In the early stages of the war, prospects for petrified German pilots, whose crashing planes would bring down village telephone wires, were – according to the accounts of the time, at any rate – more favourable than they became during and after the Battle of Britain. During the Phoney War, young Luftwaffe pilots who had survived such crashes were sometimes taken, catatonic with shock, to farmhouses, where they were given cigarettes and tea before being formally taken prisoner.
Despite the best efforts of Fighter Command and ARP wardens, the public seemed unstoppably drawn to putting themselves in danger in order to witness the rare and spectacular dogfights. This was a problem even at night. In late April 1940, an engagement between Fighter Command and the Germans took place off the south coast. The authorities felt obliged the next day to post warnings in the newspapers: ‘It has been reported that during the air activity off the south coast on Saturday night, a considerable number of persons pulled up blinds and opened windows to see what was going on without troubling to extinguish lights,’ complained the man from the Ministry. ‘The Ministry of Home Security issues an urgent warning on this subject, as such action … is attended with great danger from the point of view of national security and is also punishable by heavy penalties. It has also been reported,’ the ministry continued with greater gravity, ‘that many persons when advised by the police to take cover actually became abusive.’
This was neither the first – nor, certainly, the last – time that such an exasperated public statement had to be issued. How many schoolboys in the southeast and around air stations like Biggin Hill would soon be spending afternoons gawping up at the sky at the first suggestion of anti-aircraft fire? But it was true: there was danger involved. ‘It should be borne in mind that fragments from anti-aircraft shells and machine gun bullets from aeroplanes may come to earth at considerable distances from the points at which they were fired,’ warned the Ministry.
Coming events cast their shadows before them; the occasional skirmishes on the Thames Estuary and along the Kent coast were giving the fighter pilots their chance not merely to master the technology of the new Spitfires and Hurricanes, but also to try and find a way of controlling fear. Shattering and traumatic though the summer to come would be, the preceding weeks had more sick, silent tension about them for many pilots.
Chapter Eight
‘Interesting Work of a Confidential Nature’
The gravity of war was now pulling increasing numbers of women into the air force volunteers, and into RAF stations around the country. In the immediate aftermath of the Dunkirk evacuation, in June 1940, RAF Hornchurch was to receive a visit from His Majesty the King, there to distribute Distinguished Flying Crosses. And it was a WAAF typist who – with quick wits and a deep blush – contributed a hook from her underwear to enable one pilot to fix the decoration on his uniform. The need for ingenuity, combined with good humour – plus the ability to listen to men who were trying to make light of the horrors they had seen – seemed to be understood implicitly by all recruits.
For a few, the good-looking pilots themselves were a draw; the inducement, if only subconscious, to sign up for the WAAF. Other young women had more serious aims. There was a preconception – quite wrong – that the only jobs open to women in the Air Force were the most basic. To serve as a cook, or a messenger, or a driver, carried no shame or stigma; quite the reverse. Any young woman volunteering for such roles in any of the services was lauded for her patriotic spirit. But there were many women in 1940 whose ambitious hearts were set elsewhere. Especially those with pilot relatives; such girls were acutely aware of the daily jeopardy, the extraordinary risks, that Spitfire and Hurricane pilots took even during training flights. They had seen mortal injury and death. These women knew what the pilots – and their families – were facing.
The compulsion to join up, to show solidarity with these friends and loved ones, was powerful, but so was the desire to carry out a role that would make a real difference. This was the case for Patricia Clark, and for Eileen Younghusband too. Then there were many who perhaps sensed in the social earthquake of war that they might have a chance to contribute far more than women had been able to in the past.
The newspapers were not certain initially what to make of the idea of young girls in such masculine redoubts. ‘The first official inspection took place on Saturday afternoon of WAAF personnel at a modern operational station in a Fighter Command somewhere in England,’ ran the report in The Times on 11 April 1940. ‘Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory took the salute at the parade and inspected the airwomen, accompanied by the director of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Commandant Trefusis Forbes.’ Katherine Trefusis Forbes had been at the helm of the WAAF recruitment drive, sorting out every rule and regulation, down to the most suitable form of underwear. The report continued:
[Leigh-Mallory] walked between the lines, noting the trim efficiency of the women and the brightness of their buttons and stopped occasionally to speak to some of the older women who had the ribbons of the last war on their tunics. The women formed threes and were a very smart-looking lot … Before the arrival of the inspecting officer, a physical training display was given by some of the women, trained by an officer who was a teacher of physical culture during the war.
The report also painted an attractive picture of living conditions; nor was that picture a deceptive one. If the training regimes were a little Spartan, the women assigned to Bentley Priory, Bawdsey and other stations found their quarters rather agreeable:
The women have what used to be the men’s married quarters before the war – a little avenue of small villas. They are pleasant little houses in which usually about three women live. Each has a cosy sitting room, a good bathroom, and two to three bedrooms and a little strip of garden, in which the women have planted primroses and tulips.
But the most important aspect – for the newspaper’s women readers – was the hint at more satisfying work on offer. ‘More … Special Duties clerks are being recruited,’ the report stated. ‘The duties of the latter include interesting work of a confidential nature. No special training is needed, but would-be recruits must be responsible people not frightened by a “hush hush” job.’
Like the codebreaking establishment at Bletchley Park, Bentley Priory was actively on the lookout for sharp, fast, strong women. But first – rather like the Wrens who ended up working on the world’s first proto-computers – these special WAAFs would have to go through a period of very austere training. For some, life simply couldn’t be better.
Gladys Eva was beside herself with excitement when the opportunity arose. Some elements of the military life, such as drill, were impossible to avoid, although even this was a joy to Mrs Eva. ‘We were sent to West Drayton – square bashing for a fortnight. I loved it because I’d been a Girl Guide. Loved my school uniform, loved my Guides uniform. And now I loved my air force uniform.’
Before joining, meanwhile, Eileen Younghusband had been given valuable advice about avoiding cooking or driving jobs: ‘My cousin Mae went into the RAF. She’s a month older than me and that’s what they offered her – she became a driver. Well, I quite like cooking, but that’s not what I wanted to do. And Mae knew I always came top at maths in school, so she said, “Just tell them.”
‘Once I’d enrolled, then I was sent to the basic camp where everyone goes and you were all in it together. There were thirty in a hut. That’s where you were kitted out, you had your free-from-infection checks – nits, colour-blindness. You learned how to march, you learned who to salute.’
The sparse induction at West Drayton, an industrial suburb in the western hinterlands of London, was equally instructive for Eileen Younghusband. It was at this camp that her eyes were opened to a wider world than she had seen in the pleasant north London suburb of Southgate. ‘There was a prostitute, in amongst us,’ she laughs. ‘We were issued with black knickers that came down to our knees – we called them the Blackouts – and then they became Twilights when they got to
grey. This girl pranced around in her bra and in these black knickers. I mean, she was very funny. But she was a prostitute. She said, “I got fed up with men, so I thought I’d join the air force.”’
For those such as Patricia Clark who had enjoyed even more rarefied upbringings, West Drayton proved more startling yet: ‘We were taught how to march and given a knife, fork and spoon. We went for an interview to assess where we might now be posted on to. Were we going to be cooks or drivers or whatever? What are your qualifications, they asked. I said, “I haven’t got any.”’
The recruiter was undeterred, saying, ‘I think what we’ll put you down for is Special Duties.’
‘What’s that?’ said Mrs Clark.
She was informed, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. You have to sign the Official Secrets Act before you can be told.’
Mrs Clark said, ‘Can’t I drive an ambulance?’
Came the answer, ‘No – I’m putting you down for Special Duties. Don’t argue with me. That’s it. Out.’
‘Well, I went out,’ says Mrs Clark, ‘and I thought, Special Duties … I speak German, I speak French … I could be a spy!’
Patricia Clark found herself transported with excitement at the prospect of the adventure that lay before her, even as her speculations grew ungovernably wild. ‘I could be landed in France, I could speak to the Germans and I could spy for my country. I settled happily for it – after all, I thought, what else could it have been? Not the cook-house, not typing, nothing like that or it wouldn’t be Official Secrets Act. I was thrilled. I was all for adventure.
‘So we get down to West Drayton, to this disused workhouse that had been converted. There was a courtyard and the men’s building one side, women’s the other. All long dormitories.’ And the hopes of a glamorous adventure dissolved.
‘The girls I was with – there were about six of us – had all come from English boarding schools.’ Mrs Clark’s own background had been especially sheltered, she says with a laugh. ‘Our gardener, and the man who came to mend our radiogram, and the piano tuner, they were the only three lower-class people that I had ever spoken to.’ Now, all of a sudden, her group of girls found themselves surrounded by working-class men from the ranks.
‘And here were we, these six girls, being whistled at from across the courtyard. It was frightfully exciting and quite dangerous! We weren’t quite sure what was going to happen.
‘The following day, after we had settled in, we went downstairs to a big room with a huge table. Round the table were telephones and on the table there were counters. By this time we had signed the Official Secrets Act. And we were told we were going to be doing the very secret work of radar. I sat down at the table and looked at these tiddlywinks – and at that point, I could not have been more upset.’ It had become clear to Mrs Clark that her dreams of a career in espionage were not to be fulfilled.
For young Gladys Eva, the whole thing was a little easier because she was something of a pioneer; she had arrived at her posting a little before a great many other women. As a result, there was novelty, accompanied by the notion of being introduced to a technology whose existence she had never even suspected. After drill came the more specialised stuff: a training course at Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire. ‘That was where you were taught how to plot,’ she says, referring to the new skill she was about to acquire. ‘And that was in a church hall because at that stage they hadn’t built any special premises in the air force area to teach in. I picked it up like fun.’ What she was learning – on an extemporised table in a draughty hall – was the art of accurately noting on a map the positions and velocities and heights of aircraft.
‘There were six of us,’ adds Mrs Eva. ‘It was quite physical because the table’s quite big. We were doing everything with our hands, so we were right across the table. Plots were coming from all over the place. At the beginning of our time, the doctors decided it wouldn’t be good for our health to do an eight-hour watch at night. But then they realised it was even worse to do a four-hour watch because it broke your sleep in the middle of the night. And they thought that wasn’t good. So we did eight-hour watches. It was quite tough when it was busy,’ Mrs Eva adds with light understatement.
And it was an exclusive club – a club destined for Bentley Priory – that she found she had joined. ‘There were not very many others – they didn’t want many for the Filter Room. When we joined up, there was only one Filter Room, and that was at Bentley Priory. Very soon, of course, they were popping up all over, but right at the beginning …’ And what a prospect it was: this new world of vast maps, instant trigonometry, flashing coloured lights, telephones, teleprinters, men and women engaged on a variety of tasks that initially seemed mysterious and esoteric.
The speed and intensity of the work meant that it was important to have pressure valves. Eileen Younghusband recalls such off-duty moments: ‘At nearby Bentley Manor, which was our house – if you were new there, you put your foot in the cold fireplace ashes and then you were held upside down, lifted up, and you pressed your foot on the ceiling …’ The footprints on the ceiling was a running joke. As were the saucy adventures of fictional WAAF raver Lottie Crump, whose exploits were the invention of an incoming generation of WAAFs. Lottie’s role was to tantalise Bentley Priory’s male filterers, regarded by the WAAFS as pitiably old because ‘they were in their thirties’.
‘The men believed everything we told them,’ laughs Mrs Younghusband. ‘We were always asked: “Why does Lottie Crump never come on duty?” And we’d either say she was ill or give some other excuse. That she had had some incredible accident in the bath with toy boats. And they believed us. It’s those sorts of stupid things that we did, as a way to unwind.’
Yet the tension was ever present. For the fighter squadrons – from Duxford to Tangmere – the spring of 1940 was coiled and edgy. This anxiety was amplified in the higher reaches of command; it was in April 1940 that the term ‘lack of moral fibre’ began to circulate. The Nazi invasion of Norway – and the humiliating trouncing of the British in that operation – would have been one factor; the universal expectation of an imminent Nazi invasion of England was another. ‘Lack of moral fibre’ was deemed to be apparent when pilots reported sick or simply refused to fly. Senior commanders were at pains to differentiate such behaviour from ‘flying stress’ or ‘aviator’s neurasthenia’, which had identifiable physical symptoms such as severe gastric upsets. There had been occurrences in Bomber Command of crew members apparently refusing to fly again. It now seems quite clear that this would have been a form of shell shock, and the authorities knew this too; but in desperate times, such things could not be admitted out loud.
The calculated phrase ‘lack of moral fibre’ came to be feared among fighter pilots as well – because anyone suspected of such a thing would be packed off immediately to an ‘Assessment Centre’ and stripped of rank and privileges. In other words, it was the 1940 equivalent of being handed a white feather; an accusation of cowardice.
The pressure did get to a few men. It is surprising that it didn’t get to more. Even during training, the young pilots were required to become inured to death and mutilation. Nor was the end likely to be quick; just the long stomach-quivering drop from the sky, or the flames enveloping the cockpit, scorching the hands and the face, destroying the eyes, roasting the flesh beyond recognition. Trainee pilots frequently witnessed their fellows crashing, the inexplicable moment when their machines somehow bucked from beneath their control. They witnessed the hacked bloody bodies, or indeed bodies that had split apart on impact after a fall of thousands of feet when scorched parachutes failed to open.
Quietly, everyone knew that any airman might succumb; according to some pilots’ accounts, there was the even greater fear of that airman turning out to be themselves. The problem was particularly acute in Bomber Command, where some crew members had no control over the way the plane was flown; they were required to perform other functions in a craft that might disintegrate around the
m. For fighters in single-seater aircraft, there was at least a sense of being in charge of one’s own fate, the possibility even in crisis of escaping. But fighters suffered too.
We might now recoil at the granite pitilessness of high command when it came to identifying traumatised pilots, picking them out and packing them off. Yet at this moment of national crisis, there was also another unanswerable, abiding fear: that their fear could be contagious. Even Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, now promoted to head 11 Group in Uxbridge, said that there was a ‘necessity for the speedy handling of such cases … it is essential that any such cases be removed immediately from the precincts of the squadron or the station.’1
The cult of Douglas Bader – it is not going too far to describe it thus – expressed in some ways the unconscious determination to see this fear blotted out. Here was a double amputee who had suffered not merely in the aftermath of that 1931 crash, but also in the unspeakably painful days and weeks after the surgery: the damaged nerves, the roaring phantom agonies from nerves no longer there; then the further pain of adjusting to new, artificial legs. There was the ordeal of learning how to walk in a new way, the balance completely changed; and the further ordeal of regaining a full sense of masculinity, being able to talk to women without constantly fearing what they would think of his crippled state.
But, even more important, here was a man who simply wrestled the darkest fear to the ground without a second thought. Nothing would stop Bader in his determination to become a fighter pilot once more. By implication, any pilot – unhurt or whole – who did not share his determination was a lesser man.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 12
