Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  Finding bombers in the darkness on any but the brightest moonlit nights was a near-impossible task. When it happened it was often as much the result of luck as of skill or science. On the evening of 19 June, Tim Vigors invited a Waaf from the Kirton-in-Lindsey control room to dinner at a restaurant in Lincoln. It was a Saturday night. They set off in his Ford 8, with his lurcher, Snipe, in the back. Dinner was followed by drinks at the King’s Head, the RAF pub in the area, where he ran into some bomber pilots and ‘got seriously stuck into the beer’. Vigors prided himself on his ability to stop drinking before his capacity to walk or drive became impaired. That night this gift failed him. ‘With great care, I steered my way on to the dead-straight road which leads north from Lincoln towards Kirton-in-Lindsey,’ he wrote later. ‘My blacked-out headlights only showed the road about twenty yards ahead. Mercifully the local council had had the foresight to paint a broken white line down the middle of the road. Fixing this line between my right headlight and the mascot of a racehorse on the front of the bonnet, I proceeded slowly and carefully up the road. I didn’t talk much and nor did my companion. I knew I was too drunk to concentrate on anything but driving.’

  After dropping off his dinner date he donned a pair of bright-red pyjamas and slid gratefully into bed. Sleep was prevented by an attack of what he called ‘bedspin’, known to non-aviators as ‘the phantom pilots’. While he was struggling to control it, a message was broadcast on the Tannoy in the corridor outside his room, calling for one pilot from 222 Squadron to report immediately to dispersal. Vigors, for reasons he was later hard pressed to explain, decided to volunteer. ‘ “Hell,” I said to Snipe. “Anything’s better than this. Let’s go and see what the flap is.” I staggered off the bed, slid into my green silk dressing gown, donned my flying boots and weaved my way back to the car. Snipe followed, looking rather bemused. Even with maximum concentration on the drive to dispersal my path was alarmingly erratic.’

  His rigger was waiting for him with a parachute. He urged Vigors to get airborne quickly as a large number of ‘Huns’ had just crossed the coast. ‘My rigger jumped on the wing and handed me my helmet. I pulled it over my head, connected the oxygen and turned it on full blast. Somewhere along the line I had learnt that the best cure for a hangover was a strong dose of oxygen. I hoped fervently that it would have the same effect on bedspin.’

  Somehow he got airborne and waited for control to vector him towards the raiders. No orders came. The radio was dead. Desperation dispelled the fog of alcohol. Without instructions from the ground there was no hope of intercepting any enemy aircraft. The obvious thing to do was to land as quickly as possible. He started to turn back the way he had come, maintaining the same speed, hoping this would bring him back to Kirton. Swinging round he saw the silhouette of another aircraft crossing the moon. It had two engines and was clearly one of the returning German bombers. Vigors moved behind and underneath the tail and opened fire. Soon its port engine was belching black smoke and it went into a screaming dive towards the cloud below. He had shot down a Heinkel 111.

  Elation at this success was dampened quickly by the realization that he was now miles off course with no means of finding his way home. He decided to descend through the thick cloud, hoping that when he emerged he might spot the runway lights of one of the bomber bases in the area switched on to guide its night-flying aircraft home. At 700 feet, still blanketed in murk, he was on the point of climbing again in order to bale out when he broke through the bottom of the cloud. In front of him, glimmering out of the flat black of Lincolnshire, were the lights of a flarepath. He landed, exhausted and deeply relieved, to find he was at Barkston, a grass field he knew from his Cranwell days. The first person to greet him was one of his old instructors, who took his pyjama-clad protégé off for a drink.11

  Malan’s double success pushed him further into the public eye. Fighter pilots had now moved into the centre of the national consciousness as the importance of their role, underlined by Churchill, was recognized. The men of Fighter Command were engaged in the essential warrior task, defending their loved ones and homes from marauders, and they were doing it over the roofs of those they were protecting. This was enough to make them heroes. The stylish way they did their duty added a further layer of lustre.

