In the calm Vigors looked at his watch and saw he had been flying for an hour and a half. He had been hurling his Spitfire about with the throttle wide open, and was in danger of running out of petrol and crashing into the sea. As he turned for home, his first relieved thought was that he was still alive. Also, his Spitfire appeared undamaged. Apart from just possibly having damaged a 109’s tail, he had done nothing apart from distracting the enemy.
His biggest concern was ‘how deadly scared I’d been when I first saw those enemy bullets streaming past my wing-tip. I had never known any fear like that before in my life…I just fervently hoped I could keep it under control.’ Vigors met Bader on landing and gave a suitably stiff-upper-lip account of the engagement. But when he reached dispersal, where the returning 222 Squadron pilots were noisily and excitedly discussing the fight, and saw Hilary Edridge, his best friend in the squadron, neither of them hid their feelings.
‘Glad to see you in one piece,’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you do?’
‘Never been more scared in my whole bloody life,’ he laughed.
‘That makes two of us,’ I replied. ‘I was shit scared from the word go.’
The next day Vigors completed his baptism. On the second patrol of the day, 222 Squadron ran into a formation of Heinkels. He latched on to one, but his bullets drifted below it and before he could find another the Messerschmitts arrived. Vigors was chased and pulled sharp right as hard as he could, blacking out but bringing himself up behind the German and finding to his satisfaction that he was turning inside him. They were now on opposite sides of the circle in a classic dogfighting position. Vigors kept reefed tight into the turn, on the edge of unconsciousness because of the terrific G forces, until he almost had the target in his sights. In desperation the German dived for the sea, the tactic Vigors had used the previous day. But by now he was right on top of him and at 200 yards opened fire. ‘I saw my bullets ripping into his starboard wing and suddenly he burst into a ball of flame. “Got you, you bastard!” I yelled.’ This exultation vanished when he ‘felt a tug on my right wing and to my horror I saw holes appearing in the wing-tip’. A 109 darted beneath him and then the sky was clear again. A roll of the controls told him that the Spitfire would get him home.
Examining his feelings on the return journey, he was ‘more than happy to have made my first kill’ and felt the same satisfaction as when, on his family estate near Clonmel, he had ‘pulled down a high-flying pigeon flashing across the evening sky with the wind up his tail.’ There was a sombre moment at the thought he had just killed a man. He and his adversary would, he pondered, have ‘probably got on well together if we’d met drinking beer in a pub’. The mood did not last long. ‘But he was on the wrong side,’ he concluded. ‘He shouldn’t have signed up with that bastard Hitler.’ Later he was ‘surprised that he did not feel more remorse’. In the space of forty-eight hours, Tim Vigors had tasted many of the common experiences of flying a fighter in combat, short of being shot down, wounded or killed. Fifty hours of training was worth less than one hour of the real thing.
By early summer every squadron in Fighter Command except two had clashed with the Luftwaffe on at least one occasion. At this early stage, operations proceeded in an orderly fashion. Standing at dispersal in the rising light of dawn or the glare of an early summer afternoon, the squadron or flight was given its instructions on the ground by the commander. Then, as the riggers and fitters climbed down off the wings, the pilots hoisted themselves up by placing a right foot in the step set into the left side of the fuselage. They then put their other foot on the wing root and swung over into the narrow cockpit, stowing their parachute in the scooped recess of the steel bucket seat. Next came the nerve-calming routine of strapping in, switching on petrol, starting the engine and checking oxygen and instruments. On the order, they took off methodically and flew in formation until they reached the battle zone. The discipline of keeping position had the same effect as infantry drill, creating a feeling of security, a sense of strength in combination, that almost invariably evaporated as soon as the fighting began.
Everyone, at all times, constantly scoured the sky around them for aircraft. Good eyesight was a life-saver. Exceptional eyesight gave a pilot a considerable advantage, enabling him to see his victim before he himself was seen. Pilots twisted their heads up and down, left and right, continuously. In a regulation-wear collar and tie, necks were soon rubbed raw. It was for that reason that they began wearing the silk scarves which in time became their sartorial symbol.
