The Secret Life of Fighter Command
Page 17
There was something unintentionally droll about that ‘long-advertised’ – there still seemed not to be a completely coherent invasion plan. But the Luftwaffe, as well as luring British fighters up into the air, were proving worryingly proficient at targeting the radio direction finding stations around the coast. At Bentley Priory, the core of the fighter operation was solidly defended; the Operations Room underground, and securely beneath concrete. Around the coast (the same was true for a large variety of listening stations), installations were altogether more fragile. They did not have the luxury of concrete. Dowding himself noted ‘rather severe damage and casualties … The operating personnel and particularly the women behaved with great courage under threat of attack and actual bombardment.’ Later, Dowding reflected on the often improvised nature of the RDF facilities in the more exposed areas around the coast. Given the frenzy of preparations that had to be made in order to meet the German threat head-on, this was one detail that had to fall by the wayside; there was simply too little time, in the wake of Dunkirk and the moment of crisis that followed, to expend huge amounts of money and labour constructing elaborate premises for each and every one of the stations. Many had to remain in wooden structures.
There was later some criticism that Bentley Priory itself was so well defended when others weren’t, to which Dowding replied: ‘It was considered that the nerve centre should be protected first, with the protection of the nerve ends to come as soon after that as possible.’1
Raids on the RDF stations formed part of a shifting kaleidoscope of Luftwaffe aggression that some in the Air Ministry found bewildering. In these early stages of the Battle of Britain, some senior RAF figures appeared unable to comprehend Dowding’s defensive tactics. Francis Wilkinson, an aide to Dowding, told Robert Wright:
I think it was that which led him [Dowding] to have at least some of those awful rows with those people at the Air Ministry. Some of them up there simply didn’t seem to know what was happening, or understand what it was all about. One day, an Air Commodore from the Air Ministry came to see Dowding. It was right at the time when we were very low on pilots who really knew how to fly. I listened to him in astonishment when he said to Dowding: ‘But I don’t understand what you’re worrying about … you’ve got plenty of aeroplanes and pilots.’ I thought poor old Stuffy would have a fit.2
Among those pilots were increasing numbers of Poles, the bond with Britain growing demonstrably stronger as they burned with memories of the German invasion of their own country. In the Scottish town of Perth, the Polish airmen were much in demand in the dance halls. Sometimes, the competition between them and the local men for the attentions of Perth’s fair maids grew a little rough; but in time, many unions (and indeed marriages) were formed. Language was an initial barrier; one local woman recalls that taste in food was another hurdle to be jumped, especially when young Polish men were being presented to sceptical Perth parents. It is rather moving now, incidentally, to go and visit the Polish section of Perth cemetery; somehow it is here that one gets a real sense of the wartime impact that these pilots made.
On the part of the RAF, the admiration was mutual. One officer told The Times: ‘Their strength is rooted in deep religious feeling and a patriotism which is derived from each man’s love of his own village and country. Nearly every man bears the scars of tragedy, knowing that his family, if alive, is suffering from a degree of oppression and cruelty such as never darkened Poland before in all its tragic history.’ It is instructive to see RAF officers giving such intensely lyrical quotes; a measure perhaps – in an age long before what we know as spin – of the Ministry of Information’s long reach.
As August came, it might have felt, nationally, that the country’s guard was being dropped a fraction; at the beginning of the month, 10 Downing Street was moved to issue this statement, reported in The Times:
The Prime Minister wishes it to be known that the possibility of German attempts at invasion has by no means passed away. The fact that the Germans are now putting about rumours that they do not intend an invasion should be regarded with a double dose of the suspicion which attaches to all their utterances. Our sense of growing strength and preparedness must not lead to the slightest relaxation of vigilance or moral alertness.
In the more northerly areas of the country, a frenetic training programme for novice fighter pilots was under way. ‘We watched an exhilarating mock battle,’ wrote one reporter, not disclosing the name of the village or the county, ‘delivered by a flight of Spitfires against Blenheims in the guise of enemy bombers. These fighter pilots are in a state of eager readiness to engage the enemy, and we saw what the concentrated power of their eight machine guns means when an aircraft discharged a few sharp bursts, at a rate of 160 rounds a second.’ But in some eastern coastal areas, pilots were not so much eager as, in some cases, salivating to fight. Douglas Bader, for instance, with 12 Group at Duxford, was later to give strident voice to what some significant higher figures were saying: that Dowding was getting the tactics wrong, and that if they weren’t changed, the Germans would land.
There was sometimes an acute cruelty about the fates of the fighters. The flamboyant American William Fiske, based at Tangmere, had spent that summer on the attack, even on one occasion forcing a German plane into a barrage balloon. On 14 August 1940, his Hurricane was hit. Despite the flames, the choking smoke, he somehow managed to guide the plane in back to base. Yet he had not reached safety. His cockpit was now glowing red with fire; the efforts of the ground crew to pull him out were Herculean – he was caught in parachute paraphernalia. For a moment, it must have seemed as though he and his team had triumphed. One observer noted that Fiske was burnt around the hands and the ankles. They managed to lift him out of the plane. But the entire effort had been too much for his system. He died, as one observer put it, ‘of shock’. Fiske was twenty-nine years old.
In the first few days of August, the Germans were still aiming for shipping. They dived on Dover, trying to shoot out the barrage balloons to make life easier for the bombers coming behind. They attacked convoys near Southampton, picking off straggling ships. The British squadrons always aimed to climb above them, sometimes higher than 6,100 metres (20,000 feet). The apparent discipline of the huge German formations – the fighters ringing the bombers – was reduced during such air battles to a frenzy of chaos. The British fighter pilots swooped; and all was a kind of fractal confusion. The Spitfire pilots would see with icy satisfaction the flames erupting near the tails of the Junkers or Messerschmitts. Sometimes they saw worse; German pilots in stricken planes trapped and panicking in their cockpits, or even jammed, halfway in and out, unable to budge as their planes plunged inexorably.
Then there was the surge of adrenaline when they themselves were hit. Sometimes cockpits would erupt in flames, and pilots, in the effort to ready themselves to bail out, would suffer hideous burns to their hands and their faces. They would then have to plunge these burns into the salt sea below. There were injuries that, if survived, would change lives; and the popular imagination now began to be haunted by the image of mutilated young pilots, and their chances of leading normal lives – dances, romances, courtship, marriage, sex – outside of the war. The public understood very well the potential horrors that each pilot faced every day. The truly astonishing feat is how the pilots – both British and German – learned to overcome the disorientation of these fast, fluid aerial battles; the split-second moment of seeing the enemy emerging from bright sunshine, the climbs and dives to evade fire, the whirling, twirling prospect as one pilot chased another across the sky, trying to keep him in his sights. Training only went so far.
This seemed also to be true of the operation at Bentley Priory, as it would be of the workings of all the Filter Rooms that were later set up around the country. The women and the men, informed of incoming aircraft, had just seconds to make swift, complex calculations to ensure that the fighters were sent up to the right places, at the right time, and at advantageous heig
hts.
‘All the plotters and filterers – they had boyfriends, brothers, cousins, husbands in fighter squadrons or bomber squadrons,’ says Mrs Young husband. ‘We knew the squadrons operating.’ For herself, she recalls particular intensity not just around Fighter Command but focusing on Bomber Command, the men who were making sorties into enemy territory. ‘Especially when we were doing the high raid bombing later,’ Mrs Younghusband says, ‘you knew what squadrons were operating, you knew your husband or your boyfriend was in that squadron.’
The Luftwaffe was now preparing to step up its operations. On 8 August 1940 an extraordinarily intense and focused effort took place to destroy a convoy off the Isle of Wight. This was the first day of an entirely new phase of the air war; a lustier, more brutal, more determined assault. The attack – bombers and fighters flying out across the waters in huge numbers, totalling about 300 throughout the course of the day – began at around 8.30 in the morning. The ships of the convoy were already being escorted by fighters. The enemy dived down at them out of the sun. In the first wave, over sixty German planes attacked; two of the ships were sunk but otherwise, impressively, the fighters largely held them off. But the Luftwaffe was not finished. Several hours later, an even larger force came screaming down from the heavens: over a hundred German bombers and fighters, having massed at Cherbourg, made an even more focused effort on the convoy. Six RAF fighter squadrons roared in and the results, from the pilots’ point of view on both sides, was pandemonium.
Then, later into that sunny afternoon, the malignant drone was heard again; the convoy, now near Bournemouth, was forced to spread apart as over 130 German Junkers and Messerschmitts tore into it with explosives and bullets. Throughout, the tally of losses was, extraordinarily, very much in favour of the British. In the morning attack, they lost two aircraft as opposed to the Luftwaffe’s nine; at lunchtime, the figures were twenty-seven Luftwaffe aircraft downed against the British five; in the Bournemouth attack, it was another twenty-seven German planes lost and six British. An attack had also been launched on Dover, which necessitated sending further fighter squadrons up; it was later thought that this was possibly a decoy. But again, there were tragic losses, including that of a Blenheim, which had been up in the air in the region on a training flight. The pilot either threw himself into the battle or somehow became ensnared through inexperience.
Then, as twilight gave way to brief summer darkness, the night flights commenced; Germans crisscrossed the country, seeking out the open mouths of estuaries to lay the mines for shipping. There were German planes on other missions; in the northwest, over Manchester, one craft was dropping leaflets. Elsewhere, small and oddly isolated bombing raids were taking place. In Somerset, Crewkerne and Yeovil were targeted, as were a couple of small towns near Warrington, in the northwest. In the green Chilterns, just a couple of miles from the Prime Minister’s weekend retreat of Chequers, the town of Wendover and the countryside around took sixteen bombs.
The German air force was flexing its muscles; and on 12 August, Luftwaffe command renewed its focus on the vulnerable, largely undefendable RDF bases dotted around the coastline. These presented too tempting a target not to pick off. Indeed, there were points at which those RDF stations could not quite pick up how many German planes were massing across the Channel – the network, like a modern mobile phone network, had weak spots. When 610 Squadron set off from Hawkinge to intercept those planes that had been detected, it found, at 4,877 metres (16,000 feet), many more than had been anticipated, flying over Dungeness on the Kent coast. Some of these planes slipped away and successfully bombed Lympne airfield. Meanwhile, a little later, 65 Squadron, based in Hornchurch, had set off into the skies to keep an eye on Chatham and the great naval base near the Thames Estuary. But all movements were a little out; the German pilots had other matters on their hands. They went for the RDF stations on the Sussex and Kent shoreline, one by one: first Pevensey, then the station in the pretty little town of Rye, and finally the installation on the edge of Dover. The effects were temporary; within twenty-four hours, all were back up and running. But even in that short time, a hole had been opened up in the defences and – coincidentally – Fighter Command’s timings were out that day, which had meant that the bombings had taken place just as relief squadrons were getting ready to fly.
That was just the morning. By lunchtime, a fierce and large attack on the Isle of Wight RDF station, and on the base at Portsmouth, had been launched by a vast formation reckoned to be in the region of 500 Luftwaffe planes. According to the RAF official history, ‘The enemy bombers were in formations of seven or eight sections in line astern and layered up, defensive circles being frequently seen.’ Spitfire squadrons were already up beyond the clouds to meet them; but in sheer numbers like these, some were always going to get through. And so it was that the RDF station at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight was reduced to charred rubble; and for ten terrible minutes just after midday, Portsmouth came in for fiery bombardment, despite all the efforts of the RAF. The Spitfires and Hurricanes perhaps had reason to exercise a shade of caution here; for the Portsmouth anti-aircraft gunners were in full cry, and bringing down German planes into the sea. In the melee of aerial skirmishes, aiming from the ground cannot always have been easy or completely accurate.
It is also a reminder of how sparse the British forces looked next to the massed might of the German air fleets. Even now, it seems mathematically astounding; small squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes taking off to encounter industrial quantities of German bombers, and ignoring the numbers to take them on with extraordinary ferocity. Surprise was part of their armoury; once the defenders had reached a certain altitude, they then dived out of the sun. ‘Attacks were carried out on the rear extreme left hand and right hand section of the bombers from astern and from the quarter by the first three sections of the Hurricanes,’ states the official history. ‘The rearmost Hurricane section concentrated on protecting our fighters from an attack by the Me 109s as they carried out their attack on the bombers. They did this by firing at long range in front of the Me 109s as they dived to attack our leading sections.’
But the relentlessness was another factor; on that one day, the pulses of German attacks, all over the southeast from the Thames Estuary down to Hampshire, had gone on until the early evening, by which time the sun was starting to dip. It has been suggested by the official historian that all this activity had one specific underlying aim; to see just how far the squadrons of RAF fighters could effectively cover so much territory, and for how long. It was not so much a test of strength as a rather chilly analysis; one during the course of which the Luftwaffe lost about fifty-seven planes and a great many pilots, with yet more planes damaged and yet more pilots wounded. On that day, twenty-two British fighters were destroyed; twelve pilots killed. Despite the Luftwaffe’s heavy losses, they still had the overwhelming weight of numbers.
Chapter Thirteen
Big Wing
Life for the British fighter pilots was taking on a curious dualism: the familiarity of the base and all the faces there, the comforts of tea, cocoa, corned-beef sandwiches, the cool green grass beneath one’s feet; and then the life above – a life of daily, unthinkable stress requiring, from dawn until sunset, unceasing alertness, coupled with the ability to blank out the huge discomforts of G-force, of unheated cockpits, of the noise of engines and guns. To fly alone, for so many hours a day, would be exhausting enough by itself. But add to that the furious concentration, plus the effort to keep mind-paralysing fear at bay, and a quite different order of mental control and willpower was required. Because, of course, bravery is not about not being frightened – only a fool or a robot would not be frightened – but the ability, somehow, to compartmentalise the fear, and indeed the fatigue, shut them away in another room as, for the third or fourth time that day, you don parachute and strap yourself into your cockpit, ready once more to try and shoot men down in flames before they succeed in killing you.
Some time later, i
n 1941, an Evening News headline read ‘Methedrine wins the Battle of Britain’. It was not strictly accurate. Benzedrine was the slightly less potent pharmaceutical substance dispensed by RAF medics both to pilots and to WAAFs in filter rooms. (Joan Wyndham, an aristocratic and bohemian writer who had wasted no time in joining up, recalled: ‘I really love the clear, cool feeling in my head, and the edge of excitement it gives to everything you do’.) Strikingly, it has since emerged that German Luftwaffe pilots were, in the summer months of 1940, being given a stronger drug. It was called Pervitin; some pilots noted with delight that it made them many times more alert than huge amounts of coffee ever could. It was a methamphetamine, and it became known as ‘Pilot’s chocolate’. In the short term, certainly, this drug – essentially crystal meth – had an extraordinary effect on Luftwaffe pilots, giving them seemingly superhuman resistance to tiredness and indeed despondency. Rather the reverse; the drug induced a form of euphoria. However, it was not long before the darkness of the drug manifested itself, in inability to sleep and psychotic phases; there were even instances of suicide. And then, of course, there were the horrific side-effects of addiction, from hallucinations to profound depression.
The use of Benzedrine in the RAF was very much more sparing. But it was still about fighting off tiredness, and helping the pilots focus. Of course there were drawbacks, as there are with every drug under the sun; in this case, too much Benzedrine would result in lengthy periods of wakefulness when what the fighter pilot needed after four or five sorties in a thirteen-hour flying day was the precise opposite. Then there were the unpredictable results of mixed intoxicants, such as the uproarious scenes at RAF Hornchurch just weeks before the Battle of Britain began, when one fighter pilot swallowed his allocation of Benzedrine, then mixed it with a great slosh of whisky, which had the effect of making him noisily monopolise the upright piano in the officers’ mess for hours.