The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘We also had training lessons in the Odeon cinema in Newcastle on a Sunday when there were no shows on. The RAF would provide training films where an aircraft would appear on the screen for just a few seconds, and we would have to describe what it was. It was a sort of test, really, and there were also written tests on RAF procedures. In time I got my first class certificate but there was also an even higher grading, which was called the master test. For the master test, fifty aircraft would appear on the screen, one after another, and we had to correctly identify 95% of those aircraft … It wasn’t easy, but if you did pass you were given a little, pale-blue Spitfire badge to sew onto the sleeve of your battle dress.’10

  Another key aspect of Dowding’s meticulous organisation was the deployment of anti-aircraft artillery. These gun emplacements are – in some parts of London – still marked on the maps. In 1938, the anti-aircraft corps was under the command of Major General Alan Brooke; even though it came under the auspices of the army, it answered to Dowding in Fighter Command. The divisions were based around London, but also with a heavy presence around Britain’s docks and ports and working rivers, from Hull and Liverpool to Plymouth and Bristol. Not every emplacement was armed with an anti-aircraft gun. Some only had searchlights. There was constant anxiety – as throughout the entirety of the armed services – about whether what they had was enough.

  There was also a great deal of extemporisation: where sites for anti-aircraft guns were chosen, it was quite often up to the poor soldiers themselves to make the locations work. Not only would they have to construct the emplacements for the guns, they would also have to build all the other necessary facilities, including living quarters and wash blocks.

  At the time of the Munich crisis, anti-aircraft troops were under more pressure than anyone; for if war was declared, it was held as a truism that the first of Hitler’s bombing and gassing attacks would begin at once.

  In some places, troops were billeted in local houses; in others, they were forced to live outdoors in tents. The work was extraordinarily unglamorous, entailing as it did taking aim at the sky with big guns or big lights. Many of the recruits, it was found, were not even quite up to that, for various reasons; and they had to be moved into other roles. Only later – when the war was under way – would it become obvious just how valiant the men who did this thankless job were. Along with the fighter pilots, it would be they who stood directly first in the line of fire.

  In the months before the war, London’s population grew accustomed to the sight of the fixed big guns, dark green, pointing up at the clouds from vantage points such as Primrose Hill to the north, One Tree Hill and Hilly Fields in the south and the expanses of Wanstead Flats to the east. The King was given a tour of Woolwich Arsenal, and he looked on with apparent approval at a new generation of anti-aircraft guns.

  In 1938, a curious war rehearsal took place in west London, which seemed to carry a flavour of the old Hendon pageants, even though this one was not open to the public. On a patch of open ground opposite Olympia, near Fulham, there was a full demonstration of Air Raid Precautions (ARP) for senior Air Force personnel and various ministers and civil servants. As an enthusiastic reporter from The Times wrote:

  A scene was staged to represent Kensington High Street. Newsboys dashed through a group of people on the pavement shouting that war had been declared. A raid followed, and air-raid wardens, motor cycle dispatch riders and others were soon at their posts. Gas masks were issued and after a bomb explosion, a decontamination squad dealt with the poison gas.

  And all the while, the mighty anti-aircraft guns were aiming into the heavens. Fighter Command knew where the fight would be, at least to begin with; not in the skies over Berlin, but above the streets and parks of London.

  The Spartan life of the anti-aircraft gunner crews was conveyed to the readers of the Manchester Guardian in the summer of 1939, when escalating tension had resulted in greater numbers of guns popping up all over the country. This emplacement was just outside Manchester:

  The Territorials manning these guns are enjoying no holiday. The sites, for one thing, are not chosen for their natural beauty. In any case, each man has a day’s work to do. They rise at 6.30am and do half an hour’s physical drill before breakfast. From 9 to 1 they are at practices with their guns. They have a ‘target’ plane which flies around while they sight it and work out its height. They communicate by wireless with the pilot and are thus able to check the accuracy of their calculations.

