The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  From the Filter and Operations Rooms, the women had been able to furnish the squadrons at Uxbridge to the west, and North Weald to the east, and Biggin Hill and Kenley to the south, with vectors and altitudes. Young pilots, with not a great deal of training but a huge amount of courage, were thousands of feet up in the air, swooping down to engage against this outrage. As the German bombers got the great East End docks in their sights, the hugely outnumbered Spitfires and Hurricanes did astonishingly well in the circumstances; seventy-four enemy aircraft were annihilated. A further seventy-odd were reckoned damaged. In other words, a disproportionate percentage of the attacking forces sustained lethal or serious injury. And yet the outrage continued.

  The daytime raid had merely been the first act. At 8.10 p.m., with the last traces of hazy crimson gone from the sky, another lethal black wave of bombers materialised from the thickening darkness of the east. The Thames beneath the Germans was now a dully luminous serpent, twisting, rippling, betraying the city. The targets, many already burning fiercely, were hit more intensively. At Purfleet, the Anglo-American Oil Works went up in a lurid blaze.

  Upriver, Woolwich Arsenal – that great historic citadel of gunpowder, explosives and fissile material – bellowed black and molten yellow as stores detonated. There were fires at the Siemens Bros works. Damage was done to the southern outfall sewer that stretched out to Crossness. The vast gasworks by the claggy, thickly flowing Thames at Gallions Reach nearby were also hit, and orange and blue flames rose high into the indigo sky. The percussive waves of noise that could be felt as well as heard were described by one East End resident as being like the mighty footsteps of an enraged giant.

  That giant seemed to be stamping everywhere; every bomb that did not hit an industrial objective would instead find a domestic target. South and east London were very densely populated, with houses bunched in terraces around a vast expanse of factories, docks and processing plants. As the blue twilight settled into the total darkness of London blackout, the German bombers mocked the cover of night before turning back by illuminating the city in blazing oranges and scarlets. Houses were sliced in two in a fraction of a second, their occupants instantly dismembered; roads and railway lines were bisected. Midnight came and yet more waves of bombers flew over. Against daytime raids there was some semblance of a chance of engaging the enemy properly. At night, in 1940, pilots were still largely flying blind and into a disorientating pandemonium. ‘Has a Blitz begun?’ wrote pilot George Barclay of 249 Squadron of that night. ‘The Wing Commander’s coolness is amazing and he does a lot to keep up our morale – very necessary tonight.’1

  Meanwhile, the personnel emerging from the Bentley Priory ‘Hole’ at midnight, at the end of an eight-hour shift, saw the unnatural sunset of flame in the east. For WAAF officer Gladys Eva, taking a quick break from the relentless underground duties, the horror was immediate. ‘God, I cannot tell you,’ she says now. ‘We’d been working downstairs, so we knew what they were doing to London, once they started to bomb. You would go out of the Hole and the whole of the sky would be lit. You could see London easily from Stanmore. And we had been plotting them all the while, so we knew they were over in vast numbers.’

  There were other elements to the armoury of Fighter Command: the plump silvery barrage balloons floating on ropes in the air, a spectacle that Londoners had taken a while to get used to; the huge wheeling guns and the piercingly bright lights of Anti-Aircraft Command. But with a determined enemy thrusting through, they could offer only limited protection that night.

  Yet this is assuredly not a story of failure. Completely the reverse. The Blitz, terrifying and deadly though it was, was Hitler’s tacit admission of failure to gain mastery in the Battle of Britain. This is the story of how an institution – part military, part civilian – carefully built up and yet very often improvised, found a completely new way of waging a war, projecting it into the skies throughout the hard years to come.

  The headquarters of Fighter Command had seen many pivotal days and nights already, and would see many more before the war was finally played out. The later years would bring V-1 and V-2 missiles, as well as the extraordinary tension of D-Day in 1944. Bentley Priory saw many huge successes, as well as harrowing disasters, right the way through to the end.

