All this led to some interesting situations, as one can imagine. Furthermore, our tactics were different and they had never heard of radar or interceptions controlled from the ground. I was amazed and very favourably impressed at how rapidly the Poles mastered these complexities – both pilots and ground crews.1
The squadron was moved into the southeast, 11 Group’s area of command, and set up base at RAF Northolt on the western fringes of London. Issues of language – for all Polish pilots across the country – were dealt with smartly by the RAF, and manuals were specially issued with Polish translations. It was clear at first that Fighter Command – although welcoming its new recruits – did not quite know how to slot the Poles in with the other squadrons. The lack of English and the question of how they might handle formations and complex orders from the ground was only one element; there was also apparently concern about the Poles’ morale.
Such qualms were understandable but also a lamentable underestimation of this fresh intake. The Polish pilots had seen their country, their communities and their families fall under the shadow of both German and Soviet subjugation; many had fought their way through an increasingly unstable eastern Europe in their efforts to get to France and then to Britain. Their desire for vengeance was volcanic.
There were a great many Canadian and Australian pilots too; and among them some Americans. Officially, since the USA was a very long way from joining the war, these men had no business or right to be flying with the Royal Air Force. The numbers can therefore only be a guess. The RAF itself has identified eleven American pilots who flew and fought in that summer of 1940, but there might well have been many more. Some crossed the border from America into Canada and signed up with the Air Force there.
Despite the extra recruits, Fighter Command didn’t have enough pilots; it didn’t have enough planes. Its aerodromes in the southeast were almost pitiably vulnerable. Radar was a boon, but was also skittish and by no means some magic wand to wave.
And yet despite the weaknesses, which were apparent to everyone, those young pilots – alongside the super-alert ground crews and the sharp young women of Fighter Command – set their faces to the coming battle with extraordinary verve, their fear masked by the beguiling optimism of youth.
Chapter Eleven
The Sky was Black with Planes
If you have ever flown across America, coast to coast, and looked out of the aeroplane window, you will have seen how extraordinarily vast and empty that country is; just a few minutes to the east of Los Angeles, you are crossing desert that seems to stretch away without limit. The reverse is true for Britain; from the air, there is almost always something to be seen below.
For the Luftwaffe in 1940, there was even more than there is today in terms of potential targets: vast industrial plants, sprawling factories turned over to the war effort, the dark bulks of riverside power stations, lines and lines of glittering rails leading to railway marshalling yards filled with coal and with food for the cities. For those German pilots now based near the coast of northern France, a short hop across the grey Channel would bring them to Dover, to Ramsgate, to Deal. Pilots a little further south in France could look easily at the mighty docks of Southampton, and at Portsmouth. For German pilots carrying out reconnaissance missions, a surprisingly short journey would take them far inland, to counties like Berkshire, Oxfordshire, even as far northwest as Cheshire. In the summer of 1940, Britain was rich and replete with potential bombing targets; and that was even before the cities and the towns and their civilian populations were taken into account.
Also there for the picking was the enormous amount of cargo being transported back and forth in convoys, through the English Channel and up the east coast of Britain. At this moment of national crisis, the Cabinet and Fighter Command were left to second-guess what the German plan might be. Certainly there would be a sustained attack from the air, with a view to invading, or forcing the country to capitulate and seek terms. The question was: what course of action would the Luftwaffe decide upon? Were there to be swarms of paratroopers, as in the Low Countries? A sudden lightning strike on British airfields and bases, disabling the capabilities of the fighters? A sustained assault upon shipping, endangering the country’s food supplies? Or a campaign of bombing so relentless that the net result would not merely be a huge death toll but also exhaustion and badly damaged morale among a sleep-deprived workforce?
