The German bombers had steel plates that offered partial protection to their crews and self-sealing fuel and oil tanks with membranes that melted when the metal was pierced, automatically plugging leaks. But the engines were unprotected from the rear, making an attack from astern the fighter’s most profitable line of approach. If armour plating was fitted to cover this vulnerable spot, shooting down a bomber would become a very difficult task for a fighter armed only with machine-guns. To penetrate armour and redress the balance, cannon were needed.
This realization produced a flurry of belated activity. Experiments had been going on for at least two years to fit cannon to fighters. Formidable engineering problems were involved. The Hispano guns were potentially excellent weapons, with a high muzzle velocity delivering a powerful and penetrating blow, but the fighters’ wings had to be able to absorb the recoil. The armament also needed to be fixed in such a way that the magazines did not create too much drag and impede flying performance. One solution was to fit the guns so they lay on their sides. But this had the effect of slowing the flow of shells to the breech and interfering with the cartridge-ejection system. Also, despite their bulkiness, the magazines held only sixty rounds each, giving the fighter a negligible six seconds of firing time.
These problems were well known. None the less work began on fitting the guns to a new Spitfire type, the Mk IB, with a view to putting them into service. At the end of June the first three were delivered to 19 Squadron at Duxford, which as the most experienced Spitfire squadron in Fighter Command was given the task of trying them out. ‘They had to have special wings with this huge blister on top where the magazine fitted,’ said George Unwin, who was one of the first to fly them. ‘They were absolutely useless. You could only fire [when] absolutely straight and level.’ Pilots found that the mildest G forces were enough to make the nose of the bullet dip and jam in the breech when they pressed the firing button. Air-gunnery tests were very disappointing, with guns misfiring constantly. When the more experienced pilots lined up to shoot at a towed aerial target, only one direct hit was scored.
Dowding was under pressure from the government to send 19 Squadron into action as soon as possible to test the new weapons in battle conditions. He resisted deploying it in the 11 Group area, where it was certain to encounter 109s. In the next six weeks, operating mainly out of Fowlmere in the less hazardous air of 12 Group, the squadron had five encounters with German formations. When the cannon shells struck the raiders they did spectacular damage, shooting away propellers and tailplanes and setting engines ablaze. But virtually every aeroplane suffered stoppages on every outing. On 31 August, eleven Spitfires from the squadron went up to intercept a large force of bombers and fighters to the south. In the clash Flying Officer James Coward was shot up, losing a foot, but managed to bale out. Pilot Officer Raymond Aeberhardt, nineteen years old and new to the squadron, was forced down, turned over on landing and was killed. Again many guns had jammed and only two probable Me 110s could be claimed against the losses.
Squadron Leader Philip Pinkham, who had struggled throughout the summer to make the new armament work, had had enough. Strongly backed by his pilots, he petitioned Dowding for the return of their old machine-gun equipped fighters. ‘The next day the great man was there and he listened to what we had to say,’ George Unwin remembered. ‘He had a miserable face. He said, “I won’t teach you to suck eggs. You shall have your eight-gun Spitfires back by tomorrow morning.” And we did, except that they were all clapped-out Spitfires from an Operational Training Unit, shedding oil all over the windscreen.’10
On the morning of 5 September, Pinkham, who had not flown in the operations of the previous weeks, led his men off in these machines with orders to patrol Hornchurch aerodrome at 15,000 feet. On the way, and while still climbing, they saw a mass of forty bombers escorted by the same number of Me 109s above them to the south, approaching the Thames estuary. Before they could reach them another group of RAF fighters attacked the formation, turning it southwards. To the dismay of some of the experienced pilots, Pinkham ordered five Spitfires to follow him up into the bombers while the rest of the squadron took on the escorts.
