The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  Just a few days before, back in the lanes of England’s Home Counties, Bader had been pulled over for speeding; he received a letter telling him to attend a magistrates’ court in Stevenage. Bader had written to the court authorities with savagely civil sarcasm, asking that his case be deferred while he undertook his flying duties. The court was having none of it; in his absence, he was fined £2 10s. Bader, now luminous with rage, wrote a cheque to the court and sent it along with a letter apologising that he could not have been there, but that he was attending to another matter at Dunkirk. The story illustrates the way that ordinary life went on with ruthless stolidity in Britain even at a moment of extreme national crisis.

  At Fighter Command, the nature of the emergency of the German invasion had meant an extemporised response. At 11 Group headquarters in Uxbridge, Keith Park ran up against the most obvious logistical difficulty; Dunkirk was quite a distance away to be covered by short-range fighters, and the time they spent over the town before they had to return and refuel would necessarily be limited.

  As soon as Dynamo was under way, the fighter effort was co-ordinated at the station at Hawkinge on the Kent coast, very close to Dover. Staff at Hawkinge reported back to Keith Park. This was Fighter Command’s first serious engagement with the enemy. Park knew of the unique and terrible stresses that were placed upon pilots even in quieter periods; at the start of an entirely new kind of conflict, he had to ensure that the men had all the support they could get.

  He was thinking in physical as well as psychological terms; for as great as the mental effort and focus of flying in combat was the strain imposed on clenched muscles and limbs. His idea, according to Vincent Orange, was that there would be short periods of heavy duty for those in the air and their support crews on the ground; these would be followed by long periods in which the pilots would be able to enjoy the most comfortable surroundings possible. They would fly in the mornings and in the afternoons; consideration was given to lunch and even to tea. Pilots would take off from their permanent bases, but when returning to refuel they would land at forward bases closer to the coast.

  Meanwhile the Luftwaffe attacked northern France with demonic ferocity. Roads out of small towns leading towards the coast were choked with frantic refugees, who were picked off from above by German pilots almost as a macabre form of target practice.

  The Air Ministry and the army wanted continuous daylight patrols above the beaches of Dunkirk, with fighter planes deployed in strength; but such an arrangement was logistically tricky. Either they had continuous patrols or they had fighter planes out there in great numbers; but there were not enough planes to put on continuous shows of strength. This might be one of the reasons why aggrieved soldiers imagined that the RAF was simply abandoning them to their fate; compared to the relentless attacks from the Germans, the British simply seemed to be almost invisible. Yet the fighter planes were up there, and it has been recorded that they did an effective job of protecting the harbour of Dunkirk to the extent that hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were able to use it for embarkation.

  Midway through this extraordinary crisis, Keith Park himself flew across the Channel over Dunkirk to see conditions first hand. He concluded from his observations – and after having spoken to other pilots – that the best way to counter the Stukas was not a continual presence over the area (difficult to manage because of the need for constant replacement planes while the others went back to refuel) but fighter planes flying in twos and sometimes fours, the better to engage the enemy directly, in order to draw their focus away from the beaches and the vulnerable soldiers below.

  The fact that so many Allied soldiers were successfully rescued from Dunkirk (Churchill and the War Cabinet had anticipated that only 45,000 would escape) was therefore tangentially thanks to fighter pilots high above. But now Dowding and all at Bentley Priory, along with everyone else in the country – from the War Cabinet downwards – were expecting a full-scale German invasion of British shores. Ever the optimist, Keith Park was ‘exhilarated’ by the prospect; the dangerous days of Dunkirk had given him an opportunity to see how his defensive procedures worked in action.

  And it was now that Winston Churchill made that extraordinary, immortal speech in Parliament, remembered chiefly for its declaration that ‘we will fight on the beaches’. In fact, this speech – reproduced in The Times on 5 June 1940 – was longer than many now think, and included a lengthy passage concerning the RAF and Fighter Command that encapsulated a certain incongruous romanticism. The imagery was quite deliberate: ‘May it not be,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘that the cause of civilisation will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never has been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past – not only distant but prosaic. These young men, going forth every morn to guard their native land, and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power, of whom it may be said that “Every morn brought forth a noble chance/And every chance brought forth a noble knight” deserve our gratitude.’

  The line of poetry that Churchill quoted was from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of The King – specifically, the moment at which Sir Bedivere cries out over the dying form of King Arthur. Chivalry, death and the possibility of future resurrection (Arthur was the ‘once and future king’); this vision of warfare was a dimension apart from the nightmare of the First World War – it was cleaner, purer. Nor would Churchill be alone in envisaging Fighter Command in these terms.

  The fighter pilots were prepared, as still yet more young men went into training. But what of the nerve centre of the operation? How prepared for this defining moment were the young men and women of Fighter Command?