Churchill had given the battle a name before it began; in the aftermath of Dunkirk, he told the people that they would now be facing a ‘Battle of Britain’. It is generally held that that battle began on 10 July 1940. The initial assault was upon shipping and the towns of the south coast. The Air Ministry was very quick to reinterpret the attacks. ‘The greatest damage on the German Air Force since bombing raids on this country began,’ ran the communiqué. The newspapers were beguiled and so too, it seems, were eager English onlookers. ‘There were air fights all day long, mostly off the south and east coast of England,’ reported The Times. ‘They began soon after dawn … [there were] Spitfire pilots patrolling the Kentish coast … three British fighters attacked one formation of Messerschmitt 110s.’ A nameless pilot was quoted describing another attack as being like ‘a cylinder of circling enemy aircraft’. The report described how the pilot ‘climbed to the top of the circle, then did a spiral dive down towards the centre, attacked a Messerschmitt and a Dornier … and put them both out.’
Though one might have expected newspapers to place emphasis on German losses, the fact was that the Luftwaffe was by no means invulnerable. There had been a number of losses throughout the Battle of France, and it was taking some weeks simply to put machines through repairs and obtain the supplies required to begin an attack on Britain in earnest.
Later, Dowding observed: ‘I wouldn’t like to differentiate between the material and aircrews of the Luftwaffe and the Air Force … In technical skill and in courage we could claim no superiority over the Germans, although there was of course a very great difference in spirit. I don’t think that any higher degree of skill and courage could possibly have been expected.’1 But there was one serious difference, certainly as Dowding saw it; and that was the nature of the authorities that they answered to.
Dowding and Fighter Command had already demonstrated that their voices were heard; the plea of 15 May to the War Cabinet to conserve forces for the fight to come would not have been mirrored in German High Command. In other words, Goering and the Luftwaffe had no choice but to accede to the whims and desires of Hitler, and Hitler alone. The forthcoming invasion of Britain would not be a matter for debate in German High Command. But this element – the caprice of an already notoriously capricious dictator – made Hitler’s next moves very tricky to anticipate. At the time, Dowding said: ‘It is difficult to prophesy the exact sequence of events in an attempted invasion; but it appears at least possible that the enemy might not launch any seaborne attack in heavy ships or barges until he had established a pied-à-terre somewhere on the coast by means of troops, guns, and even tanks, transported by air.’2 He foresaw that German paratroopers might aim to capture one of the British air bases near the sea. Then carriers could sail in with more troops and more weaponry, under cover of more air attacks, frenzied in their ferocity.
There were two fearful examples: the pulverising of Holland a few weeks beforehand, and the Nazi invasion of Norway just weeks before that. Dowding noted that once the Germans got a foothold, however precarious it seemed, they were apparently incredibly difficult to ‘dislodge’.
On 10 July, there was a fearsome assault upon shipping in the Channel. The captain of one boat gave this eyewitness account:
Hundreds of bombs fell all around. It was just like a shower of hail. Some of the raiders were shot down in flames. Through my glasses [binoculars], I saw the tails fall off two of them as they crashed into the sea, chopped off by machine gun bullets from British fighters. More German aeroplanes then flew over us and they were attacked by Spitfires and Hurricanes.
The sky was black with planes.3
They had been so since before dawn; that was when the first of the German craft started reconnaissance and meteorological flights, the length of England’s south coast and further afield. According to the official history, a Spitfire caught and destroyed a Dornier over Yarmouth, on the east coast, at 5.20 a.m. on 10 July. The Dornier had been spying on shipping; several hours later, a convoy in the vicinity was attacked. Further south, the pioneering radar system picked up a build-up of German planes in the region of Calais. Just twenty minutes later, that formation of planes was swooping in on a convoy sailing past Dover. It was defended by six planes from 32 Squadron. ‘We claimed the certain destruction of seven of the enemy at the cost of one pilot,’ states the official history, ‘while the convoy only lost one four-hundred-ton ship, a ludicrously small return for so great an effort on the part of the Germans.’
