The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  As spring gave way to summer, there were cracks in the planning; internal War Office disputes and searing hostility directed towards Churchill’s Chief of Combined Operations Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose aristocratic swagger and refusal ever to accept that he might be wrong about anything were fiercely loathed by other, more experienced commanders around him. The planned raid – codenamed ‘Rutter’ – was tossed about and then discarded. Somehow, in the late summer of 1942, when Churchill was out of the country, the plan was resurrected. Now codenamed ‘Jubilee’ (and subsequently better known as the ‘Dieppe Raid’), it would involve around 5,000 Canadian troops, about 1,000 British troops, a team of marine commandos and a small naval presence, with a contribution from Fighter Command.

  Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory was in charge of this wing of the operation, and he could not have been more enthusiastic. Despite all the sorties over France, despite the bombing raids that had been carried out over Germany, the Luftwaffe could not apparently be deflected from its larger battles. The idea of Dieppe was an encapsulation of Leigh-Mallory’s air-warfare philosophy: that of taking the fight to the enemy, and attacking hard in order to reduce the enemy’s forces. German fighters would not be able to ignore an Allied raid on a French port; the targets alone in terms of shipping and troops would be too great not to take on. Leigh-Mallory’s hope was that there would be sufficient numbers, for 11 Group and its (by now) superbly equipped and skilled pilots.

  It is not remotely the fault of Leigh-Mallory that the raid itself – ill-starred from the pre-dawn start when the Allies were spotted at sea by the Germans, and ultimately resulting in thousands of casualties and deaths – was in many senses a catastrophe. By the end of the day, almost 1,000 men had been killed, and around 2,000 Canadian soldiers were captured by the Germans. Over 100 Fighter Command aircraft were lost. Leigh-Mallory wrote a report on the role of Fighter Command just a few days afterwards; bearing in mind the terrible, tragic number of pilots lost – for the Luftwaffe certainly did respond after a slow, lumbering start and of course, because it was fighting over its own territory, eventually had speed and rapid refuelling on its side – Leigh-Mallory tried to find ways to treat the day as a series of lessons, and to suggest how future attacks could be reordered. Rightly defending the pilots who had fought bravely throughout the day, he tried to focus on aspects that might be counted upon to work in the future. The operation demonstrated, he said, that smoke dropped from aircraft was effective; that his planes provided good cover for the men below; that his pilots, though flying as many as five sorties, showed ‘no undue sign of fatigue’; and that, as ever, ‘much valuable information’ had been gleaned with regard to tactics and organisation.3

  Even though he had an adverse effect upon many who met him, Leigh-Mallory’s philosophy and attitude certainly never held him back, in the way perhaps that Hugh Dowding’s approach did. Nor – quite rightly – was he stained in any way by the Dieppe debacle. In November 1942, Leigh-Mallory succeeded Sholto Douglas as Air Chief Marshal of Fighter Command. By this point in the war the balance had decisively tipped; this was the time for Bomber Command, and for Desert Command. Britain and her new ally the USA were strongly on the offensive. And while the Germans were still executing bombing raids over England – notably the ‘Baedeker raids’, so termed after the influential tourist guides, which inspired the Luftwaffe to aim for cathedral cities like Exeter and Canterbury and much-cherished historic towns such as Bath and Norwich (the death tolls were high) – there was no sense in which an invasion was expected.

  Further promotion swiftly followed as the Allied offensive sharpened; Leigh-Mallory was made air marshal, and then commander of a prospective Allied Expeditionary Air Force – the aim of which was to support the forthcoming Operation Overlord. Unfortunately for Leigh-Mallory, he was sharply elbowed into the darkened wings by the return from the Mediterranean of more battle-grizzled British and American airmen, none of whom it seemed would accept his superior knowledge or authority on anything. As 1944 came, others simply stole his command from underneath him; Eisenhower’s deputy Arthur Tedder became overall Air Commander, with of course Eisenhower as supreme Allied Commander. Other roles, such as Tactical Air Forces, and indeed Fighter Command, fell to a mix of Americans and Britons. Leigh-Mallory’s lack of charm was one thing; but in the jostling and the manoeuvring for position, he could not compete with the much more active service that his competitors had seen. He failed to impress the returning heroes and as such, it is almost as if they could not be bothered to give him a second thought; Eisenhower and his men had been blooded and now they were roaring to finish the job. Leigh-Mallory opted to move out of their way.

