The graded information was now transferred on to a map with red counters representing enemy aeroplanes and black counters friendly ones. The information was passed on to the operations rooms at each level of the chain of command – sector, group and Fighter Command HQ – where it was translated on to identical map tables. The development of a raid was watched by the controller and his staff from a balcony. The resources at hand to deal with the intruders were indicated on a large board rigged with coloured bulbs, which showed which squadrons would be available in thirty minutes, which were at five minutes’ readiness, which were at two minutes’ readiness and which were already in the air.
Fighter Command had a simple pyramid command structure, with Dowding, in Bentley Priory, at the top. One step down were the group commanders, each presiding over one of the four quadrants into which Britain’s air defence had been divided. The south-west, and half of Wales, were covered by 10 Group, the middle segment of England and Wales by 12 Group, and Scotland and the far North by 13 Group. No. 11 Group, with responsibility for London and the south-east corner of England, was the busiest. Each group was subdivided into sectors that centred on a main fighter base, supplemented by a number of satellite aerodromes.
Raids fell naturally into one or another group’s area of activity. When enemy aircraft were reported, the duty controller in the group operations room, in consultation with the group commander, decided which sector would deal with it and which aircraft would be ‘scrambled’. Control of the fighters then passed to the sector controller, whose task was to manoeuvre his aircraft into the best position to intercept the raiders. He was helped in this by the IFF reports, which allowed him to keep track of his assets. The signal – ‘Tally Ho!’ – from the squadron or flight commander, meant that the enemy had been sighted and battle was about to be joined. At this point control of events passed to the pilots.
Orders and information were passed down the command chain and from pilot to pilot in a code that was very soon to enter public parlance and the popular imagination. The enemy were ‘bandits’ (the Germans called them Indianer – ‘indians’). ‘Angels’ indicated altitude, so that ‘Angels fifteen’ meant 15,000 feet. ‘Pancake’ was an order to come back and land. ‘Vector’, plus a number indicating geometric degrees, gave the course a pilot was to steer. ‘Buster’ meant flat out. The trusty clock system – ‘bandits at ten o’clock’ – devised on the Western Front, provided an accurate fix on where the trouble was located.
The prevailing jumpiness of the first weeks of the war was partly because few of those involved in air defence had any clear idea of what to expect. The experience of Poland had suggested a blitzkrieg, sudden and pitiless, in which virtually everything was vulnerable. In fact the first German target was logical and conventional: the British Home Fleet, tucked away in the estuaries and anchorages of Scotland, from where it could menace Germany and its navy in relative security. On the morning of 16 October, twelve Junkers 88 fast bombers set off from Westerland on the Island of Sylt just off the Danish coast to attack shipping at the Royal Navy base at Rosyth on the north side of the Firth of Forth. The first group arrived at 2.30 in the afternoon, taking anti-aircraft gunners south of the Forth Bridge – just east of the base – by surprise. The main target was the battleship HMS Hood, but to the disappointment of the raiders it was in dry dock. Hitler, apparently anxious to avoid civilian casualties while there was still a chance of a settlement with Britain, had ordered that only ships on the water could be attacked.
Two targets presented themselves: the cruisers HMS Southampton and HMS Edinburgh, riding at anchor on the eastern side of the bridge. The Junkers were each carrying two 500-kg bombs. At 2,500 feet, several of them dived on the vessels and released their loads. Both ships were hit, but the bombs failed to do significant damage. Ten men were injured, none fatally.
The anti-aircraft batteries now opened up, joined by fire from the cruisers, which had previously been ordered to engage aircraft only if they proved hostile, presumably a precaution taken to counter the reckless gunnery of the first weeks. The action took place on the doorsteps of two RAF stations. Turnhouse, the home of 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, just to the south of the Forth Bridge, and Drem, where 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron was based. The raid was already several minutes old before Spitfires were in the air. As the bombers headed for home, they were chased out to sea. One was caught by three fighters from 603 Squadron, who opened fire, killing the rear gunner and shutting down the port engine. They were joined by another section from the squadron, who added to the fusillade battering the Junkers. ‘He was responding with all his armaments; tracers were shooting past me, and I got a glimpse of a gunner behind twin guns,’ one of the pilots, Patsy Gifford, said after the action. ‘We went in again and gave him some more and I saw he was hit forward. Bits of fabric were dropping off and I thought I saw a red glow inside the fuselage.’7 The Junkers hit the sea with bullets from the Spitfires stitching the water. The surviving three from the four-man crew were picked up by a trawler.
