Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  The fighting in France and over Dunkirk cost the lives of 110 pilots. Another forty-seven were wounded and twenty-six taken prisoner. The losses tore holes in the ranks of virtually every squadron. Of the twenty-two units that served in France, only three had not lost pilots through death, injury or capture. The worst casualties had been suffered by 85 Squadron. Out of its normal establishment of eighteen pilots, it had lost, in the space of eleven days, eight killed or missing in action and six wounded. The commanding officer, Michael Peacock was among the dead. Peter Townsend was moved from 43 Squadron to 85 and given the task of rebuilding the unit’s strength and identity around the core of the seven surviving pilots.

  Dowding’s policy was, wherever possible, to take pilots from the most battle-tested units and spread them through the system to provide a core of expertise that would stiffen performance and morale. But there were few to go around. Many of the most experienced pilots were gone. At Dunkirk alone, Fighter Command lost three squadron commanders killed and one taken prisoner, six flight commanders killed and one taken prisoner, as well as about twelve section leaders, including two senior NCO pilots. Some veterans were in no condition to return to the battle. Paul Richey spent his convalescence as a sector controller, overseeing fighter operations from Middle Wallop in Hampshire. Billy Drake, also recovering from the wounds he sustained in France, was sent on his return as an instructor to the operational training unit at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire, where pilots finished their training before being posted to a squadron, and Killy Kilmartin to another at Aston Down.

  It was the young and inexperienced who were pushed forward to fill the gaps, including undertrained pilots just emerging from the ranks of the Volunteer Reserve. Peacetime training was lengthy and intense. The ab initio phase to teach the rudiments of flying was followed by forty-four weeks of thorough instruction in every aspect of aviation. The final six-week stage, intended to marry the pilot to the machine he would have to fight in, was carried out by operational training units (OTUs). The shortage of new pilots created by the losses of May and early June led to the setting up of three new OTUs, which raced qualified pilots through the conversion programme in two weeks. But shortages were so acute that promising pilots in training were sometimes posted directly from their flying training schools without passing through an OTU, and by the middle of the year the notional length of time in training was often being cut in half to twenty-two weeks.6

  Charlton Haw had just turned twenty when he arrived at 504 Squadron. He was born in York and left school at fourteen to become an apprentice in a lithographic works. As soon as he was eighteen he had applied to join the RAFVR but failed the medical. He applied again in January 1939 and was accepted. ‘I’d always wanted to fly from when I was a small boy,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to do anything else really. I just didn’t think there would be a chance for me. Most of the people who went into short-service commissions at the time had very high educational qualifications. The chances for any normal schoolboy to get in until the RAFVR was formed [were] almost impossible.’7 Haw was shrewd and assured despite his lack of advanced schooling. He was also a natural pilot, a talent he partially ascribed to the gentle touch he brought to the controls from playing the piano.

  In the eight months before the outbreak of war he spent three nights a week in a classroom in Hull learning navigation and flight theory. At weekends, and during a fortnight’s holiday from his firm, he went flying at Brough airfield, the test aerodrome for the Blackburn aircraft works, so that by the time the war began he had eighty hours’ experience on biplanes. In September he had been called up, but to his disappointment was sent home almost immediately. A month later he was ordered to report to an initial training wing at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. This was based in a seaside hotel requisitioned by the Air Ministry to provide RAFVR personnel with a taste of service discipline. The routine included drilling on the promenade, lectures, formal warnings of the dangers of VD and marathon PT sessions under the supervision of Len Harvey, the famous British boxer. It lasted about a month and was, almost everybody agreed, a waste of time.