They were attacking from almost the worst possible position, lacking height and blinded by the glare from the south. ‘He flew straight into the sun,’ said Unwin later. ‘It was a pretty incompetent thing to do.’ Pinkham was last seen flying towards a group of Dorniers before apparently falling victim to the Messerschmitts. David Cox, a twenty-year-old sergeant who was flying with him that day, described the decision as ‘tactically wrong but morally right…The squadron had been told to intercept this formation which was coming in to attack Hornchurch.’11 What Pinkham should have done, he believed, was to have flown a dog-leg to gain height and bring the squadron in at a speed and position to have taken on both escort and bombers.
Pinkham, though, lacked the tactical experience to see this. He was popular with his men. Cox thought him ‘a very fine chap, a real gentleman. He treated a sergeant pilot the same as he would treat an air marshal’. Born in Wembley and educated at Kilburn Grammar School, he joined the RAF on a short-service commission and as a result of his outstanding flying skills had been selected first for the Meteorological Flight and then posted as an instructor. He was twenty-five when he died. Despite his sense of duty and diligence, his lack of combat experience meant he was a poor choice to command a fighter unit.
The cannon problem was eventually overcome by the installation of a belt-feeding system, a solution that had been under consideration from the outset. The decision to persist with an unpromising experiment meant the squadron had been sent into action with guns that were known to be faulty. Thanks to luck and skill, losses had been relatively small, but it had also deprived Fighter Command of the full use of a seasoned unit which could have inflicted much more damage on the Luftwaffe during the middle passage of the summer if it had been armed with its old weapons.
Despite Dowding’s reluctance to commit resources in the opening stages, the Germans were now arriving in such numbers that it was impossible to ignore them. Fighter doctrine as laid down by the pre-war planners, based on the premise that bombers would arrive unescorted, had been shown to be utterly unrealistic. Unruffled by this failure, the revived analysis by the senior officers of Fighter Command continued to be based on cheerful hypotheses that bore little relation to what was happening in the skies. Pilots were told that ‘whenever possible, fighters should attack enemy bomber formations in equal numbers by astern and quarter attacks at the same level’.12 At the same time the memorandum was written, fighter squadrons routinely found themselves outnumbered by bombers by five or ten to one. As for the accompanying fighters, the same document suggested that half the flight or squadron should ‘draw off their escort and if necessary attack them’.
These instructions were meaningless by the middle of July. On the 13th, six Hurricanes from 56 Squadron led by Flight Lieutenant Jumbo Gracie took off from Manston to protect a convoy coming through the Straits of Dover. Gracie, according to Geoffrey Page, was ‘far from being the popular conception of a fighter pilot. He was fat and pasty and had a high-pitched voice, more of a Billy Bunter than a Knight of the Air.’ Despite his appearance, he was famously energetic and aggressive. The controller told them twenty bombers on their way to attack the ships had been picked up on the radar, protected by sixty fighters flying above them. Grade ordered Pilot Officer Taffy Higginson to take his section off to deal with the bombers. He meanwhile led his section, including Page, up into the midst of the fighters where they prepared to do battle at odds of twenty to one. ‘I suppose with hindsight I should have been scared stupid,’ Page said later. ‘But I think I was so busy getting my aircraft ready, making sure the camera gun was switched on and the safety button on the guns was on “fire”, generally trimming up the aeroplane for the approaching combat. Then suddenly there was this enormous swarm of aircraft above us and we were climbing up.’ When they reached the height of the fighters
, they found both Me 109s and Me 110s. The latter reacted to the arrival by going into a waggon-circling manoeuvre, following each other around to give their rear gunners the chance to provide maximum defensive firepower. Page felt his mouth go dry, but still found the Germans’ caution when faced by three Hurricanes funny. He ‘dived into the circle, firing rather wildly…then the 109s came down on us’. For the next few minutes he ‘registered nothing but flashing wings bearing Iron Crosses, and streaks of tracer’. Then came the phenomenon that never ceased to amaze: the sky was completely empty ‘as if the hand of God has wiped the slate clean’.13