On the outward journey the squadron, flight or section leader could talk to the other aircraft, and his voice and manner over the R/T was an important element in shaping the mood of the pilots behind him. Confident leaders gave confidence to those they led, and commanders could be forgiven many shortcomings if they had the gift of imparting reassurance. Some, like Deere, Kingcome and Bader, did so with a mixture of humour and profanity, using nicknames, reinforcing the ties of intimacy and affection that bound the best squadrons together. The possibility of giving encouragement and direction disappeared, however, in the explosion of confusion that followed engagement.
With the first sighting of Germans, the first ‘Tally ho!’, the low hum of anticipation jumped to a sharper pitch. Heads swivelled to the bearing as the pilots searched for the enemy aircraft. They went quickly into the last routine of preparation, dropping the seat to get maximum protection from the engine block in front and the armour plate behind, tightening straps, switching on the reflector sight, checking the range and wing-span indicators and flicking the gun button into the firing position. In the distance, the enemy aircraft seem always to have appeared as alien and malign objects, a different species. They looked like ‘flies’, ‘swarms of bees’, ‘a milling great mass of little insects’, never like birds, though flocks of birds could sometimes be mistaken for Germans by nervous pilots. Getting closer, the sight of the black crosses, edged in white, standing out on wings and fuselages, had a profound effect on pilots looking on them for the first time, striking them as sinister, redolent of death, bringing home with unexpected force the seriousness of what they were engaged in.
Once again, training helped to control feeling and instinct as the fighters responded to the designated attack order and manoeuvred into position. Paul Richey found that, on seeing the enemy, ‘all the tension and concentration in my body focused in a wild leap of my heart. It always made me swallow hard a couple of times.’ Then it was ‘into action, body taught against the straps, teeth clenched, thumb on the gun button, narrowed eyes intent on getting that black-crossed Hun in the sights and holding him there.’ He felt his ‘pounding heart turn into a block of ice. Not in fear. My brain became coldly clear and I was transformed into a cool, calculating killer.’2
Shooting a smallish, nimble object travelling at more than 300 m.p.h., when you are moving at a similar speed while diving, turning and rolling, was extraordinarily hard. The difficulties were multiplied by the heavy G forces that crushed the pilots’ heads down on their chests, and turned the blood in their veins to the weight of molten metal. Pilots found that when they finally got within range and opened fire, the bullets did not fly with undeviating, linear cleanliness, but wobbled and wavered. It was no wonder that when they spoke of shooting at an enemy they talked of ‘giving it a squirt’. The process was more akin to aiming a hose than firing an arrow. The reflector sight, which replaced the old ring sight, projected a dot of red light on the angled underside of the windscreen. It was bracketed by a set of range bars which could be adjusted to the size of bombers or fighters. Kingcome found, ‘It was quite helpful in assessing distances, and the red dot simply indicated the line of flight of your bullets…if you lined it up on a static target and were also stationary, you scored a hit. What it regrettably did not tell you was where to aim at a moving target, or how much deflection to allow…Such judgements only came from experience combined with instinct.’3
The first indication that bullets were strik
ing their target was the sight of bits of debris from the air frame or wings tumbling away, sometimes striking the body of the pursuing fighter. If an engine was hit, oil or glycol might suddenly swamp the pilot’s windscreen, obliterating vision. The sight of smoke and fire spurting from an engine marked one sort of end. The other came with the death of the pilot. At such speeds, there was little human contact between the men trying to kill each other. A pilot’s head might be glimpsed wedged in the narrow cockpit of a 109, more cramped even than that of a Spitfire, as it flashed past, but it was rarely for long enough to register the features or for a look to be exchanged. The most frequent indication of the connection between shooting and killing was during a rear attack on a Heinkel or Junkers, or, particularly, a Dornier, which at this stage of the war carried less armour than the other bombers. The four barrels poking from the rear turret would suddenly slant upwards, a sign that the gunner had been hit and had fallen forward across the breech of his weapon. Some pilots noticed that, after shooting at an aeroplane without apparent effect, they suddenly sensed an invisible change in the aircraft, a loss of vitality as if the spirit had left it, then saw this instinct confirmed as the machine tipped downwards into a dive that its pilot was no longer in any condition to control.
