Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  French dread mounted as the Germans pushed closer. Rumours, many of which turned out to be horribly accurate, swirled through the towns and villages, washing over soldiers and civilians alike, saturating the atmosphere in suspicion. In this humid moral climate the pilots found that their allies could be as dangerous as their enemies. German tactics in Holland, where parachute troops had been dropped in advance of the main attack to wreak havoc behind the lines, made anyone descending from the sky an object of distrust, as Billy Drake had already discovered. Now peasants and soldiers were inclined to attack any parachutist without bothering to establish his identity. Pilot Officer Pat Woods-Scawen of 85 Squadron was shot down in a dogfight with 109s in which he accounted for one Messerschmitt himself. He baled out, to be shot at twice on the way down by French troops. British soldiers could be just as edgy. Squadron Leader John Hill, who was flying his first sortie with 504 Squadron after taking over as commander, was forced to bale out and was blasted with shotgun pellets by a peasant as he approached the ground. Having convinced them he was an English airman, he was then arrested by passing British soldiers, who accused him of being a fifth columnist. When he reached into his pockets to show some identification, they opened fire, forcing him to jump into a ditch. This aroused further suspicions and he was pulled out and beaten unconscious, only being saved by the intervention of a passing French officer who knew him.

  Fear of fifth columnists was rampant, apparently with some justification. When Pete Brothers first landed with 32 Squadron to fly for the day from Moorsele in Belgium, they found 615 Squadron, who had by now moved there, ‘a bit jumpy, looking over their shoulders the whole time’. That morning a sergeant had failed to turn up at readiness. ‘They’d gone to kick him out of bed and they found he was lying on his back with a knife in his chest…They didn’t know if it was a fifth columnist or a refugee come to rob him or what.’21

  The punishment the German bombers had inflicted on the soldiers and civilians below made them liable to rough justice if they landed behind enemy lines. Bull Halahan came across a crashed Heinkel. He asked some French Senegalese troops what had become of the crew, and was told they had been taken off and shot. Pat Hancock, who had arrived at 1 Squadron at the start of the fighting, was in Sammy Salmon’s big Lagonda when they saw a German descending by parachute into a field near Béthienville. ‘There was a greeting committee waiting for him,’ he said. ‘They had been tilling the field and now they wanted to kill him. Sammy said, “We can’t have this, Hancock. Bloody French.” His car instantly became a tank, through the hedge he went, into the field. We picked up the German. I put my RAF cap on his head and we dispersed the French far and wide.’22

  By 17 May the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, had accepted the hopelessness of the situation. He announced to his peers that he did ‘not believe that to throw in a few more squadrons whose loss might vitally weaken the fighter line at home would make the difference between victory and defeat in France’. He concluded that it would be ‘criminal’ to compromise Britain’s air defences further. Churchill agreed and two days later ordered that no more fighter squadrons leave the country whatever the need in France.23

  What remained of the eight reinforcement flights prepared to withdraw, most of them with only half the aircraft they had arrived with. On 20 May the Air Component squadrons attached to the BEF began to pack up. That evening 87 Squadron set off from Lille to Merville, the thirty-minute journey taking hours because of the blackout and roads clogged with troops and refugees. Roland Beamont described a ‘great mass…all pouring westwards…pushing perambulators, bicycles loaded up with blankets and pots and pans…As we tried to get through them in clearly marked RAF vehicles there was a great deal of hostility. I think they felt that here were the British running away.’24

  Dennis David flew to their new airfield to discover that ‘accommodation was nil in the village, and we…were thankful to have clean straw to sleep on in a pigsty’. As the morning passed and the traffic outside the airfield was joined by the same retreating Allied troops the squadron had seen at Lille, anxiety grew that they would never get away. All the rumours were bad ones. A young French officer told them ‘that Arras had fallen and that the Germans were advancing to the coast. Unbelievable! A battery of 75s stopped at our dispersal point and a harassed capitaine told us how Gamelin had been executed by the Paris mob and that the Germans had reached Abbeville [well to the south].’25 Orders were given for the pilots to carry out strafing attacks on German troops on the road between Cambrai and Arras until troop carriers arrived to evacuate the ground crews, when they would switch to escorting them ‘home to England’. These last words, the squadron diary noted, had a profound effect. ‘An entirely new atmosphere was noticeable immediately the officers and men read that. A mixed feeling of regret at leaving hospitable France and an unpleasant feeling that should anything happen to the troop carriers or the Hurricanes we should be left very much alone in the world.’

