This was one of three definite 109s claimed by 17 Squadron on the second day, as well as two army reconnaissance machines. But with the first successes came the first losses. Flight Lieutenant Michael Donne was shot down and killed when his Hurricane crashed south-west of Rotterdam. Pilot Officer George Slee also died after being shot down south of Dordrecht. Two others, Pilot Officer Cyril Hulton-Harrop (brother of Montague, killed by his own side in the Barking Creek debacle) and Sergeant John Luck, managed to bale out after being hit and were taken prisoner. Squadron Leader Tomlinson’s Hurricane was badly damaged, but he managed to crash-land and make his way back to Britain. Every one of them had been the victim of an Me 109.
The hazards of peacetime flying had meant that death was never far away, but now the pilots were encountering it in a new and unfamiliar form. Denis Wissler was at Lille-Seclin when the Luftwaffe arrived at noon. ‘I came nearest to death today than I have ever been, when two bombs fell about thirty feet away,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I was in the ante-room and my God did I run.’ A driver was killed in the attack and a cook injured, and a block of sleeping quarters destroyed. That night Peter Parrot’s brother Tim was the co-pilot in a Whitley bomber sent on a reconnaissance mission over the German-Belgian border. In the morning Peter Parrot received a signal saying his brother was missing; later he was confirmed dead.
Mortality concentrated minds. That afternoon Paul Richey had been hurrying over to his Hurricane to intercept a big formation of bombers heading for Reims when he ran into an RAF Catholic chaplain he had met previously and liked. ‘He asked me if I wanted absolution, puffing alongside me. I confessed briefly. He asked if there were any other Catholics who might want absolution. I said, “Only old Killy in that Hurricane over there – hasn’t wanted it for ten years but you can try!” We laughed and I waved him goodbye. But confess Killy did – sitting in his cockpit with the padre standing on the wing beside him.’8 Richey was shot down an hour or so later, after an extended dogfight between five members of 1 Squadron and fifteen Me 110s. He baled out and landed in a wood, and after being found by some gendarmes was reunited with the squadron the following day. Five days later he was to take to his parachute again.
The shock of the first casualties was offset, to some extent, by the realization that, despite the high speeds and heavy fire-power now employed in aerial warfare, the chances of surviving a combat in which you came off worse were considerably higher than they had been during the First World War. From the outset it was clear that the news that someone was missing was not necessarily a euphemism for their almost certain death. On the morning of the second day Flight Lieutenant Dickie Lee of 85 Squadron had been injured slightly when his Hurricane was hit by flak near Maastricht and he decided to jump. He landed in a field close to where some tanks were parked on a road. He came across a peasant, who assured him the armour was Belgian. Lee borrowed an old coat to cover his uniform and went to investigate. The tanks were German. Lee was taken by the troops for a civilian, but none the less locked up in a barn, from which he soon escaped and made his way back to Lille, arriving two days later. On the same day his squadron companion, Pilot Officer John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, was also badly hit by flak, baled out, and returned unharmed to the unit.
By the end of the second day the fighter squadrons could be reasonably satisfied with their own part in the battle. Together they claimed to have destroyed a total of fifty-five enemy aircraft for the loss of thirteen Hurricanes and eight pilots. It was an overestimate. In one case, 1 Squadron reported that it had shot down ten Me 110s over the village of Romilly near Reims when the real number was two. The discrepancy was caused by confusion rather than wilful exaggeration. Air fighting was disorienting and distorted the senses, a fact acknowledged in the squadron’s daily report, which observed that ‘questioning pilots immediately after combat, it has been found extremely difficult to obtain [precise] information as to what actually happened as most pilots, after aerobatting themselves into a stupor, were still pressing imaginary buttons and pulling plugs [the override boost mechanism to increase power] an hour or so after landing’. Building an accurate picture was further complicated by the inevitable tendency of several pilots to describe the same incident as if it was their unique experience.