  In December he moved on to Sealand, in Cheshire, for intermediate and advanced training, and passed out rated above average. In May he was due to be posted to an OTU to convert to Spitfires or Hurricanes. The shortage of pilots meant that just as he was about to leave he received counter orders to join 504 Squadron, which had lost nine of its members – half its strength – killed, wounded or taken prisoner in France. Five other half-trained pilots went from Sealand with him. The squadron was based at Wick in the far north of Scotland, where its duties included convoy protection patrols, interceptions and the defence of the Fleet, anchored in Scapa Flow. Haw found the surviving members friendly and welcoming, and morale ‘fantastically good’ despite the losses. The process of getting used to Hurricanes started immediately, but progress was hampered by the delay in delivery of new aircraft to replace those lost in France. By the time he had his first fight he had flown a single-engined fighter for only twelve hours. About a month after joining he was over Scapa Flow in a three-man patrol when the leader spotted a Heinkel 111 and dived after it. Haw, in a state of excitement, followed the attack down. Closing in, he noticed ‘red-hot chain links’ coming towards him. As he broke away a bullet smashed straight through the narrow cockpit and out the other side. ‘When I came back they were all slapping me on the back and saying how lucky I was,’ he said later, ‘and I was lucky. There as no doubt about it.’ Having come through this first, crucial, encounter, he was now better equipped to deal with the next one and his chances of survival had significantly improved.

  Frank Usmar also had his training cut short. He was on a few days’ leave, awaiting a posting to Sutton Bridge when a policeman arrived at his parents’ home in West Mailing, Kent, where his father was the village postman, and told him he was to report to 41 Squadron at Catterick. Usmar, too, had left school at fourteen and was working as a clerk while studying at evening school to become an accountant. When an RAFVR recruiting office opened in Rochester he applied to join. He learned to fly, was called up in September and did his stint of square-bashing at St Leonards before passing on to No. 6 Flying Training School at Little Rissington. He remembered later that ‘when Dunkirk happened we shot through the final stages at a rate of knots’.8 Waiting at Catterick station for a ride to the base, he was asked by a corporal whether he was there as a replacement for the pilots the squadron had lost at Dunkirk. It was the first time he heard that the unit had taken part in the action. When he arrived he was pleasantly surprised to find three of his friends from Little Rissington had also been posted directly to the squadron: Pilot Officer Gerry Langley, Sergeant Johnny McAdam, another Kent boy, and Pilot Officer Eric Lock. All of them had come from the RAFVR. Only Usmar was to survive the war.

  The four had never flown anything faster than a Harvard. A Spitfire was sent down to a nearby bomber station deemed to have a less tricky runway than Catterick for them to practice on. After three satisfactory landings they were considered competent. From then until the end of July they flew with the squadron on its daily routine, which mostly consisted of convoy patrols.

  As new pilots were coming in at the bottom of the squadron structures, changes were also taking place at the top. Before the fighting in France began it was possible to command a squadron without necessarily flying with it. This was a legacy of the First World War, when a squadron leader’s duties were not restricted to operations but extended to the whole responsibility of supervising a fighting unit. In the Battle of France, commanding officers did fly into battle with their men, particularly as the fighting intensified during the blitzkrieg, but initially squadrons were led by their flight commanders. Now it was obvious that, to provide proper leadership, a commander’s place was in the air.

  The demise of officers like Squadron Leader Stephenson of 19 Squadron and Drogo White of 74 Squadron also suggested that veteran pre-war officers, despite their seniority and flying skills, were
not necessarily best suited to lead. Despite the evidence, appointments of senior pilots who were rich in ability but inexperienced in combat continued to be made over the claims of younger pilots who knew the reality of air fighting. The obvious internal choice to replace Stephenson was Flight Lieutenant Brian ‘Sandy’ Lane. He was twenty-two years old, and had gone to St Paul’s public school. He joined the RAF after losing a dead-end job as a supervisor in an electric-light bulb factory. He was tall and good looking with permanent dark circles under his eyes which gave him a misleading slightly dissolute look. His fellow pilots loved him for his energy and cheerfulness. His leadership qualities were recognized in the decision to give him temporary command after Stephenson was shot down, but Flight Lieutenant Philip Pinkham was chosen as the new squadron leader instead. Pinkham had been with the Meteorological Flight, a sure sign of exceptional flying talent. After taking over, though, he played little part in operations until the beginning of September. The squadron had been chosen to test the claims of cannon over machine guns as a more effective fighter armament, and he was preoccupied with supervising what turned out to be a difficult experiment. Barely had the task been completed than Pinkham was dead, shot down and killed by Me 109s over the Thames estuary in a suicidally misconceived attack. This time Lane was given command.