  By the following day they were home. Dennis David, who had been shot up in a strafing run, crash-landed but was evacuated in a passenger plane. After months looking down on the plains of northern France he was struck by ‘how small and green the fields of Kent looked’. He went home to Surbiton, where his mother sent him to bed. He ‘slept without moving for thirty-six hours. She became quite concerned and actually called the doctor, who said I was completely exhausted and should just be left to sleep.’26 The sister squadron, 85, also made it back. ‘I came home last night,’ Denis Wissler scrawled in pencil in his diary. ‘Bath, bed, booze.’

  Bull Halahan decided that his men had now had enough and asked permission for the longest serving pilots to withdraw. The core of the squadron, who had been in France from the first days, left together; including the Bull himself, Johnny Walker, Prosser Hanks, Killy Kilmartin, Bill Stratton, Pussy Palmer, Boy Mould and Frank Soper. Rennie Albonico, another of the originals, was not with them, having been shot down and taken prisoner on 21 May. Nor was Paul Richey. On the last big day of fighting, 19 May, he had attacked a formation of Heinkels, and after destroying one was caught in return fire. He was hit in the neck by an armour-piercing bullet and temporarily paralysed, only regaining the power in his arms when his Hurricane was 2,000 feet up and locked in a vertical dive. He was found by the French and moved erratically westwards to end up in the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly.

  Billy Drake also passed through Paris after being collected from hospital in Chartres by an American girlfriend called Helen. Lacking uniform or identity papers, he was again taken for a German at a French roadblock and feared he was going to be shot as a spy until Helen persuaded them to let him go. They went to the Crillon, where she handed over her Buick, its tank miraculously full of petrol, and told him to head for Le Mans, where the British were regrouping. ‘The streets were crowded with refugees,’ he said, ‘and much worse, with soldiers without their rifles, just trudging. They’d had it. It was the most depressing thing I’ve seen in my life.’27 At Le Mans there was an emotional reunion with the squadron members who had stayed behind.

  Richey, too, eventually joined them after recuperating in Paris, savouring the last days of freedom the city would know for four years. One day, walking down the Champs-Élysées, he came across Cobber Kain sitting at a pavement café with a Daily Express journalist, Noel Monks. Kain had chosen to help with the re-forming of 73 Squadron, after those who remained of the surviving pilots returned to England, and was due back himself in a few days. He was young enough to still have acne, but his spirit was frayed. Richey ‘noticed that he was nervous and preoccupied and kept breaking matches savagely in one hand while he glowered into the middle distance’.28

  The following day Kain took off from the squadron base at Echemines, south-west of Paris, and started to perform rolls perilously close to the ground. Among those at the aerodrome was Sergeant Maurice Leng, a twenty-seven-year-old Londoner who was one of the first of the RAFVR pilots to be
posted to a fighter unit to replace squadron casualties. ‘He’d taken off in…the last original surviving Hurricane of 73 Squadron with a fixed-pitch, two-bladed wooden airscrew,’ he said later. ‘He took off and came across the aerodrome, did a couple of flick rolls and hit the deck. That was it.’ The sympathy of the newcomers, who had hardly known him, was muted. ‘We all said, “How sad,” but we all said, “How stupid.”’29

