Page was very lucky. Fighter pilots on both sides hated the Channel. To the Germans it was the ‘shit canal’. To the British it was ‘the dirty ditch’. Bomber pilots had a second engine to get them home if the other was shot up or failed. Hurricanes, Spitfires and Me 109s had only one. Putting down on the sea was almost invariably catastrophic. The air intake slung under the fuselages of all three types dug into the water, sending the machine cartwheeling in a curtain of spray before it sank within seconds. Parachuting was barely less hazardous. The further away from land you were, the slimmer your chances of being picked up. British safety equipment was primitive and inferior to that of their enemies. Mae Wests relied for their buoyancy on wads of kapok and a rubber bladder that had to be inflated by mouth. The Germans had rubber dinghies and dye to stain the water to signal their whereabouts to rescuers.
The pilots made great efforts to pinpoint downed comrades. The day before Page was shot down, another 56 Squadron pilot, Sergeant Ronald Baker, was seen parachuting into the sea near a British destroyer. Michael Constable Maxwell recorded in his diary how Flying Officer Percy Weaver ‘(circled) round keeping him in sight – a most difficult thing to do as the turning circle of the Hurricane is too big and the aircraft is on the verge of spinning all the time. Another tried to get the ships over while I fly overhead watching for any hostile aircraft. It is extremely hard to keep an eye on a Mae West in the water as it is so small.’8
When, after an hour, a motor boat finally picked him up, Baker was dead. Many a pilot spent the last minutes of his life savouring the bitter knowledge that he had escaped death in the air only to meet it in the water. Three pilots drowned that day. A week later Park drafted revised orders to his sector controllers, instructing them to send up fighters to engage large formations only over land or within gliding distance of the coast as ‘we cannot afford to lose pilots through forced landings in the sea’. Belatedly, a committee was set up at the Air Ministry to establish an RAF air-sea rescue organization with spotter aircraft and launches. But the incompetence of the Air Ministry in failing to put efficient rescue arrangements in place before the fighting began would come to be regarded by the pilots as shameful.
‘Eagle Day’ began inauspiciously for the Germans. The fine weather of the preceding days faltered. There was cloud over the Channel and a thin drizzle fell patchily on southern England. Goering hesitated. The weather reports predicted the skies would clear in the afternoon. That would still leave time, he decided, to deliver the smashing blow that would begin the final destruction of Fighter Command. The decision to postpone operations was slow in passing down the line. The first scheduled raid of the day was already forming up when it arrived. Sixty Me 110s, led by the Kanalkampfführer himself, Colonel Johannes Fink, had taken off early in the morning and climbed to an assembly point where they had been told fighters were waiting to escort them. But instead of slotting in alongside them, ‘they kept coming up and diving down in the most peculiar way. I thought this was their way of saying they were ready. So I went on and found to my surprise that the fighters didn’t follow…I didn’t worry much.” 9 The fighters, it seemed, had received the signal changing the orders, but with no radio link between them and the bombers were unable to pass it on.
On reaching the English coast, the formation split, with one group heading for the naval base at Sheerness and the other for Eastchurch aerodrome on the Isle of Sheppey. It was a strange choice of target. Eastchurch was primarily a Coastal Command station, of little importance given the Luftwaffe’s current preoccupations. By chance, fighters were present. Dowding had began to shift rested squadrons down from the relative quiet of the north to fill gaps in the front line. At Wittering in the Midlands 266 Squadron had been passing a pleasant summer. On 11 August its members spent the day bathing and boating on the lake next to their dispersal point and were drinking in the mess in the evening when the message came through that they were to prepare to move south at dawn. ‘After two months’ intense inactivity there was much excitement and speculation,’ wrote Dennis Armitage, who had joined the squadron from the RAFVR the previous December. ‘I went out to warn the ground staff, the bar was reopened and the news celebrated until about 3 a.m. when we all retired for an hour’s shuteye.’10 A month later, many of those toasting the approach of action were dead.