The performance of the British fighters was a welcome piece of good news in an overall story of failure. On the first day the general response of the Allied air forces to the German attack had been hesitant and did almost nothing to slow its advance, which proceeded with the speed and energy of a force of nature. The French commander, Gamelin, displayed a paralysing reluctance to provoke the enemy, fearing that if he authorized bombing raids the Germans would respond with a fury his tiny bomber fleet could do nothing to match. Barratt fumed, argued and finally went his own way, dispatching thirty-two Battle bombers against the Germans advancing through Luxemburg. Only nineteen of them came back, the rest having fallen victim to fighters and the German mobile light flak guns. A second attack was ordered and sixteen bombers flew off. This time nine were shot down from the ground or the air and four limped back badly damaged.
The Fairey Battles were disastrously unsuited to the demands of modern aerial warfare. They were slow, clumsy and poorly armed. The fighter pilots were impressed by the cheerfulness and courage of their crews, but even before the fighting began, no one gave much for their chances. On the first day, their vulnerability had been increased by the fact that no fighter escorts were assigned to them. On 11 May they went into action again in another attempt to blunt the thick black arrows already punching out in all directions across the HQ staff maps.
This time they were occasionally assigned fighters to protect them, but the results were still pitiful and the losses heavy. At 09.30 six Hurricanes from 73 Squadron had taken off from Reims-Champagne to protect a group of eight Battles ordered to attack targets in Luxemburg. Seven of the bombers were shot down. The following day, 12 May, five Battles, crewed by volunteers who were only too aware of the odds they were facing, were sent off again, this time with the mission to destroy two bridges spanning the Albert Canal in an attempt to hold up the German army, which had already captured two vital bridges across the Maas, just to the east. Eight Hurricanes from 1 Squadron led by Bull Halahan were ordered to provide cover. On the way to the rendezvous the fighters ran into a swarm of 109s. In the dogfight that followed they claimed to have shot down at least four 109s and two Henschel spotter planes. Halahan’s Hurricane was hit badly and he was forced to land. The Battles pressed on to their doom. Two were knocked down by the 109s before reaching the bridges. Two more were brought down by the flak batteries ringing the target. The remaining bomber crash-landed on the way home. Six crew members died in the raid and seven were captured.
The inadequacy of the support the fighters could offer had already been demonstrated the same morning when Hurricanes from 85 and 87 Squadrons were sent to meet up with twenty-four Blenheims, which had also been sent from RAF Wattisham in Suffolk to attack the bridges. On the way to the rendezvous the fighters ran into a succession of enemy formations. In the mêlée that followed, two 87 Squadron pilots were shot down and one of them, Flying Officer Jack Campbell, a Canadian from British Columbia, was killed. The other, Sergeant Jack Howell, managed to bale out, but his parachute only half-opened and he made a high-speed descent. The squadron diary noted that ‘although landing extremely heavily he found on recovering consciousness that he was no more than badly bruised and was flying fit within a week’.
The two were probably victims of a section of Me 109s led by Hauptmann Adolf Galland, who was to shoot down more RAF aircraft than any other Luftwaffe pilot operating in the West. In his memoirs he described closing in on the unsuspecting Hurricanes. ‘I was not excited, nor did I feel any hunting fever. “Come on! Defend yourself!” I thought as soon as I had one of the eight in my gunsight…I gave him my first burst from a range which, considering the situation, was still too great. I was dead on the target, and at last the poor devil
noticed what was happening. He rather clumsily avoided action, which brought him into the fire of my companion. The other seven Hurricanes made no effort to come to the aid of their comrade in distress but made off in all directions.’9 The Blenheims were equally unsuccessful and suffered heavily at the hands of the fighters and the flak. Out of the twenty-four that set out, ten were lost.
It was now clear that there were nowhere near enough Allied bombers to make a difference, nor fighters to mitigate the devastating effects of the Me 109s and the flak batteries. The French bombing raids were as ineffective as the British and their Moranes and Dewoitines no real deterrent to the Messerschmitts. Even if the Allied air forces had been stronger, the resistance they could offer in the air would not have been enough to counter the fact that, on the ground, the battle was being lost.
