Set against this the RAF could muster only 504 battleworthy Hurricanes and Spitfires, as well as 27 two-man Boulton Paul Defiants. The lack of aircraft was matched by a shortage of pilots. On 1 July, Dowding had 1,069 pilots to fly his aeroplanes. That meant two pilots for each aeroplane. This healthy-looking equation took no account of inevitable losses through death and injury. He cast around for volunteers from other branches of the service and borrowed fifty-two pilots from the Fleet Air Arm. But there were far too few to sustain a war of attrition.
The battle for the Channel, the Kanalkampf as the Luftwaffe called it, opened on 3 July. The Luftwaffe moved tentatively at first, sending only fifty aeroplanes that day towards Britain. About a quarter of these were on reconnaissance missions, trying to photograph airfields and ports as part of the intelligence preparations for the main attacks. A small group of Dornier 17s appeared over Manston, a forward airfield perched on an exposed patch of flat land on the North Foreland, and dropped a few bombs before being chased away by the arrival of Spitfires from 54 Squadron. In the north, 603 Squadron destroyed three Ju 88 bombers in separate incidents. The day’s total of five enemy aircraft shot down was a poor return for the effort involved. Twenty-eight squadrons had flown more than 120 patrols, a total of 570 individual sorties.
The following day the Luftwaffe launched the first serious attack. The opening raid lasted four minutes. Thirty-three Stukas appeared at breakfast time in the misty sky over Portland on the Dorset coast. They were the best known and the most feared of the German aeroplanes. They were the chief symbol of blitzkrieg, howling down in near vertical dives, releasing their one large and four small bombs on bridges, rail junctions or human beings with terrible accuracy. The first doubts about their vulnerability had been raised at Dunkirk, where British fighters found their lack of speed made them relatively easy to knock down. But they seemed impressive enough on the second day of the Kanalkampf as they plunged on ships and installations in the naval base, sinking an anti-aircraft ship and setting a tanker on fire in Weymouth Bay.
By the time fighters arrived from the nearest base, Warmwell, they were long gone. At 2 p.m. the Germans came again. Two groups of Dornier 17s escorted by thirty Me 109s pounced on a nine-ship convoy as it moved through the Straits of Dover. Eight Hurricanes from 79 Squadron were scrambled from Hawkinge, another forward field a few miles south of Manston, but as they engaged the raiders they were bounced by the Messerschmitt escort above and one pilot was shot down over St Margaret’s Bay and killed. In addition, small groups of German fighters were given the freedom to roam on ‘free hunting’ sweeps over the coast, looking for targets of opportunity and daring the British fighters to come up and challenge them. A patrol from 54 Squadron was surprised by one such group of Me 109s which appeared out of cloud, shot up two of the aeroplanes and disappeared, anxious to get back to their French airfields within the fifteen to twenty minutes that was all that their fuel capacity allowed them over target.
Patrolling was wasteful and ultimately unsustainable, given Fighter Command’s strictly limited resources. Dowding had not expected to have to protect shipping and had told both the Admiralty and the Air Staff that his fighters could provide only limited help. Radar’s usefulness in providing a warning and allowing assets to be deployed more effectively was restricted by the fact that the raiders could form up inland beyond the range of the transmitters. It took less than ten minutes to get across the Channel from the Pas de Calais, but Hurricanes and Spitfires needed a quarter of an hour to climb high enough to attack them effectively. One response was to move the squadrons to forward operating bases so they would be nearer the attackers. But this meant they would have even less time to gain vital altitude.
Dowding had guessed the German thinking correctly. He had to avoid being drawn into an engagement that would leave Fighter Command’s pilots exhausted and its aircraft depleted before the main attack was launched. Only token cover was provided for the convoys. Park, the 11 Group commander, ordered his pilots to avoid challenging the German fighters roaming provocatively twenty and thirty miles inland from the Channel. But even with this prudent approach, casualties were unavoidable. On Sunday, 7 July, six fighters were shot down and four pilots killed.