Another Ju 88 was shot down by 602 Squadron, also crashing into the sea. In both cases several pilots had been involved in their destruction. The official account recorded that this had been a team effort, but it singled out Gifford and two 602 pilots, George Pinkerton and Archie McKellar, for special mention. They were identified not by name but by pre-war profession. The squadrons involved were auxiliaries. Gifford, like several others in 603 Squadron, was a solicitor; he spent his weekends driving a Frazer-Nash car very fast, shooting, fencing, taking out girls and flying. Pinkerton was thirty years old, and had left his wife, six-month-old daughter and fruit farm in Renfrewshire behind after the squadron was called up. McKellar was twenty-seven, short, aggressive and fit, and worked in his father’s plastering business before joining the squadron full time. Gifford was to be killed the following spring, McKellar in the autumn.
The image they presented of social cohesion, of ordinary men from different walks of life coming together in the defence of their country, was naturally appealing to official propagandists. The fact that it was the amateurs of the auxiliary air force who had drawn first blood was given the maximum emphasis. ‘Saturday Afternoon Airmen Shoot Nazi Bombers Down’, was the headline in the Daily Express.
In other respects the Rosyth raid gave little reason for satisfaction. The fighters had not been able to prevent one of the raiders dropping an opportunistic bomb on a destroyer, HMS Mohawk, entering the Firth of Forth as the Luftwaffe was leaving, killing sixteen members of the crew, including the captain. Once again, the warning system had failed. Intelligence reports had predicted an attack, but from ten o’clock on the morning of the raid the local radar station was ineffective, due either to a power failure or a faulty valve. No sirens were sounded to alert the civilian population (though they were activated at military bases). Despite the rejoicing at the downing of two German bombers, the first raiders to be shot down, the Luftwaffe got off very lightly, given the superior speed and firepower of the attackers. That ten escaped was partly owing to the fact that the Spitfire pilots were under orders to go no closer than 400 yards, which was thought to be the most effective range for the Brownings. The pilots immediately recognized that getting in closer would produce more devastating results.
The bomber crews also benefited from a certain caution on the part of the defenders. When Hector MacLean, who had been training to be a solicitor in a Glasgow legal office before moving to Drem with 602 Squadron, was scrambled he ‘couldn’t believe it wasn’t another mess-up because we’d been ordered off so often to intercept things and it had been a Blenheim or an Anson or something like that’. Spotting a bomber, he ‘followed it gingerly thinking…I must not shoot one of our own fellas down, but there were the crosses so finally I had a go.’ Having emptied his ammunition, he hurried back to rearm in preparation for a second wave that never came. Until the squadron moved south in August the following year, the only Germans he saw were ‘mainly single aircraft sneakin
g over to take pictures and drop the odd bomb and attack convoys off the coast. It was easy to do. They could nip in, drop a few bombs around the boats and get out before we could get at them.’8
The same pattern of frustration and boredom settled over all the fighter squadrons in England and Scotland. Pilots spent their days at readiness, being ordered airborne to check out incursions by unidentified aircraft, ‘X’ raids as they were known, that almost always turned out to be friendly or else were too far off to intercept. Then there were the dreary convoy patrols, flying in circles over ships that were rarely attacked. There were occasional brushes with the enemy. On 20 November, 74 Squadron at Hornchurch recorded its first success when three pilots fastened on to a Heinkel 111 heavy bomber and shot it down over the Thames estuary. The following day two Hurricanes from 79 Squadron at Biggin Hill were patrolling over the south coast when they were ordered to investigate a radar sighting that turned out to be a Dornier 17 medium bomber on a weather reconnaissance. They found it, descended on it, opened fire and watched it explode as it hit the Channel.
