‘You said yesterday that I would have a stronger case in asking for additional night fighter squadrons if we were in fact shooting down enemy bombers at night,’ he continued, underscoring a certain sense of impotence in the face of the demoniac blitzkrieg. ‘I admit this, but I am convinced that in a reasonable period, we shall begin to get a modicum of success at night … prolonged training and experience is required to make successful night fighter pilots … Let us therefore take time by the forelock, and get the squadrons formed now.’ He pleaded that day fighting and night fighting were two entirely different techniques; that squadrons could not be expected to be on readiness throughout the day and then again in the blackness of night; and that Spitfires and Hurricanes could only be effective at night when weather conditions were perfect. ‘I do feel most strongly about this,’ he concluded. ‘It is vital to defeat the enemy night bomber – we may even lose the war if we don’t. Actually I think my demand is really a modest one.’4
Christmas brought respite, though the Londoners were not to know it beforehand. ‘There was so little air activity anywhere that this may be fairly described as a raid-free Christmas,’ reported The Times on 27 December 1940. ‘A blessed relief not merely for the obvious reasons but also because it granted to our airmen the rest and seasonable pleasure they deserved.’
The Christmas silence was shattered on the night of Sunday 29 December, when fighter squadrons were sent up into the darkness to deal with formations that were dropping incendiary bombs on London. ‘The warning came at an early hour,’ read the report in the Manchester Guardian. ‘A bomb started a blaze on the roof of a Wren church and commissionaires and messenger boys ran in from the street to save the furnishings, which included a heavy brass lectern, vestments and pews.’ They all got out just in time: the roof collapsed shortly afterwards. But this was just the start: the bombers were relentless and the incendiaries fell across the city: ‘The sky over the capital was lit up by flames with the brilliance almost of daytime, and the sky was filled with dense volumes of smoke.’ And still the flames blossomed further; the intention of the Luftwaffe, in an eerie prefiguring of what was to come to German cities later in the war, was to create a firestorm. About 1,500 fires were set off that night, in the heart of the city and out towards the docks. It was an extraordinary feat on the part of so many hundreds of volunteers to ensure that the conflagration was in any way contained.
Even if they could not stop all the bombers getting through – such a thing would not have been possible – the call for extra night fighters would have gone a little way towards helping the morale of the citizens below who were being bombed in the freezing darkness of the blackout. December had seen raids on south coast towns and a heavy attack upon the steel-making industry of Sheffield, and similar raids continued as the new year began. In the news reports that followed each attack, plus the nightly pounding of London, the night fighters were acknowledged. ‘British night fighters were believed to have engaged German raiders over the London area late last night,’ The Times reported on 16 January 1941. ‘Roof-watchers heard the roar of engines as though a dog-fight was on. Our fighters were also heard over an east England town after Anti-Aircraft guns had blazed away at enemy machines.’
The following night brought even more heartening and reassuring news. The newspaper reported on 17 January:
Enemy raiders over this country on Wednesday night were intercepted by RAF night-fighters and two were destroyed. One of these, a Dornier 17, was brought down in flames on the outskirts of London. One of the crew baled out. The others were killed. Early yesterday morning, Mrs Hollick, who lives in the district, heard someone calling ‘German, German’. Opening the door, she saw a young German who could not speak English. He was wounded and Mrs Hollick took him into her house and sent for the police. The German, who is 22, wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross and he was later removed to hospital.
In other words, the night fighters had succeeded in bringing down a decorated pilot.
And the Royal Air Force was determined to keep its nocturnal successes in the news, so that the public at least had a sense that some fierce resistance was being offered to the exhausting onslaught. A few days later, on 28 January, the King and Queen made a tour of five RAF aerodromes. As the newspaper reported:
When they were in a pilots’ rest-room, they had a long talk … about night-fighters and the difficulties of intercepting enemy bombers at night. A young Squadron leader, when asked by the King about his experiences, said: ‘I think we may be going to be much more successful in the future, sir.’ The King and Queen discussed with the night-fighter pilots the difficulties of their work and the new secret equipment with which our fighters are being fitted.
This ‘secret equipment’ was Mark IV Air Intercept radar, looked after by a separate operator on board. Moreover, Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas’s request had been granted. As 1941 went on, increasing numbers of Beaufighters came into service; by May, there were some 200 flying nightly intercept missions. Later in the war, Beaufighters were sent to Malta and to the Far East.
___
The issue of aeroplane production also caused flurries of internal Air Ministry ill-will in the early weeks of 1941. Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal was moved to compose an icy letter to Sholto Douglas concerning the influence of the buccaneering Lord Beaverbrook, who was still champing about plane manufacturing in his ministerial role. Clearly his full-on approach was not loved by all. Sir Charles’s letter began:
My dear Sholto,
You asked me the other day if I had any objection to you writing direct to Lord Beaverbrook, and I told you I had none. At the time, I had supposed this correspondence would only concern such matters as shortage of spares, faults in aircraft and engines, successes and failures of equipment in the field and so forth. It now appears from copies of letters that have passed between you and the Minister that I have seen, that you are advising him on the allocation of Merlin engines, and since this subject concerns all three Commands (Fighter, Bomber, Coastal), it can only be satisfactorily dealt with by the Air Ministry. I am very anxious that collaboration between the RAF and the Ministry of Production should be of the closest, but you should avoid as far as possible communicating about matters of policy which have not been fully discussed at the Air Ministry.
Sholto Douglas was very swift to realise his error, and equally swift to write back with a note of contrition. ‘I am sorry if I have transgressed,’ he wrote (a half-apology, really, casting doubt on whether he had in fact transgressed at all). He went on to explain that he and Lord Beaverbrook had fallen into conversation while watching a display at RAF Northolt, and that subsequent letters had been copied to Sir Charles’s department. ‘I hope therefore that you will agree that I have at least retrieved my transgression,’ Sholto Douglas concluded. He had; a few days later, Sir Charles wrote to him with the news that Lord Beaverbrook had presented him with the figures for the numbers of new Hurricanes and Spitfires being constructed. ‘These are very much higher than previous expectations,’ wrote Sir Charles, ‘and I think they will rejoice your heart.’5
But at Fighter Command in that bitter bombing winter of 1940, when the Germans had left gaping, burning holes where houses and families had been, there was not only anxiety about whether enough planes were being made; there had also been an ongoing struggle to make radar fulfil its potential. As a result of the technology’s shortcomings, the co-ordinates provided by Bentley Priory were not a great deal of use to the anti-aircraft gun emplacements on the hills around London. Very often they fired shots into the impenetrable sky as much to keep up the morale of the people sheltering around as aiming for an enemy plane.
And, even with Dowding deposed, the question of the effectiveness of ‘big wing’ formations itched; for Leigh-Mallory and Sholto Douglas, there was a deeper point about the purpose of the RAF to be made. A few days into the new year, Leigh-Mallory arranged for a bombing simulation exercise, to demonstrate beyond doubt that his conduct
at 12 Group – and the apparent ungovernability of his pilots – was much more effective than Dowding’s perceived havering. The exercise, on 29 January, was carried out over Kenley airfield in Kent; a ‘big wing’ formation was put together to defend it from enemy ‘bombing’. Catastrophically, it failed completely. If the exercise had been real, then the airfield would have been utterly destroyed. But the nature of belief is such that even the baldest of facts cannot sway it. When it was pointed out by his superiors that the exercise had been a travesty, Leigh-Mallory’s response was simply that he and his men would do better next time. His view, moreover, was that it was almost immaterial whether or not the enemy bomber hit its target. The important thing, the one thing that Dowding never seemed to acknowledge, was the need to pursue these enemies as they turned to fly back.
The exercise demonstrates, moreover, the determination of Dowding’s opponents – even in 1941, just months after the Battle of Britain – to prove that he had been wrong. There was a scramble within the higher commands of the RAF to write the definitive history of that 1940 victory; accordingly, the early official histories in 1941 were astonishingly brutal in minimising the influence and impact of Dowding and Keith Park. It was not until much later, and after some anguish on his part, that Dowding’s own version was to receive properly sanctioned publication.
As much as Hugh Dowding and Trafford Leigh-Mallory were bitterly opposed when it came to the methodology of aerial combat, they had in common one rather haunting interest. Both men, during their RAF careers, grew increasingly convinced about the truth of spiritualism. Dowding was to write books on the subject and indeed was to cause some controversy when he suggested to a newspaper that he was sensitive to the presence of dead pilots. Leigh-Mallory came to hold similar beliefs; and you cannot help thinking of how, for fighter pilots, violent death and the wild beauty of the skies were so intimately entwined; and how, when one is soaring high in the firmament, it must surely have been natural for thoughts to ascend higher, to the illimitable skies to come. Fighter pilot Roald Dahl later went on to write one particularly ghostly story about a pilot who, at 20,000 feet, suddenly became aware of planes either side of him, both flown by colleagues long since killed. During the Battle of Britain, one in six pilots met swift, terrible deaths. Back at their stations, what chance was there for friends to mourn their passing? And we see that the same was true for their commanders, the men who were sending them up to their fates on a daily basis.
The passion and belief involved in spiritualism tells us that both Dowding and Leigh-Mallory, in their own ways, felt each loss with dagger keenness. But more than that (otherwise every general and admiral would have subscribed to the same beliefs), there was something essentially metaphysical about the act of flying itself.
Yet there was also that grim purpose; and among many pilots, a sharpening sense of vengefulness and anger. For every house demolished, every inferno sparked, every city dweller killed by lethal shrapnel, arteries severed by molten glass shards, there was a surge of the sort of furious bloodlust that squadron leader Peter Townsend described feeling when, above the clouds, he found himself closing on his prey. In the New Year, the pilots of Fighter Command were to go on the offensive, and over a much broader theatre of war.
Chapter Eighteen
Rhubarbs
As well as the visceral carnage, and the scale of destruction, there was the dull clang of futility; for so many nights and days, weeks and months, German pilots had been targeting shipping, naval bases, aerodromes and then, in frustrated fury, ordinary streets and houses. For the Luftwaffe bomber, so high up – a famous photograph of an enemy plane above London’s docks shows the buildings and streets below simply as map-like abstractions – the mission was cold: drop the bombs as close to the targets as possible, then turn and fly. The blood only warmed for the chase back: the efforts in the dark to evade the white glare of the searchlights, the unknowable trajectory of the missiles, the odd night fighter who might materialise in front of the moon.
But even for these pilots, there must also have been a sense of nihilistic uselessness. The invasion was off, Operation Sea Lion cancelled. The Germans were not going to cross the Channel and occupy England. And all this bombing: what was the end result? The factories kept working, and the working-class revolution that some Nazis had hoped for never happened; the commuters kept struggling into their offices on trains diverted past wrecked rails, their morale apparently buoyant. The mass psychosis confidently predicted by government experts – and therefore also by German government experts – stubbornly refused to break out.
Britain could take it; and the Luftwaffe were exhausted delivering it. By 1941, the attentions of the Luftwaffe were being diverted towards the Mediterranean and to north Africa. And it was now time for Fighter Command to link with Bomber Command in order to strike back beyond Britain’s shores. Just as the Germans had soared over the Channel with bombers protected by fighters, so the RAF was now to launch its own raids, first against specific targets in France. The plan was called ‘Circus’; and in its first phase, six Blenheim bombers, escorted by Hurricanes and Spitfires, set course for an ammunition and weapons dumps in Calais.
Of this new offensive, Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas later wrote:
After the first three Circus operations, an inevitable difference of view between Bomber and Fighter Commands as to the primary objects of these attacks became apparent. The principal aim of my command was to shoot down enemy aircraft, while Bomber Command, naturally enough, attached more importance to the bombing … we agreed that the object of Operation Circus was to force the enemy to give battle in conditions tactically favourable to our fighters. To compel the Germans to do so, the bombers must do enough damage to make it impossible for them to refuse to fight.1
And so from January 1941, these speculative raids across the Channel were stepped up. For pilots such as Douglas Bader, the promise of activity after the seething impotence of the Blitz was extremely welcome. Indeed, his biographer Paul Brickhill recalls the morning when Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory, now installed at 11 Group Headquarters at Uxbridge, called the veteran in and said: ‘I suppose life seems pretty dull lately?’ As Bader gruffly responded in the affirmative, Leigh-Mallory, with that absurd bluff jocularity ascribed to him by Brickhill, said: ‘What do you think about going over to France and giving them a smarten up? We thought we might send a few bombers over with a pack of fighters?’2
There was also a pleasing matter-of-fact curtness about the typed orders that preceded each such mission; documents which now speak of growling confidence, brimming with certainty that a vital contribution is being made. ‘Circus – Twenty-Nine – to take place Wednesday 2nd of July 1941’, one such itinerary was headlined. The objective was immediately stated below: ‘Target: City of Lille Electric Power Station on Western Outskirts of Lille. Target no. Z 246.’ And how was it to be carried out? ‘Rendezvous: Clacton 12.00 hours. At 8,000 feet, crossing French coast at 12,000 feet.’ The bombers were assembled, their fighter escorts primed. ‘1 Hurricane squadron to be detailed by station commander, North Weald; Nos 303 and 308 squadrons, Northolt. Height 13,000 feet to 15,000 feet.’ Refuelling was to take place at Martlesham. And in the event of the bomber squadrons having to turn back shy of hitting the target, the fighter escorts were required to give a codeword to their controllers. On that mission, the word was ‘Parsnip’.
There was an extra dimension of psychological satisfaction. As well as giving the fighter pilots something concrete to do – anything in the world was better than the limbo of waiting – it allowed them to feel the confidence of the aggressor. Whereas constant, months-long defence could prove, for some, corrosive – no matter what one did, it seemed, the implacable enemy just kept on coming, while there was no apparent means for the pilot to follow them back and annihilate them – these missions had an element of audacity and ruthlessness. Even though the pilots of Fighter Command were quick to realise that their actions in 1940 had ensured the survi
val of the nation and the cancellation of Nazi invasion plans, the autumn and winter of the Blitz were nonetheless a draining test of morale. Now, in this high summer, it was their turn to cross the Channel.
Alongside the Circus, Leigh-Mallory had conceived of another way to keep his pilots in a state of battle-ready alertness: a series of attacks he termed ‘Rhubarbs’. The idea was that any day when the layer cloud hung low or clung to the land, the fighter pilots could roar across the Channel under natural cover and take aim at any sort of German target. And if the Luftwaffe were to respond a little too heavily, the pilots could then use that same cloud as a means of covering their escape. Sholto Douglas had approved the idea; as he later wrote, the raids
provided valuable experience alike for pilots, operational commanders and the staff of the formations concerned … It was obvious from the start that in many cases pilots engaged on these patrols would not succeed in meeting any German aircraft and they were authorised in this event to attack suitable objectives on the ground. Nevertheless, I considered it important that the primary object of the operation – namely, the destruction of enemy aircraft – should not be forgotten and discouraged any tendency to give undue emphasis to the attacks on ground objectives.3
‘Everyone wanted to jump into the Hurricanes and try the same lark,’ reported Douglas Bader’s biographer.4
Bader was appointed wing commander of 242 Squadron in Tangmere, West Sussex – just across the coast from France, as he noted with a little satisfaction. But he was also swift to spot that even this many weeks after the Battle of Britain, the young pilots were still under some nervous strain; the after-effects of those daily flights, those nightmarishly regular brushes with death, were clearly showing. It would have been extraordinary if they had not; but in an age where the phrase ‘lack of moral fibre’ still loomed horribly large, such things were not discussed to any great degree. Instead, as happened with other squadrons, it was arranged for the pilots to be transferred elsewhere in the country, to quieter postings where there was no pre-dawn wakefulness about the possibility of German incursion. And in their place came fresher pilots from those quieter postings, eager and apprehensive, and open to the new flying techniques that commanders and tutors such as Bader could impart.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 25