The following day a thick cushion of cloud was piled up over the Channel, providing the Luftwaffe with limitless cover for attacks on shipping. With several convoys scheduled to move through the waters off the south and south-east of England, there were plenty of targets to choose from. A large convoy had set off from the Thames early in the morning and was due to pass Dover after midday. Radar reported intense air activity over Calais and Park ordered up patrols in the area. A section from 610 Squadron at Biggin Hill met the convoy in the early afternoon in time to intercept a group of unescorted Dornier 17s, which it attacked, forcing them to drop their bombs harmlessly in the sea. In the encounter Pilot Officer A. Raven was shot down. He was seen swimming away from his Spitfire, but apparently drowned. Nine Hurricanes from 79 Squadron were sent from Hawkinge to take over. Soon after getting airborne, they were swooped on by Me 109s engaged in a free hunt over the Kent coast. Pilot Officer J. Wood was shot down in flames; he managed to bale out but burnt to death while descending. Flying Officer E. Mitchell crashed to earth behind Dover and was immolated in the subsequent fire, which blazed for an hour. No. 79 Squadron had been in action almost continuously since the Battle of France and its men were exhausted. Three days later they were moved far away from the fighting to Sealand, in Cheshire, to recover.
Despite the fact that serious fighting had barely started, some units were already heavily depleted. On 9 July, 54 Squadron lost two pilots, Pilot Officers Garton and Evershed, bringing the total of casualties to six dead and two injured in ten days. The death of Garton had been particularly distressing. ‘Prof Leathart’ last heard him over the R/T, screaming that he was on fire and being chased by four Germans. Evershed had been considered a promising pilot and a potential leader.
The losses meant, the squadron diary recorded, that it ‘could only muster eight aircraft and thirteen pilots’. Al Deere narrowly escaped being killed on the same day Garton and Evershed died. On his fourth trip of the day he was leading his flight out to sea to investigate a report of enemy air activity and saw a silver seaplane apparently on a reconnaissance mission, escorted by Me 109s. He managed to shoot one of the fighters down and turned towards another. The pilot swung round to face him and the two machines powered head-on towards each other. ‘We opened fire together and immediately a hail of lead thudded into my Spitfire. One moment the Messerschmitt was a clearly defined shape, its wingspan nicely enclosed within the circle of my reflector sight, and the next it was on top of me, a terrifying blur which blotted out the sky ahead. Then we hit.’2
Deere’s engine was on fire and seized up, leaving the airscrew immobile. To his amazement he realized that the blades were bent almost double with the impact of the collision. He yanked at the toggle that released the cockpit hood, but it was stuck fast. His only hope lay in a crash-landing. Half-blinded by smoke, he nursed the aeroplane over land and, before coming to rest on the edge of a cornfield, flopped it down in a great rending of splintering timber from the wooden posts planted in the ground to deter Germans landing. With the strength of desperation, he punched at the Perspex hood until it smashed open and then hauled himself out, sucking in lungfuls of fresh air.
His fists were cut and bleeding, his hair and eyebrows singed and both knees badly bruised from where they had been dashed against the instrument panel when his seat broke free in the collision. Rejoining the squadron at Rochford next day, he was asked if he was fit enough to fly. ‘Frankly I had hoped for a day or two off the station, perhaps a quick sortie to London,’ he wrote later. ‘I was pretty sore and a bit shaken but quite obviously I couldn’t be spared.’
Deere’s commander, Leathart, admitted that he, too, was exhausted and hoping fervently that they would be taken out of the line before long. The calculation of how much fl
ying a squadron could endure and how many losses it could sustain before its morale buckled and it became ineffective was a fine one, and a peculiar combination of ruthlessness and sensitivity was needed to judge it correctly. The decision, in the case of 54 Squadron, belonged to Dowding and Park, both of whom were trusted by their pilots. Dowding was approaching sixty. He had come to flying late, qualifying as a pilot in 1914 after serving around the fringes of the empire in the artillery. With his feathery moustache and pained demeanour he was an unlikely aviator, but he had a good war with the RFC in France, serving as a squadron leader and ending up a brigadier general. Dowding had a dashing side. Apart from flying, a dangerous and romantic occupation when he took it up, he was a good and brave skiier. In general, though, he seemed grave, careworn and short of friends – ‘stuffy’ as the universal nickname acknowledged. The loss of his wife after only two years of marriage and the responsibility of bringing up their son, Derek, himself a Fighter Command pilot with 74 Squadron, added another layer of seriousness to a solemn nature. These were not traits normally appreciated by fighter pilots. Then and later, though, his ‘Dear Fighter Boys’, as he addressed them, felt affection for him, and more importantly assurance. ‘Even junior people like myself had enormous confidence in him,’ Christopher Foxley-Norris said later. ‘He was a father figure. You felt that as long as his hand was on the tiller all was going to be well.’3 Dowding in turn felt a strong paternal bond with his men. Later on, when he turned to spiritualism, he claimed to be in communication with the souls of dead pilots.