This was the moment of victory, the ‘kill’. Richey maintained that aerial combat was not ‘a hot-blooded thrilling affair’, but he confessed to ‘a savage, primitive exaltation’ at the sight of an enemy going down that was ‘not very edifying’. The point of a fighter pilot’s existence was to shoot down aeroplanes, but when Pete Brothers came to do so, his reaction was ‘absolute surprise and astonishment [as] the aircraft went over on its back and some bits fell off and it went screaming down into the ground. I followed it down and saw it crash and thought “amazing”.’ His next response was alarm. ‘I thought, “My God, that’s really going to make them cross. They’ll be after me.” I began whizzing around looking behind me, making sure…They were probably going to come and do me for this. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.’4
Others felt nothing but pleasure at the sight of their opponent going down. Johnny Freeborn ran across a 109 attacking a Spitfire south of Dunkirk and went in to attack it. The Messerschmitt dipped sharply away, a defensive tactic favoured by the German pilots that exploited the fact that the 109’s Mercedes-Benz engine had fuel injection, which allowed a steep dive without loss of power. The Merlin engine did not, which meant it missed several beats at the moment of negative gravity as a Hurricane or Spitfire tipped sharply downwards. The way of overcoming this was to flick the aircraft into a half-roll, then straighten out, throwing fuel into the carburettor. Freeborn went into the manoeuvre and plunged down through thick cumulonimbus, emerging to find the 109 right in front of him. ‘He went right down to the ground and I shot the hell out of him. The engine stopped and the propeller was just windmilling.’ For once, he was close enough to see his enemy’s face. ‘He looked bloody terrified. I thought, you German bastard, and I gave him another one. He hit a telegraph pole with the prop and went straight into a farmhouse. The farmer was ploughing outside the house…I was very pleased about that.’5 Sailor Malan, shooting down his first Heinkel 111, found ‘the release from tension was terrific, the thrill enormous. I’d been wondering for so long…how I’d react in my first show. Now I knew. Everything I had learned had come right. There was hardly time even to feel scared.’6
Despite the expectation of being shot at, pilots were often slow to realize they were under attack. Flying was noisy. The throb of a 1,175 horsepower engine blotted out the sound of firing, so frequently the first indication of danger was the sight of tracer, floating towards you, gentle and seemingly innocent, ‘like a string of light bulbs’. Kingcome described later how ‘tracer comes out at you, apparently very slowly to begin with. You see these lazy, long smoke trails coming at you. They get faster as they reach you, then suddenly whip past your ear at the most amazing speed.’7
Being fired on for the first time could have a paralysing effect. George Unwin had had four years of flying experience before meeting a 109 over Dunkirk. ‘I saw little sparks coming from the front end of him and I knew he was shooting at me and I did nothing, absolutely nothing. I was just, not petrified, but, I don’t know, frozen, for ten or fifteen seconds…I just sat there and watched him shoot at me.’8 The Messerschmitt missed and Unwin lived to apply the lesson he had learned.
Frequently, the bullets came without warning, seemingly out of nowhere, arriving with a sudden heart-jolting shock. Peter Parrott was patrolling in France, unaware of any imminent danger, when he ‘heard a couple of almighty bangs on the armour plating behind me’, and put his Hurricane into a dive. When he landed he found that only two rounds from the 109 that attacked him had hit. One damaged the radio and another struck one of the fuselage formers. Even so, ‘it had sounded as if the whole thing was going to break into pieces, the noise they had made coming in’.9
The first indication that the engine had been hit was usually the appearance of oil or glycol streaming back over the windscreen. Unless the damage made the aircraft unflyable, a pilot’s first instinct was to stay on board as long as possible in the hope of being able to nurse it back to friendly territory, even if this entailed crossing the suddenly very wide-looking expanse of the English Channel. A crash-landing meant finding the nearest piece of flat ground and gliding in, slipping the aeroplane from side to side to increase wind resistance and reduce the impact speed, keeping the wheels retracted to lessen the chances of them catching in an obstacle and somersaulting. Hitting the ground, bouncing and skidding through the topsoil, the pilot faced a last danger in the form of smashing his head on the thick bulletproof glass of the windscreen.
