Prosser Hanks, trying to vacate his Hurricane after being hit and catching fire, had the opposite problem. ‘I was suddenly drenched in hot glycol. I didn’t have my goggles down and the bloody stuff completely blinded me. I didn’t know where I was and somehow got into a spin. I could see damn all and the cockpit was getting bloody hot so I undid the straps and opened the hood to get out but I couldn’t. Every time I tried I was pressed back. I started to scream then, but stopped screaming and then somehow or other I got out.’12
These dramas sometimes happened in view of other squadron members. Seeing comrades die, frequently at very close quarters, was an eternal part of the infantryman’s experience. For pilots, the sensations attached to witnessing the death of a comrade seem to have been muffled slightly by a layer of detachment. Searching for his base in northern France after destroying a Me 110, Flight Lieutenant Ian Gleed of 87 Squadron saw a Hurricane flying serenely along and steered to join up with it. ‘Just as I am drawing up to formate on this Hurricane, he dips; I catch a fleeting glimpse of flying brick, and seemingly quite slowly, a Hurricane’s tail, with the red, white and blue stripes, flies up past my cockpit. I glance behind and see a cloud of dust slowly rising. He must have had some bullets in him to have hit that house. I wonder who it was?’13
The victim went to his end encased in a machine, sparing onlookers the horrible details. There was no body to confront. Death usually occurred at some distance from the home base and dealing with the corpse, or what was left of it, was the responsibility of others. Dead bodies, of friend or foe, were strangely absent from the fighter pilots’ war. Peter Townsend never saw a corpse in his entire RAF service, first encountering one when as a journalist he covered the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967.
On the other hand, the pause between the appearance of smoke and flame and the end left plenty of time to imagine what was happening inside the cockpit. On several occasions, the doomed pilot’s R/T was left switched on and his screams, prayers and curses filled the headphones of his companions.
Crashing into the ground or sea at high speed was often referred to with standard Fighter Boy understatement as ‘going in’. The blandness of the term served to soften the hard lines of the reality. The lightness of expression used for the darkest subjects had a very serious purpose: to rob fear of its power. Acknowledged, but only occasionally spoken about, fear tainted every hour of a fighter pilot’s working day. It was the second enemy. Levels of fear varied. Different pilots felt it with differing intensity in different circumstances. For all but a handful it was a palpable presence that might be banished during the hours of darkness, driven away by the beer and the company of your companions, then fatigue, but was always up and waiting at readiness next morning. Tim Vigors was right. There really was a ‘taste of fear’. It was sour and metallic at the same time, and no amount of swallowing or chewing gum could make it go away. Other physical sensations went with it: mild nausea, a feeling of faintness in the head and a slight tingling of the anal sphincter known to pilots as ‘ring twitch’.
Unless a pilot could suppress fear, he was useless, and stood a good chance of getting killed very quickly. Hugh Dundas gave a frank account of the unmanning terror that seized him on his first encounter with Germans during the Dunkirk evacuation. As so often, when he saw an Me 109 turning towards him and noted the ripples of grey smoke and flashing lights coming from the nose of the plane, it took him some time to understand what was happening.
‘Red blobs arced lazily through the air between us, accelerating dramatically as they approached and streaked close by, across my wing. With sudden, sickening, stupid fear I realized that I was being fired on and I pulled my Spitfire round hard, so that the blood was forced down from my head. The thick curtain of blackout blinded me for a moment and I felt the aircraft juddering on the brink of a stall.’ More 109s attacked and the tail-chasing continued, with Dundas wrenching his machine into the tightest and fastest turn he could squeeze from it. He managed one shot (‘quite ineffectual’) before the Germans moved off. He was left ‘close to panic in the bewilderment and hot fear of that first dogfight. Fortunately instinct drove me to keep turning and turning, twisting my neck all the time to look for the enemy behind. Certainly the consideration which was uppermost in my mind was the desire to stay alive.’