  Chapter Ten

  Alert

  The people of Britain were nerving themselves for full-scale invasion. There were some who dreaded sleeping; they had recurring nightmares about the Nazis making land. The men of the Local Defence Volunteers – often armed with whatever items they were able to scrounge, including antique cannons from local museums – were, in June 1940, being joined by the returned soldiers, who had been forced to leave their weaponry behind on the French coast in order to make the mass evacuation possible. Yet the events of Dunkirk had somehow been a national adrenaline shot; even the omniscient sounding Ministry of Information had been caught on the back foot by the wave of exhilaration that had greeted the spectacle of the rescued soldiers. Though the German attack was expected, there was something quite new in the air.

  For the squadrons of Fighter Command, there was the ever pressing need to get more young pilots trained. The backgrounds of the new recruits differed from those who had been there for some time, and who often had previous flying experience, but recruits who survived training still displayed an almost innate ability to fly in harmony with their machines; to sense and react to what a Spitfire could and could not do in the air. It was a striking combination: a form of balletic grace combined with cold, ruthless aggression – kill or be killed.

  There is a photograph from the time, utterly arresting and haunting: it simply shows a young fighter pilot curled up in an armchair, by a fireplace, in an officers’ mess. He is in full uniform, clearly ready to fly; and he appears to be asleep, his legs over the side of the chair and his hand near his mouth, giving an initially disconcerting impression that he is sucking his thumb. It is, though, equally disconcerting how very young this man looks. There is an extraordinary innocence and youth about the way that he is arranged in the chair. And we also get the impression that he is not sleeping at all; that his eyes are shut and relaxation is being feigned because if they weren’t, then he would be pacing up and down furiously, racked with tension. This is a portrait of a boy who will shortly be required to vault into the heavens, piloting complex machinery and facing savage jeopardy. You cannot help thinking to yourself: what if that had been you at the age of eight
een?

  All around these youngsters was woven an intricate web of support; not merely from the experienced ground staff, working with laser-sharp focus to ensure that the planes – and the pilots – were in peak condition, but also from the men and women around the country who were listening closely to the enemy over the airwaves. Just a few weeks previously, at Bletchley Park, a young codebreaker called John Herivel had brilliantly found a way to crack the Luftwaffe’s Enigma codes, the means by which the most secret information and battle orders were conveyed between commanders and pilots. Partly Herivel’s work was based on psychological insight into the Enigma operators and how they might set up their machines each day. From that point onwards, Bletchley Park was able to read much of the Luftwaffe’s secret traffic, relaying intelligence directly to Bentley Priory.

  Added to this was the work of the Y Service; large numbers of Wrens, members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), based in small coastal stations, eavesdropping on radio communications between Luftwaffe pilots. As the war intensified, some of these women found that the work had a curious intimacy to it; they came to know, from their voices, individual German pilots. Some of the pilots knew very well that their radio conversations were being monitored, and they seemed not to care very much. A few sometimes addressed remarks directly to the young women they presumed were listening in to them. As the daily dogfights started claiming their inevitable victims, the Wrens of the Y Service found themselves listening to familiar pilots ‘screaming and cursing’ as their planes went down in searing flames. A few Wrens recalled how – despite themselves – they found these moments deeply upsetting. The information provided by Bletchley and the Y Service was not always useful on a day-to-day basis, though it had proved invaluable beforehand in revealing the buildup of Luftwaffe forces and it also provided an in-depth picture of great strategic value, from key Luftwaffe figures to technology, all of which was stored in cross-referenced card file indexes. Nonetheless, combined with radar and the work of the tireless Observer Corps, it offered Dowding and his lieutenants at Bentley Priory the assurance that the enemy was being monitored as closely as possible, and that each scrap of information held out the possibility of keeping ahead of Goering.

  Indeed, as the pilots of Tangmere and Hornchurch and North Weald and Biggin Hill flew increasingly hazardous sorties – now piercingly aware that the enemy no longer had to fly long distances in order to strike at the land beneath them – their work needed ever higher levels of accuracy from those working on the ground in order to be genuinely effective. The women of Bentley Priory had pilots’ lives in their hands when they calculated at top speed the positions of the innumerable aircraft massing to assault. But how ready were these women?

  Twenty-year-old Gladys Eva was at Bentley on the eve of the Battle of Britain, filled with fizz and a profound excitement. ‘It was quite extraordinary,’ she says. ‘They had literally only just that day opened up the underground Operations Room. So everybody was there: medics, boffins, all there trying to work out how it was going to work. But the medics were the most interested: they were worried about us WAAFs. We had to have tests – eyes, blood, everything – because they were very concerned about the effect it would have on us. But we were tough. There was a job to be done and that was that.’

  This was also no time for girls from a sheltered background to be delicate. ‘We also had lectures on VD and syphilis and I had never heard of anything like that!’ says Mrs Eva, roaring with laughter. ‘I was under the chair, honestly. I thought, What am I hearing? I jolly soon learned, I tell you.’

