The build up of Luftwaffe forces in France was to continue into August, but on the morning of 24 July, before the full wing apparatus was in place, Galland announced that his three squadrons were ready for operations. At 11 a.m. a British convoy nosed out into the Channel from the Medway and a force of eighteen Dornier 17s was sent to bomb it. With them went an escort of forty Me 109s, led by Galland. Spitfires of 54 Squadron at Rochford were ordered up to meet them. At the same time, a further nine Spitfires, of 610 Squadron, took off from Biggin Hill to patrol over Dover and cut off the raiders’ retreat. Another six Spitfires, of 65 Squadron, which was operating from Manston, were also sent into the area, and seeing the Messerschmitt escorts were preoccupied with fending off 54 Squadron tried to attack the bombers, but were driven away by fierce and well coordinated fire from their gunners.
No. 54 Squadron was pleased with its showing in its first encounter with Galland’s fighters, which went down in the unit’s history as the ‘Battle of the Thames Estuary’. The squadron diary described it as ‘the biggest fight since the second day of Dunkirk and in the face of considerable odds the casualties inflicted on the enemy by the squadron (including three new pilots) can be considered eminently satisfactory and most encouraging’. A claim was made for sixteen Me 109s destroyed; a great exaggeration, as it turned out. The more likely figure was two. One was shot down by Colin Gray; another by Sergeant George Collet, who then ran out of fuel and was forced to land on the beach, writing off his Spitfire.
In the clash the squadron lost one of its best-liked and most prominent members. Johnny Allen was attacked by an Me 109 near Margate. Another pilot saw him putting down in a forced landing with his engine stopped but the aeroplane under perfect control. Then the engine started again and he turned towards Manston, but it cut out a second time. The Spitfire flicked on to its back and went into an uncontrollable spin. Allen crashed to earth near Cliftonville. He was twenty-four-years-old and had been the first member of the squadron to fire a shot in anger almost exactly two months previously. In the meantime he had destroyed seven German aircraft, winning a DFC. The story of how he had been shot down over the Channel during the Dunkirk evacuation, been miraculously picked up by a naval corvette and appeared in the squadron mess later the same evening dressed in naval uniform and carrying a kitbag had been recounted in Winn’s article in the Sunday Express three days before. The photographs show an open-faced, shyly smiling youth. Deere remembered him as ‘quiet and religious…out of place’ in the boisterous squadron atmosphere, yet an elemental part of the unit. The normally undemonstrative diarist noted that ‘the loss…will be greatly felt by the squadron’.
Despite this death and the over-optimistic assessment of the damage inflicted on the 109s, the squadron was right to regard the encounter as a moral victory. Its pilots had been considerably outnumbered but had stayed to fight, refusing to be driven off. The over-claiming may have been a result of the fact that, with their fuel warning lights glowing red, many of the German pilots had used their Messerschmitts’ superiority in the dive to drop steeply down to sea-level before racing for their home field.
The German pilots returned home to the base at Caffiers to be harangued by Galland, who was dismayed by his men’s lack of discipline and apparent unwillingness to engage the Spitfires. This first sortie over England, he told his biographer, had come as an unpleasant surprise. ‘The tenacity of the RAF pilots, despite being heavily outnumbered and relatively inexperienced, had been remarkable. It had shocked him to see how inept his own pilots were; and that would have to change. This was no sudden blitzkrieg, bundling a disorganized enemy backwards across indefensible plains; this was the real business of hardened air combat, against an enemy who was going to stand and fight.’12
13
Hearth and Home
Early in the summer, as a wave of Germans closed over the Channel ports, Pete Brothers was flying low over Calais when he looked down and saw a cinema belching smoke and flame. In that moment his attitude to the war changed. ‘I suddenly thought that the Odeon in Bromley could be next. It came home to me that this was deadly serious.’ 1 By the middle of August, bombs were falling every day on placid coastal towns and suburbs where, until then, nothing much had ever happened. This was not the terror bombing that Hitler had reserved the right to order if Britain remained obstinate. It was unintended and accidental, the inevitable consequence of the stepped-up attacks on factories and defence installations prior to the big assault. Civilian casualties were small compared with what was to come. But the sense of violation was great. Bombs tore away walls, opening up homes as if they were dolls’ houses, putting all the ordinariness of family life on intimate display. Twenty-five years before, if the wind was in the right direction, the inhabitants of Dover and Folkstone could sometimes just hear the faint rumble of artillery on the Western Front and feel a slight thrill of proximity. Now the sound of gunfire was all around, and for the first time in a thousand years the enemy was visible.