  Each station has huts (wooden, on brick bases) for messing, cooking, stores and offices. Officers and men sleep under canvas, the tents have wooden floors and each man gets three blankets and a ground sheet. These defences, and good food, enable the men to resist the damp and carry on their exacting work with evident success and cheerfulness …

  There was even a primetime prewar television programme – which in 1939 would have gone out to an audience of at most 20,000 people – devoted to the marvel of anti-aircraft guns. The documentary, sponsored by Fighter Command, featured an imaginary raid on Alexandra Palace, the north London base of the BBC’s new television service. In a production clearly intended to demonstrate that London was completely covered, the black and white pictures showed ‘one of the latest anti-aircraft guns … Its accompanying searchlight, with a penetration of three and a half miles (five and a half kilometres), swung round as the sound locator indicated the positions of the attacking bombers. The predictor – the “brains” of the gun – revealed not only the position of the planes but the fuse which must be used so that the shells … might work their greatest havoc among the invaders … the entire demonstration came over on the screen with scarcely a hitch.’ The optimism was to be applauded.

  Chapter Six

  We Are At War

  Neville Chamberlain’s announcement, delivered in weary and mournful Received Pronunciation, was broadcast on the morning of Sunday, 3 September; the majority of households had wireless sets, and the majority of people gathered around them to hear the long-anticipated news. For some weeks, Douglas Bader – now working for the Shell Company and earning a good living – had been petitioning his old RAF contacts. Some, most notably Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, had been cautiously encouraging; it was a given that Bader could not have been allowed anywhere near a fighter plane during peacetime. But a time of war might make all the difference. Others, however, would not think of it.

  Bader had been down in the country with his wife and in-laws that weekend; he apparently heard the news while washing up the breakfast dishes. Instantly, he went off to write another letter to Sir Charles Portal. When he returned to work on Monday morning, his boss at Shell informed him that he was on the list of indispensable workers who could not be called up. Bader furiously registered his instant objection, and began an even more intense letter-writing campaign.

  The Royal Air Force now comprised some 175,000 men – officers and ground staff – and around 8,000 aeroplanes. As war was declared, No. 1 Fighter Squadron was readied to be sent to France. The first reconnaissance mission was sent up: a Bristol Blenheim piloted by Flying Officer A. Macpherson. He was the first British pilot to fly over enemy territory in war; the mission lasted almost five hours, and was gruellingly tense. He and a naval observer had been detailed to photograph German naval ports, and to work out the disposition of enemy warships. This brave flight resulted in a Distinguished Flying Cross for Thompson. Back in London, the air-raid sirens sounded. Reactions were surprisingly mixed; in the event, the fighter squadrons had no need to scramble. What had set off the alarm was a French aeroplane that had not reported its flight plans.

  But the false alarm was paradoxically rather a good thing; for it demonstrated that even a single aircraft would be spotted and plotted in Dowding’s system. That day is now recalled vividly by Gladys Eva, who was swiftly drawn thereafter into the WAAFs, and to Bentley Priory.

  ‘I’m a Wimbledon girl,’ says Mrs Eva, who now lives in the lush Dorset resort of Sandbanks. ‘War w
as declared and I was the first in the queue to get in. And the thing I could do was drive a car. I didn’t know anything about the air force.’ This was despite the fact that her brother had already signed up and was flying with Coastal Command. The idea – until that point – had not captured her imagination. ‘Up until the war, people really didn’t talk about aeroplanes very much. There weren’t many about and you rarely saw one. I just said to my father, “I want to get in as a driver.”’ She had very recently passed her test (indeed, driving tests had only been introduced in 1936). ‘The only job I saw advertised was with the army, but they only wanted people with seven year licences at the beginning, so I was out.’

  Until the beginning of the war, the technical work at Bentley Priory had been carried out by a mix of scientists and City stockbrokers; technical finesse and a certain native speed and wit with mathematics was required. Did young Gladys Eva – nineteen when war was declared – have any inkling of where the tide might be taking her? None whatsoever. ‘I left school when I was sixteen,’ she says, laughing. ‘I hated school.’ She had left in 1937 and was very practical: she trained to be a hairdresser in south London and, as she says, ‘put the toot into Tooting’. But the fact was that ‘I did very little between leaving school and getting into uniform.’