  In some cases, commanders demonstrated as soon as they were tested that they were not up to the job. On 30 May, 609 Squadron was detailed to fly off from Biggin Hill to patrol over the Dunkirk beaches. It was led by Dudley Persse-Joynt, a flight lieutenant, the commander having chosen to fly as an ordinary pilot with green section. On the journey out, green section put down at Manston on the North Foreland and proceeded no further. Stephen Beaumont’s diary entry noting this incident was followed by the word, ‘why?’9 After this inauspicious debut, the squadron leader played no further part in operations. He had taken over in January as the Air Ministry’s second choice after the first candidate was injured in a car crash. He had previously belonged to another auxiliary squadron, and arrived without having done a conversion course to monoplane fighters. Beaumont noticed early on that he demonstrated no great enthusiasm for flying. One spring afternoon he invited him to join him flying two of the squadron Spitfires. ‘The CO showed himself to be competent and held formation steadily, but showed no desire to repeat the performance.’

  By the end of June he had been quietly shunted out. Beaumont, a charitable man, wrote many years later that ‘no leader of a fighting squadron can ever have had less impact on it. We hardly saw him at all either at the flight dispersals or even in the mess.’ He added that he could ‘now feel sorry for him rather than blame him…I can feel some sympathy for him as he must have realized that he was unfitted for his post, but none because he never tried to act to his responsibilities.’ Some blamed his lack of leadership for the heavy losses the squadron was to sustain in its disappointing intervention at Dunkirk. Others held the Air Ministry responsible for appointing such an unsuitable officer.

  The insouciance of the pre-war days was badly dented by 609’s experiences at Dunkirk. Four of the first pilots to join were killed. Persse-Joynt, one of the set of wealthy and well-connected Yorkshire friends at the core of the squadron, failed to return from a patrol on 31 May. John Gilbert, a convivial bachelor known as the ‘pink boozer’ because of his fresh complexion and taste for beer, disappeared with him. Desmond Ayre, a mining engineer in one of the Peake collieries, crashed to his death after apparently running out of fuel, and Joe Dawson was shot down on 1 June.

  It was obvious that the auxiliary ethos of amateurism, albeit of a dedicated kind, and the quasi-familial bonds of place and friendship could not survive the new circumstances for long. On 22 June the squadron got a new commander. George Darley was a great contrast to his hapless predecessor. He was twenty-seven years old, a short-service entrant who had become a regular. Darley had no trouble making the adjustment from peace to war. He already had wide experience, ranging from operations in Aden to controlling duties in Britain and France. He knew the auxiliary system intimately, having been adjutant and flying instructor to two units. He said later that he assumed his appointment arose from his ‘awareness of problems peculiar to such squadrons, which were small squadrons of personal friends who had probably grown up together, and in which losses were particularly keenly felt’. On his arrival he found ‘the general atmosphere in 609 was depressed, which did not help the younger pilots’. He set about trying to ‘restore morale by improving the kill/loss ratio’.10

  This robust assessment was typical of Darley’s approach. Beaumont judged him ‘not a man who radiated charm, superficial or not’. Disappointed at their performance and cast down by the loss of friends, the pilots were at first annoyed rather than inspired by Darley’s determination to rebuild the squadron spirit and get back into the fighting. Flying Officer Charles Overton remembered that ‘initially we couldn’t stand the sight of the man’. It was not long, though, before ‘our attitude changed to great respect for what he was doing for all of us’.