  The judgement could have served for the whole air campaign. It petered out in a series of withdrawals westwards in ever deepening chaos. Nos. 1 and 73 Squadrons, two of the first four squadrons in, were to be the last out, together with 501, which had been in France since the start of the blitzkrieg, and 242 and 17 Squadrons, which were sent out early in June. No. 1 Squadron was now transformed, with a new commander, Squadron Leader David Pemberton, and an almost entirely new set of pilots. Pat Hancock, one of the replacement pilots, remembered the remaining weeks as ‘only retreat, anxiety and lack of knowledge as to what was going on. Communications were almost non-existent. Fighter control, as such, had vanished.’30 In the first two weeks of June the unit moved four times, in the end taking the initiative to shift itself when it was impossible to contact wing headquarters to obtain orders. They finally left on 17 June. One party departed by ship, boarding two dirty half-loaded colliers at La Rochelle. Another flew from St Nazaire. The squadron had been helping 73 and 242 Squadrons to maintain a continuous patrol over the port to cover the embarkation of the RAF and the remnants of the British army in France. They were unable to prevent the last tragedy of the campaign, the sinking of the Lancastria, which went down with the loss of 5,000 lives when a German bomb sailed flukily through an open hatch. Pat Hancock chased after one of the raiders ‘for a hell of a way, firing at it but with no success’. Circling over, he saw the victims struggling in the water and threw down his Mae West life-jacket.

  No. 17 Squadron was also sent to cover the evacuation, and set up base in tents on the racetrack at Le Mans on 8 June. The same day, Denis Wissler, back with 85 Squadron after a forty-eight-hour leave, was summoned by his commanding officer, Peter Townsend, who had taken over the squadron two weeks before, and told that ‘17 Squadron had wired and asked for two operational pilots and that he was very sorry but I would have to go, and that at once’. Wissler had only been with 85 Squadron for six weeks, but his first impression on joining was that ‘the mob seem damn nice’, and he had grown very fond of them. There were only two hours to say goodbye before he left for Kenley. He stopped on the way in London for a solitary, melancholy dinner at the Trocadero, where he ‘really got completely plastered and was put to bed by the wing commander’. The same kindly officer woke him up at 3.30 a.m. with some Alka-Seltzer, lent him his bath robe and sent him for a cold shower before he took off.

  Wissler left with Count Manfred Czernin, who had been with him in 85 Squadron. Czernin was twenty-seven, born in Berlin, where his Austrian diplomat father was en poste. His mother, though, was English, the daughter of Lord Grimthorpe, the polymath who designed Big Ben, and he had been to Oundle public school. There was none the less more than a dash of Mitteleuropa in his manner, which made him the object of some teasing. He joined the RAF in 1935 on a short-service commission after a stint farming tobacco in Rhodesia, and served as a bomber pilot before joining the reserve. Unlike Wissler, he had already been in action several times in France and claimed to have shot down four Germans. The pair managed to get lost several times on the way to Le Mans, taking twelve hours over a one-hour journey. The squadron then spent several days patrolling over Rouen and Le Havre, both towns obscured by columns of black smoke coiling up from burning oil tanks. On 12 June Wissler at last had his first taste of fighting when the squadron spotted three Heinkels bombing troopships off Le Havre and attacked. He opened fire on one of the bombers and saw smoke coming from the starboard engine, but modestly did not claim to have shot it down. Czernin, however, fired at another Heinkel in cloud and claimed a ‘conclusive casualty’. On a later patrol Wissler had another new and unwelcome experience: coming under heavy ground fire. ‘It was most terrifying,’ he reported candidly in his diary that evening.

  By now the evacuation was almost complete. The squadron returned to Le Mans after a patrol on the morning of Saturday, 12 June, to find the Naafi had gone leaving behind huge quantities of cigarettes and whisky, to which everyone helped themselves. The army had abandoned a batch of Harley-Davidson motor bikes. Pilots and ground staff took the opportunity to ride circuits round the famous track. The same day they moved to Dinard. On 17 June the pilots were at readiness all morning and broke off to eat at a local hotel. Members of a French squadron based at Dinard aerodrome were also there. Peter Dawbarn, a nineteen-year-old pilot officer with 17 Squadron, was among the English pilots who sat down to lunch. There was a radio in a corner of the dining room. When the news came on everyone stopped eating to listen. When the announcement of the capitulation followed there was silence. Then, ‘they all burst into tears’.31