Dundas was to find this feeling never went away. ‘When it comes to the point, a sincere desire to stay alive is all too likely to get the upper hand. Certainly, that was the impulse which consumed me at that moment that day. And that was the impulse which I had to fight against, to try and try and try again to overcome, during the years which followed.’
Panic descended again later on in the patrol when he found himself alone just north of Dunkirk. Instead of calmly working out his course to reach the Thames estuary and home, he set off blindly in what he thought might be the right direction. In a few minutes he was lost, high over the empty sea, where there was not even a ship to take as a bearing. He found that the ‘need to get in touch with the land pressed in on me and drove out all calmness and good sense. I saw that I was flying almost due north and realized that this was wrong, but could not get a hold of myself sufficiently to work things out. I turned back the way I had come, cravenly thinking that I could at the worst crash-land somewhere off Dunkirk and get home in a boat.’ Eventually he sighted the coast of France and worked out the simple navigational problem of finding the course for home. As he crossed the estuary at Southend, heading for the little aerodrome at Rochford, he was soaked in sweat, but ‘a sense of jubilation had replaced the cravenness of a few minutes earlier’. He felt ‘transformed…now a debonair young fighter pilot, rising twenty…sat in the cockpit which had so recently been occupied by a frightened child.’14 He taxied over to the dispersal point where the ground crew were waiting to hear his tales of the battle.
Dundas, like Vigors, had been through a rite of passage. The most testing psychological moments in a fighter pilot’s career were those that followed the first experience of coming under fire. The overpowering human impulse, having brushed against death, is to run away. The military impulse is to seek cover, but in the absence of clouds that was not an option in the skies. Dundas had been gripped by ‘hot fear’, Vigors ‘scared shitless’, yet both chose to stay and fight however inefficiently. By doing so they crossed a threshold and became warriors.
Dogfights rarely lasted more than a few minutes. Their intensity, though, made them exceptionally draining. The fact that exhaustion could set in very quickly was recognized early on at senior levels of Fighter Command, and intelligent decisions were often – though not invariably – made to move squadrons and pilots out of the line for a rest before their efficiency was so diminished that they became easy targets. Deep fatigue could drag depression and moodiness in its wake. Paul Richey, after being forced to bale out on the second day of the air war in France, ‘began to feel peculiar’ when he got back to the squadron. ‘I had a hell of a headache and was jumpy and snappy. Often I dared not speak for fear of bursting into tears.’ He was put to bed by the squadron doctor with some sleeping pills but the sound of bombs on the airfield kept him awake. When he did sleep it was only to relive the day’s experiences and he found himself ‘in my Hurricane rushing head-on at a 110. Just as we were about to collide I woke up with a jerk that nearly threw me out of bed. I was in a cold sweat, my heart banging wildly.’ He went off to sleep again, but the nightmare returned and continued to do so at ten-minute intervals all night. ‘I shall never forget,’ he wrote, ‘how I clung to the bed-rail in a dead funk.’15
The question he had asked himself as he lay there was how long he would be able to go on. It was clear from the start that there would be no quick victory. The absence of any sense of progress was potentially particularly demoralizing to pilots who were confronting a future which consisted of the endless repetition of a routine that common sense told them was almost certain to finish in death. As early as 16 June Denis Wissler was writing in his diary:
‘Oh God I do wish this war would end.’ But for him and the rest of Fighter Command, the real war was only just beginning.
10
Before the Storm
During the morning of 4 June, the pilots of 222 Squadron were stood down from further patrolling duties and given the rest of the day off. Tim Vigors heard the good news after returning to Hornchurch from a sortie over the French coast, during the course of which he and Hilary Edridge narrowly escaped being shot down by 109s. Wondering what to do with their free time, Vigors noticed the date. It was speech day at his old school, Eton. He asked Edridge, his constant companion since they joined the squadron together, to go with him to the celebrations.