The squadron was supposed to go to Northolt for the day and return to Wittering in the afternoon. Like so many plans of the time, it had no sooner been made than desperate circumstances rendered it redundant. In the hectic weeks of the summer, squadron leaders would get used to responding to constantly changing orders as Dowding shifted Fighter Command’s stance to meet each German feint and lunge. The pilots of 266 ended up spending all day at Northolt before being ordered on to Tangmere, where they arrived in the early evening. The following morning they were told to prepare to fly to Eastchurch the next day, where they were to escort Battles – the sluggish, death-trap bombers that had fared so badly in France – on raids on E-boats in French and Dutch ports. No one had brought a razor or a toothbrush so an aeroplane was dispatched to base to fetch basic kit.
Before they left they were ordered up to patrol over Tangmere, but with strict instructions not to engage the enemy unless absolutely necessary. Twenty minutes later that changed to an order to head south and attack the large bomber formation approaching Portsmouth. It was the first time the squadron had been properly in action. ‘Having done so much messing about, waiting, wondering what was going to happen, getting your teeth into something was a great thrill,’ Armitage remembered.11 He shot down one of the three German machines claimed by the squadron. But there was a price to pay. Pilot Officer Dennis Ashton, who the day before had been celebrating the move south, was shot down in flames. He was twenty years old. His body was found a month later by a naval minesweeper and buried at sea.
Armitage finally arrived at Eastchurch that afternoon to find ‘an odd place built on a bog with a small, L-shaped, undulating landing ground’. The officers’ mess was ‘an enormous erection of light girders and plywood. You entered by some steps onto a great verandah running the full length of the ante-room, which was big enough to have housed a dozen full-sized billiard tables.’ In the middle was a wide chimney and four cavernous fireplaces. It was rumoured that the building had been designed for use in India but had somehow been misplaced. That evening after supper there was a conference at which the station commander explained the plan. Armitage and the others were told that the planned dawn take-off had now been cancelled because there was no precise intelligence on the whereabouts of the E-boats and that as yet there were no bombs for the Battles. He promised more information at 10 a.m., when everyone had had a good night’s rest and enjoyed a late breakfast.
This pleasant prospect was disrupted by the arrival of the Germans led by Fink. The first bomb landed shortly after 7 a.m. Armitage ‘awoke to find my bed waltzing about the room, which seemed most unpleasant but was caused by what in reality was a blessing…the bogginess of the land. The whole place shook as if we were having a major earthquake, but the bombs…buried themselves deeply before exploding, leaving nothing but a little pile of earth.’ One bomb struck one of the ground-crew huts, killing sixteen men and injuring several more. Armitage was slightly hurt from a bomb which struck the gutter above the room where he was sleeping and exploded before it hit the ground. The same blast shook the chimney and monumental fireplaces in the mess, where several pilots ducked for shelter as the raid began. They emerged smothered in soot. Another bomb demolished a hangar, exploding the squadron’s stock of ammunition, already preloaded in metal trays ready to slip into the guns when the fighters returned to rearm. But only one Spitfire was destroyed and the rest of the fighters, carefully dispersed around the airfield, were untouched. After the engine notes of the departing Germans had faded and the initial relief subsided, the 266 pilots recognized that the squadron had got off lightly. The dead airmen were a tragedy, but the brutal truth was that airmen, even highly skill
ed riggers and fitters, could be more easily replaced than pilots. Such relative good fortune could not last.
Hurricanes from 151 Squadron at North Weald were sent up to harry the raiders as they headed home. Fink’s early unconcern about the lack of fighter protection faded. ‘The RAF fighters attacked only singly, but we were a bit scattered, so we simply used the cloud layer. If the fighters were up top we dived down. If they were below we climbed up. But we lost five aircraft…I was furious.’ After landing ‘in this over-excited condition I went straight to the phone, got on to Kesselring and shouted down the line exactly what I thought about it. I asked what…the people at HQ thought they were doing to send us out unprotected. Poor old Kesselring was so overwhelmed he was unable to get a word in edgeways. Eventually he said, “All right, all right, I’ll come over personally.” ’
‘Eagle Day’ may not have started well for the Luftwaffe, but the brightening weather offered a second opportunity. By early afternoon the meteorological reports proved correct. The sky cleared. The order was given for the main attack to begin. It was launched, not directly from across the Channel but from the south-west. A huge mass of aircraft began forming up above the Cherbourg peninsula, made up of 120 twin-engined Ju 88s and nearly 80 Stukas, protected by about 100 Me 109s and 110s. At 3.30 p.m. they began to appear as a thick cluster of blips on radar screens, stretched out across a forty-mile front and coming from the direction of the Channel Islands. The blow seemed to be aimed at the ports and air bases of the West Country, 10 Group’s area. Nearly eighty Hurricanes and Spitfires from Exeter, Warmwell in Dorset, Middle Wallop in Hampshire and Tangmere were scrambled to intercept them. This was, by Fighter Command’s standards, a very large number of fighters to commit to one action. The momentum of the raiding force carried it through. One group pounded Southampton. Another split off and headed for Middle Wallop, but failing accurately to locate the base dumped its bombs around the village.
