I shall never forget the first time that I flew really high, and, looking down, saw wave after wave of white undulating cloud that stretched for miles in every direction like some fairy city. I dived along a great canyon; the sun threw the reddish shadow of the plane on to the cotton wool walls of white cliff that towered up on either side. It was intoxicating. I flew on.
A little later, when training in Scotland, Hillary had to undergo the extreme anxiety of learning to fly at night, but despite his occasional panic and disorientation in the thick blackness, losing sight of lights, there were still moments of eerie and silent beauty:
Below lay the flare path, a thin snake of light, while ahead the sea was shot with silver beneath a sky of studded jewels … I was released, filled with a feeling of power, of exaltation. To be up there alone, confident that the machine would answer the least touch on the controls, to be isolated, entirely responsible for one’s own return to earth – this was every man’s ambition.3
———
Back in London, the outbreak of war had given a shot of ferocious energy to young magazine journalist Patricia Clark. She was finding irksome career obstacles, and was to vault them in the most unexpected way: ‘I had had the best part of a year working as a very junior editor on a woman’s magazine, after I left Germany where I had been at school. And I had a row with the editor, Mr O’Connell.’
When she handed in her notice and told him she was joining up, he replied, ‘You can’t do that, it will ruin your career. You have a promising career, you’re doing very well. You could end up being editor of Woman and Beauty.’ Her response: ‘No, I’m going to join up and do my bit for the war.’
Having made this impressive declaration, Mrs Clark knew that she could hardly hang around. In her lunch hour, she left the office and went walking and thinking. ‘I had just passed my driving test,’ she says, ‘and I was mad keen to drive anything anywhere. So I thought, I know what I’ll do. I’ll join the army and drive an ambulance. I’ll drive it in France and rescue wounded officers from the trenches, like my mother did with my father. Having read all her stories, I had this romantic idea that under gunfire, you rushed and rescued the man of your dreams. So this was my intention. But blow me, I couldn’t find an army recruitment centre.
‘I was walking back towards the office near St Paul’s and I thought, I am not going to go back to that office and eat humble pie, there must be something.’ On her way she passed Adastral House in Kingsway, the headquarters of the RAF. ‘I thought to myself, They must have ambulances, they get wounded airmen. I might as well drive an ambulance for the air force, why not? So in I went. It was a huge great place, I think it must have once been a ballroom. On the walls leading right up to the end were opticians’ charts. And at the end of this vast room was a platform with benches on which people were seated. On the platform were two men, each one with optician’s boards, big letters down to small letters. And there were people moving up along the sides, one by one: “You’ve passed, you haven’t passed, you’re in, you’re out”.’ It was, says Mrs Clark, a ‘conveyor belt system’.
‘I thought, piece of cake. Joined the nearest to me. My turn. Got down to the last two. Failed the eye test. So I said, “Look, I can see if I’ve got my glasses on, I can see those easily.”’
‘No,’ was the reply, ‘you can’t have glasses in the Air Force, dangerous if you get shot at.’ Mrs Clark was told to go home. But her indignation was at molten levels. ‘I’m not going to be flying an aeroplane, I thought, I’m going to be driving a car and I can wear my glasses in a car. How can I get round this? So I put my glasses on, slipped over to the queue on the other side of the room. While I was moving up it, I memorised the little lines on each board. All I had to do was remember that the board beginning with a big A was the one which had certain letters on it. So I now sailed through the test. “Fine, you’re in,” they said.’
For Gladys Eva, the process of getting into the most esoteric of WAAF sections was less guileful, and was based on a piece of pure serendipity. ‘I scoured the paper every single day,’ she says. ‘One night – I always wish I’d kept it – there was a little advert at the top of the London Evening News: “Women required for WAAF special duties – no qualifications required.” Well, I hadn’t passed an exam in my life – I was always playing bridge.’
Next morning she rang up and a woman said, ‘We’re interviewing tomorrow – if you come up to HQ, it’s a free for all.’ She found herself waiting for several hours among almost 130 others. ‘My name was called, in I went.’ She was expecting to be asked where she lived, where she had been educated. Instead they asked, ‘What are your hobbies?’