  The Fighter Boys were extraordinarily good for morale. It was important that they were properly rewarded. In the aftermath of the May and June fighting, the medals began to arrive in quantity. On 27 June, King George VI went to Hornchurch to present a batch to a group of pilots who had emerged from the anonymity of their squadrons and were on the way to becoming national figures. Al Deere, Sailor Malan, Bob Tuck and Johnny Allen all received the Distinguished Flying Cross for gallantry in the face of the enemy. James ‘Prof Leathart was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. The ceremony took place on a warm sunny morning. Afterwards the king took sherry with the pilots in the officers’ mess and chatted with them about the relative performances of the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt, a subject on everybody’s minds. Deere was particularly proud. ‘As a New Zealander, brought up to admire the Mother country and respect the King as her head, it was the honour of a lifetime, an ultimate milestone of my flying ambitions – the Distinguished Flying Cross presented by the king, in the field of action.’12 Afterwards, on the spur of the moment, the pilots rushed from the mess and lined up along the drive leading to the main gates to salute the royal visitor as he drove off. Underneath the top dressing of irony there was simple, solid patriotism.

  Malan, Deere and Tuck were now almost famous, following behind the brief comet trail of glory blazed by Cobber Kain. Kain was not forgotten. He had been on the point of getting married, just before his death, to an actress, Joyce Phillips. His mother and sister Judy were on their way by ship to England for the wedding when the accident happened. A photograph in the Daily Express showed the two young women meeting for the first time. The caption reported that ‘the two girls talked of Cobber and themselves. They played on the piano “Somewhere in France with You”.’

  Some pilots had put off thoughts of matrimony to avoid just such melancholy situations. Harold Bird-Wilson had never forgotten what happened after five members of 17 Squadron were shot down on their first patrol over northern France. When the unit withdrew to England, ‘the wives of the missing people came daily to the officers’ mess and hung around waiting for information as to the return of their husbands…some of us vowed that we wouldn’t marry until things calmed down.’ One of the missing made it home. Another was a prisoner. The other three were dead.13

  The war had come at a very inconvenient time for Charles Fenwick. He was in love with Bunny, a dark-haired girl with smiling eyes whose good nature shines out from the old photographs. Motoring up to London from his boring initial training stint at St Leonards once a month was, he wrote to his mother ‘the only thing that makes life bearable…then for a few hours everything is heaven’.14 They went to shows and ate at the Strand Palace Grillroom ‘very well indeed’. By the end of July he had made up his mind, and wrote to tell his father.

  Before I joined the war I had little chance of meeting many girls. Since then I have had plenty and have made the most of them to see if I was as completely in love with Bunny as I had thought. To cut a long story short, of all the varied types of girls I have met they one and all either bored me to sobs or made me feel slightly sick, particularly if I kissed any of them, not through any lack of physical attraction on their part but just because I loved somebody else. Now after all this time of ‘trial and error’ I am completely convinced that my love is no passing breeze. That being so I will tell you what I would be glad to have your opinion on. The desire of both of us is needless to say to get married, the question is when.

  The answer, of course, was as soon as possible. He asked his father to let him know ‘which side of the balance your vote will go in’. His father wrote back sympathetically, but argued firmly against matrimony. Fenwick was unhappy, but he submitted. ‘Dear Pa,’ he
wrote a few weeks later. ‘Thanks. You win, you brought me out of a spin and I’ve come down to earth all intact although just a bit shaken.’