  In the wake of D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe, Leigh-Mallory was offered a new post by Lord Mountbatten; that of Air Commander of India. Leigh-Mallory accepted very quickly. His haste to get there brought him face to face with fate. He and his wife were flying out from Northolt, west London, in an Avro York in November 1944. There had been warnings that the weather over France was very bad that day, suggestions that it would be better to delay the flight until conditions became more congenial. Leigh-Mallory was determined; he was not going to be held up for anything. And so it was that he demanded that the plane take off. Just a few miles outside the southeastern French town of Grenoble, the plane swooped and smashed into a mountain ridge and all passengers were killed. It was the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, who sadly observed afterwards that there really had been no need for Leigh-Mallory to hurry.

  The direction of the war had changed but the Germans, pushed harder and further, were fighting back with extraordinary tenacity; and the weapons about which they had been theorising for many years before the conflict had even started, were at last about to be unleashed upon the people of London.

  Chapter Twenty

  Death Will Send No Warning

  For such a narrow stretch of water, the English Channel – roiling, ill-tempered – has always proved formidable. In 1940, it was partly the prospect of sending landing craft across and making a sure and consistent landing that cast clouds of doubt over Operation Sea Lion, and its chances of success. Part of the miracle of Dunkirk – to some veterans, a literal miracle – was that the sea stayed uncannily calm largely throughout the evacuation. The technological achievement of D-Day – and that is without mentioning the courage and fortitude of the Allied troops – was tempered by the nausea that the angry waves conjured before the beach landings were made on 6 June 1944. Then, days later, Hitler deployed mechanical agents of vengeance that shot over the sea, and over the White Cliffs. It was to be Fighter Command’s last extraordinary mission of the war to find a way of stopping the flying bombs.

  As a proposition, it would have seemed, at first glance, many times more difficult and complex than intercepting a few enemy fighters. The V-1 missiles – the ‘V’ standing for Vergeltungswaffe, vengeance weapon – were fast; the novelty of a pilotless craft – which, in essence, is what they were – led some to describe them as ‘robots’. Human pilots are fallible; how do you stop a pre-programmed robot, screaming at colossal speed at low altitudes across the meadows and plains of England, reaching London in a matter of minutes? How much time would any intercepting pilots have between the first warning being given and reaching not only the height but also the speed of these lethal machines?

  Even by 21 June 1944, Bentley Priory and aerodromes in the southeast were claiming some success against the new weapons. ‘Judging by the results achieved to date,’ wrote a correspondent from The Times, ‘the best answer to Hitler’s flying bomb is the latest British fighter, the Hawker Tempest. During a stay of a night and a day at a fighter airfield in southern England, I have had a chance of seeing two Tempest squadrons – and ground defences – in action – and in that time, both added to their score.’

  The best combination, it seemed, was that of fighters and anti-aircraft guns. What the reports could not mention was the added element of the plotting work being d
one at Bentley Priory. ‘Fighters were on patrol when, from the direction of the Channel, came a sound like that of an angry bee,’ continued the reporter, relaying the novelty of the terror. ‘A tiny speck of light appeared over the horizon, growing bigger every second, and the buzz and the light soon synchronised themselves into what appeared to be a meteor with a flaming orange-red tail …’

  A pilot described what it was like to attack one of these flying projectiles. ‘As you close up on it,’ he said, ‘it looks like a large flame with wings sticking out on either side. Because it is so small it is not easy to hit but the flying bomb is very vulnerable.’ Such a sentiment, it might be added, was very necessary; all those in London whose lives were soon to be punctuated by this innovative form of death falling from the sky needed reassurance that their defenders knew what they were doing. The fighter pilot continued:

  If your bullets strike home on the jet unit, the whole thing catches fire and it goes down with a crash. If you hit the bomb, the robot blows up. When we started attacking these things, we trod warily, shooting from long range but as we have got experience of this new form of attack, we find that we can close in, sometimes to 100 yards [90 metres]. If you are close when the bomb goes up, you sometimes fly through the debris and some of our Tempests have come back with their paint scorched. Some have been turned over on their backs by the force of the explosion but the pilot feels no effect except an upwards jolt.

  The pilot optimistically concluded: ‘Often it is not necessary to hit your target badly. A few bullets sometimes upset the gyro [automatic pilot] and then the robot does some queer manoeuvres and crashes straight in. We can catch them without undue difficulty and making these attacks is helping to make our shooting very accurate.’1

  The secret operation to intercept and thwart the new threat is recalled vividly by Eileen Younghusband, who was now back at Bentley Priory as an officer: ‘D-Day was June 6 – and I think it was four or five days later that the very first V-1 landed. Now we hadn’t been warned, I don’t think. Probably Bletchley Park knew about it. We had been warned that there might be something, though – and it came. And we were told that if anyone heard it … there was a codeword, “Big Ben”. I was at Stanmore and we were over-ground. I remember the day when we were told we would get this “Big Ben” signal from a radar operator who could pick it up because of the trajectory. Which meant the filter officer literally shouting out the codewords “Big Ben”.

  ‘I had to stand on the chair and shout out “Big Ben, Big Ben, Big Ben” … With the first one there were three people killed, lots injured. I used to see the results of it after they came. As you travelled around London, you would see quite a lot of damage. And you would see them sometimes hanging on the telegraph lines, caught.’

  For a population who were now counting the days until the end of the war, these renewed attacks were corrosive to the spirit. Despite the airy colloquialism, ‘doodlebug’, by which they became known, there were many who hated the idea of nights spent anticipating these bombs falling from the sky. Moreover, there was the added stress of suspense – the buzzing noise of the approaching missile in the sky, followed by an abrupt silence when the missile’s guidance system calculated that the target had been reached, and the missile went into a steep dive before the moment of impact. It was like a form of Russian roulette from the heavens. When you heard the buzz, then the silence, you had to brace yourself for the prospect that it might be you. ‘I can … remember a funny eerie feeling,’ recalled social worker Judith Hamilton, a north London girl during the doodlebug attacks. ‘Suddenly you could hear a bomb coming across and – it stopped. The noise of the bomb suddenly stopped and everybody bent down, covering their heads, hoping it wasn’t going to be their house or our shelter that was blown up … and then … when you heard the All Clear, opening the door and going out, and the relief that it wasn’t your house and seeing in the distance fires and things and feeling sorry for whoever it was.’2

  The V-1 was launched from sites both in France and along the Dutch coast. In its own way, it was a curiously elegant and economic weapon – a simple gyrometer guidance system, a pulse-jet form of propulsion – and swift: the time between launch and impact was a little over twenty minutes. A total of 9,521 were fired, resulting in 22,892 casualties. Against this horror, however, is the extraordinary leap made by RAF Fighter Command; of nearly ten thousand missiles launched, only around a quarter got anywhere near their targets. Around 2,000 were knocked out by the efforts of anti-aircraft gunners from the ground; another 2,000 or so were knocked out by pilots, either by firing upon them or – bravely – by getting close enough to tip their wings and cause them to crash over unpopulated areas.

  One such fighter pilot was Peter Middleton, who was with 605 Squadron at Manston in Kent. He, together with his fellow V-1 ‘nudgers’, was highly skilled – having previously trained other pilots in Hurricanes and Spitfires, he flew throughout this frenetic period in the summer of 1944 a de Havilland Mosquito fighter bomber to deflect the missiles. He might be better known today for a family connection: he was the grandfather of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.