A handful of reinforcements arrived in the evening of 12 May. Sixteen Hurricanes of 501 Squadron were sent off from Debden and divided themselves between Bapaume and Vitry-en-Artois. This piecemeal offering was unlikely to do anything to quieten the clamour for more aircraft that was coming from the French government and supported by Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister on the day the blitzkrieg began.
Dowding had always regarded the sovereign strategic objective of Fighter Command as the protection of the British Isles. He seems, from the outset, to have doubted France’s ability to defend itself. Well-founded pessimism, a cold streak of realism that contrasted with Churchill’s sometimes alarmingly romantic approach and a keen appreciation of the paucity of his resources led him to view the sending of any more fighters to the aid of France as an appalling waste. He would oppose every request for further sacrificial offering of pilots and aircraft. But the battle had already created a vacuum, drawing in pilots and machines in a futile effort to stem a German advance that was now flowing westwards with the inexorability of lava.
On 13 May, the first German tanks crossed the Meuse at Sedan, a psychological as well as political frontier. The more intelligent observers who had grasped the nature of blitzkrieg understood that this, most probably, meant the defeat of the Allies was inevitable. Churchill, by his own admission, had failed to appreciate that warfare now moved at what was a lightning pace by the standards of the previous war. Thus, he was relatively unperturbed by the news of a breakthrough, believing that, as on the Western Front a quarter of a century previously, the thrust could at the least be blocked. That day thirty-two more Hurricanes and pilots were ordered off to France to make up the losses. The Luftwaffe was now concentrating on creating havoc in the rear of the French and British armies, smashing road and rail links to prevent the forward movement of men and supplies and wrecking the already fragile communication network. From now on, chaos was to be the status quo.
The Allies’ ability to manoeuvre was dictated by the activities of the German bombers. While the Heinkels and Dorniers savaged supply lines, the Ju 87 Stukas moved ahead of the advancing Panzers. They had already proved their destructive power in Spain and Poland. The damage they did was as much to morale as to flesh, bone and metal. The mounting shriek of the sirens as they tipped into their dive was a devastating coup de théâtre that terrified even the most cool-headed troops. The Allied pilots, though, felt no concern about meeting them. Stukas could only manage a top speed of 238 m.p.h. and when cruising trundled along at just over 200 m.p.h. They were to prove a gratifyingly easy target for British fighters later on. But now, with the Me 109s in almost constant attendance, there were few chances of getting at them.
Despite the dramatic developments, 13 May was a quiet day. There was one raid by seven Battles over Holland, which was mercifully completed with damage to only one aeroplane. The French also sent seven bombers, with a heavy fighter escort, against troop concentrations in the Sedan area and the pontoons the German engineers had thrown across the Meuse. The effect was negligible. Ten Hurricanes were shot down, six of them, including Billy Drake’s, by Messerschmitts. He had been on dawn patrol with five other Hurricanes from 1 Squadron at 22,000 feet when he started ‘feeling very woozy. I looked down and sure enough I had no oxygen so I said I was going home. Round about 10,000 feet I saw these four [bombers] and it didn’t look as if they were being escorted by anybody. Just as I was firing away, I suddenly heard a bloody great thump behind me and a Messerschmitt 110 had obviously got behind and [blown] me out of the sky.’
He felt as if he had been struck hard in the back and the leg and flames were streaming from his engine. ‘I tried to get out but I’d forgotten to open the hood and the aeroplane was really brewing up by this time. I released the hood and went onto my back and that probably saved my life because all the flames that were coming into the cockpit went round the fuselage and missed me so I was able to bale out.’
As he floated down he heard the twin engines of the 110 above him, then tracer twinkled past as the Messerschmitt opened fire, apparently at him. He tried to accelerate his rate of descent by tipping air out of the canopy, but the pain in his back was too great for him to lift his arm. The German veered away and he hit the ground only to face another hazard. Drake was wearing an old white flying overall from pre-war days and his hair was very blond. The French peasants who ran to the scene ‘thought I was a German. They all had scythes and pitchforks and they were literally coming for me.’10 His parents’ investment in his Swiss education paid off when he yelled in French that he was a British pilot. When he showed them his wings they became effusively friendly and took him to a field dressing station in a school near Rethel that was crowded with casualties, several of whom died while he was being treated. He had two bullets in his leg, and shrapnel and bullets in his back. He was given morphine that did little to dull the agony as the debris was prised out, then moved to the town hospital.
