For the civilians far down below, these epic encounters in the skies were sometimes difficult to follow; for small children, the falling bombs and the bullets and the constant alien noise triggered profound anxiety. Mollie Mellish was then ten years old and living in Kent. Decades later, she recalled: ‘It was during the hop-picking school holiday. On that day, waves of German planes came over from Dover and the Kent coast and I remember standing in the garden looking up at so many planes that it was like a big black cloud. I tried to count the German bombers but there were too many and I had to give up. Then Spitfires and Hurricanes came on the scene, they were dog-fighting with the German planes most of the day. There was lots of machine-gun fire and vapour trails, maybe also the odd parachute of someone was shot down … It was the worst day, with continuous gunfire noise …
‘The boys in the village, including my brother and his friends were all out looking for shrapnel and shell cases. Some shrapnel found was very jagged and still hot.’6
The producers of that shrapnel were making decisions faster than split seconds. Flight Lieutenant Dennis Robinson, based at Warmwell, years later recalled one particularly harrowing engagement, and the way that it affected the course of his life afterwards: ‘The first thing I felt was the thud of bullets hitting my aircraft and a long line of tracer bullets streaming out ahead of my Spitfire. In a reflex action I slammed the stick forward as far as it would go. For a brief second my Spitfire stood on its nose and I was looking straight down at mother earth thousands of feet below. Thank God my Sutton harness was good and tight. I could feel the straps biting into my flesh as I entered the vertical with airspeed building up alarmingly. I felt fear mounting. Sweating, mouth dry and near panic. No ammo and an attacker right on my tail.
‘All this happened in seconds,’ he added, ‘but now the airspeed was nearly off the clock. I simply had to pull out and start looking for the enemy. That’s what I did, turning and climbing at the same time. As I opened the throttle fully, with emergency boost selected to assist the climb, I noticed wisps of white smoke coming from the nose of my fighter. God, no! Fire!’
Like all other airmen, Mr Robinson had one abiding fear. ‘Suddenly the engine stopped,’ he continued. ‘Apparently a bullet in the glycol tank had dispersed all the coolant and even the faithful Merlin [engine] could not stand that for long at full power. So that explained the white smoke. Blessed relief. The fuel tanks of high octane fuel are situated very close to the pilot in a Spitfire. The dread of being burned to death was one of the worst fears. It drew heavily on any reserves of courage one had. You can imagine by now, my eyes are searching wildly, frantically, looking for my adversary – but, as often happens in air combat, not a single plane was to be seen in the sky around me. The release of tension as I realised my good fortune is something that cannot be described. You only know what it is like to be given back your life if you have been through that experience.
‘The problems that still confronted me … seemed almost trivial in comparison with my situation of a few seconds before,’ Mr Robinson concluded. ‘I experienced this feeling several times during the battle … It somehow changed my value system, so that things that had seemed important before never had the same degree of importance again. Maybe that’s what generated the anti-authority behaviour among us. It was no good telling us not to do a victory roll over the airfield when we returned from a scrap.’7
Morale naturally was central; and airmen were allowed all sorts of latitude rarely extended to the members of other services. Even their entertainment was of a racier quality. The pilots of RAF Hornchurch were on a couple of occasions treated to performances from the Windmill Girls. Part of Vivian Van Damm’s Revudeville at Soho’s Windmill Theatre, the girls were famous for forming ‘tableaux vivants’ in the nude; the only way that they were permitted to hold a licence for performing – issued by the Lord Chamberlain – was that they stayed stock still on stage. ‘If they move, it’s rude,’ was the dictum. And so the naked ladies would arrange themselves in scenarios such as ‘Paris Street Life’, with one making the shape of the Eiffel Tower.
There was also music, and comedy too; a dozen or so nude women standing stock still in silence might have been both sexy and slightly uncanny. They had been to the station before, invited by the then commanding officer Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son; he moved effortlessly in show-business circles. On that occasion, the women had put on a few garments in order to perform some sexy dance routines. In response, the station’s WAAF officers staged a walkout midway through the many encores.
Any distraction, no matter how absurd, was eagerly appreciated. And in the meantime, the ever-shifting tactics of the enemy kept the pilots tensed. The German bombers weren’t now aiming purely at industrial targets, or even airfields. Another tactic was what they termed ‘dislocation bombing’, the idea of which was to launch raids over factories and working-class housing, shattering the sleep of the workers below. The bombs that fell across the Liverpool area at the end of August, from the docks to Port Sunlight, were an element of this approach. If the planes hit any targets that could do damage to war production, then that was considered good; equally important, though, was the task of eroding the spirits of the workers, particularly in areas of high trades union membership, for there was always the possibility of fomenting damaging strikes and demonstrations, putting pressure on the government to sue for peace.
Another maddening factor, calculated to increase the psychological pressure, was the requirement for England’s towns, from Swansea to Newcastle and over the border in Scotland too, to remain on the highest air-raid warning alert. The eerie banshee cry of the siren would jolt tired populations towards the shelters, their sleep for the night truly wrecked.
When Winston Churchill rose in the House on 20 August 1940, he was keenly aware of the need to bolster not only the exhausted young pilots but also the general public who understood just how much these pilots were doing to defend them. Once again, this speech of Churchill’s – reported in full in The Times the following day – will live on immortally thanks to one phrase, which came at the core of a long and occasionally florid address. Of course, the Battle of Britain was still raging; and strikingly, Churchill chose first to issue reassurance of a different sort.
‘The great air battle which has been in progress over this Island for the last few weeks has recently attained a high intensity,’ the Prime Minister declared. ‘It is too soon to attempt to assign limits to its scale or to its duration.’ But, he went on, Britain’s fighter forces were expertly inflicting grievous losses; as a result, brilliant salvage work meant that all sorts of machine parts could be given new life. Churchill was first keen to address a key national anxiety: a shortage of Spitfires. ‘The splendid, nay astounding increase in the output and repair of British aircraft and engines which Lord Beaverbrook has achieved by a genius of organisation and drive, which looks like magic, has given us overflowing reserves of every type of aircraft, and an ever-mounting stream of production both in quantity and quality.’
These words were also partly for the benefit of German High Command; there was always the knowledge that such speeches would be pored over. The speech rose and swelled: ‘The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion.’ There then followed the phrase invoked so often today: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’
His speech, though, continued at some length afterwards, mentioning the courage of the bombing crews, and then broadening out to the fallen state of France, to the possibility of new alliances elsewhere, to the prospects in the Mediterranean, and most particularly, reaching out towards the United States of America. ‘The right to guide the course of world history is the noblest prize of history,’ Churchill sa
id in answer to questions about war aims. ‘We are still toiling up the hill; we have not yet reached the crest-line of it; we cannot survey the landscape or even imagine what its condition will be when that longed-for moment comes. The task which lies before us immediately is at once more practical, more simple and more stern.’
There had been airy mentions of a possible invasion, largely for the purposes of dismissing the idea, but Churchill concluded – using a pointedly American image – with his thoughts about the future. ‘I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no-one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.’
For Fighter Command, those more benignant days were still some way off. This was not a flood with which they could roll; they were having to hold it back with all their might. Back at Uxbridge, Air Vice Marshal Park, having ceded a little ground on the number of planes sent up to fight off the invaders, at last gave 12 Group, together with Douglas Bader, the role – absolutely vital – of defending 11 Group airfields such as North Weald and Hornchurch, while 11 Group pilots took off to meet Germans head-on.
Yet in this murderous world, there were also outbreaks of a weird but genuine chivalry. Pilot Officer Dowling of RAF Hornchurch recalled the day in August 1940 when the crew of a Luftwaffe bomber that had been shot down were safely picked up, arrested and taken back to the station where they immediately ‘clicked their heels and bowed’. One of the German crew was a major. It emerged that he had visited Hornchurch as a member of a pre-war delegation. Now, captured, he announced with some bravado: ‘We will all be here soon.’ Despite the boast – and the potential murderous ill-will in the air – a German-speaking English officer lightened the mood by taking to the camp piano and striking up a popular German tune which the bomber crew could not help themselves joining in with. Naturally, the next day, the prisoners were hauled off elsewhere for interrogation; but that night with their English counterparts gave further evidence of the mutual regard shared between highly skilled pilots.
The latter days of August saw the Germans starting to intensify their night bombing raids. Birmingham, Coventry, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Liverpool and the wider area around Merseyside were the focus of this new phase. And the attacks were heavier; many more high explosive bombs were being dropped. But at this stage, once again, the Germans were not quite succeeding on their own terms; for it appeared that a number of their pilots were failing to locate the Mersey. The Luftwaffe pilots thought that they had hit their targets; this, at least, was what they reported back to their own commanders. However, the result was that bombs fell on Wigan and St Helens, and a large number in the depths of the Cheshire countryside. An aircraft factory at Speke was on the receiving end of a few incendiary devices and several oil tanks were set ablaze at Ellesmere Port.
Then, right at the end of the month, they came for the airfields again. And this was the point at which the jagged schism between Air Chief Marshal Dowding, and Trafford Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader of 12 Group was painfully torn open. As Dowding said years later:
There were occasions when Park was so hard-pressed that all his squadrons were in the air at once. But was it for a squadron commander in Norfolk, in no. 12 Group, with a clearly defined task, to decide whether he should be drawn into some other task? Park could ask Leigh-Mallory to look after some of the northeastern aerodromes on no. 11 Group if he felt it was necessary, and there were the squadrons standing by for that very purpose. Among them was Bader’s own squadron, to be called upon when necessary.8
On 30 August, Squadron Leader Bader led his pilots into an assault on a formation of German bombers, and they succeeded in bringing down a few of them. As a result, an exultant Bader made a request of Commander Leigh-Mallory that he should be allowed to take up many more fighter aircraft from several squadrons. Leigh-Mallory could not have agreed more vehemently. It should be remembered that the disobedience was not to spite Dowding; both men were convinced it was about the survival of the nation.
Dowding wanted them to protect airfields in the southeast; and they didn’t. The inherent problem of the ‘big wing’ tactic was that it was fine when directed against a solid, unified formation of bombers; but often the Luftwaffe would send over feints and decoys – fighters without bombers, more waves of bombers coming behind but heading for different targets. On 30 August, as Keith Park’s 11 Group fighter pilots were dealing with incursions over the south coast, the key airfield of Biggin Hill in Kent just outside London was targeted; the bombers got through with ease. [T]he attack was one of the most successful that the Germans had so far made against a Fighter Command station. Thirty-nine officers and men were killed and twenty-six wounded.9 No. 12 Squadron failed to see the attack formation in time. Later that day, another formation of German bombers came roaring up the Thames Estuary and again turned south, subjecting the airfield to another bombing raid. Keith Park’s 11 Group requested that squadrons from 12 Group patrol and defend the area around the North Weald base, just on the outskirts of London near Epping Forest. That base was indeed successfully protected; Bader and his fellow pilots launched a bravura fightback against the incomers.
But, the better to intercept the invaders, Bader disobeyed radio instructions from his controller concerning the height at which to fly. The controller had said 4,572 metres (15,000 feet); Bader chose his own co-ordinates. In part, this seemed to reflect his frustration with Dowding’s RDF system; very often, Bader had found that the information passed back to him from the controllers concerning the position of the attacking force was either inaccurate or simply came in with not enough warning.
Radar was also incompatible with big wing formations. But this was where Bader and Leigh-Mallory had appeared to completely misunderstand Dowding’s system. For this tactic to work, they needed time to assemble, to take off; the time simply wasn’t there. The incoming Germans might be over London by the time they got themselves together. Worse: the big wing would then, of course, be picked up by Dowding’s radar system; the presence of so many planes in the sky could interfere with the clarity of the readings on enemy planes. Another consideration: such formations would make the work of the anti-aircraft guns much more complex. How were the big guns to discriminate between German bombers and large numbers of RAF fighters?
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Meanwhile the certainty prevailed that these concentrated attacks on airfields were the prologue to the invasion of England. With air bases knocked out, and the RAF unable to defend from the air, the sky would soon be filled with German paratroopers. At Bentley Priory, the table of the Operations Room had already become almost full with enemy plots in the southeastern corner.
Given that Fighter Command’s squadrons contained between them approximately one thousand pilots, the raids of August had seen a frightening number of casualties and deaths. In the days around the end of August and the beginning of September, just over 100 pilots had been killed. As well as the human loss and the suffering, there was now also an alarming deficit of flying experience throughout the squadrons. ‘For the whole of August, only some two hundred and sixty fighter pilots had been produced … and these were outweighed by casualties,’ states the official history. ‘The Command was steadily wasting away.’
The young men were there; but it took time to train them to a level where they might be able to take on the hugely experienced Luftwaffe. The memoirs of so many pilots are filled with the recurring leitmotifs of headstrong young men taking to their Spitfires, imagining that they are flying flawlessly, only to meet with hair-raising near misses – trying to land at night and completely missing the landing grounds, forgetting to lower landing gear, misjudging turns and rolls. The adrenaline gave them a fleeting illusion of immortality; the number of their fellow trainees they witnessed being torn apart in great orange blooms of flame, their planes crash-landed in fields, soon ripped that mirage away. The ground crews were dedi
cated and among them featured a great many experienced men, but these young pilots needed all the voices of wisdom they could get.
The stories of some casualties haunted the national imagination. One such was the Oxford rower and putative novelist Richard Hillary. On the morning of 3 September 1940, he and his fellow pilots had taken off through ‘the yellow fog’ that habitually settled on RAF Hornchurch, alerted to an incoming raid of at least fifty enemy fighters. Even in battle, Hillary noticed the beauty of the white clouds, ‘like layers of whipped cream’. Over the Channel, they saw the enemy and the enemy saw them. What followed was a vortex of disorientating action; Hillary fixed his focus on a Messerschmitt that was to be his prey and closed in on it, giving it bursts of gunfire. With a huge red explosion the Messerschmitt jerked out of sight, but now Hillary’s own plane was rocked by an explosion that shook the control stick from his hand. The cockpit was in flames; Hillary managed to tear back the hood but was then aware of a moment of piercing agony. He lost consciousness.
When he came to, Hillary was falling through the air. In a radio broadcast he made on the subject, he did not dwell on this at all, merely observing that he pulled the ripcord of his parachute. But to have passed out convinced that this was the moment of death, only then to wake flying free through the air; to be suspended between the earth and heaven, completely detached, completely free … Hillary’s parachute blossomed and held, and he dropped into the waters of the North Sea. On the way down, he had become aware that he was very badly burnt; his trouser leg was seared off, there was intense pain by his hip, and when he closed one eye and looked down, he could see his horribly burnt lips jutting out like ‘car tyres’. His hands had been pretty much melted; and in the water, he scrabbled uselessly at the parachute release catch. Hillary now contemplated death more consciously, as he floated in his life-jacket in the ‘not un-warm’ water, and his eyesight went. He knew rescue by a passing boat was unlikely; and as much as he tried to retreat into dreamy abstraction, he remained sharply conscious. At one point, accepting quite calmly the inevitability of his death, he deflated his life-jacket and tried to slip beneath the waves. But drowning oneself is not easy; and as he kept on bobbing back up, that incredibly unlikely boat did pass by, and he was rescued.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 20