  Women, and wives in particular, complicated things. When Fred Rosier took over 229 Squadron, based at Northolt, later in the year he ‘found that the wives of some of the chaps were living in the vicinity…It wasn’t long before I stopped chaps living out. And I said it would be better if their wives moved, because it was affecting, I thought, morale, in that these wives would count the number of aeroplanes leaving and the number of aeroplanes coming back, and were on the telephone to see if Willy was all right. It was far better when we were all living together and in the mess and developing a first-class squadron spirit.’15

  June drew to an end in an atmosphere charged with anticipation. The countryside was littered with chopped-down trees and derelict cars pushed into fields to block the arrival of the Germans. Overhead, flabby barrage balloons rolled in the warm air. Odd incidents betrayed the tension. At Debden an aircraftman who had never piloted an aeroplane in his life took off in a Hurricane, flew over the airfield and plunged to the ground, killing himself. In the dispersal hut of 72 Squadron at Acklington a sergeant pilot woke up everyone in the dispersal hut, shouting challenges to the German paratroopers he dreamt had just landed.

  It was hot, as memorably hot as another summer month in the not very distant past: August 1914. One bright morning a legendary figure from that era descended on the pilots of 72 Squadron at their base at Acklington on the coast of Northumberland. ‘We were honoured by the company of “The Father of the Royal Air Force”,’ the squadron diarist recorded. ‘We were all lined up at dispersal standing there in the blistering sun and his very first gesture was to dismiss the parade – suggesting we all squatted down in the shade of the nearby trees. Sitting on the ground, too, he spoke of [the] activities of World War I, associating the duties and responsibilities of the airmen then with those that faced us at present – with the encouraging conclusion that there was no doubt in his mind that we would win through again.16

  11

  The Channel Battle

  A few weeks after Trenchard’s visit, three Spitfires from 72 Squadron were ordered off to investigate an unusual aircraft which had appeared near a convoy steaming off Sunderland. It was a Heinkel He 59 biplane, equipped with floats, and was painted white and adorned with red crosses. Undeterred by the innocent-looking markings, Flight Lieutenant Ted Graham led the aircraft into line astern and attacked, spattering the seaplane with 2,500 rounds. It crash-landed close to the beach and its four-man crew was captured by an escorting cruiser. Graham had been right to ignore the red crosses. The aircraft carried cameras and was on a reconnaissance mission.

  The little victory of 72 Squadron, though it did not know it, was an indication of the new direction the air war was taking. Trenchard had been wrong on that hot morning when he linked the duties and responsibilities of the First World War airmen with those of the pilots sitting in the shade at his feet. The task facing them was very different from the one carried out by the RFC on the Western Front, and the burden they would have to carry was much greater. The duels over the trench lines in the First World War were an adjunct to the main military effort and decided nothing. Fighter Command was entering a battle that would decide everything.

  The German forces had been allowed a short period of relative relaxation after conquering France. It was time now for them to deal with Britain. The question of how this was to be done had never been clear. Different commanders in different services held strong and conflicting views. Hitler himself had not devoted much time to the subject, having always hoped he could negotiate an agreement with the British government that would leave him free to rule Europe unmolested. When the collapse of France failed to weaken the will to resist, it seemed that Britain would have to be forced into submission.

  Hitler announced his intentions in Order No. 16, issued on 16 July, which stated: ‘Since England has still not given any sign of being prepared to reach an agreement, despite her militarily hopeless position, I have decided to prepare an operation to invade England and if this becomes necessary, to carry it through. The objective of this operation is to eliminate the English home country as a base for the continuation of the war against Germany and, if this should become unavoidable, to occupy it fully.’

  With these words ‘Operation Sea Lion’ officially came into being. Various invasion plans has been drawn up by the German navy and army since the start of the war. Initial doubts as to the feasibility of the exercise had largely dissolved in the intoxication of victory. Even sceptics like the naval commander Grand Admiral Raeder none the less hoped, as Hitler appeared to, that a combination of blockade and aerial bombardment could, on its own, crack British resistance, removing the necessity for an opposed landing. What the German High Command all agreed upon was that the defeat of Britain, whether through invasion or being battered from the skies, depended on German command of the air. That made the destruction of the Royal Air Force a precondition of success. Hitler spelled it out. A prerequisite of the landing, he wrote in his order, was that ‘the English air force must have been beaten down to such an extent morally and in actual fact that it can no longer muster any power of attack worth mentioning against the German crossing’.

