by John Willis
Not all the Hurricanes from 257 were airborne.
One plane failed to take off. It was Frizzell’s. I went to see what was the matter. ‘That’s the second time today that my plane’s refused to start up,’ he said. ‘I seem to miss all the big shows. It is a damned shame!’ Frizzell spoke without much conviction. I knew he was glad to be out of it. He guessed what I was thinking. ‘It’s not that I particularly enjoy a blitz,’ he said, ‘but I don’t like letting the other boys down. Nobody enjoys the blitzes, I’m quite sure, and I don’t mind telling you I’m shit scared of them, and that all the others are too. Some of them pretend they’re not but if you talk it over intimately, you’ll find they’re all shit scared like me.’
He was a boy of nineteen who had been thrown headlong into battle with his ideas in complete turmoil. He was not born to be a fighter pilot and was acutely conscious of this.
In fact, Frizzell was wrong about himself. He went through the war as a successful pilot and finished up commanding a squadron.
The small band of Hurricanes was significantly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. The enemy reached the south-eastern edge of London untroubled. 257 knew they could make an interception but they were beneath the enemy planes when they arrived and the Germans had the advantage of height. Tuck and his pilots had no choice but to attack. They ignored the German fighters and headed for the bombers, the Heinkels and Junkers ahead. As Tuck tried to shoot down a bomber, an Me 109 headed straight for him. For a second, Tuck thought that he would die on this course but he managed to climb away in a steep turn, swiftly followed by Pilot Officer Carl Capon.
Ahead they saw a group of Me 110 fighter-bombers making a turn. Tuck swiftly lined one up and fired. The 110 burst into flames. While Carl Capon followed a Heinkel as it headed down and away, Tuck waited for a second German fighter to appear. The Luftwaffe fought in pairs and he knew that a second plane would be in attendance. Tuck was right. As the enemy plane crossed in front of Tuck’s Hurricane he fired again and the German aircraft spun swiftly downwards, bellowing smoke.
As the pilots from 257 looked around the blue sky it was strangely empty and eerily quiet. All Tuck could see was a single parachute drifting slowly downwards to the south.
Back at base, Myers waited anxiously for the pilots to return. Any sense of joy was muted when they arrived home because Stanford Tuck, Pete Brothers and Carl Capon were missing. Surely, thought Myers, we can’t have lost our leaders again, so soon after their predecessors, Hugh Beresford and Lancelot Mitchell, had been shot down?
West was the first to land from the second blitz. He couldn’t speak and had to rush off. He had been sick all over his uniform just as the squadron was entering into the enemy formation. He had to return quickly. West was no coward. He was a typical brave young lad. But he was new to air fighting and did not know that his stomach would play tricks on him with a half digested meal when he faced the enemy at 15,000 feet.
While Myers waited for the missing men, Jimmy Cochrane landed.
‘Anything doing?’ I asked him. His hands were still trembling with the excitement of the battle. He had not even had time to take off his helmet. His eyes were still wild, as he began to speak.
Jimmy was sure he had shot down a German plane but, as other fighters were close by, he wasn’t sure if he could claim a ‘kill’.
Cochrane had been smart again. He and two other members of his section had swooped down on a Heinkel 111 and had emptied all their ammunition into it. His eyes, like two daggers, seemed to pierce the Heinkel again as he told me how it went down.
The operational records had the German aircraft as a Dornier 17 rather than a Heinkel but the end result was the same. The 257 pilots, led by Jimmy Cochrane, saw two crew members bail out and then the pilot brought the aircraft down safely in the thick mud.
‘Oh! It was a luscious sight! We circled round the two fellows as they sailed down in their parachutes. I bet they went through a few uncomfortable moments when we flew round them. They must have been wondering whether we’d machine-gun them as they had been doing to our boys, the bastards!
As Jimmy Cochrane put it in his combat report, ‘After six or seven bursts the E/A [enemy aircraft] turned over and went down in a spin, one parachutist leaving the smoking Do17. Just above the clouds the machine blew into bits.’62
The euphoria continued.