  And she immediately fell in love with the atmosphere of Bentley Priory and the structure of Fighter Command. ‘I was fascinated, of course. We had such an interesting time. It was early on and the boffins were still working down there in quite large numbers. You would always have two or three of them down there with you, trying to work out if they had got the whole system right.’

  There was a lot of testing; everyone had to be absolutely clear about the sort of operation they were about to embark on. This was a new kind of war; on all levels, the new techniques had to be checked neurotically. No detail was too small to overlook.

  ‘No one really knew about the work,’ Mrs Eva continues. ‘We were the pioneers.’ Even if not every detail was imparted to her, Mrs Eva was well aware that she was working at the heart of something that a decade ago would have been regarded as supernatural agency.

  ‘This radar system was something amazing,’ she says. ‘On a really fine day, you could pick up the Germans from take-off. It didn’t often happen. But I’ve seen it happen. Then you would plot them, and they would be massing together. And we all knew what was heading for us.’

  Nor were the women simply automata to be guided by the rhythms of the new technology; from the start, they took a great deal of initiative and their superiors at Fighter Command were grateful for it. ‘We did two or three days learning how the system of radar worked,’ says Eileen Younghusband, ‘and how it was used. Superficial, in a way, but enough to give us a picture. They gave us varying tests. Then we were separated out. Some of the people who were manually dextrous and perhaps not so good on other things became radar operatives, because their role was going to be manual. Anybody who was good at maths was immediately put in the Filter Room. And then the rest went into the Operations Room.’

  There was one other extremely important requirement: precise diction. At Bentley Priory–and other Fighter Command stations – clear Received Pronunciation was regarded as being literally a matter of life and death. ‘At Bentley, you had to speak what was then called the King’s English. Because imagine the radar operators talking on a telephone line to a filter room plotter. They would be giving all the salient information. They would say “Stand by, new track” and then give the actual position – estimated 50-plus [miles, 80-plus kilometres] and 10,000 feet [3,048 metres] … And if that man had had a broad Geordie accent and the girl this end had a Welsh accent and she had to say “Could you repeat that?” – the information would probably be half a minute late and it would go on the table with the wrong number.’

  Meanwhile, Patricia Clark’s initial dismay at the first sight of her work – the very idea that she would be ‘playing tiddlywinks’ – dissipated very fast. ‘As I got to know what it was all about, it was a different matter altogether. It was exciting and I loved my work. I was never at a stage where I wished I wasn’t doing it.’

  Mrs Clark had less pure interest in the scientific side; she was more interested in grappling with the practicalities. ‘We went off for a fortnight during training to Bawdsey Manor, where we were told about the Dowding system and I don’t honestly think I took an awful lot of it in. I wasn’t awfully interested in the background – only in what we were doing, not how we came to be doing it. The seriousness of the situation didn’t really evolve until after Dunkirk probably, when I realised how crucial the whole thing was.

  ‘There wasn’t a lot of incoming flying the first year that I was involved, because everything was going on over there on the continent. But there was the excitement of being on duty – and then all the enormous education in what went on in the big wide world. Then there was Dunkirk: then the flying started … I also had friends, two cousins, who went into the Air Force, killed fairly early on in the Battle of Britain,’ she says quietly. ‘We all had friends who were involved in active duty. One chap who went to Dunkirk had his arm blown off. So one was very much involved in the war.’

  The fall of France had brought expert exiles: Polish airmen, among whom were some who had tried – with very limited numbers of planes – to hold off the German invasion of September 1939. Their ideas on air defence were interestingly similar to those of Air Chief Marshal Dowding; like Fighter Command, the Polish had used a system of ‘ground observers alerting a central control point, which in turn was in radio communication with flight commanders on patrol’. What they lacked, however, was Dowding’s secret ingredient: radar. On top of this, they ha
d but a fraction of the air power of the Germans.

  After Poland had been brutally overrun, many pilots had decided to continue the fight by travelling – often by circuitous and hazardous routes – to France. As the Germans then swept through the Low Countries and across the Maginot Line, the Polish flew and fought bravely, though again in planes that had little of the nimbleness or versatility of British fighters. And now, in that moment of summer when Britain was caught in breathless suspension, a squadron of Polish pilots was formed, first coalescing in Blackpool. Commanded by a British squadron leader, Ronald Kellet (together with Canadian Flight Lieutenant John Kent), 303 Squadron was pulled together with some fine Polish air veterans.

  Initially there were obstacles, not least of which was the language. Kent later recalled:

  We were not only faced with the problem of forming and training the squadron in a normal way, we also had to teach rudimentary English and convert the pilots on to our aircraft, which were Hurricanes. This presented more problems than one would normally expect, as some of the pilots had never flown aircraft with retractable undercarriages. Also, throttles worked in reverse direction, few had handled constant speed propellers, the air-speed was indicated in miles per hour instead of kilometres and the altimeter registered feet instead of metres.