The women who worked with Dowding at his headquarters at Bentley Priory could sense warmth behind the stiffness. ‘We all admired our Stuffy enormously,’ said Elizabeth Quayle, a Waaf operations room plotter. ‘We had great loyalty to him. I think you might call it affection. He built up a tremendous esprit de corps among us. He was very remote, but if you met him he was always very considerate.’4 These qualities did not necessarily recommend him to his senior colleagues and superiors. Dowding’s heavily worn sense of duty and touch of lugubriousness – what Trenchard had called his ‘dismal Jimmy’ side – brought out the bully in some of those above and around him. When his big work was over, he would be disposed of with a bad grace that dismayed the men and women who served under him.
Keith Park was less taut, more approachable, but still someone who glowed with discipline and purpose. He was a New Zealander who had been wounded at Gallipoli, then transferred to the RFC in France, where he shot down twenty Germans. He made a point of showing himself to his men in 11 Group, flying around the bases in his own Hurricane, listening rather than talking. Many seem to have seen the long, lined face, which made him look much older than forty-four, at some time during the summer months of 1940.
Dowding’s chronic lack of pilots was alleviated a little by the arrival of foreign airmen now entering the system. Most were Polish pilots, a large number of whom had managed to escape through Romania at the end of 1939 and made their way to France, where they carried on fighting. Altogether 145 of them served in Fighter Command between July and October 1940. Billy Drake, after recovering from his injuries, helped to train them up. He found them, as most did in the RAF, ‘very independent minded. They were all a touch older than we were and a touch more experienced.’ They could also ‘be a handful…they wouldn’t take any orders except from their own people’.5
Discipline was less strict in the Polish air force, and divisions between ranks less marked. Officers and crews socialized with each other in a way never seen in a British squadron. The reputation for hot-headedness and indifference to air drill was soon established and stuck with them until long after the war. Language difficulties explained some of the Poles’ alleged reluctance to follow orders. There were also deeper reasons. Experienced pilots were unhappy with the formation tactics that persisted throughout the summer, believing them to be stupid and dangerous. Contrary to another popular myth, the Poles were not particularly reckless, and their casualty ratios were in line with those of British pilots. It was true, though, that they hated the Germans with an un-Anglo-Saxon vehemence. Some pilots found this aggression admirable. To others it could seem embarrassing, even distasteful. Stories circulated accusing Polish pilots of shooting at Germans as they floated down on parachutes, but there is little hard evidence to show this was a regular practice. The leading historian of the Polish air force in Britain, Adam Zamoyski, does concede that ‘it is true that some pilots finished off parachuting Germans by flying directly over them; the slipstream would cause the parachute to cannon and the man would fall to the ground like a stone’.6
Given the differences of language, culture and approach, the Poles and the other Continental pilots, Czechs, Belgians and French, fitted surprisingly easily into the fabric of the fighter squadrons. British pilots did not try to master the consonant clusters of the Slavic names, simplifying and jollifying them instead, so that Karol Pniak and Boleslaw Wlasnowalski, two of the three Polish pilots who joined 32 Squadron, became ‘Cognac’ and ‘Vodka’, and the new soubriquets slotted democratically in alongside the other squadron nicknames. Pete Brothers found the newcomers ‘very good value…socially everybody mixed in’. However, there was some unease when a German pilot who had been shot down was brought to Biggin Hill. ‘The police captured the chap and stuck him in our guardroom,’ he said. ‘In the evening we were still at readiness in the dispersal hut and we had him brought over. We had the wing of a 109 propped up against the hut, which [Flying Officer Rupert Smythe] had shot down…He’d come back to Biggin Hill with it on the roof of a car. We said to the German, “One of your 109s,” but he wasn’t going to commit himself. We had a chat to him in dispersal and decided we’d better keep our eyes on the Poles, who were sitting all three together some distance away. We thought, “If we take our eyes off them they’ll probably murder him,” which I would have done, given the chance in their circumstances, most certainly.’ The German, who spoke English, was led away for a drink in the mess. ‘He said could he have paper and a pencil. We said, “Why?” He said, “I want to write all your names down because tomorrow the Luftwaffe will blacken the skies, you will have lost and I want to make sure you are all well-treated.” He couldn’t understand why we fell off our stools laughing.’7
Not all foreigners in 32 Squadron were popular. Comte Rudolphe de Hemricourt de Grunne was a twenty-eight-year-old Belgian who had gone to Spain and fought for Franco as a pilot in the civil war alongside the Luftwaffe. He claimed to have shot down fourteen Republican aircraft. He later joined the Belgian air force, and when the country was overrun made his way to Britain. He arrived at Biggin Hill early in August. Brothers considered him to be not a ‘Nazi sympathizer so much as a mercenary’, but he was regarded as too boastful for the squadron’s liking. The 32 Squadron pilots were very impressed when he told them he had flown an Me 109 in Spain and they expected him to have no problems when encountering one from the other side. He managed to shoot one down on his second day in action, but a week later was shot down by another, an event that caused some amusement. De Grunne was to meet his death at the hands of a 109, drowned after a fight over the Channel in May 1942.
