With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

by Michael Korda

  Much has been made of the “chivalry” of air combat, but in World War II, as in World War I, your object as a fighter pilot was primarily to sneak up on your opponent from behind and above and kill him before he was even aware you were there, while your opponent’s objective, if he was lucky enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of you approaching from behind in his tiny rearview mirror, was to escape by means of violent evasive action, then turn tightly, close in behind you, and kill you. Fighter pilots who survived were cold-blooded killers, but this is not to say that many of them actually liked killing—it was simply their job, the sole and only purpose of their long and expensive training, and of the even more expensive machine it had taken so many man-hours to create and build.

  Instant death was a commonplace. There was a brutal “learning curve” (to use a phrase from a later age) in air combat. A pilot coming to a fighter squadron fresh out of an Operational Training Unit had almost no chance at all of surviving his first five “sorties” in combat. If he did survive them, by sheer luck or superhuman natural skill, then his chance of surviving the next fifteen sorties increased on a rising curve as he gained experience and confidence. After twenty sorties, however, the law of numbers took over, and his chance of surviving began to decline rapidly toward zero again. The survivability of a newcomer to a fighter squadron with no combat experience was not improved by the fact that he would naturally be assigned the oldest, slowest, most often patched and repaired, and most “clapped out” fighter in the squadron, serviced by the least efficient and least motivated ground crew, or that he would very likely end up in the position of “tail-end Charlie,” the last aircraft in the formation, bringing up the rear, and therefore the natural target for any enemy fighter pilot looking for an easy kill. There would be cases during August and September 1940, when the battle was at its peak, of a young RAF pilot arriving at the squadron to which he had been posted and being rushed straight into a fighter before he had even unpacked his suitcases, and killed before anybody knew his name. Opening the suitcases he had left in the entrance to the mess was the only way for the Adjutant or the Station Warrant Officer to learn who he had been.

  Nor was death in the air necessarily quick and clean—the risk of being burned alive was considerable, and many WAAFs who served in ground control remember to this day hearing through their earphones the screams of young men trapped in a flaming cockpit, unable to slide back the canopy because their hands were too badly burned. The machine itself, for all the thought that had gone into it, was inherently dangerous—a missing cotter pin, a filler cap insufficiently tightened, or a moment’s carelessness on the part of an exhausted aircraftman in your ground crew could kill you as surely as an enemy air ace. A nick in your oxygen tube could put you into hypoxia and send you plummeting to the ground from 30,000 feet to your death, unconscious and helpless. A bad landing, particularly in a Spitfire or Bf 109, with its narrow tracks, could easily turn into a ground loop and trap you upside down in your aircraft as it burst into flames on the runway. A stray seagull crashing into your plane’s radiator intake on takeoff could bring your plane down with an impact that scattered it and its pilot in a fiery circle fifty yards wide. A parachute jump from a crippled fighter might send you drifting into the sea, where, particularly for British pilots, the chances of being found and picked up by an RAF rescue launch were remote.*

  All three fighters—the Spitfire, the Hurricane, and the Bf 109—were a tight fit, even for a pilot of modest height and girth. The Bf 109 was the worst in this respect—it not only had an incredibly narrow, cramped cockpit but was claustrophobic, since the heavy, metal-framed cockpit canopy opened sideways, like the lid of a coffin, and pressed down against the leather helmet of a taller pilot when it was closed.† In all of them, the cockpit canopy was narrower than the width of an average person’s shoulders, so it was easy to feel trapped by the inward-curving sides of the fuselage. Getting into any one of these aircraft was difficult enough, but getting out of one quickly in midair was harder. The Bf 109 had an advantage over British fighters in this respect—by pulling a red handle on the port side of the cockpit, the pilot could jettison the entire canopy structure (which looked something like a sturdy miniature greenhouse), whereas the pilot of a Hurricane or Spitfire had to push back the canopy with both hands to get out. On the other hand, Mitchell had wisely designed the Spitfire’s cockpit with a hinged, downward-opening panel on the port side, and the larger Hurricane had a metal panel on the starboard side that could be jettisoned; both devices gave the pilot a little more legroom to push himself out of the cockpit in an emergency. All the same, pilots of all three aircraft usually tried to take advantage of gravity by doing a quick half roll to bring their plane upside down so they could unfasten the seat harness and drop out—not an easy thing to do if the controls were damaged, or if you were wounded, or on fire. The half roll also reduced the chance of being stunned or decapitated by the tailplane as you left the cockpit and were carried down by gravity and back by the slipstream.