  Most accounts of Chamberlain’s broadcast on that Sunday morning, 3 September 1939, emphasise the solemnity of families and loved ones gathered around the radio; plus the electric shock of alarm in London when that very first air-raid siren sounded almost immediately. Gladys Eva recalls not so much solemnity as blackly comical chaos. ‘We were all saying, “Where are the gas masks?” Because we thought the Germans would be over the top of us. Everybody thought that. Even someone like my father, who was a very well-read man.’ With this, Mrs Eva laughs. ‘After about ten minutes of us sitting there, my father said, “I’ve had enough of this, let’s go down to the club and have a drink.” So we all landed up at the club. And of course there was no bombing for quite a while. Well, he [Hitler] wasn’t any more prepared than anyone else. He hadn’t got anyone to put up in the air.’

  The question of preparation, however, seemed a little fraught on both sides. Had the Germans really decided to attack in those first few hours of war, would there have been enough air power to fight them off? The official history of the RAF commented, of the situation just one year beforehand, ‘We cannot judge whether Fighter Command had sufficient forces at its disposal or whether those forces were sufficiently equipped to carry out the tasks of air defence …’ On top of this, when it came to the other defences – the anti-aircraft guns, the Observer Corps – there had been ‘an unavoidable catalogue of deficiencies in every department’. By the time war was declared, those deficiencies had been smoothed out – but the fact remained that this was a completely new form of war. A few Zeppelin and Gotha raids would be as nothing to what the world had witnessed being rained down in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

  There had been production delays too. As the official history points out, they only started making Spitfires in any numbers around the time of the Munich crisis; the factory lines began speeding up in 1939, but this did seem to be a textbook case of leaving it until the last minute. Building new planes was one thing; getting the fighter pilots accustomed to them was another – although, according to Geoffrey Wellum’s beautiful and haunting account, man and machine very swiftly melded. On his very first flight in a Spitfire, he recalled his initial apprehension; then, as he prepared to launch into the sky, the sensation changed – the plane, he wrote, ‘has come alive with feeling’. The Spitfire seemed to radiate personality: mischievous and impatient and ready to dominate rookie pilots. But after just a few minutes of flying above the cloud, Wellum was infused with a sense of the sheer beauty of it, the ‘grace and form’ of the wing. And he felt himself almost to be in a dream. Harrowing, terrifying days lay ahead; but Wellum conveyed seductively how the small cockpit could make the pilot feel as if the plane was somehow a natural extension of himself.

  The very physicality of flying made it intensely attractive to those who were used to taking risks in their sport. One such was Roger Bushell – later much better known as one of the leaders of the daring break from a German PoW camp upon which the 1963 film The Great Escape is based. Born in South Africa in 1910 and brought up amid great wealth, but educated at Wellington, a rather austere English public school, and then at Pembroke College, Oxford, Bushell was heedless when it came to outdoor pursuits. He was the captain of the Oxford and Cambridge skiing team – one remarkable 1930s photograph shows him in mid-jump during a competition in Canada. He also became close friends with Max Aitken, the son of newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, who was an equally enthusiastic pilot. Bushell was quick-witted too; law was his speciality and he became a barrister. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, accounts of the cases that Bushell was involved in peppered the newspapers: the successful prosecution of a Dagenham clerk for murder in Epping Forest in 1936; the defence of an Irish labourer in a case of a Paddington bar brawl that ended up with one man dead; even the prosecution of a west London test pilot for flying an ‘autogiro’ or early helicopter in a manner that would cause unnecessary danger to the general public. ‘This was a disgraceful piece of bad flying,’ declared Bushell for the police, ‘extremely low and dangerous.’