Virtually every squadron was enriched by a dash of overseas blood. Of the 2,917 airmen who flew in Fighter Command between 10 July and the end of October 1940, 2,334 were British, 145 were Polish, 126 from New Zealand, 98 from Canada, 88 from Czechoslovakia, 33 from Australia, 29 from Belgium, 25 from South Africa, 13 from France, 11 from the United States, 10 from Ireland, 3 from Rhodesia and 1 each from Jamaica and Newfoundland. Some pilots liked the mix of nationalities. With him in 92 Squadron Tony Bartley had South Africans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. ‘I felt,’ he said later, ‘that when someone lacked something, the other compensated for it, because of the different part of the world they came from…We had Czechs and Poles who were very brave and we had a Frenchman…Together it made an absolutely indestructible team…Everybody’s morale was [compensated] by each others. The whole thing,
put together, was undefeatable.’8 Dowding was less convinced, at least as far as the Poles were concerned. He worried about their numbers diluting squadron identities and from the end of July began making plans for separate Polish squadrons.
Manpower was more of a concern than machines. The appointment of Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Air Production in May had an almost immediate effect in galvanizing manufacture, and by July the flow of Hurricanes and Spitfires off the production lines was sufficient to keep pace with losses. The fighters had proved their flying ability against the aircraft of the Luftwaffe. But the early summer fighting had increased doubts about the effectiveness of the British fighters’ armament of eight machine-guns when compared to the combination of cannon and machine-guns carried by the Me 109.
The Colt-Browning guns in the Hurricanes and Spitfires carried 2,660 rounds in total, enough for fourteen seconds’ firing. The bullets were only 7.7 mm in calibre, the same as the ones used by infantrymen, though the introduction of the De Wilde incendiary type had increased their effectiveness. The Me 109 had two wing-mounted Oerlikon cannon and two 7.9 mm machine-guns sited above the engine. There was only enough room in the wings to carry sixty cannon rounds per gun, but they were 20 mm in calibre and usually explosive. The machine-guns each carried 1,000 rounds.
It seemed clear early on that the Me 109 carried the heavier punch. It has been calculated that a three-second burst from an RAF fighter weighed about thirteen pounds. In the same time a Messerschmitt could deliver eighteen pounds.9 The rate of cannon fire was much slower – only 520 rounds a minute against 1,200 for a machine-gun – but the shells exploded on impact and one or two hits could bring down a metal-skinned Spitfire (though the Hurricane’s old-fashioned fuselage construction of struts, formers and fabric made it less vulnerable). This was an advantage in circumstances where a fighter pilot chasing another fighter pilot could expect to have his target in his sights for only a few seconds. To be effective, machine-gun fire needed to smash the engine, set it on fire, shoot off a vital control or kill the pilot. The greater size of the bombers, with their extra structural strength and armour plating, meant that thousands of rounds fired by several fighters might be needed to bring one down. One of the most dispiriting experiences a fighter pilot could have, captured on many a camera-gun sequence, was to catch and hold a bomber in a perfect deflection shot only to watch it cruise blithely through the blizzard of tracer.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 28