The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  The presumption was that the very first day of such an attack would result in tens of thousands of deaths.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Edward Ellington studied the maps and drew his own chilling conclusions in 1934. He hypothesised the Germans marching into the Low Countries and setting up a range of aerodromes. Such bases would make London almost absurdly easy to attack; a short distance across the water, a dreadful head start on the defenders before they could know that the attack had been launched, and the Germans would not spend long in their enemy’s airspace – just drop the bombs, turn, and back to base. Ellington’s proposed solution? For Britain to occupy and defend the Low Countries before they could be overrun.

  Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had been thinking of those enemy bombers. Famously he believed that nothing could ever stop them getting through: ‘I think it is as well for the man in the street to realise that no power on earth can protect him from being bombed.’ More than that, ‘Who does not know that if another great war comes, our civilisation will fall with as great a crash as that of Rome?’ he asked in 1933.

  Yet there was another side to this neurosis; the knowledge that whatever the enemy did to us, we could do back to them. There were those in Whitehall who tried – vainly – to make such calculations too. In the event of British and German populations being struck repeatedly and unstoppably, in the event of entire cities going up in flickering plumes of searing heat, which side would lose its morale first? Which population would be the first to turn on its leaders to beg for the horror to stop?

  This had been a major preoccupation in Germany long before Goering and the Nazis came to power. At the 1920s height of the Weimar government, many civic leaders had been reading authors such as H.G. Wells (in The Outline of History, Wells had painted a vision of the results of total war from the air; elsewhere, other authors had gone so far as to suggest that chemical bombardment could induce mutations). In 1927 (a year after Germany was allowed by the League of Nations to have defensive military and naval arrangements), the German Air Defence League was formed. It asked experts from many fields to prophesy what would happen if German cities came under heavy bombardment. Chemists were drawn in with the hope that they might be able to suggest ways of neutralising the poisons that could be rained down. Architects were consulted about ways that buildings, streets and neighbourhoods might be somehow made more bomb-proof; could apartment blocks and road layouts be reconfigured so as to minimise the effect of blasts? The country was clearly experiencing a jangling paranoia in the wake of the First World War, a belief that the vengeful Allies might yet seek to crush Germany further.

  As soon as Hitler came to power, the Nazis sought to intensify that national neurosis. Just months into 1933, ‘the Nazis rehearsed air attacks to simulate the vulnerability of the Reich,’ wrote Peter Fritzsche. ‘The most spectacular was an air raid over Berlin … “unknown foreign” aeroplanes bombarded Berlin.’3 The objects dropped on this occasion were leaflets, outlining the ever-present horror that might fly overhead at any time. One newspaper helpfully underlined the point by declaring that next time it could be chemical weapons or incendiary bombs. The shadow of the enemy bomber came to loom large in propaganda; one magazine cover of 1934 depicted a map of Germany and, menacing it from all sides, various types of bombers. Every arena of municipal life was touched; in schools and factories, everyone was urged to learn how to use gas masks, and how to get to gas shelters in an orderly fashion.

  There was also a sickly emphasis on the terrifying detachment of bombers; the height at which they flew and the preternatural power which that gave them. It was pointed out that unlike soldiers on the ground, fighting clearly defined lines, defending sacred territory, the pilot of a bomber high above could not even see the physical demarcations of national borders. Why show respect to something that – from such a distance – seemed so insignificant? As the decade wore on and the Nazis’ grip on power tightened, some canny lateral thinking took place about making the civilian population more aviation-minded. The new sport of gliding had – like many outdoor pursuits in Germany – been enjoying a vogue but when the Nazis came to power, they made it all the more popular. Gliding clubs popped up all over the country, heavily subsidised by the Nazis. The German gliders were launched from high hills, hauled to the top by eager teams waiting for their turn to soar. The idea was to quietly train as many people as possible in the principles and science of aerodynamics. As many as 60,000 German people held gliding licences in the 1930s.

  The propaganda had a double edge. By terrorising its own population with the prospect of total war, the Nazis were clearing the way towards making their own version of it completely acceptable.