Page was regarded by his colleagues as an exceptional fighter pilot. The line dividing the merely good from the outstanding was a fine one. Sailor Malan, considering the qualities needed to fly fighter aircraft successfully, reckoned that, unlike among the First World War pilots,
courage, these days, is a minor talent. No man is braver than the next…the air raid wardens in Coventry or Plymouth, these men do things under fire which we fighter pilots can only regard with awe. A fighter pilot doesn’t have to show that kind of courage. Unreasoning, unintelligent, blind courage is in fact a tremendous handicap to him. He has to be cold when he’s fighting. He fights with his head, not his heart. There are three things a first-class fighter pilot must have. First, he must have an aggressive nature. He must think in terms of offence rather than defence. He must at all times be an attacker. It is against the nature of a Spitfire to run away. Second, both his mind and his body must be alert and both must react instinctively to any tactical situation. When you are fighting you have no time to think. Third, he must have good eyes and clean hands and feet. His hands and feet control this plane and they must be sensitive. He can’t be ham handed. When your Spitfire is ambling along at 390 miles an hour a too-heavy hand on the rudder will send you in an inadvertent and very embarrassing spin. Your hands, your feet, your mind, your instinct must function as well, whether you’re right side up or upside down.14
Malan might have added to his list, possession of very good eyesight. He himself was said to have been able to spot ‘a fly on the Great Wall of China, at five miles’.15
Page was certainly aggressive. Writing to a friend from his days at Cranwell, late in the evening after a night in mess, he confessed: ‘I enjoy killing. It fascinates me beyond belief to see my bullets striking home and then to see the Hun blow up before me.’ But the sight, he admitted, ‘also makes me feel sick. Where are we going and where will it all end? I feel I am selling my soul to the devil.’16
Given the disparity in forces it is remarkable that more pilots were not killed in the Channel battle of July. As it was seventy-nine died. The worst losses came on the 19th, the disaster resulting from the failure of machines rather than of men. The Boulton Paul Defiant was a strange conception from the outset. It had no fixed gun that fired forward. Instead, a gunner swivelled around in an electrically powered turret sunk into the fuselage behind the cockpit. The extra weight meant it was slow, managing just over 300 m.p.h. The four Browning guns could generate a reasonable rate of fire, but this only counted if the pilot manoeuvred his partner into a good position. The aeroplane was an anachronism before it ever went into action, reflecting thinking about aerial fighting that had gone out with the First World War. It was the very weirdness of its design that explained the Defiants’ brief success. During the Dunkirk campaign, the Germans had at first mistaken them for Hurricanes and, going in from the rear, were unpleasandy surprised when they spat back bullets. On one day, 29 May, 264 Squadron claimed to have shot down thirty-five German aircraft. It was an exaggeration, but there was no doubt that they inflicted significant losses. The Germans soon learned the difference.
On 19 July, the Defiants of 141 Squadron were moved forward to Hawkinge at breakfast time and sent off on patrol. The crews had never been in battle, had only arrived in the south from Scotland a week before and were unaccustomed to 11 Group control procedures. At 2.30 p.m., twelve Defiants were ordered off to patrol just south of Folkestone. Three machines had to be left behind with mechanical trouble. There was no warning from control when, a quarter of an hour later, a swarm of Me 109s from the Richthofen Geschwader crossed the path of the squadron in the air and, identifying them correctly, moved in efficiently for the kill, attacking from below and astern where they were at no risk from the guns. Four Defiants were shot down in the first attack. The gunners, clamped into their claustrophobic turrets, went down with their aeroplanes. One pilot baled out and was picked up wounded from the sea. The remaining Defiants tried to hide in cloud, but one was caught and set on fire. The gunner baled out but was drowned and the pilot was killed on crash-landing. Four made it back, two of them damaged, one beyond repair. Altogether, in the space of less than a quarter of an hour, six machines had been destroyed and ten men killed. The losses would have been even greater if Hurricanes from 111 Squadron had not arrived to scare the Messerschmitts off. Two days later what was left of the Defiant squadron was sent back to Scotland.