‘Well, that suited me – I played all sports. Outdoors. And all card games. They said, “Yes, you’ll do.”’
Another woman who was to prove highly effective at Fighter Command – Eileen Younghusband – recalls her own feelings when first confronted with the technicalities that were to dominate the next few years of her life.
‘I go mad when I see films talking about Bentley Priory and it just shows the Operations Room,’ she says now. Mrs Younghusband is speaking specifically of the best-known image – that of young women pushing markers around on a map, like croupiers in a casino. ‘All those girls are doing is pushing on the end of the stick the final elements that appear.’ But where had all these elements been drawn from? A more frenetic and urgent area: the Filter Room. Here, women like Eileen had to bring order to a maelstrom of different signals.
The complex and extremely rapid job of the filterers – who knew exactly where all the radar stations were – was to evaluate the full range of readings and extrapolate from them more accurate positions and bearings. It was a combination of fast thinking with iron nerve and confidence, because any mistake – even being just a few degrees out – could easily result in pilots’ deaths.
Women like Eileen Younghusband and Patricia Clark underwent gruelling and stringent training: partly this was mathematical, partly to ensure a nimble response, and partly to instil icy courage. The authorities had to know that they were psychologically – as well as intellectually – up to the job. In essence, the filterers had to draw order from the chaos of cathode rays and the physical sightings of incoming planes telephoned in from countless watching posts. This is where mathematical confidence and alertness was needed; the ability to think instantly in terms of height and speed and direction, and to transform a fast-approaching formation of bombers into a geometrically accurate impression.
Once they had established to their own satisfaction the presence and position of the enemy, they would lay ‘a new track’ down on the table before them. As soon as any radar station reported or ‘plotted’ an enemy signal, ‘the filterer nearest – sometimes there would only be two on the table – or up to four on busy nights – would put a counter down – a little cone with a knob on the top. That was to signify a new track. And once she got two plots, she’d got a direction. But it wasn’t necessarily correct placing till you got two stations reporting.’ Circular plots indicated the planes’ position, while numbered triangular plots gave the estimated number of aircraft. Square plots marked the planes’ estimated height.
There would also be varying data from other sources, including that from Observer Corps operatives in fields and on cliff-tops. ‘Once you got that first counter, you’d call out to the raid orderly, who had a big tray with little metal plaques. They were magnetised and each had a number, and I think they went from one hundred to two hundred. The filterer would say to her, “New track,” and she put the next number on. There would be no other information initially. Once the filterer had more information appearing, she would add [with new counters] the estimated number of aircraft, estimated height – and constantly those figures had to be changed. First, because aircraft lost height. And also because more radar stations picked them up and you got more accurate readings. It was a constant reassessment.’ Once the process was complete, the information could be sent through to
the Operations Room, where WAAFs were on hand, using the complex system of coloured markers to note positions on vast maps of England.
There were other refinements too. For British planes, Mrs Younghusband says, ‘we had IFF [Identification Friend or Foe] signals and Broad Identification Friend – the SOS – and that was an even wider extra bleep. All our aircraft had IFF built in.’ This was obviously so there would be no difficulty differentiating them from the enemy. IFF had been introduced a little earlier in the year; each plane – whether from Fighter, Bomber or Coastal Command – was fitted with a device that would show up on radar screens as friendly identification. ‘But the pilots didn’t always put it on,’ says Mrs Younghusband. ‘Either they forgot, or they thought Germans had got it as well.’
Nor was the system perfectly formed at the outbreak of war. It took a certain amount of guile on the part of Dowding’s deputy, Keith Park, to iron out the labyrinthine complexities. Wrote Vincent Orange:
At Bentley Priory, Park … introduced a second table on which could be displayed a clean – ‘filtered’ – plot once queries had been settled. Only this filtered plot should be passed to the main table. Dowding rejected the idea of a second table when Park suggested it, so he secretly set it up in the basement at Bentley Priory and had power lines installed or reconnected to suit. For some time, all that Dowding noticed was that his ‘general situation map’ seemed to be much more readable and his Operations Room far more quiet and well regulated. When Park judged the time right, he unveiled his basement secret and Dowding was convinced.4
And then the purer, ‘filtered’ information would be fed to the Operations Room, where, in calmer circumstances, the young WAAFs known as plotters could move counters on maps with certainty. The system, when described on paper, sounds ponderous: but in reality, it moved with tremendous speed.
———
There was another quiet, non-technical revolution; instead it was a philosophical one. It was the very idea that instead of middle-aged men filtering the co-ordinates and performing feats of instant trigonometry, this was work that could be carried out by women. The Air Ministry was at the forefront of this thinking; there was some initial disquiet at Bentley Priory about the idea. There were concerns that, first, an Operations Room would be much more vulnerable to attack than a number of other places, and that it would be wrong to place women in such obvious positions of jeopardy. Then there were questions about reliability; could women be trusted to stick with the work? Would there not be the chance that they would bow out for all sorts of personal reasons?
Such sexist anxieties would have made young women like Eileen Younghusband snort with derision. Nonetheless, how was it that Mrs Younghusband appeared from the start to have such an affinity for the work? There were three factors: the first was her education at Southgate County School in Enfield, north London, which was, she says, ‘excellent … I took matriculation at fourteen and a half.’ Having passed her core exams, including maths, she had the time for a much more practical education – allowing her to work on the second factor that made her so suited to Fighter Command. ‘I did one whole year of Commerce at the end before I left school at sixteen. It was a fabulous education. I learned book-keeping and accountancy before I was sixteen.’ The third factor was a very strong family element. Mrs Younghusband’s father had been in the Royal Flying Corps, while her cousin Eric had already signed up as a pilot, receiving his training at the grand establishment at Cranwell. Mrs Younghusband felt very strongly that this had to be her direction.
And rather like Patricia Clark, she had, as a girl, seen something of the darkness that was gathering in Europe. After leaving school in 1938, Eileen started work with a new company called the School Travel Service, which was set up to run continental trips. Her French was in need of improvement; and so, as a teenager, she took herself to France and managed to get a job as a nanny and governess to three young children in a small town. After the 1938 Munich crisis, it seemed obvious to her – as it was to many others – that it would be sensible to return to Britain. The farewell to her French family was heartbreaking; the rail journey that was to follow haunts her still. The train was packed with Jewish refugees. Mrs Younghusband recalls how, the closer the train got to the coast – and to the prospect of the ferry – the more her fellow passengers visibly started to relax: ‘I can see them unwrapping their things, the closer we got to the port.’ This intrepid young woman was still a shade too young to join up, but the RAF was to influence the course of her life.
As the war started, the image of the new generation of young RAF pilots was carefully burnished in the newspapers; possibly not with cynicism, but with the journalists’ ardent desire to have confidence in these men. As The Times put it:
If all the facts could be set forth, this one would be a story of a strangely romantic quality. Romantic in the devotion of an industry to a task of a magnitude such as it had never contemplated before; romantic in the harnessing of science to the peculiar and urgent needs of air defence; romantic in the sense that the nation has thrown up in surprising numbers young volunteers physically fit in every respect, and moved by a spirit of earnest endeavour, disguised under a light and even flippant manner … These young men have not to be seen in the mess, or tearing along the roads in their motor cars, or playing violent squash, but at work in their aircraft.
Technology and spirit; an intricate country-wide web of innovative radar, combined with squadrons – particularly those ringed around London and the Home Counties – twitching with readiness. And back at Bentley Priory, Air Chief Marshal Dowding was now set to see if his architecture of command would work. The sky was instantly expected to blacken with bombers. That they didn’t might now be described as a fantastic stroke of luck.
Chapter Seven
Dress Rehearsals
From the night skies above Germany fluttered the snow of leaflets; millions of them. In the air, this was one of the first offensive acts of Britain’s war, on 3 and 4 September 1939. Hamburg, Bremen and the Ruhr were targeted. The leaflets, in German, offered a blunt message. ‘Warning! From England to the German people!’ it began, printed in gothic script.
The Nazi regime has, in spite of the endeavours of the leading great powers, plunged the world into war … You cannot win this war. Against you are arrayed resources and materials far greater than your own. For years … by means of an incredible system of secret police and informers, the truth has been withheld from you. Against you stands the united strength of the free peoples, who with open eyes will fight for freedom to the last. This war is as repulsive to us as it is to you, but do not forget that England, once forced into war, will wage it unwaveringly to the end. England’s nerves are strong, her resources inexhaustible. We will not relent. Pass on [this leaflet]
The response from Hermann Goering contrived to sound amused, though the threat at the end was dark: ‘If the British aeroplanes fly at tremendous height and drop their ridiculous propaganda on to German territory, I have nothing against it. But take care if the leaflets are succeeded by one bomb. Then reprisals will follow and will be carried out as in Poland.’
Goering’s statement also inadvertently suggested that Germany was not invulnerable to attack. Indeed, the British raid, involving bombers, served a double purpose, according to Major F.A. Robertson, writing for the Manchester Guardian: ‘A gratifying feature … is the ineffectiveness of German Anti-Aircraft defences. The millions of leaflets strewn about the countryside are evidence which proves to every German that our machines had it in their power to drop bombs and that the German defences were powerless to prevent them.’
From the point of view of Britain’s defence, these first nervy days of the war were also making something else quite apparent: that the Luftwaffe was not about to launch an all-out attack on Britain. To do so at that stage – before their invasion of the Low Countries and France – would have required quite a flight: first the German pilots would have to cross the Low Countries, then the Channel, and th
en fly seventy or so miles up through Kent and the Thames Estuary to target London. Their time and fuel supplies would be limited, and their vulnerability to defensive British pilots great, given the huge distances over which they would then have to return. Not that there was any relaxation in Fighter Command; if anything, the lack of activity increased the nervousness.
This was manifested most sharply – and tragically – on 6 September 1939 in what became known as ‘The Battle of Barking Creek’. In fact, the incident in question took place in the skies above the Thames Estuary and the watery marshes of Essex and Kent. It was a misunderstanding sparked by a false ‘plot’ which suggested an incoming formation of enemy planes. RAF Hornchurch, on the easternmost edge of London, was base to 74 Squadron, led by the formidable and hugely skilled Adolph ‘Sailor’ Malan. The confusion of the day was recalled by pilot Samuel Hoare:
A false plot had been spotted over on the Essex coast … This aircraft was reported as unidentified and initially three Hurricane fighter aircraft were sent off from North Weald aerodrome to investigate. Well this started the ball rolling, the three Hurricanes were then unidentified by the RDF station, I suppose through lack of communication …
The RDF station then had one unidentified aircraft plus a formation of three, so the controller at No. 11 Group decided he should send off a flight of aircraft to investigate further; so six aircraft went off to investigate the three.1
Those Spitfires took off from RAF Hornchurch, and leading them was ‘Sailor’ Malan. For all these pilots knew, this was it: the first engagement with the enemy. What unfurled was a horrible farce. British fighter planes were chasing one another across the wide skies of the Essex and Kent coasts, Malan and his pilots in unwitting pursuit of the men from North Weald. There was an extra element of jeopardy: as they flew close to the naval dockyard at Chatham in Kent, the guns on the ground opened fire, the men down below as well as the pilots above apparently unable to distinguish between enemy and friendly aircraft. As Wing Commander John Connell Freeborn recalled: ‘We were quite a bit away behind the first section of aircraft and were trying to catch them up, when Malan sounded the “Tally-ho!” over the R/T, seeing these supposedly enemy aircraft … Our section went in and we shot down … two unidentified aircraft which turned out to be Hurricanes.’2 According to other accounts, Malan had spotted right at the last minute that their prey was British, and had shouted down the R/T that the attack should stop. If he did so, then the order was heard by neither John Freeborn nor fellow pilot Paddy Byrne.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 10