The phone rang in the tent. The controller ordered the ambulance and the fire squad to go out on the field. Gundry had been shot up and was not sure if he could land. His Hurricane circled twice round the aerodrome, dipped slightly, bounced a bit and settled down in a gentle run across the field. When Gundry put his head out of the cockpit he had a twinkle in his eye. He noticed my amazement. The whole of his port tailplane had been shot away and tatters of canvas were hanging from his main plane. Petrol was streaming out of his tanks.
Miraculously, Gundry had made it home and, more than that, he had additional success to tell:
‘I got the bugger who did it. At least, I can’t claim him as ‘destroyed’, but I damaged him all right, because I saw the fabric hanging from his tailplane, much like mine. I shouldn’t think he got back, poor devil. There must have been thirty or forty of them when we intercepted them south-east of London. I doubt if many of them got back again. There seemed to be hundreds of Hurricanes and Spitfires in the air. It was a lovely sight. We really seem to have got it taped now. Before, when we went up, we seemed to be alone, but now it’s quite different.’
But celebration of success was stilled. Tuck, Brothers and Capon were all still missing.
The bag was the best the squadron had had in one day. Eight ‘destroyed’ or ‘probably destroyed’ as we classified them. Three damaged. But nobody felt in the mood for rejoicing about that. No Tuck, no Brothers and still no word about Capon. I was getting more and more fidgety. I tried not to show the boys my concern.
The minutes were slipping by. Soon they would be out of petrol. By now, all the other pilots who had returned were lying on their beds lined up in two rows. The BBC announcer was already talking about the Thames Estuary Blitz. They listened to him with complete indifference, knowing that the details would be received only hours later. We were still all waiting for news of Brothers and Capon.
Myers waited at the dispersal point with Jimmy Cochrane, who always called it ‘desperation point’.
I could still not believe that we were in for another black day but I was haunted by what happened at the last blitz when neither of the flight commanders came back.
The rest of the squadron were put on a quarter of an hour availability and were fetched up to the mess for tea. Then, the anxious Geoffrey Myers had a telephone call to tell him that Tuck had refuelled at another airfield and was safely on his way back.
Faces brightened up at that, although everyone had felt pretty sure he would turn up.
When Tuck finally landed, Myers told him that 257 had been credited with shooting down several enemy aircraft and, although two senior pilots were missing they had, as yet, suffered no confirmed losses themselves. The enthusiastic groundcrew stencilled two more swastikas on Tuck’s Hurricane, making a total of sixteen.
Tuck came back and wrote out a personal combat report for two enemy aircraft destroyed and one probable.
No sooner had the pilots arrived in the mess than word came through that Brothers was about to land in his own plane. Two of us rushed down to the dispersal point.
Pete Brothers had suffered damage to his aileron controls but RAF Biggin Hill, where he landed, had failed to inform 257 that Brothers was safe. He had also shot down a Dornier 215. Despite returning late, the only thought of Pete Brothers was to get back into the air.
Brothers immediately started to superintend the refuelling and rearming of another Hurricane placed at his disposal. He darted around from one side to another to see that everything was in order. Today was his ninth bag and the first time he had been hit. Before going up to the mess he darted into my tent and looked at th
e preliminary report of the battle. When he saw ‘Flt Lt Peter Brothers D.F.C, missing’, his face became flushed but he said nothing. ‘We’ve got to do that after a few hours,’ I told him, ‘so that there can be a check-up at Air Ministry. We all felt sure you would turn up.’
Myers was particularly fond of young Carl Capon, his ‘personal hero’, adding that ‘he was like a schoolboy, uncertain of himself, but he was going to do everything that he could in his own way. Even if he knew he could be shot down this was his job, and he was going to stick to it. He was pure.’63
So Myers could not relax – even though both Tuck and Brothers were back in one piece – until Carl Capon also joined them safely at the aerodrome.
We went back to the mess for tea. Tuck was actually saying that it didn’t look too good for Capon when there was a phone call from dispersal to say that he was just about to land.