Driving through the East End they stopped at a pub. Vigors noticed that they were the only people in uniform and customers ‘cast glances at us as if we had come down from the moon’. The woman behind the bar remarked: ‘You boys aren’t half going to have to look after us now. I just hope that there are enough of you.’ Edridge mentioned that they had been airborne only a short time before, and shooting at Germans. The other customers did not believe them at first, then tried to buy them drinks.
At Eton, ‘the sky was cloudless and the sun shone down on the brightly coloured scene. Pretty girls in picture hats strolled with their blue blazer-clad escorts under the big shady trees which surrounded the cricket grounds. The peaceful murmur of conversation was broken occasionally by subdued clapping as a boundary was struck or a wicket fell. The war was a million miles away. Could this be the same world in which we had battled so few hours ago? Somewhere God had got this day wrong.’1
Several pilots had sensed a reluctance among British civilians to accept that what was happening to the rest of Europe could also happen to them. But after Dunkirk and the fall of France the public’s complacency, or studied disregard, had faded. Now that it was no longer possible to treat the danger as remote and theoretical, the sense of detachment from the events that characterized the phoney war gave way to defiance, and in some cases alarm.
Official statements designed to reassure seemed as likely to have the opposite effect. On the morning of 18 June, the Ministry of Information issued a leaflet telling the population how to respond to a German invasion. Citizens were ordered to stay at home to avoid the chaos that had gripped Holland, Belgium and France, when hundreds of thousands of refugees blocked the roads, paralysing supply lines and the defenders’ ability to manoeuvre. The second instruction stated: ‘When you receive an order make sure that it is a true order and not a fake order…if you keep your heads you can also tell whether a military officer is really British or only pretending to be so.’2 The military correspondent of a newspaper circulating in south-east England warned readers to be on the lookout for parachutists, ‘mostly young men of the desperado type’ whose task was to ‘organize local fifth column members and arm them…create panic and confusion and spread false news among the civil population’.3 Such advice made people panicky. A commercial traveller who failed to stop his car in time at a checkpoint near Wrexham, manned by Local Defence Volunteers, was shot dead. Enemy aliens were moved away from coastal areas and innocents were arrested after tip-offs from neighbours on suspicion of being spies.
But the general mood, as disaster piled up on the Continent, was resolute. The bad news brought with it a sense of relief. Somerset Maugham, docking at Liverpool after fleeing France in a crowded refugee ship, recorded that ‘in the officials who came on board, in the porters who took our baggage, in the people in the streets, in the waiters at the restaurant, you felt the same spirit of confidence. Fear of invasion? Not a shadow of it. “We’ll smash ‘em. It’ll take time of course, but that’s all right. We can hang on.”’4 On the morning of 18 June, The Times quoted from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘November, 1806’ when England stood in isolation against Napoleon’s army, fresh from victories at Austerlitz and Jena.
‘Tis well! from this day forwards we shall know
That in ourselves our safety must be sought;
That by our own right hands it must be wrought;
That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low
Other newspapers remembered it was the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.
That day Winston Churchill laid the foundations of a new British legend. It had dawned hot and clear, another gorgeous morning in a memorable run of fine weather. The prime minister was due to address the House of Commons in the afternoon after the usual Tuesday-afternoon question time. The Cabinet met at 12.30, but Churchill stayed away so he could work on the text, and was still scribbling changes as he sat in the House on the Treasury benches between Neville Chamberlain and Clement Attlee waiting his turn to speak.
He got to his feet at 3.49 p.m. before a packed House and a public gallery overflowing with ambassadors and VIPs. Despite the grimness of the situation, Churchill started off optimistically, presenting catastrophe as a sort of triumph. He stressed the great achievement of the Dunkirk evacuation, not mentioning the fact that the rescued troops had left most of their heavy equipment behind. He emphasized the obstacles facing a German invasion, starting with the Royal Navy, which ‘some people seem to have forgotten’ Britain possessed.