Peter Parrott, who after surviving France had been posted to 145 Squadron, was in the process of shooting down a Heinkel over the coastline of the Pas de Calais when he was hit by return fire from the rear gunner, which damaged the radiator and put a hole in the glycol tank. His cockpit was full of water vapour and the only instrument he could see was the oil temperature gauge, which was dangerously high. Wondering how long the coolant would last before the engine seized, he turned towards England, streaming a long trail of vapour. Half-way across the Channel, the rest of the squadron caught him up and Roy Dutton overtook to try and lead him to a safe landing place. ‘We crossed the coast at Deal and within inches of crossing…the engine stopped…I was around three or four thousand feet and looking for somewhere to put the thing down with the wheels up. Manston was too far to the north and Hawkinge was too far on the south side. Behind Deal there are some downs. It was a Sunday evening and a lot of people were out for their evening walk. I picked out these three fields. One was on the upward slope one was slightly curved – the dome so to speak – and then there was the one on the other side which went downhill fairly sharply.’ He chose the top of the hill, expecting to bounce along the turf, but instead came to an almost immediate halt, killing two sheep in the process.
Parrott was soaked in glycol – ‘sticky, filthy stuff’ – but otherwise unharmed. He and his Hurricane were soon surrounded by strollers, then a policeman arrived and Parrott went off to a farmhouse to phone the base at Manston. On the way he met the farmer arriving in a pony and trap. ‘The first thing he said was, “Who’s going to pay for them sheep then?” In a lordly tone, I said, “The Air Ministry.” He grunted, got back in his cart and went off. So I was faced with going down to the farm, facing this angry man again to ask if I could use his telephone. By the time I got there he and his wife were having high tea. There was a large ham on the table. It looked lovely but I wasn’t invited.’ Parrott called Manston and a car was dispatched together with a guard for the Hurricane. He left the inhospitable couple to their tea and was back in action next day.
The robustness of Hurricanes and, to a lesser extent, Spitfires meant that even quite badly damaged aircraft could be coaxed back to safety. But if the engine caught fire the only choice was to jump. The decision was inst
antaneous. The sight of smoke and flame curling backwards, wrapping around the Perspex bubble of the canopy, was enough to settle the issue. Like their First World War forebears, all pilots had a particular horror of burning. When they did bale out, it was, almost without exception, the first time they had been on the end of a parachute. There was no place for practice jumps on the pre-war training curriculum and this did not change when the war started. Parachutes had only become standard equipment in 1928, when the extraordinary argument that possession of them would lead to a diminution of fighting spirit was finally dropped. Pilots were taught the drill for leaving their stricken aeroplane. It required sliding back the canopy, releasing your harness then flipping the fighter on to its back so you dropped free. It sounded easy enough in theory, but in the urgency of the moment things conspired to go wrong.
When Fred Rosier’s Hurricane was hit and caught fire over northern France, he went into the drill but found the cockpit hood was jammed. He remembered sitting back ‘and thinking that that was that. The next thing I was falling, and I suppose instinctively pulled the ripcord. I saw that my trousers were all on fire. I remember the skin leaving my hands as I tried to put the fire out.’10 Pilot Officer Ronald Brown of 111 Squadron had not even been taught the theory when he was forced to jump from his Hurricane over Abbeville. Ignorant of what to do, he simply pushed the hood back, stood up and was immediately whipped out of the cockpit by the wind, smashing his legs against the tailplane. ‘I always remember it was beautifully warm and I wanted to go to sleep. Then something made me say to myself, pull the ripcord you bloody fool. So I pulled it – a sharp jerk. And there I am on my brolly.’11
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 24