When he did not return the squadron began to worry. Paul Richey had to collect something from Drake’s room after lunch ‘and saw his meagre possessions spread about…a photograph of his mother, a bottle of hair oil, the pyjamas he would need no more. Poor old Billy!’11 Then a call came through from the hospital that they had an English pilot. Richey went to see him and plans were made to move him to British care. The next day, though, the hospital was evacuated and Drake began a long and painful journey westwards.
That evening eight pilots and Hurricanes from the new batch of reinforcements landed at Reims-Champagne to shore up 73 Squadron. They were being thrown in at the deep end. None of them had belonged to a squadron before, let alone seen action, having come directly from No. 6 Operational Training Unit. The following day more machines and men, many of them equally inexperienced, were spread around 607, 615 and 3 Squadrons. No. 1 Squadron also received some welcome arrivals when Flying Officer Crusoe and Sergeants Berry, Clowes and Albonico returned from a gunnery training exercise in Britain, making the last leg of the journey on a train that was bombed several times en route.
On Tuesday, 14 May, the Allied air forces made their first and last concentrated effort to stem the German advance now pouring through the gaps in the front around Sedan. Every available British bomber was mustered to destroy bridges on the Meuse on either side of Sedan and crush the heads of the columns thrusting into France, and a mixed batch of British and French fighters were ordered to protect them. Altogether eight attacks were launched on crossing points. The first raiders escaped lightly, protected from the flak batteries by the morning mist rising from the confluence of the Meuse and the Chiers. As the hot day wore on, the German gunners perfected their aim and the sky filled with watchful 109s and 110s. When the biggest raid of the day was launched in mid afternoon, the defences were primed. The first wave of twenty-five Battles, accompanied by French Bloch and Morane fighters, arrived at 4 p.m. local time and flew straight into a wall of flak. Then the hovering Messerschmitts descended to pick off the survivors. Eleven of the bombers and six of the fighters were shot down.
The second wave of twenty-three Battles and eight Blenheims was supposed to be guarded by Hurricanes from 1 and 73 Squadron.
On their way to the target, however, the fighters were diverted by the sight of a formation of Stukas grouped over La Chesne, south-west of Sedan, where they had been sent to bomb French troops. The Me 109s protecting the bombers were slow to realize the danger. Killy Kilmartin shot down two, while Hilly Brown, Bill Stratton and Taffy Clowes claimed one each before the Messerschmitts intervened – figures that for once were subsequently broadly confirmed by the German reports. In the clash that followed, four 109s were shot down. No. 73 Squadron also ran into Stukas, destroying two and seriously damaging two more. Pressing on to their rendezvous with the bombers, however, they were ambushed by 109s and Sergeants Basil Pyne and George Dibden were shot down and killed. Earlier another 73 pilot, Pilot Officer Valcourt Roe, had also been killed over Namur. These encounters drastically increased the bombers’ vulnerability when they arrived over target. Of the twenty-three Battles that set out, only nine returned and five out of the eight Blenheims were lost.
The day saw the heaviest casualties Fighter Command had yet suffered. Fifteen pilots were killed and two so badly wounded that they subsequently died. Twenty-seven Hurricanes were shot down, most of them by Messerschmitts. The dead ranged from beginners like Flying Officer Gerald Cuthbert and Flight Lieutenant John Sullivan, who had arrived the day before, to some of the most seasoned pilots. Among the latter was Les Clisby and Lawrie Lorimer of 1 Squadron, who had set off at breakfast time from Berry-au-Bac with Prosser Hanks and Boy Mould to chase a large formation of Me 110s which had appeared overhead. On first seeing them, their inclination had been to leave them alone, but they were spurred into action by a fitter who urged them to set off in pursuit for the honour of the squadron.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 19