  The story of the Second World War’s fighter pilots, men such as Alan Deere, Richard Hillary, Roger Bushell and Douglas Bader, is clearly one that cannot be celebrated enough; indeed, their story seemed to have been imprinted in the national consciousness even before the Battle of Britain began. The images are so familiar as to seem like clichés from innumerable John Mills films: the absurd cheerfulness of the pilots in the face of death or mutilating injury; the aerodromes with their concrete hangars; the young fighters running for their fighter planes, taking to the skies in small metal constructions that now look as if they could barely survive collision with a flock of geese.

  Then there are those battles in the skies above, now pressed into national folk memory as seen from the ground – skies swirling with curling contrails, moments of mad exhilaration when German pilots swoop in so low that they can be seen in their cockpits; and then the moments when these young men are shot out of the sky, planes spiralling down, distant explosions in far-off fields.

  Added to this is the folk-memory of the individualistic nature of the courageous RAF squadrons; the lightning-fast decisions taken at stations like Hornchurch and Debden and Northolt and Duxford; then, after the fighting, the accounting of the dead, and the swift, deliberate insouciance of the surviving fighting men. As such, the images convey a sense of cohesion and assurance; it is startling to think now that so much of this was extemporised.

  And even the flashing lights of the Fighter Command Operations Room – the special clocks with the differently coloured sectors, the futuristic looking, brightly illuminated panels, the WAAFs spending hours leaning across the table map like croupiers, moving the tiny markers that signified the different sorts of enemy waves and their positions – was a system that had to be adapted constantly to new emergencies.

  It doesn’t take much now to imagine the asphyxiating weight of anxiety on Hugh Dowding, the architect of a system for which he was to receive next to no thanks. He was remembered by all who knew him as a reserved man; and during these days of national crisis, this grave figure would be found in his office in Bentley Priory, the windows facing out west towards Harrow, his desk sparse, save for the in-trays of seemingly illimitable paperwork that had to be done even in emergencies. Even at the height of the Battle of Britain, Dowding faced poisonous office politics; superiors who wanted to get rid of him at any cost.

  In May and June 1940, the people of Britain had been galvanised by the unnerving rout of the British Expeditionary Force in France that had led to the evacuation of Dunkirk. The brave voyages of the Little Ships were instantly mythologised by press and public alike. The returning soldiers – half-starved, almost hallucinating with tiredness – were greeted at railway stations as though they were film stars. But after a long Phoney War (or ‘Bore War’) in which public and military alike had seemed perfectly confident of Britain’s ability to hold back the Nazis, the next few weeks were to be marked with a mass cognitive dissonance. Hitler’s invasion was widely anticipated, yet the public and the returned soldiers contrived somehow to press on with a kind of black good humour.

  In Parliament, Winston Churchill – who had been Prime Minister for barely a month – made reference to the pilots of the RAF. ‘The battle of France is over,’ he proclaimed on 4 June 1940. ‘The Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ And so the coming conflict had been named before it had even started. Churchill too referred to RAF pilots in Arthurian terms; the new chivalrous knights, brave men of the airy realms, who would now be doing battle to protect the honour of the nation. His words might have been a response to the fury among so many ordinary British soldiers about the RAF’s perceived lack of help during the Dunkirk crisis. The soldiers were wrong; the pilots
had been fighting, all right. And behind the scenes Dowding too had been bitterly fighting to preserve the forces that he needed for the confrontations to come.

  But the story and the life of Bentley Priory extends much further out and further back. It begins in another age, another reign, as dreams of flying took on corporeal life. And it also encompasses that point at the outbreak of war when a nation was jolted into modernity; not just in technological terms, but also in terms of meritocracy, the dissolution of old class structures, and in the ability of a younger generation of women to find a voice in this new world.

