air-to-ground firing in the Hurricane. The deafening noise and the recoil of the eight rapid-fire Browning machine guns came as a surprise compared to the two Vickers machine guns of the Gloster Gauntlet. Meanwhile, the difference in airspeed meant quicker reactions were vital, but Brothers soon felt at home with all aspects of the new type, ‘I’d flown a Hawker aircraft at training school: Hawker Harts and so on. Interesting thing about Sydney Camm’s designs …all the Hawker aircraft I flew, on the stall they always dropped the left wing; notorious. Something in the design I suppose …’