Myers and others rushed down to fetch Capon, who reported, ‘I got shot up and went right through the London balloon barrage. Don’t know how I missed one of them. They fixed my plane up at Croydon. I expect the telephone must have been bombed, or something, as they were dropping their eggs around there before I landed.’ There was terrific excitement in the mess. Everybody back without a scratch! The squadron’s luck had turned.
Fighter Command had successfully resisted the largest raid ever mounted by the Luftwaffe and 257 Squadron, ‘the deadbeats’ – as Tuck had called them – had played their full part. Tuck himself later concluded that ‘September 15 was one of the most important days of my life. It was the day that 257 became a squadron, and after that they never looked back.’
Myers recalled, ‘It was one of the most extraordinary things. Marvellous. At these terrific odds we were winning – saving Britain against invasion.’
Myers meticulously recorded the successes.
I had expected a record, but the figure fairly took my breath away.
57Patrick Bishop, Fighter Boys (HarperCollins, 2004)
58Larry Forrester, Fly for Your Life (Frederick Muller, 1956)
59Larry Forrester Fly for Your Life Frederick Muller 1956
60Battle of Britain Monument
61Interview with Author, 1981
62National Archives, Kew
63Interview with Author
CHAPTER EIGHT
September 15 was a great day for the RAF, as well as for 257 Squadron, and the pilots all went out to celebrate. Forrester’s biography records that, ‘Tuck was the pivot of the party, pacemaker in the drinking and the loudest – if not the most tuneful – of the songsters.’
We started the evening in the White Horse with drinks all round in the public bar. Brothers kept things going by telling anecdotes in rapid succession. We then went to the Nine Nines Club of the local sports airfield which had opened its doors to the RAF. Stanford Tuck started calling the barmaid Mamouchka. ‘Don’t you think she looks like Mamouchka, Geoff?’ he asked, ‘I think it fits her very well. Come along boys. Another round.’ Brothers had got behind the bar and was making the perfect imitation of a barman going down the steps into the cellar. Uproarious laughter. Mustard, as we called Capon, had got hold of a broom and was perfectly happy dusting the bar and all its inmates.
A pilot from another squadron was already at the Nine Nines Club and joined the rumbustious celebrations of 257. He was accompanied by his wife, Maggie.
Poor Maggie seemed to be waging a perpetual fight for equality with him. He was refined and she was not. He married her almost by mistake after spending an evening drinking with her. After their marriage he let no opportunity go by to show her that he resented her presence. And yet he continued to go around with her.
Jimmy Cochrane and Charles Frizzell eventually joined the rest of the squadron just before midnight, and the drinking and hilarity went on beyond.
On the way back to the aerodrome Frizzell, in whose car I was riding, drove slap into a concrete defence block on the road. Brothers, with the rest of the squadron in his sports Bentley or on horseback on the mudguards, crashed into our rear. I got out as best I could – or at least I thought I did – with blood streaming from my forehead. I thought I tried to help Jimmy Cochrane out of the tangled mess. I was put on the grass bordering the road. Gundry was placed beside me. ‘I can’t remember a thing,’ he said. ‘Where are we? What happened? Why are we sitting here?’ I struggled to remember and repeated everything that came into my head.
Other reports identified Bob Stanford Tuck as the driver of the car that smashed into the vehicle that Myers was riding in. The website for the Battle of Britain Monument recorded, ‘On 15 September, Charles Frizzell was injured in an accident at Martlesham Heath when Squadron Leader RRS Tuck drove into the back of his car.’ Tuck’s biography made no mention of the crash. No doubt, putting two precious pilots out of action after a night of drinking was not expected of a squadron leader. Nonetheless, whoever was driving, the end result was the same.
We ended up in the local hospital. The nurses were rather disappointed to find that we had been injured in a car accident and not in the air, but this made no difference to their kind treatment. We were extraordinarily lucky. Jimmy Cochrane and Charles Frizzell are still in bed. They will probably remain there for some months. I am up and only have two or three scars to show for the accident.