  It is a story that extends across Britain too; not just to take in all the pilots in all the squadrons in those strategic positions, but also the personnel keeping up with events on the ground. From the ever vigilant Observer Corps, dotted around the country in their little exposed huts; to the anti-aircraft gunners, posted on hills and in parks, doing what they could in the hours of darkness to beat back an enemy that was all but invisible; to the dedicated young women from Bath to Suffolk, in underground control rooms, who were overseeing the very earliest days of radar. At these far-flung bases, young women recruits found a strong taste of independence that they might not otherwise have had; the responsibility and the skilled work brought commissions for some, like Eileen Younghusband, and the eye-opening experience of entering formerly male strongholds.

  But what they all found was a life of needle-sharp intensity. Not merely in terms of duty, but also in off-duty hours: the romances, the dances and even the unauthorised pet dogs on base. Looking back now, we tend not only to imagine the war in black and white, but also to assume that it was conducted very much on one note. The veterans, by contrast, recall the vivid range and depths of emotion that the period inspired. It is worth repeating that in an age before computing, Fighter Command’s accuracy in the plotting and interception of enemy planes was genuinely astonishing. Above all it is a story about a group of young men and women thrown together in extreme circumstances and immediately growing both in maturity and experience.

  There is a sharp difference between the lives of the fighter pilots and those of the bomber crews, who belonged to a separate RAF branch of command. The work of the bombers, the cruel precariousness of their existence and the crushing weight of their function, was by its nature unrelentingly haunting, especially in the later stages of the conflict. By contrast, even though the sacrifices made by the fighter pilots were vast, there was something perhaps less philosophically burdensome about their war; right from the start, there was even a sort of purity about these duels in the sky. Which is why, despite the mortality rates, despite the hideous injuries and disfigurements, such battles still now tend to be associated with the cleanness of blue skies and white clouds.

  The story is also in some ways a portrait of a younger generation in microcosm; or at least of everything that the younger generation wanted itself to be. Long before American GIs came over with their irresistible music and attitude, the pilots and the women of RAF Fighter Command embodied a certain style and cool. They were sharp, sophisticated, amusing, attractive. Like their opposite numbers in the Luftwaffe, it is true that many were, at least initially, drawn from the more rarefied levels of society. But where the Prussian princes and minor noblemen of Germany were noted both for exquisite social manners and high seriousness, the RAF fighter pilot was – at least for the consumption of an eager public – an indomitably cheery, even slightly raffish young man. At the time of the Battle of Britain, the average age of a fighter pilot was twenty. They were not even old enough to vote (the age of majority then was twenty-one); yet anyone halfway sensible would have understood the depths beneath that studied insouciance. The memories one hears now – either from those long gone or those wonderfully still with us – are tinged with an unusual amount of humour, as well as of poignancy; surprisingly, some of their stories are very funny. There is also an unusual lyricism, and a lingering sense of spirituality too. It makes their achievements all the more breathtaking.

  Bentley Priory was at the heart of the sort of war which will never be fought again. Those pilots achieved a victory that it will be given to no one else to win. All the control rooms, all the aerodromes, all the exquisitely designed aircraft, all the airmen with poetry in their souls, came together in one unique national moment: an island fighting to ensure that its soul remained intact.

  Chapter Two

  The Vision of Wings

  From the beginning, there had been a curious mix of pure addictive adventure, the exhilaration of climbing beyond the clouds, and the extraordinary, concrete power that these flights could bring. Even before aeroplanes, in the middle years of Victoria’s reign in the nineteenth century, young men were looking up at the sky and daydreaming that Britain’s empire might be further strengthened from high above. In 1863, in the secret woods of Hampshire around Aldershot that had been closed off for military training, Lieutenant George Grover and Captain Beaumont were enthusiastically preparing to rise high above the green canopy, having been given hesitant permission by their superiors.