  Back in Britain and within the RAF, not dissimilar arguments – in philosophical terms – were taking place. But there was also a much more serious focus upon building up Britain’s defensive capabilities. This led to furious in-fighting within the Air Ministry; by concentrating solely on self-protection, some argued, Britain was effectively ceding potential control over the whole of Europe to the Nazis. As the arguments raged, recruitment raced on. Unlike the army, which even by the late 1930s was run very much as though it were still in the late Victorian era – officers most often educated at public school, and a great proportion with private incomes – the RAF was attempting to trawl more varied waters for new candidates. The levels of skill that the new generation of pilots would need meant that the Air Ministry could not afford to overlook genuinely promising candidates. The inception of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1936, as Martin Francis noted, ‘opened up the service to lower middle class grammar school boys looking for an alternative to dreary clerking jobs in the city … All recruits to the RAFVR shared the same initial instruction, and commissions were only awarded later, on the basis of performance in training.’4

  There were also a number of highly experienced instructors in the air force who had risen up through apprenticeships; a long way from the amused, confident aristocrats who went at it as a hobby. In Geoffrey Wellum’s haunting account of his own time as a pilot in Fighter Command, he dwells on the flight lieutenants who patiently tutored him when he was barely eighteen years old: though they were older and wiser, and their aviation experience was obviously far greater, they wouldn’t allow him to call them ‘sir’; he was in training to be an officer and they were thus his juniors in terms of rank. Therefore they would call Wellum ‘sir’ and he would refer to them as ‘Flight’.

  Wellum himself was not grand, hailing from the comfortable middle-class fringes of Epping Forest in London. But in the mid-1930s, the RAF was becoming publicly known for its dashing, suave, better socially connected recruits. A man who would shortly make a name for himself was Peter Townsend, (later, in the 1950s, he made an even bigger name for himself as the lover of the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret). The son of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Townsend, a Burma district commissioner, the fourteen-year-old Peter was enraptured by the sight of three Armstrong Whitworth biplane fighters making a landing in the fields of his English public school, Haileybury.

  Five years later, at the age of nineteen, he went to Cranwell to enrol at the Royal Air Force College. Townsend was in some ways the very archetype of the young RAF pilot; darkly handsome, socially assured, not boorish but instead languidly confident, at least outwardly. It can never be reiterated enough that flying – even simply for training purposes – could in fact be intensely frightening. The masks that these young pilots wore must have been easy for barmaids, publicans and batmen alike to see through. But in the 1930s, it was still a service that was struggling to find respect from either the Army or Navy. Townsend later wrote:

  The RAF’s impudent claim that priority should be given to air defence rocked the sea-dogs and the Colonel Blimps. It was unbearable that the old country should have to look for protection to pilots of the RAF, whom the old guard tended to despise as the rag-tag and bob-tail of the nation’s youth, beyond the fringe of respectable society, with their pub-c
rawling and noisy sports cars.5

  Nor did the Colonel Blimps really understand either the grave souls of these outwardly flippant youngsters or their poetic need for the sky. Even as a small boy, Townsend had felt it: ‘Unlike the sea, [the sky] was changing and ethereal,’ he wrote. ‘Unlike the gloomy, invisible depths of the sea, the air was full of enchantment.’ He also understood very well as an adult that the euphoria he experienced when flying opened up other philosophical possibilities: ‘I was never a fatalist, but the more I flew, the more certain I became of some will beyond our own.’ This was a sense that a great many pilots shared.

  Elsewhere, Patricia Clark, the daughter of that era’s bestselling romantic novelist Denise Robins, was to join Fighter Command as a WAAF to play crucial roles in the Operations and Filter Rooms – and she had been partly inspired in that direction by the fact that her brother and cousins were, in the 1930s, drawn in to become pilots. As a very young woman indeed, one of her very first ‘dates’ – although the term would probably horrify her – was with a young man who already had his own aeroplane: ‘When I was a teenager – I think I was the only person who dared do this actually – I went with him when he wanted to fly. He would take me down to Lancing on the south coast. And we would beetle up Brighton front in his little Moth – where he would go down as low as he could over the piers, skate over the top of them and scare everybody. He was absolutely mad.