The defenders fought the battles of high summer in view of the people they were defending. Often the pilots were diving and shooting over their childhood homes. Roland Beamont could see his family house in Chichester every time he took off from Tangmere. John Greenwood, a pilot officer with 253 Squadron, flew head-on into a formation of Ju 88s over Surrey and was horrified when ‘they jettisoned their loads which fell between Epsom and Tolworth. My family lived in Tolworth and seeing the bombs exploding I went down to ground level to have a look.’2 The nearest bomb had been several hundred yards away from his home. When he got back to Kenley he telephoned his mother, who told him she had been sheltering in the cupboard under the stairs during the raid. Peter Devitt of 152 Squadron was flying near Sevenoaks one Sunday evening when he saw Dorniers fleeing from a raid dropping their last bombs on Young’s depository, where all his furniture was stored.
In some extraordinary cases, parents watched their sons fighting. On 16 August an intense engagement broke out between a large German formation and Hurricanes from 1 Squadron. One of the British fighters was hit in the fuel tank by a cannon shell and burst into flames. The pilot, Pilot Officer Tim Elkington, managed to bale out and was drifting down into the sea when Sergeant Frederick Berry swooped past him and used the aircraft’s slipstream to blow the parachute over land. Elkington landed safely at West Wittering and was whisked away to hospital. The whole event was witnessed by Elkington’s mother watching from the balcony of her flat on Hayling Island.3
Until August the fighter bases had been insulated from the violence of the war and the comfort and orderliness of mess, living quarters, flower beds, tennis courts and squash courts were undisturbed. The calm was about to be smashed. The mess waiters, batmen, clerks, Waafs, fitters and riggers; the great host of supporters who sustained the men in the sky, were now in as much danger as the pilots themselves. Watching the Germans swarming across in ever-bigger concentrations, many pilots felt a sense of revulsion they had not experienced before. The urbane Brian Considine ‘hated them…thinking of what they were going to do if they were allowed to do it and what they had already done’.4 Christopher Foxley-Norris described the sentiment as ‘the sort of wave of indignation you get if you find a burglar in your house’.5 No matter how the feeling was expressed, it gave an edge to the pilots’ courage, driving them on to make greater efforts and take bigger risks.
August had opened quietly. Dowding and his senior commanders correctly interpreted the lull as the harbinger of a new and more intense phase. He could view the coming clash with some confidence. Factories were producing more fighters than the Germans were destroying and production targets were being overtaken. On 1 August he had roughly 650 combat-ready aircraft. In contrast to only a month before, he also had an adequate number of pilots. By trying to fight only when strictly necessary, he and Park had kept most of the squadrons relatively fresh. Some, like 54, had done a disproportionate amount of the fighting. But in all only a quarter of the strength of Fighter Command had been on ex
tended duty during July. The problem, as the weeks ahead were to show, was not the quantity of pilots available but the quality. Many of those swelling the ranks had been hurried through training and were still not fully familiar with their machines. The accelerating pace of the battle meant that these novices would be thrown straight into aerial fighting of unprecedented intensity.
Hitler had set the date for the start of the new phase as on or after 5 August. Another directive, expressed in general terms and without naming specific targets, called for the air force to attack ‘flying units, their ground installations, and their supply organizations [and] the aircraft industry’. This was in keeping with the imperative to destroy the Royal Air Force before any invasion could begin. In another document he told the three services to be ready to launch Seelöwe by 15 September if, by then, a landing had become necessary. Field-Marshal Kesselring, the leader of Luftflotte 2, which covered a line drawn east to west just above Paris, and Field-Marshal Sperrle, commanding Luftflotte 3 below it, differed over the approach. Kesselring favoured a dispersed campaign that would reduce the risk of concentrated, heavy losses. Sperrle backed a short, furious effort, hurling bombers, dive-bombers and fighter bombers en masse to smash the British defences.