  Of course all this has to be seen in context. No doubt plenty of nice old ladies sitting in front of a cozy fireplace with a cup of tea in their hand and a cat dozing in their lap were vaporized when a German 250-kilogram bomb fell on their house—you didn’t have to wear a uniform or go looking for trouble at 20,000 feet to die suddenly and violently during World War II. Still, the fact, though much resented by frontline soldiers and naval personnel on ships, that fighter pilots, if they lived, came back at the end of the day to have a drink and dinner in the mess and spend the night in their own bed, does not diminish the courage it took to go back up in the air the next morning and fight three or four times a day.

  Despite the danger, to most fighter pilots it was an exhilarating, adrenaline-producing, incredibly intense experience, very often over—one way or the other—before there was even time to be frightened by it, and repeated day after day until the inexorable law of numbers caught up with you. But even for the young, fit, and self-confident—and by definition all fighter pilots were supremely young, fit, and self-confident—it was a grueling experience; and exhaustion, mental weariness, and, in some men, the slow draining of their stock of courage, took its toll as the weeks and months of the Battle of Britain went by. High in the air, in the dizzying rush of combat, it was easy for a pilot to suddenly find himself alone in the sky, perhaps with his ammunition exhausted, his fuel running low, and a cloud cover below him that prevented him from seeing the ground, and at such times a fighter pilot experienced extreme loneliness and a sense of helpless exposure to danger that could unnerve even the bravest of men.

  A not untypical example of what it was like to be a fledgling fighter pilot was Geoffrey Wellum, who at three months short of nineteen years old was plucked from Flying Training School before he had completed his course, or had even seen a fighter, and posted straight to an operational squadron, where, after a few hours of flying a Spitfire, he met his “baptism of fire.” “Will I have the courage needed?” he asked himself, as he watched his fellow pilots take off, and precisely because he wrote about a young man’s first experience of air combat, his account, in First Light, a classic of its kind, still seems fresh and believable. He notes the pertinent small details, such as taking off his tie and loosening his shirt collar before getting into his aircraft so as not to chafe his neck as he constantly turns his head to look behind him, and as he listens to the ground crews starting up the engines at first light he wonders for the first time, “Which one of us is going to be killed today?”

  Going into combat for the first time, he carefully checks his oxygen as he reaches 10,000 feet—he’s very good on the small rituals with which pilots steady their nerves—and suddenly hears his squadron commander shout to the ground controller, “Tally-ho! Tally-ho! I can see them. They are at least angels one five* and what’s more there are hundreds of the sods!” Wellum “looks up into the far distance, the vast panorama of the sky,” and sees the enemy, like “a swarm of gnats on a warm summe
r evening,” Dornier bombers, Bf 109s (referred to as “snappers” by the RAF) above them. Wellum has never seen so many aircraft in one place in his life, but he wills himself to follow the drill he has been taught—turn the reflector sight on, set the gun button on the control stick handle to “fire,” adjust the airscrew pitch to higher revs, lower his seat as far as it will go, and tighten his Sutton harness. He holds tight to his leader’s Spitfire, its wingtip less than thirty feet away, and follows him into “a mix-up of aeroplanes, in fact bloody chaos,” keeping his eye on the Dornier he has selected despite streams of tracer bullets arcing toward him as his squadron attacks the Germans head-on from below, at a closing speed of about 500 miles per hour:

  Sight on, still on, steady…Fire NOW! I press the gun button and all hell is let loose; my guns make a noise like tearing calico…I get the fleeting impression of hits and explosions on the glass nose of the Dornier, and of Brian’s Spitfire breaking away, its oil-streaked belly visible for a fraction of a second…. For Christ’s sake break off or you’ll hit him…. I stop firing, stick hard over, I even hear his engines as he flashes by inches overhead…. In less time than it takes to think about it, I am at 3,000 feet…Stick back and I pull up, feeling the g loading and using full throttle, regain the level of a real old mix-up, everybody split up, each man for himself…Keep turning, Geoff, don’t fly straight for a second. The R/T is alive with shouts, warnings and odd noises…The effort required is enormous…A 109 crosses my front. I fire a quick burst and I manage to fasten on to him but a Hurricane gets in my way and I have to break off…There’s tracer behind me and very close indeed. I break down hard and a 109 I hadn’t seen pulls up flying at terrific speed…I see…a Heinkel 111 going like a bat out of hell between me and the coast…Ease the stick forward, throttle open and I drop out of the sky after him…Sights on, never mind the return fire, steady, fire again, a long burst this time…Certainly I hit him…The rear gunner has stopped firing and the nose of the Heinkel has dropped…My guns fire a few rounds and then stop…Sod it, out of ammo…I break away. A flash, bright like magnesium and a sharp, very loud explosion…I’ve been hit. So this is how a fighter pilot dies…Looking back over my shoulder an ME 109 is sitting on my tail not thirty yards away…I hold on to the turn for all I’m worth and even tighten it…A quick glance at the gauges. How seriously has he clobbered me? I start to black out. Must be pulling six g. Lean forward, raise my feet on to the rudder pedal extensions. God, they’re heavy…The physical effort is tremendous and the perspiration starts to pour off me…The German pilot is trying to tighten his turn still more to keep up with me and I’m sure I see the 109 flick. You won’t do it, mate, we’re on the limit as it is…He stops his turn…This is it, now get the hell out of it! Stick over and roll on to my back; let her go. Stick centre, take off the bank and pull through hard into a half roll…Throttle still open and hold the vertical dive…Speed is building up at a tremendous rate…Ailerons getting heavy as hell; hold it, hold the stick over, desperate straits need desperate remedies. Blimey, we’re shifting…I take the Spitfire down to ground level, flying very, very fast…The sky is clear, except for a few dispersing smoke trails…Not another aeroplane in sight…I can’t really explain it but I realize how lonely I felt up there…

  Wellum’s description of his first fight is about as good as words get in describing the indescribable. He went on to fight through the Battle of Britain, win a DFC, do more than 100 sorties over France, and fly a Hurricane off a carrier deck to land on the besieged island of Malta and fight there. Summing up what he had learned about air combat, he wrote, “No amount of training can prepare you for mortal combat…You must remember a simple, straightforward golden rule: Never, never fly straight and level for more than twenty seconds. If you do, you’ll die.”

  A lot of young men on both sides learned that lesson in the sky above Dunkirk from May 26 to June 4, 1940, and for some of them the lesson was fatal. Whatever the troops on the ground thought, Fighter Command had played a significant role in making their evacuation* from Dunkirk possible and had put up an extraordinary fight against overwhelming odds, for the 200-odd fighters of Park’s No. 11 Group were facing two entire German Luftflotten above Dunkirk. In the twenty-four days since the German attack on France and the Low Countries, the Luftwaffe had lost more than 1,200 aircraft, and the RAF 959, but for the British the most significant number was that 477 of these were Dowding’s precious fighters, which he had never wanted sent to France in the first place, and which he dispatched to Dunkirk with infinite reluctance and foreboding.