  Darley decided early on that the older pilots would have to go. Beaumont, now over thirty, was ‘inwardly relieved’ when he heard the news. ‘I knew that I was really not suitable as a fighter pilot, let alone a flight commander, but I do not think any of my contemporaries would say I did not try.’ The original composition of the squadron had already been altered during the phoney war by the arrival of short-service commission officers and the first of the RAFVR pilots. By the end of the autumn, the core of pre-war members was gone, most of them dead. The same process overtook all the auxiliary squadrons. By the time of the high-summer fighting, death and shared danger had melted most of the pre-war distinctions.

  Darley also put his men through a heavy training programme of mock attacks with himself acting the part of the enemy. A lull in the fighting gave the squadrons a chance to practise and to try and apply the lessons of the recent fighting. No attempt was made to pool the hard-won information gathered in combat, let alone to analyse it and use the findings to refine tactics. Intelligence officers restricted themselves to trying to establish the veracity of claims. It was up to squadrons to work out their own approaches. Despite the redundancy of the old system, the temptation was to use it as a starting point in coming up with new solutions. ‘We practised a wing formation with the Hurricane squadron yesterday, eighteen machines in formation,’ wrote Pilot Officer John Carpenter to his parents from 222 Squadron’s base in Kirton-in-Lindsey. ‘I have been told that it was quite good from the ground.’

  Denis Wissler, back from leave after his stint in France and with 17 Squadron at Debden, applied himself with a particular dedication to training, only too aware of his lack of success and touchingly determined to do well. For a week he spent every day practising formation flying and some new attacks evolved by the squadron, which ‘did not work out too well’. But it was still air drill that appeared to matter most. On Friday, 28 June, after two flying sessions in front of an audience of senior officers, he thought his formation flying was ‘pretty good but apparently the CO and wing commander thought I was the weak link, though the CO didn’t say it was really bad’. Wissler confided to his diary that he was ‘a bit browned off at the moment. We were suddenly called to readiness at 9.15 p.m. and weren’t released until 10.35 and now we have to get up at 3 a.m. tomorrow.’ The pattern was to continue until the end of the month.

  The heightened state of alert was in response to the resumption of Luftwaffe activity. From the middle of the month Goering launched regular small raids, mostly at night. The bombs did little serious damage. The main purpose seems to have been to unsettle a population which suddenly found itself in the front line, and to probe the effectiveness of the air defences.

  As if on cue, several attacks had been mounted on the warm evening that followed Churchill’s great speech. As night fell, groups of German bombers set off across the North Sea, arriving in the early hours of the morning, and scattered bombs haphazardly on towns in eight
counties in East Anglia and the north, killing twelve civilians and injuring thirty. Blenheim twin-engined fighters from Wittering in the East Midlands went up to meet them. One was shot down by a Heinkel, which in turn was destroyed by Flight Lieutenant Raymond Duke-Woolley, an ex-Cranwellian from 23 Squadron.

  To the south the searchlight batteries around Southend at the mouth of the Thames picked up a formation of bombers. Sailor Malan, with 74 Squadron at Rochford, was in bed. He heard the bombs falling from the direction of Westcliff-on-Sea, where his wife Lynda had just given birth to their first son, Jonathan. Malan stood outside, watching the raid and getting increasingly agitated at the rumble of falling bombs. Normally, night interceptions were considered risky from bases in the area because of the danger from anti-aircraft artillery along the coast and around the Thames estuary. But it was a clear night and the moon was nearly full and Malan was worried. He asked for permission to attack the raiders, which was eventually granted. Shortly after midnight he took off and, climbing to 8,000 feet, found a Heinkel 111 held in the beam of the battery searchlights. Closing in from behind he signalled to the ground that he was in a position to attack, and when the anti-aircraft guns stopped he opened fire. There was only time for a three-second burst before he had to break away to avoid collision. As he pushed his Spitfire into a steep dive, the windscreen was smothered in oil from the stricken bomber, which crashed on to the beach. Turning back, he saw another Heinkel caught in a cone of light above him. He approached it cautiously, opening fire at 200 yards. It caught fire and sank from the sky, landing in a vicarage garden near Chelmsford in an eruption of flame that was seen for miles around.