Both agreed a sledge-hammer blow should start the assault. The operation was given the Wagnerian code name of Adlerangriff, the ‘Attack of the Eagles’, and Adlertag (‘Eagle Day’) was eventually set for 13 August. The preceding days were filled with dress-rehearsal raids and attempts to knock out radar stations to weaken the defenders’ capacity to respond. On the morning of 12 August, Dover radar station was bombed, then a few minutes later those at Rye, Pevensey and the Kentish hamlet of Dunkirk. The damage looked spectacular but was quickly repaired and all stations were back on the air within six hours. The installations were small and well tucked away. The very flimsiness of the criss-cross construction of the transmitter towers made them remarkably resilient to blast. The Luftwaffe was never to achieve its aim of a total blackout of radar, but raids could result in dangerous blind spots in the cover that could last several hours.
While the radar was down, bombers raced in to exploit the advantage, attacking Lympne and Hawkinge airfields on the Kent coast. The decision to target Lympne, which since June had only been used as an emergency satellite field for fighters in trouble, was an early indication that the Luftwaffe’s information about the nature and importance of RAF installations might be faulty or incomplete. A few hours later, Manston, sitting vulnerably on the crown of the North Foreland, was strafed by Me 110s closely followed by Dornier 17s dropping 150 high-explosive bombs. The landing ground was pitted with craters and four of the ground staff were killed. Once the smoke cleared and the chalk dust settled, it was seen that the damage was not catastrophic. None of the Spitfires caught on the ground was badly damaged and ground crews laboured to fill in the holes so that the airfield was in action again within twenty-four hours. The raid gave an unpleasant foretaste of what pilots, and particularly the ground staff of Manston, would have to suffer over the next weeks as the aerodrome was hit again and again.
The temporary loss of radar meant that a huge fleet of bombers protected by a fighter escort launched later that morning was already well on its way to its target before it was picked up and a force of forty-eight Hurricanes and ten Spitfires, operating in separate squadrons, sent up to confront it. The bombers were heading for Portsmouth. The bomber force split into two. The first group swung in through a gap in the balloon barrage defending the city and ploughed through a storm of anti-aircraft fire. Bombs hit the Royal Dockyards and the railway station and sank some small ships in the harbour, killing twenty-three people and wounding a hundred. The second group of fifteen Ju 88s turned for the Isle of Wight and dived on the radar station at Ventnor.
The German fighters circled behind and above the bombers, tempting the British fighters to come up. It was an invitation that they were learning to resist. Instead, the Hurricanes of 213 Squadron waited for the first group to emerge from the Portsmouth defences and pounced on them, shooting down the machine of Oberst Johannes Fisser, who was leading the attack. The second group was also set upon by Spitfires from 152 and 609 Squadrons, as it turned for home from Ventnor. Three 609 pilots, Noel Agazarian, James ‘Butch’ McArthur, who before the war had been a civil aviation pilot, and David Crook had been about to set off from the forward base at Warmwell, Dorset, where they were living under canvas, for London on a twenty-four-hour leave when the order to go to readiness came through. They took off immediately, except for Crook, who was delayed by a faulty radio. He arrived over the Isle of Wight to find ‘circling and sweeping all over the sky at least 200 Huns…“My God,” I said to myself, “what a party!”’6
The circling aircraft were the Me 110s on station to protect the bombers. They found themselves in a tactical dilemma. The British squadrons were launching small, successive attacks on the bombers. The escorts faced the choice of coming down in twos and threes to try and chase away the attackers, in which case they would be engaged by other British fighters; or they could descend in a great flock, which meant breaking up the defensive umbrella and creating a free-for-all in which the Spitfires and Hurricanes could get among them relatively unmolested. The raiders had lost ten bombers before their fighters, circling 10,000 feet ahead, could react. When they finally arrived they were punished, and four Me 110s and two Me 109s were destroyed in the space of a few minutes. Agazarian shot down two and Crook one. After landing the British pilots resumed their plan to set off for London, arriving five hours later than intended, and were back in the battle again the following day.