On 3 February Peter Townsend took part in the destruction of the first German bomber to be shot down on British soil since the First World War, after 43 Squadron had exchanged bucolic Tangmere for the bleak surroundings of Acklington, high up on the north-east coast near Newcastle. He was leading his section on patrol over the sea, keeping at wave level to surprise any German aircraft, which tended to hug the clouds, when he saw a Heinkel. The crew saw nothing ‘until the bullets began tearing into their bomber. Only then did red tracer come spurting from their rear guns, but, in the first foolish rapture of combat, I believed myself…invulnerable.’ The Heinkel staggered over the cliffs at Whitby and crash-landed in snow behind the town. Townsend felt elated at the success – then, on hearing there were two survivors, a touch of remorse. He visited them in hospital. Then he returned to the mess to drink champagne. It was, he thought later, ‘a horribly uncivilized way of behaving, really, when you have just killed someone. But an enemy bomber down was proof of our prowess, and that was a legitimate pretext for celebration. For the enemy crew, whom we had shot to pieces, we gave no thought. Young, like us, they had existed, but existed no longer. Deep down we knew, but dared not admit, that we had little hope of existing much longer ourselves. So, meanwhile, we made merry.’9
Death was more likely to come through accident than enemy action that winter. The need to have fighters on permanent standby around the clock meant that pilots were called on to do an increased amount of night flying, a skill to which insufficient attention had been paid before the war. George Bennions, now with 41 Squadron at Catterick, found it was ‘automatically assumed that they would just send you off at night and there would be no problem’. The Spitfires they were flying were notoriously difficult to operate in a darkness which had deepened considerably with the introduction of the blackout. ‘The long nose blotted everything out straight in front of you, and because the engine had very short stubs, all that you saw…was a great moustache of flame…The only thing you could do was to tuck your head back into the cockpit and take off on the instruments, which was all right for a trained pilot, but for new pilots who hadn’t done any night flying, or very little, it must have been terrible.’
A Canadian pilot, Pilot Officer Overall, took off one night, circled round and flew straight into a house. Bennions protested at the stupidity of sending off pilots in pitch darkness without allowing them to first get familiarized in conditions of bright moonlight. A senior officer accused him of being afraid. His suggestion, though, was eventually adopted.10
Even the most skilful pilots found themselves in difficulties, especially when sensory deprivation was combined with incompetence on the part of those directing them on the ground. Al Deere nearly got killed while being guided back after a night patrol in total darkness by the Hornchurch controller, who vectored him straight into a clump of barrage balloons. It was no wonder that so many pilots hated and feared night flying.
The winter of 1939 is frozen in the memory of those who lived through it as the bitterest they ever endured. On many mornings, snow had to be shovelled off the aprons and runways and the Merlin engines of the fighters thawed out and run up before any flying could take place. The aircraft were often covered in a crust of ice and had to be scrubbed down with wire-bristle brooms. At Drem, the ‘coldest spot on earth’, the pilots sat in poorly insulated dispersal huts, clustered around a lukewarm stove, playing ‘uckers’ – a form of ludo – and waiting for the phone to ring. Very soon everyone could distinguish the tone of the ‘ops’ phone, announcing a scramble, from that of the ‘admin’ line. The bad weather would continue to make flying and life in general difficult well into the spring.
Conditions in the cosy brick messes and living quarters of the fighter station headquarters were bearable enough, but existence at the satellite stations could be miserable. The members of 32 Squadron, pilots and ground crew, had to move to Gravesend while Biggin Hill was temporarily closed so deep shelters could be dug and a concrete runway laid – part of a nationwide programme to replace the now embarrassingly anachronistic grass fields with all-weather surfaces. The squadron diarist recorded that ‘the wretched troops lived in the utmost discomfort, sleeping on palliases on the floor and being fed from a cooking trailer…the NCOs also slept on the floor, and the less lucky of the officers.’
Great ingenuity was used in the pursuit of fun. When the well-connected sportsmen of 601 Auxiliary Squadron found themselves based briefly at Hornchurch around Christmas, the commanding officer, Max Aitken, son of the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, used his show-business contacts to arrange for the cast of the Windmill Theatre to visit. The men loved the demure striptease for which the Windmill girls were famous. Several members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the ‘Waafs’, who were now being posted to RAF stations around the country, walked out in protest, however.