  Others, including the prime minister, still retained hope that France would survive the initial disaster of the war, as it had survived the Battle of the Marne by a hairbreadth in 1914, when the Parisian taxis had shuttled General Joseph-Simon Gallieni’s troops from the Gare des Invalides to the front in time to save France. Churchill, however poorly he spoke French, was a devoted, passionate Francophile, and although the writing was, all too clearly, on the wall, his generous nature and his romantic impulses prevented him from seeing, at first, the full and shameful extent of the French military and political collapse. Throughout most of his lifetime, France had been Britain’s only European ally; he himself had commanded an infantry battalion in the trenches in France in what was still called the Great War; many of the senior French generals and not a few of the politicians were his friends. Accordingly, Churchill was profoundly and sincerely reluctant to leave France in the lurch. Dowding, however, shared none of these emotions, nor the illusions that they kindled in the prime minister’s breast. He had never had much confidence in the idea that the Maginot Line or the French army would stop the Germans, still less any confidence in the French air force, which he knew was poorly equipped and trained, and possessed neither modern fighters, nor radar, nor an efficiently organized fighter control organization. Dowding took it for granted that the Germans would attack Britain as soon as they gained possession of the French, Dutch, and Belgian airfields; that Britain’s survival would depend on his fighters; and that every fighter and every fighter pilot sent to France directly weakened his strength. He did not believe that his Hurricanes—his few Spitfires were too valuable to even consider sending to France—could stop or even slow down the German advance, or that their presence would restore the morale of the French army. The British fighters in France were flying from makeshift, primitive airfields, without radar and fighter control to guide them; the French had no modern antiaircraft guns to protect the fields; and a long, tenuous supply line went all the way back to the Channel ports (which were now being taken one by one by the Germans) and was dependent on the French railways and road system, both prime targets for German bombers. Fuel, equipment, ammunition, and spares seldom reached the places where they were most needed through the chaos of the French retreat, which led to the rapid wastage of British aircraft and pilots for no gain whatsoever.

  The French, not surprisingly, saw the matter from a different point of view. Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force had been too small to make a difference in the major land battle, and had in any case returned to Britain via Dunkirk, leaving the French army to fight on alone, with lessening cohesion and rapidly sinking morale. Nobody in France seriously expected the British to summon up an army of many divisions overnight and ship them to France, but the one thing they did have, apart from the Royal Navy, was a powerful modern air force. Now, in the view of the French government, at the supreme moment of crisis, was the time to send it into battle, to give the French army a breathing space in which to establish a viable line of defense.

  What the French wanted most was fighters, despite the fact that an eight-gun Hurricane was powerless against a tank, and the reason for this has to be explored, for it was to become the major issue between the British and French governments, and between Churchill and Dowding. The military alliance between Britain and France was a relatively recent historical development, an unusual happy interlude in a 900-year history of mutual warfare, rivalry, a
nd contempt—a history that still made many Britons and most of the French uneasy. Old prejudices die hard and slowly, and the fact that the French and the British had fought on the same side in the Crimean War and in World War I had done nothing to erase the French people’s memory of Crécy, Agincourt, Trafalgar, and Waterloo or their suspicion of “perfidious Albion,” or to reduce British contempt for the “frogs.” Nowhere were these feelings stronger than among the senior officers of the armed forces of both nations—indeed, after World War I the air defenses of Great Britain had been built up with France in mind as the potential aggressor, until Germany revived sufficiently to resume that role.

  One effect of this long-standing hostility between the two allies was that the parties behaved toward each other, as in a bad marriage, with exaggerated politeness and a total lack of frankness. Thus, although it was clear enough that French generalship had failed spectacularly and that the French army had, with a few signal exceptions,* fought very badly indeed, where it had fought at all, the British were deeply reluctant to say so, and since their own small army had distinguished itself so far only by conducting a well-disciplined retreat and a providential evacuation, they were in any case in no position to criticize France. As for the French, a proud nation with a rich tradition of military gloire second to none, and fresh memories of victory in World War I, they themselves naturally did not jump to the conclusion that their troops had fought badly or that their generals had bungled. They looked for another reason, and found it in the fact that the Germans controlled the air.

  The French government and generals agreed that this was the problem. Although the Germans had not in fact launched a serious bomber campaign against French cities, they had used their Stukas as airborne artillery, as well as for strafing the roads. Retreating soldiers and civilian refugees alike, jamming France’s road system, had been terrified by the sudden appearance of German dive-bombers—one of Udet’s shrewdest moves had been to fit the Ju 87 with a siren that gave out a banshee howl as it dived, sowing panic among all who heard it. Though the actual number of deaths caused by the Luftwaffe in France was low, particularly compared with the casualties that France had suffered in World War I, the psychological effect was enormous, spread mostly in the form of horrifying rumors, which paralyzed the government, eroded the already doubtful morale of the army, and terrified the civilian population. It also served as a simple, all-purpose explanation for France’s defeat—not only had the British not done their share of the fighting; they had also failed to provide enough fighters to protect the French army.