But further west along the coast, the positions were reversed; a German plane, flying alone, managed to slip across the water and bomb the harbour at Falmouth in Cornwall with devastating results. One vast ship was sunk outright and several others went up in an inferno. It was concluded that the new radar system had its weak or blank spots; this part of the southwest was clearly one of them.
In early July, Dowding had expressed misgivings about the idea of Fighter Command having to devote men and planes to the defence of shipping; he was looking forward to when the convoys would be routed around the north of England and Scotland. On that first day of the Battle of Britain, Dowding and Keith Park must have felt their hearts to be the weight of anvils; so too must the young pilots of 11 Group who were expected to meet head-on a force whose size they could not calculate. It was those pilots who were most directly in range, and on whom the responsibility disproportionately fell.
Spitfire pilot Geoffrey Wellum was among those who had been relocated closer to the front line in the sky, down at the Biggin Hill base in Surrey. In his memoir, he wrote of those days: ‘This must be England at her most endangered, and her most dangerous. She is alone. Nobody else in the whole world to help her. Taking tremendous punishment, her back to the wall, but dishing it out too. We can only go forward. Can’t go back any further. Bloody Nazis. Someone has got to stop them.’4
An island under siege: that feeling, shared by the majority of the population, was acutely heightened for the pilots. Lying on their beds and trying to sleep – imagine trying to sleep in those circumstances, knowing what the next day is going to bring – they would often hear the distant drone of a German plane high above and their anxiety would be intensified further. A soldier on the ground was one thing; you could defend, attack, know roughly which way he would move. But the freedom of the air meant that the realm above was so much more difficult to defend.
Those early days of sustained German attack also put a huge strain on the brand new system installed at Bentley Priory – the Operations Room and the Filter Room. ‘It was very, very physical – and you had to be pinpoint perfect,’ recalls Gladys Eva. ‘There was never any room for a mistake. Particularly when you were telling [marking down co-ordinates]. If you put a counter half an inch out of line, you were putting the whole shoot out. It was very particular. Mentally you were tired by the time you went off watch. But I never wanted to go off. I loved it.’
Mrs Eva’s recollections about accuracy were echoed throughout the Air Ministry. Interception was a lickety-split business; if the timings were out, the fighters would be too late to stop the enemy from raining fire down on their targets. But all sorts of complications were thrown in for women such as Gladys Eva and the staff of the Filter Room; first, there had to be a built-in time lag from the time the planes were first registered by the new radar system. Then a certain amount of intuition was needed when it came to calculating the height of the planes. The Spitfires wanted to get above them; but often, the Germans would swoop in low and – counter-intuitively – begin to climb the closer they came to the British shore.
For the women and men hoping to interpret the distant echoes from the atmosphere, training only went so far; they needed the real experience that would bring more instinctive responses. Imagine if their timings erred towards the premature, indicating that the Germans were approaching faster than they actually were. The young Spitfire pilots might be launched into the air too early, causing confusion when trying to get a bearing on the enemy and creating problems with the planes’ limited fuel supply; there was only so long they could stay in the air without having to come back down again. There were other difficulties: the system might detect traces of enemy planes, but the significance of their flights and their routes still required correct interpretation. The enemy was canny, sending up decoy flights to trick fighter squadrons into staying up in the air before being hit with another force flying at them from out of the sun. The mathematical co-ordinates could only reveal so much; the rest would have to come from a kind of sixth sense borne from experience. On the ground, pilots were starting to overestimate the heights that they would need to climb to, their aim to literally stay on top of the enemy.
The German focus sharpened in July 1940; and it sharpened on the shipping. Protected by circles of fighters, German bombers delivered murderous attacks on convoys and other shipping in the Straits of Dover. They were also working in conjunction with the German navy; pilots high above would send details of convoys on to E-boats, the sleek German fast-attack vessels.
In other words, it was an almost impossible proposition for the pilots of 11 Group. On the other side of the Channel, the Germans had absolute freedom over when, how, and in what numbers they would launch their attacks over the sea; squadron leaders and the personnel of Bentley Priory could only, at best, second-guess them. It was also the case that 11 Group was formidably outnumbered; not only were the Germans frequently high above them, but in daunting numbers too. The pilots could see with their own eyes just how many bombers and fighters they were attempting to fight off; the scale of the enemy’s forces compared to their own. Yet they were to go up continually, day after day. The biography of Douglas Bader lays great emphasis on his aggression; a similar attribute, found within all the pilots of 11 Group and running counter to their insouciant public image, helps to explain their persistence in carrying on the fight against such odds, although different accounts and memoirs suggest that it came in the form of icy cold-bloodedness as opposed to hot temper.
In the pilot logbooks one can now examine in the archives – so carefully and formally printed, bound in black or blue leather, with names embossed on the cover in gold, and columns inside for ‘aeroplane type and number’, ‘time’, ‘height’, ‘course’ and ‘remarks’ – can be found reports of this incessant daily activity. We see a little of that studied brevity, yet also flashes of surprising boyishness. In one pilot’s logbook – that of H.R.L. Hood from Manston, detailing days in late July 1940 – we see that he has been taking his Spitfire up over Kent between three and five times a day; that he has been on ‘interception patrol’ and ‘convoy patrol’ and occasionally on interception between Manston and Hornchurch. Then in one day’s entry, amid these clipped ‘remarks’, we see two little hand-drawn swastikas – one with a leg going the wrong way, showing then as now how oddly difficult swastikas are to draw from memory. These represent the two German planes that he succeeded in shooting down. ‘Shot down one ’87 and one 09’ is his only comment. A day later, we find him back up in the air, on three sorties, once more on patrol.
Another logbook, that of W.E. Coope, carries on its cover one man’s proud progress through the RAF: the titles ‘Flight Officer’, ‘Flight Lieutenant’ and ‘Squadron Leader’ have each been scrubbed out in turn, and underneath them on this palimpsest is the title ‘Wing Commander’. Amid the flights and missions marked ‘secret’, there are occasional glimpses of human frailty; the entry for one period in 1940 does not deal with flights taken but makes a very quick nod to ‘hospitalisation’ for ‘jaundice’. Of course in strict terms, pilots were not supposed
to keep diaries; yet looking through a logbook now – all those meticulously recorded sorties, and the time they took – it doesn’t take too much imagination to peer between the lines, to envisage the daily task of conquering the most understandable fear in the world in order to get out back among the clouds.
The dogfights over the roiling waters of the Channel quickly brought home another advantage that the Germans appeared to enjoy; when their bombers were shot down, they were frequently able to rescue the pilots, quickly picking them up and sailing off in E-boats. It was different for the British, at least at first: when either a Spitfire or a Hurricane was hit, and was forced to plunge into the water, the plane would tip over nose first – and sink almost immediately. This was a further terror in store for the pilots; if not death or mutilation in some nightmare inferno, then drowning in black, freezing waters, your body never to be seen again. Many pilots were unable to stop imagining the idea of sinking to the bottom of the sea and staying there forever, forgotten. The early days of the Battle of Britain led to changes; the navy and coastal stations were made ready to launch boats to swiftly retrieve any pilots who might have managed to get free of their planes before that final plunge.
Yet what were the aims of the Luftwaffe? What were the aims of the Führer himself? On 19 July 1940, as German planes locked on to their shipping targets with increasing confidence, and by night laid mines in the waters, Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag, reported in the Manchester Guardian, in which he sought to portray himself as the voice of reason, and Churchill as the blood-stained warmonger in cahoots with Jewish financiers:
Believe me, gentlemen, I feel a deep disgust for this kind of unscrupulous politician who wrecks whole nations and states. It almost causes me pain to think that I should have been selected by fate to deal the final blow to the structure which these men have already set tottering. It never has been my intention to wage war, but rather to build up a state with a new social order and the finest possible standard of culture.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 15