For most pilots, though, life was spartan and uncertain, especially for the newcomers and those finishing their training. In letters home they recounted their daily routines, successes and setbacks in a tone of jaunty confidence that seemed designed to calm the fears of anxious mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Occasionally, though, a note of doubt or worry breaks through the surface of imperturbability, a reminder that behind the bravado were innocent young men, barely out of adolescence, green, apprehensive and homesick. Paddy Finucane, then at No. 8 Flying Training School at RAF Montrose, still sounds like a schoolboy in a letter to his younger brother, Kevin. ‘How did you like Robin Hood! I saw it in London when I was at Uxbridge. It was on at the local fleapit and I enjoyed it immensely. The part I liked was when old Guy of Gisborne got a good twelve inches of cold steel in the bread basket. The fighting and shooting scenes were very good…’11
Noel Benson sent long, regular letters to his mother and doctor father at their house at Great Ouseburn, near York, throughout the winter of 1939 and 1940, detailing his progress. He had gone to Cranwell as a flight cadet in April 1938 after leaving Sedbergh public school. At the end of November 1939 he was with 145 Squadron at Redhill and Croydon and writing home to complain that the letters ‘daddy’ sends are not long enough. His main concern is the stinginess of the authorities in allocating petrol coupons, which may prevent him from getting home for leave. He seems to have spent much of his spare time quietly, visiting family and friends in the area for lunch and supper, dutifully negotiating the blackout to give lifts home to other guests. The news from the squadron was mostly domestic. A brother pilot was getting married and he would like to give him a dog as a present. A bitch in the Benson household had recently littered. Could they send photos of the pups so he can pick one out? Occasionally he vented his frustration at the inaction of the phoney war. One of his acquaintances was ‘one of the lucky ones’, who had been posted to one of the four fighter squadrons sent to France. On 11 December he was ‘pretty fed up because there is absolutely nothing doing here. But the big bugs do such damn stupid th
ings at times that it is enough to make anyone wild and fed up. If I try and say any more I shall probably choke with rage!!!’
Eleven days later he had been posted to 603 Squadron, now at Prestwick near Glasgow, and was ‘busy from the word go. I started flying immediately which suited me fine.’ At the end of the month he reported that he was ‘having a very busy time here but like it very much. I am “on” from dawn to dusk, so you see I have not much free time. I am afraid there is no hope whatsoever of any leave for the next month or so.’
On the first day of the New Year, Benson was trained up and took his place as a fully operational member of the squadron. He found his comrades ‘a very decent crowd’, and liked the fact that, despite an influx of outsiders, the unit was still mostly composed of the pre-war amateurs. ‘Being an auxiliary squadron they [all] had jobs before the war and this was really their hobby. So there is a lot of red tape brushed aside. The regulars in the squadron are quite often horrified at the irregular things that they do but I must say they get the job done.’
The squadron routine meant that time off was scarce. After three weeks’ continual duty, he went with a friend to Glasgow, where they could ‘hardly see a thing because just outside the city we ran into the smoke fog that hangs over the place, and although it was mid afternoon it looked like dusk. Everyone seemed to have long faces and I don’t blame them if they are always in that muck.’ There is no mention of girlfriends or even women. The boyish note, the thank-yous to uncle Reg for a cardigan and unknown donors for mittens to combat the hellish cold, gradually fades, edged out by a mounting confidence. For his birthday, he announced, he would like a car badge, ‘in the form of a Spitfire. It must be a Spitfire, no other type will do.’ On 8 February he reported ‘we chased away another Hitlerite today, two in fact, but they nipped into the clouds before we got a smack at them’. Early in March he once again expressed his frustration, this time because the auxiliaries of 602 Squadron were seeing more action than his own unit. ‘There is a good deal of friendly rivalry between us,’ he wrote. ‘We are rather annoyed because we have not seen any fun lately while this other squadron has been having all the fun.’12 This fretting at not being in the thick of things earned him the nickname ‘Broody’, the commanding officer of 603 told Benson’s father later, in a letter, ‘because he was always so despondent if, for any reason, he was not allowed to fly’. He also ‘had a habit of pondering over the many problems confronting him’.13
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 14