  The newcomers had formed a low opinion of the French. Pilots’ attitudes towards their allies differed, depending on when they joined the battle. Many veterans of the phoney war had enjoyed the company of their spirited fellow officers in the neighbouring escadrilles, even if they had not found them particularly supportive or even visible during the crucial phase of the Battle of France. No. 1 Squadron had a much-loved Frenchman attached to it as interpreter, Jean ‘Moses’ Demozay, who was to escape to Britain in an abandoned Bristol Bombay troop carrier and fight bravely and effectively for the RAF and the Free French for the rest of the war. The reinforcement flights and squadrons rarely saw the French. The few recorded encounters were not happy ones. Flight Lieutenant Fred Rosier of 229 Squadron put down at an airfield near Lille, after being nearly shot down in a battle, ‘to find the French were there, with brand-new American aeroplanes, fighters, and they were not flying. They were quite friendly, but I was livid…They were not participating in the battle at all.’32

  The French the replacement pilots saw appeared demoralized and apathetic. Peter Dawbarn and the 17 Squadron pilots had come across French fighter pilots on previous trips to Dinard, which they used as a base for patrolling, ‘but they never took off as far as I know. We kept taking off, they didn’t.’ The locals could also seem treacherous. The squadron was convinced that traitors were reporting their movements to the Germans. ‘The fifth column is operating here we are sure as Morse code starts every time we take off,’ wrote Wissler. The 17 Squadron Hurricanes left from Dinard, fuselages packed with cigarettes and alcohol, and landed at Jersey, where they celebrated their escape in Fighter Boy style with a party. When they left the following day, one Hurricane carried a passenger, a young woman who made the brief journey to freedom with the pilot perched on her lap.33

  Most of the Hurricanes that went to France never came back. Given the tight margins Fighter Command was working within, the campaign had been ruinously expensive in machines. Of the 452 fighters sent out, only 66 returned when the main force withdrew. Of the missing 386, German fighters and flak accounted for only 208. The rest were abandoned as unserviceable. This was no reflection on the ground crews, who worked continuously while being regularly bombed and strafed, with only a few hours’ sleep in tent or field to sustain them before going back on shift. All but intact aeroplanes suffering only light damage had to be set on fire because there were no spares, or the chaotic conditions made repairs impossible. The normally genial tone of No. 1 Squadron diary faltered when it came to describing the waste. ‘It has been most noticeable that on a patrol yielding no apparent results as many as two or three aircraft out of six may be struck by shrapnel and on return to aerodrome it has been found necessary to write off all three as u/s, due to lack of proper servicing and maintenance facilities…Wastage has so far been in the neighbourhood of thirty-eight, only ten of which have actually crashed. Apparently we in France are the poor relations.’34

  The pilots of Fighter Command could feel proud of their p
erformance in France. Churchill had claimed that they were ‘clawing down two or three’ Germans for every British aeroplane lost. It was a vast exaggeration. The Hurricane squadrons reckoned themselves to have definitely shot down 499 bombers and fighters. The true figure was lower but it was at least 299. But with losses of 208 on their own side, it still left the RAF pilots well in the lead. Their success was their own. They were dedicated and aggressive and they made the most of their excellent machines. What they lacked was an effective early-warning system, or any proper control or direction from the ground. The pilots fought using tactics they invented for themselves for objectives that were never explained, if they were ever understood. Given these handicaps, the cost in lives looked relatively low. Altogether fifty-six pilots were killed in the twelve days between 10 and 21 May, and thirty-six wounded, with eighteen taken prisoner. But such losses could not possibly be borne over a long period, and as soon as this battle ended, a new one was beginning.

  8

  Dunkirk

  At Dunkirk some 500,000 British and French soldiers were now penned in, the sea at their backs, awaiting capture or annihilation. The job of finishing them off was given to the bombers and fighters of the Luftwaffe. Goering had proposed the idea. Hitler accepted it, apparently wishing to spare his army for the next stage of the French campaign.

  The RAF was given the task of protecting the exhausted lines of soldiers, zig-zagging across the grey North Sea sands waiting to be rescued. This was the heaviest responsibility the air force had yet had to face. The troops were appallingly exposed. Defending them meant not only mounting continuous patrols over Dunkirk port and the beaches on either side. To be effective the fighters would also have to push inland to try to knock down the bombers before they could drop their loads.