10 Group was a quiet sector. Most of the pilots had never seen such an array of enemy aircraft. Kenneth Gundry, who had only arrived at 257 Squadron as a pilot officer ten days before, tried to describe the nature of the experience in a letter to his parents.
We separated as a flight and found ourselves sitting under about eighty Me 110 fighters milling around in a huge circle. Above them were about fifty or more Me 109s. Two of our five got split away by a few stray Jerries buzzing around and then the next thing I knew was a ruddy great earthquake in my A/C [aircraft] and my control column was almost solid. On my left another Hurricane was floating about over a complete network of smoke trails left by cannon shells and incendiary. We had been attacked by another unseen bunch of Me 110s…[After] shaking the bleeder off my tail I managed to get some fairly close but ineffective deflection shots into him, but he used his extra speed and dropped clean away, down out of range leaving me with plenty of others to contend with. I joined up with another Hurricane and Jerry just seemed to dissolve. We just couldn’t find any at all.12
When he landed he found that the tail of his Hurricane was ‘shot to hell’ and his starboard aileron was splintered in two and hanging off.
Despite its schoolboy language, Gundry’s account must have given his parents some feeling of the frenzied struggle going on over their heads and added to their burden of worry. It also reflected the vengeful mood gripping the pilots. Later in the letter he described how ‘one poor swine of a Ju 88 was spotted while going back from a raid…and about seven of us whooped with joy and dived on him from all directions. His rear gunner put up a marvellous show and was replaced later by the observer, I guess, but he finally went down in a complete inferno of red-hot metal and we could see the column of smoke rising from where it crashed…from our ‘drome at Tangmere for several hours afterwards.’
The satisfaction of downing a German bomber was enormous. As one Stuka squadron left the Dorset coast for home it ran straight into the guns of 609 Squadron pilots, who shot down six of the dive-bombers, despite the presence of a fighter escort. The attack was led with customary icy professionalism by George Darley, who described later how he ‘managed to slip the squadron through the fighters then went right through the Ju 87 formation, taking potshots without throttling back. This enabled the chaps behind to position themselves without having to avoid me.’13 John Dundas, who claimed one of the victims, wrote in the squadron diary: ‘Thirteen Spitfires left Warmwell for a memorable teatime party over Lyme Bay, and an unlucky day for the species Ju 87.’14
‘Eagle Day’ ended as an anticlimax. It had decided nothing. Fighter Command could feel some satisfaction at its performance. Initial assessments put the German losses at sixty-seven with thirteen on the British side. In fact forty-seven Luftwaffe aeroplanes had been destroyed. The human cost had been greatly disproportionate. The Luftwaffe lost eighty-nine pilots and crew killed or taken prisoner, while only three British pilots died. In a war of resources these ratios were comforting.
The Germans were more successful, though, in their new aim of destroying Fighter Command’s infrastructure. Despite the early warning and the large numbers of fighters put up to block the raids, the bombers had managed to get through. It was the Luftwaffe’s bad judgement that had averted a catastrophe. An afternoon raid devastated the aerodrome at Detling, near Maidstone, killing sixty-seven people, military and civilian, demolishing messes crowded with airmen and flattening hangars. Once again it seemed an unlikely target to choose. It was not a Fighter Command base and its destruction had no effect on the fabric of the defences. None the less it provided a stark demonstration of the havoc that could be wrought if the bombers were directed on to an important target, such as the sector bases which acted as the synapses for the fighter control system.