Myers was consumed by relief that the accident had not been worse but was also angry that valuable pilots had been injured on a drunken car journey and not from fighting the Luftwaffe. He wrote to his wife:
What would you have said, Ducky, if years later you would have learnt that I had been killed in a car crash after a night out at two bars? I know what a good many wives would have said but I believe you would have put two and two together. You would probably have guessed that I made an effort to be sociable with the boys and not to damp the enthusiasm of that night. You would probably imagine me getting behind the bar and pouring whiskies. Yes, Ducky, I think I was doing my job.
While Myers was convalescing, 257 Squadron were still in frequent action under its fresh leadership. The worst disaster was when Sergeant Donald Aslin, flying P3643, was shot down over Detling in Kent. He bailed out but suffered serious burns and shock and was eventually moved to the legendary McIndoe Burns Unit at East Grinstead where he became part of the exclusive Guinea Pig Club. Aslin had only joined 257 Squadron the previous day.
In Billericay Hospital Terry Hunt, still nursing her badly burned husband, David, reflected. ‘Already those first September days were something vivid with distance; the planes so clear and bright in a sky full of haze, and the sirens with a special quality to them: a clarity and purpose that familiarity had obscured; and there was so much sun, and the air itself vibrating with excitement; and David out of it all in his bed.’
For the next few weeks, Myers only heard of what was happening back in his squadron second-hand. He wrote to his family from the convalescent home where he had been transferred after a bomb had exploded close to the hospital where he’d originally been taken.
I am surrounded by willows and elms and pine trees. I’ve sketched this place for you, Ducky, and thought I would make another drawing for you tomorrow. But I won’t after all because I have succeeded in leaving the place. I didn’t want to get stuck here for weeks when I felt all right. I want to get back to work as soon as I can.
The stupidity of the accident and his good fortune in surviving continued to play on his mind. Reflections on both mortality and faith swirled around him.
My love, I didn’t realise what a lucky escape I had in that road accident nearly a fortnight ago. Tuck told me in the mess last night that none of us moved after the car had crashed into the defence block. He and Pete [Brothers] pulled Cochrane and me out of the car. I thought I had jumped out myself. ‘You were certainly not in a state to jump out, Geoff,’ he told me, ‘You were completely dazed and stood there with Gundry like reeling shadows until we put you on the roadside where you effectively held your cuts together with a handkerchief until they wer
e bound up. It is an extraordinary thing that you were not all killed.’
I have been thinking a good deal about this accident, and also about my prayers. I have been asking myself, ‘Why am I alive? How is it that I have been so lucky with the bombing?’ Certainly I want to remain alive because of seeing you all again, and being useful to you when the war is over makes me want to live on. But that is no explanation. With an entirely personal God it is hard to fathom personal occurrences. One calls them ‘luck’ or ‘providence’. This appears to be one of the reasons for the great appeal of Christianity. It seems to have added to Judaism a bridge over which one can step to God.
Of course, convalescence also gave Myers more time to think about his trapped family.
I looked at your photo yesterday, Ducky, quite calmly as if I was seeing you in a fortnight’s time. I showed it to Jimmy and Charlie, and they also saw Robert and Anne. I remained calm all the time. They didn’t know what I was going through. Good. I am improving. I can look at your photo and be a man.
We had seven wonderful years, my Love. We may have no more on earth. You may never see my letters. And yet we are bound up in each other in the scheme of things eternal.
Myers was determined to get back to work and support 257 Squadron. When he heard that the doctor would be visiting he took a four-mile walk on his newly unstitched foot, just to prove to the medic that he was fully fit.
The doctor, like a sensible man, concluded that I was well enough to leave [the convalescence home] and he told me if I wanted to go I could come back with him to the hospital in the ambulance.
The doctor immediately signed Geoffrey off for a few days’ leave before he rejoined the squadron at Martlesham Heath. For his brief time off, Geoff stayed at a cottage near Chinnor in Oxfordshire, which belonged to a friend of his mother’s.
October 1 1940
I walked up the hill. It is a little cottage in a big garden, cut into the brow of a hill, with a dozen trees clustering around it. Plenty of room for a big vegetable garden. Fields all around. A small paradise. The sort of cottage for which I would have looked for years to get for our little family.