Some of the losses of July seemed particularly wasteful. Fighter Command insisted on mounting night interceptions even though the chances of catching anything were tiny. Seven pilots were killed in accidents during the hours of darkness. Most pilots feared flying at night. It was very dangerous and the results were almost never worth the risk. Stephen Beaumont, the most uncomplaining of pilots, was told, one night at Middle Wallop at the end of July, to hold his flight at readiness. He was exhausted, there was no moon and it was pitch-black.
As they settled down at dusk in the dispersal hut they devoutly hoped they would not be required. Half an hour before midnight the operations room ordered one pilot up to investigate an unidentified aircraft near Ringwood. Beaumont thought this was ‘stupid, ineffective and potentially dangerous’, and said so. He contacted his commander, George Darley, but was told, with some sympathy, that orders were orders. Flying Officer Jarvis Blayney, the son of a Harrogate doctor and one of the pre-war squadron members, was sent up first. He set off with a heavy heart but his engine overheated and then it was Beaumont’s turn. He trundled down the runway, swinging his Spitfire from side to side to see the line of the flarepath and managed to take off and climb to 1,000 feet. He cruised overhead, desperate not to lose sight of the dim glow of the lights below, and was greatly relieved to be told to forget the interception and come back and land. He suspected afterwards that Darley ‘had been to the Operations Room, expressed his views on the futility of this order and got the controller to recall me’.17
July had been unsettling for the pilots, just as the Luftwaffe intended it to be. Kept in the dark about Fighter Command’s assessment of the Germans’ intentions, the pilots had no idea as to how the battle would develop. Most seem to have shared Brian Kingcome’s feeling that what they were engaged in was ‘part of a continuing routine, certainly not…an isolated historic event…merely part of the normal progress of the war, which we assumed would continue unabated until final victory.’18
The pilots understood, though, that for the coming weeks and months they were the most important people in Britain. All eyes were on them. Since May the BBC had been broadcasting morale-boosting talks by fighter pilots. On 14 July, Harbourne Stephen of 74 Squadron went on the radio to describe how his squadron, though greatly outnumbered at Dunkirk, had escaped unhurt and knocked down several bombers in the encounter, and recounted Malan’s exploit of bringing down the two bombers at night over Essex. The day before, a team from Life magazine turned up at Debden to shoot a feature on the fighter pilots who were beginning to be famous across the Atlantic. Denis Wissler was one of those ordered up to provide some formation flying pictures for them. Afterwards the 17 Squadron pilots were called to the mess and posed for a picture. The pilots stand around in frozen, monumental poses. Only one is looking at the camera as the mess steward in a starched white jacket distributes ‘half-cans’ of beer in silver mugs. The effect is stilted, straining to be epic. One of the subjects is starting to look bo
red. Denis Wissler, in the centre of the shot, planted squarely in a leather armchair, is scratching his nose, beer in hand as he skims a magazine. Later, the caption reports, ‘everyone joined in a harmless battle, hurling the flashbulbs of Life’s photographer at one another’. The article did not appear for another year, by which time half the men in the picture were dead.
Were they supermen, the journalists wondered, or the boys next door? Godfrey Winn, a star writer for the Sunday Express who visited 54 Squadron on 18 July, decided they were both. The article was called ‘Portrait of a Miracle Man’. ‘He has captured the imagination of the whole world…What is he like as a man?’ asked Winn. He went on to provide a composite profile.
First of all he is a very ordinary fellow. He keeps on stressing that over and over again to you. And if you press him he will assure you that only with the greatest difficulty he reached certificate standard at school and never got his colours as if that had anything to do with it. He roars with laughter at all the references to himself as a knight of the sky and he tells you that the reason why he is a fighter and not a bomber pilot is because they discovered he was better at flying upside down.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 29