  ‘Being as young as I was,’ she continues, ‘he was the brother that I had never had, but had always wanted. He took me out in London in the winter and the roads were all frozen. He had this beautiful car and he was practising skids. And after we had done this for about an hour, he said: “Well, now we’ll practise kissing.” And I had never kissed a boy before so I thought, well, that’s not a bad idea as I don’t know how to do it. So he said, “Right.” And he bent down and pressed his mouth on mine – and it went on and on and on and on. I was breathless, he was breathless. Eventually, he took his mouth away and said, “That’s a record. I counted to one hundred that time.”’

  Incongruous innocence and impetuosity seemed oddly defining leitmotifs of many young pilots. But the Colonel Blimps had a point; from Cranwell to Duxford, Hornchurch to North Weald, the RAF men really were roaring around in newly bought motor cars and drinking heavily in country pubs. Writing of that period, novelist Jane Oliver declared that ‘to the average citizen … these noisy young men were just a nuisance, with their tendency to pick fights on the least provocation, to drive almost continuously to the danger of the public, to break all the comfortable conventions.’6 There were moments of tension in smart restaurants when more reserved army officers were faced with the prospect, at another table, of these boys in their blue uniforms with their ‘long hair’ and – to military eyes – slovenly standards of dress. Meanwhile, certain public bars near aerodromes could be monopolised. One exception to the drinking (though not to the fast cars) was young Douglas Bader, who claimed that he had never liked the taste of beer, or any other alcoholic refreshment, and so avoided it. But he was happy to be in the company of those who didn’t.

  Yet this was far from being yobbishness. There was a great deal of stress involved in fighter training: not merely the tough instructors and exams, or the anxieties of navigating before the days of radio technology, using only compasses, maps and even Bradshaw’s railway timetables to work out where exactly the plane was, as the fuel gauges dropped lower. These very young men had entered a world in which death was frequent and common, yet always came as a stomach-punch of shock. Trainee pilots who had barely started shaving would make friends, form close bonds with their fellows, shake off the tension of spins and rolls and engine seizures with beer; and then watch, with horror, as a comrade in the air experienced engine trouble, or stalled, and couldn’t pull the plane out the death-spin. Such intimate acquaintanceship with mortality at so young an age had a tremendous psychological impact.

  In that febrile atmosphere, the British welcomed a visit in 1937 from a diplomatic German Air Mission. At that stage, new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did not regard war as inevitable. He was pursuing appeasement; although it is difficult to find anyone now who does not view his aims with contempt, it is important to point out that for those who had lived through the First World War, there was a certain honour in trying to avoid sending Britain’s working men into a fresh hell; honour, too, in at least attempting to make a lunatic dictator back down from a mania for conquest that might result in the destruction of the Continent.

  The senior Luftwaffe commander who led the 1937 mission to Britain, Erhard Milch (the man who had so carefully watched and enjoyed the RAF’s earlier Hendon pageants) was carefully steered away from classified technological developments; but he was allowed to meet crews and inspect planes. He and various other figures from the Reich Air Ministry were taken on quite a grand tour: from the aerodrome at Hornchurch to RAF Odiham in Lincolnshire to Mildenhall in Suffolk.

  A couple of pilots remembered awkward moments, as Milch inspected cockpits and enquired about reflector gun-sights, which the men had been warned not to talk about in any detail. But Milch was not there to undertake espionage. He in turn talked relatively freely with his British counterparts about Luftwaffe developments. There was said to be an atmosphere of ‘intimacy’. Yet away from the eagerness of obsessional men, there was a carefully unspoken darkness. Milch was keeping a larger secret of his own. By 1937, the Luftwaffe as a force was some distance ahead of the RAF in terms of numbers and squadrons. On Milch’s return to Germany, he was interviewed at great length by Hitler and reportedly praised very highly all that he had seen. Only a man supremely confident about the superiority of his own forces would have dared to do that.