With the House settled and primed, he moved to the heart of the speech: ‘the great question of the invasion of the air and the impending struggle between the British and German air forces’. Churchill conceded that it was ‘a very great pity that we have not got an air force at least equal to that of the most powerful enemy within striking distance of our shores’. But this note of caution died as quickly as it had been struck. Then the old certainty returned, and coursed warmly through the remainder of the speech like vintage Armagnac. In the fighting in France in May and June the RAF, he stated confidently, had ‘proved itself far superior in quality both in men and in many types of machine to what we have met so far’. Despite the disadvantages of operating from foreign fields and having lost many aircraft on the ground, the air force ‘had still managed to routinely inflict losses of two-and-a-half to one’. In the fighting over Dunkirk, he claimed, ‘we undoubtedly beat the German air force, which gave us the mastery locally in the air, and we inflicted losses of three or four to one…In the defence of this island the advantages to the defenders will be very great. We hope to improve on the rate of three or four to one that we achieved at Dunkirk.’
Churchill went on to predict victory, and calm any fears about the condition of Fighter Command. ‘I am happy to inform the House that our fighter air strength is stronger at the present time, relatively to the Germans, who have suffered terrible losses, than it has ever been and consequently we believe ourselves to possess the capacity to continue the war in the air under better conditions than we have ever experienced before. I look forward confidently to the exploits of our fighter pilots who will have the glory of saving their native land, their island home and all they love from the most deadly of attacks.’
And so the speech surged on towards its famous end:
‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.
‘If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore address ourselves to our duty, so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will say “This was their finest hour.”’
The Times parliamentary reporter, numb fingers coming to rest at last, recorded ‘loud and prolonged cheers’.
Th
at evening Churchill repeated the speech, which was broadcast by the BBC. Some of the pilots at Biggin Hill listened to it in the mess. ‘We were standing in the hall drinking beer and our feeling was one of relief,’ said Pete Brothers. ‘Thank God we were on our own and not saddled with a craven ally.’5 This sentiment, though he did not know it, was shared by King George VI. Group Captain Grice, the station commander, had the speech typed up and posted around the base. Most of the pilots, though, seem not to have heard it – too absorbed in the process of recovering from the losses of the previous five weeks to hear the prime minister’s dramatic definition of the task awaiting them.
Churchill’s analysis had, characteristically, been inaccurate in details but correct in essentials. It was true that the fate of Britain now depended on the fighter pilots. It was also true that, henceforth, flying from their own soil and defending their own homeland, they would enjoy significant practical and moral advantages. But the highly favourable ratio of losses he claimed between British and German aircraft in their encounters to date was, as he must have known, an exaggeration. The RAF did not have more fighters than the Luftwaffe. A month later Goering still had at least 760 Me 109s at his disposal against Dowding’s 591 Hurricanes and Spitfires. And Fighter Command was, if not exhausted, depleted in men and machines and in serious need of rest, recuperation and reorganization.
Dowding was now engaged in trying to nurse Fighter Command back to strength before its next great trial, patching up battered squadrons, injecting new blood and replacing the lost fighters. Some units which had been particularly hard hit were moved out of the front line. Among them was 92 Squadron, which had lost six pilots, and was posted to Pembrey in Wales, in the 10 Group area, where it spent most of the rest of the summer. After leaving France at the end of May, 87 Squadron moved north to Church Fenton near Leeds to re-form. There, Roland Beamont found only ‘the remnants of the squadron’: a few of the Hurricanes that had made it out of France and half the original complement of pilots. The ground crews arrived in ‘dribs and drabs’, having been left to make their way home by ship. Some aircraftmen who had served in France in other squadrons were not to return to Britain before the middle of July. The squadron diary reported that ‘during the first fortnight in June, the task of re-forming went steadily ahead…not made easier by the fact that practically all equipment, service and personal, had necessarily been abandoned in France’. Another veteran unit of Fighter Command’s French adventure, 73 Squadron, which had only seven pilots fit for operations and half its ground crew, and whose remaining Hurricanes were all in need of repair, also moved to Church Fenton. It spent the next months in the relative calm of 12 Group, practising, patrolling and night flying until it was sent back into the middle of the air battle at the beginning of September.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 25