Luftwaffe activity slackened off on 14 August. A raid was launched at noon that resulted in a swirling dogfight involving 200 aircraft over Dover. Manston was attacked again, and Middle Wallop, this time with more success. A month previously such action would have been memorable. At this frenetic phase of the battle it counted as a lull. Dowding took the opportunity to rotate tired and battered units out of the 11 Group area and bring fresh ones in.
The following day was bright and clear, not what the Luftwaffe’s experts had forecast. In the expectation of bad weather, Goering had summoned his commanders to Karinhall, his princely hunting castle near Berlin, for an ‘Eagle Day’ post-mortem. The intended spectacular assertion of power had flopped, achieving little but losses. It was time to try something different. When reconnaissance flights over Scotland reported clearing skies, Goering decided to press on with another full-scale attack. This time it would be made on two fronts, taking the battle for the first time to the north of England. The forces of Luftflotte 5, based in Denmark and Norway, had taken little part in the fighting so far. Now they were to be brought into play. At the same time virtually every unit of Luftflottes 2 and 3 in France was brought to readiness. The aim was to breach and overwhelm Britain’s air defences down the whole eastern and southern flanks of the island on an 800-mile front stretching from Edinburgh to Exeter.
The numbers the Germans were able to muster were greater than anything ever seen in aerial warfare. On the German side were 1,790 bombers and fighters arrayed in a huge, ominously curved crescent. Set against them Dowding had 233 serviceable Spitfires and 351 Hurricanes. The battle opened just after 11.30 when Stukas, strongly protected by an umbrella of fighters, bombed Hawkinge and Lympne on the Kent coast. At Hawkinge they dropped heavy bombs which destroyed a hangar and damaged a barracks block. They also scattered small fragmentation bombs, but the aircraft they were designed to destroy were no longer there, having by chance been ordered off half an hour earlier by the Biggin Hill commander, Group Captain Grice. There was a separate raid by Me 110s on Manston, the third in four days, and two Spitfires belonging to the luckless 266 Squadron, which had moved on there after being bombed out of Eastchurch, were destroyed on the ground. As well as being the target for snap attacks, Manston’s position in the German
s’ path meant that any enemy aircraft with bombs or ammunition remaining was likely to use the station as an opportunity target before racing home across the Channel. This vulnerability, the base’s historian remarked, ‘created an atmosphere of danger in which death could come without warning at any time of the day’.15
The first force from Luflotte 5 set off from Stavanger on the Norwegian coast in mid-morning. It was made up of seventy-two Heinkel bombers, protected by twenty-one Me 110s. Their targets were aerodromes in north-east England, particularly Dishforth and Usworth. A group of Heinkel seaplanes flew ahead of them, heading for Dundee, hoping to draw away the defending fighters. The ruse worked, and when the aircraft showed up on the radar, squadrons at Acklington, Drem and Catterick were brought to readiness. Once again luck came to the aid of the defenders. As a result of a navigation error, the bombers had been drifting steadily northwards as they crossed the North Sea, so they neared the coast at the point at which the feint attack had successfully lured the British fighters. When they realized their mistake, they turned quickly southwards, but by now the fighters were in the air and heading towards them. Led by Squadron Leader Ted Graham, 72 Squadron intercepted the raiders twelve miles out to sea over the Farne Islands in Northumberland. ‘None of us had ever seen so many aircraft in the sky at one time,’ wrote Robert Deacon Elliot, a twenty-six-year-old pilot officer. Faced with so many choices, Graham took time to giving his order. When he tried to speak he was hampered by his chronic stutter. ‘By the time he got it out,’ Elliot remembered, ‘the attack was on. There was a gap between the lines of bombers and the Me 110s coming up in the rear, so in there we went. I do not think they saw us to begin with. When they did, the number of bombs rapidly jettisoned was fantastic. You could see them falling away from the aircraft and dropping into the sea, literally by the hundreds. The formation became a shambles.’16
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 32