  The Hitler directive confirmed an operation that had, in fact, already started. The German Armed Forces Supreme Command (the OKW) had anticipated the next stage of the war and had ordered the Luftwaffe to step up operations. By the beginning of July the air force had the use of the entire North Sea coastline from Norway to France from which to spring attacks. The new phase began with an intensified programme of reconnaissance missions, like the one brought to an end by 72 Squadron, probing defences and photographing potential targets. At first these seemed to be no more than a continuation of the harassing missions that had disturbed the sleep of Fighter Command during June.

  Then a series of attacks on the convoys, scurrying heavily laden through the Channel to deliver as many cargoes as possible while the going was good, announced the overture to the Luftwaffe’s next great symphony of violence. A much earlier Hitler directive issued in November 1939 had envisaged the air force ‘waging war against the English economy’ once the Anglo-French armies had been disposed of. By bombing convoys, the Luftwaffe was engaging economic targets. But they also hoped to lure Fighter Command into a battle of attrition that would wear it down and weaken it before the opening of the main air attack, which would deliver the fatal blow.

  The Luftwaffe operation order of 2 July set two objectives: to close the Channel to British shipping and to clear the air of British fighters. With his usual overconfidence, Goering decided at first that only a limited number of aircraft would be needed. German intelligence, equally inclined to optimism, reckoned it would take between a fortnight and a month to smash the RAF. The job was given to a battle group drawn from Fliegerkorps II, based in the Pas de Calais, and to Fliegerkorps VIII at Le Havre. Oberst (Colonel) Johannes Fink was made Kanalkampf-führer, commander of the air battle over the Channel. He was forty-five years old, sombre, religious and intensely patriotic. He had been one of the five pilots allowed each year to receive flying training under the stringent terms of Versailles. When the order came, he was at the head of a bomber wing, Kampfgeschwader 2, equipped with Dornier 17s, based at Arras some way back from the coast. To this force were added two groups of Stuka dive-bombers and two fighter wings, Jagdgeschwaders 26 and 53. The fighter element was led by Oberst Theo Osterkamp, a First World War veteran who had been shot down by Albert Ball. To close the Channel and grind down the British fighters, Fink had at his disposal seventy-five twin-engine bombers, sixty or more Ju 87 Stukas and about 200 fighters. Down the coast, Fliegerkorps VIII could provide a similar number of Ju 87s and fighters. The unit was commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, ‘the Stuka general’, a cousin of Manfred, who had flown in his unit on the Western Front. Later he had become an energetic advocate of dive-bombing as a b
attle-winning tactic and put his theories convincingly into practice in Spain, where he was responsible for the Guernica atrocity, Poland, Belgium and France.

  Fink set up his headquarters in an old bus on Cap Gris Nez within sight of the White Cliffs of Dover. By the end of the month he had radar, known as Freya, to track ship and aircraft movements and an eavesdropping service which listened in to the radio traffic between RAF sector controllers and fighters. The German air force commanders, pilots and crews were in no doubt about the outcome of the battle ahead of them. Their power, as the chief of operations of Luftflotte 3, Werner Kreipe, wrote later, ‘was now at a zenith…the pilots were highly skilled…Their morale was very high and they were confident of victory.” 1 Standing behind the Channel battlegroup, should it prove insufficient for the job, was the weight of Luftflottes 2 and 3, the Luftwaffe deployment in France. Between them, by the end of July, they had 769 serviceable bombers, 656 Me 109 fighters, 168 Me 110 twin-engined fighters and 316 Ju 87 dive-bombers as well as about 100 reconnaissance aircraft. Many pilots had fought in Spain, Poland and the air battles over France and the Low Countries, and replacements were being turned out of training schools at the rate of 800 a month.