  Their means of doing so was by balloon. The two men were very excited about the possibilities that it represented, chiefly for watching over the enemy’s activities from a safe distance above. Such contrivances had already been used to a limited extent over the battlefields of the American Civil War; the French were also exploring the possibilities. It would take a dedicated amateur balloonist, Captain James Lethbridge Templer, to make a more persuasive case, as he did when, fifteen years later in 1878, he proudly presented his own balloon, made to his own designs, to the military engineers and scientists at London’s Woolwich Arsenal. The first British military use of aviation came in South Africa in 1884, and in Sudan the year afterwards. From above, it was possible for observers to make out not merely enemy movements, but also artillery that might otherwise have been hidden. This new omniscience was hated and feared by those on the ground; even from the start, war in the air engendered a permanent sense of insecurity.

  However, when air technology took a vast leap forward in 1903 with the work of the Wright Brothers, senior British military figures were resistant to the innovations that immediately suggested themselves. Others weren’t. The Germans, inspired by Count von Zeppelin, who had made a maiden flight in the dirigible that bore his name in 1900, had developed a strong fixation with the potential of airships. The deadly possibilities of such craft were not lost on the popular fiction writers of the day. Indeed, in 1909, an early cinema film called The Airship Destroyer concerned an invasion of such ships (depicted via some basic animation techniques) throwing down bombs and missiles on a helpless populace.

  But there was the soaring romance of flight too. In 1909, the Daily Mail began offering cash prizes for astonishing feats of aviation. Not only did men love risking their lives to fly into the clouds; millions of readers thrilled to their exploits too. In that year, Louis Blériot successfully – and stunningly – made a flight across the English Channel. In the midst of aero-hysteria, Chief of the General Staff Sir William Nicholson observed to his colleagues: ‘It is of importance that we push on with the practical study of the military use of aircraft in the field … Even with the present type of dirigibles and aeroplanes, other nations have already made considerable progress in this training and in view of the fact that aircraft will undoubtedly be used in the next war, whenever it may come, we cannot afford to delay the matter.’1

  The military and senior politicians in Whitehall naturally did delay the matter. The following year, Colonel J.E.B. Seeley announced that ‘the Government does not consider that aeroplanes are of any possible use for war purposes.’ Yet that war was coming; it was foreshadowed in popular fiction which was filled with hysterical paranoia about the hostile intentions of continental enemies. The novelist Herbert Strang eagerly seized upon all the adventurous possibilities that aeroplanes presented and used them in story after story. Notable was the stirring 1910 effort King of the Air, in which bandits kidnap a diplom
at – and two daring young men in a flying machine subdue the kidnappers by flying around their stronghold and dropping explosives upon them.

  Cinema added a fresh dimension to the flying craze. Daredevil pilot Claude Graham-White took his plane up with a film camera in 1911; beguiled audiences were shown breathtaking – and hitherto impossible – views of London taken from hundreds of feet in the air. The moving images induced disorientation in many. And those who had read their science fiction might also have felt a pang of unease; from street level, all cities look indestructible. This was the first time that everyone could see how – from above – even a grand capital of stone and marble suddenly started to seem a little more vulnerable.

  By 1911, there were just six military aeroplanes in the whole of Britain; by contrast, at this stage, France had a total of 208. At last, the authorities understood the need to catch up. And soon, there was a Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, Hampshire, the presiding genius of which was a talented engineer called Geoffrey de Havilland. It often took the enthusiasm of civilians to help the military hierarchy see fresh possibilities. In 1912, the Royal Flying Corps was formed, overseen with keen interest by Lieutenant General David Henderson.

  There were several branches to the Corps: the Military Wing, the Naval Wing and the Central Flying School. To ensure a minimum of tension between army officers (the War Office ran the school), it was decided that it should be run by a naval officer: Captain G. Paine was selected. There was one initial setback: he had yet to learn to fly. Paine was taught in the space of ten days. The Central Flying School was established on high ground outside a small village called Upavon in Wiltshire, a location noted immediately for its bitter wind, cold, and rugged terrain that should, as one observer pointed out sardonically, have produced the hardiest imaginable aviators.