The toll among the defenders had been high, with eleven pilots killed and six wounded. Among the injured was Geoffrey Page. He was sitting on the grass in front of the dispersal tents at Rochford having afternoon tea after a long day of fighting when the field telephone rang and the order was given to take off in squadron strength to meet ninety bandits approaching from the south at 15,000 feet. Only ten aircraft were available. They caught up with the Dorniers as they were heading north past the mouth of the Thames, having dropped their loads. As Page, in the leading section, closed on the nearest Dornier 17, he saw ‘all this tracer ammunition coming from the whole formation. They’d singled me out as the target…all these things that looked like lethal electric-light bulbs kept flashing by until suddenly there was an enormous bang and the whole aircraft exploded’.
Like most of the pilots Page had never made a parachute descent. The drill was taught in training, however, and now it came to his rescue. Instinctively he released the heavy webbing Sutton harness strapping him to his seat, slid the cockpit hood open and rolled the Spitfire on to its back. He remembered ‘popping out of the aircraft like a cork out of a toy gun’. It was not fast enough to save him from the flames. Page was not wearing gloves. His hands, and the area of his face not protected by the oxygen mask, were terribly burned.
Free of the machine, he found himself ‘tumbling head over heels through space. I remember seeing my right arm extended and I sort of looked at it. My brain ordered it to bring itself in and pull the metal ring of the rip cord on the parachute, and that was agony because with this cold metal ring and badly burned hand it was like an electric shock.’ Somehow he yanked the cord and looked up to see the parachute blossom overhead. A ball-crunching shock between his legs as the harness arrested his descent told him he was safe for the moment, and drifting down he took stock of his situation. ‘I noticed quite a funny thing had happened. My left shoe and my trousers had been blown off completely by the explosion. I was just about almost naked from the waist downwards. My legs were slightly burnt and I could hear the fight going on all around.’ It was a sound he had never heard before. Engine noise blotted out the noise of fighting.
It took Page ten minutes to drift down into the sea. As the water came up to meet him, he ran through what he was meant to do next. The drill taught him he should twist the release catch on the harness through
ninety degrees, then bang it to make it spring open. His roasted hands would not obey. As he settled in the sea the parachute silk and shrouds sank down on top of him ‘like an octopus’s tentacles. I knew that if I didn’t get away from the parachute quickly it would get waterlogged and sink and take me with it.’ Desperation numbed the agony and somehow the metal disc flipped open.
The next thing was to inflate his lifejacket, the Mae West that every pilot wore over his tunic. He blew into the rubber tube and was dismayed to see bubbles frothing through the holes where the fabric had been burned through. There was nothing to do but swim for it. Through swelling eyes, he could just see the English coast, and weighed down by his waterlogged uniform and a helmet which his fingers could not unbuckle, he struck out. He remembered that in his jacket pocket was a brandy flask given him by his mother.
‘Quite often in the mess over the previous weeks when the bar had closed my fellow pilots had said, “Come on Geoffrey, you’ve got a flask there, let’s have a tot of brandy,” but I said, “No, one day I may have an emergency.” As I was swimming along I thought that this probably qualified.’ There was a further agonizing tussle as he unbuttoned his tunic flap and extracted the flask. He wrenched the cap off with his teeth when ‘a dirty big wave came along and knocked it out of my wrists and the whole lot went to the bottom of the Channel’.
Despairingly, he floundered on. He had been in the water half an hour and almost given up hope when he heard the chug of an engine. His descent had been spotted by the coastguards, who sent a launch to search for him. After he persuaded his rescuers, with a stream of obscenities, that he was not a German he was dragged out of the sea and taken back to Margate where the mayor, strangely attired in a top hat, greeted him on the quayside.7
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 31