The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  In the aftermath of the winter Blitz, the Ministry of Information needed some form of morale-raising news, and they found it in the form of a night fighter. Pilot John Cunningham – among many others – had been soaring into the deep darkness in a Bristol Beaufighter. He had the advantage of a technological breakthrough not yet available to Spitfire or Hurricane pilots: a simplified form of radar (or direction finding) hidden in the nose of the plane. Beaufighters were two-seaters; and with John Cunningham was radar operator Jimmy Rawnsley. The amount that they and their fellow crews could do against multiple incursions was limited; nonetheless, these planes came to be feared, and not just by the Germans. Later on, as the war moved far east, these black-painted aircraft would come to be nicknamed ‘whispering death’, a tribute to their stealth and speed. Cunningham himself, however, was not entirely happy to find himself suddenly a nationally known figure.

  Like so many of his colleagues, Cunningham seemed destined for the RAF from a very early age; even as a very small boy, in middle-class South Croydon in the 1920s, he had been fascinated both by the new technology of aircraft and by the aerodynamics of birds. As soon as he could leave school, Cunningham joined the aeroplane manufacturer de Havilland and enrolled in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. By the late 1930s, de Havilland’s company was still making luxurious passenger aircraft, as well as fulfilling ever more urgent orders from the War Office and the Ministry of Supply. The poetry of flying was scored on Cunningham’s heart. He was to become a test pilot for the firm, and he worked alongside the owner’s son, Geoffrey – an equally obsessive and (one might say) addicted flyer. Call-up came swiftly in 1939.

  After an initial period of night flying in the less nimble Blenheims, Cunningham made the switch to the fleeter Beaufighters in the deep autumn of 1940; soon he was making a name – in an otherwise atrocious period of destruction – for downing the enemy, including three Heinkels in the space of one night. And so it was that the Ministry of Information pounced.

  They had just one problem: how to avoid alerting the Germans to the nature of the extraordinary new radar technology that was giving Cunningham such a steady and true aim. So instead, in publicity, his successes were ascribed to carrots. Carrots, it was said, imbued him with almost uncanny levels of night vision, which enabled him to pursue bombers through the thickest night. The Ministry, when referring to his skill in downing German bombers, gave him the nickname ‘Cat’s Eyes’; Cunningham didn’t care for it, but he was lumbered with it for the rest of his blessedly long life.

  The myth about carrots and their super-powers persists today. John Cunningham found that his ‘Cat’s Eyes’ status was also being used as a means of encouraging urchins to develop a taste for fresh vegetables, and to wean them off heavily rationed sweets. The story is also instructive in the government’s keenly developed sense of how the achievements of pilots and the RAF were to be projected to the public.

  Interviewed a few years after the war by The Times, an amused yet exasperated Cunningham explained the truth of the matter. ‘As a matter of fact, my night-sight is only about average,’ he said. ‘That nick-name was absolute baloney. I’ve always disliked it but I have had to learn how to live with it.’ However, there was one grain of truth: despite the radar innovation, Cunningham’s RAF superiors were convinced that Cunningham had a kind of preternatural ability. So much so that they sent him for repeated tests at the opticians. ‘They didn’t seem to realise that whether a chap could see 400 or 500 yards in the dark was irrelevant. The point was, could he and his navigator fly an aircraft under instructions from radar close enough in to get their targets at short range?’ Even by 1941, it seems, there were still a few in the RAF who persisted in thinking of radar as an uncertain miracle. Not Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas, though. In an article some years later, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, who had brought the technology into being, cited him as – of all the senior officers – the one who did the most to fashion this new science into an effective weapon.

  And, of course, the secrecy applied on the ground as well, as WAAF filterer Gladys Eva now recalls. ‘You didn’t talk about anything – you didn’t go off duty and chat about anything. No way,’ she says. ‘Nobody but us knew about the Filter Room. One day, not all that many years ago, there was a Fighter reunion outing. We were having tea afterwards and the people we were with had worked on the screens on the coast, in the coastal stations. Not one of them knew where their information was going to. I asked them, “Where did you send the information?” No idea. I said: “Well, you sent it to me.” They had absolutely no idea. That’s how deadly secret it was.’

  Even though things were quieter now on the home front, the underground operations rooms could still be a source of immense claustrophobia and resulting friction. Patricia Clark, who had been based in the West Country, recalls an encounter on the balcony with Wing Commander Rudd, the man who had outwitted Eileen Younghusband over her desire to join Intelligence. ‘When we were on the table, if one of these men did something wrong, from his balcony he would bawl down at them and shout and tell them off – what the bloody hell, that sort of thing. I thought this was awful.’

  After a while came an unexpected development. ‘Rudd – who I think may have taken a fancy to me – comes through on my earphones.’ Would she like to come up on the balcony and watch proceedings from above? Not particularly liking him, she said: ‘Thank you for asking me but no thank you.’

  A few minutes later, he said: ‘I thought I asked you to come up on the balcony.’

  She said: ‘You asked me if I’d like to, and I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to?’

  ‘Quite honestly, I would just rather not.’

  ‘Right, it’s now an order, you will now come up on the balcony.’

  Knowing she had to obey orders, up Patricia went on the balcony. Rudd sat her down on a chair beside him and said: ‘Right, why don’t you want to come up here?’

  She replied: ‘You shout at these officers on the table, my father was in the army and he was taught that you were never rude to your servants because they couldn’t answer you back. And it seems to me that the men can’t answer you back and it’s not fair.’

  Mrs Clark concludes: ‘I think Rudd was absolutely shattered. But do you know he never did it again? I was there three years and towards the end, we became quite friendly.’

  And so the pilots of Fighter Command flew out over the grey Channel, accompanying bombers just as the Germans were doing over Britain. For some, the burst of action was welcome. For a few others, there was a faint hint of scepticism, at least when the ‘Rhubarbs’ began. Young Geoffrey Wellum and his mate Tommy Maitland-Thompson had some difficulty keeping straight faces when their commanding officer outlined the plan for the first raid on France with a portentousness that suggested these bombs would turn the war. They were reprimanded for their schoolboyish tittering. When Wellum at last was in the sky among a formation of fighters escorting Blenheim bombers, he justified his gut reaction.

  ‘If one is at all cynical, it is difficult not to poke fun, to a certain extent, at the importance attached to this “offensive” of one and a quarter hours,’ he wrote. ‘Anyone would think the target was Berlin, not Boulogne. However, at least we are going over there and taking the war to the enemy, which makes a change.’ Yet this first-mission blitheness was not to last; as Wellum and his fellow pilots reached the French coastline, he understood both the danger they faced and the danger that they posed. It was a curious moment:

  A black inky-looking thing like a chunk of dirty cotton wool brings me back to the reality of the present. What on earth is that? Another one appears and, as if by magic, a whole lot more. They are pretty close as well, not far away at all. How interesting. Two more puffs happen to be nearer than the others and a batch is right among the rear of the Blenheims. Finally, it dawns on me. It’s flak, that’s what it is, anti-aircraft fire. I’m being shot at and there’s not an awful lot I can do about it.

 
For a pilot used to fighting above home territory, the change of emphasis must have come as a salutary fright (even though, on many occasions when in combat over the Channel, pilots found themselves having to dodge friendly fire from naval vessels):

  Dreaming as I was, it’s with something of shocked surprise that I see the French coast almost under our noses. The Blenheims have their bomb doors open, their course straight and steady as they complete their run in. Down there someone is going to get hurt, and presumably it doesn’t matter who. What a funny war. Don’t like the idea of bombing much. At least the role of fighter pilot seems cleaner somehow. Makes you wonder what life is all about. It must be a lousy way to get yourself killed, to have a bloody great bomb dropped on you.5

  Wing Commander Douglas Bader entertained no such doubts or philosophical speculations. He was a totem of pure confidence. Bader’s biographer related how, on missions, the veteran pilot would cheer younger pilots by making jokes about the landscape beneath them – commenting, for example, when flying over the golf course at Le Touquet that ‘those greens could do with a trim.’

  This image of the airman as a figure of light-hearted wit was cemented firmly in the months after the Battle of Britain, when the Ministry of Information understood just how powerful such stories were in terms of boosting morale. The RAF fighter pilot became an emblem for the national character itself: unflappable, cheerful, touched with a shade of whimsy yet unbreakably stoic. Indeed, the tone had been set in the aftermath of Dunkirk with the publication in The Times of a letter written by a bomber pilot to his mother. It was anonymous; the writer had stipulated that it should be sent in the event of his death or disappearance. In fact, it was from Flying Officer Vivien Rosewarne, who had been based at RAF Marham in Norfolk. His commanding officer, having forwarded the letter to the pilot’s mother, asked for her permission for it to be reproduced in the newspaper’s letters column; she assented. The text evoked that exact mix of courage and swooping romanticism with a certain lyrical intelligence.

  ‘Dearest Mother, though I feel no kind of premonition at all, events are moving rapidly and I have instructed that this letter be forwarded to you should I fail to return,’ he began. He went on to tell her of the importance of the missions he had flown; the convoys saved, the lighthouse crews rescued. He asked her to accept news of his death dispassionately, for ‘I shall have done my duty to the utmost of my ability. No man can do more, and no-one calling himself a man could do less.’ He went on to declare:

  For all that can be said against it, I still maintain that this war is a very good thing: every individual is having the chance to give and dare all for his principle like the martyrs of old. However long the time may be, one thing can never be altered – I shall have lived and died an Englishman … I have no fear of death; only a queer elation … I would have it no other way. The universe is so vast and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice.

  The letter ended with references to biblical adversity, and with the airman’s one regret: that he would not be there to make his mother’s declining years more comfortable.

  The letter caused an instant sensation: The Times was besieged with readers wanting specially printed copies. A run of 10,000 pamphlets containing the text was printed. But the airman’s letter resonated further in 1941 when it became the subject of a short film directed by Michael Powell. The letter was read out, in character, by John Gielgud, over a montage of shots in crisp black and white: the exterior of a pretty country cottage, which a postman approaches on a bicycle; the interior of the cottage, where a collie dog can be seen. And as Gielgud’s narration fills the soundtrack, the camera glides across the young airman’s mementos, including (strikingly) a portrait of T.E. Lawrence, the most romantic of individualists. The camera then swings out back to the window and to the rural landscape beyond, and thence up to the sky and the clouds. It is as if the airman is neither dead nor alive, but is a presence still skimming those clouds, a spirit infusing an archetypal English landscape where there were, even then, wheelwrights and blacksmiths.

  Gielgud’s crisp Received Pronunciation locates the airman firmly in the upper middle classes (this was also the case in the later Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger epic A Matter of Life and Death (1946) where airman Peter Carter – played by David Niven – is a well-spoken poet whose mother lives in Hampstead). Powell’s message in this short film was quite clear: the immortal souls of the airmen are the essence of the spirit of England itself, a spirit that will always prove indomitable. So we can see that in 1941, pilots served not only a vital strategic military purpose but also an almost metaphysical one. Their planes might fall out of the sky, but the sense was that their immortal souls would continue swooping through the empyrean.

  ___

  If the departed airmen had a kind of beautiful evanescence about them, there was still an air of Captain W.E. Johns about the RAF recruitment advertising at the time. One such advertisement, in The Times, featured an image of the view from a Spitfire cockpit, a German fighter in its crosshairs. The copy ran:

  Look at the war THIS way … reserve your place in the cockpit of one of the world’s best war-planes … do your part amongst the airmen who are holding and increasing Britain’s mastery of the skies … This is the role for the man who can relish a first-class scrap above the clouds – who knows that in air war, individual daring, tenacity and self-reliance count above all. You who have these qualities – volunteer today!

  The advertisement’s small print stated: ‘If you are 17 and a half and not yet 31, go to the RAF section of the nearest Combined Recruiting Centre and say you wish to volunteer as a pilot.’

  Another advert from 1941 featured an image of a handsome pilot in traditional fleece-lined flying jacket; he was an ‘RAF instructor’ addressing the reader. ‘You’re physically fit and take a pride in keeping so,’ ran the copy. ‘You’re the sort who knows by instinct just how much he can ask from his machine … You’re in your element in a scrap, all the more so when it is against odds … in short, you are the man the RAF is looking for.’

  The language in both cases was deliberately that of Biggles; first-class scraps, individual daring, against all odds. The gap between the schoolboy terminology and the lethal reality was massive. Yet there was no dishonesty here; the advertising accurately reflected the spirit of the more youthful pilots at stations from Hornchurch to Tangmere.

  Women were being enticed in different ways. Eileen Younghusband and Patricia Clark had their commissions, taking on responsibilities never previously granted young women. Now the possibility of such advancement was used as a means of drawing more women into the service. An advertisement in The Times in the middle of 1941, designed to look like a garden party invitation, put it elegantly:

  From the ranks come the efficient and capable officers who lead their fellow women … yet many of them were not long in the ranks, for keen eyes at the Recruits Depot are ever quick to note the potential officer. More and more commissions are being granted as the WAAF expands and the woman who joins today will be earmarked for promotion as soon as possible if she has suitable qualifications. The ability to lead … to use initiative … to take responsibility … to see things through … These qualifications, added to a good education, are the requirements for a good WAAF officer. You who have these qualifications are needed in the WAAF now.

  Indeed, a new era was opening up. Just as women generally were flooding into factories and steel smelting works to replace the men who had been called up, so the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was offering all sorts of different jobs that had previously been all-male closed shops. For those keen neither on cooking nor running messages, in fact, the options were quite wide and satisfying, from the evolving and quick-witted art of wireless telegraphy (many were drawn into noting down Enigma-encoded Nazi messages intercepted from all theatres of war), to sparking plug testers, to radio and teleprinter operators. Women were needed for highly complex map work; they we
re drawn from pools of commercial artists.

  And at Bentley Priory, Rudloe Manor, Watnall in the Midlands and Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, women had a commanding presence that went far beyond the patronising term found in Douglas Bader’s biography: that of ‘The Beauty Chorus’. In the case of Eve Lockington, a young woman from Essex who was inducted into the mysteries of ‘Clerk – Special Duties’ in 1942, this ever-changing war landscape opened her eyes not merely to the inner secrets of vectors and plotting, but also to subtleties of class and sex. She was posted, to her delight, to RAF Debden, and was billeted in the pretty town of Saffron Walden. ‘I subsequently learnt,’ she recalled, ‘that in the early days of the war, Clerks Special Duties had been recruited mainly from girls who had been to public or private schools. However, there had not been enough of these to man the Operations Room during the Battle of Britain so the field had been widened to include grammar school girls. However, among the WAAFs on the fighter stations, the clerks SD were considered rather snobbish. By the time I joined up, this was not so, but it was certainly true that I did find myself among girls from county families, as well as from families similar to mine.