  Patricia Clark recalls that even though there was a chance to intercept the V-1 flying bombs, the nature and speed of the work – the mathematical effort involved in trying to anticipate route and trajectory and distance and velocity – was harrowing: there was no ambiguity about the nature of the threat, and of how many lives depended on its successful interception. Radar could pick up a V-1 coming in on a particular arc, and the Observer Corps could see where they landed. ‘So they had all that – but what they didn’t have was the launch site. We would calculate on a piece of paper where the arc went down and finished. And then when they had enough plots showing the point in France, they would send a squadron over to bomb it.’

  For WAAF radar operator Marie Ebbeson, this new phase of the war brought some hair-raising moments in 1944. ‘Because we were a somewhat seasoned group of radar operators, two of us were chosen to go to London for a special briefing,’ she recalled. ‘Once there, we were sworn to secrecy and we were asked to try and operate a very strange and different screen. We were then told that Intelligence had discovered that the Germans were going to launch a rocket that would reach London and that in its warhead there was over a ton of explosives … it seemed unreal that a rocket could go that far. The strange screen was to be able to plot the rocket and at our side we, the operator, could press a button that would set off the sirens in London, giving people a chance to take shelter. However there was only a three minute time gap before the rocket would have landed … so finally that plan was ditched.’

  Back at her base at Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, the doodlebugs also brought Marie Ebbeson moments of personal jeopardy: ‘We were opposite the coastline of the Continent – in the direct line of the doodlebugs, we were able to plot them on our screens. We could always tell them as their signal moved much faster than a plane. We worked in an underground bunker, but we could hear them as they flew over making a sound not unlike a rattly motor-bike. We had an Ack Ack site nearby and their job was to try and shoot them down before they crossed the coast; not that easy, a small target and very often flying low down. Now as long as the Ack Ack guns were firing away with their frightful noise we felt secure. It was when they suddenly went quiet that we would listen with bated breath in the bunker or for that matter anywhere on the station because it meant the doodlebug was heading for us at a low level! Oh the relief when it chugged on past us to fall somewhere in a field!’3

  Elsewhere, historian E.S. Turner looked back with some personal pride on this short chapter of the war; he had played his own part in downing the doodlebugs as an anti-aircraft gunner under the control of Fighter Command. He wrote in 1985:

  For most of the war, we who served behind barbed wire in public parks and on lonely headlands, surrounded by jolly ATS girls, were well aware that the public thought very little of our marksmanship. Since every shoot depended on dozens of people doi
ng the right thing at the right time, the capacity for error was enormous. Then came the unmanned V-1, or ‘Doodlebug’ … the rate of execution was gratifying and the sky of southern England glowed with orange blobs as Hitler’s cut-price weapon met its come-uppance. Anti-Aircraft Command seemed to have justified itself at last … Regrettably, in the last months of the war came the V-2 supersonic rocket, against which the anti-aircraft defences were seen to be starkly impotent.’4

  Indeed they were; yet conversely, amid the destruction they caused, it was a matter of good fortune that there had been so many delays in the manufacture of these weapons. Had different decisions been taken in 1939 and 1940, the rockets might have started hitting London in 1942, when the effect upon morale could have been catastrophic. Intriguingly, the very idea of these revolutionary rockets long pre-dated Hitler and the Nazi party; in the Germany of 1928, there were early experiments with rocket aircraft, and explorations of new liquid fuel systems. But in 1932, as the Nazis achieved power for the first time, and just months before Hitler became Chancellor, the party lured the brilliant young engineer Werner von Braun away from his own amateur rocket group and installed him at the University of Berlin. By 1937, with the air armaments race gathering ever more frenetic pace, the Germans built a top secret weapons centre at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. It was only thanks to Hitler’s capricious ebbs and flows of enthusiasm that research on rocket technology wasn’t given higher priority.