  Yet Milch’s visit was mirrored – more informally – by a particularly remarkable encounter just a few months before. It came about when two British pilots – Squadron Leader Herbert Rowley and Flight Lieutenant Richard Atcherley – took it into their heads, independently of their superiors, to fly over to Germany to see what the country’s air force was like. The story, long kept classified, was unearthed by Vincent Orange several years ago.7 As well as providing astonishing, illuminating detail on the sluggishness of British intelligence in that period – detail which, knowingly or otherwise, Rowley passed on to the then politically marginalised Winston Churchill – there is also a curious tone of rambunctious comedy: two RAF boys, with a heightened appetite for drink, in the middle of Hitler’s Germany in 1937.

  They flew out early one morning in a Percival Gull monoplane and, having stopped off in Kent and then Amsterdam, made straight for Berlin, landing at one of the city’s main airfields. Their arrival seemed to cause no consternation whatsoever. As Orange noted, ‘they were charged a nominal sum to house their aeroplane.’ There was still so much about aviation that was new.

  Britain had an air attaché in Berlin; Rowley and Atcherley called on him. From the start, senior Luftwaffe figures were also keen to meet them; at the grand British Aero Club, the pilots were introduced to Colonel Friedrich Hanesse of Germany’s Air Intelligence Service and told him – with winning frankness – that they were simply ‘out to see as much as they could’. What followed was the sort of VIP visit more normally accorded to senior Air Ministry dignitaries. Rowley and Atcherley found every door open, and a chauffeur-driven Mercedes waiting to convey them wherever they wished.

  Meetings and appointments were set up at air bases and air production factories. Obviously this was not one-way traffic; their German hosts were clearly anxious to hear as much about the RAF as they could. But underneath was something that – for those few brief days – pushed to one side notions of nationalism. The English and German pilots – experts at what they did – already knew one another. Atcherley, for instance, knew the Luftwaffe head of research and development, Ernst Udet, from a very different life; both men had performed acrobatic stunts at well-paid American air shows. In just a few years, Udet had progressed from stunt flying to a position of s
erious power within the Luftwaffe; and he told the two British pilots about his new project, the Junkers Ju 87, otherwise known as the Stuka, a plane with an extraordinary capacity for near-vertical dives, giving the pilot lethal firing accuracy.

  When they returned home Rowley wrote a long and considered memo not to his direct superior but to Wing Commander Charles Anderson, who ensured that his friend Winston Churchill was privy to what Anderson regarded as short comings and deficiencies in the organisation of the RAF.

  If there was a general idea that RAF pilots were largely recruited from the more well-to-do strata of society, there was a parallel notion, in the late 1930s, about their Luftwaffe counterparts, remembers Patricia Clark. Before the war, she and her sister had been sent to Switzerland – and then Germany – for their education. This was not unusual; many girls from rarefied backgrounds completed their educations over there. There were formal dances – and smart young women were sought out as partners.

  ‘Just nearby Munich, there was a training establishment for air force cadets – Luftwaffe – and they were being taught how to behave as gentlemen in the mess,’ says Mrs Clark. ‘An appeal went out to foreign visitors who would be willing to go – at invitation – to partner these cadets while they were learning to dance. My friend and I both put our names down and sure enough we were carted off to this party.’

  The prelude might not have been terrifically elegant – but what followed was. ‘There, we sat around in a ballroom and the Luftwaffe cadets all wore white gloves, very old fashioned. Music would start. They would come across the room, click their heels, bow. “May I have your permission to dance?” And then you would get up, dance round the floor. Then they would bow, click their heels, hold your hand and thank you. Very formal. Quite fun, really a giggle, because we were very young. Once or twice we made friends with some of the Luftwaffe pilots and they were just like any ordinary English students.’ Nor did they ever discuss politics. ‘They weren’t Nazis or anything – though whether they belonged to the Nazi party – well, they probably did, because they had to. But there was no sign of anything like that.’