  But Bushell was able to inhabit two worlds: the fusty panelled chambers of Lincolns Inn Fields and the wild, wide world high above. The RAF had pulled him in early – Bushell had been flying for the service as an auxiliary for 601 Squadron since 1930, when it was still very much the province of rich, well-connected young men. In October 1939, he went to RAF Tangmere with the reformed 92 Squadron and became one of the first to fly missions as a night fighter. His later exploits at Stalag Luft 111, masterminding the break-out, also give a sense of the cussed bravery he showed in the cockpit. When the British were pulling back to the port of Dunkirk in May 1940, Bushell’s squadron was moved to RAF Hornchurch near the Thames Estuary; it was during that harrowing evacuation, with Fighter Command seeking to protect almost half a million men from German dive-bombing attacks, that Bushell was brought down and captured.

  Elsewhere, younger pilots such as Anthony Bartley – born in India in 1919 and educated at Stowe public school, he joined the RAF in 1939 – were drawn in by a straightforward love of flying, coupled with a fascination for the technology that was making this war in the air possible. However, he, and other pilots in turn, attracted attention (and visits to air bases) by figures from a more glamorous realm. As well as going on to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, Bartley came to know actors such as David Niven and Rex Harrison, who were themselves mesmerised by the possibilities of flying.

  It was by no means all glittering rich kids; some of the RAF’s finest pilots had more rugged hinterland. Alan Deere – who, many pointed out, looked the archetype of the square-jawed hero of the clouds – was born and brought up in New Zealand, and educated at technical college. Like so many men of his generation, the evolution of flight – the possibilities offered by new technology – was utterly hypnotic. But his life experience was wider than skiing with chums and Belgravia cocktail parties; at one stage, in order to support himself as a young man, Deere took off into the New Zealand countryside to work as a shepherd. In 1937, he wrote to the Royal Air Force, applying to join. Having been accepted, he was a flying officer by the autumn of 1938 and was then posted to RAF Hornchurch. He was to inspire awe for the number of times that he gave death a swerve after having been shot down; and also for maintaining such an appearance of good cheer after each terrifying near miss. In his quieter moments, Deere must have had an extraordinary sense of his own mortality, and of the fragility of life itself.

  For others, there was an element that seemed more spiritual, and for whom the Spitfire had its own sort of animal vitality. Richard Hillary, who was to become one of the most renowned – and later most haunting – Fighter Command pilots, recalled how, at a moment of crisi
s in the air, his plane ‘quivered like a stricken animal’.1 Hillary had the sensibility of a poet; what had drawn him towards the Royal Air Force, as opposed to the sea, or an infantry regiment? Like Roger Bushell, he had a colonial background. Born in Australia, but educated in the bosom of the English establishment (Shrewsbury School, Oxford University), the physically robust and good-looking Hillary had joined the University Air Squadron at the time of the 1938 Munich crisis and had swiftly trained as a fighter pilot. He was a thinker, one who laid great store on the crucial role of the ‘creative imagination’, as he put it. He also labelled himself as one of those who would ‘dearly love to be creative artists but are not’. He had an admiration for his sometime RAF predecessor, the late T.E. Lawrence, and there is a sense too of a highly self-conscious man being pulled towards a destiny that he cannot escape. During his days studying at Oxford in the late 1930s, Hillary got into an argument with a pacifist and explained to him why he would be gravitating to the RAF:

  In the first place … I shall get paid and have good food. Secondly, I have none of your sentiments about killing, much as I admire them. In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed. It’s exciting, it’s individual, and it’s disinterested. I shan’t be sitting behind a long-range gun working out how to kill people sixty miles away. I shan’t get maimed; either I shall get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night-club.2

  Hillary was being deliberately ironic; the disfigurements that he was to suffer later got him more than stared at in nightclubs. And others, including the author and political philosopher Arthur Koestler, who championed his writing, were to focus on his apparent fatalism. Yet the common factor between such wildly different figures as Hillary, Douglas Bader, and indeed the austere Hugh Dowding, was individualism. Added to this, for the pilots, was the ecstasy of flying itself: