The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  Yet even before the Battle of Britain, fear in a fighter station could be as pervasive as the mist on a winter moor. Pilot Geoffrey Wellum quietly encapsulated this in his references to the mess after a mission, as the men sat around, waiting for the telephone to ring with the order to set out into the skies once more. Wellum noted the silence, as well as the outbreaks of blustery bonhomie. He noticed that one of his fellow pilots – sitting deep in an armchair, seemingly too absorbed in his book to join in the sporadic, strained conversation – never turned a single page of that book.2

  According to Lord David Cecil, in his essay ‘The RAF’:

  So dangerous a life inevitably leaves its mark on the nerves. The airmen preserve a rigid appearance of imperturbability and good spirits; but one soon begins to realise that they are living in a state of tension. The newspaper picture of the laughing aviator, carelessly risking his life, is not really a flattering likeness. It is no compliment to a man to say that he is too insensitive to know when he is in danger. Anyway, it seemed to me a false picture. Going down to the airfield with a group of men about to start on night operations, one notices that through the mask of self-control, their eyes gaze out serious and preoccupied.3

  The bluff heartiness was a recurring leitmotif stretching back to the First World War; and in contemporary accounts of epic, extraordinary beer-drinking, we catch a glimpse of the effort to beat back the darkness. Even the aware, sensitive (and comparatively teetotal) Geoffrey Wellum was brisk on the subject of death: the training comrades who had lost control and had been incinerated in their cockpits; the pilots failing to eject as their planes spiralled out of control. The expression ‘gone for a Burton’ originated with the RAF; the light way of announcing that a comrade was no more. The phrase had been an advertising line for Burton ale; only pilots could mordantly conflate the act of going out for a beer with death. And yet, even with such studied nonchalance, how was it possible for pilots to get a decent night’s sleep after a stretching day or night in the sky? The author Roald Dahl, as a young man, was a fighter pilot for the RAF in Africa. Of the experience of fear, he wrote that:

  [It] creeps closer and closer, like a cat creeps closer stalking a sparrow, and then when it is right behind you, it doesn’t spring like the cat would spring; it just leans forward and whispers in your ear … At first it whispers to you only at night, when you are lying awake in bed. Then it whispers to you at odd moments during the day, when you are doing your teeth or drinking a beer … and in the end it becomes so that you hear it all day and all night all of the time.4

  For some fighter pilots, the outward signs might include a shaking hand (one recalled how a friend of his would hold cups or glasses at an angle so no one would see the tremor), violent stomach upsets or constant facial spasms. Occasionally it was even more direct: a pilot refusing point-blank to get into the cockpit. But as well as that straightforward fear, there was an invidious extra layer of dread: the idea that the authorities might spot your fear and haul you out of the squadron, labelling you a coward and a man who would let all his friends down. This was the double cruelty of the idea of ‘lack of moral fibre’: men were forced to violently quell their most natural fears because of the even more unendurable fear of disgrace.

  All of which enables us to place those legendary fighter pilot drinking stories in a rather more understandable context; the squadron leader, for instance, based at a rural station who, upon his return from a mission, would clamber into his car and activate a loudspeaker system attached to the car roof. He would drive through the country lanes and when he came within three-quarters of a mile of the squadron’s favourite pub, he would announce into the loudspeaker, ‘Three pints of bitter and two gins, please,’ thus ensuring, to save time, that his refreshments were already lined up when he arrived at the bar. In some accounts, the drinking stories – the rural taverns, the cheerful after-hours lock-ins, the beer and whisky, the enormous quantities consumed – make you wonder how these men could possibly function before dawn the next day. Many of them must surely have been still drunk come first light. Perhaps for some that was the best way to approach the next day’s flying.

  And what of grief? Close friendships were formed during training. What would be the impact when a good pal was killed? Said Wing Commander Athol Forbes: ‘When a chap doesn’t come back, we don’t grieve over him. If we did that, we’d go completely nuts in no time. We just think he’s been posted to another squadron in a hurry and hasn’t had time to say au revoir.’5 Which is almost a romantic way of looking at it. For young Geoffrey Wellum, instead of pretence, or indeed remembrance, there was something rather more oppressive and chilly: perfect silence.

  Also, according to Wellum and many others, there was a huge amount of superstitious observance – although, interestingly, rather less religious observance. The superstition came in the form of little mascots, charms, and even images painted on the outside of the plane. One pilot had an image on his aircraft of Hitler being booted up the backside. There were men who flew with souvenirs from their girlfriends, including silk stockings. Others were more traditional, carrying St Christopher’s medallions. Some squadrons had charms lucky enough to cover all men. At Biggin Hill, 609 Squadron’s mascot was a goat, christened Billy de Goat. Billy was even promoted: starting out as flight sergeant, he made squadron leader, and was permitted in the mess, where he was allowed the occasional slurp of beer. He was also occasionally allowed to enter the office, where it could be claimed truthfully that he had eaten any particularly irksome paperwork.

  The days were fast coming when the character of these young men, and of the young women working alongside them, would be tested in a way that nothing could have prepared them for. And Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, in those days – before the battle that was to define him – would have to withstand vicious attacks from many on his own side. The time for the system that he had so diligently constructed – this high-tech web of radar and observers, superbly skilled young pilots and sharp-witted young women – was at hand, and the nation’s future was their responsibility alone.

  Chapter Nine

  Blood Runs Hotly

  The walls had been closing in on Air Chief Marshal Dowding since the beginning of the war. Not only were other services and sections of the air force making demands upon resources that he felt should have been devoted to building up Fighter Command, but in the spring of 1940, there was also constant pressure to send pilots to France. The feeling in the Air Ministry and the War Cabinet was that the British had to do all they could to bolster the French forces. For Dowding, though, there was a biting anxiety that he had not yet sufficient pilots or planes to look after British interests, let alone French.

  Some months earlier, in October 1939, he had written an impassioned plea to his colleagues in the Air Ministry:

  The best defence of the country is the Fear of the Fighter [sic]. If we were strong in fighters we should probably never be attacked in force. If we are moderately strong we shall probably be attacked and the attacks will gradually be brought to a standstill. During this period, considerable damage will have been caused. If we are weak in fighter strength, the attacks will not be brought to a standstill and the productive capacity of the country will be virtually destroyed … I must put on record my point of view that the Home Defence Organisation … should receive priority to all other claims until it is firmly secured, since the continued existence of the nation, and all its services, depends upon the Royal Navy and the Fighter Command.1

  Nevertheless, during the eerie months of this twilight war, French demands and British fears had coalesced; six fighter squadrons were flown to bases on French soil. That winter, when the snow fell heavily and the hard frost gouged ruts into the frozen earth, there were limits even to the amount of training that could be done. Yet there were suggestions throughout this time that more fighters would be needed. The Air Ministry wrote to Dowding:

  We must face facts, one of which is that we could possibly lose the war i
n France just as much as in England. And we must therefore anticipate the possibility that we could not in fact refuse to come to their assistance any further if they really had their backs to the wall. If we had not done something in advance to enable us to come to their assistance in such a situation, the result would be, I am sure, that we should have to send over aircraft but they would be in no position to operate at all effectively when they got there.

  When the Germans launched their assault on Norway in April 1940, Dowding’s Fighter Command was being stretched in other directions too; there was to be greater protection both for the bases in northern Scotland and for shipping in the Channel and the North Sea (this defence of fishing boats gained fighter planes the nickname of ‘kipper kites’). A great deal was being asked of the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots already. And although extra squadrons were being added, it was never easy to find sufficient properly experienced officers to train them.

  In the pre-dawn darkness on the morning of 10 May 1940, the citizens of the Low Countries – and in particular the inhabitants of Rotterdam – woke in dread at the noise of successive hollow booms, the shaking furniture, the nightmare sense that some giant was approaching out of the night. The Germans had launched their Blitzkrieg, demonstrating the lethal effectiveness of the Luftwaffe. This was the event the dress rehearsals for which had been witnessed by the world during the Spanish Civil War.

  For Britain and France, the war had now started in earnest; and the calls for further fighter squadrons to be sent to France intensified. Some soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force who marched over the border to Belgium recalled being cheered by the sight of a Hurricane taking on a Junkers, and winning.

  On that same day, 10 May – the day that Winston Churchill took over as Prime Minister from Neville Chamberlain at the head of a National Government – the HQ of the British Air Forces in France issued this statement to the newspapers:

  In the course of today’s operations on the Western Front, the Royal Air Force has been constantly in action. Our reconnaissance aircraft have been operating over a wide area. Enemy troops have been attacked by our bomber squadrons. Wherever German bombers have been encountered, our fighter squadrons have engaged them. Reports indicate that in the course of these combats, numerous enemy aircraft have been destroyed.

  This pathological public optimism was maintained even as it became swiftly and horrifyingly apparent that the German armies were starting to scythe through France. On 16 May – a day that would turn out to have the greatest significance and impact upon Dowding’s career – it was cheerfully reported that ‘our fighter pilots had a good day. There was no lack of targets and attacks were pressed home from dawn to dusk. A formation of six Hurricanes attacked 25 Messerschmitt 110s and shot down five … the morale of our pilots and crews could not be higher.’ And a statistic was deployed that would be repeatedly echoed throughout the coming weeks and months: ‘The daily toll inflicted on enemy aircraft is working out at more than three to one in our favour.’

  The French still wanted a great deal more from the RAF. Not only had Churchill been Prime Minister for a mere matter of days, he could not have been thrown into the job at a more precipitate moment; he had flown to Paris and the pressure from his opposite number Paul Reynaud was intense. Reynaud wanted ten more fighter squadrons to be sent over to help in France. In fact, it is still worth asking whether extra numbers of British fighter planes might have helped in the face of what seemed an unstoppable and inevitable German advance. And even if there was not much practical effect, might the impact upon morale have made a difference? In other words, had the French felt more fully supported, might they have avoided collapse?

  Yet at this crucial point, with promises being made to the French by the War Cabinet – promises of which Hugh Dowding was not yet properly aware – he issued the first of a series of explicit pleas for the strength of his home defence not to be diminished. His initial salvo was in a letter, dated 14 May, to Air Marshal Peirse: ‘I want the Fighter Command to pull its full weight in this battle, but I want it to do so by shooting down Germans in this country and not by being used as a reservoir for sending reinforcements to France.’2

  Later that day, Dowding learned that the War Cabinet had approved the plan for ten more of his squadrons to be sent over the Channel. His response can be read as a cry of distress and passion, even though his language and manner were measured. He asked that he be allowed to address the War Cabinet in Whitehall, in person. Permission was granted.

  There are those who see Dowding’s intervention as the moment that the course of Britain’s war was decided. It was unusual to have such a figure speaking out personally, as opposed to simply trusting to his superiors. What gave the situation an extra twist of poignancy was that for those superiors, and for those around that War Cabinet table, Dowding was a man who seemed to be on perpetually borrowed time – on one occasion his retirement had been coldly announced to the evening newspapers by his superiors without his knowledge, and then equally dismissively deferred. On 15 May Dowding wrote a memo to the Under-Secretary of State for the Air Ministry which repeated the points he had made to those men:

  I hope and believe that our Armies may yet be victorious in France and Belgium, but we have to face the possibility that they may be defeated. In this case, I presume that there is no-one who will deny that England should fight on, even though the remainder of the Continent of Europe is dominated by the Germans … Once a decision has been reached as to the limit on which the Air Council and the Cabinet are prepared to stake the strategic existence of the country, it should be made clear to the Allied commanders on the continent that not a single aeroplane from Fighter Command beyond the limit will be sent across the Channel, no matter how desperate the situation may become…

  I believe that if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the fleet remains in being, and if Home Forces are suitably organised to resist invasion, we should be able to carry on the war single-handed for some time, if not indefinitely. But if the Home Defence Force is drained away in desperate attempts to remedy the situation in France, defeat in France will involve the final, complete and irremediable defeat of this country.3

  Ahead of his appearance before the War Cabinet, Dowding had written to Keith Park on 15 May, possibly in search of reassurance:

  We had a notable victory on the ‘Home Front’ this morning and the order to send more Hurricanes was cancelled. Appeals for help will doubtless be renewed, however, with increasing insistence and I do not know how this morning’s work will stand the test of time; but I will never relax my efforts to prevent the dissipation of the Home Fighter forces.4

  And Dowding, after his speech to the War Cabinet and his careful memo, prevailed; but was he right? The German troops – some hardened to the edge of psychopathy by their experience of raging across Poland, certainly gave the impression of terrifying confidence as they smashed through small French towns and tiny villages. Yet it was quite a different matter in Berlin; the sheer audacity of the push past the Maginot Line that sent the tanks rolling into the French countryside was viewed with some nervousness by a few in German High Command. And there would come a point when this advancing spearhead would have to stop, regroup and refuel. The supply lines might have been vulnerable. There was indeed an Allied fightback on 24 May at Arras; such a thing was not inconceivable. If perhaps the Allied soldiers had not witnessed traumatised refugees being sadistically picked out by diving Stukas, but instead had seen those Stukas being engaged by more Spitfires, might there have been a different view of the Wehrmacht as a whole?

  Operation Dynamo – the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force – from northern France was initially a secret so well kept that even Members of Parliament were unaware that it was under way. In the warm blue amethyst evenings of late May, a flotilla both impressive and deeply eccentric was gathered at Ramsgate and at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. The hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers trapped in the port town o
f Dunkirk, and on the wide exposed beaches outside it, would clearly need an extraordinary number of vessels to get them clear and back across the Channel.

  The bulk of the carrying was to be carried out by naval destroyers; but in order to transport these crowds to the larger boats out in the deeper water, little ships would be needed. Those doughty Thames barges, flat-bottomed skoots and elegant Thames yachts were to become a perfect synecdoche for Britain itself. But they were going to have to sail through fires, for those fine blue days also made conditions murderously easy for the Luftwaffe.

  Douglas Bader, by now back in the cockpit with 12 Group at Duxford, recalled through his biographer, Paul Brickhill, the curious and alarming nature of those days. As ‘dawn glowed in the east’, he was told: ‘Patrol Dunkirk, chaps, 12,000 feet [3,660 metres]. Take-off as soon as we’re refuelled.’ Bader replied: ‘What the hell! What’s happening over there?’ The officer shrugged. ‘Haven’t the slightest idea. Something about evacuating I think.’5

  They saw how, ‘out from the Thames estuary, from Dover and the bays little boats were swarming, slowly converging, heading south east till they stretched across the sea in a straggling line, trailing feathers of foam, yachts and tugs, launches, ferries, coasters, lifeboats, paddle steamers’. Then, moments later, Bader saw the men on the beaches, thousands of them ‘like ants’. There followed a dogfight with a Messerschmitt.

  The ensuing days perhaps mirrored the anger that the soldiers felt below; in Bader’s account, it was difficult in the air to find a fight tangible enough to take on. Flying out from Hornchurch, down the Thames and then across the Channel to France, he was aware below of the burning seaside town, the flashes of heavy artillery from the surrounding countryside and, even at the height of 910 metres (3000 feet), the heavy, thick smell of burning oil. The Messerschmitts at which Bader tried to take aim ‘flicked across in front like darting sharks, winking orange flashes in the noses as they fired’. Bader fixed his sights on one, and saw another go down. ‘The heady joy of the kill flooded back as he slid out over the water towards England,’ wrote Paul Brickhill. ‘A glow of fulfilment. Blood runs hotly at the kill when a pilot wins back his life in primitive combat.’6